Colorful Cactus in Acrylic Paint

1. Introduction: Hello, love. Welcome to colorful cactus in acrylics. In this class, we're gonna learn how to paint this pretty prickly pear cactus with a vibrant palette of colors. This is one of my favorite plants ever. They have beautiful shapes, wonderful fruit, and they're a little mysterious with their protective needles saying You can look but don't touch in. This class will cover the materials, making the composition and shapes of the cactus painting in the base colors and then more vibrant colors and then finally will add some lovely details to give the cactus texture and personality. So if you love kept, I like ideo I invite you to paint along. This class is a beginner slash intermediate class, so as long as you bring an open mind and a free spirit, you can keep this as simple or get as in depth as you like. Are you ready? Let's begin 2. Materials: Hello and welcome to the materials lesson of this cactus class. All of the materials that I talk about in this section are also in a materials list, which I've attached to this class. So please pull that up and you can print it out or make any notes with it. All of the materials convey substituted for similar materials by different brands or different, slightly different colors or different sizes. If you use a smaller size canvas, you might want to use smaller brush sizes. If you use a bigger canvas, you might want to use a larger brush sizes. It's all to scale. Okay, so let's see what I have today. I have an 11 by 14 canvas panel. This is different than a stretched canvas. It's a little bit thinner and nice for storage. I also have a glass palate. You can use any palate you want. There's of course, water to wash our brushes, and I have a lot of brushes. But in the materials list, I get a little bit more specific and I also name the brushes when I use them in the class. I have my paints here, which is in the materials list a swell with the specific colors, but these air acrylic paints and I have a rag for catching any drips on my brushes, and I also have I. I use a piece of chalk for doing a drawing over the dried acrylic, So gather your materials and I'll see you in the next lesson where we work on the background. 3. Background: Hello and welcome to the background lesson of the cactus class. So I have titanium white. I'm gonna put that out in the middle of my palate. And I also have teal, which is a gorgeous color. I love using teal and Payne's gray, which is really a nice navy blue. I have a one inch bright brush, but you can use a flat brush as well, if you like. And I'm gonna activate the brush by dipping it in the water and then wiping off any excess drips really well, and we're gonna work on a Grady int. So we're gonna change colors as we move down the canvas. So I'm just gonna bring over some white and a little bit of color Both the teal and the Paynes grey. I'm mixing all three together, and I am going to apply that to the canvas, using my brush really well. Teoh get all the coverage pushing, using a lot of pressure, and I added some white up above to make it lighter up at the very top. So I just added it to my brush because there was already color on my brush and mixed it up on the canvas, and I'm using really free loose brush strokes, and I kind of hang the brush over the edge to get along the side so I don't get too much pain on my table. If you don't have a painting table, you might want to put some newspaper down and notice that I'm switching up the direction of my brush. I like to do this because when you just go in one direction the direction that your arm bends, you're gonna end up with a really streaky background. There I added some teal, and it was a little too dark, so I added some white, and now I'm just blending it out. I worked fairly quickly while the paint is still wet, getting most edges, and now I'm just going to add a little bit of that. Payne's gray and a little bit more white. I added, like a lot of pains, great ones. It was a little dark, so you can see how much contrast there is. So I'm just gonna probably go back and well, I'm working on blending now, but a go back for some white and just at that straight onto the canvas, and then I can feathered out a little bit so that we get that nice transition from light to dark, which is what a great aunt is. All right, So bringing in some teal now I like to work with two different blues just because it gives a little bit more variation. But if you only have one blue that's totally cool. You could just use white and blue. Whatever bill you have, you can use ultra Marine blue or Fei lo blue. You can use anybody you want. And as I moved down, I just don't add as much white. They're still a little bit in there. It's not as dark as that. Payne's gray is alone. That's a really dark color, and I am just fanning it out, kind of feathering it out in this misty way and keeping my hand going in different directions and at the bottom. I just have to be kind of careful because I run out of places to hold the canvas. Still, there's my little finger spot where I was holding it. From now it's painted over and you can see the brushstrokes. I'm not going for perfect blending. I'm okay with seeing some of the brushstrokes. I like it to look like a person made it and not a robot. So now I'm just gonna go back over a bit and, uh, change up any where, where I think things are, I need to be fixed. And it's all about how much white you add. Really? Because that's your light. That's how you're going to get that tinted light look. So there you have it. That's my ingredient. And I'm ready for the next lesson. Now where we're going, Teoh work on the shape of the cactus and getting the composition down on the canvas. I'll see you there. 