Compose, Paint, Create Part 2: Let's Put Composition into Practice Painting Watercolour Botanicals

1. Introduction: I wanted to begin today by acknowledging the Wadawurrung people, traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today and pay my respects to the elders past and present. I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who join us. Hello and welcome to compose paint. Create part two, where we're going to paint our way to understanding composition. My name is Natalie Martin and I'm a professional watercolour artist from the surf coast in Australia. And today we're going to explore a whole bunch of critical things that are going to basically formalise our understanding of composition. You may have joined me for part one. If you haven't yet, I would highly recommend starting there first. Because part two, I'm going to refer to it a little bit, although it is its own standalone course. In part two, we're going to visit the five other principles of art, which are contrast, rhythm, pattern repetition and movement. Love movement, movement is a really good one to explore. All of these principles differ slightly to our first five that we explored, because I'm going to speak more specifically to how they generate a mood or an emotion within the work. In part one, we looked more closely at how to place things and where to get successful formulas happening with our compositions. From there, we're going to look at how to analyse your composition, which I know sounds potentially a little dreary. But I promise you it's probably going to be your most favourite module of the whole course because it brings everything together. And it's not going to only affect how you see your own work, but how you see artwork everywhere. And then the infamous. And also awesome is how to learn how and when to break the rules. So breaking the rules is something that is often talked about, but maybe we don't know how to get it started or why it's actually a fun thing to play with. If you've purchased the course through teachable or my website, your enrolment includes the companion guide. My e-book. The e-book is your ride or die alongside this course, it has all your course notes, links to specific products, extra tips, tricks and hints, as well as an extension projects for each module. Every module has a project wrapped around it. I think it's really important that you are able to put things into motion as soon as you hear the theory. I think it helps cement everything so well. And today we're going to use flowers as our guiding theme. Again, I think having a subject to carry us through is going to help focus certain things. And I've got lots of different and fun flowers for us to paint with today. So, I can't wait to get started. Grab your paint brushes. Let's get into it. 2. Let's Talk Materials: Before we launch into our principles of art, I want to go through a few of the materials we're using today. And you definitely don't need to give me an excuse to talk about art materials. It's become a bit of an ongoing joke, but I love to talk about art materials. We covered most of what we're going to use in part one, So if you did visit part one, it's all the same things with a couple of extra additions. So we have our paints which are covered quite thoroughly in part one. You're more than welcome to use whatever paint set you have. do highly recommend these. If you have you joined me for previous classes they're absolutely fine to use in this course. You'll need your jar of water. A handful of coloured pencils is going to come in handy. I'm going to use these in one of the exercises, just as one of the demonstrations. But a little handful of those, if you don't have any, you can also just use paint. But the pencils just shake it up a little bit for us. I've got my handful of brushes. So with the brushes are, I'm lucky enough to own the whole suite of Polina Bright brushes. Now I'm going to introduce a mock brush for the first time, I've got a size two and a size three here, I will largely use a size two. I was saying today if you have one, it's okay if you have none. It's also fine because if we use our synthetic rounds to do the same job, it is okay. The main difference between these two, I'll pull out my two size two, so they're both size two. That is true here. And you can see there's quite a distinct difference in the shape of the brushes. This one here has a really fine point, and it's really good for getting a variegated line, and it gets a really nice sharp fine point as well. And the bristles themselves are very springy, so they've got a really nice tension. Whilst you're painting, if you haven't painted with a mop brush before, they're much, much softer, bristles, they hold a lot more water, but you can move things around very smoothly on the page. It's quite a different sensation whilst you're painting. It's not an essential ingredient, but I would highly recommend that if you are looking to expand your kit in any way, when you go up a size in the mop brush, it's just more water, more area. So it is a really handy tool to have. What else do I have here? I'm definitely going to encourage you to work on cotton paper for this course. Again, cotton is just such a beautiful thing to paint on. And there's a significant difference between your cellulose common in watercolour paper. It's often cheaper. Well, definitely cheaper. Cotton is sort of the Ferrari of papers and cellulose is more like a Ford. What I didn't show you in part one though, is how I tear my paper down. So I thought I might do a quick demonstration of that today too. This is all large full sheets of paper that I've bought from the store and I tear down to the size that I like. I haven't torn them out of a pad. You can buy cotton watercolour paper in a pad as well. But I find that I prefer to customise my sizes a little bit too much. So I'm just going to put them to the side and I'm going to grab my paper, which I forgot to grab. I've got a couple of sheets here that I'll tear down for you. I've left them a bit of a strange size, so hang on, let's have a little play. I always use a metal ruler whilst I'm tearing paper. A metal ruler has a much crisper edge and it's a bit heavier, and you're going to get a nicer tear when you're tearing down that paper. So I'm just going to measure up, what length do I have here? That is 28 centimetres. I think I wanted to do a 28 x 22. Not quite A4. It's a little bit more squared off. Yeah, there we go. So I'm just going to measure really lightly and put a mark at 22, and then again at the other end. And then here's the bit that makes people nervous. But you do get a beautiful torn edge as opposed to cutting it. I wouldn't recommend necessarily cutting your watercolour paper. The deckled edge is the handmade edge there, and this one's a torn edge, but you just get a really beautiful finish to your paper. All right, so I'll line up my ruler and the most important part is lots of lots and lots of pressure on that ruler whilst you're tearing, otherwise you're going to slip the paper from under the ruler, or you are going to get a bit of a bend in the paper and you're not going to get a clean tear, or it might shift the angle. So lots and lots of pressure. And you'll see me move my fingers down the ruler as I tear. And the other important part is to do it really nice and fast. It's like a ripping a band aid off. So there we go. And then I'm just going to keep moving those fingers down so they have really nice, firm pressure on my ruler. There we go. That is a nice clean tear. And then never throw away these scrap bits of paper, because these are really handy to cut down into smaller pieces as like a little reference chart if you wanted to check your colours against it. So all these scraps are really handy as well. I'll keep those ones in my pile of papers there. All right. Now, the other things that we have here are the colour wheel, so this will come in handy for contrast, If you don't have an understanding of colour, one of these from the art store will really help. Or if you've done my magic of colour mixing course, this will also come in handy. This guy is the colour colour mixing wheel that we paint in that course. Either of these is going to come in handy for our contrast module and then just a little bit of your average printer paper is going to be really handy as well. This is just really basic light paper just to do our sketches and thumbnails on what have I missed here? I've got pencil, eraser, and I just keep them all in this little bowl to put my sharpenings and everything in. That's what I have this box cutter here for. I actually use that to sharpen my pencils as opposed to a traditional sharpener because it makes them last a little bit better. And then I've got some paper towel, I might use some salt. I think we use salt in the last one, but it might come in handy again in this one. I haven't decided whether I'll do that or not yet. And then finally, oh no, I haven't done palettes yet. That's something that I really wanted to talk to you about because I completely skipped over them altogether the last time. So I'll just get these out of the way, because what I've done here is I've got my watercolour mixing palette here. And all of these are my individual paints that I've squeezed out. And it's a plastic palette, so it's lightweight. It has a lid so I can transport it really easily. And it's really great because I've been enjoying painting en plein air lately, so taking my paints outside, so something light that's easy to carry has been really important for me. But I wanted to show you because palettes are such a personal journey. It took me a long time to come to this as a palette. I had a vision in my mind that I'm going to have this beautiful porcelain palette, and da, da, da. It just wasn't practical for me in the end. So I wanted to run you through some of these palettes that I've got here. These are all my palettes that I've used throughout the years and experimented with even the lid off your coin, or paints that can be used as a palette, and I have used that on plain air before. It's obviously very limited with what you can do, but it is still a mixing surface that can be used. This is the one that I see mostly with the beginners. They run out and buy these. They're about $2 but I find them very limiting because I love the broad mixing area and I really encourage a lot of mixing. So by the time you've mixed your nine colours or whatever, you don't have that much room to keep mixing. And they stain. They're cheap. They're a great starting point, but you're going to grow out of it extraordinarily quickly. I wanted to show you this one. I don't know if I showed you this in Welcome to Watercolour the first course, but this is my original set of water colours. This is what I was given to me when I first introduced myself to water colour. It's a little travel set. So this was the palette under here, and again it's in the wells. I really struggled with the wells, but at this point in time, I was working a lot smaller and finer, so this was actually really suitable to the style at the time. Once I started working bigger and with larger areas of colour, even these little pans stopped working for me because it was too hard to collect the paint quickly enough. But that's my beautiful first set that I treasure. This one was recommended to me by another watercolour artist because you can dab your tube paints. It's a smaller version of this essentially, but it's a heavy porcelain tile. You can dab your paint colours in here and then wash out here. Again, just not enough area for me to mix. But that might be really suitable to you if you've got a really specific set of colours you want to work with. This one I broke pretty much immediately. It's supposed to be a beautiful travel palette, but it's supposed to seal it, never sealed, it leaked all through my bag. And see how the plastic itself is like a buttery yellow kind of colour. It meant that all your blues and everything represented a little bit incorrectly. So this one I wanted to put in there to reinforce it. It's important to have white as your base for your colours so you can visualise them on the palette really clearly as you're collecting. So that one was a bit of a palette fail. That was when I was originally getting into en plein air and I really wanted to have a really neat and tidy little set. And then I just kept going back to this one in the end anyway. Now this was part of my vision of the beautiful porcelain plate. So this is a ceramic handmade, had some chalk in it. Beautiful ceramic handmade one. The problem again was I ran out of mixing room really quickly, plus the base is not a pure white. So I found that I couldn't get the clarity of colour that I found through this process, that having the clarity of colour was really important to me. I stopped using this one as well, but I should continue because all this paint is completely viable still. Then the final one I wanted to show you, let me just get rid of all that chalk that I've dumped out of there is the one that everyone always asked me about. I have included a link to this inside the e-book and in the the link descriptions because it's actually, it's an oil palette that I got from my local art store. But it is the best one I've found for mixing lots of different colours, but making sure that they don't all run into one another. So this one I get an e mail at least once a week about. So I wanted to show you this one, and I've given you a link now. So that's it for me on palettes, I think that's everything else we have needed to cover in materials. Just doing a visual check here. The last thing I wanted to mention, which I forgot to mention in part one, was we still need that pinch of courage. The courage is so important and it's an essential ingredient to investigate and exploring, and just giving things a go. And today I'm going to really push that. I'm going to really try and encourage you to just give things a go if you need to pause, revisit, check out the e-book, and then come back. And then come back with that courage. Come back with excitement and you're going to have so much more fun painting. So that's it for me. I'm going to stop talking about materials. Just give me another opportunity and I'll be right back there with you though. From here, we're going to dive straight into that first principle of art, which is contrast. See there. 