A Color Story - Your Guide To Mixing And Exploring Paint Colors For Art

1. Welcome: Hey, I'm Denise Love and I want to welcome you to class. Let me show you what we'll be doing. This class is packed full of goodness. I am so excited about all the things that I've pulled together to share with you about color and color mixing and using the color wheel and coming up with great color combinations all while playing with mixing our paints. We're going to take a little deep dive class for color and start out with learning the very basics of how to use color, how to mix color, making a color chart of some of our colors so that we can then jump into, how can we make certain colors out of fewer colors that we happen to own. Once we learn all about mixing colors, we're going to start putting those into practical applications to give you some practice. We're going to learn how to do complimentary colors, split complimentary colors, triad colorways, tetride colorways, single color, and paint a lot of yummy art pieces. You can do abstracts like I'm doing. I started out with complimentary colors. I'll show you the way that I like to make abstracts that are fairly easy and stress-free. When you're all done, you get these super fun colors and paintings when you're finished that are ready to frame. I mean, how beautiful are these? We've got complimentary, we've got split complimentary. This one came out with yummy little micro paintings that I thought were just really beautiful. Split complimentary is three colors that are outside of my comfort zone normally. But look how beautiful this one is. This came out of the same painting, completely different look with the split compliments. I love that same painting. Then we get into one color and I know you see black and white here, but black and white are our neutrals, then our one color would be, in this case, that pretty salmon. Look how beautiful these pieces came out with one dominant color. I love that. Then we have analogous colors, which are colors that sit beside each other on the color wheel. Super fun. Look how beautiful that is. I can't wait to frame one or two of these. Then we have colorways that are getting a little outside of my own comfort zone too. We've got the triad colors and we've got the tetride colors, which use colors that just are a little more uncomfortable and harder to pull together, but makes such interesting combinations and you may find it really easy. I'm just playing and experimenting right here alongside you and trying to come up with things that pushed me outside of my own boundaries. Mixing paint is very fun and mixing colors in ways that I normally wouldn't do helps you grow as an artist. I did all these projects right alongside you so I could grow with you. This workshop is truly packed. I even go through saving your color palettes when you create your compositions, whether you love them or whether you hate them. If you hate them, then you know what not to go back to. But we talk about saving your color palettes in some type of journal that you would love to keep and refer back to over and over and almost consider my color palette journal, which is an old book, it's an altered book that I got from thrift store, almost consider this a piece of art by itself. When I fill up all of this side of the book, I'll come back and fill up this side of the book. Then I'll have a giant resource library of different things that I've tried and played with that I might want to revisit again and again. Truly excited about everything we've got packed in this workshop. I hope when we are finished, you have a better handle on mixing and using and playing with color in your art pieces. You can do this with any type of paint. I have chosen to focus with acrylic paints in this workshop. But these exercises can be done with all of your art materials, watercolor, oil paint, acrylic paint, gouache, anything that you happen to enjoy working with. These are invaluable exercises and things that you can do to help you figure out how to mix them. What are they going to do when you do make some? How can you use them? What do they look like? Invaluable, swatching things that you'll use for the rest of your art career. These are things that I'll now hang up on my inspiration board behind me and continue to refer back to over and over. I love these and little samples that I tried. Now I can figure out what color combinations that I love and which ones I might go back to and which ones really challenged me and maybe I want to go back to them just to work on that challenge. I'm pretty excited to have you in class. I can't wait to see what you do and what you come up with. Definitely come back and show me some of the things, the projects that you're working on. I'll see you in class. Let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Some of my favorite color books: I want to show you some of my color books that I have and I have quite a few because I've studied color for a long time. I did color in college. I won't even say how many years ago that was, but we'll say it's more than 20. Because I have a fine arts degree in interior design. I actually used it for most of my working life and then I started my photography business, Tudelaw Studio in 2012. Then when my parents got sick, I took that business full time. I've done a really in-depth workshop on my main site for photography and color. With photography, you have to be a little more subjective with your colors because it's not like paint. We're not mixing exact color shades that we want. How can we make a color palette more interesting that we're photographing. It's in the choice of colors that we pick. We can't pick exact shades, we can create exact shades with paint, but it's still a way that you can focus and make things more interesting in your interiors and your photos. We're going to talk about it in respective to paint here in this workshop. I have lots of books on color because I enjoy color and I tried to relate it to other things that I do, like my photography and my interiors and stuff. My very favorite book is this one here, this 1500 Color Mixing Recipes for oil, acrylic & watercolor. This is a really cool book because you can basically go into any page and pick a color and say, that's the color I'm trying to create. It'll tell you what paint colors they use to create that color. I like aquas and teals and I'm always trying to come up with the perfect shade of aqua-teal. Look how beautiful that is. Then they tell us it's mostly Phthalo blue and two percent yellow ocher and this is water Level 1. That would be like just a little bit of water if we're looking for watercolor or something like that. It has different chapters, paints for landscapes, things like that. It just really takes you through depth of color and giving you recipes and telling you the colors that were used. This is such a fantastic book to use and refer to. It includes some color mixing grids, which I want to make a color mixing grid with you here in this class. We'll take a look at that. But if you only got one book for paint, this might be the one that you want because it's invaluable. It's like your little color mixing Bible. This is by William F. Powell, Color Mixing Recipes. This book is really fun, local color, seeing place through watercolor. What I like about this is it takes you through different places and coming up with a watercolor and you can relate this to paint also. But coming up with a palette from wherever it is that you're looking at, you're visiting, you're trying to recapture. I like this because the colors are beautiful and you can see if they compliment each other and you can see the differences through the day and the colors that you might be looking for. It's a really handy book for getting you to look around your environment and recreating the colors that you're actually seeing as you're doing stuff for your art. This is a cool book. I like this. Local Color by Mimi Robinson. This is a fun book because it's a reprint of a very old book. It's the book that Charles Darwin used to describe colors in nature. When people described a color in nature, in a book or an article or anything where they talked about color, if you didn't understand what that color was, you could come and refer to his nomenclatures here and be like, oh, that's what he's talking about. This color right here is a vegetable. It's called oat straw mineral, might be sclerite, calamine, animal, polar bear. The actual name of the color is straw yellow. He gives you references for each of these colors so that you could then say, okay, I know exactly what color you're talking about as you're referencing it. Asparagus green, a brimstone butterfly, a variegated horseshoe geranium, a barrel. How cool is that? You can actually visualize what he might've been talking about. I love this book just because of its historical context. It's funny the things that he references in the book as far as what these colors might stand for. I love it. That's a great little book. The Color Index is interesting because it's just lots of color palettes. It's more for maybe interiors and things like that, but it is interesting to be like, okay, I want a color palette to work with today and you could come to a book like this and say, okay, this is the one I'm going to work with or something. It's more for design and illustration, maybe for interiors. It gives you the actual color numbers that you can reference in addition to what it looks like. The Color Index is super fun. The COLOR SCHEME BIBLE is for interiors. But you can see I've tagged lots of different pages that I like in here that just show different color palettes. Again, this is a book I like to reference if I'm looking to, say, start a painting and I'm thinking, I want to use a color palette, what color palette might I use, I can open to a page In here and be like, oh, this is an interesting color palette. Maybe I'm going to work in that today. It's really meant for interiors. If you start off with the biggest color being something like your walls and the medium colors being bigger accent pieces and the smallest colors being something like throw pillows or something like that, That's how you can pull all these colors together with some pops of interest. But it's a fun book and I like having it because I like color palette things. It's good for design, which is what I did for so many years. Super fun book. This book is a Color Workshop for Artists and Designers. It's like going into a little color workshop in a book. It's got different projects and a lot of information in here and different things that it references and it's how you could take a little mini course on color and do the projects that it's talking about in the book to get yourself comfortable with it. It's fun. It's a Color Workshop for Artists and edition's by David Hornung. These two books are really fun. They talk about color and color origins and how they work in our society and stuff. I find that fascinating and because I've done so much on color workshops and things like that, this is a good book that I have referenced in talking about colors and their meanings and where maybe they've originated and where they've come from and how we look at them in society, the secret lives of color really jumps into the origin of each color. If you ever wondered the origin of yellow or fuchsia or puce or anything like that, this book jumps into the origin of that color, which is really fascinating. Where did orange come from? Where did Naples yellow come from and all that kind of stuff. This is a really fun book. I like it a lot. This is Josef Albers' Interaction of Color. I guess I could have told you The Secret Lives of Color's by Kassia St. Clair and On Colors by Stephen Farthing. This one just talks about colors and how they interact with each other and what they'll do, putting colors side-by-side and how they manipulate the eye when you combine different colors and you change the way that they are configured in their setup. I like this because looking at some of these, they're almost like an optical illusion. Look at what this purple looks like next to orange or gray next to purple or the orange next to green, it's almost an obstacle illusion on how some of these colors interact. Look how different this looks is if you put a black stripe in the middle of those versus a white stripe. This is an interesting book, just to get your eye focused on how colors look different to each other and how the color changes. Like this blue looks different next to this orange than it does next to this blue. This one right here looks different next to orange than it looks to blue. I think in some respect, they're supposed to be similar colors and how they look different next to each other. Here if we put that tan spot in the middle of this green, it looks more like this army color, but if we put it in the middle of white, it looks more like a true beige. It's interesting how colors change depending on what you put them next to. I think this book is fascinating for that reason. That's Josef Albers. Then one of my very favorite books is an interior book, but it's Hans Blomquist, In The Mood For Color. This is a book that I just like having on my bookshelf. I like pulling it out to reference it lots and lots. It has color palettes in it that are very much along things that I love. It has great ideas for still life photography and just great ideas for paint and things that we might do in a painting. We could use this as color palette inspiration. I love how he'll have the color palette that he's referencing and then lots of yummy inspiration photos to go with it. Absolutely the most delicious feast for your eyes. I love this book. He's got three different books. I actually have all his books because they're just so gorgeous. Like this cabinet, wouldn't you love to have that cabinet in your art room? It's just so delicious. I love every page in here. Then I use this too. I get ideas for my photography. I get ideas for, look at this cool wall of old mirrors hanging so you could get inspiration off of that for decorating. But I love every bit of this. I love yummy antiques and look at that piece on that desk. That'd be beautiful here in my art room. I love these colors, like a really pretty neutral palette if you wanted to work in a neutral palette. I love that there's examples on what that really looks like. This is such a beautiful book on colors and color palettes and ideas. It's set up quite a bit differently than a traditional color book. These are super fun. I just wanted to show you some books that I really love that I've kept on my bookcase for quite a few years now because I've done a lot of different things on color and it's very exciting now to do one on color as related to art rather than just photography or interiors. I hope you enjoy looking at some of these. If you only get one, this Color Mixing Recipe book is by far going to be one of your favorites just because if you get stuck on how to mix the color, this will get you there. I love that. It talks about hues and highlights and main color and just all kinds of interesting information in here for color mixing that maybe you're just not thinking of we're getting there. I love this book. It is my favorite for paint and it is probably the one book that you'd want to have out of all the books that I've listed there. I will see you in class. 3. Using The Color Wheels: [MUSIC] Let's talk about using our color wheel. There's lots of different color wheels out there that you could get. I have several of them myself just because each one was a little different and I thought, Oh, I need that. [LAUGHTER] I've got three color wheels and color wheels are invaluable. They tell you lots of different information. The first color wheel I have has one side on it, this is a guide to mixing color, because we're in a color mixing workshop, how perfect would this be? But it basically tells you how you're going to get different colors mixed up so if you want a pretty orange, it tells you if you take yellow and add red, you'll get orange. If you want this pretty a lime green, if you take a green and add yellow, you'll get more of this yellow, green. To get more of an aqua, if you take green and blue, you'll get a greenish blue. Blue-green add white and you'll get this beautiful aqua color that I love so much. You could just continue going around this palette and looking at the different colors that it tells you you'll get just by mixing in red, yellow, blue, white, or black, which is what we'll be using to create colors. This particular color wheel is invaluable for that reference right there. Now you know, if you're looking to get green, blue and yellow make green, blue and red make purple. Red and black make a darker red. I mean it just goes through and tells you what you're going to get by mixing your primary colors in with other colors, how you can get different shades. I love that. The backside of this is showing you some different tints of the different tones that we've got across the back here. What this great little circle does is it tells you some of the most interesting color palettes that we're going to be trying out in this workshop. They're going to give you the most interesting contrast and hues that work together so you can do complimentary colors which are directly across from each other on the color wheel. Like yellow and purple, green and red, blue and orange, those are the ones that are exactly opposite the color wheel. Then split complimentary would be instead of using yellow and purple, which is my least favorite color combination probably. You could use yellow and green and oranges, yellow. Split complimentary means they're across from each other, but they're the two colors that are split from the one directly across from here. If we go to red, we could do red, green, and blue, but more of a yellow, green and more of a blue-green, not blue and yellow or solid. It's some of these mixes. Because if we take yellow and green, we get this yellow-green or if we take green and blue, we get this blue-green. Blue and yellow and red, that's our primary colors. Blue-green, yellow-green, those colors in between there are our secondary colors. They're the colors that we got when we mixed the two primaries. That's fun. Then we could do a triad color scheme, which would be things that are equal distance around the color wheel. That's pretty cool. Or we could do tetrad, which are two complementary colors. We could do it as a square and we could have like green and blue-violet and this purple and this yellow and so we know purple and yellow are across from each other. It's just very interesting matching these up to see how we can get four colors that are equidistant from each other versus split complimentary versus complimentary. They're just different, interesting color-wise. In this workshop, I want us to be able to do each of those color palettes at least once, just so we can see how they operate together and what they do for us. This next color wheel is really cool because it gives us tints and shades. It takes the main color tone and it adds white. As we get more and more white to that color, that's how it lightens all the way almost to white. Then if we flip it over, it gives us shades so it's got tints and shades. If we start with blue, when we add black to it, it just gets all the way to the darkest tone of that color. I like this one because it does tints shades. It also shows us the complementary color. With the complementary and the split complementary and the tetrad and the triad with those, it doesn't mean that we have to use the most vibrant tone of that color to get that combination. I could use this really pretty light blue and this really pretty light orange. That would be my complementary color, directly across from each other, but not the strongest version of that color. If you're thinking, well, I don't like real strong purple and real strong yellow, which I don't really like real strong purple and real strong yellow because it's just too overwhelming and it's not my thing. But maybe I would like this lavender and this yummy butter yellow. That would be more in my color palette and something that I would like quite a bit more. Or maybe I like this blue-violet with this light ocher, buttery shade. Or maybe I'm more into this maroony color with a light green. You can see how we can then manipulate those color formulas to get us lighter or darker versions of the color that maybe we like better than the purest form of that color. Super fun. I like this one because it does show us the tints and shades and we can get a quick glance at the color range we'd like to be working in. This color wheel is super fun. What it's telling you is a color harmony wheel and it's telling you what are the most harmonious colors to work with. What it's saying here is let's say that I want to work in red, if this is the biggest portion of the color that I'm working in, these group of colors would be analogous to that color scheme. Then these group of colors would be the colors that we could throw in for a little bit of pop. This is going to be the one that compliments whatever's directly across from here. Then these are going to add some discord or a little bit of that interests, that little bit of pop of color so you want these to be just a little pops here and there. This to be maybe a bigger amount of that pop. Then this to be your main color. It's just really fun to just play and see if I pick this blue-green, what are the colors that are going to complement and pop for me? I think that's pretty fun and interesting to look at. Then it tells you on the back side how you can really use that to its best advantage. Different color wheels, just showing us some fun different things so definitely look at color wheels at your local art store or Amazon. I found, I think this color harmony wheel on Amazon. If you're interested in any of those and as far as color goes, I do like this guide to mixing color just as a quick reference in case you're mixing color and you think, well how do I get a certain color. Then this is very interesting on how you get those. It's just a little cheater sheet, so I really like this. Just a little word here on color wheels, we're going to be using some of these complementary, split complementary type color palettes when we get to just painting some little color studies. Those might be fun to reference, even if you just say one of those on your computer. I'll see you back in class. 4. Acrylic paint types: Let's call this Color 101 because I want to show you that no matter what type of paint you're using, whether it be from the very least expensive brands to the very most expensive brands, and you can get lots of acrylic paint in lots of different brands. Let's just talk real quick about the different brands I've got here. You can get, let's hold in, artist grade paints or student grade paints and a wide range of things in between there. I have a little bit of everything. I've got some from the Binders or the Dick Blick, some from online. You've got different thicknesses and consistencies to your paint. Then I also have all the way down to little craft paints. Craft paint is the least expensive acrylic paint that you can usually get. It's a good size quantity. You usually see them at Michaels or Hobby Lobby and there's a whole aisle of craft paints. I liked the Martha Stewart paints myself just because of the yummy colors that are mixed up. But here's what you get with the cheap paints. You get very little pigment and a whole lot of filler, and it's a craft quality. It's not going to be archival, something that you're going to paint a very important piece with. This is more something that you just buy and do craft paints and cheap projects basically. Then up like a grade from craft paint would be student grade paint. Student grade paint is exactly what it sounds like. It's made for students so it's budget friendly. Again, it has less pigment and a lot of filler. But they're good for projects where you're practicing and learning, and you're really getting your footing with your art and they give you a lot of color options for not very much money, and they're just fine. Then some of those might be your Liquitex Basics. They come in a big tub of paint so you can really get a lot more paint for your money. This Amsterdam is a brand that probably came from the art store. This one is the binders and it tells you right on it, value series, improved formula, white fast, so you can know that you're getting lots of big quantities of paint for not very much money so you're probably in a student grade paint. Which for the project that we're doing, and for a little abstract color play and stuff like that, these student grade ones are just fine. Then you do get into some nicer paint qualities I'd still call these student grade though when they come in like a little container like this but they are really nice quality. These are a little more liquid than these ones that come out of the metal tubes. They're not heavy bodied, they're considered more flow acrylics things, and I have quite a few of the for acrylic brands and differences there. This is Blick brand. This is a random brand from one of the art stores and it may have even been Michaels, I don't remember. But they're fun because they have lots of color. These are a little more color saturated, I think then the cheapest of the craft paints, so they are fun to experiment with. Then you get into this Arteza, which I really like the Arteza. This comes in a big box of 60 colors and you certainly don't need 60 colors. I'm ridiculous when I want something, I want every color of it, whether I need it or not, and the drawback to that is then you get color overwhelm and you almost paralyze yourself because you are like, "Oh, no, I have too many colors, what do I do?" Because I have so many colors now, I like to limit my color palette, so I'll come over to my bucket of paints or whatever it is that I'm doing, and I'll say, today I'm going to work in pink and orange, I think I like this pink and I like this orange, and maybe I want to work in white, like a titanium white. This is going to be my color palette today, and I'm going to put all of these colors away, and now I'm not going to be overwhelmed with color, I'm going to see what can I do with these three, and I almost set myself a goal. What can you do with the colors that you have rather than all the colors that are available. The Arteza I like because you can get a box of 60 colors for around $60. That makes these little tubes of paint about $1. These are really nice quality. I would say these are better than student grade, but they're not quite artist premium grade so it's a medium line in there. I like it that these are not toxic. A lot of the colors that you can get in paints like the cadmiums and the stuff like that, those are possibly toxic colors, they'll get on your skin, they have bad ingredients and you want to wear gloves when you're using them. All of these are non-toxic and you might not have cadmium red, you may have bright red so there you have tried to come up with colors that are as close as they could get, but not use toxic ingredients. If you'd like to finger paint and get your hands and stuff, which is really fun when painting, this is a nice brand for experimenting and playing because you don't have to worry about what's in it. The Arteza is nice because you can get that box of 60 for around $60, and actually, I was very lucky around Christmas and got that box of 60 for $30, which basically makes these about $0.50 a tube. Then you can test out the 60 colors in there and whatever color you really, really love, you can buy a larger quantity of those and then you can just replace the ones that you run out of with a little bit larger quantity of your favorite colors because not all 60 are going to be your favorite, there's going to be colors you've never use even once. But there's going to be colors that you love and how are you going to know until you get them and try them and think, I love this color. These, you can buy a larger quantity after that. But for something like this where we're doing color experiments, I feel like I spent, $0.50 or a $1 for this tube of paint, whereas for this tube of Charvin, I might've spent $20 for that. I don't feel as free to waste the nicer paint as I do the cheaper paint. I do encourage you to get some cheap paints to start color exploring with because you're not going to be as precious about it. Same thing about these golden fluid acrylics, these are very high-quality, nice artist grade paints, and they're very fluid. They've got an additive in there that still allows them to stay very pigment heavy, but at the same time be very fluid and drippy for the different paint things that you have to do. Now these are expensive, just like heavy-bodied acrylics. They've really nice heavy-bodied acrylics are going to be the most expensive, they're the artists grade, they're the ones that you want to work in when you're making projects for say, galleries or to sell or things like that, and they're going to be the most expensive. What I'd recommend to start with is maybe something like this artist quality, student quality brands. Get a big thing of say, red, yellow, and blue, maybe black and white, and that's our five colors that we'd be using the mixing any other color with, and then upgrade to the really nice paints as you discover what you love and what you're doing with them. They're really nice paints. There's plenty of those. There's Holbein there's Charvin, there's Gamblin, there's Winsor and Newton, there's all brands and I've got a little bit of the different brands. But I've got a lot of the Charvin because these colors are just so beautiful to me. But you don't have to have the most expensive paints. You can certainly mix just about any color you want. It'll just take you a little bit longer to get there then it would just pulling it right out of the box like this. Most color coming right out of the package you want to mix with a little bit of something in any way, and it looks like on my acrylic paints, most of what I have is the Holbein. Here's another Winsor and Newton. But I have more Charvins than anything because man, I love them. But, you know what? It's a little bit of a waste because I just paint for myself and for teaching workshops and things like that. I don't paint for other people, so I'm just using the best on myself, I guess. But I want to show you, it doesn't take a lot of color to get a lot of color. I'm going to start with the primary colors, red, yellow, blue, and then the black and the white just to see how we can get all the other colors out of just these few to start with. I will see you in the next video. 