Color Stories: Exploring Color Mixing & Abstract Art with a Limited Palette

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone, and welcome to color stories. Exploring abstract dart with a limited palette, a class where you'll discover how much beauty and depth you can create using just two colors plus black and white. Through playful color mixing and expressive abstract painting, we'll explore the power of limitation as a creative tool. I'm Denise Love, an artist who loves exploring texture, color, and creative play in the studio. I'm so excited that you're here. Working in a vintage style ledger journal or any journal that you choose or even blank pieces of paper, you'll build custom color pallets on one side and paint intuitively on the other side, creating a personal visual story with each spread. Whether you're new to painting or you're looking to reconnect with your creative voice. This class offers a fresh, approachable way to explore color, composition, mark making, one palette at a time. 2. Class Project: Your class project, you'll create one full spread in your ledger or your art journal or on just regular sheets of paper using a limited palette of two colors plus black and white. On the left side, you'll mix and swatch as many variations as you can from your chosen colors, documenting your discovery in a simple, beautiful color grid. On the right side, you'll use that custom palette to create an abstract painting or any art that you enjoy creating using the layers, marks and intuitive brushwork to express mood or story through color. Your finished spread will be a unique visual record, part reference, part artwork, and a powerful reminder of how much you can do with just a few paints. Don't worry about perfection. This is all about exploration, play, and trusting the process. Bonus points if you share a few thoughts about what inspired your palette or how it felt to work with the limitations. 3. Inspiration: I want to share with you my inspiration for doing this particular project, which I have come to truly love and enjoy. So in 2025, the Ranger company got with Dana Wakeley and came up with this lovely ledger journal, which is a replica of an actual real ledger journal that she found when she was out shopping at the antique market. And they replicated the exact size, the cover, and the inside pages of that journal. They've made it in a very nice medium weight paper with a smooth surface, which is ideal for mixed media collage work, acrylic paint. I've really enjoyed these pages, and I like vintage books and vintage pages. And so paid. I like painting in real old books. So I have a very old hymnal, and all through here, I have used it as a color journal, and I would take the pieces of art and then put beside the different things that I was using in that piece as a color palette guide like my very first initial color palette jumping into and saving things that I really loved before I got things like the color cube and working with color palette cards. It's really fun to work in a vintage book. If you don't have the Dena Wakeley media journal. You can get any old book and do this kind of project in that book, and it's fantastic. Well, when this came out, I thought, oh, that's perfect because it was like, I want to say $32 on the Ranger website, give or take. And this book right now is definitely when the class comes out, it's still available, and then I don't know how long they'll be selling it for, but it's usually a couple of years that they keep these things, and then later when they no longer have that, but you're watching this class, then you can look at some of the other options I'm going to present to you. But I just wanted to share the inspiration first, though. I got this book practically right after it just came out, I was a first early adopter getting this book. I thought, oh, what could I do with this? That would be super fun, a good reference, something that could inspire me to paint through the whole book. This is the one I've been working in for more than a year. I just made a fabric cover, which is basically folded and glued on here. It's not even really sewn, but it's kind of made like how we used to cover our school books in grocery sack. You know, the cover, it's kind of made in that same way. It's just folded over and glued. I put a button on here. I actually sewed this part of the cover. I just kind of stitched a stitch on it, even though this fabric is glued to that fabric and then it's all glued to the book. I just got creative making the cover. And then just flipped on the back side too. And then I sewed a button on it, just came through here with my all, poked a hole and sewed a button, and then I have some pretty ribbon that I right now have it loose so that it's not permanently attached. I can keep working in the book without messing up the ribbon. I can take the ribbon off for now, but I like these vintage looking uh, velvet ribbons. They look so rich to me. This is my very first original one, and I was playing and I thought, you know, I love color palettes. I like the way the mixing palettes look when I've seen other people do those on just regular paper. I thought this would be super cool if I did a mixing palette and then painted a piece right next to it kind of as a reference library of what these colors mix and look like and what you can do with it. And this has turned in to the very best project ever. This is the very first page that I did. I left a blank page at the front and went back and did that palette. This was the first palette that I did in this book and I have a whole playlist on all of these inspiration pages that I'm going to show you so you can go back and watch all of these pages and just keep on learning and seeing what else I've done in the book. But this is the Zorn pilot and Zorn pallet is an artist. The Zorn palate is a famous limited pallet of four colors yellow ochre, ivory black, vermilion or cadmium red and white or titanium. It's named after the Swedish painter Andrew Zorn, who masterfully used it for rich harmonious skin tones and figurative work by creating a wide range of values and muted colors through mixing. While Zorn popularized it, the palette roots are ancient, allowing artists to achieve complex naturalistic effects with minimal pigments, though it's less suited for vibrant, saturated colors. I had just come across like some information on Zorn, I thought, Oh my gosh, that would be so fun to experiment with that color palette and this was the first page in here and it was a red, yellow, black and white. Then I thought, Wow, I could really run with this idea and just pick two colors in whatever paint line that I wanted to use. I particularly enjoy experimenting with the black mat paints because they're a good quality paint. They're a little bit more than a craft paint, but they're less expensive than an artist heavy bodied kind of paint, there's a lot of colors that I could have I have through the years collected basically their whole line of these because they're fun to play in for your sketchbook or your pieces of art that you're playing with. I actually dated this one. In here, I've gotten where I did this one in February of 2025. That's right after this book was introduced, and it's the Zorn palette. You can make notes in here if you want to. If you pick pages that are heavily already written on in the ledger, then maybe it would be harder to make notes, but you could put a sticky note in there if you wanted to make notes and stuff. I write the colors at the top usually, and then this has been the most exciting experimentation for colors and just play and creating abstract art and that I've done. It's a beautiful reference library, and it lets you now go back and look and see, maybe I'm looking for this lovely orange blue color. Now I know how to make that and what colors that I use to create it. I have thoroughly enjoyed creating and working in this book to the point where now I just want to go ahead and put this idea out there in a class so that if you haven't been on my socials and seen these, then you too can jump into this idea. And this is my favorite journal probably just because of its beauty and the fact that it's now an amazing reference library, and it makes color mixing fun. I know a lot of people shy away from color mixing, and a lot of times in videos, I'm using convenience colors because it's convenient. Something like this really gets you outside your comfort zone and gets you to start experimenting. So as far as I got a little bit of the book left. I'm excited that I got that many pages in here done. But what kind of beautiful journal does that make? I mean, don't you want to come and just look through the pages and be inspired? It's excellent for reference. It's good for inspiration for experimenting with your art supplies, for playing with different palettes. Yeah, so this has been super fun. So this is all acrylic paint and other things on top of it that I've used in this book. It's kind of fun if you have, say, one whole supply that you've experimented with. I started a second book because I had enough people ask me, well, how does it work with watercolor? This is a watercolor page with the watercolor directly on the paper with no prep work, and it worked fine. But the watercolor didn't really move around. I do like the way it looks, but it did not do the same as if it were on watercolor paper, but it did work, so you could do that. This page is watercolor with prep on the page. I used Daniel Smith transparent watercolor ground. Then the paint did actually move and react differently on this page than it did on this page and you can see it's a totally different using the prep and not using the prep. So you could do a watercolor one. The paper does hold up to it. It's not really warped or anything. If it warps while you're painting it, you can always close the book up and let it sit flat under some other books because they flatten nicely. So you can do watercolor if you want it. I did experiment with that. This one is a my next whatever idea I have, I got a couple of them. So in this class, I just kind of want to show you the process of how I create these. And then I have a gigantic playlist of all these pages that I'll put in your supply PDF so that you can go back and watch how I did some of these. Alright, so I'll see you back in class. All right. 