3. Principles of Art: Contrast: Okay, the first of our five principles that we're going to explore today is contrast. Contrast is one of, I think, the most crucial things to understand that influences your composition. Contrast can really change the mood, feeling, message, everything of the way your work is interpreted. And it goes beyond maybe what you think is the obvious kind of contrast. So there's three kinds of contrasts I want to show you today. If you think of like a value contrast, so looking at the brightness of your colours from light through to dark, something like this is a good example of a value contrast. The black background really makes these light colours pop. So there's a very strong contrast between the dark ground and the white of the flowers. And having that range gives everything. A lot of it gives it a dynamic feeling and a little bit of energy as well. If I'd gone for a fully black background, that would have increased that contrast. So contrast has a range. It's on a sliding scale. And you can have very low contrast, and that often feels very safe. Gentle, soft, and you can have very high contrast. High contrast is more striking, more dynamic, more energy. Think of high contrast and the message it's communicating. And you could think of say if we put it in a movie posters context, your horror movies are often black and white, and striking and strong and very high contrast. But your romance films are usually more harmonious. They're gentler, softer, low contrast. So working with that contrast is a way of really communicating your message that you would like. For this one, I want it to be quite striking and bold and quite dynamic, rather than just a static still life. I wanted to bring a little bit more drama to it. So that's my reasoning behind that. Here's another little demo that I did in another painting, in another class where it was a sole subject, but I really wanted to lift that subject out so I masked the black background a little bit like what we did in the unity example in part one. And that just made that Bird of Paradise flower pop out of the background. And it gave it a bit more of an edge in a story than just a floating flower on a page. Another way to think of contrast though, value, is what we generally think of is the dark and the light of things. And bringing those two things together in closer areas is what's going to create that contrast. Contrast is all about bringing differing things together. In this example here, in this sunflower, I've used colour as a way of contrast. And this is why I've got my colour wheel here. In this example here, I've used yellow as my main fundamental colour of the flower itself. And if we've got yellow, if we track across the colour wheel, we have blue. Actually, it's over here. I've got it spun around. Violet should be violet. The opposite to yellow is violet. I've used violet instead of, I say, a dark or a murky colour, or a black or a shadowy colour in these deeper areas. And that is going to create that dynamic energy again. So rather than it feel a bit flat or too deep, adding in these pops of blues and purples all through these shadow areas is going to really exaggerate that shape and give it more life. As opposed to just using, what we tend to do is go and put a black in there or a dark brown. This is a way of popping them out of the page at a little bit more. That's all about working with your complimentary colours, which are colours that are on opposite sides of the colour wheel. I go into this in way more depth in the Magic of Colour Mixing. But for this particular thing, complimentary colours, they can also be called contrasting colours. You may have heard that term before as well. Here's another example that's maybe a little bit more subtle. I've got two sets of complimentary colours happening within this painting. I've got this purply mauve colour up here, which again, is the opposite, is yellow. So we've got the yellow of the flower, but then I've also got all these bluey greens. And I've got these tiny hints of pink all the way through the painting. And having those two sets working together is again going to pump that full of energy rather than have a flatness to it. I really love working with contrast to create a dynamic painting, as opposed to just going with the colours that you might be seeing with your eyeball. This is a way of lifting things and using a bit of your creative intuition. This example here, I don't have anymore. It's sitting in the beautiful house somewhere. But this was another example, obviously really leaning towards the complimentary colours in my own work. I think it's just although I do work with value a lot and value and complementary colours together can really, really enhance a work and add a lot of contrast. But in this particular painting, I've got more subtle brown tones. So I wanted to show you that even though you may not use, I say, a bright orange to complement your blue, Even an orange brown or something that's familiar to orange is going to still create that really dynamic energy within the work. The final type of contrast that you can work that I use in your work and create is what we call a proportional contrast, which is actually kind of covered in proportion. And I did kind of tell you through part one. Like these principles, they can't be neatly put in boxes, they are all entangled. And this is one of those entanglements. Contrast falls into proportion, and proportion falls into contrast. So I wanted to show you this one example again in case you didn't watch part one, where it's a more subtle version of proportion. So the larger flowers are where your eye goes first. And using that contrast of the smaller flowers, it creates that energy to drive you to those places. Okay, now I wanted to show you one final one which is a contrast fail of mine very recently I'm working on a series at the moment and I really didn't want to show you this because I really feel like I should be better than this sometimes. But, you know, we all have our moments. And this one, for me, it was really lacking contrast. Everything was of the same tone, all the same value, and there was no compliments in there either. I'd gone too safe with my painting, I might have just not been feeling it that day or whatever. So in the end, I tried to add it in after the fact. So you can see these higher value items here and it just never actually els because I didn't have it in the forefront of my thinking as I was painting. So it's something to bear in mind because it's harder to introduce in later. You can always add more depth and add more contrast in value. But your colour selections, if you're going to work with your complimentary colours, can be quite challenging. So I just wanted to show you that one is that we're all human and we all have a funky one every now and again. All right, we'll put those ones away into our exercise today for our contrast exercise. You may have already had a little snoop in the download files, but I've provided just one photo, which is this one here, of a still life. This is actually right here with me as well. It's a still life of a dried banksia. You're also more than welcome to create your own still life if you're just not feeling that that's not your vibe. Create your own still life and just follow the same instructions. And you'll come up with a beautiful example as well. What I'll do now is demonstrate a few ways of playing with this contrast. We're going to do a couple little studies before I launch into a final painting. I really highly encourage you to explore all of these concepts through the thumbnails and not skip over that part. I know it can feel like, you know, it's the grunt work, it's the bit we don't want to do, but it's the bit that's going to make you a better painter and have better outcomes and have better resolve paintings. In the end, you're going to enjoy your painting process so much more because you're going to have a higher success rate. Thumbnails are so important for our photo here. I've actually got it kind of well composed in there yet. If I had a third, that vase is sitting on the bottom third. The banks ahead is sitting on the top left. Third. Top left. Yes. And a few others flying around the sites. What I wanted to explore though was some of the fundamental things where people go wrong with their compositions. So a few, a few things that happen whilst we're painting that we can't really work out why. I'm just going to drop a few little thumbnails here and I'm going to put my thirds in. I'm just going to do this in pencil. Hopefully you can see that nice and clearly. All right, one of the main things that I see all the time is people put things right in the middle. And we did talk about this in a little bit in part one, but it means there's no room left for the flower. It gets really crowded out, just fill that in a little bit and it ends up glancing this edge here. That is one of those things that is always going to be a little bit awkward for our eye. This little touch here, let's avoid that one there then. Having things placed dead on the centre is it feels safe and it's familiar and you know where that is. But if you can try and train yourself to slide that onto a third, instead of just plunking it in the middle, your whole work is going to feel a little bit more considered. The other one that I often see, again, you could have things right on the bottom go like this. That's also going to feel really weird. All right And then say if we put the vase in, in the vase, glance at the bottom edge again, that's a bit of a blunder when we come to our composition because it's going to feel like it falls off the bottom of the page. I see this often with my beginner students when they're excited to get things on, but they're not thinking about where they're placing things on the page. So it's something just to bring into the forefront of your mind when you're doing these thumbnails. Which other one did I want to show? Okay. Overlapping, if we had a second flower in there, this is one that I often see as well, if I had two flowers. They're going to look better with a slight overlap then if there was no overlap. A no overlap makes them feel quite separate if you're wanting to explore that two units instead of three, because three is far more harmonious for our eye. But sometimes I like to challenge that and work with two. That can be a really nice way to do it is just overlap them and then you visually read them as one element thing. That's just some of the things that I see most often is that this one falls off the page, glanced edges like this or it can be a little cramped at the top there. Really common mistake when we're first starting because we get nervous about where to place things. Thumbnail, thumbnail, thumbnails. That's going to really help you get to where you need to be and feel comfortable when you get to your nice cotton paper. I like the good paper. I know that can be scary. All right. I'm just going to explore these three concepts that we've just talked about with this as my reference. The first one was contrast and it was value. I'll do my little thumb now, the next one is colour. The final one is proportion. I'll do one more there. Something to bear in mind when you're doing these thumbnails as well is to make sure it reflects the ratios of your page. This one over here that I'm going to work on, my final piece, is not quite an A4. You want to try and make sure that if you've got a square up there, your thumbnails are square. And if you've got an A4, they're relatively, you're not going to try and squish things in. You want to try and reflect the end zone that we're working in. Value is the first one that we'll be exploring. I'm actually going to stick to a similar composition to what we've got in the photo reference here. I'm going to put that vase on the first third, like so. And then I'm going to put the flower on the top left third and I'm going to connect the dots. So I'm trying to manipulate things and they sit on the third nicely, not so much replicating exactly what's in the photo. I'll slide some leaves in there. All right, and in value, it's all about exploring the darks and lights of the thing. It's about creating contrast by using the darks and lights. And using those differences between the two to create lots of dynamic interest. So I'm going to throw in a little bit of colour into these different to what we did in part one. Because I think especially for contrast, it's really important to visualise these things. It makes a huge difference. I'm going to just throw in, it's a bit of a dark, actually, I want a bit more blue in there. I really want a dark blue. There we go. All right, we'll pop this blue in here. I'm going to do it really roughly and we're on really average paper that's not designed for water colour. So I'm just going to quickly throw it in together because it's simply a visual reference. It, it's not the finished artwork by any means. So I've got a really nice, dark, striking background there. That means to create my value contrast, I should be doing a very light and bright flower and that's going to create really strong contrast between the two. I'm going to throw in a bit of ground colour there as well, just for fun, like so. And then I'm going to stick to the colours that I'm kind of seeing in the flower there anyway. So let's go with a little bit of orangey, brownies, ochres. And I'm going to keep trying to keep that as light and bright as possible so that the focus is all about the contrast in value. So there we go. That's about a speed that I do a thumbnail for myself. Anyway, It's just really to throw an idea down and see if it's going to work. And sometimes you get them, you're like, I just can't get it to work. Like it doesn't make from my mind to the paper, it, it doesn't become a cohesive idea. So it's a really important step for us as we're learning to do the thumbnail process. The next one is colour. I'm going to stick to a similar layout here. Put my flower up there. So colour is going to be all about exploring complimentary colours to create that same sense of contrast. Or better put the ground in again. There we go. So this time around I might do, I want to go brights and just have a little play with the brights. I'm going to grab this turquoise here, throw that one in. When you play with colour contrast, it's a really beautiful way. If you get a bit stuck with painting things a little bit, literally like you're looking at the subject, you're like, that's not green. I can't possibly paint it green. This is a nice exercise to shift that notion and have a little play with getting more challenging with your colour choices. I can get a little bit literal to myself sometimes, and I just want to paint the thing as it is, but actually, once you put a little bit more of your artistic voice in there, it becomes your own. All right, so we've got a teal in there. The opposite to a teal, if we look at our colour wheel, is a red orange. So I'm going to make sure that there's a little bit of red orange in there. And let's see, oh, that's a bit of muddy because I've got a dirty brush. Bit of orange, wears a clean bit of palette is the one problem with my filthy mixing area is that it gets a little bit grubby. I'm going to throw a bit of pink in there as well. Just an extra compliment because I like to have a lot of wacky colours in there sometimes. Sometimes I get stuck in the literal, sometimes I go too far outside that world. And then I'm just going to throw a little bit on the vase and working very quickly just for fun, I actually might even leave that white on the bottom. Might go like that. Yeah, I think that looks good. Okay. The final one is proportion. Proportion is all about showing the differences inside the thing through scale when we're just working with one subject. I've got two, I've got the vase and the flower, and I want there to be a contrast between the two. I need to bring one of those into attention and send one of them back. So I might actually look at this one from a different perspective. That can be an interesting way to change it. So I might actually go something like that, where the flower