5. Making a color grid: In this section, we're going to make our own color mixing guide. I was inspired by this magic palette, which I got several years ago somewhere that had color wheels. You could Google probably magic palette and get one of these. It tells you on the back how to use the magic palette. But basically what it is a collection of colors. This one has 12 colors. I think I've put 13 on mine, and then it has black and I've put black and white on mine because I thought I'd want to see the black makes shades and the white makes tints and I want to see a row of tints up here. But what really we should do is we should have a color guide of these bright colors, a color guide of everything mixed with black and a color guide of everything mixed with white so that we see all the really light shades and all the really dark shades and all of the bright shades so we can have a bright, dark, and light color guide. But for mine, for this particular exercise, I do have a row of white and black here on my grid. I've just copied this grid here onto a piece of watercolor paper. I have not been super exact about it. I've just eyeballed it and drawn my lines each way. I've drawn enough lines that I can have all my colors, the white and the black and it's 13 colors that I've picked. Then I've got the 13 colors running across the top here. What this is, is this row here is going to be the dominant colors because you'll notice on here it says the dominant colors are on this side. Mixing colors are on this side. Mine's flipped. I did the colors at the top, but these are all mixing colors. Right here at the top, I've written dominant colors are coming down, mixing colors are going across so that I remember as I'm color mixing, which is supposed to be the main color and which is supposed to be the color I'm mixing in. I really loved this because it's amazing. If I'm getting in here, I'm like, I love this particular blue. How do I get to that color? Well, now I know know if I start with cobalt as my dominant color, which is this lighter, teal blue and I add in quinacridone magenta, a little bit of it, not a lot, but just a little, it's not a 50/50 mix. It's a lot of the first color, a little of the second color. I would say 75/25 percent, 75 percent of the dominant, 25 percent of the mixing color is what we might be going for, for our grid just to see where we end up with the colors that we're using and how they mix together. Isn't that pretty cool that we could get to this color by mixing in teal and a little bit of magenta? I can see the little bit of magenta in there too. But I will say I have used this color palette before. This is a printed guide that's laminated and these are ink colors, not actually paint colors. The colors I get have been slightly different than the colors that it shows me. I really think it's valuable to create your own color palette out of the paints that you own and use because this will get you close, but it's really not exact. It would be very helpful because every brand may have a different color of yellow ocher. It'll be close because yellow ocher is a certain color we expect to see in an art supplies in a orange-y, yellowy tone. But still, every brand's ocher is going to be slightly different. Like the Charvin yellow ocher is going to be slightly different than the Arteza one. It may have more orange to it, it may have more yellow, who knows what the particular formulas are for each brand and they're not sharing their color formula to get the exact same shade across all brands. They're all going to be slightly different. So if you're just starting this and you're wanting to use cheap paints just to get the feel for the color palette and stuff, then definitely, do like I'm doing and play in the Arteza. But at some point, you're going to want to do this with the real colors that you use because this would be a chart that you would then reference every day in the use of these colors. I may not have just standard colors in the nicer brand, I may have just the colors that I wanted. Maybe instead of having regular green, blue, red, whatever, I have, ocher, raw, sienna, Caribbean pink. These are the tones and colors that have really appealed to me, alizarin crimson. It would be very interesting to know how my favorite colors all combined if this was the color palette that I wanted to work in and the brand that I wanted to use. It'd be nice to know how do the colors I use all the time really interact with each other? Start off with a color palette like we're doing. But at some point, if you're using watercolor or acrylic oil paints in a particular different brand, do a color palette of the paint you're using all the time. You're going to really use that color palette all the time and the effort will definitely be worth it. I've just drawn a grid. I've written my colors across the top and the side. I could have gone ahead and put a little splotchy color there. Actually, when I started, I meant to have that first row blank so that I could put that main color there, but I forgot to do that so then I just went back and dabbed a bit of the color next to each one. We're going to just go through, and this takes a little bit of time so you might set aside an afternoon to do something like this, but it's so worth it. I can't even tell you how worth it it is. If we have a dominant color of white, I'm going to put white there and then maybe my first color is light sap green. Because I'm using the Arteza, the colors vary slightly from the colors on that magic palette because this one uses yellow green, phthalo green, cobalt, teal, phthalo blue, ultramarine blue, dioxazine purple, quinacridone magenta, quinacridone red, cadmium red, cadmium orange, cadmium yellow medium and cadmium yellow light. Those cadmiums I think have some toxic things in those colors and I'm not sure about the quinacridones, but this Arteza brand doesn't have these exact colors. Maybe they have one or two that are similar. Like I've got the phthalo green and blue, but I didn't think I had anything else that matched. I have used as close as I could get in the Arteza, the same type color shades. I've gotten pretty close. I've used light sap green for this yellow green. I've used the phthalo green for the phthalo green. You can see right there how different phthalo green is on my palette versus what it actually is on my sheet. This actually looks a little more blue than this. This looks more like a moss green to me. The phthalo green in my brand looks a little more like it's got blue in it rather than that mossy dark green color. That's a perfect example how if I took phthalo green and mixed any of these colors, mine is not going to look exactly the same because I didn't start off with that same mossy color. I started off with this little bit more vibrant tealish green color. That's what I was meaning when you're using this and your colors don't quite come out to that inks plot. That's why. Who knows what brand they might've been using here. This is an inks plot, not a paints plot. That could change from the process of them painting, photographing it, and then printing it, or just picking a color out of Photoshop and putting it on there and then printing it. Who knows what they used to get that print color? It's different than my actual paint color. It's really important for me to know exactly what I'm going to get. I need to not push that all in my paint. I need to have my exact colors on here. I don't need to use something that could possibly be close. I need it to be exact. I want to know exactly what I'm going to get. I'm going to start with, I've picked the colors that I could get that were fairly close to that color chart just to get started. What I'm going to do is I've got the white, I'm going to take a little bit of sap green and get my white and green color square. Actually, l like this smaller paintbrush for painting these colors. I should probably just use it. I'm just going to paint a square on there. The more care that you put into this, the better this color thing will be when you're done. I'm going to go ahead and have mine just go all the way down green with a little bit of black. That was a lot of black actually. But I'm just going to go down the line and mix these. It may even be easier if I mix it with a palette knife and then paint it with my paintbrush. Let's try that. I've got lots of little palette knives over here. We could take a little bit of this sap green and with our palette knife, just get that mixed in there. Look at that color. That's a good color. Then I can wipe off my palette knife rather than using tons of water. Then we'll go ahead and paint that in here. Look at that. I love it. Then I still want sap green open, but I want to sap green and sap green. I'm going to go ahead and just do a sap green square. Then I want to sap green with a phthalo green. Let's go ahead and put a little bit of phthalo green out here. Pick a little bit of the sap green out with my palette knife. Mix that up. You can see where this would be handy to have a color chart of all lights and a color chart of all darks and a color chart of the brightest shades. Because it would be nice to know what does this phthalo green mixed in with white give us. If I take a little bit of white and I mix that in, I'm going to have a different color than what I've just painted on there and that would be good to know. While you're working, if you're feeling really creative and industrious, make yourself three charts. As you're mixing, mix in black and mix in white and have a black chart and a white chart and a vivid chart. We'll call it vivid because these are the brightest of the color without mixing in white or black. So dominant color, we've got some cerulean blue, because that's the blue I picked. Then we'll take a little bit of the sap green and mix that in with the blue. Even though we're duplicating our colors here, like I have sap green here and sap green here, the sap green here is the dominant color, the sap green here is mixing color, so we're going to end up with different colors depending on what we've used as the very dominant color and what we've used as the less dominant color. It doesn't matter. We're not going to end up with a color chart of a whole bunch of the same color. Basically, it's not going to be two squares that look the same because we're going to get different shades by the different things we mix it with. Now I've got a phthalo blue and still working with the light sap green. That's a pretty color. Then see if we had mixed in, say white. That would be very interesting to see how that color lightens up. Look how pretty that is as a lighter color. Get a new paper towel. You could definitely go faster than I'm going. I'm sitting here talking in the middle of all this. But you can see that it's going to take you a little bit of time to actually do your color chart. But it's fun. It's meditative. You can put some music on. Look at that color and just go at it and spend a morning or an afternoon or sitting in front of the TV, binge-watching on Netflix. Just see what you can get. Here's a more of purple color mixing. I know it seems like a tedious exercise, but man, it's really not. It's the best way to learn what colors are doing what as you're mixing them up on your color palette. This one ended up being a weirdly puking strange moss, brownie green. That's very interesting. Let's go here with the magenta light. I'll get a little bit of this green. That was pink-y brown which, let me tell you, that's good to know because now if I were to take a little bit of white with this pink-y brown, just get a little bit of white to the side here, that I can mix into stuff. I were to get a little bit of that white in there. I'll lighten that up a bit. Let me show you what we end up with, which is super good to know. Look at how pretty that is, we end up with the very prettiest brownish-pinkish shade. That's important because one of my very favorite colors from Charvin is this Caribbean pink, which is a light brownie, pink-y shade, really light. We basically just mixed a color very similar. I could probably keep adding white to it as I make a mess here. I could keep adding white to that and making it a little bit lighter and a little bit lighter so that we get almost identical there with that more expensive color that I really like. This would be the perfect way to cheat and get the color with your color mixing without spending $25 on a tube of paint. That's the magic of color mixing, especially when you don't want to invest in a whole line of the more expensive paints. There are ways to get those exact colors without spending all that money. That was very interesting experiment. That was magenta light sap green and white, and we basically got that very pretty Caribbean pink. Now, who would have thought that? I never would have thought that there was any of this sap green in that pink. Let's go ahead to this conical red. A little bit of that. Now I'm thinking with this reddish, greenish, we're going to get closer and closer to brown because that was like Christmas red and green there. This is a little bit of a brownish red that we're ending up with here. It's actually a pretty color. Look how pretty that color is because I dropped water on our watercolor thing. That's a really pretty red. Then we've got vermilion that I picked. Caribbean pink there is my favorite little find here. Never would have even thought that. Look at that, that's more of an orange-y green, an orange-y brownish. Looks similar to that one. This is a shade darker. I don't know if it's really showing up for us here. Maybe I'll paint a little bit more on there. There we go. This is a little orange-y brown here. Then we've got our orange-yellow. Keep in mind, I'm trying to do the dominant color to be the most paint, then the color I'm mixing in to be a little bit less paint because I want the dominant color to be 60 or 70 percent and the less dominant color to be 30 or 40 percent. Just so I remember later, how do I get that color, can keep that in my mind. You can even write that up here how you were trying to get those color shades, how much were you going forward to really get that shade? Later, you can think, it wasn't 50/50. You can remind yourself what that really was. That's a little different color there. You see how that's easier just doing it with a palette knife and having one paintbrush that you're working with. Otherwise, I'd be out there changing my water every few colors because our water would be so dirty, I would feel like I need to clean the water. Let's do this sap green in this ocher. That's a puke-y. Just lost my paintbrush, I think. Let's pick a different paintbrush. There we go. This one's a puke-y. It's like green gold. I don't know if you like green gold or not green gold is one of my favorite colors to use on some of this because it's such a neon-y tone. Let's see if I can find it. Green gold. See this is green gold. This is the Charvin and it's more expensive paint, but it's maybe a little bit lighter than that but it's very close. If I were to continue mixing and playing there, I think I could get that maybe a little white in there. Let's see here. That's exactly it right there, a little more white. Look at that. We're real close. We'll shade different, but it's very close. It's maybe a little bit browner than the green gold, but it's so close that I could definitely fill in with the one I mixed if I didn't want the more expensive brand. That was a fun little experiment, yellow ocher and sap green gives us something close to a green gold. I got one more color here. Let's see. You're not going to make these discoveries unless you just sit and do this project. 6. Finishing the color grid: It's just fun and interesting to see the way the colors mix and then what you end up with. Sometimes, I'm surprised even though in my mind, I'm feeling like the color is going to go one way, it may go another way and surprise me. That one's really pretty there too. Now, I have done one full color. What I'm going to do is go ahead and do all my other colors and fill out my color chart with all 13 colors plus white and black that I've picked out and end up with a complete color chart very similar to our magic palette color mixing guide that I was inspired by, but frustrated by, because even though it tells me the colors, it doesn't really give me an exact match to the paints that I'm using. I'm going to go ahead and finish out my little color palette because this will be something that I use over and over again through every project I ever do going forward and it's worth the time to sit and get these filled out. I'm going to go ahead and paint in more of our squares and I'll come back and show you my finished grid. Check this out. So I know you didn't think I was going to get to it, but I did do all the way down until the very last color and I thought what I would do is show you how I sped this up pretty significantly for myself and got this down to about five minutes a row. Basically, what I did was I kept all my paints over here in order. So I didn't get them out of order so that I could just come through and very quickly lay each color on my palette in the order that they are here on my board. This definitely significantly sped this process up for me because I know you're looking at that thinking it's very daunting and you're just not sure if you're going to tackle it. I'll be honest, I've been working with color for so long, it's ridiculous and in theory, I understand color just fine. I can talk about the differences that the colors make you feel like yellow is, that's too much. Yellow's bright and happy, and orange is the color that means cheap and fast, which is why you see like Home Depot aprons are orange because when you walk in, it just mentally gives you the idea that they're going to be cheap and fast and you're going to get what you wanted at a good price. Blue is prestige and purple is royal and very prestigious. So I'm down to the last color. Basically, what I'm going to do is lay my color down next to every single one of these ready to mix. This is how I sped this way up. Even though I've done color for so long, I'll be very honest and tell you, I've never sat down and done this project right here. I always think of workshops as my own personal projects, especially with photography. If I want to personally deep dive into macro photography, I think, "Oh good. Let me think of all the different things that I could do to really help myself with this project." Then I film it, make a workshop out of it so that I'm doing all the work that I have asked you to do. It's not like I'm asking you to do something I didn't do myself. Let me put a little bit of this on before I close this up because this pale yellow is pale yellow. I want to be able to do all the projects that I ask other people to do and usually I want to film it and then show you I did it too. Let me tell you, in kitchen design, that's where I was for the last eight or nine years of my working life when I didn't work from home doing this art business. I went to school many years ago and got a degree, Fine Art degree, interior design and you might be thinking that that is decorating, like decorating your spaces and colors, and while that is a very tiny part of it, interior design is actually designing spaces and working with blueprints. I worked in the last regular job I had, I worked eight or nine years in kitchen and bath design, designing cabinet tree for people's kitchens and bathrooms and how much cabinet tree can you fit into whatever space that they have? It's basically all math. It's really not as exciting as you would think if you're doing the decorating side of it. I'm doing the back-end blueprint side of it. To date myself a little bit, when I was in college, we did all this on a drafting board. I drafted, I didn't get the benefit of CAD and 2020 and all these computer-aided design programs that I got to work with later, I actually drafted out blueprints when I was in college. My point is here, even though, in theory, I could design out your kitchen and give you a 3D drawing of the most amazing space you've ever had, I never was on the job site doing actual real-life application and problem-solving in person. When I designed my own bathroom that got remodeled, I encountered all kinds of real-life problem-solving issues because this was a condo built in the '70s, so it's not like it was all a new build and we could get around some of the issues that you have in a remodel. There was all kinds of real-life issues that I encountered that I'd never really seen in person and gave me a completely different perspective in what my remodeling customer coming into like a Home Depot or Lowe's might've been encountering versus what a builder is building new. There was really invaluable. I really think builders and department stores like Home Depot and Lowe's miss out a lot on not sending their employees out to the field for real life, in-person experiences there with some of that stuff because it changes your perspective and makes you a better designer and able to then see problems that may be coming. We could forecast those issues and solve them on the front-end rather than being out in the job site and we're going, "Oh, crap. Now I need X, Y, Z and we're going to have to delay this job three weeks to get it." This is from real life paint mixing experience. Even though I have these little paint mixing charts and I have the little color wheel that says, here's what you should do things, I've never actually sat and done this project. I thought I need to sit and do this project if I'm going to recommend you sit and do this project and then see what surprises did I come up with. Did I come up with things mixing color that I wasn't expecting? Look how beautiful that is. I'll probably cut this down to make it nice and neat and remove my paint palette out of the way because I tend to set stuff right on it and get paint everywhere while I'm talking. But I had a lot of surprises in here that I wasn't expecting, like this Mars orange mixed with titanium white actually comes out to something that's really close to my own skin color. That was pretty fun if I needed my own flesh tone in a painting for some reason. Now I know that Mars orange, titanium white would get me very close. Maybe even a little more titanium white if I wanted to shade darker, but look at that. Then depending on your own skin tone, you could match up to something in the color chart that could match up your skin tone. Some of these oranges and pinks were so pretty that I wish I had nail polishes this color. That was a fun thing. Cerulean blue surprised me. It stayed very similar in color until I got here to the end where I was mixing in yellow, so it seems like that, cerulean blue. It's very dominant and kept sucking in color as I was putting it in there. When it came to some of these other blues, it just aided up. Some of these lighter tones mixed with white, I really would like to see my whole chart mixed with white because some of these lighter tones was nice and surprising. The phthalo blue, really pretty lighter tone. The cerulean blue, real pretty I bet if I talked a little bit of green in there, I come up with a pretty turquoise, not a bunch, just a smudge because here's some other like this right here, this yellow ocher, maybe if I tuck that in with the cerulean blue, I did right there. It's a little more turquoise. You'd begin thinking outside the box, this yellow ocher and cerulean blue down here, super pretty. Was I already looking at that? Was that the other one I was looking at that I liked so much? I think it was real similar. But because the yellow ocher or ocher's dominant here, then up here the cerulean is dominant. That shade is different. It's more of a bluish color here, it's more of a yellowish color here. You can see how even though we're using the same colors, going up and down, whichever color is dominant really determines what shade you'll end up with. I like the cerulean blue dominant with a little bit of yellow ocher, way more than I like the yellow ocher dominant. This was really interesting too, to see how many colors turn to mud and give you different shades of brown like this orange, yellow, and this phthalo blue, makes the prettiest dark brown that almost looks like a Van Dyke brown to me. It's very super rich brown, I liked that. It's interesting to see how many browns we got because the colors mixed together just made a muddy shade. So I hope you do try this out. The real-world mixing of the paint and seeing what they do as I'm mixing together was definitely pleasantly surprising and I really enjoyed it. If you lay your colors out like I did, you could get that down to about five minutes of rows, so it'll take you a little bit to do one of these, might be hour-and-a-half to do that. Now that I've done that with these 13 colors, I really want to do it with my more expensive paints, just so I know what colors can I get out of the colors that I have, because this was amazing. What I really would like is to do all 60 colors, with all 60 colors, and have just a ginormous graph of these, and that might be a project for another day. I really like these, right in here, those are so pretty right there. I just love shades of blue and aqua, and teal, and turquoise and those all color ranges. But anyway, I really would like to have a gigantic one of my actual paint colors rather than just a random mixing guide that gets me close. I want to know what my actual colors are going to be. Because if you looked at those two, really, my colors are not as nice and neat in the final format as this ink chart where they're all nice and even in the exact color. This one shows something that this printed one doesn't. We can actually see transparencies which paints are thicker than others, which are a little more transparent. Which is important too. Because if you're thinking that you're using a solid color, but like this, they look green. It's transparent and I can see through easier than I can, say, on this yellow ocher. Some of these transparencies was a little bit surprising. Actually, if we're looking at our paint colors here, we can tell. Let's see, what was I saying? Phthalo green is right here on this package. It shows us a little box that's half white, half clear, and that means that that semi-transparent. If we go with one where the box is all the way clear, that's a transparent color, which if you're looking on here where it's ultramarine, I can see right through that color so that transparency is what that's telling me. Then that phthalo green was semi-transparent and I can tell that that's a little less transparent than that blue. That was very interesting, and then for instance, like this cerulean blue, let's just stay up there in the blues. The cerulean blue, is solid white, so that's solid. No transparency is what that's telling me. Then I can see that cerulean blue, I can't see through that color at all. I can see through the phthalo green and I can really see through the ultramarine blue. You're really not going to digest that or realize that, or put that into a real-world application until you do something like this. Then titanium white and black. Depending on the black that you do, those are solid, so you're not seeing through those at all. When you mix those colors with one of these other colors, you can see how now, with that phthalo blue, you can't see through it nearly as much as I could over here or the ultramarine. It's more solid than it is see-through those colors adding white or black to your colors, if they're solid, not transparent will make that color solid and not transparent even if you start with a transparent color. Very interesting, some of the things that you learned by doing this. What though adding the white does, the black just change the shade of black basically, but there is a difference in every one of those that I wasn't seeing until it dried. But it's very slight. But it's interesting because I like these dark purple-y blacks are really pretty. I hope you do this project. I'd like you to do it with some standard colors. On this little mixing guide, I just followed their colors and they had a yellow. They had a medium yellow which is like a yellow orange. They had an orange, they had a red, cadmium red. They had a fuchsia and a more of a magenta, and a purple and ultramarine blue and then phthalo blue and then a teal and then phthalo green and then a yellow green. While I did not have those exact colors, I did get just visually close in my range, and you're looking at the rainbow there. I started off with white-black. I did sap green, phthalo green, cerulean blue, phthalo blue, ultramarine blue. I pick them off. Pale for that purple, magenta light, conical red, vermilion red, orange, yellow, Mars orange, yellow ocher and yellow pale. That's the colors that I chose to do that we're very close to what was in this color chart, just to give myself something similar, so I got the overall feel of what we were doing. Then at some point later, I may go back and do one with all of the colors that I happen to have in the nicer acrylic brands so that I know what they do. I've got these colors. How far can I push them? Because I'm not going to go out and buy 150 of these tubes at $10, $15, $20 a tube. Whereas I can have 150 of these at 50 cents or a dollar a tube. So once you get some good basic colors and maybe a few colors that are outside the box that you really love, then do a color chart of the colors that you actually own and see how far he can push those colors with a chart like this. Super fun. I hope you enjoyed doing this. I actually enjoyed it quite thoroughly and have regretted that I've pushed this off as far as I have. Color mixing can be pretty fun when you're doing it in little boxes like that. I hope you enjoyed this project and I'll see you back in class. 