4. Surface Choices: I wanted to talk about some book options. In this class, I am going to be using the Dana Weekly Media Journal. You can get that on the Ranger Inc website. You can also get it on several other websites. You might Google to see what's available where you are. If this is not available or this class has been out for a while and maybe you can't get it anymore. I feel like when the class is out, we'll be able to get it all through the next year or two. But after we may not be able to get these. If we can't get these anymore, there are other options that we can do, so you can get a vintage Ledger journal and paint in it. If you do that, then you need to gesso the pages with gesso. I would do Liquitex or whatever brand you want, but I would do the clear Gesso. This book has some watercolor ground on it, which is basically Jaso for watercolor, which is this Daniel Smith watercolor ground. But this page has been painted with that watercolor ground, and that's what clear gesso and watercolor ground look like on the page. You can't tell it's there, but it feels like a sanded surface. You can tell that there's something on this page versus a smooth page. This is what a prepped page would look like. You can't really even tell anything is there, but it makes a huge difference in a vintage book like this one here. Where I've used it to do lots of exploration. Like this page right here, real smooth. This page has ground on it and feels like a sandpaper just about. Painting real vintage books. This is a hymnal. It's beautiful. It's very delicate. So when I did stuff like this, I actually stapled a few pages together so that it was stronger. Then the next page that I paint on would be several pages later. I staple these together. And made each one of these more than one page thickness because it was just so delicate. I didn't want to do it on single sheets and then it fall apart even faster than I expected it to. So, these old books, go to your Thrift store, see what they've got. If you find an old edger journal, fantastic, just go ahead and prep your pages with clear or if you're doing watercolor, prep them with watercolor ground. Another choice is some handmade art journals. I've got all the handmade art journal classes that you can go watch where I've made these, but you could do color palette on one page, painting on the second page. That's an option with whatever watercolor paper is your favorite paper. That's something that you could work in. I also have these that I made with the different pages in it. This is also another fantastic use of the handmade art journals, whether they have a different page here where you've done a color palette and then the painting on the page beside it. You can do this with basically any of your art journals or books. Another option is premade art journals, obviously, and I thought something like the perfect sketchbook that has a cotton watercolor paper in it, which is what I like to work on. I thought this kind of Nice. It's a nicer art journal. They're more expensive if you get the eta one because it's got the arches kind of paper in it or something nice. It's 100% watercolor paper, but I just want to show you like options. So you can do the color palette painting on this side. You could also get you know, use inexpensive watercolor paper sheets. You could use, you know, just single sheets and cut it in half and do a palette and a painting, that's an excellent use. Then this could be a page in a future art journal that you maybe stitched together after you've painted lots of these. You could do that on inexpensive cotton water color paper or whatever your favorite paper is. I'm just showing you the options that I have sitting around my desk. You could also do this in the original Dana Wakeley Media journal, which has all the different types of paper in it. There's enough in here where you could do a pilot and a painting, and then you could maybe do another painting and fill in. You could use the different pages in the same way that I'm using the ledger journal. So that's another option. So get creative. You can just do these on plain inexpensive watercolor paper if you want. It's all about the play and the discovery for me. And then as you're going about it, if you're going to end up with something this amazing, then consider going one step further and maybe gluing some fabrics or painting the cover or using a nicer book for your reference library because these are worthy of your sketchbook, if you've got any of the sketchbooks and you're scared to use it. Perfect project for any of those because it's beautiful and it's inspiring when you're done. Don't get hung up on what book I might or might not be working in versus what you have available. Use what you've got if you want to do some of these on just plain paper. If you've got a sketchbook or something, an inexpensive one that you want to use, then go for it. It doesn't even have to be a big one like this, but I do think the larger size is really nice because then you've got more room for color mixing. If you just want the whole book to be color mixing, you could do that. I just like how there's a reference one next to it. You're like, look what those colors really do, whereas maybe you can't visualize it with just that, now you can. So use whatever you've got if you don't have access to the same things I do. Use plain paper. That's fine. If you have one of these, this is, like, the perfect use for this book. So I definitely want you to get creative. Make a sketchbook, if you want in what you're using. And then I will see you back in class and we'll start painting some layouts. 5. Supplies: Let's talk about the supplies that you might consider for your project. So you'll definitely need either single pieces of paper and then maybe you can work on a single piece of paper, half of a color palette and half a piece of art. So you definitely need some type of paper. I will be using the Dana Wakeley Media Journal, which is a vintage is a reproduction of a real vintage journal. In that, I'm using one page for color palettes and one page for the painting with that color palette. I like to do abstract painting and mark making and playing with stencils and just making a mess over here. If you just make a big mess over here, that would be fine too. The idea of this page is just showing you how the colors mix and blend together, whereas on this page, they're separated, and so it's maybe not as easy to visualize. This could just be one big mess of you cleaning off your brush, and that would be just fine. This could be some elaborate, full scale painting of whatever style that you enjoy. I enjoy abstract art. That's where I have gone with this is the beautiful palette, and then what can I create with that on this page? So you need either plain paper or maybe a ledger journal, if you want to, that's available and you can still get one and get one of those. You could also work in a regular sketchbook. You could work in a book that you made yourself. I've got several how to make your own journal books and you could do a plot and then a painting and something like that. I've got several different classes to show you different styles of bookmaking. You need a book. Scoot this out of the way. Then you need to decide what paint are you going to use. I did kind of glue a cover on to here and attach a button and some ribbon. So that would be next level for anything that you wanted to create, but you can check out making, stuff like that in one of the book classes. But I think that elevated it if you paint or cover your journal, that might be something that you consider. And then I discovered that when I was painting these, I started off just painting them just like this haphazardly and I decided, here we go. I decided I didn't love that look as much as defined columns where there was a stop Start paint. I have been using a half inch painter's tape or artist's tape here in this book and then I've discovered that this paper does not work well with tape. There are some layouts in here where the tape has peeled the paper. So you definitely have to put it down, paint your palette, and then use a heat gun to heat the tape up really good and peel it very slowly for it not to tear the paper. You can't leave the tape on for a long time. It will not release and then paint on this side. I'm using a half inch tape for that. I liked the width of that. And the further I got, I just love that. I didn't mind that it was different widths. Or heights, but I did want there to be defined columns, so that's how I got that. Then the next thing that you want to consider is what is your reference library? What paint is it? Whatever paint you want to use, whatever paint you have, that could be your reference. You could have any acrylic paint. I do think this works pretty good with acrylic paint, but you could have anything, any kind of paint that you want to work with, you can use in something like this. This is your reference library. It's what's going to allow you to see how your materials work and what colors you can get. I like the Blick mat paints because I use them a ton. They're nicer than craft paint, but they're not as expensive as um artists paint, and they're very pigmented, because I enjoy using these so much, I thought, aha this would be a good choice for me. You can use whatever paint it is that you love. If you're going to do watercolor, definitely, you need some watercolor ground because on the one where I tested the watercolor out, the watercolor ground pages got ribbon hanging out, hang. The watercolor ground page, this is no ground, this is with ground. The watercolor ground pages looked a little more like watercolor and it allowed the watercolor to blend and flow a little differently than without the ground. But you could do it either way. The book could do watercolor just fine. The pages held up, they're not warped. So do what you want with your different paints, just decide what you want to use. With every one of these, you need two colors, orange and blue, for instance, and then you need black and white. Every palette has black and white. That's how you're making your lighter shades and your darker shades. Then in between those, we're using some of just this, some of them mixed, some of just that, that's how we're getting the variety. White and black and two colors is what each page is comprised of. Then when I get to my painted page, it's whatever I want to use. It's definitely still the acrylic paints. But then what am I going to use on the layers on top of that? Whatever I'm using on top of that, I am trying to stay within this color palette. For instance, I like to use the No Color two crayons a lot. If I were doing something on this page, I would pick something that falls within that color palette to continue working on this page. That's the goal. Say within this color palette but pull whatever other materials that you have that you might want to work with. A lot of times for me, that's a posca pen, a neocolorT crayon. Um, you could work with acrylic paint markers like the different brands. You can work with something like temper sticks if you wanted to, but try to stick within your palette. And then that's how I approached this page. Stay within the palette. A supplies that you want to work with is where you're going here. Then if you want pencil and pen kind of things, then I consider those to be neutral. There we go. Start gathering your supplies, and then we will start painting a palette and a piece of art and just see, like, what can we come up with? So I'll see you back in class. 