becomes the dominant thing in the picture. And vase becomes less of the thing if you're looking at it directly on. You have to use your imagination a little bit. Let me see. The flower becomes a little bit more oval and the leaves coming out all other sides. Then the vase itself gets hidden behind here a little bit. This is very rough. That's the top up there, the vase is here. This technique is called foreshortening. It's changing that contrast in perspective, basically. Like so. Now my challenge to you here is to take your preferred one of these to a final painting state on your cotton paper. I was actually thinking I might tangle these two up and do one with value, but has a little bit of colour contrast in there as well. It's a way that I really particularly like to work the proportion one I use in some instances, but less so if you are someone that struggles with the literal colour thing. I would highly recommend trying just a straight colour contrast one. And really go for bold contrast, go for directly opposite colours. And it's going to really shift the way that you look at things because you have to look at more specific kinds of things, dissect what colours to use, where. All right, from here I'm going to get started and I'll put this to the side. Everyone knows I'm not a big fan of pencil work. Once we get to the cotton here, another benefit of doing our thumbnails is I can put this to the side. Now I don't need to use that anymore. It can be a bit of a crutch. When we get to our final painting, we get nervous about breaking this white page up. But the pencil, once the under water colour you can often see it and you often get quite tight trying to conform to your pencil lines, I want you to feel quite free flowing and relax when it comes to this. Yeah, I highly recommend just parking the pencil and just going for it. And my other challenge to you is, before you watch me paint it, give it a go yourself, I am going to paint it. I'm not going to leave you hanging. But if you give it a go yourself, you have ownership over that work. And I can guarantee you, you will love it so much more than if you just mimic what I do. So pause now and I'll meet you on the other side and I'll get painting as well. All right, I hope you've had a good go at it. And I can't wait to show you where I come up with as well. And it's worth taking time to compare the two. And not so much for the skill level, but just your approach, I think would be really interesting to have a look at. Because the way I explain things, you're going to adopt and interpret different ways to what I do myself. So I think that's such a fascinating part of the learning process. I'm going to go with my value and colour combination. So I'm going to go with a bluey black background, which means that my complement colour is an orange. So I'm going to use value as well as colour within my final painting without pencil lines. I'm just going to get started. Most people get really bound up about where to start, especially with a more complex subject, something like a banksia. I always say go with the heart, go with the gut. If you're leaning towards painting the vase first, just go with that. Or because some people like that for the stability into something so it grows from there. I tend to always start with the flower. I love to put all the energy in there, and then the rest all complements it. So I'm just going to get started, make up a few colours here to work with. Now, I'm not necessarily working with the literal colours before my eyes, but I'm going to work with some oranges, ochres, yellows for the flower itself. And then I will, I'll work in the background. So the background, I'm actually going to do secondary because I'm going to use some negative space and stuff to create those leaves and to get a nice strong dark background in there. All right, flowers going in. I'm just going to throw in some really rough shapes initially. And as I'm painting the other things, the rest of it all start to come together really light and bright with your brush colour. I got to go over here a bit of yellow. You can still shift your colours around. You don't have to get stuck in one colour. It's not a monochrome exercise. But just be mindful of what colours you are introducing onto the page because it's all about creating contrast. You might be like, but there's leaves all going in front of there. I'm just ignoring them. I'm I'm not going to try and paint them in over the top, I'm just going to put the rest of the leaves as support at going around the sides. There is beginning of my Banksia. If you've gone too heavy and you want to retain a little bit of white and it's a bit dark to what you want and it's importantly still wet. I can blot that off and it can take it back down to a white page. It's just something to bear in mind if you work a little bit heavy handed and I tend to do that myself as well. It can just bring back those highlights whilst it's all wet. All right, so now I'm going to paint in a little bit of branch, get this vase in as well. I'm making up a nice kind of grey. I'll add a little bit of yellow in there now. It's gone green. I need my purples. Alright then I need to make sure I'm looking at my picture here. Because I can sometimes forget about that and carry on. And forget all about what I'm actually trying to paint here. I want to make sure I get that vase sitting onto the third. All right. I've been painting a lot of green things lately and that is my palette is all green. Get a little bit more contrast in there. Again, especially on this dark side. I'm just getting a little bit of colour on there. For the front surface of the vase, it's feeling good. Alright, now I'm going to get some of these leaves in. I know these leaves can look very intimidating, but I promise you just have fun with it. And you want to see how you don't have to be so prescriptive of your shapes. You can get the gist of things in without getting too pedantic about details. All right, so it's all about getting lots of playful shapes in there. All right. Now we need to get yellowy, ochre back in. I'm just, I think for me the arc of the leaf is more important than the zigzags I get just doing the zigzag generally through the shape, trying to mimic these things over here and get those crazy little wacky things in. If you're international and you've never seen a flower like this before, you have to look them up, they're so beautiful. This particular one's called an Acorn Banksia, and it's actually bright orange down the bottom when it's not dried, when it's fresh. So it's a little bit like party streamers. Okay, it's getting closer whilst this is drying here, I'm going to focus on the background if there's always a task for me to be doing, I think whilst I'm waiting for things to dry and if I'm not, I'll be working on something else completely while I like the idea of maybe the leaves bleeding a little bit into the background as I paint. I'm basically going to paint around all of that to create the background, which I think can also feel quite intimidating sometimes. And you're like, why don't you paint the background first. But then I don't get to be all light and bright with my brush. I think this is a nice way to approach it instead. So I'm going to make up my blue black. And this is going to be what creates all that contrast, which is a mix of the Cerulean and Paynes Grey again. All right, and then we've got the browns. Oh, that felt good. As I get some of these sharper shapes in, what I'm going to do is actually switch to my mock brush as well. Make sure I put some negative space leaves in too. I might switch to the mock. Now, opportune moment, I'm going to switch to my size to mop because I'm covering a larger area. This is going to make this whole thing a whole lot smoother and feel it'll make the paint sit more happily on the page. That's the advantage of the mock. The way that it spreads the paint on the page is that it distributes it a lot more evenly than round brush. The round brush tends to dry things up. All right. I'm going to make up some more. When you work with dark browns, you really get you really note how much paint you use because you use up a lot of paint. All right. I'm going to even leave a little bit of these little white spaces around because I think it has a nice painterly effect. And then before it all dry as I need to fill it in with that big mock. You want to work into the. You can see how I started in a tight corner. You want to work into the tight corners first and then make sure you're always working into the wettest area of your page. Always. Because that way you can keep that wet paint moving. If you started up here and had two directions, you would have to constantly switch between the two directions to make sure that you weren't getting a dry edge. Because the dry edge is what's going to leave some ugly marks on your page and make it less desirable. So you can still get quite a nice fine point with this brush. I like so, but it just carries so much more water. And it's got a cool kind of jagged effect when we work like this. I've got my concentration face on, his tongue just hanging out of my mouth. A big more blue. This is where the mock comes into its own. In the big areas. My challenge to myself pretty much constantly is more paint, more loose. If I get too pedantic about this, I end up getting tight, like you can see it in my shoulders, and I'm concentrating really hard. If you just take a breath, you can and hold the brush up higher actually is a nice way to think of looseness too because you can't control it as much. But if that is going to generate a more stylish effect, I know it is a real thing. I love painting loose. Other people love painting really tight and they like the look of it, those hard edges, and the very predictable outcomes. I love the unexpected. Having that unexpected element come into it is really important for me. I'm mixing my blue black mix over and over and over again, and it's constantly just changing a little bit. I like that part as well where it's not just one colour mix because I could have just squeezed the tube and use that one colour tube. But having a little bit of that shifting happening with your mix I think can be really nice as well. It flattens it. Without it get in there, I actually might switch to my little guy again now, just getting these tight spots. I line it up well, not really. Alright. Yeah, I need to add a little bit more detail into my Banksia. Pretty dry. Pretty dry. I'm going to give it a go anyway. I definitely better rinse that one. I put that one down fully loaded. That's a bad idea. Switch to my little guy. I'm just going to add more detail into this one. It's a little bit like what we're doing, lessons in layering a bit more information to make this the focal point. If we're thinking about part one, this is going to be our emphasis. Putting lots of extra detail into it is more emphasised. And I'm using the orangey colour as a complement to the blue getting there. Oops, get some of the blue out there. Right now, I just need. I'm going to go a bit darker with like a orangey. My burnt sienna is running low. Alright, just do a couple that kind of run over the top. That's feeling pretty good. Now. I did want to do a light blue background as well, so I'm going to throw in just a little bit more blue down the bottom here, but I'm going to make a really nice light blue wash. It's going to largely be a diluted version of what I used in the background just as to really drive home that value difference as well. So lots of water in that mix. I'm going to get it really, really washy. And I'm going to slide that in here. It's a lot more speedy when you're painting with the mock. It spreads a lot easier. All right. There we have it. That's pretty close. Well, maybe I need a couple more little details. I can't help myself. We got to build a bit more contrast in there. Alright, that's better. I've got to step back, have the fresh eyes because sometimes it's just glaring you in the face. What you actually need to do with a thing. There have it. That's my example of a contrast project with using value and colour as our contrast. My challenge to you as an extension project would be to explore the one that you gravitated the least to out of these three. Because in this course we're only ever really throwing one dart at the dartboard. Whereas you could really explore every single one of these kinds that we do in each chapter. So I would encourage you to try the one that you either aren't confident with or you don't naturally gravitate towards and do this whole process again and come up with another painting, and all the learning will just start to settle for you. From here, we're going to dive into our next principle of art, which is movement, which I cannot wait to share with you. See you then. 4. Principles of Art: Movement: I hope you enjoyed exploring contrast with me. The next principle of art we're going to explore is movement. Which is something that you may not typically think of with artwork. Because artwork is flat, it's static. In our case with watercolour. Anyway, there's two ways you can actually work with movement. You can do it optically. Literally, moving your eye around the work is one way to incorporate movement. And you can also imply show that the thing is moving. We're actually going to explore both today. I've got some examples here. So implied movement here. In this piece of La Niña, I was literally inspired by the trees thrashing around my head. So movement was a really crucial thing to incorporate into this work and imply that there was a lot of movement happening around. So with all these little marks and the angles that they're on is going to imply that there's movement in this one here, which is called Meditation in Green. It's a lot more subtle in its movement. But I did want it to feel like there was a little slight twinkling of the leaves, like there was a light breeze. That's essentially all I wanted, but you still need to get that gist into the work. This one here, energy abundant, has more movement to it than say the previous, but maybe not as much as La Niña. There is again, that sliding scale of like, is it howling wind or is it a gentle breeze? These things we all have control over, and they help communicate again the message within the work and set the mood. If it's howling and dark and stormy, it's going to feel that way. And then if it's more gentle and light, then that's also going to help generate that feeling in the work. When we're talking about optical movement, that's literally giving our eye cues to move through the work and moving our eye through the page. In this instance here, there's actually a number of ways I've used optical movement, but I wanted to talk about the contrasting dark elements that are all throughout the work. So the little, tiny, dark blobs help your eye move around the work and take in what is quite busy with everything that's going on. I also have the wattle piece, which I have on the easel next door to me here. That is again, more subtle in its optical movement. But I have these bright orange, dark hits that are all the way through it. And those little things help lead your eye around. Movement really coincides with repetition. Repetition and movement. Go hand