7. Using primary colors to mix colors: So let's take a look at the least amount of colors that we need to start with. If you're on a budget or you want a good challenge, this is a fun exercise. I've just picked out what looks to me in the Arteza colors to be a primary red, a primary blue, and a primary yellow. These three look like brilliant red, ultramarine blue, and lemon yellow, they looked to me to be the most primary. There's plenty of colors in here that we could pick from. If I wanted this to be a little more ocher, I could have gone with this mid yellow, that could have been my three primaries. But I think I'm going to go with the ones that I've picked out because there's in that little Arteza set, there's a whole slew of yellows, there's deep yellow, there's mid yellow, there's lemon yellow, there's three or four of every color for you to pick from. There's a light apricot that looks yellowy, there's Indian yellow. We've got a lot to pick from, but I'm going to go with the one that to me looks most like a primary yellow. Then I'm going to go with white and black because no matter how you take these colors, you don't get white and black out of them. At the most, you get a muddy brown if you mix them and make mud. To start with, I'm going to use little quantities, but let's just start with the three primaries and we'll start with red and blue. What I'm going to do, I may keep pulling paint colors out of these, but what I'm going to do is I have a piece of watercolor paper here. I want to just put somewhere on here, the red, I'm going to put them around the circle from each other. I'm going to do red and about a third of the way through, I'm not doing it super fancy. If you want this to keep and say frame for something fun that you did, this is a front project to say, look at this and make something pretty out of it. But red, yellow, blue, a third of the way through. If I take blue and yellow or blue and red or red and yellow, what colors do we get? We've got the three primary colors, the three colors that we get when we mix those colors together are considered our secondary colors. I'm going to take a little bit of blue and we'll say a little bit of yellow. Because these dry so fast, I'm going to be working out of the container here. We're just going to mix that up, we'll say blue and yellow make a green. Depending on how much blue or how much yellow I put in there is how strong more towards the blue are more towards the yellow that we get. If I take that color, then if we do red and blue, I'm going to come up here and just put a little red up there next to that blue, maybe a little more blue. This is why I want you to use a cheap art paint. If you get to the point where you think I need to know what my colors are doing for the nicer paints that I'm working with and you want to really see how your colors react and not just how color reacts in general, then that would be an instance where you would go ahead and use your more expensive paints to do the things that you wanted to do. But because for this initial project, I just want to see what colors create what as I mix them, I'm using just a less expensive paint to do that. When we mix blue and red, we get some shade of purple, depending on how much red is in there, it may be more red or it may be more blue, but we get some shade of purple when we do that. Then if we mix red and yellow, just take a little bit of yellow, put that next to the red, I'm trying to make these quantities 50-50 but I may not be 100 percent successful, but that is the goal here. If I take red and yellow, mix that together, what I should get as some form of orange, I'll put that right there, it's a little bit more of a red, orange than orange, orange, maybe I needed a little more yellow, maybe I didn't get it quite 50-50. I really want it to be an orange, orange and it could be the color I've pick that yellow color I picked. There we go, now we've got a more orange, orange. Now, those are our secondary colors. So our primary colors are the red, the blue, and the yellow, that's our primary. The secondary colors are the colors that we made with those colors, it comes out like a little star. Now, our tertiary colors are the colors that we make in-between those. So if I take blue and this green and I mix that together, what I should get is a blue-green. If we take a little more blue, that was a lot of blue. Maybe I'll make some green and then add some more blue to it. If we take our blue and our yellow, we get that green, but if we add more blue to that, then we get a blue-green, that might be, there we go. We get more blue and the more blue I add, the closer it'll get to this blue shade, that's very fun. Then if I take that green and add more yellow to it, which I could go ahead and do now, I should come up with a more yellow-green rather than a blue-green. Look at that. We have more green there, maybe if I add some more yellow. This is just about playing and figuring out quantities versus color that you're trying to get, add a little more, mix it up, see if that gets you there. Still green, green compared to my original green there. We just keep on adding more and more color until I get where I think I want to be, more yellow-green. There we go, I like that. Then if we want something in-between the orange and the yellow, we would add more yellow to our orange. Let's just make some more orange first. Red and yellow make orange, then there we go. Then if I add more yellow, I will get one shade, if I add more red, let's go ahead and set this over here, I will get more red-orange. Let's start with this yellow orange, look at that, that'll get us right there a little more yellow. Then if I come over here with more red, I'm going to be closer to this red over here. Then if we come over here and we add the red and the purple, which I could just go ahead and scoop up some of that, you'll see we get closer to that shade. If we add the purple and the blue, put some blue out here next to that purple. I'm not cleaning my brush off for all of these I'm just trying to go around the wheel a little bit. Now we get more of a blue purple than a red purple, so super fun there. Then if we want to get mud, like we want a brown, for instance, then we can take any of the ones that are directly across from each other, yellow, purple, green and red, blue and orange, we can take any of those three combinations and we can add the opposite color to it. If I'm doing purple and I want to get brown, then if you'll mix purple and yellow, you'll get something that looks like mud, a brown mud. Let's just mix in some yellow and that purple, let's get a little more purple, let's take a little more blue and a little more red. Basically if you take your blue and red and add that yellow, you'll end up with something that looks like brown. Depending on what shade of red and what shade of blue and what shade of yellow, that'll determine what shade of brown you end up with because there's different shades in brown and gray and all that just like there is in all the other colors. We'll get a brown. If I used the blue and the orange, side some blue over here to this, I'll get a different color of brown than I just got, let's just pick up another paintbrush, mix these. See? It's still real similar though. If I use red and green, just put some red out here and I'll pick up one of these paint brushes. I'm trying to at least keep the color clean enough. So I need a little more blue and yellow. I didn't have quite enough green there. Remember, blue and yellow make green. To make it brown, we're going in the red. If you mix all the primary colors there, blue, red, and yellow, you'll still get that same brown mud color. Then the reason why I have white and black in here is because we can't make white and black. White is supposed to be the combination of all colors. But if you combine all the colors, you get brown. Black is supposed to be the absence of all color, which when you add them all together, you get closer to black. I don't really know how they come up with that, but that's how that works. The absence of all color in the combination of all color. But if you're talking about in terms of light, all the light combined make white, and the absence of light make black. If we take white and we add that to one of our colors, we get a tint of that color. With red, we should get a tint of what do you think it should be. Red plus white equals pink. Let's take a little bit of red, and a little bit of white, and a little bit of red, and a little bit of black and see, what are we going to get there? This is where you get into a tint and a shade. Shades are things that have darkness to them. You can think of it as darkness and black. Darker tints are things that have lighter parts of that color, red gets a little bit lighter. Then as I add more white, I'm going to get even lighter. As I add more white, we're going to steal even be a shade lighter. We could do this until we've got almost all the pink gone and mostly white. So if you're looking to get a light pink fairly quickly, then start with white and add a little bit of red to it, because adding white to a color just lightens it a little bit. Adding the color to white will get you closer to that color. Now, black is a lot stronger than white, so you'll get darker pretty quick. Here is a shade of red. As we add more black, it will get darker, and then more black and we get darker. You see that is how we get into our main color and then a tint of that color or a shade of that color, depending on if we add white or black to the color. We could do this to every single color here on the color wheel. If I do blue, then I'm going to get different shades of blue. If I do green, different shades of green. Depending on how much white or how much black I add into my mixture, that's how light or how dark we're going to end up. I hope that makes it fun and takes a little bit of the guesswork in how we mix colors. It's a lot of trial and error. Let's say if you're using your color mixing book that I recommended earlier. Here too, it talks about color value recipes. This is cerulean blue. If you add this cerulean blue with a touch of white, you get this and a little more white and you get this and a lot of white and it starts really getting lighter for the tints. For the tones, if you add in gray, which is not quite as dark as black, you get a medium range of tones here, a little darker, but not as dark. Then if you add black into your cerulean, you get much darker color. It's interesting to see what shades of blue do you like. The cerulean is a little more turquoise-y. The ultramarine is a little more vivid blue. This book is just really interesting for getting different colors. Let's say you want to get to pretty orange or peachy color, this one mixes crimson and cadmium yellow, a little bit less crimson to a little bit more yellow. This could really help you then get into shades and colors a little deeper than just mixing our primary colors. I'm going to experiment with the primary colors because you can get any color out of the rainbow that you could think of using just the three colors. You're just going to have to mix and work at it and blend and say, well maybe a little more of this or a little more of blue or maybe a little more yellow. As you are blending and doing things in there, you'll get closer and closer to the different color shades that you may be interested in using. This is a super fun experiment. Using just three colors and white and black, you can start with the minimum investment just to see how they work and how they blend the colors that you can get. Then once you get to the point that you're wanting to try it out with your nicer colors, then you could maybe spend the time and the money on the better quality ones to see exactly what each brand does, because from brand to brand, the colors do vary slightly. Not enough to be a big difference to me, but when you get to really being in your art practice, those nuances begin to matter, and at that point, I would color swatch the colors that you're going to be using in all your art. I hope you love this little color study practice here with red, yellow, and blue, black, and white for making just your basic colors, next level of colors, your third level of colors, your tints, and your shades, and how we got there. All right. I'll see you back in class. 8. Color mixing deeper dive: [MUSIC] I thought it might be fun to dig a little deeper into the color mixing just to have a little bit of fun and give you some direction with how you might play with colors. If we're looking at our color wheel, the colors fall into two different ranges. They can be warmer or they can be cooler depending on what colors were mixed in to get that color. So red can go towards the purple-blue, which would be cooler or it can go more towards the yellow-orange, which would make it a warmer red, so this red over here is a lot warmer than this red that's over here going towards the blue tones. Every color has the warm and the cool. Yellow can go towards the orange or it can go towards the green, and it's warmer versus cooler depending on which of those yellow shades you pick. The same thing with green. This is going to be warmer and cooler depending on if it's closer to the yellow or closer to the blue. When we mix colors, we've got to decide are we wanting the warmer colors or the cooler colors. All the colors come in different warmth. For instance, if I'm looking at these artisan colors, we've got this canicule red. I might be pronouncing that wrong, so I apologize if I pronounced that wrong all through this workshop. But it looks like canicule, and brilliant red. I can see that this goes towards the blue, it's bluish-red, and this goes more towards the orange, so it's a warmer orange yellowy red. Let's just pick out two, so here we started with yellow, red, and blue. If we mix red and blue, we've got different shades of purple. In that, if we went with more blue, we'd get a cooler purple. If we went went more red, we got a warmer purple, so that's how that worked out. Let's play with the red and the blue, because with this I just worked with the red, the yellow, and the blue that I thought was the most primary. But you don't have to do that. We can go with any shade of red and put that with any shade of blue. For instance, I've got cerulean blue, which is a warmer color, I've got ultramarine blue, which is a cooler color, and then I have Payne's gray, which is a grayish blue, which is a really fun color to play in. The funny thing with the Payne's gray is it does very pretty widely from brand to brand, as if it's a deeper, grayer shade or brighter blue shade, so you'll just have to play with your Payne's gray. But I thought it would be fun to mix the different shades of red with the different shades of blue and just see the differences that we can get. If I put out some of this red, that's warmer and some of this red. I'm sorry, the red that's cooler and the red that's warmer, and then I'm going to put the cerulean blue over here, and I will put ultra marine blue over here, so we've got our warms and our cools, and then I'm going to put the Payne's gray down here. Sometimes when you're mixing you think I didn't get the color I thought I was going to get, and the way these colors mix that might be why? Because maybe you pick the warm with a cool, and you ended up with a different shade than you thought. But let's take a little bit of this red and mix it with this cerulean. Mixing the colors is just a little bit of trial and error. If you get a shade that you love, then stay with it. If you get a shade that's too red, add more blue, if you get a shade that's too blue, add more red. Let's just start here with a little bit of this red painted on here. Then you might also, you might make color cards for yourself. That was the conic red, and then mixed with the cerulean blue. Look how pretty that shade of purple is. That's really pretty. I could also, let me just get a towel, then mix that red with ultramarine, and I'm not adding tons of ultramarine to it, I just want to start off suddenly and see what we get, and then I could add a little more. But I liked that amount right there, and you'll see check out this color. If you add more red, you'll get more of a burgundy shade. Oh, look at that. Really pretty. Then if we take a little more of that red and mix that in with this Payne's gray will get a completely different color, because in this brand that Payne's gray is a really nice, deep, yummy shade. Look at that, so we should get a really pretty almost stormy purple. Let's see what we get. That is real pretty. I could even have added a little more of the Payne's gray to that, then we could have got it even darker. Oh, yeah, that's pretty. Let's try that. Oh, look at that, so pretty. I could also, and I'm going to use the gesso for this. I could also take a little bit of gesso into each of those colors. So if I took a little bit of this red and put gesso on it, now I've got a tint. I don't have the solid color of that. I've got a tint of the color and I can even add a little more gesso, and as each time that we add that gesso we get a little bit lighter color. That's really pretty. Let's go back and do the same with these yummy purples that we just mixed. Let's go add it right over here to this one, which is the one that's got this cerulean blue in it, and we get a little bit. Even if these colors are transparent, when you add the white into it, it's making it a lot more solid, it's not going to be as transparent. Look how pretty that is. Then let's go ahead, and we can add black to, and if we add a black, then we're making a shade rather than a tint. I think that was the Payne's gray, so let me not mix these up. This was the Payne's gray one. I put more white in there, we'll get even a lighter shade. They get a little more gesso out. I could have used the white paint too, I didn't have to use the gesso, which just convenient because the gesso it's just such a large container and fairly inexpensive compared to a tube of paint. Look how pretty that is. Now, if we take a second piece of paper, and I just use a little watercolor paper here on these. Look what happens if we go with a completely different color of red, so let's do a little bit of this brilliant red with the cerulean. Yeah, that's very interesting. I'm going to take a little bit of this brilliant red and put it over here. That is definitely a bright red. [LAUGHTER] My goodness. That's a bright red. Let's call this one brilliant red. You might go ahead over here and do the blue that you added into these cerulean ultramarine blue, Payne's gray. Then you'll remember exactly what you mixed plus to get those colors. Plus white. Just so you'll know how did you get those colors? What gave you those shades? Let's go ahead and we've got our first purple here so let's go ahead and add that. Look how pretty that purple is. That with the cerulean and that's really pretty. Let's go ahead and mix some of this red with ultramarine blue. Can see how that red really cool that color down for me. I mean I want that color up being on the red side. Completely different than that other one that I had over there. Here's the one with ultramarine blue. Fun. Let's go ahead and add this red to some Payne's gray. A little bit of white mixing in there, but that's okay. Keep adding more of the blue in there because I was getting more red than purple there. Let me put our Payne's gray one down here. That's really pretty. I might even make that even darker. It's very similar there to my ultramarine. Let's see if that gives us a little more of the color we want here. Oh, yeah, pretty. Then we might go ahead and take our three colors and add some white to it. I really love this particular lavender. There's that one. Let's go ahead and grab the one with the ultramarine blue in it. Oh, yeah, I see. It's more along the burgundy shades and a little bit lighter, still. A little more white paint. Doing all your colors like this, this is part of your workflow, your part of your study, part of your studio time is playing with different colors like this and seeing, what do you get? Let's pick a color today and let's pick a different color tomorrow and let's just see what do we get and save your little color cards. That's really pretty there. Make a little book of color cards like this so that when you want to know how to get to a certain color beyond our little chart of stuff that we mixed earlier in class, you can really experiment and play here and get really cool results. Just with a little bit of color play each day. Let's mix a little bit of white and that red. Let's make some more white in that red. Actually, I want a little more white. Let's just put this white up here. [LAUGHTER] There we go. It makes different shades of pink. I can really tell that this is warm versus cool as I stand back and look at this because now we can compare the different shades. You can see how this one is significantly brighter and more yellow, orangey versus that one which looks like it's got the blue in it. Then as we add our different colors in to make purple, you can see how drastically different all of our shades of purple end up with just that little bit of difference. Are we working with a warm color? Are we working with a cool color? What happens when we mix warm and warm? What happens when we mix warm and cool? What happens when we add white? What happens when we add black? Because we could do this with these are our tints because we added white, but we could add a line of black in there and see what the shades are, see how it gets darker. Super fun. I hope you get these colors out and play. You could do the red, blue to get purples. You could do the green and the yellow and the red to get the different shades of green, you can do the green and sorry, you can do red, yellow, blue so you can do the different shades of yellow and blue to get all your greens, yellow and red to get all your oranges and stuff. You can get the red and the blue to get all of your purples and stuff. Pick some of those primary colors, pick two colors, and pick a warm version of that color and a cool version of that color. If I was in yellow, this looks a lot warmer to me. Then this is oxide yellow versus lemon yellow. This looks a lot brighter and cooler to me like maybe there's towards the green family and that'll be like towards the orange more. Then if I were to do blue, maybe the cerulean and ultramarine again. If I were going to pick, say got red, those are blues, these might be the yellows that I picked. That might be your three sets of primaries that you're playing with. Just pick two shades to see what am I going to get mixing them up for the different purples and the different greens and different oranges. What can I get? This is super fun and I hope it is fun for you and then you start realizing the differences. Like red is not just red, is it more warm? Is it more cool? Blue? Is it warm or cool? What color warm, and coolnesses are you bringing into those shades that you're creating? Hope you have fun with this little project. I will see you back in class. [MUSIC] 9. A few Interesting Color Palettes: [MUSIC] I want to show you real quick in this video some of the color palettes that I've experimented with that I find particularly appealing. If we're looking at our color wheel. I have this colorway that I really love. It's not your standard blue-green colorway, but it is one of my favorite pieces that I have done that I have hanging on a wall downstairs and it is a color combo that we did in this class with the earlier video that we did, so check that out. I do the blue-green with the analogous colors. They sit next to each other on the color wheel. But I'm not using the traditional blue blue and the traditional green green. This is more of a yellow green, green gold color almost in the yellow palette, but not quite yellow, and then this cerulean blue, which was real fun, which is not quite a vivid blue, but a little bit more like a sky blue almost and this is one of my favorite pieces and I think this is a particularly fun color combo to play with. Another one that's in the analogous color schemes that I particularly love is pink and red. So this is different shades of pink and red. You could almost consider that a one color range because it's pink, red, and orange, so it could be different tints in the red range. So you can almost consider that a single color or an analogous color where they're sitting side-by-side on the color wheel, and pink and orange, I love this bright colorway. Another one that I really love is pink and ocher, and so we're in the ocher, which is in the orangey yellowish family and back here in the red family. So we can probably consider that some analogous color also. But this colorway is just always really pretty and thrilling to me even when doing a larger piece of it. It's so appealing. I really love this colorway. Then this one is another of my favorite and it's in the red and teal and you can see that those are across the color wheel from each other. So we could call that complimentary. But look how vivid red and teal is. These are just some fun color studies that I did using the oil sticks just to see how the oil sticks worked versus oil paint. At one point and I thought, "Oh my gosh, I love this teal next to red," sometimes I see artwork that uses the teal red combination that always jumps out at me. So it is a really fun, vivid color choice. Just want to show you some out of the ordinary, little bit brighter, maybe colors you might not have been thinking of, for color choices that you might consider that I find particularly appealing and I will see you back in class. [MUSIC] 10. Supplies For Color Projects: Let's talk about supplies in this video. In all of the color mixing examples that I was showing you, I was using the ARTEZA Acrylic Paint, and definitely use that paint if that's what you got, use whatever paints you have. What we're going to be doing throughout this next little set of videos is working with some of the dynamic color combinations that throughout history have been proven to be some of the most interesting or most contrasting or you might not like them at all, who knows, but the color combos that you always hear about are the complimentary colors, the split complimentary colors and then we're going to also do a triad color and a tetrad color. The complimentary colors are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel, so that's blue and orange, red and green, yellow and purple but it could also be these colors in-between, red-orange and blue-green or it could be this red-violet, and this yellow-green. Think in that set of colors, what is it that say for the complimentary colors, what do you want to focus on? Do you like red-green? Do you like blue and orange? Do you like purple and yellow? I think for mine, I'm going to focus on blue and orange. Now, does that mean I'm going to focus on the brightest color blue, and the brightest color of orange? Probably not. I'm going to come somewhere in the blue family and somewhere in the orange family and have many shades of blue and orange but I'm going to limit myself in that particular color palette to blue, orange, black and white. Black and white could be used in any of the color palettes. They are your two neutral colors and feel free to mix those in. Let me zoom out just a little bit. If we are picking purple-yellow, you could pick purple-yellow, but you can also pick a lighter purple, or you could mix white with that purple and make it lavender, and you can mix white with that yellow and make it a lighter purple. We're going to be mixing colors and experimenting, but we're not going to limit ourselves to just acrylic paints and use whatever brand you have. If you have other acrylic paints and let's say you have a green and a purple that you like, see like that, purple one is blue and this green gold, look like this lighter yellow-purple combination or even a little bit in the greenish with that green gold, but it's really a bright yellowy green. It's not really green, it's not really yellow. But just to say, here's how you could still work in those color combinations that maybe not be exact to the brightest of those colors. We're going to pick a colorway and we're going to then have white and black that we could use but we're not going to limit ourselves to just acrylic paints because then these projects, I want to do my great big piece of paper where I just do paint and pencil and maybe some neocolor crayons I might pick out and I do marks, and I just make the whole big paper a big mess of yummy color without thinking about composition or worrying about, did I get something right here, right there. What we're going to do once we have that great big piece of paper filled, then we're going to search out little yummy compositions in there to cut little abstracts out, and is by far my most favorite way to create. I find if I just take a square and try to create the perfect picture in that square, I'm just not satisfied ever. I don't get the right composition or something didn't end up where I thought it should or who knows what, but I'm just never satisfied. But if I do it on this big piece of paper where I'm just really not even thinking about it the whole time I'm painting, and then I search out that same size composition, I always get something I love. Here's a set of smaller ones that I had done at one point, same theory but look how beautiful these are when you search out little compositions, even though the great big piece looked like a big fat mess and I was doubting if I was going to love anything, but man, I love these so much. They're hanging on the board behind me and I just loved to create this way. I thought for color experimenting, it would be the perfect way to experiment with color, limit your color palette into a particular colorway, and just see what we can get. I love creating this way so I'm going to personally possibly be using some neocolor to crayons. I happen to have the big box, but you don't need that. You can have just a couple of colors and say if we're doing blue and orange, then I'm going to pull out just the blue and orange crayon. I'm going to work within that color palette no matter what materials I'm pulling out. For instance, I might use this blue and this orange. I might pick out a blue and orange out of our basket of colors and I've still got that white and the black and also, at the end might use some posca pens for drawing some lines. I like that for line drawing. For mark-making on the piece of paper at the bottom, I might possibly use some graphite and charcoal because I have them and I'm going to keep them in a shade that's allowed. The graphite and pencils and things are actually like a shade of gray, but you know what, if we mix white and black, we get gray. We're going to say that gray is a loud color because the two colors here I can mix and get gray. If it's a color that's not something you can mix with your four colors that your two colors and the white-black, then limit yourself and say, I can't use that. It's not in my color palette because for this particular type project, I really want you to hang out in the particular color palette that you're doing just to see what you can get. I also might be using soft pastels on the top because I really love those. I may possibly be using some hard pastels because they give you a different line and it just works different than the soft pastels. I can get more definition and these are going to be more smudgy colors, so I might be using those, but again, I'm going to limit myself to my color palette. I'm not going to work outside the colors I've chosen. I might use tinted charcoal. Charcoal you normally think is black, but the tinted charcoal comes in several different shades and so if I'm going to be doing blue and orange, then I'm going to limit myself to colors that would possibly fall within that color palette. I also have my marks, a lot pencil, the Stabilo marks all this. I love that it comes in black. It comes in a few other colors, but the black is my favorite so I may be mark-making with that tool, I could be mark-making with my mechanical pencil. I can be mark-making with my black Posca pen. Just some different ideas on what you might be using as we're going through this project and I may or may not use all that, you might not have any of that. It's not a big deal. Use some of the supplies that you have. I want you to get comfortable with the supplies and then just start playing with color and then when we go to cut out our pieces, you're going to be so excited for what you're coming up with. The paper that I'm using is 140-pound paper, which is 300 gram if you're in that metric measurements. It's watercolor. This is cold press watercolor, and this is an 11 by a 15-inch pad, which is 27.9 by 38.1 centimeters. It is the extra large pad because I want to work on a great big piece of paper that I can then search out a little, maybe five by five or five by seven or four by four, three-by-three, any composition size. I want enough paper there to let me do that. I also will be using some gesso in with my acrylic paints so I do have some clear gesso and some white gesso that I will be using to mix in with the acrylic paint because it then allows the acrylic paint enough texture for me to draw on top of it with other marking utensils like the pastels and stuff, because if you can't just draw on top of regular acrylic paint with a soft pastel, it doesn't work, so you'll definitely want to either mix the gesso with the paint or be willing to coat the whole piece when you're done with a coat of clear gesso so that you can then continue to add to your composition. That's most of the tools that I just happen to have. I didn't go out and buy lots of new stuff, already had lots of stuff. I want you to experiment with what you have, but stick within your color palette that you choose and then we're going to do several different color palettes. I'm looking forward to exploring those with you, so I will see you back in class. 