6. Acrylic Palette In Ledger Journal: This first project, I'm going to start in my original inspiration book that I did and just a quick flip through of all the color palettes that I've experimented with. And I'm going to do a color palette mixing on one side, and some type of painting on the other side. My book is all about abstract painting and play. Your book can be about abstract painting. It can be about whatever type of art that you create. This is very personalized. The goal here is to Experiment and play and see what amazing colors all of your colors create that you've chosen, the two colors and the black and white, and then to have some type of lovely painting beside it, or even just splotches of color. You can just throw all the extra paint on this side as a visual of what these colors might look like when you're using them. Um, so I chose to do abstract paintings that are, you know, basically complete, but you could just squash color over here and have that be your reference also because it's very personal to you. Don't want you to get stressed out about it. Don't want you to get upset if this page is not exactly what you were thinking. The goal here is just mixing and then giving a reference of how those look together. But man, this is one of my favorite books now. Look how amazing these turnout. And these are not perfect. They're not great. They're not anything special. But I love them. I love them. Okay, so I'm going to use half inch painter's tape, and I'm going to use the one that leaves residue so that I can show you what to do if you have something that left a residue. I got a trick. I like tricks. I like tricks. And I like it to be three columns, so I just kind of tape off three columns. And this is painter's tape, so it is the blue tape that I got at the paint store. I'm not sure how I got one that was a little bit odd and left residue, but I did. So then I had sticky stuff in my book until I came across the secret. And what is that secret? A high polymer eraser. So when we peel this off, if we've got any sticky residue, you can use one of these erasers just to erase the residue. It's amazing. Another thing that I discovered, and I'm not going to stick these down super hard, but another thing I discovered, I want three columns, so that's what I'm doing. Um Now I forgot the other thing I discovered. Maybe I'll think of it. All right. So I've got three columns. I like it to start and stop, you don't have to use painter's tape at all. But I like the defined grids there. I'm using the Zorn palette modified because Zorn is basically red, yellow ochre, white and black. I'm using pink, deep and yellow oxide from the blucke mat paints, which is my red and my yellow, and then black and white. You can do this with any kind of paint that you have. You can do with anything. It doesn't have to be anything that I'm working with. I want this to be a reference library for yourself and the paints that you have. The goal here is to and I'm using a Princeton umbrea brush. I usually put the color right up top that I'm starting with and then doing columns coming down. And I'm going to mix that pink with the white. I'm going to mix that yellow with the white, and then I'm going to mix the pink and yellow together, and then I'm going to mix the pink with the black and yellow with the black and that mixture together with the black, so you can see how we can end up with an absolute ton of colors. I do like to write. After these are dry, I like to write what colors that I used. Again, you can do this with watercolor if you want. But this paper is not watercolor paper, if you do it with the watercolor paper, you can do it without ground or with watercolor ground. Remember, I used the transparent Daniel Smith watercolor ground in the one where I did watercolor I think it was this one. Um, this is without the watercolor, how it looks without the ground, and this is with the ground. You can tell it does a whole completely different look with the ground without the ground. So you can do it with watercolor, and it does hold up, but this is not watercolor paper. Alright, so let's just get started. I have discovered if I start painting this at the same time as I'm mixing, I don't forget any colors over here. They don't get lost because they were just sunk into some other color as I was mixing. We don't lose those. There we go. I'm just going to start mixing that with white and then a little more white. You don't have to be perfect here. It's not about perfection, it's about play and discovery and seeing how many variations can you get. And then I'm going to start mixing in this yellow with this pink. Look at that. Let's use some of that color. It's like a pretty salmon. And this is with a lot of things that I do, kind of come in from the edges. I just personally like that. It's my own little my own little way that I start and do stuff normally is I come in, kind of like that and just start moving color around. Alright, so that's a really pretty salmon that that created. And then I'm going to start mixing in some white and seeing where that takes us. Oh, you know what? Here we go. I also discovered if you leave the tape on here for too long, you're more likely to tear the paper. It's really good if you can get to pull in that tape before it really has time to sink in super duper These are so pretty. Oh, my gosh. Okay, so the pink is cool. All right, so now I want to go yellow with white, so I may even have to put some more white down. It's not about even keeping the white clean. It's just more about mixing and let's get some of this paint off this paint brush. This is why you might just put blops of color over here and it's just about seeing what color did we get rather than turning it into a full on abstract painting. I just because you're not really going anywhere here. You're not starting with anything specific. So if you're finding it hard to get to a finished painting, that's not the point. The point is to have fun and mix and play and just see what can we come up with? Let's put that yellow up there. A little more white. Bit lighter. I'm not fully mixing my colors either. It's loose, but that's just fine. It's not a big deal. This one here. That's pretty. Then I'm going to go back to my red with some black, my yellow with some black, my mix with some black. We're trying to get into increments. I'm going a little bit not as incremental as you could. So no, don't worry about perfection here. Wow. This is so pretty. Let's go ahead and start in with maybe some of this mixed with black. We can mix in with some of our colors and you'll notice too, that you'll get some of the really prettiest grays. This is the two mixed together. If you don't remember how you got your stuff, it's not about 10% of white with 90% of pink. It's not about trying to get perfect and figuring out what was that exact mix for me? You can do that if you want. You can make notes that says this mix was 10% or whatever versus Oh, look at that pretty gray. Um, you can make notations if you want. My goal is to not be that stressful with my color mixing. I just know that I started here and I made these colors. I could get there again if I needed to. Kind of wonder if we can move this around with, like, an old card just to get some mark making and just some fun. There's some with more pink in it. You know, black is a very dominant color, so you're gonna get wherever it is that you're going really fast with the black. And, you know, I don't want it to all just be black. Oh, look at that. That's like a a mustardykind of black, mustardy black. Oh, that's like a pretty kind of mustardy black brown. Yeah, that's a good one. Oh, look at that. Let's put some of this over here. We could take some of this and do some mark making. Oh, that's fun. Fun. Okay. Then I've also got pink yellow, mix that and maybe a tiny bit of black and we can throw in with some of these mixes, some white so that we get back into lighter colors. Let's throw this over here with white. Oh, look at that. We're end up pretty gray. Let's do some more of that and we'll get a little lighter. So I mean, you could end up with, you know, way more colors than I've done or way less colors. It's just dependent on how incremental you want to go. Let's mix this with this yellow over here. Maybe a little more white with that. Maybe a little more white. Oh, look at that. Okay. Dudes, that was a lot of yumminess we had going on there. Okay. So now I got a lot of paint here on my brush. Let's get rid of some of this paint on the brush. And then I might pick up some of these other colors which are going to turn dark. Okay? They're gonna turn dark 'cause there's so much paint on my brush. I'm gonna pull some of this paint out. It's not as much left, so I'm not wasting any paint there. It was the very last of that. And let's go over here. And then what I might do cause I'm feeling it is maybe some stencil on top of that. That could be fun. Okay. So really, before I forget, too, let's go ahead and heat our tape and get that off before we tear our paper. Oh, yeah. Now, we got a tiny bit of residue, so good, so we can do our little trick there. Perfect. Secrets do not go very fast, heat up that tape really good. I'm just using the heated craft tool. It's a heat tool. It puts out more heat. It's not a hair dryer, which puts out more air. I just have a little they make lots of different ones of those, so you just look up heat tool. Somehow I managed to touch where I didn't mean to right there, but