in hand and help guide your eye around the page, especially when we're talking about optical movement. The last bit of movement that I wanted to talk about was leading lines. You may have heard me talk about this in part one. During the emphasis section, I talked about using leading lines in our work here. So these stems, the branches of the poppies are our leading lines, Drawing our eye up to the point of emphasis. Leading lines go hand in hand with movement because it's the way you're moving around the work. And leading lines are almost always directing to the focal point. So these two things are really important to create engaging work. If you've just got one sole focal point, there's less to engage with, less to emotionally respond to. Whereas this one helps you, it drives you up, keeps you engaged, checks this one out over here, you can actually map the way that your eye moves around to work. So for this one, for me is I get let up this way, I engage in this main key focal point here. Then I head off to this secondary focal point, and then I exit out down here. But it's almost circular because then you kind of enter it again. So it's just something to bear in mind. I wanted to show some examples of leading lines as well. They're probably most common. It's a term you may have heard before if you've done any research on composition whatsoever. But it's a term you see most often in landscape because it's an easier thing to generate in a landscape. Think of a road, a pathway, a line of trees, a fence line. Any of these things in a landscape direct you. So in this particular example, this is a valley, and there's a river at the bottom of the valley. And that orange section there is that, it's a leading line taking you off into the distance. But it helps you tour through the work as you move in Another one. Here is another landscape I've done, which is of Teddy's Lookout, which is an aerial view of a river mouth by the ocean. And this leading line takes you out through the work and you get to explore the whole thing. So it helps you meander through the work. Essentially, another key when I'm talking about florals, branches and our stems become leading lines. And you would have heard me harp on before about not too heavy with the branches because they are so dominant if you have very strong lines through your work and it's something to bear in mind. In this instance here, I've got all these sweeping branches, and they're leading lines that help you digest the work, It helps you move around smoothly and take a journey through the work. So today I've got a little challenge for us. And it is to explore not just one, but two kinds of movement. We're going to look at optical movement and we're also going to look at the implied movement. First of all, I'll do some demonstration. Let me just put these to the side. Yeah, I'll pop that one. Let's just wanted to bear in mind with our leading lines for the demonstration. What I wanted to show you was ways to incorporate optical but also implied movement. One thing to bear in mind is the marks and the colours you choose actually help reinforce your movement. Warm colours imply faster, like think of fast red car. That's not for nothing, that's a real thing. There's science there. Cool colours are slower and calmer. Then we also have sharp triangles versus circles. Triangles are always going to feel faster than they are a circle. Circle feels sluggish and round. The other thing to bear in mind is with implied movement. We have our shapes and we have colours. You can already see like the marks that you make can imply speed. If I did that slower, it's not going to be as fast feeling. The other thing to bear in mind is the positioning of your subjects within your picture frame. Think of it like a tower of blocks. If I stack all my blocks really nicely and your eye trusts that that is going to be stable, then that's not going to have any movement, that's going to feel really static. And if you look back at our contrast example, we have a still life, It's very static. It might feel pretty dynamic because we have a lot of contrast. But it's dead still. So I wanted to take that and flip it on its head. And we're going to try and get lots of movement in this one to imply movement. We might have to go with our shapes. We'll just put that one on a bit more of an angle. What else am I going to do? Between those two things, this one feels safe, stable, comfortable. This one has tension in it because they're going to fall, they're going to tumble. But it's implying movement mentally because has that unpredictable effect. My challenge for this project is we're going to take one of my favourite subjects, gum leaves. And I feel like it's quite a natural progression to gum leaves for a sense of movement because they always are gently moving in the breeze or thrashing around in the wind or anything like that. We've got these three photos as references. But what I really want to drive home is that I've actually included a bunch of videos for your reference inside the files as well. And I'm going to use my little technical magic here with the video editing, and I'm going to show you one right now. That is going to be our inspiration. I've got the photos as a fallback, but I would really encourage you to paint with the videos. Because if you're painting with something that is already moving and this happens with working en plein air as well. Things shift change, the light changes, everything's always moving. You will get a more lively result just by painting from that as a basis rather than a static thing like this. The photos are like this and the videos are going to paint more like this because you don't have that thing to perfectly get them into the right place. I'm going to demonstrate not one, but two paintings in this exercise. So I'm going to do one that's a static feeling painting, but I'm going to use optical movement, meaning that the leaves are going to feel still. But I'm going to move the viewer's eye around by using repeated elements. And that's going to help your eye digest the work. And then I'm going to do a secondary piece that's going to have implied movement. So it's going to feel like those leaves are flying through the air. It's going to be a really interesting exercise, but I would like you to give it a go first painting with a video and see what you come up with before I take on my two. Everyone's going to do this differently. And I think the videos, I think I've got a handful about ten of them in there. So you're welcome to choose whichever one suits you the best. It's going to be quite, quite busy. It's a bit of a sensory overload, but that's part of it, trying to dissect what elements and what parts you want to work with. And it's the same with a photo. I want to omit all that background and I just want to work with that branch. So it's something to just bear in mind is don't feel overwhelmed when you get to painting with the videos. So take a moment, watch some of the videos I've provided, give it a go, see what happens when you try and work some movement in to your painting. The idea we're going for is to get that gentle breeze moving through the leaves and make them feel a little more lively. Hit pause and have a look at those videos. Give it a crack and then we'll come back and I'll get painting. Welcome back. I hope you've given it a good crack. I'm dying to see whether you end up doing this again as well. So if you've done one, and then you've watched me and then you've painted it again, I think that would be a really interesting exercise too. The first painting I'm going to tackle here is the optical movement one. So I'm going for the leaves to feel quite static, but I want the eye to move around the work. And it actually is going to be quite similar to the final project in the magic of colour mixing. So I'll move that one to the side. I am going to use these as inspiration, but not A literal reference where I'm just going to mimic exactly what's there. What I tend to do with branches and things when you want leaves to attach to a certain singular place is I will put a stem in. I think that can really help where you attach your leaves. And I'm going to get some of those leaves happening there. I might put some down there. Really, it's only a marker, a guideline for where I'm going to attach those. And I'll paint the stem in last because the stem will ultimately function like a leading line. And if I put that into heavily, it can just be a little bit overwhelming and dominate the whole work. All right, watch me try and find that pencil in a little bit. I won't be able to find it. I've where I normally put it. Okay. Static leaves, optical movement. I'm just going to make up some colours here. Get some nice gum leaf greens going. Yeah, I'm going to use these as my reference. I like to mix all my colours up first because then I can move quite fluidly once I'm painting. And I don't have to stop and think as much, Although I still will keep mixing, it won't be as stop start. Now I'm going to be thinking about value and contrast as well. So it's all of the things, all the pieces of the puzzle that are going to start coming together. All right. I'm really trying, hard to not get too much implied movement in there, so I can have quite an obvious, um, difference between the two outcomes. And I'm really struggling because I want to put movement in there because the gum, the gum leaves. And that's what I love the most. They're so fun to paint. Now, what am I going to use as my tool for optical movement? I think I'm actually going to use this really rich gold green here. And I'm going to use that as a repeated element throughout. And that is going to be what helps lead that eye around. I might need to put a little bit more over here. Put those behind a little bit. It's hard to put gum leaves behind one another, but it's something that can make your work look a lot more sophisticated is if you've considered where they're going, you just don't keep piling more leaves on top and they become quite flat and 2D. Definitely something worthwhile considering in your work is I slot them behind by painting in a little bit darker and it is safer doing it when it's dry. You can see that one there. I've slotted it in, needs a little bit more there. I've used negative space to let it sing out a little bit, but basically all my leaves to make this feel quite static are just hanging straight downwards. It's not really moving too much, it's feeling very, very still. A bit more of that one. Bit of purple or something. I really like it when the leaves bleed into one another as well. I think that can make them look quite magical when your eye recognises patterns and familiar shapes. Once it's seen it once, it automatically, in your mind, multiplies them out the same. So actually you don't need to paint everything individually and perfect. There's some fingerprints of mine. That's my bad. Yeah, I'm just going to do some final little hits of this gold green, maybe. It's going to do little touches all the way through. That is going to be my optical movement. My eye is going to recognise those marks and it is going to travel around the work trying to find them. And that's what optical movement essentially is, moving that eye around and encouraging the viewer to stay and engage. There's my branch. I think the pinks ended up becoming quite optical as well. All right, so there is my example of a, say, optical movement, as I said, that lime green has essentially become that thing that is used to drive myself around. It's also probably complemented by these soft pinks that I've included because they hit around as well. So bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And if I was to map where my eye follows her in, I think my eye enters the work at this green blob over here, and then travels up and digests it this way, and then circles back down because of this lower pink. It's a really interesting thing to start thinking about, especially if you refer back to that pile of like unfinished or unresolved works. Is sometimes it's just not engaging you enough and you need to complete the way that you absorb it. So a circular pattern is really nice, or just a nice meandering trail through the work rather than like, bang I'm done. Nothing else to engage with here. Okay, so I'm going to slide that one off to the side. And in this one I'm going to do a far more dynamic implied movement feeling. So I'm going to encourage those leaves to fly around. They're not going to be at that predictable angle, and that's going to imply that everything's moving. And you'll see quite a distinct difference between the two paintings. All right, so I might move that one just a slightly more to the side because I'm a splasher. Sometimes I get too enthused and it becomes very splashy. This is the one that I would recommend the most for watching the videos and doing this one off the videos, because you will get a far more interesting result if you can see how the gun leaves move in the air and how they hang off the tree and how they bounce around in the wind. That's going to really help you with the angles and the shapes that you're going to paint here. I'm going to get a similar kind of branch, but I'm going to try and do it in a way that it feels like it's a movie. I didn't even put my branch in here. You can of course combine the two ideas as well and do optical movement inside something that has implied movement as well. I hope I'm not confusing those two concepts for you too much. They're quite different from one another, so already you can get more of a sense that these guys are on the move. There's a bit of a breeze blowing. I'm going for a bit of a gale force apparently. It's nice to work multiple cut, even if you're not thinking too specifically about optical movement. It's nice to incorporate multiples of the same colour all the way through. And we're going to cover that a little bit further in repetition actually. That's what that falls under, can be a really nice way to lead the eye around too. A few more warmer colours in this one is going to help it feel like it's moving a little bit more as well. Just another thing to consider. So I might put a little bit more of my pink in. Things that get a bit blurry and interesting. That can also be a way of implying movement as well like a speed blur, Like you can always see that in cartoons and stuff. Or leaving a bit of a ghost of where one was behind you can, it's like a perceived movement. There's nothing I love more than watching beautiful spills happening with my paint. And I only can put those wheels in motion. I can't control it. And that's one of the things I love most about water colour is just that letting go process of letting nature the rest of like taking out of your hands, the rest is not in my control. I love that part. All right, so I'm going to throw in 'cause we've just talked about how contrast creates some dynamic energy. I'm going to throw in some higher value colours to try and make this feel even more energised. So really, really deep blue here and a little bit more there. I just grew one more leaf, the bigger brush for that one. All right, Now I'm just gilding the lily. I can just keep going forever and I'm really bad at stopping myself. What I might do is just add a few little