4. Shapes: hello and welcome to the cactus shapes lesson. So I am going to grab a piece of chalk. If you don't have chalk, that's fine. You can use a pencil, but you're going to see the chalk a little bit better. And I'm just kind of groove in and getting a sense of this canvas taking it in. And I'm starting the first pad of this prickly pear, and I do a couple passes there because I had a wobbly line. There's one pad behind it, but I realized it was taking up a little too much space. I don't want to crowd the canvas, so I'm just bringing this down by a small amount. And that's a great thing about Chuck, is that you can just wipe it off. Now you want to make sure campuses dry. Of course, I should have said that first. Got to make sure it's dry and you could make corrections really, really easily. Okay, so thirds of the 1st 2 pads of this cactus I'm going to do a little one down below. It's almost touching the one next to it, so I'm just re establishing that line so that there is a little gap, and they're kind of like balloon shapes. So here I'm coming down, and I decided to go off the canvas a little bit, So it looks like it's existing out of the plane of the canvas. Then I'll do another one up here up and around, and uh, then went off to that side and one going up and another going up so really easy balloon shapes there and they just connect right off the tops. Now I am doing the fruit, the prickly pear fruit, and they're the same shape that one's overlapped. But they're just smaller. So, um, just paying attention to the negative space. I don't want to, um, crowd anything too much. I wanna have, like, an even composition signs squeezing out some Quinn aquazone magenta. But if you have red and blue, you can mix those together to make kind of a red violet, and I'm gonna use a medium, small, bright brush. But if you only have a flat brush or around brash, you can use that as well. And I'm gonna load that brush, flip it over, loaded again, and I'm pulling paint off of the side of that area. Magenta on the palate. And then I'm going to paint lines over the chalk and I'm going right over the chalk. It will absorb into the paint, and it kind of just disappears as you paint over it. And it doesn't matter how thick or thin these lines are. But you want the outer line to be mawr smooth. That's going to be the line that shows up when we're done. The interior lying part of the line will be painted over so you can see I kind of broke that one up a little bit. That first cactus pad. There's a break in the line and that's okay. I'll just paint over it. But the outside needs to be fairly smooth, so you can always, um, take a money passes is you need to get a nice, smooth line. However, my lines, you can tell that a person painted them. I'm not going for perfection. I'm just going for a smooth as what feels right to me. Okay, so now I've just sped this up slightly because all I'm really doing is tracing these lines and I'm using it helps to use the narrow side of the brush. See, there I go over it again, uh, to to get a nice, smooth line. Um, and you can use the broadside of the brush to get a fatter line, and then there I'm just making sure those air overlapping to get the depth. And you wanna wash your brush when you're done, I just leave it in the water and let it let this painting dry completely. And then I'm gonna come back over with my rag. I'm gonna put it around my finger, dip it in the water, and then just wipe away any excess chalk that's left over and it comes off beautifully. And you just really want to make sure this pain is dry. You can imagine the mess you'd have if there was a small amount that was still wet. So up next, we're going to do the base color. We're gonna start to fill in the cactus, so I will see you there. 