not even worried about it. If you make a little mistake or you move something where you didn't intend, don't stress about it. It's not a big deal. I want to maybe do some stencil work, so I might dry this off. My favorite places to get stencils are Stencil Girl and joggles. So I just need to go on their site and just see what fun stencils and stuff that they've got. I really like this little stencil here, which I may or may not be able to see a number on. So go on to their site, stencilgirl.com or joggles.com. And just see what they got. I've got an ink blending brush that I use with my stencil work, and I'm just going to come through with some of this stuff I've already got out on my color palette. You can mix some more if you run out and you're like, oh, I love what I'm doing over here. I love what I'm doing over here. That was a good one. I like that. It's a little misshapen squares, but definitely look on their site because not all of these, I can't see any of the numbers anymore, and some of these are too small to even see what that was. So definitely play in whatever stash of stencils that you've got. I really love this one. This one is a stencil girl. Steg Miller, STEGLLRS 321. I'm feeling right over here with this red color. Maybe some of this fun little wave. That's fun. Not quite what I was thinking, but it is fun. I need some more of this color. Let's just put some more of that. A yummy color out. I'm not going to do any more of that. It's fun, but it wasn't quite what I was thinking. Now I'm just looking at, look at this one. This one's fun. It is a 355 Wolf WOLF. And when I do stenciling, I don't do the whole square. I just do parts and pieces of it in my work so that it's not too perfect, too exact, and I just move it around. And then I'm like, I love that. Not starting off with any particular idea. We're just going for it. Whatever we're going, we're just going. Oh, this thing's fun. Look, this thing, I like words. This one says write your own story. This one I think is a where's the number? It's Seth apter. Let's see if I can even see what that says. Stencil Club 11 of 2015. The stencil club stencils, you have to be a member of their Stencil club. Let's do this then like I don't know, something. Let's just let's just mix around and see what we can get here. So yeah, the stencil club, you got to be a member of their club to get the stencil club stencils, and it's got its own page. So these would have been ones that I got part of that stencil club. But I like having a little bit of a graffiti look in some of mine. So I like word stencils. So even if you don't have, you know, something like this, you could have some other words sencilar letters, stencilar number, stencil. Anything that looks kind of graffiti ish, I love. Okay, this may be almost there for me. I kind of loving it. Maybe we could do some oh, maybe we could do some just thinking as I'm going. This is this is how I always do it. I'm going to put my brushes in the water so that they are doing their thing until I get to them to dry them. But maybe we need some posca pen. I'm looking to pull in some colors that are already over here, so I'm staying within my color palette, even if I'm not still using, for instance, the exact colors that I mixed and maybe some extra mark making. At this point, we're done. We've done what we set to do. We've put our colors out over here to see what it looks like as a piece that we've created. And we're done. But you might go the extra step and have it be a finished piece over here to whatever that you happen to like, which is what I'm doing because now it's a book of finished pieces and color palettes, which to me, makes it so inspiring and delightful. Brings me joy every time I open this book. I just love it. Like, it's the best art idea I've ever had. When that came to me, I got it in the mail and I was like, Oh my gosh, I have a vision for this book. It has been the best. Now you'll see a whole lot of people out there doing this idea, but I did it first. On this book. Okay, that's pretty cool. I'm loving exactly where we landed with that. How do you think that turned out? Zorn modified Zorn palette and abstract in our ledger book. So you don't have to have a ledger book to do any of this. We'll do some projects on some other pieces of paper. But I did think it was pretty cool to paint and just see where we ended up. We spent 20 minutes, 25 minutes painting this, and then we had a super cool spread. If you like to do collage work, this book is great for collage. You could collage things down. And then paint things on both pages. So many ideas and directions you can go with. One last. One last thing I forgot. We did have a little tiny bit of tape residue over here. So in that case, you just run right up and down that area with your eraser. And you can do this later too. It doesn't have to be immediately, but anywhere that you feel any tape residue, if you've used a tape or a washi tape or whatever that's left some because you heated it up, um oh, you just come back and just erase that residue. It's amazing. So I meant to mention that real quick, 'cause I did have a tiny bit of it, which I used that tape on purpose just so that we could get rid of that. Alright, there we go. So there we go. See you back in class. 7. Acrylic Palette in a Watercolor Journal: This project, we're going to work in one of my handmade journals. This is one of the Bar spine beauty journals that we make in the journal class. I call it Bar spine beauty because it's basically watercolor paper folded in half to make some different signatures. If you look on the edge, you can see the edge of all the signatures. This is super easy to make. It's just a your bookboard which could also be the back of your pads of paper. You could just cut that in half. One pad of paper, and this happens to be the Hnomule paper that's in this book, which is why I thought that would be fun to work on this. You could work in a book like this with the Hnomule paper or whatever your paper is, or you can work on just sheets of paper. It would work out the same. Um, way. But one pad of paper makes one of these books, and then when you're done, you have a gorgeous book instead of just plain sheets of paper. So I'm going to work in one of these. I haven't gotten these out yet. I'm not going to do the front page because maybe we'll come back later and do some fun painting on there to get it started. But for this, I'm going to work on it's just a spread. Color palette on one side, painting on the other side. And to keep it kind of from going on to all the other pages, I could just flip a piece of deli paper in here. And so that I'm not all over the place, I'm gonna go ahead and just cut it down and I can keep on using this piece of paper. In this book, I can just move it back as I'm going. That'll hopefully keep me from painting on the pages below as I'm doing the abstract piece on this side. So there we go. I thought we would do blue and orange. So I'm using green blue deep and orange deep in my black mat paints. Just getting the build up off the cap there. So I'll start with some blue. And then I got some orange. I'm going to put some white over here, and I'll put some black down here. There we go. We are ready. Let's tape this off on this side. I've got my little bit of painter's tape, and I'm just going to do the same thing that I did in that big journal. That is to tape myself off some areas. I can adjust it before I stick them down for good, but I do like to have my colors in columns, so I've discovered through painting most of that ledger journal, which again, you'll find I put in the supply PDF, the big playlist of all those ones that I've already done, so you can have plenty of fun videos to watch and get inspired by. Go check those out in your supply PDF. And then this is the honeymule paper, so I have extremely good luck with it not tearing my tape. No tearing my paper as I peel my tape, so I'm gonna go ahead and just get that on there pretty easy. And then I'll leave the top for my original colors, and then I might take a pen after the fact and write what those colors were up there because I'm not going to remember that later. Using one particular set of colors though, like all your Daniel Smith or your golden paints or whatever it is that you decide to do yours because I want you to use whatever you have. This is about figuring out your supplies, how they work, what the mixes you can get with it, and then having yourself a reference library when you're done of everything you can do with those paints that you might not have known you could do with them later. So I've got my water right up top there. White really not using the water, but it is up here, and then we'll start off with our colors here. I might start the blue with just a little bit of white. I'm just doing the same thing. I am working on watercolor paper rather than mixed media paper because I like watercolor paper. Almost everything that I do, I do it on watercolor paper. I'm not interested in having 15 different kinds of papers that I work on. I like watercolor paper. So working in this journal is perfect for me. This is also perfect. If you're doing watercolors tests like this. If you're in a watercolor journal, then you're already working on paper that would be appropriate for that medium. This would have been a good time to switch mediums, but it's all about just play and experiment. Don't get hung up on your pieces. I had a lot of white in this. Let's go ahead and dump some of this over here on this page because there's too much paint in my brush to keep going. And that's a really unusual gray color that we just ended up with. And we end up with neutral colors when we're starting with opposites. Blue and orange are opposites on the color wheel. So they are going to cancel each other out basically and usually give you a gray or brown or some type of muddy color. So that's what we just got. We got mud because I had blue and orange with the color in the middle, when you're mixing the two colors together, another color range that we could get out of that is that color with more orange and that color with more blue. You can definitely get more colors out of these by just going a little more one way and a little more the other way rather than going straight into the white or the black, which gives you mostly dark shades of gray and black. I didn't do that as much on the other one where I went skewed more blue or skewed more orange in that middle mix, and