dobs of that lime green again because I love that colour and it's going to help marry it over to this one again. All right, so between optical movement and static movement, there's quite a not static movement, that's the opposite to static movement that's implied movement were giving you the idea that everything is moving. There's quite a distinct difference to the way you approach the paint, but it's just something to consider because this one feels a lot more energised, there's a lot more going on, a bit more tension. This one feels a lot more predictable, but there's still enough interest in things going on there. So if you're working with a more static subject, this is the way to go. And if you're working with something with a lot of dynamic energy, using those sharp quick marks, and using angles and things like this to imply your movement is probably the better angle to take. Each of these have a leading line, because that's the branch leading you in. And I've got even more subtle branch happening over here and it leads you in and around. For an extension project, you could go back and review any of the works we've completed so far. Say the contrast exercise or anything from part one or even from that pile of the unresolved that we keep talking about. And see if any of them could have benefited from movement. And see what kind of movement would work best for it. And try and rework that work to be resolved and a finished thing with the sense of movement in it. From here, we're going to go straight into rhythm, and I can't wait to share that one with you. 5. Principle of Art: Rhythm: Okay. We just had a look at movement and now we're going to move into rhythm. You might start to see some things that are repeating themselves over the next little while. Because all of these things that we talk about, movement, rhythm, pattern, and repetition all have one thing in common. And that is that repetition. Repetition is a super powerful tool in your composition. When we're talking about rhythm, it's not unlike when we talk about music or poetry. It's that cadence that steps you through the work. It really sets the mood and think of them like stepping stones, and the pace at which you digest that work. Rhythm is a really crucial thing. It's not present in every single piece and it is very driven by repetition. It's really hard to create a rhythm without those repetitive elements. I wanted to show you a few examples of rhythm within my own work before I describe a few of the different types of rhythm we can use. So are we going to need our colored pencils for this exercise as well? This one here is a bunch of native blue bells. They're called Wahlenbergia. In Australia, I wanted to use this one and I like to think of explaining rhythm like different genres of music. And for this one, for me I think of it as a classical. It's very soft and gentle even though it's quite busy and there's lots of things going on, you can kind of take it in in a gentle pace. There's the way you move through. It is kind of a dawdal, there's a lot of this talk of movement, but when we talk about rhythm, it's the pace of which, the tempo that it takes you through. So this one I think of as classical. If I went over to this one next, it's like big Band or jazz or not jazz, it's more like like a salsa or something like that. It's hot and spicy. There's a lot going on, there's a lot of repetitive shapes, there's a lot of movement, but the rhythm is quite distinctly different. That it is actually just a little trial work and I've used a lot of salt and other fun things in here, but it's very loud in my mind That summary, that quick takeaway impression is what that rhythm is leaving you with. This one here is quite regular in its rhythm. The way that you move through here, it feels a whole lot safer. It's more familiar, it's probably more like a drumbeat in my mind. I don't work with regular rhythm very often because I love organic shapes. But this is about as regular as it goes. For me, it's a bit more easier for your eye to move through and it's a very steady pace that your eye moves through. This one here is actually what I would have described as jazz. There's a lot going on in a lot of different directions and these little repetitive marks are what's going to determine how we digest that rhythm and how we take it all in. That one's, again, quite busy, but the muted colour palette helps tone that one down a little bit. And then I also wanted to show you this one here because this was a rhythm fail. This one here, it was, of the beautiful snow gums covered in snow in the middle of winter. And because I've used these really busy fast marks and the amount of marks in the repetition, it feels too busy and intense. And it's not conveying the message that I wanted it to the rhythm I got wrong with this one, I should have done more gentle, big soft shapes that repeated and that would give you that more gentle soft rolling impression that I had. I got a bit carried away, I think, with this one, but anyway, I just wanted to show you one where the rhythm didn't really sit the way that I wanted it to in the end. And that can affect the outcome of the work as well. To explore our different kinds of rhythm, I wanted to grab our coloured pencils and explore these things through colour and experimental line. So basically we're distilling our elements to just colour and line. The very first one we're going to work through is regular rhythm. I just had to second guess myself on how to spell regular. For some reason, regular rhythm is like what I was talking about with that tree piece. It's very strong and familiar. It could be just simple lines, like this, very geometric feeling. But then don't forget that it can change. It's not just restricted to this one thing. You could do little lines like this, then, then bigger, then bigger. That still has a regular rhythm, a pattern and a cadence that takes you through that particular kind. Regular rhythm isn't stuck in just very consistent pattern marks. It can be a little bit more vague than you would imagine. Sometimes rhythm is really obvious in a piece and sometimes it's a lot more subtle and harder to pick up. It's probably out of all of the ten concepts that we're running you through in composed paint, create, it's probably the most difficult to wrap your head around, but it is an important one to understand because as I showed you in that last one, when you get it wrong, it actually affects the whole outcome of the piece. Irregular is our next one that we're going to cover. Irregular. A little bit more unpredictable. Can't follow it as easily. There might be some overlapping, What's going on here? Again, it's not just limited to say, one colour even. We could go like this and then add another shade of green. This is still going to create a pattern that our eye is going to pick up, that irregular rhythm of repeated elements. Irregular is probably the rhythm that I like to work with most often. Next up we have progressive rhythm. Progressive is letting things grow and undulate as well. Say, if I went like this with my lines and they get bigger, that's a progressive rhythm, we could go. I'm literally just restricting myself to two elements, colour and line. If you start to involve all seven elements, then you've really got a lot of things to play with when it comes to rhythm. The last one I want to show is flowing rhythm. Another one of my favourites to work with, because as you can imagine with branches in the natural world, one thing flowing into the next that has a really nice feel. Let's grab a different colour just for fun. Now, flowing rhythm can be all kinds of shapes are thinking something along these lines for our project, in this one, Alright, We're flowing along here, one thing flows into the next using those repetitive marks. All right. So regular, irregular, progressive flowing. And once you've wrapped your head around those, you'll start to see rhythms all over the place. And in particular, lots of, say, abstract work, some of your own work, you might start to identify rhythms for our project. For this one, I'm going to take this idea of flowing rhythm and I'm going to evolve it into a work. And I'm going to show you how I'm going to do that. Let's get rid of that one. We don't need that one right now. I'm thinking all of these little marks that I've made here feel a little bit like stems of flowers. And what I want to do is create a little gardenscape that feels like flowing flowers blowing in the breeze in a field, maybe with a few bees in there. It has a really nice rhythmic flow all the way through, really gentle and just a quiet pace, not too busy, and we're going to go for that nice, calm feeling. So if I was to start to thumbnail this out, and I might just draw myself my little thirds here. Mm hmm. In here. So I'm going to grab, say, a green. And then I might grab a different green. I might grab one more green. Then I'm going to keep these flowing up like this. Put some of that one in there. This one's going to build in stages. And I'm not going to challenge you to take off on this one on your own. I think this one will be a fun one to follow along. And you're, of course, more than welcome to adapt it to however you might suit you. You might have certain things in your garden you would like to incorporate. The main thing to get across is this idea of getting the flowing rhythm happening. If I went like this is starting to feel a little bit more garden like, get a bit more in there, I'm going to fill it out like so. And if I was to do one more example, what have I done with my pencil? Well, there it is, hiding. I really thought I'd just thrown it away or disappeared, then do like this. Now, if I was to do basically this again, but start to think about these things as flowers, I'm just going to start adding a little bit of colour here, a little bit of colour there, and I have a thumbnail to work from when to when it comes to arriving on our cotton. So we don't have that freak out and worry about ruining our beautiful cotton paper. I've got a plan, man. What do we do next? This one, yellow. I'm really just doing generic flowers at this stage because I'll probably get a little bit more specific once we get to the actual work. It's getting that flow. It's all about getting the feeling down pat. Before worrying about all those little details, I want the colours to sing together. I want the crucial to feel nice, soft, gentle. I need to add some flowers in there. And then maybe a bit more red using repetition again. Because as we talked about in the optical movement, my eye is naturally going to find those patterns and find those repeated elements. I want to make sure that I have repeated things through there too. Repetition is the key way of creating a rhythm within your work too. What am I going to put there? Maybe some more yellow. So I'm constantly just analysing what's going where it doesn't feel balanced. Is there enough value contrast, or am I going for a colour contrast? I might go a bit more. Well, no, I do that pinks. Now what am I going to put there? Maybe some more red. Then this one again. This one again. I haven't got enough of that dark in there at the moment. There we go. I wanted to shake things up and get into the coloured pencils. Because I think when you trying to do something with water colour out of the picture and you just playing with shape, two things, colour and line, it can help to steal it all down. Just to understand it a bit better then we can get into the painting part later. It's more about getting these ideas and fomenting them in your mind, all right. A bit more purple. A bit more yellow. A bit more pink, pink here and a bit of red. All right. So I've blown out my surd there a little bit. I might just try and make a note for myself that I do need that top edge. I want to try and have it equal spacing around this one, so it has a nice white bit of breathing room around it. Okay, that's my game plan of what we're going to translate there. The next stage is translating it. I hope you can see the benefit of just switching things up and trying out with coloured pencils now, actually don't need these at all anymore. I'm going to pop them to the side for us clear the way. It's always nice to have a nice clear space to paint with. This is my roadmap of how and how I'm going to get from here to here is I'm going to feel it out. And I think I really wanted to incorporate something like this where we have to troubleshoot on the fly because we might have, this is our roadmap, but as soon as things start going a little bit pear shaped or they don't go on the page like we anticipated, it can be really easy to just go, stuffed it up. That's got to go. It sucks, and you start beating yourself up. I'd rather you try and troubleshoot your way through it. So if you've maybe put too much purple there, just compensate for it elsewhere rather than give up on it altogether. And if I remember, I'm going to try and talk out a bit of my verbal dialogue as I'm painting along so you can see what's going through my mind as I'm painting. So I want to get into it. I'm going to start by painting a few little things here and there. What I don't want you to do is start a blob here and then start a blob over there of the same flower. And then one over there. Because you're going to lose that flowing feeling by creating those building blocks. And you'll see what I mean by building blocks. By painting out each little section of flowers, you're going to naturally flow a lot better than you trying to puzzle piece your way to the next thing. That's going to be far more difficult to troubleshoot, so. All right, let's get started. I'm keen to get painting first. I'm going to kind of use like cottage garden flowers as inspiration for this one. But really simplistically, it's gonna feel quite illustrative. In the end, I'm going to put in some of my first lots of stems. And it's the stems in this instance that are going to be those repeated elements creating the flow of our rhythm. Oh, now I might start off with something like a Tulip in the pink. There we go. I might actually add a couple of little leaves in there too, so it feels nice and garden like all right. First flower in now, I know it's really tempting to go masted my tulip. I'm gonna go put all the rest of the tulips in. That's exactly what I was just talking about. We're gonna keep building out and keep moving from the bottom upwards so that it has that nice flowing effect as soon as we try. And Piece things together, that's when they get a bit stilted, a little bit awkward, and we have these strange gaps and we want to really consider where we place things from here. All right, from here I'm going to do don't enough want to do red 'cause I end up doing quite a ready pink there. So I might actually already changed the plan and I've had red in my mind here, but I might change it to say, a blue instead. I'm going to change my green though, as well. So the stem is going to feel a little bit different. Might do some blue bells even. All right, so there's the little stems. And then I was going to grab some blue. I'm going to paint in these little blue bells. And whatever I paint once, I definitely want to paint multiple times throughout the whole thing. because that's that repetition