5. Base Colors: Hello and welcome back to the base color lesson. So I'm going to pour more white out on my palate because I used it all up in the background , and I'm also adding chromium oxide green to my palette. I'm grabbing a medium filbert brush, but you could also use a bright or a flat brush. The Filbert has a rounded end to it, and it's flat the other way. So this is gonna be a good brush for blending color. And I'm going to start by just going straight into that chromium oxide green. And I'm gonna fill that in at the bottom of each cactus pad, and I'm going to go up the sides a little bit and then around the bottom out. And then as the paint runs out on my brush, I just kind of feather it out with a dry brush technique, which is when there's not a lot of paint on your brush and it becomes transparent a little bit. All right. So I decided to give this cactus pad an edge because it seemed like it would taper in a little bit, so I'm gonna do the same thing here, even though they're overlapping. I'm just going Teoh, pretend I know where it comes out and then fan it up and let's do the same thing on all of these cactus pads. So just trace the bottom outline. You can leave a little bit of the magenta showing and then bring it up with a curves. Okay, next, I can correct any, um, places on the shape where there's weird brushstrokes or I didn't do the lines perfectly. I can just paint over that part with the green and make any corrections and getting all the way into any nooks and crevices and then curving up. And the curve is going to give thes cactuses contour and make us believe that they're more rounded and that they have form. So it's a contouring trick to do this little area. So this is our shadow color or one of them. We could use a lot of colors in this class. Now I'm taking that chromium oxide green and adding some white and some teal to it, and I want it to be lighter, so I'm really going for like a fresh, minty light grain that is kind of blew like a blue green and I'm going to go up over the line of the, uh, the edge of that chromium oxide green. And I'm going to just come up to about the halfway mark up this cactus bad. Maybe a little bit further on some of them. These don't all have to be the same. A lot of these cactus plants have many different colors, and each pad is a little bit different. So, um, feel free to change it up. You conduce different colors in different places, but because this is the base color, I'm just keeping them all fairly similar. Okay? And you can be really loose here. We're gonna paint over this layer. Um, it's really just about getting a transition of greens going into this magenta color at the top. So now I'm adding more chromium oxide green to that mixture. So it's kind of like 1/2 way mixture between the dark color and light color, and you'll see how when we paint it in the middle of the two colors that I just painted, it becomes really soft looking. So I'm taking out the harsh transition and making a softer transition here and very loose application. I'm, uh, you don't want your brush to be overloaded or under loaded, So don't be afraid to mix enough that it will stretch all the way. I know I noticed a lot of students mixing really tiny amounts of paint on their palates sometimes. And you really want enough paint, So don't be shy, okay? Just bringing this up to the top, keeping it loose. And now I'm adding white again because we're getting higher up and I'm adding some teal, and, uh, this is just going to give it a little change. I'm getting a lighter green here, and, um, it's gonna make it seem like there's more light hitting those areas up higher on the cactus . So just changing the grains up as I go up, Okay, so next I'm going to do something kind of strange, and I'm going to take a little bit of magenta, and I am going to apply it to the palate. There's green on my brush, the same green that I was just using, and I'm going to pick some more of it up. And what this is going to do is give me kind of a neutral mauve color. I don't want it to be too bright right now because it's, um it's what we get when we mix green and magenta together. So we're getting this transition happening. And so I do a strong line up at the top with more paint. And then, as I worked my way down there's less paint on my brush and it becomes a little bit transparent. And, um, you can see that it's just because becoming a little bit transparent as it goes over that green. So, um, just kind of bringing it down into the green. And because that green is in this mob color, they work side by side really well and then just bring it down the O do a clean line up top and then just kind of scribble it down. It doesn't have to be really even coverage as the green and the mob color meat. They can be really gestural and impressionistic at this point, and I started running out of paint, so I'm mixing more with the green and magenta and the white, and it's not the same exact mob. But it's close enough because this is just the bottom, coach. Okay, so just finishing off those areas of mobs. You can really have fun with brushstrokes here and the dry brush technique. Okay, so there we have the cactus pads filled in. I wanna wash my brush. Really? Well, dry it off. And now I'm going to go straight into the magenta and paint the fruit. I could have done this a lesson ago when I drew the men, but, you know, sometimes we just make decisions when we make them. And this is when I made this decision when we're filling in that line. So, uh, yeah, just filling him. And it's really simple. And we are done with this lesson, so make sure and wash your brush really well and let this dry up. Next. We're gonna work on some brighter colors, so we'll see you there. 