11. Complementary colors: All right. In this first color study, I am going to do complimentary colors. That's the very first one I want you to tackle. It is the easiest. It's a two-color combo, and it's colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. The colors we always think of is orange and blue, red and green, purple and yellow. We can also do the colors in between. We could do red-orange, and blue-green, which I think is where I am going to do for this because it's a little more interesting. There's a little bit of color mixing going on in here. Looking at my color chart that we made, which let me tell you is a little bit invaluable. Now, if I want to be in the blue-green, I'm looking at some of these colors that I created that are blue-greenish, and I really like this cerulean blue mixed with the mars orange. It's a really pretty deep aqua color, and I also like the one mixed with yellow ocher. So not only do I want to just pick an orange and pick a blue, I want to pick an orange and blue that I have to mix a really nice shade of. So I'm taking it one step extra so that I'm not going to be lazy here. I like these two blues, so I need a mars orange, which I've got out. I also need the yellow ocher, which I'll find in just a moment. I'm not going to use these other oranges, I'm going to stick in that color palettes. I really liked that. Then I will pull the ocher out because even though ocher is not orange, we're mixing it with one of our oranges. I have to find in a second. We're going to mix it with one of our blues to make the perfect teal color here. Don't be afraid to get the other colors in there. But when you're mixing your final goal is to be the two complimentary colors. Then orange-wise, I really want something that's not vivid orange, I want an orange that'll match in with these aqua teal shades that I've got there. I'm going to look down here to see which one do I think is the most pleasing with these blue greens. I'm looking for oranges that are on the red side. I really like the mars orange, which I already have out mixed with this vermilion red. That's real pretty, or this conical red. I like these shades right here. I think even if we add white to those, they'll still be really pretty. I do like the mars. I really liked the one. I think I like the one with the conical red and mars orange as my orange like that. Then I like this cerulean blue that's mixed with the mars orange. We're still staying in the same tonality. We're starting with this orange-y color here. I might go ahead and pick out these blues, the cerulean. Look how pretty those are, and put the other blues back. Then I've already got the mars orange out. I'm going to mix that blue and orange to get this pretty teal color. Then I'm going to mix the mars orange with one of these reds right here to get the reddish orange, and then will be in our colorway. That's what I'm going with. Then I've also pulled out other supplies in my color tones so that I'm limiting my colors. I'm not straying outside of it because I'm finding all these. Here's the vermillion right there now that I'm looking over here the red. Let's pull that out. There we go. I'm not getting distracted by all the colors in the box. I just want different materials in the right colors. I've got the soft pastel, the hard pastel, some neo color pencils in shades of orange that I think will go with my color palette. Then I've also got them in shades of blue that I think will go with my color palette, which was the more blue-green, the more teal-ish colors. These are the things that I'm going to use that are going to be optional. I also have the white and the black here because we're going to allow ourselves the two neutrals. That's my color palette. To get started, I'm going to tape my paper down, and I'm going to put my paints out on my color palette. So I will be right back. Now, I'm ready to start painting. I've put out my vermilion red, my cerulean blue, and my mars orange out here on my color palette. I have white gesso and clear gesso that I'm going to use to mix into those colors. Because I'm using the white gesso, I'm going to say the white paint and not add that in at the moment, I might change my mind and put white paint up there, but for the moment, I'm not. I've also got this out on a fun ceramic palette. I like using a ceramic palette because it's a little more eco-friendly. I'm not throwing away paper palettes, but depending on my supply, I use paper palettes like the paints and stuff because the cleanup is just such a mess if you don't. But with acrylic paints, I just use all my paint and then scrape the paint off the next day and I can throw that scraped off paint in the trash. I'm not washing any of these paints down the drain because depending on what acrylic paints you're using, you may have some that are toxic. I'm using, these are teases, so I know none of these are toxic, but you still, as a general rule, don't want to wash paint down your drain. I'm going to get started right here. You're looking at a white paper, so you're thinking white paper paralysis. I don't know what to do. Where do I go from here? To solve the white paper paralysis, this is just a big piece of graphite. I just come and just start mark-making on the paper. We may or may not see these marks under the paint when we're done. The goal here is not really to have some great big design in mind with these marks. It's simply to dirty up the paper. Now, you're not looking at it thinking, oh no, I'm about to ruin this piece of paper. You're like, you've already ruined it. If you want to say it in that way, you've already got some good scribble marks. You can come through and practice your mark-making. If you'd like to add words of inspiration or say poetry or anything like that, some writing you can do that in here. You could do something that looks like a little bit of scribble writing. You can have this mean something or you can have it mean nothing. It's just a way to go underneath and dirty up the white paper. There we go. Now we have started; we've got our paper dirty. We might come in here with some color and maybe we'll use our non-dominant hand so that it's not really uniform, and try out the different oranges. This is the place to try out the colors that you picked so that you can be like, oh, look at those. These are the neo colors that I'm drawing on here. What's really fun about the neo color is they're water-soluble. Let me just get a cheap paintbrush here with a little bit of water on it. You can see that I can come through and activate those with a little bit of water. That's fun. Definitely a good way to experiment with your supplies at this point, because most of this is going to be covered up, and so you're not really ruining anything, but you're figuring out that this graphite does not really activate with the water and these crayons really do in that fun. That's just a fun little thing there. If I were to use a charcoal pencil, which let me see if I've got a charcoal pencil out. I can grab one out of our little set here. If I've got charcoal versus graphite, let's just pick this deep blue here. I go ahead and mark around with the charcoal. It's almost black, so that's fine too. Charcoal does activate with water. I can do that. If I wanted something where I could activate it and smoosh it around, charcoal would be the better option over graphite because charcoal, I can do that with. That fine. That's just fun things that you learn, especially on these under layers that don't really matter. Which one of these tools is going to give you the look that you're wanting to go for? Do you love my Stabilo pencil? Stabilo pencil is water activated. If I did that on here, I could come back with that paintbrush, and I could activate that Stabilo pencil too. So super fun. Let's just keep on going. Now I'm going to go ahead. I think for this I'm going to do bigger blocks of color. You'll remember that on our color palette, I really liked this mars orange mixed with this vermilion red to get me this muted, red-y orange color that was on here. Then I also liked the mars orange mixed with this cerulean blue, which gave us this really pretty tealish color instead. Then so I'm going to mix that color with both of those. I might do that with a palette knife to start with and just see what we're starting with here. Then I could also use both of these colors just as they are. I'm going to leave a little bit of the original color there. Or maybe not, I may use it all. That might have been too much orange to that blue. Well, that's still an interesting color. It gets more interesting the more it gets mixed. There we go. That's the color I was hoping for. I may have to mix up. Look how pretty that color is now. Oh, my goodness, that is such a pretty color. Good choice. I may have to mix up some more depending on how much paint I end up using here. Because I'm not sure how much I'm going to use up. Let's just mix it all. Let's just get right in there and really get that color in there. Look how pretty those are together. I want you to get creative with your color mixing and don't just use the colors straight out of the bottle. Here we go. Let's start with this. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to start adding paint to my paper. This is very interesting too. I can see right here that this paint is translucent because I can see stuff shining up underneath it that I might not have been expecting, so that's interesting too. Are you using a transparent paint? Are you using a solid paint? I actually meant to mix that with the gesso. So let's go ahead and get some gesso in there. Then I might run back over here and top it again because I want to be able to put stuff on top of this acrylic paint. This will also take out the shine of the acrylic paint, but I want layers on top of it. I don't want it all to be one layer. Let me grab my other paintbrush and come in with some blue mixing it with that clear gesso at the moment. Then I'll come back maybe with some of the lighter shades and just fill in. You do want to be careful when you're using these colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel like we are because, if we mix orange and blue while they're still wet, we'll get mud. That's how you get browns. You just have to keep that in mind as you're going. If you don't want brown in there, don't mix too much wet on wet. I'm not really thinking too hard about where I'm putting these and I'm going to add some white and get some white in there, lighter shades. At this point, I just want you to play, fill up the paper with scribble and marks and paint. We'll come back and find good compositions when we're done. I actually find it harder to paint big stuff and I do little stuff. You need to use a bigger paint brushes and bigger blocks of color and the big blocks of color is what I find hard sometimes on, tend to want to get in there and have little scribbles of color and I'm working on that myself. Get your fingers in here if it's not doing what you want or you've got too many brushstrokes that you don't love. I might go ahead and mix in white with our yummy orange-y color here. See what we got? Use a different finger because you've already got paint on one of these fingers and I'm not using gloves today because I purposely decided to use non-toxic paint. But if you're using paint that's got any toxins or anything, definitely put your gloves on. Because if I'm working with oil paint, I'm wearing gloves every time because I know some of those are just not good. Look at that color. I like it when it's mixing, not mixing. I love that. What I love about doing this with acrylic paint is it dries fast so we don't have to wait until tomorrow to cut pieces out. We're going to be cutting pieces out of this today. Let's just keep on going here. Now that I've got some big splashes of color and we'll come back and just fill in and just see what I can get. How the colors will mix. I'm just going to go ahead and just really get in here with some of these paints. I like it when it makes us a little bit, but not enough to make a brown. Also, while I'm in here, I want to be doing some mark-making. I may have waited too long on some of this, but I want to go ahead and put some interesting lines and some marks going in here. So I'm just using a sharp tool. You can use a little skewer you get from the grocery store, one is wood skewers for something like this. I do this a lot with my mechanical pencil. You don't even have to have anything special. I do it with my pencil a lot because I do get some graphite sometimes in that when I do it. But I want to go ahead and just start getting some lines and marks in my paint. Then I might add some more paint. See how much more interesting some of this has already gotten with just some lines and scribble on it? Already breaking up those solid colors. Look at that, I love that. It gets so excited when stuff is getting exciting. My marks are getting fun. Let's add a little bit more of this white gesso. Don't forget, you can do white and black also. So don't feel like all of that has to be a color. So I may come back in here with some white. Maybe I'll get a third paintbrush out. What paintbrush do I want? I think I want this one. Let's just get a little bit wet and maybe we'll just come on top here with some gesso. Or I can do some mark making. Or I could take my palette knife and I could do some palette knife work. As you're going though, your paper is going to buckle a little bit. As it dries, we will get rid of some of that buckle. So it's not a big deal. As you're going, you might think purple and orange, ew, but man, look how pretty these colors ended up? I think ew when I think yellow and purple. Maybe I should have done yellow and purple to get past that stigma in my mind of yellow and purple. But man, look how beautiful, these are turning out. I need to let this dry for a moment. I might actually take my heat gun and heat it with the heat gun real quick so that I can come back on top with some mark-making stuff and we put those in water for a moment. Then just to show you what we'll be doing, I've created these little view finder windows out of watercolor paper. I just cut four strips and taped it together in a size that I like in the five-by-five is usually my favorite size. I usually just like to search out pieces that are going to look interesting and then see where else do I need to maybe add some extra detail and marks and some fun and some things in there. This is a five-by-five window, and I've just taped together pieces of watercolor strips to make that window. Then when we get our next layer of mark-making on here, we'll start searching out fun patterns. I'm going to draw this with my heat gun and I'll be back. 12. Finishing up complementary colors: [MUSIC] We're 98 percent dry. We've still got a little bit of wet paint going in there, but we're mostly dry. Now, I'm just going to come in and start doing some mark-making. This is my Stabilo in black. I'm just going to start drawing some marks here on top of my paint colors. I'm not thinking of a pattern and composition at this point, I'm just thinking organic lines and marks, adding to whatever I'm going to search out later. You can tell if your paint is still wet. It doesn't draw on top as easy. This is a really good time too to practice your marks and different things that are going to make pieces individual to you. Do you like little dots? Do you like random scribble? Do you like things that look like writing? Do you like shapes? Do you like things that are rounder, more scribbly, and straight? Definitely, time to experiment. Let's get out our Posca pen here and play. Make sure I got some paint coming out the tip here. Maybe I want some dots. Let's do dots. [MUSIC] Give it some fallen whimsical elements in between some of the other elements. I like using paint pens with this, so this Posca pen as a paint pen, you can use any paint pens that you like. I do like the Posca because they don't stink. [LAUGHTER] Some of the paint pens have such a strong odor that they almost run you out of the room. I have a goal that's like that. [MUSIC] You may be thinking as you're looking at this, how are we going to get anything fun out of this big mess? Because I just don't think in big paintings like a lot of people do. I'm searching now for yummy fun little sections. All of these details that we're adding are going to really give us that fun that we're looking for. Maybe I'll do some white lines up here maybe. Another thing that I like too is one of my silicone tools to dive down into the white paint and then come back with yummy white lines. That's one of my favorite things to do. A lot of my little paintings will have random white lines in there that I've done like this. I'm not thinking too hard about where they're going because, at this point, I'm not searching out compositions yet. [LAUGHTER] Just thinking, yeah, that needs a decoration like right there. So let's go ahead and just add that right in. Look at that. I love that little subtle lines there. Then once we got what we like, silicone tools are easy to clean up. We can just wipe paint off of them. That's why I like using silicone tool stuff, just wipes right off. Let's just see. What else can we add onto here? We might come back in here with some pastels. Let's go ahead with some pastels because I really like some of these. This is almost too blue. Let's look, hang on. I like this color. It's that lighter shiny here. We could come back and add some pattern. We could just smudgy some color and really make it more defined in certain places. It's again, another chance to experiment with all the supplies you have in your art stash. [LAUGHTER] Because if you're an art supply lover like me, then chances are good that you have a gigantic art collection of supplies. Because you know what? Buying art supplies and doing art, it's really two different hobbies. [LAUGHTER] It's almost like I want to just buy all the colors, and so that I can look at them. This is fun with some little dots on the orange. Now, this is where I really like the stiffer Neil colors better because the dot you get with the soft pastel is not consistent because it's so soft and every time you touch the side on there, you're wearing the side down. So the next dot is not going to be uniform and consistent, but it is still fun to use them. Then to add in some color and some smudgy and really define some of your patterns where you thought you needed more color and you don't want to get your paint back out. [LAUGHTER] But the hard ones give you a much better little line and mark if you're wanting to do some nice defined mark-making. [MUSIC] Those are fun. This blue is maybe blue than I'm thinking for this. But now that I've got a couple of spots in here, we might as well add a spot or two more so that it looks like it was on part. Well, actually now that I've got some in here, it is a fun variation. We can smudge just an extra little color in there. I like that. I was doubtful there for a minute. [LAUGHTER] Just a tiny bit though. That's all I'm going to do for that. Then, you're going to have stuff all over your fingers. I do like to have baby wipes handy in my art room by my art table and I can just get pastel off my fingers pretty quickly. I don't know if I'm done yet, but let's just search out a few compositions and see if anything at all is calling our name. Look how pretty that is right there. I like that right there too. This one, I might actually want more dots. Let's get our paint pen back out and do some more dots. This is too how you encounter refined stuff easy for yourself. You can do this big mess like we just did, and then come back and say, "Okay, if I like this composition right here, and this is the piece I'm going to cut out, now, what do I want to add to it to finish it?" We can cut the piece out before you make those decisions too. You don't have to do it all right now. We can cut the piece out and think, "Okay, what could I have done to make that better?" I really like that now. [LAUGHTER] Let's not forget that right there. I really like this one over here. That one goes into that one. I love that one right there. Let's search out some compositions and cut our pieces up. Then we might add some finishing details. I'm going to take the tape off and move my paint out of the way so I don't paint everything while I'm doing this. I will be right back. So I've just got a cutting board underneath this, and I've got my viewfinder. You can draw this out with a pencil if you find one you like and just cut those out with a pair of scissors. I cheat a little bit and I have a little board that I now use as my cutting-out board. It's a five-by-five piece of art board. So when I find one I like, I just use that as the thing I cut around. [LAUGHTER] I have a couple of different sizes of this that I use that as a little cheater, but you could use a ruler if you draw all around it, then you could just have a little ruler that you use as your cutting guide. Any way that happens to work for you. But first, let's go get the one that I know I really loved with the dots in it. I like this one a lot. We're going to say that right there. I'm going to cut that out. I'm using just an exact dough knife here. I'm trying to be pretty exact. I don't want to be so super messy that I'm cutting out here where I might find one that I need. Then I've cut it. I don't want to do that. I want to mostly get just the section I'm wanting. Then if I've got that little extra piece left over, maybe cut that too. I got off of my little board here a little bit, but that's okay. [NOISE] Look how pretty that is when we cut it out. I mean, that right there is the moment that I look for. I got a little bit of paint on here from whatever is on my board. Must have oil paint on here. [LAUGHTER] For when I did oil paint one but that's okay. Don't even mind, not even hating it. Look at that, it is so pretty. Oh my goodness. Then the little pieces that you have left over, look how pretty that is, this would be a very pretty collage piece, or in this case, a mini bookmark. You can save all these little bits and pieces for collage work if you'd like to do collaging. Now, I like this one over here. Now that I can see exactly what we've cut out, also you don't want to get stuck in one direction. If we had turned this around, is there one that we like in a different direction? Let's just seek and see what we find. [LAUGHTER] Like that, right there is very interesting. If I'm looking at the two of them as like a pair that can hang together, that could be different enough, but interesting enough to be really cool. I could come back in with some more white dots if I wanted that to be a little more defined with some white dots. I like this one. That's interesting there with a lot more of the orange. Maybe even as far over as we can go. Whoa, I'm thinking that one right there is pretty cool, and it's really interesting there as a pair, completely different and more orange. Let's do this one because it's got more orange. Then if I've got anything leftover that I can do, I might possibly do it too, because there could still be one more over here with the way I've cut this. Let's just be a real careful. [NOISE] Oh, yeah. Look at that. That is so pretty. Oh my goodness. This is the most exciting part of doing these cut and stuff out. It's like pulling tape off of your piece, and the tape actually magically makes your piece beautiful. Pulling a lot. I still like this one right here. We think of that right there. I think in that. I like how this is kind of on the third. Now when I'm looking around, I'm looking at composition. I don't want it to be cut in the center, like I wouldn't want that centered, like that. It's less interesting. Then if I have it kind of this as a third instead of centered. I'm thinking composition a lot of times when I'm going back and then I might want more dots on this one. Let's cut it out. [NOISE] Then we may add a detail or two. Yeah, there we go. I like it. [NOISE] Sometimes I get too tight on this wood board and then cut the wood. [LAUGHTER] A metal ruler might be the better choice, but I don't know. This has worked out good as many times as I've done it. [NOISE] Eventually I might just need to replace my little board. [LAUGHTER] See how much prettier that is after we get that cut out? Oh my goodness, it just comes to life. Then look what we have leftover. These pieces are really pretty too. Like I could do this as a small three-by-three piece perhaps. I don't have a three-by-three cut out there, but I could do these as smaller. Look how pretty that is. What'd really be nice, and let's just take our ruler if now we could cut these into smaller sizes and use them as tags, collaged pieces. Now I want to go ahead and maybe cut these into shapes that I can just store and use for other things. [NOISE] See, look at that, that would be really pretty as a collage piece. Let me tell you, you know, you wonder, are you going to love this color way, you know, blue and orange? But look how pretty this blue and orange turned out, this is crazy good. [NOISE] I could do a whole series on these limited color palettes. Look how pretty that is. We can cut this in half, it could be separate little tags, might copy and a half, but it's close enough, [LAUGHTER] it could be many pieces of artwork that you frame, so now we've got some little micro pieces that are beautiful. I love this one. This could be like the prettiest little bookmark. [NOISE] Still got these pretty pieces, look how pretty this one is. I'm just going to grab my scissors. These are some sharp scissors you will see. Cut some of these pieces off. [NOISE] Look at that. [NOISE] That would be a beautiful collage piece or bookmark. I love that one. I do try to keep any piece that has enough paint that it can be a tiny collage piece. If it's pieces like this white thing that I'm cutting out, I'll probably throw it out. But like little tiny pieces like this that are all paint, that's a pretty little stripe for something. [LAUGHTER] I do just keep a box of things that can be collaged pieces. I love this one, [NOISE] with these dots down here at the bottom, [NOISE] this one just spoke to me. Look how pretty that is. I could make this into pretty tags, we can cut this in half. [NOISE] Now those are some pretty little pieces of art. I've got a white edge here, I don't want on this. [NOISE] Look at that. Oh my goodness, I love that as a little tiny piece of art. I do like making little things that are so pretty because they're easy to store [LAUGHTER] or hanging up on my inspiration board, I can do other things with them. [NOISE] Look how pretty that piece is. We've got lots of extra pieces and then we have our main pieces. Let's pull those back out before I cut them up, mistakenly. I mean, look at these, oh man. Now I think I like this one without the dots. If I wanted to really tie that in, I could add dots. I'm going to do like it without the dots. But this one, I think needs a