really important for keeping that sense of rhythm going. Okay, It's always a good idea to take a little step back, make sure it's all working for you. All right. Perfect. Now I might do, what am I going to do? I've got orange or a yellowy kind of thing there. Maybe like a Gerbera or something like that. I'm thinking I'll go with maybe a lighter green and maybe a little bit more yellow in it. There we go. And then I've got them going up by this, let's get the flow going, grab some orangey yellow. I'm the absolute worst at keeping my paints clean. Like I just completely obliterated my yellow with a whole scoop of orange. But if you do do that, just a little bit of fresh water and you can clean it out usually, or sometimes you can even neutralise it with the opposite. But I find that can make things muddy as well. So usually you can just clean it out or grab from a different area if you're in the zone and you don't want to have to deal with that just yet. Now, I've made that too yellow. Okay. Just do the centres for now. I've got my littlest brush here because we're working quite finely. This is the size zero and I find this is really good. Like I don't often need to go anything smaller than this because you can get such a beautiful fine point with this one. So I highly recommend that one. For this exercise, you could do it with a bigger brush, but the chances of like accidentally dropping water in there and not being at, to work as finely as you want is very high, these little petals. So it's a bit of a different way of working, but I think this is a really fun exercise to explore rhythm How much, now I might do, what am I missing? I need a purple in there I think, maybe a foxglove or something like that. Going with my cottage theme, I'm going to paint the flowers in first of this one. Um, and my lines are going to go that way so you can already see you'll be like she's not following the plan. I don't know what to do. I've started already adapting because if I put more red there already, I just don't think it's quite ready for that yet. It's my intuition telling me maybe not just yet, we'll put that in elsewhere. So I really want to put some purple in there. That's what to complement this orange and set all this off, I want to put purple in, so I might almost be flipping those two where I'd originally intended to put red. I might put the purple instead. And it's that light footedness in you're paying that I think can help troubleshoot along the way instead of just going, oh nope, that's done. I can't be bothered trying to fix that or I don't know what I've done wrong. Persisting is sometimes the best way to go, and I can 100% tell you the paintings that I have battled with the most. And sometimes it is a true internal battle. The ones that I'm most happy with and are usually the best outcomes because I have had to troubleshoot and problem solve like no other. And it ends up with a far more creative outcome than just, say the obvious result. So Foxgloves. Do these big bells. So these are just like the little, daintiest little marks. I'm not worrying too much about varying my colour enormously because there's going to be quite busy anyway. There's going to be plenty of variety on this. And I'm, when we talk about variety and unity, I'm hoping for a unified feeling as well. Just keep that flowing feeling happening. All right. Now I'm going to put like a turquoise kind of star. I just messed that up. Turquoise kind of stem. In that one, I'll keep that flowing feeling. I need to add a couple more flowers in there. I might just put a few leaves in there too for that one enhance that flowing feeling. There we go all. Now I might need to do, I think a few more tulips to tuck in there, so I'll go back to my limey green. I'm going to mimic these colours but just change the angle of the flow so everything's going to start flowing together. But what I want to do is make sure it fits snugly into this little shape here, as opposed to just jamming them in, because that's where I thought they should go. So let's go like this. Maybe one more there. Yeah. And I'll get my pink back again painting these tulips and say if you're just not the most massive fan of a tulip, you're welcome to changes to any flowers whatsoever. You might be a die hard fanatic of Australian natives, like me. You could do the whole thing in natives, you could do the whole thing from flowers in your own garden. I just wanted something to hinge as a running theme through here. I've chosen new cottage garden flowers to a few leaves. Like so. Now I think I'm going to counterbalance that with some more of these Gerberas. Let's grab a bit of green here. Something like so, like this. Go back to my yellow, my goopy yellow yellow centres. I never did leaves on the other ones. I was just trying to work out whether I need to add a leaf, adding these little pillows. One more. I need to add one more. There's a gap just here. I need to add in a tulip pedal or something. There we go. That's better right now to my eye. These poor little bluebells down here are looking a little bit sad. They're looking a bit lonely. I need to add some more of them in next. It's constantly analysing what you're putting in place and then how to remedy that into the work. Where am I going to put them though? I might put some in here. Go with the same thing, follow that flow like this, each one's folding into the next to my blue. Clean off that brush. I've realised I haven't put leaves on that one as well, and I think I want to, I might just do the littlest leaf. Oops, just want some of them. There we go. That's looking good. All right. And you keep, you might have heard me hearing talk about holes or things that are not quite feeling right. If there's a gap and everything else is feeling quite populated, that's what I'd call a visual hole. And that's one of those blunders that I was talking about. In contrast, if there's something that's awkward and there's a gap in there, then you can, that visual hole will end up turning in to a point of emphasis rather than something that you want to ignore. So just be aware of where you're leaving gaps and where things are maybe not quite flowing that well. And bear in mind that they can accidentally be a trap door in your work. Okay, So I almost, what do I need to do? I need to put in some more purple. I think next I'll get my purple. You may have also noticed that I'm basically ignoring my sketch here. Altogether. Because once you're into the work, you need that to work the best way possible. More so no one's ever going to be comparing your thumbnail to the outcome. They're like, oh my god, what were they thinking? They've completely stuffed up their thumbnail. Put more attention into this now. And it's okay to let that go, especially if you're confident and feeling happy with where everything's driving. I'm going to put these guys in more foxgloves. Just fun illustrative style to play with. Maybe a little bit smaller down here. Grab my, what did I do? I did turquoise like a bluey turquoise teal colour the stems and some leaves. All right. Yeah, I'm happy with how this is coming together. Okay, Now, where to next? Could be two things. I actually think I want to balance this out, so I just put a drop of water on there. That's not going to be very helpful. A little block, I think I'm going to put some more of our Gerberas up here. And then I have to somehow put a little bit of more tulip to just something to bear in mind. Because otherwise, with two lots of tulip down here and nothing else up here, it's going to feel unbalanced. So it's all about finding those balances as we pull the puzzle pieces together. I might actually put the Gerberas in here and allow the tulips to go at the top there. Grandma light green again. Now there it is. So that's leaving plenty of space up there to throw in some finishing tulips up that end, what am I doing? gerberas, back to those little centres. That is probably the topmost point of this work as well. That's always something really good thing to keep in mind is those little boundaries. Because if you strike on those boundaries and end up going beyond that, the whole work on the page is going to feel a little unbalanced. Oops, still yellow on my brush. All right, now to put those fiddly little petals in. Yeah, so there's our topmost point. And I'm doing that by going, okay, that's about an inch. That's about an inch were good. All right. That almost might be the last one of them. Now I know where I'm going next. I need to complete that corner by using the tulips so that's a clear path next. And then, like, I'm not working a step ahead right now. Usually I've got the next step in mind, but I need to work out whether this is going to complete that balanced feeling over this corner, And then I'll work out what goes over here. Let's do, I think it needs to curve in for these guys. Yeah, let me do some leaves, and the flowers themselves. All right. Hot pink tulips. All right, now I'm beginning to think I've got some blue bells to put in next, maybe flowing out the other way though. And then I'll work out what to do in this top corner. Feel like there's going to be blue bells. And then maybe a little bit more of the Foxglove. And then I'm not sure how I'm going to fill out that corner, but it'll be one of those things where I have to troubleshoot it once I'm in the moment. Grab my blue bell green, I like that. Then a bit more blue, a little bit more. A little bit more. And I've got to put that leaf in again. There's a bit of a visual hole in there again, for me, but I'll troubleshoot that when I get to the end. I think now purple guys versus what do I do next? What I do need to do, I've gone a bit tight over on this corner over here, so I might just add another extra couple of leaves over here to counteract that. Then I may end up adding some leaves to the bottom of the gerberas, potentially just for that balance. All right, I'm now going to put in, I think, the final couple of foxgloves. And then I might have a little awkward gap here, or I could potentially fill it with tulips. I'll assess that when we get to it. What is I doing? Foxgloves. Back to the foxgloves. We want them flowing back in again. So when I say back in again, I mean pointing in towards. If it was pointing outwards, I think the whole thing would feel a little lopsided because everything would be, too many things will be pointing in the same, the same direction. Maybe just two stems. This guy, put those ones in there. Okay. Now I'm definitely going to think, I'm going to finish this one off with just a few more tulips in that top corner, and then I might add some leaves to these gerberas. There's all these questions that are coming through my mind all the time. And I'm constantly analysing what's happening next. Where's the next move? What colour is missing? What colour is needed? All these kinds of things. All right. I'm going to keep following this flow. Maybe just three enough to fill in that little gap like so I'm grabbing my last little bit of pink. Got a bit too much paint there. Yeah, I think I want to add those petals leaves to the bottoms of the gerberas. Is It's going to help balance of their little funny leaves. Very non-descriptive leaf I have to say. Alright. Oh, the one final little thing that I wanted to add into this guy was a little bumblebees. And that can be the little bit of optical movement in this bright yellow that is going to carry out eye around the work. I'm, we got a bit of fluff there, get rid of you actually in this instance it's going to be a really nice way to fill any awkward gaps, those visual holes I was talking about. I'm going to put a little one in there, a little one in there. And your eye will be like, oh no, Why did you put it there? You could put it there. That's your own intuition, telling you what to do. And just trust your intuition. I'm not there to take the brush out of your hand or force you to do anything. You can just work with whatever's feeling right for you. Let's go maybe one in there. One over there and I need one down low. Where am I going to put you? Maybe down there all about balance. All the time, always thinking about balance and maybe there. All right. I'm just gonna wait for that to dry. I'm going to add a couple of details on top to make them look like cute little bees. And this one will be done. All right. It's all dry now, so I can add that final layer, those final few touches. Even with that bit of space of just me drying, taking my eyes off everything, I can just see everything clearer again. And I really can't encourage that. Enough is to not get too buried in what you're doing that you can't see the forest for the trees. So I'm just going to add in some cute little details here to make them look like little bees and little, maybe another little wing. Yeah. Then maybe this one goes this way. Little be, it adds to the story when you add these little quirks in. Like you probably weren't expecting me to go there, but it can help tell your story, which I think is really a nice thing to do. And anyone will be like cute bees. Why did you put them in there? Obviously, it's spring and it's humming with energy and summer, it helps also take your eye around the work because they're repeated elements. Repetition is going to be a very big theme for the rest of this course. There's those ones there. I'm just going to add in a few tiny little background marks and details to fill in some spaces. It's going to make it feel a little bit more crowded, but I'm going to use a really light tone just to fill in and make it feel like a very busy, little, productive garden. I don't know if you can hear the rain, but it's beautifully tinkling rain outside. And it's just making me very inspired to paint gardens and all these natural things. All right. Maybe a few in there. It's just like this. Like these little marks are. If you're thinking, if this was music and we're talking about rhythm, this is just another little beat, another little tune that's happening in this rhythm that's going to make it feel more complete. There we go. I could keep going, but I won't. All right. So my goal was for like a lovely little dawdle in the garden and a gentle, gentle flowing rhythm. And I hope you can see that that's what we've achieved. My challenge to you, if you've completed this, and love doing this as a project is to take these same elements, but then shift their proportions or their colours or something like this. And change that rhythm. Try and create a more busy or faster rhythm. Or slow it down even more. But even just a few shifts with the assets that we've built here, and you're going to have a completely different rhythm. And it's a really interesting thing to explore from here. We're going to dive into pattern, which is another way of exploring repetition and another crucial way of exploring the way we think and paint. I can't wait to share that one with you. 6. Principles of Art: Pattern: All right, we've just explored rhythm, which is one kind of repetition we can use within our work to create a flow or a cadence throughout the way we interpret the work. Now we're going to look at pattern. And you'd think pattern is the same thing as repetition here, but actually it's kind of like its own whole subdivision. And I wanted to talk about it separately