6. Bright Colors: All right, Welcome back to the bright color lesson. I'm really excited about this lesson because, well, you just get to kind of let loose with a bunch of colors. We're gonna add a lot more color and make this very bright. This is a little bit longer of a lesson. So if you haven't taken a break yet, I recommend that you just kind of get up in stretch and grab some water. Uh, get a different perspective from your art piece. It always looks better when you step away and look at it from across the room. So, please, please, please do me a favor and look at it from across the room and just can't. And then, you know, look away for a little bit as well, and you're gonna feel better when you sit back down and you'll be recharged for this lesson . Okay, so I am going to ads cadmium, yellow, medium hue to my palette. And then I'm gonna bring over some green close by, pick up some yellow and then, uh, just yellow is a really weak color when it comes to mixing. So I use a lot of yellow, and then I um, bring in green slowly If I need Teoh. So I have this yellow green and I'm going to bring it in, uh, down below. I'm gonna let some of the shadow color show through and just kind of Dapple that in a bit. This is called scum bowling. It's like stumbling, but with a S c. So I'm stumbling this in, which is when you kind of just scribble it in. But you're letting the bottom layer show through a bit, and yellow and magenta are going to make each other pop quite a bit because they're opposites on the color wheel. So now I'm going to bring in some till which is really bright. I'm going to bring in some bright yellow and then mix those up and it's gonna give me just this really fun green color. So I'm getting it, Teoh, um, just a bright green and then bringing this in just kind of Dapple ing it in stumbling and and like I said, and these cactus pads are kind of spotted, they have texture. They have different variations in color. It's not just one smooth. Uh, marking on the coloration isn't just a perfect transition So it's OK to get really creative with your brush strokes. So I'm just keeping a light Hold on the brush. I'm painting from the very end of the brush. I'm not smashing all of the paint down onto the canvas because that's gonna just unload a ton of pain at once. The pressure that you use with the brush will determine how much paint comes out of it. So you wanna, um, experiment, But the pressure that you're using from the brush or with the brush? Okay, so there's that green down, and I will now make it even more yellow. So I have a really, really yellow green lots of yellow in there. And I'm gonna bring that in for some, like sunning highlights. And it can also perhaps be where part of this cactus has turned a little bit more yellow in its coloring. So it some of some of these cactuses really do have a lot of colors in there. But also it's just going to make this pop so much with that vibrant yellow green. Now I'm washing out my brush and I want to vigorously swish it out, wipe off the stray water drops and go into the magenta, and I'm gonna bring in some white now, so I've got a light magenta. It's like a fuchsia pink color, and I am going to bring that up on the top of each section of the cactus, and you can really be smoothed with that top line. You can cover a lot of the magenta in your line so that it's just like a thin outline. And it's not just an outline. The cactus actually does have a lot of magenta in it up top. So, um, I'm adding a lot more paint up at the top with this light magenta and then bringing it down , and I'm letting that mauve color show through so that we see that it's a layered paint application. Okay, so a line of pink up at the top and then lightly bringing it back down. As I need more pain, I'm pushing more paint out of the brush and let's do that up top as well. So this is really a dynamic color application. The this pink is just, ah, lot more of a vibrant color than the mob I used underneath it, and it's, uh, conveying the fact that more light is hitting the cactus up at the top as well, because I've added white to that. So when we add white to a color, it's called tenting. And the more white that's in the color of the more light the color will be. And that translates to more sunlight hitting the object. Now I'm adding magenta to that pink. So I've got 1/2 way, um, mix just like we did with Green. And the last lesson I'm bringing a, um, halfway point between the straight magenta and that pink that we used. And I'm just softening the top a little bit because in nature, this cactus does get a little bit darker at the edges, and that's just the natural coloration of the plant. But it also makes it seem smoother and like that, there's more of a transition there. So bringing that line across and then smoothing out that harsh edge to make it softer okay , a line at the top and then smoothing it out to make it softer here. I'm just kind of quickly getting it on there, and I kind of forgot the last one. So, um upsy Daisy e. I didn't do it with the last one. I overlooked it. So do what you want. Okay, now