few more dots like that one. I could come down here and just add some dots down here. [NOISE] Oh, yeah. See, now that just finished it. I love every bit of that. As these two can hang together, so beautiful. If I added some dots into that one I think then it would make the perfect third. Maybe I should just go ahead and do a few dots so that we can definitely pull the series together. [NOISE] Oh, yeah, look at that. Oh my goodness. Totally just made it. [LAUGHTER] I know you think I'm crazy, but I just get so excited when they work out. Every single time I do these cutout abstracts, I love every one of them. Look at that. Look how pretty this is. Oh my goodness. There we go, blue and orange. I definitely want you to pick a complimentary color set, and that's blue and orange, green and red, purple or yellow, and see what can you create doing this whole little series like we just did. You don't have to use the most vibrant part of those colors. You see just what I did. I mixed some colors, I played with color mixing. I allowed myself white and black in addition to the color palette. That's your goal. Pick a color palette, one of those three color ranges, plus white and black, paint a big piece and then cut out your abstracts and see what you can create. I'm pretty excited about these. I definitely want you to show me what you come up with, and I will see you back in class. [MUSIC] 13. Split complementary: In this color study, I want to do split complementary. So we've already done orange and blue. So I want to get a little bit away from the colors that we just did in the last video. I want to do split complimentary and I think I want to use something in the red family. Then that splits over here into the blue-green and the yellow-green. So in my mind, that yellow-green could be something like green gold. You can find green gold in just about any brand. But I'm going to use the charvin because it's a pretty color that I already like. Pinkwise, I'm going to be in this pink family, which we could take a red and mix white with, but I'm going to use my favorite Caribbean pink. But I'm also going to use this conical red because it's in that same family. So we don't just have to keep two colors. It's in that same family, but it's a darker shade and it might make some of the blending colors really pretty. Then I also want a pretty blue-green. So I was looking at our yummy color chart that we created. I really like the cerulean blue mixed with the yellow ocher for that blue-green. Here we go. It's this one right here for that really pretty blue-green color. So I've got my cerulean, blue and yellow ocher out to make that mixture. So I've got our red family our green, yellow family, and our blue-green family with things I'm going to mix. Then I also am going to allow myself white and black, but I'm not going to use the white and black paints. But remember they're your neutrals. So that'll go anywhere from white, any shade of gray to black that you could tack in there. But what I'm going to use is the white gesso on my palette and black gesso on my palette because I have on that I want those paints mixed with the gesso so I can draw on top of them. Then I've just pulled a couple of pastels in blue and green and pink that could possibly add to our composition. I might want a darker pink, so I might look again and pull a darker red pink out. Then I've got my Posca pens ready, my mark-making tools, everything that I might want to use on top. I've got that sitting up there ready also. So let's go ahead and get this one started. Just going to lay out my colors. I just love this color so much and then there's so many times that I would use it and I'd be like, it looks terrible. But now that I've figured out, what I like mixing that color with, with the green and the like a magenta and stuff like that, I really love playing in that green gold and I don't know if I like it so much just because it's called green gold and maybe I just liked the name of the color. Who knows? Doesn't matter if you get anything on the paper at this point because we're not being so precious about the paper. Because we don't have anything on it yet and we're going to mess it up anyway. So I'm going to get a palette knife and see if we mix this up. If I like the color that it is right here. Get a little palette knife and we'll mix up and see if we've mixed to the color to where we want it. Now on that color chart, I really should have done the cerulean blue as the dominant color, and the yellow ocher as the mixing color, which means the yellow ocher, there's less of it. Then the blue, it's the one that you just continually mix in until you get the shade that you want. So I may have used too much yellow, but we'll see. So that's a pretty color, but I do think I want it more blue than it is. Let's just add some more blue in there. We'll get these colors situated before we start. We might even add a smidge of black to that and make it a shade darker. So I think I will go ahead and use black because if you remember that may be too much black. Black will make darker shades of a color and white will give us tints of a color. So I might just want to set that black a little bit about black to the side. Let me scrape off a little bit of that so that we can add that gradually. There we go. Now we will start adding black in so that it's a darker shade. But too much black and you'll just end up with something super-duper dark and that might not be what we want. I want a shade that matches in with my other colors here. Let's add more black. This is a really pretty color that we're getting. Let's just add all the black in now that we've. Look at that color. That is such a pretty color. Let's go for that color. I'm liking that. Then let's go ahead and add some black gesso just down here. Using the gesso, gesso was acrylic paint mixed with additives to give it that grittiness that allow other things to attach on top of paint. That's clear just so that I just put on there, suddenly it needs some more of that. But we'll start with this and get us a paintbrush and let's just go for it. We're going to do a little mark-making. So let's just grab a pencil and dirty up that page so that we're no longer looking at a white page. We're looking at a page that we don't mind. Just scribble and painting on top of. Perfect time to practice different mark-making that you like. Like, I like this little scribble lines, scribble line, that's fine. Perfect time to start practicing with some of that. Then let's just go for it. Let's see what we can get here. So I like, let's start with a little bit of dark out here. Maybe even some black gesso in with that make it even darker. Man, this is a cool color. I do like this really dark bluish tone. Let's get some of this clear gesso out here. Again, I'm just mixing the gesso in with the paint so that it gives the paint enough grit for me to then put other things on top of it. I'm not doing it for any other reason than I like to and I wanted to draw on top. If you want to paint with solid paints and not put the gesso in, you can do that too. What you're going to end up with then would be something where you'll have to possibly add gesso to the top of it, if you then later want to add stuff. Get a little less white. We can mix a little bit of this blue in with this green. We don't have to keep the colors just as they are. I like mixing it up a bit and blending and get my fingers in it if I don't want those brushstrokes. These colors are a little crazy. I'm doubting myself here. Will we get something we like or not? This could be my first failure. Just know that when you're painting and you're looking at things and you're doubting yourself, you are not the only one. We all do it. It's at this stage right here when it's an ugly stage that I begin to think did I make a bad choice? But the prettiness in these paintings is the layers so we're at the very first layer. We're at the paint layer. I want to come in before this gets too dry and do some marks in it. You can tell where it does get dry because then my pencil actually puts down some pencil mark. We could take our spatula too and we could use this opportunity to do some marks in here with the, we might get instead of this scraper, I might use a palette knife. This could be a chance that we do some paint spreads. Once your paper starts to bow a little bit, it's a little harder, but it flattens back out so you just have to be careful with how you're spreading that you end up in the dip where you didn't intend to. Now, look at that. Now see spreading some of the paints together, that's very interesting. I might come back in with some more mark-making. I like what this color mixing over here is doing a whole lot. I might try to get some more of that. Certainly draw back to mixing the colors as much as we do. Then when you need more of it, you have to mix more of it. But that is good practice for then seeing how watercolors have been mixed and how you come up with that same color again. Really nice practice with that. I think in the end I want there to be less of this pink and more pink just shining through. Let's do some of those lines that I like just using the white gesso on the edge of my catalyst here. This is definitely looking a little crazier than I even expected. Fun surprises you get when you start doing some of these experiments with color. The pieces that you create and hang in your house or that you purchase from other people then hang in your house, you know the stuff that you collect might not be the type of art that you were meant to create. That just was a revelation to me one time when an artist said that, that may be what you collect and what you create are not the same thing. I expected to be able to create pieces of art exactly like I collected. When I didn't do it and I ended up with something crazy and I thought, what have I done wrong? Why is this not working out for me the way I expected? What I'm going to do is dry this with my heat gun real quick so that I can do some other marks and maybe dots and lines with my Posca pen and maybe my pastels. Let's dry this a little bit. 14. Finishing up split complementary: This is definitely crazier than I even expected. So I'm going to come in here and let's start doing some mark-making. Stick that in the water and maybe we can whimsy it up here with some of our marks that we like. Because that's what I like about said dots. They make it more whimsical. They give you some excitement that you weren't expecting. Another thing that we could do, which I might really like, so we might do it at the end. Let's take this really bright and do some splatters with our paintbrush. But let's do that at the end so that I don't stick my hand in wet paint more so than what I'm doing here. These are definitely wild though, this is even wilder than I expected. Will we have anything in here that we love? Let's just take our little viewfinder and see. Is there anything that's going to talk to us? I might come back in here. Oh, look at that right there. That one just got me excited. That's okay if you do the whole thing and you find one, it's okay. One is all you need, one is perfect. But I do like to go ahead and cut up two or three and make a series. I actually am digging this here too and we might get to turn it on its side and see something else that we like. That one right there is definitely speaking to me, so that made me a lot happier there. I may come in here with just a few dots and just see what we can get. I'll definitely be cutting out this little square here. I'm definitely loving that one. Don't let me forget that. Definitely want to cut that one out. All right, so let's just go ahead and we're just going to add some more dots. I know I like this big splotch of color and I didn't really leave myself a large splotch of color anywhere. In the next piece I do, I might need to remember that, leave myself some bigger splotches of color like that rather than making everything wild. I do like how all these colors blended though. There's some really pretty pieces in here that are going to make beautiful collage pieces. Let's just take our Stabilo pencil and maybe get in here and make some marks. Sometimes it's the marks that make all the difference in the piece. If you don't want any dark in your piece, you want it all to be lights and whites, then you don't have to come back with the black Stabilo. I just do like it a lot. I think I have a white Stabilo too though, let's see. Well, I've got a white Scribe-All surface pencil, so yeah, this is water-soluble. It just doesn't say Stabilo on it. It might be a different brand that I got through one of those art subscription boxes I had. Here's the Stabilo. Oh, well, that still says the same thing on it, so I don't know why they're not calling it. Maybe it's an older one. I do have a white one, let's just see. It is a lot lighter, doesn't really show up as much as the Posca pen, which it still would be good for mark-making. If I wanted, as I break the tip, if I wanted to do some lines instead of dots, I could do lines with this. That's fine. I do like having this little bit of black scribble in here. I like that. Anything, I could come back with black dots if I wanted, but I don't think I want to, I think what I want to do is search out compositions that are alike and then we will see if any of them need a touch of anything else once we cut it out, so let's go ahead and feel our tape and get our cutting mat out. Go ahead and cut out one of these. I know the one I love, so we're going to definitely get that, I feel that was a success having this one right over here. I know I love this one over here and I got my X-Acto knife here, so let's just see exactly where do we love it. Do we love it all the way? I love it right there. What do you think? Is that where we love it? I think it is. Hopefully,2 I've let the paint dry, but we're just going to go ahead and go for it. So I'm going to cut off the one I know I love more than anything. Then we'll search out something interesting from what's left. Even if I end up with one piece that I love, I'll consider this as a success. Because this was way outside my own comfort zone with these colors, I'll be honest with you. That's the point of some of these exercises where you're working with colors to get outside of your comfort zone and discover new things about yourself. Look at that, well, now that we've got it separated out from anything. Now I'm really digging that one. That's the point of this. Let's get outside of our comfort zone, use things that we never would have thought of before. I'm digging that one up there. That's fun with this big swash of blue. There's a lot of movement going on there that I think is really, really fine. Then as a companion piece, that's super fun. I might even want a few dots, do a few more dots possibly. Let's claim this one. I'm definitely liking that one. Seeing some of these others are still fun. Let's go ahead and claim the one that I know I love. Let's claim that one right there. I'm a little more optimistic than I was a little while ago when I was definitely doubting everything, I doubted whether I'd like anything. But I'm telling you every time I sit down and do one of these and then search out things, I always leave my paint table happy. Which I got to tell you is quite a different feeling from when I used to do things years ago and I would leave mad every time I sat down to paint something and there was that white page and I didn't see now that it's cut out, look how pretty that is. If we put that next to this one, wow, super fun. Totally outside my comfort zone. I don't know where I picked that red paint, but I need to move the paint out of my way. This is what I mean when I said stuff in paint that I didn't mean to and then we paint things. Oh, good, I didn't paint the end of that. Then I paint things I didn't intend to paint. Move your paint away from your workspace. Just make sure I'm not going to get red paint everywhere. There we go. Let's see if there's another five-by-five that we like. Let's just turn it and see. Well, now that's fun there. Those are all little smaller. This might make a really pretty four-by-four or three-by-three. I do like that. Let's just go ahead and claim out one. Oh, look at that. Now with all the pink in there, now I'm digging that right there. Let's go ahead and claim that one and we'll call that our third piece. I think I'm liking it, we'll get it cut out and see. Pink paint. Let's cut this one and let's just see. It's like pulling tape off of a piece. It just reveals the final piece and you're so surprised when you're done and you peel that tape off. The same way with this. I'm so surprised when I get it cut out, then I think, wow, I really do love that. Let's see what we got here. Look how pretty this piece is now. Oh my goodness, before we reveal that one, let's get our scissors here. Look at this piece. See, some of these smaller pieces are going to be really beautiful pieces for like collages and little miniature pieces of art. But now that we've got these smaller ones cut out, look how pretty this is right here. That right there. Super pretty. I love that as say a bookmark or a gift tag. We've cut that in half for gift tags. I might actually cut that in half. For a little mini pieces of art, I do like having a little micro pieces of art or gift tags. Now, those are very pretty. That's a pleasant surprise. This is very vivid and I'll tell you that I do not like that corner, I don't think. But as like a three by three or a four by four, it might be an interesting piece. But I don't like the vivid corner. I like this bright corner here. Let's reveal the one that we're still hiding. I had wet paint on there. Let's get the paint off my finger before I get it on this piece we cut out. Let's see what we ended up with. That way, I think that we'll see, wait a minute, or maybe that way is up. Now, here are the three pieces that I got out of that color way and I'm actually happily surprised and I'll still say that this one is my very favorite and the one that I would possibly frame because I like framing my own art and having it sitting around in my art room to inspire me or in my house in different little gallery walls. It's almost like these two go together and this one's off doing its own thing. Man, I surely love that. Look how pretty that is. I might look one last time to see is there anything extra any of this need? Do I need a few dots in here to complete it off? Just one last. Oh, yeah. That was right. That's what I wanted there. Maybe a few up here. Oh, yeah, I like that a lot. Maybe a few lines if you wanted lines. I didn't do any of my pastels. So I might look in here at this point and say also, did I need any pastel lines drawn in here that I neglected to do? Maybe. Do I like this green? Do I need any extra green somewhere? Do I want to come on here, fill in with some of this? Shade those colors maybe, because once you get it cut out, you can really see that, you're like, oh, I want to extra dab of this here or there. Maybe an extra or whatever you're seeing. It really is easier when you get these cutout to see anywhere that you might want a touch of something that maybe you didn't get in there originally. Once you cut these out, just take one extra little look and see, do you have everything that you really wanted? I like that color in there. Let's put that over here. Just a tad and then I've got some pinks over here, I don't know if I'm going to use them or not. Let's see. I don't think so. I think we'll stop there. I think now we'll call these done. I might cut a couple of more little tags. I've got one more little piece here that this can be pretty tags or a pretty collage piece. Look how pretty that is. These can be pretty tags to add into my smaller pieces here. I do like having those. This is really pretty. I do like this edge. That's a pretty edge, so adding a touch of something later to another piece, I love that. I do want to save my color palette, so I'm going to have my color palette book out that I saved my color palette in. Don't forget to do that. Then I do have a color palette video talking about that and why I do that, so definitely check that out. I'm going to go ahead and make my color palette and I will call this set a success, and I hope you had fun checking out, split complimentary and how vivid and fun and contrast-y those colors really work out for us. That's an interesting color way to play with. I did the red, the blue green, and the yellow green, and you can really see in there, I picked that pink, I picked a color closer to this shade down here and I picked that green gold, which is right in that family of yellow, greenish colors. It's vivid. It's outside of my comfort zone. It's not something I normally would have picked, but I really love it and I love this section right here. I mean, look how beautiful this side is. I would really love to re-experiment with the blue-green and the yellow green, which would be more in the analogous colors, colors that sit beside each other on the color wheel. But man, that one right there is really speaking to me, so that's a color way I would revisit and that's very interesting seeing that here in this piece so that I know, wow, I like that and I would revisit that. I hope you enjoy this colorway. I can't wait to see what colors you come up with for this project and I will see you back in class. 15. Analogous colors: In this project, we are going to do analogous colors. These are colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel. I'm going to play in the blues and the greens. You could play in blue and green. You could play in blue and purple. You could play in purple and red, red and orange. Red and orange is another particular favorite of mine. To do more specifically pink and orange, those, I love that a lot. Orange and yellow. You could use yellow and green. You could do any of these colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel and I'm going to choose to do a shade of blue and a shade of green. It doesn't have to be the most vivid shade. It can be any shade or tint in that family, and I've chosen to use green gold. I'm going to use the Charvin colors for this because I like them. I'm going to use green gold, and I'm going to use Winsor Newton is the other color and it's the cerulean blue. Then just to give you an idea how that same color in every brand looks a little differently. I was using cerulean blue here in Arteza on some of these other things and just to put a tiny bit of that down. It's almost identical. But maybe this is a shade darker, just like barely, but it is a smidge of a different color. It doesn't matter which one of those I used. I could have used either brand. I just pulled out the Winsor Newton to play with that and then white and clear gesso, and put that on my color palette because I like to use the gesso mixed with the paint so that I can then draw on top of that. If I were doing just the acrylic paint with nothing mixed in, I couldn't really draw on top of it because acrylic is very plasticky and nothing's going to stick to the top of that. But I could coat the whole thing with gesso when I was done, if I needed to be able to draw on top of it, I could do that. I've also got my POSCA pens up here. I've got two little pastels pulled out that work in the family that I'm in. Let's just go ahead and maybe take our Stabilo pencil and just start making a mess on the paper. I loved to start it off like this because then I get less precious about the paper. I don't worry about what I have going on because you know what, the paper is no longer white. It's called white page paralysis. That's what I call that. Now, that paper doesn't have white, it's got all fun marks which we may or may not see as we put paint on top of this. But it is a fun way to practice your mark-making and the different things that you like to see on top of paintings. This is a good way to practice different marks and shapes. Maybe I like some scribble, it looks like writing. Maybe I like little cross hashes. Maybe I like little dashes. It's a way to practice and play with your different mark-making and shape-making skills which you want to practice because it's drawing. This get you more familiar with making a shape you really want or like. It's a good practice for your hand to hold a pencil in your hand because I never do that. Maybe I like some lines coming across here. We may or may not see that. It's just a way to mess up your paper. As you get started. I'm going to start with this green gold, which is a transparent to semi-transparent color. It's not a solid color and we can look on our paint here and see that it's got a half-black, half-clear box, so I know it's semi-transparent. I don't see this box on the cerulean. If I look at my color chart that I made, I know that cerulean's pretty solid. I can expect that one to be pretty solid also because whatever pigments they're using to make that, cerulean is probably pretty similar from brand to brand. I'm just going to start coating my paper with the green gold, cerulean blue, and the white. I can use black, white, blue, or green. Any shade of blue or green. If you want to say, in this analogous color scheme, you've got four shades of blue and three shades of green, and have all those colors out on your color palette. You can do that. It's not like the one color series that we did in one of the other videos, where we had to stick within our one color shades intense. We're in a color family now and the color family that we're in need to sit next to each other on the color wheel. So I've chosen blue and green. That could be 12 shades of green and 12 shades of blue, however you decide to interpret that. I'm just going to go ahead and continue putting these colors on here. I've got a lot of paint on here. I think for the moment I'm going to stop and draw this a little bit before I start mark-making on top. 16. Finishing up analogous colors: I let this dry a bit and I'm going to come in here now and do some mark making, and just see what else I could add in here. I may have overdone this, I do like this color palette quite a bit, but I might have wanted some bigger swatches of color left over. I tend to do that, I tend to think I want one thing and then I'll just go crazy with it and doubt myself at this stage. I think every single video I've said the same thing, I doubt myself. So just know as you're creating, if you're doubting yourself, you're not alone, we all do that. And I'm just using my mechanical pencil here to put some yummy, finer lines and some graphite in here. Just a little bit of scribble. I did this one time and I made these little loops and then what I had in there looked like a flower, so that was pretty fun. It was totally accidental, but it was a very fun little bit that was left in there. I really like this ladder. So I might come back over this ladder and make it stand out a bit more. I call it a ladder, it looks like a ladder to me, nice tall ladder to get on top of a roof. And I like it so much, I might just add another one in here. I'm just doing this with a Stabilo, it's the pencil that basically marks on anything. So that one completely dry, let's just get rid of my fingerprint there. I might come back in here with a Posca pen, let's do the white Posca pen. That's the wrong one, that's a brush pen, I don't want the brush one. I want this one, it's more of my favorite little dot pen. Let's add some yummy little details in here. Before I do lots of dots everywhere, I could go ahead and add some of my pastels in here. I like this crazy bright greeny yellow, which happens to have apparently some red on it, all the red in here. That was not what I intended, but it's there so we'll just go with it. So if you have any colors sitting on the side of your pastels, you might wipe them off. That will translate over to your piece, even if you don't intend it to be there. And this is a crazy yellow, and you might think, wow. Because I'll be honest, the first time I ever used it, I was like, wow, but when I did a piece with similar tones as this because I do actually like this kind of blue, greenish colorway. I used it and then I cut pieces out and I actually liked that way more than I even thought I might. So I'm just scrubbing that color in and rubbing it in with my finger just to see what we come up with. We may not like it at all when we're done, and you may be surprised and like I was, you may love it. I really like this bit of sea green that's right here under this blue. That's such a pretty color there. I'm just going to make some lines, maybe I'll do that again over here. And I'm doing it mostly on top of the blue with the lines because it really pops, that little bit pops out of there, I like that. And I've got this blue here, maybe I could draw little circles. And I could have done this with the hard pastel rather than the soft pastel. If it's got the right colors for you, and I would have got a much more defined line. These are real thick lines rather than real fine sharp lines, but that's okay. I like this. Some little lines there, let's see what else we got. Let's maybe do a few lines over here. And see if we didn't use that gesso in that mixture, I would not be able to use the pastels on top of this at all, it just wouldn't work. I can draw some bigger lines, maybe. I might go back now with that paint pen and add some little whimsy dots. I really like this color right here too, with that blended in, it's such a pretty color going in there. We've got a lot going on there now. So what I might do is peel my tape and look and see if there's anything interesting that we love. I'm digging that right there actually, and then we can see too once we get some colors out of here that we love, then we can see if there's any other additional marks that we want to make. But first, clean your fingers off if you've been using those pastels, you don't want to get that all over everything that you're doing. And then let's just peal to tape and see what we got. And you want to be careful that you don't peel it so fast, you rip your paper, which I did in one of these projects because the paper is probably not completely dry, so it's still likely to tear and catch. So I'm just being real careful, peeling at an angle, and then it's just coming off real pretty. As a big piece, again, if you love what the big piece looks like, don't be afraid to keep it. Let's see what we got