I should have because it's different. You get different shades of whatever you were going for depending on how much of one color or the other you mix in there. And then mixed all that with white. I'm not going perfection, but you could go for straighter rose instead of fatter. I'm not worried about it. I'm just playing, enjoying where this takes me. And then cleaning the brush off when it's got too much paint on it rather than wasting that paint. Put that paint down on that paper. Okay. Let's go over here to the orange with the white orange and white. Then you'll see too, I have more colors, but my rows are shorter, do I have more colors? Because really on the other book, the rows are bigger before I get to the Blacks. Okay. So let's go ahead and I'll start mixing in some blacks now. So I want the blue and a black. So let me get some black out and pick up this blue over here and see where that takes us. And then a little more black. Again, I don't want you to get hung up on mixing and getting stressed about it. It's just think in your mind, I got that, a little more black, a little more this, a little more of that. Let's go for the orange over here. Let's mix some of this onto our paper. Look at that. That's a pretty brown that we've got in there. I think it's a little bit because I've mixed with the orange and got that. But that's pretty. Look at that. Let's mix the orange with a little bit of black. Then let's throw some white into these mixes. I've got the blue and the black and the white. And then over here, I've got the orange and the black and the white. I basically have three rows of color. Look at that. That's so pretty. Oh, my gosh. So now let's come over here and play on our abstract over here. We've got all these yummy colors to fill in. I do use my brush personally way back, basically fisting it. It's my own personal preference. I like holding it like I'm a 3-year-old with very little control, which is why I hold it way back to the back. If you want more control, then hold it more like a pencil, but that's going to be very, very controlled. My goal with abstract painting is not to be so controlled. I want it to be whatever. Now I'm just mark making. We could do mark making with some other tools and stuff. This is one of my clay tools. It looks like a needle. But we could come over here and kind of drag through our paint and see what we have in the different layers. I like doing that a lot. And then we could continue doing some mark making. You can do some stencil work on top of this. Let's go ahead and dry this a little bit. I'm going to put that paint in some water. Then I might get out some of my stencil girl stencils again because I enjoy them s376 Shaw. I like this one because of the constant little marks. You can do that with a paint brush too. You don't have to do it with a stencil. I'm just doing stuff that I enjoy and just bringing you along, giving you ideas, just kind of showing you some things that you could maybe do and consider. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that was a good one. Oh, my gosh. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Perfect. Okay, that's a good one. It's one of my favorite. That's 376 by Shaw, Stencil girl. Oh, I I like these ones that look like little two sided rainbows. I kind of feel like I need a few of these with the bluish color, and I don't want to go directly with the ink blending brush that I just had because if I put blue right on that orange, I will have brown or mud or something that's not this color. Okay, let's go this way. That was it. That was it. I love that one. That's a good one. S943 dub DUBE then can look at it and think, is there anything else I'd like to do? I'd like to come back with some white something with some white maybe maybe these lovely squares. I like these. These are S five oh one Wolf WOLF. And we're going to go with some white. Oh, yeah, look at that. Perfect. That's so much fun. Okay, that's a good one. All right, I'm gonna throw these stencil brushes in the water until I can go rinse them off like a paintbrush. I just clean those like paintbrush. And all these supplies are on my favorites page. So check out my favorites. I've got that in your supply PDF. I'm going to go ahead and peel this tape. I don't know if I'm done yet, but I'm giving this a moment to dry. And because I'm using some good quality watercolor paper, I should be able to get this off without the tape tear and the paper. But just as a precaution, you could take your heat tool, craft heat tool, and heat that tape up a little bit, and that'll make sure if you're using a wood pulp paper, it'll definitely tear. So definitely heat the tape up before you peel it. This is a cotton paper, and sometimes it tears and sometimes it doesn't depends on paper got wet or whatever while you were painting. Pretty, pretty. Okay, so then I can look at this and think, is there anything else that that needs? Do I want to come back with any additional mark making? I could come back with some pencil. Just kind of mark making in there. It's still wet paint. Just as, you know, any final marks or however you might want to finish your piece. These don't have to be finished pieces. I think it's just fun. Do that? Look at that. Oh, my gosh, super cool. That's super fun to do this on watercolor paper in or whatever mixed media paper that you want to use in a book that you made yourself. So definitely consider making yourself a fun book and then doing these as the pages because then I would flip it right over. I do the next color palette here and the next piece of art there, and then the next color palette and the next piece of art. The whole book would be this lovely reference library. Again, the main goal is to see what colors you mix, white, black, red, orange and blue, seeing all the different kind of colors you can get out of that. And then just getting that color down so you can see what those look like together, how they're going to really work together. 'Cause blue and orange, they pop off each other, so you get some really cool color combinations and contrast with that color palette. So this was a fun one. I hope you enjoyed hanging out with me for that, and I'll see you guys back in class. Mm hmm. 8. Gouache Palette in a Watercolor Journal: Project, I thought we would do a quash for our collar palette and I'm just taping off a grid. I'm working in that same fair spin and beauty sketchbook that I made. This has got the Heine Mule paper in it. I thought I'd go ahead because I'm working in a guash, which I use squash just like I use watercolor. It's very similar to watercolor. It uses the same binders usually as the paints do, but the pigment sizes are different. I like guash. It's just different. I like it. I thought what we would do is try this project with the guash. And just see what fun we can come up with. I could go ahead and just protect that page there. It's another piece of watercolor paper. I've got the deli paper somewhere. We'll just play the same experiment with the white got some white guash and just see how it works. A lot of times with watercolor and guash, I'm doing a color palette and a lot of times I'm mixing like one color in that palette with all the colors and a hero color or mother color and getting a cohesive color palette in that way. But this one, I'm going to try the same experiment as we were doing. But you could definitely do a color palette, mix one in and see what that gives you because that gives you a cohesive set of colors that are going to match even if they don't seem to match to begin with. But I want to do a two color black and white just as a similar challenge as we did with the acrylics. I've got white black in the Holbein guash. I'm using G six oh six and g659. I've also got raw umber G six oh two and Rose violet g588. I just looked at the colors and thought, what inspires me today and just picked some. There was no rhyme or reason as to why I did a specific color over another one. I think for this, I'm going to use watercolor brushes and I could use a square brush or I could use just a regular round brush. Looking here at my options. So we can then do this or with the round brush, I could just do this. I might just do the round brush. There's no right or wrong way to do these. But I'm looking at my options here. I got a lot of mop brushes because that seems to be what I like to use. I don't want that to be super short. Let's just use this round brush and go for it. So what I'm gonna do is I've got water. I've got the quash. Maybe I'll pick up the water I just put on my table. And I'm going to put just up top the colors that we're starting with. And again, just pick two colors. It doesn't even matter what they are. The goal here is to experiment with all your paints and see what all the different color palettes can do, and you might end up finding some surprises and things that you really didn't expect. I do that a lot. Like, Wow, I didn't even see that coming kind of thing. And I'm going to go ahead and put the white up there even though you can't really see it. I've gotten extra water just in case my waters get too dirty. Um, so I'm going to do the same experiment that I was doing. I picked one of these pallets with a lot of extra wells so that I could then come over here with, say, a lot of yellow and maybe pick up a tiny bit. Well, just mixing that up, aren't we? Um, and that's real thick too, so I could add more water and we could actually have different opacities in our color charts that could be fun. It's squash though, it is thicker than watercolor. It's not meant to be exactly the same. It's usually opaque, which I love. Let's pick up some more of this yummy pink and mix that in. Again, I'm not trying to be real exact here. I'm just adding a little extra to it just to give me a color shift so I can be like, here's what it is with a little more of this or a little more of that. I do like the sides to be straight. That's why I tape it down. That's a half inch painter's tape. I don't mind if the heights vary. I just like the uniformity of doing it with the sides. We're just getting further and further towards the pink here. Almost to the point where it's just going to be the pink. So we could go like that and then start adding yellow to the pink and just see does that make any difference to what we were already getting if I add a little bit more yellow and go back the other way with pink being the dominant color, basically. Does that look different than when yellow was