I'm taking magenta. There's a little bit of white. It was that pink that was already on my brush, and then I'm bringing in green and bringing in blue. I'm really bringing in everything. And I don't really know what I was thinking at this point. Well, ideo I was thinking that I would make a neutral because in the middle of these cactus pads here and bringing in more white, I almost have, like a gray happening at this point because I have so many colors in one mix and in the middle of the cactus it does get a little less bright because there so many colors. But when I painted it on, it started to look like this really nice pink like just neutral pink color, and I was just enjoying it, so I kept it. I just kept on using it and kind of in the streaky, brushy kind of way really lose. And you could take this or leave it if I mean I like this color because there's more white in it and it's giving the impression that there's more light hitting the cactus. It also conveys that there is a point where all of these pigments are mixing up in the middle, and that's cool. I mean, it's fine, but I end up working over this quite a bit. So I mean, if you don't do this color, it's like, not the end of the world. I was just kind of experimenting at this point, which is part of the whole process. You have to try things out. So if you want to try this out, feel free. Now I'm adding more white and a little bit more green, Um, and rolling my brush around in it, getting a nice coverage there, and I'm going to do one step up with a lighter center, and this is going to give more light to the middle of the cactus, just kind of a smaller area right in the center. And, um, now I'm gonna add till to it, because I just decided that I didn't like the direction that color was going into. And, um, you know, like now it's a little bit more blue. It's kind of just like all right, Um, it's fine, you know, But I wanted to show you this because I do paint over it a lot, and I wanted to show you that it was in there, but ultimately, I don't know that it was completely necessary. Now we're adding some red and I'm gonna grab my filbert brush. I believe getting it nicely washed out and I'm gonna pull some red. Red's a really vibrant color. It was a long way. So I am just adding it to the center of the fruit This is going to give them or opacity less transparent. Now, here I'm just making a distinct curve so I can see how those air overlapping and the magenta that I used before is representing that shadow underneath. So just finishing those off, it's just a really loose fill in there and then doing a Natasha touch ups. Great. Okay, so I had read in my brush. I brought in some white. There's a little bit of magenta here. I'm keeping this really warm and lighter, so I'm starting. Teoh, bring more of a pinkish highlight. Lots more white there, so really going for where the light is hitting the cactus and bring that up in around a little bit more light is really gonna be shining on the top. So that's where the light source is coming from. The sun is up in the sky. We can also see in the background that there's more light up top. So, um, I can just cruise along and put some loose brushstrokes in that curved area up top. Now I'm washing my brush out ready, and I'm going to grab some of that Payne's gray or whatever dark blue you're using, and I'm gonna pop it in along the edge at the bottom. And that was pretty harsh. So I'm actually going to make some of the green and with the pains grave, and I'm going to bring in a really deep shadow just really small. I'm not painting a whole lot of space here, but I want to give the illusion that this is a shadow and it's gonna make thes pop and give them more form. Anytime you add light and shadow, it's gonna give your object more form because the light appears to be hitting the contour of that shape, and I'm going to use the same color for shadow up on the fruits or just a rounded little, a small bro stroke here and there. It doesn't have to be a full outline of the whole bottom of the fruit. Just a little bit here and there will give the I all it means to know that there is a form happening. There's a rounded form to that fruit and then we're just gonna carry that all the way through the top. Bada boom, bada bing. And that looks really good. I used less up top because it's higher up. Okay, so I had that color on my brush, and I'm going to add some teal as a color to soften those harsh edges. It's cool. Um, the teal has a little bit of white in it to start with its the way it's made, and it's not that dark of a color. So when I mix it with the Paynes Grey, it makes a really nice kind of like mid tone shadow color as it gradually comes up into the light, and I'm gonna wash my brush. All right, so I'm gonna grab some yellow and add it to this pink. You're so what's in pink, white and red? I'm adding a little bit more red. So I've got an orangey color and I'm going to bring a highlight into the fruit. So I just want to make sure that their this is lighter. We're coming up in value. Value means how light or dark something is. It's