here. I'm going to move this paint out of the way because I have a tendency to paint everything as I'm going accidentally. We can look and see, do we like any of these larger pieces because maybe I do, maybe I like that right there, which I feel I might like that. Severen do I like this right here as the companion piece? Maybe I do. Definitely fill in that one. If I cut these into five by fives, I can probably find a few more but I am really loving this here. There's not a lot of these that I do as larger pieces personally because I don't know, I like these little five-by-fives, but sometimes if a piece speaks to you enough, you should probably go for it. I think I really like this here, but I like this ladder being more right here, coming up on the third, or see even if I do that piece right there, the ladder is still in there right there. Do I love that better? Maybe I do. It just over to the side if I come all the way over, even all the way over to the end. I think I'm going to go for the bigger piece because I don't do too many that are bigger and I love this right here. Then what I'll do this time is actually draw a pencil mark all the way around this and cut it with my ruler or I can cut that with a pair of scissors if I want. Nice little Exacto knife here. I'm just trying to get really the tiny bit inside that pencil line. I don't want that pencil line to be part of the art. If you cut pieces out of the middle, you'll get less pieces out of here that are bigger but that's okay. I don't even care. I want whatever ends up being my favorite part of the drawing that's what I want. It doesn't matter if it's in the middle to me or not. Look at that and go either way with that. I love that. I like it this way. That's a little pretty, I like that. I do have a random m right here in the middle. How funny is that? Let's see what else we got before. Now, do we like this big piece here as a companion or do I want a little five-by-fives? Let's see. I like that right there. I do really like that right there. Let's see. I don't want any of that. Look at that right there. I think that's it. I feel like that's it right there, so I'm going to cut around my little whiteboard. We may just get two out of this for these bigger pieces because that's just happened to be where it falls. Some of them I get four pieces out of and then lots of little pieces. Some of them might get three pieces. This is probably the least pieces I've got out of one as far as larger pieces like this. It's just the way it works sometimes, sometimes you just get one, just look for one that you really love. Now see, I really love that. Now, these are the two that I really love out of here. I love it. Just look for at least one that where you really loved though. Then if you've got other pieces left over, I do like a lot of these pieces in here, so there'll be really nice for collage work or maybe bookmarks or tags. Look at this piece here. I like this piece. If I cut the white off, you end up with a really cool elongated piece or we could cut this into smaller tags. Let's just cut the rest of this and see what we end up with. That's a pretty collage piece, possibly. Some days I think I do a better job at painting than other days. While I was looking at my scraps of paper, I actually decided to cut a four-by-four square out of here, because I really like my little ladder. Don't necessarily like it in the center, but I do like the piece overall. Now I've ended up with a five by seven, or five by five, a four by four, and little samples. Then I went ahead and saved my color palette, which I'll go ahead now and attach one of these pieces to my page so that I can remember, you know what, what created this color palette for me? I just show you in the color palette video how I go about prepping the page and making that but I love saving these because now I have a whole library of wonderful color palettes that I have tested and tried out. I can see what I love and what I didn't love and what I want to explore again. If I want to do a whole series in a certain colorway, I could do that. I do love all the little pieces that we came up with. We might take this moment before we're done to see if any of the pieces need any extra little touches. Actually, with this little piece, I think I would like to have some of our little dots and just pull this in as part of this little series. I do like to have elements that repeat in different series. Yes, I love this. Glad I cut the smaller piece out. I love it. I love that. That just added a little extra touch. Love this colorway. I want you to pick out for this project, give it a test out. Two colors or three colors that are on the same side that sit next to each other on the color wheel. I played with two colors, you can play with 10 shades. You could do all things in here, but they just need to be sitting next to each other on the color wheel. I hope you enjoy this color play if the analogous colors, and I will see you back in class. 17. Single color story: In this video, we're going to do a one-color story. Rather than picking two or three colors like we did with the complimentary or the split complimentary, we're going to go with one color and then we can still have white or black. Remember, you can mix white or black to get shades of gray. You do have a few choices there with the white and the black. We can mix white to make lighter shades of our color and we can mix black to make darker shades of our colors. It's not really limited to just a single tone. What I'm going to do, I was going to just use yellow ocher because I love that yellow for some reason, but that wouldn't be very in the spirit of mixing colors and so I rethought that and thought that I would go for one of our colors that we mixed on our color chart. I've picked the yellow ocher because I love it. I think I want to go for this really pretty bright orangey salmony color. To get that color, I need to put yellow ocher as my dominant color and I need to add in magenta light. Even though I'm using one color to paint, I'm using two colors to create my color that I'm going to end up with and I want you to do that too. I want you to pick a color that you're going to mix, not a color that you can just use straight out of the tube. I want you to mix the color and then go from there. That's what we're going to do. We're going to mix the color and then we can use white and we can use black. I'm going to mix a fairly large amount of the color because this is a large piece of paper. I want to be able to add white and black. I want to hopefully not run out of paint so I'm going to start with the dominant as the yellow and this magenta light, the color that I'm adding to it because that's the colors I used on my palette there. I'm going to start with just a little bit of pink to whole lot of yellow and just see, do I like that color? This point, I could add white and black in here to make this color lighter or darker. Look how pretty that is already turning out. Maybe I want it a little more pink. Let's add a little more pink in there. Try to mix up a pretty decent quantity when you're doing this so that you're not stuck right in the middle, having to go back and mix more paint so maybe a little more pink. Maybe I'll get that color off of there. Man, is this a pretty color? Let's go a little more pink. Just keep adding your adder color in bit by bit until you think, I've got it. That's really pretty color right there. Let's compare that to our little chart. See now that's pretty close to our color chart right there. Because we're going for that second one up right there and that's pretty spot on. I'd say I got that pretty good. When you're mixing it, try to get as close to your original color that you did on your color mixing chart too. In that way, you really figuring out, how much did I add in there? Did I get close? Could I recreate this color again? Because this is what's going to make mixing color easier for you as you go forward. Just doing a little bit of man that sure is a pretty color. A little bit of experimenting and mixing and getting confident that yes, I could get back to a color that I would love to see again. I may still need more of that. We'll start with that. I'm also going to put down some black and a little bit of white and I'm also going to put down some gesso. I do have white and black gesso, so I could've used that instead of the white and black paint. But once we're going, who knows what I'll actually want to use? Let's just put a little of each down. I'm adding my gesso to my paint because I like to have that grittiness in my paint so that I can go back later and draw on top of it with other materials. At this point too, I could get out any other drawing things that I want to draw on top of it, but make sure it's in that one color. Don't pick out a bunch of stuff in a lot of different colors. We're trying to do one color palette. If I were to get into my soft pastels and I'm in this pretty pinky shade here, I would try to pull out something that is super close that I can then use as maybe a mark maker lately. I don't want to pull every color that I have available, I just want to pull colors that I could possibly have created by mixing white or black with that. I could end up with a darker shade. I could end up with a lighter shade. If you have one that's the same color, that would be okay. But you don't want to pull every color that you have available. See I could come up with that color as a lighter shade, so let's pull those two. I've already got my posca pins up here. And I've got some credit cards two available because maybe we want to try spreading some paint with something other than a paintbrush. That can be fun. Sometimes I mark on my palette before I even get started with some mark-making tools. You could certainly do that and you just start getting paint on the paper. Maybe this time I want to start with a bigger paintbrush actually and get some really big bits of color going rather than tiny bits of color. Let's just get started here. Look how pretty this color is. My goodness, this is such a pretty color. I'm going to come back in with maybe some white and some black on top, but let's start laying down a little bit of color. This I won't like in a nail polish. Definitely, prettiness going on here. Maybe I'll try a little bit of gesso, just see what we can start getting here with our card. Let's put some more on the paint. That's going to move in slow. That's all right. I'm going to go in here with some black mixed with gesso, which is basically then the black gesso so I'm actually just pulled off the black gesso, so that's okay. Remember on these I'm not looking at the moment for anything specific. I'm not trying to get in there and plan out compositions yet. I'm trying to, for the most part, lay color on here and go from there because we'll add more layers. I'm just trying to fill the paper with my color and with my marks and maybe get some good color on here and then let's go back and add some marks and we'll see what we can get here. Maybe I'll come on here with my stabilo. I've got it up here because I love it and then also I like my mechanical pencil because it makes a good line and then later it lets me add graphite as part of that because it's a drawing utensil, but it's really one of my favorites just to start marking. It draws on dry paint, but it will dig into wet paint so I like all that. All right, like that. Maybe just come on back and we'll start breaking up some of this a little bit. It's different when you're just working here with the one color and white and black, you have a few last choices on here of what you're going to put where, you smear someone with your fingers the gesso is not toxic. These are teaser colors are not toxic so I don't mind getting my fingers in here and playing. If you're using some of the more toxic paint colors, definitely get yourself some gloves on before you put your fingers in here. I love that. I might come back on here with just an old card. It's just like an old credit card and I'm using this a bit like a pallet knife here and going to spread some color. Trying to remember one of our other color stories, I really mentioned how much I liked the big swath of color, so I'm trying to keep that in mind for myself personally that I like that and don't make it all tiny bits of color. This is going to be one of my cutout things because these little projects are really nice for that and I might just start looking. Do I see anything that's tempting me? Do I see anything that I think is going to work out? Do I need to keep on going? I think we need to keep going because I got really weirdly squishy with some of this, thinking it's not quite what I wanted but, we're not done with color here. We've got these pastels that we can add on there. I can get into colored pencils if I want. Keep in mind though that you're working with basically, one color so if you're using another material that you don't mix, it's got to be in the same color family, something that we could have possibly come up with if we had mixed it has got to be this close to this shade as we can get to be able to really use that. I want you to stay true to the color story for this and then when you're doing your own art, definitely branch out and explore. I just feel like if you do a project with the spirit of what that project was, you really get an appreciation for little different stories that you're working on. I like a little of these black. Let's put some of the blacks just so down instead of black paint so that we've got that available. I might come in here with maybe some black lines instead of white lines that might be fun. I do like white lines, but I'm trying to push myself too out of my own comfort zone. I'm using colorways that I never would've tried myself because until you do a project like this there are some of these things that maybe you think you understand in theory, but until you actually do it, you're just not going to discover things that you're like, oh, I didn't expect that. That's why I love doing stuff like this. I just get so much out of it myself and then filming it for a workshop just allows me to share some of those things. I just love it. Let's take our stabilo and maybe we'll go in here and do some mark-making paints a little bit wet, but we are getting some line, so that's good. I was hoping for some line. I'm okay if we get in there with a little bit of wet paint. I've got a pencil sharpener back here, so I might just sharpen my pencil real quick. Yeah, I've got one of those pencil sharpeners from 1970, and then does it sharpen up that pencil like nothing else. It's one of those old ones like you might find in a school or something that I got off of eBay. It's fantastic. It makes a sharper point than like a little hand pencil sharpener. Now we have some excitement and some movement some interests going in here. I'm liking some of this a lot. Let me put that paintbrush in there so I'm not tempted to keep picking it up. We could also go with some shapes in there. If you've got anything that will make an unusual shape or a circle, let's go with this. This is just a rubbery funnel. This might give me some shape. Maybe I want the bigger side might be easier if I just paint some on this bigger side rather than dip it. Let's see because maybe I want a big black circle in here. Oh, yes, yes. Oh my goodness. Did you see that? Just put a couple of these. I don't want them everywhere. Super fun. Looks a little bit like graffiti art now. Yeah, I love it. I love it. I love it. Oh my goodness. I really like how this one has lines in the middle of it. I love that. I love it. All right. So let's go with that. I don't even care that I have white paint on my little funnel and never use it. I randomly just have it. I won't even hurt it and it's silicone. I could go wash it off in the sink so I like that. You could also come up with some different mark-making things just to see what that might give you as some paint brushes with little marks on the end here. We could maybe come back with some fun mark-making with different things like this. It's very interesting. I got some graphite, which is in the gray families so we'd be okay to draw with that picking up a little of that black paint, that was fun. We got a lot going on there. Let's see if anything is now starting to possibly look like something that I would want to cut out. That's pretty too. Stepping outside my comfort zone for some of this, I almost want there to be some dark in there maybe. I could have also pulled dark, gray, or black, out of these pastels. Look in my other little basket here and see, yes, I've got like this. It's almost brown. Yeah, that's black. I could have pulled that out too and I could've done gray since we can mix gray. I could have pulled a dark gray out. There's a good one. That's brown. I don't want to stray too far off. I don't want weird shades of gray that I would not have come up with like this pretty taupe gray. I wouldn't have come up with that color in any way no matter what I mixed out of my three options. I could not have come up with this color of gray, so I'm not going to use that color or gray. I'm going to stay true to what I need and I couldn't come up with white, but I think I've got enough white in there. Some of this is not dry enough, so let me dry it with my heat gun and I'll be right back. 18. Finishing up single color story: They're completely dry but definitely drier than we were just a moment ago. I should be able to now take a few of my little pastels here and add marks and some bits of color, and we should be able to see that. You can see that gray fits right in with everything else that we have going on in here. I can use it to mark make. I can use it just to enhance some color. Maybe over here. Let me just think this out now that I can think a little bit about composition. I almost want there to be some dark over here a little bit. I might ruin it, but I almost want there to be some dark elements doing something over here. I might not like that. These are just some of the risks that you take. I might even come back in here with some gesso and go right over that. Now that might be fine. Having that black in there, but it may be too black. Maybe we want to put down a little bit of white gesso like that more gray but it just depends. Do you want some nice sharp contrast? Do you want it to be a little bit lighter contrast? Just mixing a little bit of this black with this white and maybe doing a little bit of color. I don't know. I get to this point and I doubt myself. I'm going go in here with a little bit of this brighter color that I think I could have got by adding white. That's fine. Now I do like that pop-up there. That was really fun. When you're using soft chalky pastels like this on top of a piece, you're going to have to use and we'll go back with this darker color that I think I could have got by adding black into that. I'm trying to stay true to my color palette without veering too far off with other colors but I do want it to have shades and tints of my main tone there. When you're using a chalky pastel like this, you're going to have to use a fixative at some point to fix that color in. I am usually using this Sennelier fixative. Depending on what stage of the drawing I'm in, I'll do a couple of coats if I just need to set it for me to keep working. That does not mean you can't still smear it, this chalky stuff, no matter how many coats of whatever you put on it, it's still going to be slightly chalky and possibly you could smear it. Just know that if you're creating pieces like this, you might want to consider later having it framed under glass or something so that it truly does live up to as long as it should last. Let's come over here with this color. If you're doing an online canvas pieces, 15 or 20 layers of that fixative, you may get something good enough to let that piece last pretty well but just know it's not like one coat and you're done. A lot of people will actually coat that one way, coat it another way, let that dry, a couple more coats, let those dry and you'll keep mixing in some of those. For several, up to 20 coats if it's not a final finished coat. Look how pretty this color is. I might come on top of this with my posca pen and maybe add some white paint pen to it. I could add black paint pen too, but I really like white dots. They just speak to me. I probably will add more white dots when I get to the point that I need it but I'm really loving some of this now, way different than I would've expected. If I stop now and let it dry and then we can cut some pieces out of here. We can always add a finishing touch but there's some interesting things going on in here that we might really like like I like this here. Dig in some of this here in the middle. Let's let this dry and then we will come back and cut some pieces out of here and see if there's anything that we love. Taking the tape off and I wasn't real careful when I spill on my tape and I told part of my painting. As an overall abstract, I actually like this a little bit. But I like it better with some of the spots that I've found that I might want to cut out. I'm going to make sure that I don't include that. I wish I hadn't torn that because that could have actually been a very interesting piece of art by itself. If I haven't liked this, that's actually really cool. If you ever have one and you think I love the whole composition and everything that I ended up with, feel free to not cut it up. I'm going to grab my Exacto knife. This is a five-by-five, little cut-out piece that I've just created with strips of watercolor paper. This is a five-by-seven one that I created because some of these I might actually like as a five-by-seven rather than a five-by-five which surprises me because I generally like the five-by-seven but look at that right there. That speaks to me, I've got the dark, I've got movement, I've got the color. I'm really liking that. What I'm going to do, since I really like it, is take my metal ruler and get right up here on the edge. I'm going to go ahead and use this as my guide to cut it. I'm on a cutting mat so we're good there. I can draw it with a pencil. That worked out great. I could draw it with a pencil and cut it that way instead but this is working. If I leave myself a little bit of a line in there, then I'm pressing against the metal ruler that's working out pretty perfectly. I may just have to trim the corner up after I really get it where I need it. Then I could line it up here with the edge of my paper piece. I don't have to keep the paper piece in the middle of it, but I don't want to cut my paper piece. I don't want to ruin it for later uses, but there we go, lined right up. I do want to be real careful not to be cutting my paper piece. Let me just move this around because surprisingly enough, I am loving this piece larger, which I stepped way outside of my comfort zone for this. I'll make sure I didn't move this anywhere. Working with some of these color palettes is very surprising. I love the little surprises that we get when we're done. That didn't end up being perfectly straight, but I could do something frame it we'll be all right. There we go. Get this corner out. Get this corner trim in really good. Look at that. I'm super loving that. I'm really surprised at what we've ended up with because I wasn't expecting to like this in the bigger size. Now, is there another one in that size that we can love or do I want to cut some out of the smaller size. I'm almost feeling if I want to look at these as a pair, I'm almost loving this maybe. I really love this right up here. If we flip this over, see what I got here. I love this right here. Maybe I like the larger and two smallers out of here because I like this smaller and this smaller. I think that's what I'm going to do. I like using my little piece of art board that I now basically, use as a cutting board I need a five by seven, one. I really love that right there. Let's go for that. Here we go. See now I can just put it where I saw and it can guide my cutting. It's a little easier to me. But whatever works for you when you get to your cutting out is just whatever makes it easiest for identifying little pieces of art. You can draw a pencil around it and cut it with scissors. It doesn't matter. Let's see here, I got one corner that's stuck. Look at that. I like it. I hope I have enough left to get this one over here. Just barely because I tore my paper right there. I got to be real careful. Let's see how far, that's as far over as we can go. Do we want to be more here? Maybe I like that better. I need you to be able to give me a little opinion there. I'm filling this actually because I like the orange in here. I like that this dark is on the side. Let's choose that. I think I want to make sure I'm on the edge, but I'm actually got part of the torn paper over here, that's going to really push it close. Second to push it too close. That might push it too close, but we're going to cut it out and see. We could always frame it mattered and if we ended up with a piece where it had torn paper on it, I could just hide that with a mat. It's not a big deal. There we go. What I might do actually I've got a little bit of paint over here. I might fill this in one little piece in with paint and then you won't even know that that's there. There we go. Perfect, my goodness. I love it. Let me get that little bit of paint off my finger, that out of the way. Now, let's see, we've got these really pretty pieces left. I love this right in here. I'm just going to take my scissors and cut these out. See, it's really easy to cut these with scissors, but I'm not a straight cutter on the main art pieces sometimes. Look at that one. I love this. I'm telling you this is such a good challenge because working with one color plus white or black so you can get different shades and different tints and end it with a white and the black in there is a challenge, and seeing if you're going to like it when you're done and really working outside your comfort zone and mixing the color that you're going to use instead of just using a pre-made color. Now we'll have some of these little strips like this right here, is such a pretty little strip which would be perfect to save in our color book. For something like this, in my color book where I save color palettes, I would save the yellow and the magenta, I would save these two colors in the book. I would then underneath that save the color that it created. Then I would have a record of that. Then I would put one of these pieces in my book with it. Here's the one I'm talking about, but I would put like a little bit of yellow and a little bit of the magenta, and then I would put that pretty rose color underneath it. I know that I'm mixed those two colors to get this color. Then having this in with it would really remind me what that color palette was. These are so pretty and we could cut these up and make them pretty little tags. These could be little pieces of art just like they are. They can be great collaged pieces. I love saving all the extra bits because now they can work their way into a future piece of art. But let's look what we ended up with. Because man, I'm insanely happy with the three of these in a color that I mixed myself and doing something that I haven't ever played myself. Like I haven't sat there and tried this particular, I like it better like that, experiment until now. I don't want you to be doing something I haven't done myself, but man, I'm extremely pleased with these. How beautiful are they? Super fun. I hope you enjoy trying out one color. I do want you to pick the color out of your mixing chart that you made and make it one of these that you mixed up, not one of these just out of the container. I don't want you to say, I'm going to use cardinal red and that's the color I'm going with. I want you to mix the color up and let that be your one color. I can't wait to see what you come up with. I'm pretty excited about the one color story, and I will see you back in class. 