the dominant color? It might not look different. It might look like we just reversed them. But this is how we figure some of those out. This is our discovery. And because I've already got that going, I might also I'm going to start adding white here in a minute. Thinking out loud, sorry. Yeah, let's start adding in some of this white. Kind of the white with the pink and see what that gets us. Look how pretty that is. Oh, my gosh. Oh, that's a pretty pink. We'll put a little more white in there. And then we could pick mostly white with just a tiny bit of pink and get real white there. Then I want to see what that looks like, of course, with the yellow so I might pull some white out. We're going to have a little bit of color contamination, but I don't even care. Does not bother me. M. And then I'll just keep adding a little more yellow in here and seeing what shades of ochre are we going to get basically. That's a pretty color. I mean, it's not even ochre we're using. We're using raw umber, but it's a very ochre color. Huh. Ooh, that was a lot of paint on the brush that I didn't get mixed in. Because raw umber is more yellow than burnt umber. Burnt dumber is more brown. Now I'm going to start adding in some black and see what the black does with some of these colors. Again, you can be super exact if you want or you can be mismatched just to it's about exploring for me. It's not about getting it perfect or exact or getting an exact ratio because let me tell you it's stressful when you get into the oh it's got to be this exact ratio or or you're not doing it right. I'm going to play and mix stuff and just see what I can get. That to me is more fun. Look at that color. That's a beautiful deep brown. I like that one a lot? I love this color. We got some good ones out of there. Let's add the black to the pink. I'm adding it to some of the solid color, but we can also add it into some of the mixed color. The black was very dominant there. See if we pick up some of this mixed color, we can get up some grays. That's the two and the white. I'm sorry, that's with the pink and the white. We can get some pretty grays in here if we're doing some of this. Want to pick up a little tiny bit of black, but more pink. Oh, Yeah, look at that. Then we start getting shades of these pretty colors instead of solids of those. I love that. Oh, my goodness, yes. Let's do a tiny bit more. That's too much. It's what makes this great big pilot here, fun, too. I got enough wells to play in. Then let's see. Let's do one tiny bit more, maybe with some yellow here. Oh and a little bit of white. There we go. Let's get that right there. Oh, there we go, like a pretty gray. Excellent. Okay. Now, because this is watercolor paper and that's watercolor or that squash, which is very similar to watercolor, I'm going to let it do its thing there before I peel the tape. I'm going to pick up a bigger brush because let's just go ahead and put something over here with all the randomness that we've got going. Doesn't have to be anything exact, but I think I'm going to use maybe this great big Oval wash, which is the bigger size of what I normally use in my smaller pieces. I just think having that great big brush would be convenient. I'm just going to start picking up some of these colors and laying some color down. Look how pretty that is. Oh, my gosh. Alright. That right there is already been like, oh, I love it. Okay, that's a fun choice. I'm just going to pick out of here and pick and choose and I've got dirty water, but I'm not even worried about it. Then again, when I go to layer on top of this because I like the mixed media aspect of a lot of things that I do. When I go to layer on top of this, I'm just going to shoot for, say, if I do stencils, I'm going to shoot for colors that are in my palette, even if I didn't mix it, for instance, just to be consistent if I want to finish, it's really still all about playing and experimenting though and learning the colors and seeing what do I get out of here with this set of colors that I've mixed and how do they mix together and what do they do? I'm not trying to create some beautiful finished piece of art either, even though I do enjoy when these are finished. And they look like lovely abstract art. But it's okay if they don't can just be color blotches. I mean, at this point, just adding the mixed colors over on this page could be done. You could be done right there. The goal is to see what this palette would look like if you used it in a piece of art, but it doesn't have to be a finished piece of art. It could just be lovely color splotching like this. This is pretty. And then just seeing too, how does that paint interact with other colors and stuff on the page? Okay, I kind of want to stick this back down. Let's put that right there. Okay. So I could let this dry and come back in and stencil through with some I could even use the guash for the stenciling. Got paint stuck in that brush. I need some clean water. I'm gonna let this dry a bit. Let's do that. Let's dry it. Okay, not completely dry. We're getting close. I'm gonna pull out some stencil girl stencils. So I do link my favorite resources and stuff on my favorites page. Definitely check out your projects and resources PDF for links and stuff to some of these favorites, but I love this grid here, which is S five oh one Wolf WOO LF I'm going to just use the Guash as my stencil paint instead of getting out acrylics because we've already got some really fun colors that I like right here, and the brush is dry, so I'm just going to get some paint in the brush and just see. What does it look like if I use it? It's all about maybe some extra experimenting. I don't really know. What? Look how good that looks. All right. Guash is a great stencil medium for the wind. That's almost like using an ink because it's an ink blending brush to get the texture on there exactly like I liked. Oh, my gosh, that was a good choice. Squash for the wind. Let's use this other one. I love this one too. This is s376 by shaw. Want to maybe pick up. I don't know. We'll just pick up something. I don't know what we're getting here. We're just going to pick up a bunch like we're mixing right in the brush. It's all about play, experiment, see what you oh, that's perfect. It's just so light and I like the layers. The layers are what make this so good for me. That was fun. Do we have anything that might, these are fun. Let's use this. Preferably maybe with some yellow. Let's pick up some of this yellow. I'm just digging that into the brush to make sure I don't have a big lop of paint. I was a little thicker, but I'm liking it. Let's see what that did. Oh, yeah. That's perfect. Okay. Yes. So the guash. Good for stenciling. Or at least the whole bind one. That's the one I'm testing. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Mm. Okay, so that's a good one. This 1s574 Shaw SHAW. So again, all at stencil Girl. Art, do I feel like I'm there? I mean, we could come back in with maybe even, like, just to finish it off, maybe some white dots with a posca pen. Again, I'm still staying within my color palette. But what I think is fun is even though you could just do blops over here to get an idea, it is fun when the whole book looks like palettes in abstract art or palettes in whatever art you love doing. That little tiny bit of extra effort is what makes looking through these pilots and pilot pages. I really gives you a sense of accomplishment and a lot of joy. At least I get a lot of joy out of it. If you're going to do it, you don't have to be exactly about it because we're doing a page and under you know, 30 or 45 minutes. But when it's done, you can look back. I didn't think, Oh, my gosh, look how good that looks, and it's a good reference guide. These are my favorite. I just love doing these pages. This is the only art that I made for the rest of my art career, I'd be happy with that. I like playing with color, texture, experimenting. Okay, I like that. That looks good. Good job. Think I'm there for today on this particular palette page. You don't have to be all invested in a whole day of art making. We can simply be in to something fun. Let me dry this real quick. I think I got this palette off of Amazon. I do go through the little Amazon storefront that I link at the top of my favorites page. I link all the supplies that I get on Amazon. I usually tag in that store front so you could be able to go back and find it or something like it or even just ceramic plates. I like ceramic because you can go wash these off pretty easy or you can keep using these paints and that could be your color palette for a while. Because these rewet really nicely, just like watercolor. These are not 100% dry, but they're mostly dry. Let's just peel the tape and see what we got. And you could come back in, too, and draw like an ink grid around these if you wanted to kind of ish it up, make it look a little more Wow. You could come back in and wow that up with some separating. You could do black. You could do gold. You could draw a line across here and kind of frame them all in if you wanted. I'm not going to do that, but I do like the thought of that, and there we go. What do you think about doing the lovely color palette with gouache instead of acrylic paint. I just wanted to give you an idea of how that might work. Hope you enjoyed hanging out and painting this one with me and I'll see you back in class. 