like a scale. So the value scale. So we're getting lighter and lighter and value and warmer and warmer, more red tones, more yellow tones or orange Essentially okay. Now they're really taking shape. I'm gonna make a lighter yellow orange. So it's It's a little bit more yellow than a straight orange myself room to work there and rolling that rush around, getting it nicely incorporated on the bristles and covering more of the fruit up top. So it's going up and up in lightness, and there's more yellow. So it's just bringing that shape up, and the light is hitting the top of those forms. Okay, And why not? Well, there's orange on my brush. Let's bring some in. It might seem like it's in weird places like, Oh, let's put it on the side and let's put it on the bottom or whatever. I'm just kind of dancing around with this color to add more of that brightness to the whole composition and tie everything together. Okay? And I'm going to do the same thing with Teal, so I'm gonna bring in some Thiel just kind of pepper it in. And it is, uh, just a nice way to really bring some brightness to these forms. And you can see I'm starting to cover up. Um, some of the, um the colors that I was using in the middle of thes cactus pads before, and it's really just like a quick scribble, and I'm really playing at this point. It's not like an equation or a recipe that you have to follow to the tea. You know, we're not baking cookies right now. It's more like we're making a stir fry, and you can add whatever you want. All of this is an experiment, and if you don't like anything, just let it dry and then cover that little area up. You know, you contest in small areas here. I have, like a light green color. I think there's some teal and green and white on my brush, and so I'm just adding some light green to the center so the edges have more saturation and the middle has a little bit less, um, color. It's a little bit more neutral, which is nice, because it gives the I arrest from all that intense brightness and, um, gives it a little bit more neutral area in the center there and lets the colors around it pop. Okay, so I'm gonna wash my fresh, Okay, I'm going to go right into the red and just pop in a little of that straight red. Just It's a pretty dark color, so I'm using it towards the bottom, and it's just gonna get them a little bit more color. I'm just, you know, using color in really various places. The darker it is lower. It should be around the edge because that's where there's more shadow, and this red is a little bit darker. There's no white mixed into it, and it just comes out of the tube a little bit darker than some other colors, like yellow and teal. No, I'm going back into some pink I had read on my brush. I was kind of like, Oh, this is there's a lot of paint down and I was going for something pretty light so I decided to use a different area of the pallet where it could really mix in a lot of white. I didn't wanna have to use too much pain because we're just doing a little highlight up at the top again. I am just, you know, as I work throughout a painting, I'm just adding more and more white and going for more highlights and more shadows. You want to stretch that spectrum out here's more yellow into that light mixture. You want to stretch out the spectrum of light and shadow to make the painting film or complete, and I'm adding that yellow and pink mixture up to the top. Just little dabs, great mixing mix. At this point, this looks really good. So up next we're gonna work on some details bringing some of those needles and just a few more little tricks to wrap up this painting. I will see you there 7. Details: Welcome back. We are in the final lesson where we will be working on the details of the cactus. I have a tiny little brush. This is a bright brush, but if you want to use a round brush, that's fine, too. I'm going straight into the magenta, and I'm going to hold the brush so that it's using the narrow into the brush, and I'm holding it at an angle where just I'm tapping down the corner. But really what? I'm going for his little dashes and I'm starting in the centre, kind of higher up and then coming down one side and down the other. And so they have this pattern that is almost like a V shaped or U shaped but upside down. And it also gives the cactus lots of contra because those lines the dotted lines are curved and it tolls the viewer's eye that their shape there okay, but also in nature. The pattern of these needles does have, um, it's not just straight across, so we're not just making a straight line curb because there's contour here. It's because there's also a pattern on the cactus pads that does this to, and this is not the needle part of the cactus. It's the bed of the needle. So there's a little div it in the skin of the plant and its darker. So we're just gonna do this all the way around. It's kind of busy work, so I'm just making sure to keep my brush loaded but not overloaded. You don't want it to get to gooey and keep it going throughout, just kind of round and round we go. And it doesn't matter if some parts