because it serves a really separate, distinct purpose pattern. We see all around us. It's on our homewares, it's on our clothes, through to city scapes and all throughout Nature. Pattern is literally all around us and our eye loves to seek out patterns. It loves to find a sequence and find that familiarity. Pattern can be used within your artwork in two ways. The artwork itself could be the pattern. And you would see that like if you're familiar with William Morris or any of those really fabulous, fantastic pattern designers that for your upholstery or anything like that. So you can do a whole surface of pattern and you can just lose yourself whilst you're painting those. It's a really, really meditative process, trying to repeat things and pan painting them is really fantastic. And then the other way you can use pattern is you embed it within your work. And I think Gustav Klimt is a really good example of this one, where each of the shapes is filled with different distinct patterns. You can also think of the vase in say, your still life, if that had a pattern on the vase that still classifies using pattern within your work. The table cloth in that same still life or anytime you're incorporating pattern within a painting is also a use of pattern. Because pattern can really help communicate a culture, a time and place. I can convey opulence. It communicates a vast array of things because we have so many mental associations with patterns in the first place. Broadly talking, we have two general kinds of patterns. There's geometric, which should be Sound pretty self explanatory, from right down to your basic ginghams and checkerboards, through to more complex geometric and tesselated tiles. They're all geometric patterns. What I love to work with are our organic patterns. And there's a few different ways we can use those, and pattern is such a fun one to play with. And I don't want you to dismiss it, because I think if you can sink yourself into a pattern and just find your rhythm, I guess within that it's a really, really fun way to paint and it's a whole other way of applying your work. So for me personally in my career, I have had the opportunity to paint all kinds of seamless patterns for fashion brands. I'm going to show you some now, and each one of these is seamless. So elements are painted. Then I digitize them and arrange them on the computer so that they can tie easily across the length of the fabric. And they've been applied to anything from dresses to high fashion, to packs, to anything really leggings, all sorts of things. And it's a really, really fun way to think of your artwork in an applied way, but it's not limited to that either. I just wanted to show you a few of the other kinds of things that you can do with your watercolour art, not just necessarily producing greeting cards or paintings for your wall. Here are a couple of other examples that I thought I'd show you today. And this one actually did end up as a yardage for a brand that I know we digitize, that we actually ended up changing the colours a little bit, but it's just a really fun one. I painted this whilst I was on holidays in Mexico and was inspired by the tiles there. So it's a really nice way to collate your experiences as well. This one was one I dug out of the drawer, which was just some really basic trees. It's from a little while ago, but it's quite stylized. I just wanted to show you there's quite a pattern is enormously broad like it could actually just be its whole own captual course on its own because it's such a fun and broad thing to play with. And I think that it's quite distinctly different from repetition because we go into repetition next, so I will sort of distinguish the two. But pattern is very much about motives. So these trees here are motive, which are collections of elements that are repeated in a sequence or an organized manner. And our eye will pick up on those patterns. So that's something to just bear in mind when we talk specifically about pattern. Here's another little one of like some mountain ranges. And then this was a fun one that I did with some masking fluid and multiple layers and a bit of salt as well. So this one is actually I've used as the inspiration for where we're going to take today's project. What I'm going to show you now is our subject, which I've chosen for us, which is the nasturtium. I love these. I have them in my garden, and I don't know whether people think of them as like Daggy Veggie patch garden flowers, but I think the way that they sit in their environment is just really beautiful. I thought I'd make a perfect opportunity to do a bit of a pattern work. I've, I've got a piece of paper here to do my final work on. So I'm going to work on this size here, which is roughly a bit shorter than four. I've also got a bit of a scrap here, because what I'm first going to do is isolate some of these elements. Because once we have a few little pieces pulled out, that's easier for me to then arrange into a beautiful pattern rather than Try and find my way through the work itself. So I'm going to pull out my puzzle pieces, and then I'm going to play with some thumbnails to try and get a pattern that has a nice flow to it. And then I'm going to paint into this work here, bearing in mind that I would love to introduce a negative space element in there as well. Just to throw extra curveball in there, because we all know I love working in negative space. So the very first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to paint out a few little things for myself. Basically just nutting out how I would approach painting some of these things. So I'm going to paint out a flower, maybe a bud, and a few different leaves. And then I'm going to try and use them as building blocks to create a beautiful pattern. I need a smaller brush. I'm going to go down to the size one on this one, which is the equivalent of a eight, I believe in your traditional brushes. She has her own unique brush slizes. All right, So my main colours that I'm working with are these bright, hot oranges, a bit of yellow and a bit of green. So it's got that really, really garden lush feeling. So I really want to try and enhance that. So when I'm working and choosing flowers, I'm working with things that I'm firstly appealing to. So if nsturtiums just don't do it for you, choose another flower. Make sure that you've got some photos of leaves or all the other parts of the flower as well. Because if you just have the flower itself, it may not be enough to build enough of a range for your pattern. This one I love because it's got those funky little lily pad style leaves and the flowers are nice and bright. So I really want to run with that when I try and do my painting, I'm just going to paint out a couple of different flowers first. So I've got some orange, yellow, and red to work with. I've supplied all these photos in the downloads as well. You don't obviously have to print them. I just thought to be handy so you can see what I'm working from as well. And it's the same thing as what you've got to. All righty. So they've got the big petal down the bottom there and then side one, side one. Then keep those colours shifting. Things are in shadow. Things get the sun. Things don't get the sun. We want all those feelings then. And then I just want to wash off all that colour. And I'm going to grab some bright red to get those little guys right in the middle. I love those cat whiskers kind of thing. There we go. And I'd say I just need a touch of yellow in there for the center. All right, I'm going to try one more of those as well. So make sure to remind myself that there's plenty of variety to work with as well. When we talk about pattern. You can have a regular pattern, which is the same thing, repeated over and over again in a familiar way. And then you can have an irregular pattern, whereas that's in lind of almost back in rhythm. When we talk about that where it becomes a little bit more unfamiliar, I think the way that I like to do my patterns, because they're all hand painted, I gauge by eye, I'm not measuring anything out or working on a grid. They become quite organic and sit sort of somewhere between regular and irregular. So it's just something to bear in mind once it gets to a more formal stage and you're putting things into commercial production, they need to be a bit more regular and the seams have to work perfectly. But when we're just playing along like this and painting out with our hands, it's perfectly okay for them to be a little bit irregular. Alright, so here's a red one. I'm using a bit of negative space here because I actually want to use primarily negative space, is one of these things that are going to bring the whole thing together. I love working with negative space and if you've seen what I do in lessons in layering, this is going to be a little bit similar but with an extra spin, extra bit of challenge to it. I'm going to go a little bit darker there. Perfect. All right, now, so there's a couple of the key elements in my mind is the flower, now I really want to make sure I get a bud in there. Let's a little bit like that and then maybe a bit of green. So there's one bad, I might just do another one as a little trial. Because, you know, the more you paint, the more you get familiar with everything perfect. All right. Now, the leaf, the leaf is actually more challenging than you would think. And I spend a bit of time practicing them because I love the little wobbly outline. But then to get all the veins in the center with a negative space, I found quite difficult. So I end up kind of painting triangles. That was the way that it worked best for me. If you come up with a better solution, please let me know so they all should come and meet in the middle. It's definitely not perfect because I want it to feel quite loose and playful and I really want to enhance that wobbly little outside edge to play with. I might just tidy that up, the edge though. All right. Now, what else have I got with I think the other shape that I really want to try and incorporate into this pattern of mine is the sideways leaf, which is a bit more like a, sorry, sideways, a side view of it, so you get a bit more of a idea of it. And then the stem goes off like that. And that stem could go like that. And stems and seed pods and pollen and all of these things are really interesting, like you can bury quite deep into one flower and pull all of those elements out. I've only done the basics here. Two flowers, two buds, and a couple of different shapes of the leaves. I mean, I could do a smaller leaf because I think that could look good too. But we could keep going down, and down, and down, and keep finding all these shapes to play with. And they're our puzzle pieces. They're the things that are going to make this pattern work or not work there too. And we could have a little seed pod. I love the little seed pods. Mind you, I didn't love them so much. At the end of summer when they were just all throughout my garden, I could tell that they were going to germinate. And I've now got 5 billion Nttiums everywhere. All right, so this for me is a little sheet, a little card of shapes that I'm going to work with to build out the rest of my passion. I've got those now. I know that I want to work with negative space. This is a challenge for myself that I really enjoy because it really makes you rethink how you approach a lot of things. Especially when it comes to I love the negative space option for when you've got density of leaves and really rich colours can get a really cool effect going. It's going to do my thirds. And I've got my piece of paper here, so I want to make sure that it matches that ratio. And I'm going to start putting flowers in as my primary key focal point. I might alternate them here, and this is just me playing because there's literally unlimited options. When it comes to pattern, there's so much opportunity to play. And once you've broken those elements down, then you've just got to think about how to pull them together and whether you need to have a have a look on Pinterest or have a look on line and see what kind of pattern you can inspire you. Because there's Baroque, Rococo, traditional country, there's just so many different kinds of pattern. I want to kind of go with this really lush garden feel and that's what's driving me to this outcome. What am I going to do next? I'm going to do a, maybe I'll do a bud out or maybe in and continue that up. So I want it to feel a little bit regular like you're expecting things to happen in a pattern like way. Because by the time we hand painted, it's going to feel quite irregular. Then I need to put some leaves in, there's sideways leaf, sideways leaf there. It's almost feeling like a little bit like a Hawaiian tropical floral at the mini. Then we want to do circular leaves as well. Then the trick of it for me is going to be working out. At what point in the negative space layering do I introduce all these elements? We need to go fill that out. I could have done just a regular pattern. I could have just done the flower over and over again, and that would have been enough. I could have played with scale and made some big, some small, or I could have just focused on the leaves and just done the leaves over and over again. There's just literally so much to play with here and you could fill sheets and sheets and sheets with thumbnails. Don't agonize over it too much though, because I'd love for you to get into the painting part of things too. Bear in mind regular, irregular, regular meaning. Predictable. The same cadence, the same pace all the way through. Irregular, slightly more unpredictable. But I can still pick up that pattern. It might be over a broader scale, it might be more complicated, or it may not be as obvious. I like to sit somewhere between the two. I think that's a really nice balance of like a handmade hand painted pattern. So from here I think I should just get into it and get started because I'm itching to what are we going to do? We're going to get first into this. Unlike what we've done with negative space exercises in the past, I'm actually going to start by painting in positive things first. So I'm going to paint the flowers in first, and then I'm going to paint around that and do the negative space work in the background. I know that's going to be a bit of a brain bender, but I've got this here as my reference. Where am I going to put you? I'm running out of space now. I'll put him, I'll put you here. There we go. I've got this to follow as my guideline, and I'm going to paint this whole sheet, so I'm not going to leave a border or anything. This is going to be exactly as it is. And I'm just going to paint in these flowers as the main key point right now. All right, so following what I did before, sitting right on that third, I'm going to put a flower would be a good one to do with pansies or there's lots of different flowers that are going to suit this. Violets, Whatever tickles your fancy if you're really not feeling the nasturtium. I just thought it would be a good challenge and something just totally different to what I normally do. Put these little guys in because I don't want the yellow center to bleed. I'm going to allow that to dry and come back to it later because in here it bled. And I don't