9. Watercolor Palette in a Vintage Book: This project, I'm going to do a watercolor palette in an old book so that we can see how to do that. This is an old hymnal that I have used for a couple of years for a couple of different projects. The first project I started was put the piece of art here and put the color palette that I use. If I ever wanted to come back to that color palette, I could. I did a whole bunch of those. When you have a book that's old and delicate, it really helps if you will staple a few of the pages together so that it's a little bit stronger. Like you'll see, I've just taken a regular staple and just stapled some of these together. I didn't even glue it, but they do great, just stapled. I could have done both sides, but I was just kind in here playing a couple years ago with a modified version of a color palette, so I remember what did I use in these particular pieces? I didn't have color cubes at this time or work with the color palettes like I do now. It was a really nice way to have a reference library for pieces that maybe you loved or maybe you didn't love and then you thought, Okay, I didn't love this, definitely don't go back with this brown or whatever. It's just a good way to keep a little diary of pieces and what you've done. Then I used it also for an interesting color palette. With a guash. You can see how pretty that is with the vibrant gouache. And what I like about this is you can kind of see through the paints and you can see, just things peeking through there. I thought that I would take this particular one, which is a couple of pages, again, stapled together. I think it's only two stapled together. Yeah. And so I might staple a couple of these together when I'm done, but I'm going to go ahead and just prep it for now. So I'm prepping it for watercolor, so I am using our watercolor prep. The Daniel Smith. What, watercolor ground. You can try with gesso, but I don't know if it would work as well with the gesso as it does with the watercolor ground. I don't know if they've got something different in those mediums, but since I've got the proper ground for the medium that I'm going to be working in, I'm just going to go ahead and prep these two pages. With the ground. It just needs just a nice thin layer and then set this to the side and let that dry and that will protect the vintage paper from any medium that I'm putting on top of it, like the watercolor and also allow the watercolor to do what it's really supposed to do rather than just sink into the paper and do something wonky. Now that we have prepped that, we're going to set that to the side and let it dry and then we'll come back and do a palette with some Daniel Smith watercolors. What color palette are we thinking that we might want to do? I I got to decide on the color palette. We've already done an orange and blue. Of course, I'm setting that right on top of that wet paper. We've done a second modified Zorn Palette and then we did that's the palette in this one and you can see how interesting the differences are. In a similar color palette, you've got some differences and you've got some similarities and it's fun to compare those. We could look at some of the color palettes that I've already done and I could revisit something like that. Let's just see we've got blue green, we've got the red ochre, we've got the yellow, orange and the blue. We've got a pink and a teal. Red and orange or red ish, purple and ochre. We've got a blue and orange. We've got a pink and purple, which I like that one. I like this blue and orange quite a bit. Purple and yellow. We've got a blue and a green. This one's got some oil pastels in it and I haven't gone out to spray it. And you can see, it's not sprayed. I will still come off on your fingers. In a book like this, I probably wouldn't do more oil pastels unless I were going to be more diligent about spraying them or you could put a piece of wax paper in there to protect it. We've got red and tell, which for some reason, I just love red and tell. That's a good one. We've got yellow, green and pink. I got blue and yellow. I do like this. It's really a rich palette, and I didn't really expect that, but it's a brown and orange. Maybe a brown and something would be fun. Purple orange, blue and aqua, Zorn Palette. I really like that palette. We've got brown and burgundy, another brown and reddish burgundy, yellow and pink, blue and yellow. Blue and green. So you see we've got some good choices. So we're going to let that's kind of two Zorn pallets in a row. I really like the Zorn Palette apparently. But look how pretty those turnout. There's a reason why that was a master's palette and became so popular. Alright, so we're going to let this finish drying. It's almost dry, but we're gonna let it finish, and then I'll be right back. Alright, I have let this dry for quite a while. So it really be good if you had plans to do this, like in the morning. Then the evening before, you could come through and paint your pages and be ready for the next day. Now, what I'm doing is I'm super curious is this delicate paper would hold up to me color mixing and swatching and taping off my grid. So I'm going to go ahead and tape that down and I'll be right back. I've decided to do a blue green palette. I pick some Daniel Smith colors, Sleeping Beauty and undersea green because I like these colors. I also don't have a black watercolor. Randomly because you don't usually use black as in watercolor a whole lot, people tend to avoid it. I have pulled out a Pains gray to be my black for today because the Daniel Smith Pains gray, it looks pretty dark. Then I've pulled out a random white watercolor from M Grant and company so that I had a white. Normally, I don't normally don't use white and black too much. What I'm going to do is just get it started right up top here so that we know what we're starting with. Then I'm going to do just like I did with the acrylic palettes. I am going to mix a little of this with a little of that and just see where we can get with these and color mixing. You can do circles and you can do your own version of color mixing. I think it's fun. See, that's really close to a black well. I just hit it with the white. I want it to actually be black. I'm going to take a tissue and wipe it off before it soaks in. How about that? I actually want it to not be mixed in with the white. There we go. Okay, so I'm going to do a little of this and a little of that. I like the columns. That's my own little thing there that I want to do. I'm going to start with the sleeping beauty with a little bit of white and we're just going to see where we can go with this color. I didn't need to wipe that out. I don't know why I did that. You can do circles, you can do however it is that you're thinking that you want to do. That's pretty fun there. I think I could have had even a darker shade out of that. Don't know why I keep sticking my brush and my water. Ignore that. There we go. I like that. Going to go ahead and mix blue and green, maybe I'll pull a little of this out and put a little blue over here and a little green over here. And just see. You can do a little more green and then a little more blue and let those go off in their own directions and just see how many shades can we get? It's not about perfection. It's about experimenting and seeing where these colors can go, a little bit more blue on this one, maybe a little more of that blue. Be now you're going to have a really good color reference of what will these colors do for me? A little more blue. Now I want a little bit of white in one of these. Look at that. The white, you can see makes them even more opaque, so they're not as transparent. That's a super interesting observation. If we weren't aware that that might do that, super interesting that we discovered that. Maybe a little more blue over here and this white and this green. Yeah. Then I'm going to mix some of these with our Pains gray, which is my version of black in this scenario. If you don't have a black, don't be afraid to substitute it for the darkest whatever that you happen to have. Now, some of this looks like it's bubbling up with the watercolor ground. That's interesting. There was the green and the blue with the pains gray. Maybe I'll mix a little bit of the green and blue over here. That was the green with the pains gray. Going to do a little mixture over here with the green, the blue, and the pins gray and you can see I'm not getting real exact. You are welcome to be way more exact than I am doing. But it's not about the pressure and stress of getting it perfect. That's pretty cool. I actually want to mix some of that with the white and just see what does that turn into? It turns into a grayish. I also needed to mix some of let's see. We did the blue and the green. I didn't do the blue and the pains gray. Maybe we'll do a little blue with some pains gray, and see what that does. Maybe a little more pains gray. Maybe a little bit of that mixed with white. The white definitely adds an opacity to it, which I think is very interesting. Okay, look at all these colors that we got out of that, and that was a very unscientific, playful way to go ahead and just play. I want you to get in the practice of mixing stuff without it being just too much thought and worry and stress. Now I'm going to paint something on this other side and I've got lots of choices. I'm just going to pick up some paint and see what it does. And I've used the watercolor ground quite a bit. It reacts a little differently on different papers. It's interesting to see what it does with the different papers. Because this one I'm really seeing a lot of the design coming up from underneath it, but that could be because I'm using a more transparent watercolor when you know mostly what I use is more opaque watercolors, a lot of times. So or vivid, ones that are really vivid. I'm doing a big oval abstract, which is one of my signature fun things that I like to do. For abstracts is gigantic oval things just because I like that shape and it makes for interesting abstracts when you're done, Okay, I like that a lot actually. Now I'm thinking that we could use some dark, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the dark of the watercolors that we've used. What we could come in with now is other mark making things to just give us a finished fun abstract. Or you could stop right there. That could be your abstract. Then now you've got what the colors will do and how many colors you can get. But I could also come back in on top of this with some things that match with that and make it a true finished piece. I'm going to dry this a little bit. Normally, I like it all to dry itself. But I'm gonna dry it a little bit. I'm gonna go ahead, too, and pull my tape, and I'm going to heat the tape so that I have less chance of damaging this paper, and this is our experiment to see. Can you gesso it with a ground or regular gesso and still get the tape to peel off or will it tear your old book? So I didn't get it taped down super good right there, bled up underneath it. But I didn't push it down real hard 'cause I was afraid. Okay, so yes, the tape will pull off book with the ground or the gesso. If I were doing acrylic paint, which is what I've done on all those other pages, then I would prep that paper with the clear gesso rather than the watercolor ground. The watercolor ground is just watercolor gesso. Clear gesso is good gesso for acrylic paint. If I were doing all this in acrylic, I would prep the pages with the clear gesso so that I can still see the