19. Triad color story: This project, let's do triad. Triad colorway is three colors that are equidistant around the color wheel. If we're thinking in equidistance, we could think of three primary colors being blue, yellow, red. Those would be equidistant. I don't want to do blue, yellow, red. I would rather do blue, violet, yellow, green, red, orange. I've picked green gold and I've got sharp and green gold, because I'm not sure I have green golden and anything else. I've got a couple of blues. I've got Prussian blue because it just looks like it's a purply blue to me or Payne's gray, which will be a darker grayish, purply gray. But maybe we'll do the Prussian because I've not used it before. Then I've got Mars orange, what's really looks like this color here on this color wheel. I'm just visually trying to match it up to those colors to play with way outside of my comfort zone. Not something at all that I would have picked to go together, but I'm actually excited to see what we can get. Then of course, white and black are your neutral and they're how you're going to get different tints and shades. Well, look at all of those. Those look exactly like our color wheel colors that I have picked for the triad. How fun is that? I've kinda picked these just different, not the brightest of those, a little more contemporary colorway there. In this one, I've also pulled out a couple of pastels that I thought might work in that same color family, the orangey red, the same green-goldish color in that and then some blues that I thought were not the exact same color but maybe close enough. I also have an oil pencil which I like. It's pit oil pencil. I like it because, and I have a couple I don't want to get the one that's sharper. That it only comes in white and black. It's not like this pencil comes in a lot of colors, but it's the pit oil-based Fiber-Castell sanguine color. I like it because it is about the same color as that orange, so it might be a really good mark-making tool. I like the way this draws on top of things. Then, of course, I have my Stabilo in the black that I could use. I have my white Posca pen. I'm going to put down some black Gesso and some white Gesso and some clear Gesso instead of black and white paint because I'm going to use these as my paints. My pallet's still a little bit wet from where I just cleaned it. That's okay. Paints are running around. I've got my Gessos ready. Got my paint. I'm going to tape down my paper, ready to paint one of my big random abstracts. The big random abstracts are my particular way to have fun art table when I'm doing exploring and different things like we're doing in this workshop. It's how I can walk away with fun finished pieces of art without really putting too much thought into the play process which I love more than anything because every time I do this, I leave my table happy. Sometimes that's what you need because there's been so many times when I've left my art table frustrated and then wondering why do I even run a creative business, and why do I even try to create, everything turns out terrible because you can see where that mindset leaves you if you leave your art table mad and then you're less likely to come back for a while. That's exactly what I would do, I wouldn't come back for quite a while because I would just get so frustrated. Doing this as part of my play and color experimenting just leaves me a much happier camper so that I'm not stuck mad and not coming back and playing. Let me grab a towel and I'm going to start experimenting with these colors. I thought I might do this a little different and maybe do a little blocks of color rather than great big swatches of color like I have been doing. That would be really fun way to experiment with color mixing. If I just start off maybe marking around here some different colors, just blocking it in. Really, I could go ahead and start mixing with the white. Maybe start coming over here to the blue. Not really thinking of composition at this point, I'm trying to allow myself the freedom of mixing colors and just play. I'm going to go ahead, probably speed you up so you don't have to watch me paint every bit of this. I'm going to paint random squares everywhere and then we'll have maybe some mark-making on top and just some experimenting to see where we end up and If we like what we did. I've not painted in this way before. I usually do big swishes of color, but, maybe this is my time to experiment with my abstract skills and just add color and be fun and then mark making, then we'll see did we get anything that we liked when we're done. I'll freely admit that as I'm painting this, I'm definitely doubting whether this is going to give me anything at all that I like. At this point, I'm going to stop and do some mark-making and maybe do some other things on top of this that maybe we'll like and maybe we won't, we'll just see. This is just a paint pen, and a Posca paint pen. I'm going to go through and just maybe make some marks. Is a little brush that Posca has. I'm just trying out something new, step outside my comfort zone because from everything that I've done in the different classes that you've seen and including the different examples that we've looked at in this class, you can tell this is way outside of what I would normally do. But you know what? That's what makes color studies and things like this fun. This is the time to step outside your comfort zone because I may not visit this technique again, or I may be done and think, "Wow, why didn't I do that before? I'm glad I tried that." Just some different things in there that I've never done before and I may never do again, we'll just see. Because let me tell you, I did think these colors are pretty starting out on my paint palette. Then as we started putting the colors on and I was mixing some of the colors together, I was thinking, "Oh, these are ugly." But in for a penny, in for a pound. Let's just go ahead and finish it. Maybe will love it, maybe we won't. Let's just see. Are we going to like any of this? I'm not feeling this one. This one's definitely got me stumped in a way that normally doesn't happen. I wonder if on top of this, I take some white paint, smoosh it across if that would change anything for me. Because I don't think I'm really the cubist person here, these just don't grab me. Don't be afraid to just continue adding layers when you end up with a discovery like this and you're thinking, "Oh, I just want to tear this one up and throw it out." Keep adding some layers of paint. I mean, there's nothing saying that you have to leave any of this like it is. I can come back and then just layer on top of this. This could have been my bottom layer. Now I can come back on and smoosh paint on top of it now that I've discovered that. Maybe this is not quite my style. No matter how I tried to frame it up as it is, it's just not going to work for me because nothing is appealing in here. Maybe if I go through and swoosh some paint around, then I might end up with a composition that I like better. I'm still in my color palette, so it's not like I have deviated from what this initial project was. The interesting thing about most art pieces is the layers in there. Keep dipping it in the wrong one. Here we go. I think I'm going to come back and start painting on top of this, even though this is just going to end up being whatever that bottom layer it was meant to be because is just not doing it for me. But maybe some of these layers peeking through wood, so we'll come back through here and do my smooshy thing. 20. Finishing up triad color story: I think I'm going to let this dry. I may add in some more marks once I hunt out some patterns I really like. I've stayed within our color palette. I haven't changed off of that, so I thought it'd be fun to have blue speckles on there to make the blue pop, since I covered a lot of the blue in here. Let's just dry this and see if I can find some pieces that I like and cut those out. Then we'll see if it needs any extra additional mark-making or color once I do that. I'm going to dry this and I'll be back. This is mostly dry, so I'm going to go ahead and pull the tape off. That was an interesting experiment to figure out what I like and don't like. Apparently, even if I like seeing other people paint in a very boxy fashion, that doesn't work for me. I may need some darker color in here, but let's start out. I really liked this right up here. That could benefit from some blue edges or some blue paint on it. You can see that little bit of blue right there is nice. But I think I might cut it out before I add that or consider adding it. Then I might search out some other pieces. I know I definitely like this. I don't believe I want it in the larger size, but let's turn this around and maybe I do. Let's see, because I liked what I had going on right in there. I do like that. I like it better as the square, or do we like it better as the bigger piece? It's fun as the bigger piece, right there. Almost if I'm going to do that in the smaller, might want it like right there. I need you to go ahead and vote and tell me. Let's cut the bigger piece because I like this right here too. We can always cut it down smaller, if we decide later we'd rather have that smaller bit. I think what I'm going to do is take my pencil and draw this square out. Then I can take my metal ruler and my exact dough knife and cut that out. Actually, I might re-cut that. I want to be inside the pencil line. I don't want the pencil line to be part of my art. I might cut that a little tiny bit tighter. I got off on my line there. There we go. Perfect. Let's cut this out. What do we got? See now, once we cut it out and now you can see the little splashes of the blue. I've got some big swaths of color. I can see some of the stuff coming from underneath the layers, like this was from our original paint layers that we did. Look how pretty that turned out. I'm actually surprised because that was a gigantic doubt when I got all of those squares. The more I look at it, the more I like it. But I did not cut the bottom off where it was supposed to be cut, so let me cut that. I must have just cut the white off instead of at the pencil line. There we go. I'm actually pleasantly surprised, for real, because talk about the biggest doubt moment I think I've ever had was right there in this piece. I seriously doubted every color choice. This is really pretty right here. I think I'll go for that right there. I almost wished it had a little bit more white in there, so I could go back and add a little bit of white. But let me just go ahead and draw that out. Cut that one out. Then, definitely a good experiment there, playing with this color palette and a triad color palette. A triad color palette apparently is one that I find challenging. That's interesting to know about yourself. That pencil line one completely straight. The paper is a little tiny bit warped, so finding the pencil line is not doing exactly what they should be doing because I guess I could have dried it for a couple of days and left it sitting flat. But I'm impatient. I'll just trim the pencil line off if I have to because really if I'm going to frame these, I can mat it up to any size I need or if I take them to the framer because I love them so much then I can have the framer frame it up and that will be just under the mat. Let's take a look here. That is pretty. Look at that. With the two together, that's actually quite striking. Then the pieces that are leftover, I'm really digging those. I'm going to grab my scissors. These are used for collage pieces and for tags and little micro pieces of art. Because this right here is real pretty, that would be a pretty tag or a small piece of art. I like having small pieces of art, micro art sometimes. That's real pretty. This little strip is really pretty. I like all these little pieces. I like this one with the dots. Very pretty. This, I love it and at the same time, I almost want it to have a tiny bit of white. Now watch this. I might regret that I'm doing this. I'm just going to stick my finger in here and maybe give it a touch of some white up here. I like that. I just feel like it needs some touches in here. I don't mind getting it on my art board. That's what that board's for, protect the table with a little bit of a board. Well, I liked all of that I did except that bit right there. That's pretty. I need that to dry. Maybe some dots in here. I actually don't have any of this color, this darkest color. Maybe I can go ahead and tuck some of that over here on the edge. That's pretty. Of course, I still have my little pastels over here. We could come in and add a little extra mark-making if we wanted. I do like this green and I could come in here and do a little additive of the green and smudge that in. I'm getting white everywhere, I think. I think I'll come back in here with some POSCA pen dots. Try not to put my hand down on the wet side there. Those are all pretty. I think I like this one. A few dots, maybe. It's got dots but maybe not. Maybe I'll just leave that one like it is. I do like this one with the extra little bits that are added. Then look at that. That is my analogous colors. We actually could switch these to that. That might be the way I want them hanging. Maybe like that, I don't know. That's my triad color scheme. I want you to give this a try-out and I know this is definitely stepping outside of my own comfort zone. I'm not sure I would use these colors together in this way again. But you can try any of the triad colors, which are the ones that are equidistant around the color wheel, so green, purple, and this orange. Could be blue green, red violet, yellow orange. Could be blue, red, yellow. Could be blue violet, red orange, yellow green. I think we're back to our red, green, and blue, orange, violet, and green. Then we're back to where we started. I want you to give this a try-out. I know it's a little bit uncomfortable on these colors. That was uncomfortable for me, but I'm actually quite pleased with the finished pieces, even though what I started out with was quite a bit different. If you don't like those first layers, just keep painting on top of it till you get to a point that you think you may have something in there that you would like and apparently squishy colors everywhere is my thing. I hope you enjoy this colorway and experimenting with these colors. I'll see you back in class. 21. Tetrad colors: [MUSIC] In this lesson, let's do the Tetrad colorway. I'm picking out some colors in that colorway that I've already got mixed but if you really want a deep dive into the spirit of mixing colors, you could definitely mix all these colors together. Orange, green, blue-green, and red-violet are the ones that I'm using. A Tetrad is two sets of complimentary colors. The orange and blue, and the purple and yellow, purple greenish they're on the color wheel as compliments. We could move this around and have green and orange, red violet and blue. That would be one. We could have red violet and the blue-green. It's still in the blue family. We could have the green and the red orange. What I've done is pick out colors that pretty much fall right there on those color ranges but you can mix each of them too. But for the sake of experimenting with this color range and this colorway, I want to get the feel of how these colors work together to see how exciting this colorway is going to be. Then when we get to our random color Palette 1, I'm definitely going to mix all the colors and experiment with that. Some of this is figuring out interesting color combos in addition to figuring out mixings and paints. Let's go ahead and do our red-orange. I'm using light sap green so red and green. Then I'm using magenta light for my red violet, and I'm using deep green for this blue-green color. It might be greener than I'm expecting. Let's see. No, it's more of a teal. Look at that. That's a pretty color. I'm going to go ahead and put down some white gesso and maybe a little bit of black up here. I may use some black, I may not. Black and white paint is how you get your tints and shades. Little bit of Clear Gesso. I might need to put more of that out. Then also I might look and see as I'm going, is there any other materials that I want to add into my colorway? I might take my charcoal. This is a charcoal. Yeah. Do some marks underneath to get my white paper paralysis started and messed up and then I don't get afraid of what's on the paper and messing it up because it's already messed up. [LAUGHTER] Then some of these will then be able to show through to the top layer possibly. Sometimes you don't see that layer at all for me. I like to ruin the papers so that I dive right in and get started. I've got a bunch of these cheap brushes. I usually ruin these pretty good. I use them with glue and then they all get stiff and stuck. I really like these though it's the cheap brush. You get at Michael's for a couple of $. It's a good little brash for all stuff. I need to go back and get some new ones, I've been working with these for so long I've ruined most of them. I like this one inch but shorter bristle look, that's my favorite. Let's get started here. I might mix a little bit of white and see what color. Look at that. It really is like a vivid teal. That's pretty. What do we want to do here? Look at color. That is so pretty. My goodness. I'm going to do large quantities of color here instead of small bits of color, and get started with that and then I'll come back in with some mark making, and I'll come back in with other colors on top. Let's go for this green. I like blue and green together. Look at that green. [LAUGHTER] So far I'm liking the blue-green. I can see that that green, it wants to be transparent but it is pretty solid there. [NOISE] Look at this colorway. I could do the blue-green with these two colors. I love blue and green in my decorating in my house that's particular colorway that I love. Let's jump in here with some of this magenta, mixing it with the white. Not really being specific about where I lay the colors down or thinking about composition at this point. This is my favorite way to create abstracts. This is the way the undoing these art projects. Definitely don't feel that you have to do them this way. You can certainly do your own type of art with these different color projects and really get a feeling for when you're creating what, how you're going to use colored enhance what you're doing. Of course, mixing in white, I'm making lighter shades, lighter tints of that color. I'm not using the full intensity of these colors yet. [NOISE] Fun. Let's get our 4th brush and grab this vivid orange. I've definitely gone for, at the moment, the vivid parts of these colors. I could have really gone in with a lot of white, enlightened these into the most pastel shades of these colors, but it's not what I've started with. It doesn't mean it won't be what we end up with. We could certainly continue adding paint layers and seeing what we can get. I got some black in there. One of my favorite abstracts that I've done was with these big blocks of colors. I like revisiting big blocks occasionally. Let's go back with some blue. Fill that in. This blue-green that's pretty. That is such a pretty color. I'm going to have to remember how pretty that color is. That's what I like about doing these. You discover stuff like this color that I probably wouldn't have used or picked up because there's so many choices. This might not have been the one I picked up and looked at. Now I know that I will want to revisit this color again. Let me put some more of that out. That's the deep green bar teaser. It's the prettiest shade of teal. Which I'm always looking for pretty teals and oculus. [LAUGHTER] I love those. Charcoal which we put under this, is actually water soluble, or it will be activated when you paint on top of it. We could have been smearing it around, but I'd actually don't think we really had any trouble with the dark charcoal being under this. Now we've got some big colors marked out. I'm going to come back now and we put out some more white gesso. We'll come back now and start mixing on top of that, and making it a little more organic in the field there. Still mixing in with the white. I want to go lighter. I don't want to really go darker. I don't think. I'm going to fill these in with white. As I drop a paintbrush. I just happened to think I want to go ahead and get some mark-making going. Switch this around a little bit. I want it all to be like a brush. I'm going to take my mechanical pencil, start doing some drawing and mark-making some of this is so dry, it's not going to give me the color through until I get more wet paint out there. That's okay. It'll give me some lines in addition to dig through. Really pick up some of this white and orange. If I get some of this blue-green in here, it starts to mix into a different shade, which that's interesting. Don't be afraid to mix some of these colors as you go on. Might want to talk some orange into some of these little spots. These are different. Yeah, this is not as hard for me as the tetrad one. I think the tetrad one was harder. This adding the fourth color, or maybe I'm picked colors that I liked better. Adding this fourth color didn't make this as hard as I felt that tetrad one was. Or it could have been the way I decided to paint [LAUGHTER] that one. I actually found that whole one to be very challenging. I don't like the green next to the orange. That was interesting. I do like orange next to blue. Those are fun. I like the blue orange combo though, and it doesn't have to be like vivid orange and vivid blue. I like it more when they're softer oranges and softer blues, but I do like those. I'm going to put some more paint out so I can continue smudging some paint around. See orange and green like brown. That's probably a good reason why I don't usually use that little combo there. You got to be careful when you're working on these. If you're going wet on wet. Are you going wet on wet, making mud? Or are you going wet on wet and making a pretty color? Wet on wet, with the opposite color like the purple-yellow, blue-green, blue-orange, and red-green if you're putting those right with each other. I'd think for a minute. You're creating brown, remember. Don't get hung up sometimes on. Can just be careful where you're laying those colors sometimes. I do like this hint of this magenta color oh. It's laying in that in there. Let's see, maybe I'll do that with the orange. Look at that color. That was nice. I might come back in here with my little tool. See if I can make any marks. Just dig into some of this wet paint, this right here made mud. I definitely didn't want a big splash of brown in the air, so definitely keep that track of what colors are going to make mud. I think what I want to do, I'm going to put all my little paint brushes here in water. What if we come on top of here with some white? I've got a rubbery paintbrush that I might try out to see. If we can just start maybe spreading some of this around and some of this paint is still wet. I'm going to be grabbing some of that paint too but it would be nice to see if I could maybe get some other stuff going in here. I might have to take my paintbrush with the white or maybe my fingers with the white and see. Well, we might have to let this dry a tiny bit. But I do like seeing how paint colors mix some. Like some of these are really pretty mixing and if we mix enough of this together, we're actually ending up with gray, which is very interesting too. It's another muddy shade, but it's a pretty gray shade. That's fun seeing that mix like that and get gray. Like this over here in this corner looks like a little rainbow going in there. That's pretty. I think what I'll do, I can get a white, I work with just a white paintbrush, but I think I might just go and start spreading some white in here. I'm getting a little more gray in that when I do that too, look at that. Very interesting, I do like this gray color. We'll put a little more white just so on here. I've been making a mess with my gesso, so every once in a while I even had to clean the top of the gesso out or it's no longer going to shut. We will pick up one of these towels. But I could pick up a paintbrush for the white. See if I've got one that I haven't put too much glue in. Oh, yeah, there we go. I like this one too. Might need to go ahead and let some of these layers dry. I want this white to actually be white. I think what I'm going to do is draw this with a heat gun and then I'll be right back. [MUSIC] 22. Finishing up tetrad colors: We're dry or mostly dry. Now I'm going to come back in and see how much white I can add in here because I want this to be a little wider. I am, again, just like I always do, I look at this, and I go, am I seeing anything I'm going to like in this? I start to doubt myself. I'm at that point right now in every piece it does to me every time. It's going to be anything that I like. Every painting has its ugly stage. When you're doing this, its ugly stage is very large, and then we search out the fun stuff in it. Or maybe over-whiting here. I might need to come back with some color. I could have just overdid this. Let's see. We've got our little searcher thing that I created with just some. Let's just see if anything at all is looking interesting with some of these color shining through. I don't know. Let's keep going. Let me use my other tool, which I really like for adding lines. This is my catalyst blade, my silicone catalyst thing. I always like to add lines and dots into my pieces. That seems to be some of my own favorite mark-making. What I enjoy seeing when I start searching out compositions, these extra details are what get me excited. I've got lines. We can also do some circles. I've got that silicone little funnel that I was using with the black the other day. We could go in here and add some white circles. It's interesting. I think I'll stop at just a couple. You'll get creative in what tools that you have. We can also do some speckles of a color. I'm just going to take a brush, wet it down really good with it. Look at the orange. I do like speckles. Speckles and dots make me happy. Now I've just got it super wet so I could do this. You want to be real careful when you're doing paint speckles like I'm doing because you could paint everything. Not on purpose, but it does happen. Let's do some of these pretty magenta-looking ones too because I have repainted my art room here last year. But before it was repainted, I had paint all up and down this wall. It sits in front of this table because at some point, I was definitely speckle happy and I was just whacking that speckling around, and let me tell you, made the biggest mess. Now, I try to just tap with my finger so it goes down and not everywhere. Just keep that in mind as you're going. We could do some colored lines and stuff. Let's use this little brush and come in with some colored marks. All my marks don't have to be white. They really shouldn't all be white. Look at this. This color is very interesting. It's really the marks and the things that we do on top that pull these paintings together. It's what then starts making them exciting and then I start finding things. As we're searching out stuff, I start seeing compositions that I wasn't seeing before we got to this stage. Let's go back with the Posca pen. Maybe do some dot work. I really like those colors that I always just dotting on top of it. I had that little bit of the gray shade that it had turned into, but it was really pretty. This blue green is combined right in here. That's really pretty. I wouldn't mind revisiting that blue and that green, which if we were just to do the blue green, we would be in the analogous colors because those are colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel. Because I liked that blue and that green. Those are pretty. I think I would definitely like that as a piece of art in that colorway. I've used different blues and greens. I've done that teal with that green gold which is that really vivid green, but this is more of a subdued green. It's not so vivid as that green gold. Maybe fun to draw some shapes in here too. We don't have to keep it all completely abstract. I could come in here and draw some pretty leaves. I might want a finer tip to paint pen to actually get those leaves nice and fine. If you want it to like draw some botanicals, that would be fun. I actually want to focus more on botanicals in a class, so that might be something I jump into next. We'll see. I think the dots are fine. I definitely am going to revisit the dots. We're going to keep coming back to that, but come in here with just a few lines going through maybe. This is just my mechanical pencil. Some of these are not super vivid until you get up close to look at all the details, and I love that about pieces like this. Let's just see if anything is coming together. I really like this in here with all this green in the middle, like right there. That right there is actually talking to me. I love this with the vivid pink. Once we pull this tape, I'll be able to turn these around and see. This right here is really pretty too. I like it with this blue right here. Once I pull the tape, we'll be able to see what we have going on, cut out a few pieces, and then see if we want to add any other details. I'm going to go ahead and draw this with the heat gun and pull my tape off and I'll be right back. I've got mostly dry or 99 percent dry. I went ahead before I forgot and started my color palette there in my color palette books so I do not forget. There's a few in here that I do actually really like, like this right in here with the green, that's really pretty. I think I might have turned it around as I was pulling that tape off because it looks like I had it. Maybe not. I guess I didn't. This is really pretty too. I like this with these lines and that bit of color pop. I actually really like this one. Let's go ahead. I don't think I want these to be bigger, but I could check just in case, but I don't think I do. No, I like it smaller. I'm going to go ahead and cut this one because I like that one, right here on the edge. Get my little X-Acto knife and I'm just going to use my little cheater board, which is just one of those boards that you do art on that I'm just using as my guide for cutting. I have sacrificed it to be my cutting guide. Then sometimes, I cut the wood. That's okay. Still makes it easier to cut for me, so I don't even care. There we go. Let's see what we got. This is like opening a present. Like pulling the tape. All right. Here we go. I do love those colors. Look how pretty that is. I like that even better. I do like that even better, let's see. Do we like that? I think this is the winning combination. I like this big swatch of blue. Looks like I have a piece of white that came up because of my board that must not have been completely dry, but I got it fixed back in there. I'm loving that one. Let's search out and see what else we can get. That was very interesting experimenting with the two. I like this one right up here. I'm filling this corner here too. Very interesting experimenting with the two colorways. It's not until you get into a where did we like it right there. Is that where we like it? I think that is because I like these coming in here, these coming in here, and the green here in the middle. I love all of that. Because you're never going to usually do color projects like this until you're in a class and it's part of your assignments. I find that that's the way I tend to operate. I like giving myself these assignments, especially if I'm filming a workshop because I'm going to do these projects that usually you're just going to wave off and think, I don't need to do that. It's not really, look how pretty that ended up. I love that right there. Then the two together in that pretty, oh my goodness. A little bit out of my comfort zone with those colors. I'm glad I played with them because that blue and that green really was very fun. That's a really pretty small collage piece. I love that because doing stuff like this really gets me out of my own comfort zone, gets me out of creative slumps that I get into, especially going back and forth between photography and art because in my main business, I do photography workshops. But those take everything I've got out of me. They're all-consuming. What do you think about that one right there. I'm filling that with the pink and the blue coming in. But they're very all-consuming and I'll spend a couple of months making a photography workshop. Then I am exhausted for weeks because it's like my brain when I'm done just shuts down and it says, you need to refuel because you just used every creative cell that you got. Then if I'll come up and play in my art room, I