were more dense with dots and some parts are less tense . It's cool, you know? Just do your best. Mine is far from perfect. And then I come around and do a couple like three or four dots in each of the fruit, and now I'm going to use a tiny round brush, and I'm gonna add a couple drips of water to my palette. And then I'm gonna add some white to that and mix it up. So I want the white to be a little bit thinner, almost like an inky consistency, and you can go back for more water just like a dripper two, until you get a little bit, uh, thinner. consistency and I slipped the canvas over because when you use a round brush, it's easier toe pull towards you than push away and these needles are going to go up and I'm using very little pressure here. I'm going for thin lines and so I just touched down and then pull up and release my the pressure on the canvas. I'm so it's like a quick pull away and I'll get you a better shot here in a moment. I know this is really small detail, so I'm just going to speed this up as we go along. As we get closer, I'm going back over to do some make it a little bit more consistent. But as I go down to the base of the cactus section, I'm using shorter lines because they get smaller as you go down there a little bit longer at the top and this is all upside down. So here I'm once again doing longer lines and as things get closer to the bottom, they're going to get shorter. And here I zoomed in for you, finally, so it's almost like little claws. They start in that little bed where we did the magenta about halfway in and then by now they're shorter. So they're just like, a little dash. And then I flipped it over so he could visualize this right side up. So here's my hand coming. I just turned the shot upside down because the campus is upside down, So just little dashes. Really. It's simple. I'm using really light pressure. You can see when I add more pressure, the ling gets thicker, and now we're just gonna speed it up because this is all just kind of busy work just going around. If you miss and you put a A line like a little bit off to the side or whatever or you miss one, nobody is going to notice. Nobody's gonna go through this with a magnifying glass looking at every single mark. Usually people look at art from cross room and they'll say, Oh, look at that nice cactus painting. All right, so I'm taking some more white on my brush, and I'm just gonna do some small, tiny highlights on the fruit. And it's really gonna add a lot of light there, just like these little crescent shaped marks at the top. And they I always use white at the end. Uh, the painting session. It's one of the last, um, applications are the last things I do. Just add a little bit of white to give it that final highlight. So that one was a little big. But I keep it. That's time and a top. It doesn't have to be perfectly placed. It's just that it's there is enough to give the I enough to go on. And I'm just going to kind of gauge now how things are going. Do I want to make any more adjustments? And so I was like, I want more yellow. There's not enough yellow in this painting, so I just adding a little bit of yellow down at the bottom, making that green area just pop a little bit more, a little bit brighter and makes the whole painting a little bit more sunny and fun. And I'm just kind of I use my finger to kind of smooth it out just to give it a faint um blends there, adding a little bit of yellow up top to the fruit. And right now I'm being a little bit nit picky. I did not need to do this step, and actually, I over work the piece a little bit. So I want to caution you, um, that it's a sometimes a very small step to overworking a painting, so I haven't really done it yet. I'm liking this yellow, but then I'm like, Well, now this needs more orange, and I go, like, head in, you know, like just bringing, like, a ton of orange. And where I really had some nice transitions and colors and form in this fruit. And I was like, I want more orange, and I erase a lot of fat work that I did, and Oh, boy, So beware. Um, you don't even switch brushes. It's like, Oh, God, Come on. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. I brought some orange into the the cactuses. Well, which I like, you know? I mean, and none of this is like gonna ruin the painting, But like, when it comes down to it, I really didn't go this far into, um, doing final touches. I could have left it. I really liked the way it was, but, um, this doesn't ruin it. It's fine. So there we have a nice painting. I am going to park my brush in the water and just enjoy my painting. Now. Thank you so much for joining me. I really had a lot of fun exploring this beautiful botanical peace with you. Every time I paint, I learned something new. If you're looking for more painting, inspiration and tutorials, I invite you to browse my other classes either from my website or my profile on skill share . Remember that art is meant to be fun. So as long as you show up with an open mind and keep practicing, you will improve and learn something new every time. Happy painting much love.