page coming up underneath it. Now that we have that, thinking that we can mark make and just add in here some of these colors as some extra mark making. Yes. Just some fun. Just something that gives us some extra interest and then gives you an idea too in this color palette. What else could I add to that that's not necessarily just the paint that I'm using? Good choice. I do graphite pencil a lot of times personally. I might put some graphite marks in here. I like dots, so I might come up with some white dots or some colored dots or something like that. I think the paint is still drying, but we're going to go ahead and just see what we can do in here. I could do some stenciling on top. You know what? That might be fun just to get one or two stencils and use the watercolor as our stencil medium. Because it's all about experimenting. If you think of something and you think, I wonder if I can do that, then I want you to give that a try. Let's pull out some stencils that I've already used, but I like them for something like this. This is stencil Girls stencils. I've got s376 Shaw, which I love this 1s574 Shaw which looks like water ringlets. I'm going to get ink blending brush, and we're just going to pick up some watercolor, dry brush and not super wet watercolor, let's just see what it does. Let's see if we get some marks. Okay, we do. Look at that. I love it when I just come off the cuff and I'm like, let's try this because some of this stuff, it's all about being a little kid and playing and experimenting and just trying it out and just seeing where you get. There's no right or wrong way to do some of this stuff. I want to mix a little bit of say, white in this blue. Can I pick up enough of that blue? Because I want it to be opaque, but that color or any color over there will be fine, actually. But the white is going to give me some opacity. And then what if I picked that up with the blending brush. I might not get anything. Let's see. Kind of need some more of that white. There we go. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yes. A pick up, pick up a bunch of white. Oh, look at that. Oh, my gosh. Total winter. Alright. So don't be afraid. To pick up some watercolor and do that as a stencil if you're wanting to stay in the same medium. Look at that. Oh my gosh. That was a total win. Now, let me tell you on your stencils, the problem with some of this that I've done, watercolor and gouache are mediums that will reactivate. If I go to use this on my next project and I've got this medium on here that reactivates with water, that color will bleed into the new piece that I'm doing. In the very rare occasions that I'm not using acrylic paint because acrylic paint, I just let those dry on my stencils. I don't even care because the paint is so thin and I can use these for a long time before I'm like, maybe I've done too much, but I don't even worry about it. You can throw these into a little tub of water while you're working if you're wanting to keep them clean until you can wash them off if you're using acrylic paint. But if you're using watercolor and guash, this will reactivate. I could go wash that stuff off and it would reactivate and come right off, but it will also reactivate and come right off on the next piece of art that I do. Weirdly enough, I don't mind that and so I'm going to probably leave it on there and you're going to see it show up in a future video and it's going to bleed onto something that we may or may not like. But I thought I would mention that depending on the material that we're using, you could have that color bleed off into the next piece. This is super cool. This is for today, just fine. It was all about experimenting and seeing what these colors would do in our piece with the color palette that we picked, I would take a little black pen probably and write the colors on top of those of what I used. But there we go. So if you can't get, say, a lecture journal and you want to use something more interesting than say a watercolor paper, go and find a very interesting old book at the Thrift store or the antique market. I wouldn't spend more than $10 on it, personally. I think this might have been $10 when I got it. And then look at all these pages that we still have that we can fill up. Even though I staple two or three pages together when I do stuff, there's a ton that you can do in these books. So if you go every other page and staple them, look how gorgeous that is. Oh, my gosh. All I hope you had fun experimenting with watercolor in a vintage book. I don't see you back in class. 10. Evaluating Our Projects: All right. Let's take a look at some of the things that we did in class. I started with the Dena Wakeley Media ledger Journal, which is a replica of a vintage journal that Dana Wakeley found. And it's really nice for mixed media. It's not a watercolor paper, so I don't like it as well for watercolor, but I did do watercolor experiments in it, just to show you that again. If you didn't see that in the earlier video. This is watercolor on the straight paper. This is watercolor using watercolor ground underneath the paint. So it's definitely doable with watercolor. I did like the way that it looked with the ground a little better if you're liking the watercolor look, the transparency of it. This looked a little more solid to me and did not move and swish around like a watercolor might normally do. So that was my experiments with watercolor in this book, just to show you. And so for the rest of the book, I actually liked doing the acrylic paint experiments, which is how I started being inspired by the Zorn palette and just playing and experimenting. And you don't have to have a piece of art over here. It's more about color mixing and experimenting and then throwing that color over here just to see what they do and how they interact. And I just think it's fun that I did do some mixed media pieces over here because now this book is super fun to flip through. So these, I have a playlist of all these other videos that you can check out if you want to watch more color swatching and abstract art making. So that is in your supply PDF. Download that off the Projects and Resources page. And so there's a whole bunch of videos that you can sink into in this journal. So this journal is about 33, $34 in that range. I thought it was super reasonable for what it is. It's a new book that if you have a problem using old books and tearing them up and painting on them and stuff, and some people do, then this is a nice alternative and the price is very reasonable. So, acrylic paint in that book. Now if you don't, if these are no longer being made, and at the time that I made the class, these are fairly new steel, so we've got a while. But after that, they're not going to be made anymore, then you can do your color palettes and experiments in watercolor journal. This is a handmade journal in my bare spine beauty class. It's one pad of paper to make one book. If you've got whatever your favorite paper to work in is, mine's a honomule paper. Takes one pad of paper to make this one book, which let me tell you. Ends up being fantastic because they then fill the pages and you're using the good paper, but you're using it in a way that is meaningful and you're going to get a lot of use out of, and then you're practicing on the good paper and you're making something that you're not afraid is going to be ruined or at least I'm not because I love these. We experimented with acrylic on the watercolor paper, which I do all my media on watercolor paper. It doesn't bother me a bit. Um, and then we did gouache on the watercolor paper, which turned out fantastic. And then, of course, you could do watercolor on the watercolor paper. This really is the perfect paper for tons of mediums. If you're using oil paint and you want to make something like this, you could use the arches oil paint paper and do the same thing. So, got you covered on any medium that you happen to like and want to do. Then check this out Vintage Book. So if you don't want to do any of the other options and you're like, Oh, I want a real vintage book. Go get a real vintage book or your own vintage ledger. Go to the antique store, go to the thrift store, look around. I like to keep my purchases under, say, $10, and then I'm not afraid to tear it up and use it. I don't it doesn't bother me a bit to paint and tear up stuff. I'm giving it a second life, a book that might have wound up in the trash can. Then look how amazing it is to flip through a real vintage book that you created amazing stuff in. So look around and the more interesting the book, the more creative the finished piece might be. This is a hymnal, so it's music and I love that. We did watercolor ground and watercolor in this book as a test to see, could we peel the tape? Did the watercolor ground do what it should? Even though some of the watercolor bubbled up on the ground as it was going, it dried. Amazing. Don't even worry if you're getting it bubbling a little bit on the ground. If you're going to use a a vintage book for acrylic paint or anything else, then I would use clear gesso on the pages instead of the watercolor ground, like I used. But whatever you got, I'm sure the watercolor ground will work just fine too. It's just for cost wise, gesso is probably cheaper than ground. Yeah. What a fantastic way. To make yourself a library of mixing without the pressure and stress that a lot of the color mixing things puts on us and several different ways to get creative in your books to create the most amazing reference library for yourself and to have just a beautiful piece of art when you're done. I hope you enjoyed creating some of these with me. I'm super excited to see what you create, definitely come back and share whichever route you went, share those in the project area. I can't wait to see them, and I'll see you guys back in class. 11. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me in this creative journey through color and abstraction. I hope this process of working with a limited palette has shown you how much depth, variety, and emotion can come from just a few colors and how freeing it can be to explore without overthinking. Remember, this is a practice you can return to again and again. Every new color combination tells a different story. So keep experimenting. Keep playing in your ledger, and let curiosity lead the way. I'd love to see what you create. Be sure to share your spreads and your color stories with the community.