get re-energized and I get excited again about doing creative stuff and it allows my mind to not think of what I usually do in my regular day job, and look how pretty that is, say cutting these out are really what pull them together for me. I don't know if you get where you're thinking, I don't need to do little projects like this but you discover such interesting things about yourself and what you like. That's a pretty little piece. You start then developing into what your style is going to be because you've taken the time to do projects like this, where you're experimenting with colorways and things that I really think. I don't know, it's not big enough for that. I was thinking maybe a four-by-four, I like this little section here because really until you experiment with all your supplies and all your colors and you do fun little projects like this where you basically say taking aspects of the color wheel and giving it a go and just seeing is there anything that you like? Is there things you don't like? Because during this workshop alone, there's been plenty of times when I've said, I don't think this was my thing for whatever it is that we were doing and I would not have discovered these or made these discoveries without doing something like this workshop because sometimes I have a hard time coming up to just play. I'm going to cut this one anyway. Let's cut this one to like say a three-by-three. Let's see, 1, 2, here's three inches here. These are how you get into those discoveries and how you start to narrow down what do you love. It's all those individual choices. What you love, how you use what you love to create, what you end up supposed to be creating and stuff, and that's how you develop into your style. It's all those micro choices that you made to get to this point. I'm going to make this into like that's pretty right there. I was going to make it three by three, but I like it just like that. This would be a really pretty gift tag or the front of maybe a card or framed as a little piece of art because that one right there makes me very happy. This one is a ton of orange and just a teeny bit of the other colors that we were playing with, and see how dynamic, just having those touches of color in there. But maybe the entire piece being almost one color. That was a really fun discovery here in that, I love that. This is fun, but I do love the other one even more but this one's really pretty, I like that teal, and this I could keep, It's just a big piece for a possible collage later or we could go ahead and cut this up into little pieces that could be a micro pieces of art. Really, I just might do that. Let's just see, we've got almost 2.5 inches. Let's just go ahead and cut that into little tags and just see how pretty they are. These are fun because they could be future inspiration for compositions and color and mark, well, there's a funny place on catching. There we go. I'm getting so enthusiastic with my X-Acto knife and I'm cutting the plastic ruler. Maybe I'll get out my metal ruler. There we go. Look at these little shades of color right there. How pretty is that? That I like right there, that whole little strip. That make a really beautiful bookmark. Little tags. I'm just cutting these at about, say, 2.5 inches. I'm going to end up with something left over and they're not completely straight, but look how pretty that is with those colors. Mostly white with some of our colors just shining through. That's really pretty. That would be a pretty cover to a card or a gift tag. That's my favorite out of that. Just going to cut some more of these. I do like having little bitty pieces of art to play with. Then when you're really serious about them and you're going to be using them for stuff, you can be a lot more exact than I'm being right now. But look at that one. That's really pretty and I like how we've got the white along the edges and then dots that's really in the swishiness of the color underneath it so that it's not bright, vivid, solid colors and we've just got some peak throughs all of our colors. These are really fun. These will be pretty little collage elements or pieces of micro art which I like to create, I really love that one. Then we've got our three bigger pieces. I think out of these, this one with that green in there is my favorite. This was a very fun little exercise using four colors around the color wheel that are basically two sets of complimentary colors used in the same piece, and that's not something I would normally do. So I'm definitely stepping outside my own comfort zone there and working a little bit outside a box that I might normally stick myself in and discovering some really interesting things like, I love a lot of orange, some white, and touches of those other colors that would have been a good thing for me to do. I also liked the way the colors mixed underneath this bit of white, so that was particularly interesting. I might visit this colorway again, even though halfway through, I do love this one. This one might be one of my favorites with the touch of orange and a little bit of blue and the little speckles of the other colors. I love this one. This could be a really pretty bigger piece. I might even scan that in my scanner and print it bigger. You could do something like that if you create a little piece that you love and you think, gosh, I wish that were big enough to frame. You can scan that into your scanner, print it out on a nice photo rag or art rag. GicleeToday is one of my favorite print sources for art prints. I can print that a lot larger and have that as a bigger piece to frame. If you create little pieces and you're just totally gaga in love with it like maybe this one, scan them in and print them bigger. They don't have to stay micro pieces of art. These are really fun. I hope you give this colorway a try. I know it is a little harder to work with so many opposing colors and not make mud because remember if you mix the complement to a color, you're getting a brown. Some of these even turned into a yummy grayish color as we were mixing some of those. This one especially, we got some of those pretty grays in there, I really loved that one. I hope you can enjoy experimenting with this colorway. If you want to mix all four of your colors to practice with your mixing, that would be great too. I cannot wait to see what you come up with this set. All right, I will see you back in class. 23. Random Palette: [MUSIC] In this one, I'm going to do a random color palette that I just want to try to create the colors and then see what I can create as a piece of art. I've got little color palette books from IV Newport that I enjoy. Basically, these are books that take a photo and you pick colors out of the photo. You could do this with any of your photos and go in Photoshop and pick out a bunch of colors that come out of that photo if you'd like the color white in there and print that out and use that as your reference. You can find color chart inspiration like this on Pinterest if you search, color charts or different things like that just as a resource guide and go through and find one that you think, "Oh wow, I really love that," like this one I really loved this gray and brown in this green-gold color. That's fun. But what I'm going to do, whether you take your own photo or you get on Pinterest and you look for color chart ideas, or you get a book. This is my favorite book. [LAUGHTER] In the Mood for Color by Hans Blumquist. This is an interior book showing how you can have different colors inspired in your interiors. I'm going to use these three colors, they're muted. They're really pretty, they're grayish, bluish, greenish, depending on which one of these three colors you're looking at. I'm looking at that thinking, "Okay, what do I need to create those colors?" I'm referring back to Miami color chart that I created. I can see right up here in this cerulean blue, right about here. I am with this color that's at the far left overhear. That color is almost identical to that and that is a color we get by mixing cerulean blue and orange, yellow. We could even do this vermilion red either one of those I think would get me right there on that color. If I mix Mars orange, I'm almost to this middle color and then perhaps a little bit of white. I think we will be right there exactly on that color. Then if we come down here to maybe the yellow ocher with this cerulean blue, where the yellow ocher is the more dominant of the two colors. Then I think we will be right here in this third color. Well, it looks exactly right at it. I have pulled out the cerulean blue because that seems to be the dominant color that I'll be using for all three of these. I've pulled out the orange-yellow because that got me right there to that darkest color. I've also pulled out the mars orange because it got me that next one over, which I thought could have been that medium one, maybe with a little bit of white. Then I've also got my yellow ocher and I've got black just in case I need to make something darker. I've got white if I need to make something lighter. We're going to put the color chart where I can see it. I'm going to set the book over here to the side where I can see it and compare color. I'm going to do little mini abstracts instead of my great big paper that I usually do, just to mix things up and we're going to go and start mixing. I'm going to put a good amount. Two of the colors started with cerulean blue. One of the colors started with yellow ocher. I want enough that I can do a couple of these without remixing. To get the darkest color, we're going to start with the cerulean blue and the yellow-orange. I'm going to start with that and its dominant color is the blue, adding color is the orange. I don't want to start with so much orange that I can't go backwards. [LAUGHTER] Then I have the white and black here if I need to. That right there, that might have been it just a dab of that orange might have got us there. I think comparing it to our book here. If I pull this back where you can see it, we need to add a little bit of black to that because it is a little bit brighter. Let me just add a touch of black. See if I can get that a tiny bit darker. I'll add more black in as I think I need it. I think I need more black. Oh, that was way too much black. Oh, my goodness. We're going to have to take a little bit of that [LAUGHTER] and move it to the side because I can use the rest of that black later. There we go. I don't want to ruin my color by putting too much black in it all at once. I want to get there a little more gradually. I'll definitely, as I'm doing this in spreading this color around, I can see them. We're probably going to have to make some more of these colors, but maybe not we'll see. Look that we're almost there. I probably could've used all that black, I'd rather add in a little bit at a time than add too much and think, I got too far. Yeah, I could even use more black. Well, now we know let's put some more black. Because I really want to take a moment and just see if I can get the exact colors that we're trying for. Yeah, that's super close. Maybe just a tad more black. This is the most fun experimenting. Pick a color palette and then just say, "Okay how can I get there," and by having that color mixing chart, look at that color. Yeah. Now, by having that color mixing chart, we took out like three-quarters of the work because I already had something close. But now look at that. We're almost identical. I would say that's a great match. Let's leave that one there. I'm hoping you'll have enough and I don't have to mix it again. [LAUGHTER] But guess what? We know how we got there. We had our color chart and then we added a lot of black. The next color we're trying to get is that middle color, this pretty greenish, bluish and we decided that the Mars orange was the way to get there. Let's take the Mars orange with the cerulean blue and you can tell that's a completely different color than that really vivid orange that we were just using. Yeah, we're definitely getting a different shade here. I like that. Let's see how close we got. That actually is a tad orange here than my paper. I think I might need to add black to tone it down and then add white to brighten it up because it is a tad too bluish it's too vivid. It's not as dulled down as that picture, let's add some black to dull the color , and then we can all wet. Yeah, that's getting closer. Then we can always add white to brighten it up. Let's just do a little more black. Yeah, let's add some white. We're almost there. I'm just doing a little at a time. You'll notice I don't want to put too much of any one color in there. I'd rather get there in steps and just add a little and say, "Okay, did I get there, or do I need something else?" Maybe a little bit more white and the goal here is to definitely just try to get as absolutely as close as you can. You can certainly stop it good enough but the challenge with color mixing is just saying, "Can I get that color?" It almost needs more black to be grayer. These are really gray colors and then I do like the lightness that we're getting, but it needs to be grayer. Just a touch more white. I mean black and hopefully, that'll put us right there. Maybe a touch of white now. This is a great way to really make your artwork stand out from other people's artwork because some people are going to not be creating their own colors. Now look at this and you will be able to look how pretty that is. We're almost identical to that shade, I'm very happy with that color. Let's go ahead and move on to the third color. Because keep in mind too, I'm not looking at actual paint swatches there. I'm looking at some ink. So the third one started with ocher, but we had cerulean in it. Let's add a little bit of cerulean to a lot of ocher and see if that gets us that greenish tone. This will be more of a greenish gray than a bluish gray hopefully. This color is not going to get me there. That's way too yellow still, we'll add some more blue. Yeah, but this is how you could have colors in your artwork and different things going on that nobody else is going to have because you've mixed it, it's very personal to you. Your likes, your color mixtures, how you'd like to create. Now that is almost there. Let's add black. Just comparing my color to my splotch there. Let's put some black in here. Then we can add some white if I need it to be lighter. Look at that. That is a pretty color. This would be a great exercise for you to do. Maybe a little more black for you to do like one color palette a day, and just spend some of your time mixing and creating color. It's how you get really comfortable with doing this. Now, that is gorgeous. Check out this color with our inks blot. I think we're there. I'm really inspired by this photo of those colors, that's really why I was going that route. That photo really inspired me. You'll notice in these photos that there is a little bit of, say, a creamy or a white or taupe color. I might even allow myself with that color palette. Let me put this book where it's not going to fall. That color palette, I might even allow myself say like a taupe or something like that. Like, I've pulled out two pastels here, a blue that I thought actually matched one of our colors if I wanted to use some pastel. Then there is a pretty taupe color here that I have pulled out. I might allow myself, say, a grayish or a warm color in addition to these. Also, I'm going to put down some white gesso and some clear gesso. Because I like to be able to do stuff on top of these paints. Then I might come back to the wider, the gray as we're going. I'm going to go ahead and start laying some color out here. I might make each one of these dominant different color just to see what can I get. I'm mixing the clear gesso in here. I'm not changing the color at this point. Let's start that one. Let's go ahead and start one here. I'm starting in the corners, that just tends to be what I like to do to get my composition started. Maybe pick a third one here as our dominant. Let's just see how laying these colors in here a little differently for each one of these gives us something different. Then the fourth one can just be whichever color way you think you're going to like. [LAUGHTER] I should have just done like three there, that's okay. Then let's come back in here on these and start laying some other colors in. I'm going to work really hard to have larger sections of color. I don't want it to be real tight, I already got that color on there. Let's go ahead, we get to the forth. I want to have larger sections of color instead of smaller sections of color. Let's see if I'm successful. [LAUGHTER] I think this one didn't have this color at all. Yeah. That was the lighter one, so maybe a little touch of this color in there. I might go back with the white and lighten up some of these. Now that we have our color palette, there's nothing saying that we can't deviate and add white in. They will come back with some of this lighter, with the white in it. This is really pretty the way that blue is mixing with that green right there. That's pretty nice. This will be very interesting. I've never used a colorway that looks like this. I tend to go a little bit towards the brighter. This using this random palette just to experiment and get outside my own comfort zone. Look how beautiful this is, this is such pretty colors. Let's go back in here with this medium, blue with some white in it. [MUSIC] I might come back in here with some white. Look how pretty these colors are. This was definitely something fun to experiment. Let's come in here with one of our making tools and drew some lines. That's so pretty. Let's continue on with one of the next ones. Let's see, this is the medium color. What we want there in the middle, maybe I'll use a lighter green in the middle of this one and maybe some white. Try not to overthink these. When I'm doing color studies like this, I want to work a little faster. I don't want to think is hard, I want to get everything laid down. Let's go back in with our little pencil. I try to get everything laid in a little faster. What do I just do with my other little tool? No, I've set it down somewhere over here, it's in my hand. [LAUGHTER] I'm trying to do this without thinking too hard, and I want to go a little faster. Let's go back in with some green up here. If I go a little faster, I'm not thinking too hard, I'm not getting stuck in the process of painting. I'm getting a little more stuck in the process of laying the color and moving a little faster. You might even do something like this and set a timer for yourself. I think I want this lighter blue with white in it. Set a little timer for yourself and then work a little faster. See, what can you create with a little color palette and a time limitation? That might have been overdue with that, but let's go ahead and put a few lines in there. What do we got left here? Let's go back here. Maybe with some of this, just put that in the wrong color. Let's go back to the green brush. There we go. Maybe with the blue, but maybe with some white in it. Let's hit it with this middle color maybe, and then I'll come back with some white. [MUSIC] 24. Finishing up random Palette: Lay some white on here and a little bit of that darker color back on here. That's what I'm add in there, maybe the green. I think now I'm going to let these dry solely for the last look, let's just double-check. I don't want to overwork it so I don't want to think too hard. Let's put the paint brushes in the water. Let me draw these down and then we'll come back with maybe a little bit of pastels, POSCA pen, we could use our Stabilo. Whatever we want to add to the top of this, because I've layered in gesso with that acrylic paint so it will let me put stuff on top of it. Let me draw these with my heat gun, and I'll be right back. I've got it mostly dry and looking back at my inspiration photo and color palette. I really like how these colors lay on top of each other, and they're almost scraped on like you scrape paint sometimes with a palette knife. I think what I'm going to do before I move any further, is I might take a little bit of one of these colors and just see if I very lightly scrape down. Can I get a little bit of that look in here? I don't want a lot of it, but I do want a tiny bit just to see what can we get. That really reminds me of that weathered worn wall that we had there. That's fun, just as an extra touch in here don't have to be a lot. I just liked that look and I thought, that'd be cool if I had touches of that somehow like that's pretty right there. Before we get to the point that we're wrapping it up, could I include a little bit of that feel in here. Let's not overthink it, but I do like having those little touches in there. I could come back now. I could do some POSCA pen, I could add some of these little pastels. I didn't come up with a lot of colors that I thought really matched. But I could go back into my color box and pull out a green, that would at least be close enough for some mark-making. That's my blue box. Because I can see where maybe even a moss green would fit in with some of that, maybe this kind of green right here. Let's use that. Sorry. We could come back in with a few marks, and few color smudges to work in, maybe some darkness if we want. I can mix that in with a little bit just so it'll take up some of that color too. I like that, it's adding in that little bit of shading there with that darkness. Just an extra tiny bit of a touch. See, I've got this lighter blue pastel. Then we just have to decide do we want to do anything else? Do I want to do any white lines, this one's got a broken tip let me sharpen that. Got an old pencil sharpener from the 1970s that I got off eBay and I just love it. This one's not as vivid really as the black pencil, this is the Stabila White. We can do it like just a little bit of mark making, just for some interest not a ton. Then I might go ahead and call this done. I'm going to wipe my hands off and then pull the tape. Because pulling the tape is definitely the most exciting part of this project when you do these, seeing what you reveal. These I was fairly careful to have the same size borders hopefully. I'm going to be real careful and pull the tape at an angle pretty slowly so don't rip my paper. Because these little abstracts that I do like this are some of my very favorite, and I do have some of these framed up in my house. That's fun. Once you pull the tape, that is your chance to take one last look and see, is there anything else you need to add? But look how pretty that one is, I love these, these are so much fun. These two if you thought, I love that so much I wish I had it bigger. You could definitely scan these in and print them at somewhere like G-Clay today on a nice photo rag. I like that Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag and then it comes out so beautiful and you can make it quite a bit larger. But I actually have some of this size framed too hanging in a little gallery wall, across the room for me in my art gallery here. My art studio. Look at that, so pretty. Pulling the tape is my favorite part, it's like the ultimate reveal like Christmas. Here we go, and then when you see all the pieces, I always like to do more than one. I like to work on several pieces at the same time. Once you're done and you get the reveal, you get all four pieces together. They make such a pretty collection. There we go. Look how pretty that is, but you can see would it look better the other way? The other way than how you painted it. I don't know, we'll have to just decide. Then I always have a favorite, I don't know yet what my favorite is but I do end up usually with a favorite. Trying to be real careful not tear my paper. These have chalk pastels on them, so I would take these outside and spray them with a final fixative when I was ready to do something with it. These are so pretty. Do I like it better like that? Maybe I do, I'll see. I like it like that. I think I like that one like that. Look at our yummy collection that we came up with, that was inspired by this section of the book, and the colors that we created. I think we did a pretty darn good job here with these, these super exciting. That was a fun experiment, mixing all of our colors from scratch. We didn't use one color out of the tube, and this is what I want you to do with this project. I want you to look at color palettes on Pinterest or create a color palette from one of your photos. If you've got great photos that you want to try to use, create a color palette off of. If you've got a book, like a photography book. If you've got the one that I've got, I really love that. In the Mood for Color by Hans Blomquist, where he gives you color examples that he's used. Whatever your source is, you might print that out on your printer a little one's fine. Have it here at your art table and try to get almost identical to the colors that you're sampling. To build on your colors skills and help you figure out how do I get to these colors from the colors I have. It really does help if you spent the time earlier on creating the color grid, because you saw how I can then just very easily start off with the color that was as close as I could get. Then adding white or black, getting me right on the money. You saw how much easier this made that. If I had just started out with this bucket of colors and I thought, how do I get to this shade of blue, blue green, and green. I might have been here all day trying to do that and never ever even getting accomplishing that. You can really see how much easier that made it. Now that we've got these like this I could even, I think you need some white dots, but not white dots like we had with the POSCA pen. How funny but I want to see this with some dots. Let's just see if I can do this and not ruin it before I sign off. But super fun project, I want you to try this. Pull a color palette anywhere that you want to source it. Those are too big, there we go let's try that again. I'm making them each a tiny bit in a different area, there's a little water that got on there. Look at that, I love that. Just that little tiny extra detail that we just added in there. Super fun, oh, my goodness. These are super fun, I really enjoyed doing that. I want you to try this project anyway that you do your art, you don't have to do abstracts like I do, but I do find these fun. Mix your colors, get it as identical as you can. Then I would love for you to come back and show me your source picture, and you're finished paints and your project that you came up with, that would be amazing. But you don't have to. But that would be really cool if you came up with something, and you were able to match your colors exactly. Especially if you did a color grid and then it won't take you very long. Hope you enjoy doing this one. Can't wait to see yours, and I'll see you back in class. 25. Saving your color palette: [MUSIC] So let's talk about keeping track of our color palettes, and I talk about this in just about every class that I do because I'm a really big believer in keeping a color palette book. So just to show you, I'm using just an old book. This is a old church hymns book, and I just thought it was pretty to have the music behind my color palettes, and it makes the color palette a little bit more artistic, and I like to keep the color palette, and one of these little scraps that I cut out. I like to keep those in my color books so that I remember what colors did I use, and what did the piece look like when I used them. Did I love it? Did I not love it? Do I want to revisit this again, or not? So I really love this pink palate colorway, which this could be a colorway that we do in class. This could be colors that sit side-by-side on the color wheel. Instead of crossing the color wheel, pinks and oranges, and reds. I think that might be definitely the analogous colors that we might visit this too, with the blue and the greens. That's analogous in your color, colorways. I really like that. So those are the ones I've saved, and before all my paint dries away to nothing, I do coat the page with some clear gesso to protect the page from the paint, and then let me paint on top of it with these paint colors without it sliding through. So I just real quickly go through, paint this with the clear gesso, and I usually let this dry before I paint on top of it. [NOISE] Before I put all my supplies away, I'm going to come on here and save each of these colors. Get me a paper towel because I want to just wipe the water out of this brush as I'm going. [NOISE] Now I'll remember later, what colors did I use? I used orange, I used white, and I used this pretty blue. You might, if you can't remember what colors these are going to be later, you could take a pencil or a marks all or something and mark in your book different colors and then I come back with, if I used a little crayon, I go ahead and mark on here with the different things that I used. Just making it, for a color palette thing, a little more creative. [NOISE] It's almost like we're creating a little piece of art also in our color palette book, instead of it just being plain white, and I used a little bit of all these Neo colors. So let's just draw one with those. Don't think I used any of the orange pastels. I did use my marks all pencil, so we just might come over here with that. I also used my graphite, so my little pencil here. Fun, and then I will take my stapler and I will pick one of these scrap pieces that best represents what I did, but doesn't necessarily take my bigger pieces that maybe I'm going to use for collage. Then I can put that right in there because this has got all those color tones. Love it, and I just staple this in and sometimes I'll just grab two pages. If the book is really delicate, I'll let it be two pages in-between, and I'll staple this with the two pages together. There we go. Look how beautiful that color palette was. It's really surprising what we ended up with versus the bright color that we started with. So I want to encourage you, every single thing that we do, you make a color palette in a little sketchbook, or an old book like I've gotten from the thrift store and make that your art color palette book where you save color palettes that you can come back and visit again later. One of my very favorite things to do with these projects. I'll see you back in class. [LAUGHTER]