want it to bleed as much as what it did there. So I'm just going to leave that one as is. I'm going to paint the next one and I'm going to try and make sure that they're not all too similar. I just want them all to be slightly different. It has that really hand painted nature. If you wanted to focus entirely on the flowers, you could easily do that as well. And just look at them at all different angles. And that's enough of an inspiration to create a completely distinct and unique pattern. Put one down here, then I need to go up here, put one on this. Again, really trying to use the fine tip of the brush on this one. Get all those fine veins in there. Then I'm going to go up here and do the bottommost one. You can see I'm starting to step this pattern out. You could easily do this on a sheet this size or double the size, or quadruple the size, and you could just keep stepping the pattern out. All right, next up is I'm going to put these buds in which they come off the flowers. We might go like this and I'm going to keep a close eye on my thumbnail over there. I don't stuff it up. I'm gonna paint this in in the red back to this colour and Yep. And I got to go back the other way as well. I paint all those stems in, whoops, nilly went the wrong way. I'm doing the thing that I always tell everyone not to do and not spinning my page. Definitely worth spinning your page, especially if you're going to be working in something that's a bit more complicated for your brain to just run with. Okay. That's as far as I'm going to take that for now. I'm going to let dry and I'm going to come back and I'm going to paint the whole background in and work into a negative space area from here. It'll be really exciting to see how it all turns out, so bear with me whilst I let this dry, and I'll be back in a moment. Okay, the paintings all dry now. And I've done this so that when I paint the background in that my orange doesn't bleed into my greens and blues. You don't necessarily have to do this, but I did want to kind of butt the colours up together rather than have too much white space around the flowers. So that was an important step of the process for me. I'm going to fill this ground now with a mix of greens and blues. Maybe a little bit of purple. We've got a lot of strong red and orange here, so I've got to bear that in mind with my colour balance with the rest of the painting. If it's all blues, that's going to make that too extreme. And if it's all greens, it because it's orange and red, the opposites are blue and green. That's going to make that contrast too strong. And I want it to be a little bit more subtle than that. So I'm going to fill it up with lots of different shades of greens and keep it moving. Maybe even with a little hint of purple or something like that with my mop brush. So I'm back in the mop. Again, we didn't just invest in mop for one exercise. I'm going to quickly paint in this ground as fast as possible. I mean, you can take your time, but I don't want you to have to sit here and watch me paint the whole time. I'm going to mix those colours. In each time I pick up paint, I'm going to try and pick up a different shade of grainy, bluey mix. A little bit careful around those little edges, but I want to be pretty light and painterly with my choices as well. I'm not getting too stuck. This mix here is going to be the lightest of our leaves, if that makes sense. Because it's going to be our topmost layer in our negative space. So it's important to keep that fairly light and washy, not too strong. I love all the sound effects that I do as I paint. It's like 'cause I go into silent mood and concentrating on, because that makes perfect sense to everyone else. Okay, I'll go almost to a yellowy green just to really harmonize those stems in there as well. Paint up here. This is what I was talking about when we're painting in our backgrounds for contrast. If I don't come and revisit that edge there soon, that's going to freeze on the paper and it's going to leave a hard edge. So you want to try and keep everything moving as much as possible. I might have to take a little holiday from this corner and go back down there. I might even throw a bit more blue in the mix there. And keep that edge wet and moving because otherwise it will leave a mark on your page. Too much water and it's all going to take too long to dry and you'll get fed up with it. Try and keep it not too wet. I'm going to feel this whole ground as I'm moving around. Those of you that are unfamiliar with this process, it's a really fun way to think about your shapes within the work. Negative space is such a powerful tool with water colour because it's always translucent no matter what you get these magical effects when we start to think about things with a negative scope rather than always working into the positive need a bit more bluey over here. All right. Now I've forgotten about this edge over here again, so I'm going to have to whizz back up there, make sure that doesn't freeze. Okay, get in there, people, let me in those dots. I love the variety of greens that you can get in here as well. And it's funny because me, myself in my own artwork, you may or may not have noticed it. It's quite subtle, but I loathe green. Like I really struggle to work with green. And I have very few greens in my palette. I very rarely reach for them. I almost always cheat greens with like a brown, a gray or a yellow. I really struggle with green. I don't enjoy painting with it very much. I really wanted to challenge myself and I think that's always a good like hat to have on is like how can I challenge myself to improve? And one of my things this year is to start just embracing green. It's not evil or anything, it's just something I prefer not to use very much. Which is very odd for someone that loves to paint plants as, as much as I do. But once you've seen it, you'll see it everywhere. I do not paint with green very much at all. Alright. So this is my little challenge to myself. Paint and enjoy green. Make sure my balance is good. If I've got one huge more teary colour, I better introduce a bit more of that elsewhere because otherwise it's going to look very lonely. So I might put some more of that over here. Some of you might be like, what's she done with the rest of the leaves? Why is she just painting it all in green? That is yet to be revealed. It will come together. This is our base of our negative space that we're putting together right now. Nearly lost that edge. It's just starting to freeze. If you do find that one of your edges is a little bit frozen, you can just give it a little bit of a scrub and that will generally activate it again, not a day old or anything but a few minutes. And it might have changed. But you can see if you've fussed your paint too much. It's always obvious where your brush has been. So I'm going to try and get rid of those marks and hopefully they'll sort themselves out. That's looking really nice. What I thought I might do from here is I want to really sort of capture that dappled light, that feeling that comes through the leaves when they're all dense and lush like that in the garden. So I'm going to ad, a little bit of salt helps if it's open. Oh, that's way too much salt. It's definitely like less is more when it comes to salt. If you haven't worked with salt in water colour before, it has this magical way of absorbing all the water around it and it leaves a beautiful, dappled, mottled kind of effect. Less is always more. And I think an even sprinkling as much as it's nice on your roast lunch or whatever, it's better if it's a little bit more varied on your piece. Here we want a little bit here and a little bit there, but not too even coverage. It will make a much nicer effect. There was one other thing that I wanted to do, this one, which is one we haven't done before, which is grab a nice big wet brush and get a little bit distractive. We're going to put big fat blobs of big drips of clean water on there. And that's going to have a really interesting effect as well, but it's going to get a bit more of that organic loose feeling that we want. So basically flick the brush and watch out for other things around you. So, and you can see it dispels all that pigment and displaces it, and you get a really cool, dappled light effect. So I'm going to, again, pause for now. I'm going to dry this off and then I'm going to paint, start beginning to paint in my negative space layers. All right. We're all dry again. Now, if you let your work dry off in another room and the salt is still on top, just brush that off once the work's dry. Don't try and do that while it's wet because that will cause disaster. Basically, it just brushes off once it's dry, and it's feeling like a little bit of an ugly duckling right now, but it only gets more exciting from here. I love all the textures that have come together from this texture is something that people don't really associate with water colour because you've just got the one surface, you don't have the thickness of the paint to work with. But I think there's so many awesome ways to manipulate your pigment on the page. And they're unique specifically to water colour that I don't even worry about the texture so much. Now my next challenge is to pencil in. And I'm going to use my pencil here so I don't get too lost with, because it's going to get more and more complicated as I go in to do this negative space. So I'm going to pencil in some of the leaves, this, and this is where the irregular pattern comes into play. Because I'm doing this by hand, it's all going to be slightly different, which is one of the aspects that I really like of it, to be honest, is you just don't have that much control. They're going to be a little bit regular. Like I've got a rough idea of where I'm placing them, but they're not really too specific. Okay, I think that's going to be our next set. I've just done one level of leaves and they're going to be some of the biggest leaves in the mix. If I'm looking at my little road map here, I've placed these ones along the way and I've ended up putting extra ones on the sides here to marry that all in. So I'm going to grab my mop brush again. I'm going to get a same similar mix of grains going but just the same depth again. So it's going to add. By the time we add another layer on, we're going to keep adding that depth of colour and it's going to keep getting richer, and richer as we add and add one of the beautiful aspects of painting with water colour. Okay, now for me, the tricky part is to follow those lines and not get too lost in the moment and paint over an area that should be in negative space. So I'm going to have to concentrate, right? And hopefully I don't run into too much salt along the way. I haven't quite got it all. Off the page there yet. Go off all those areas again. Basically, we're painting anywhere that is not the leaf, the whole background all over again. Anywhere that I've penciled a leaf I'm avoiding, you're going to leave a little bit of that wobbly line that sits around the leaves as well. All right? Each time we do a new layer, the area that we're painting gets smaller, if that makes sense. Making funky shapes there that I didn't like. I'm going to get quite blue. I think over here, maybe a bit more water in there. Hoops nearly did. It got a bit too much water there. Now, you definitely don't want swimming pools as you move your colour around, it's all well and good to have a little bit of a loss of control and allow things to swim around, but too much water is definitely problematic as well. It's a bit of a bad habit of mine. See, we're halfway there already and the leaves are starting to evolve. They're starting to reveal themselves. We're gonna dive through here next in this little tight gap. I forgot this little gap in here. That's an important one too. All helps define. Negative. Space can be so tricky because you're painting everything but what your brain wants to paint. I think that's why it looks so effective in the long run. But it can do your head in a little bit whilst you're trying to work out what's next and where to paint. What have I forgotten? And just give yourself a bit of kindness. It'll come together and it might take a couple of goes to get it right. I try not to get my fingers in the paint there. Yeah, there's a bit of leaf there. I got to make sure I get those edges before they dry again. Okay. Now we through with this layer. It's gone a bit heavy with the blue on this side, but I can balance that out within the next layer. Actually, don't mind that it's a little bit one sided for this layer, I think it looks good. Come around here. This is a little edge that I'm going to have to reawaken because I forgot about him. If you're not careful, it can reactivate the pain a little bit and get a sort of ugly bloom. There's beautiful blooms and there's ugly blooms. Ugly ones are when we've tried to fix things, unfortunately. And that was me trying to fix that edge that I'd forgotten about. All right. Ideally, if we've painted sort of relatively closely enough to our pencil lines, they should disappear and not have to be. You wouldn't even have to erase them. They just disappear under the various layers of paint. I'm painting a little more painterly so you may see some of mine, but I might be able to erase them afterwards if they're not under paint. Okay, there is our next layer. I'm going to let it dry this time. I'm not going to do anymore. Actually, I might do a splatter because I really enjoyed that look. I'll do a splatter and then I'm going to dry it off again. You can see that I've preserved the areas where there's leaves. I've preserved a little bit of the salt effect, but I've lost a lot of the water effect. So I'm going to do that one again. We get that going again. It's almost like it's been raining and it is just really fun, splattering water. It's not something that we do every day, so why not enjoy it? Alright, Give me a mini, I'm just going to dry that off again and then I'm going to do the next layer and see how it's all coming together. Alright, that one's dried off again, so now you can see the leaves are starting to reveal themselves. I'm going to do at least one more layer layer, maybe two, we'll just see how it starts coming together. So I'm going to add in some more leaves because I'm basically just working into the greens and gritting that depth of leaves happening in here. But I want to keep that pattern feeling going, so I need to make sure that I'm really considering the placement of each leaf so it creates that flow. Because each one's got a bit of a similar, but not identical placement to where it is right now. Okay, So I'm going to maybe put one in here, and then that means there's one that goes over here, there, then another one goes there, then it means I got to do another one here. Then what I thought I might do is do a bit of a sideways leaf as well, which means that one goes there. I know you won't be able to see what I'm painting very well, but really, it's a little map for me to follow and you'll see it as I paint what gets revealed. I'm missing one. Needs to go here. Yep. Okay. Do I have my balance right? I reckon that's going to be pretty good then. Once I get to the end of this layer, I'll just do a little bit of assess, see if I need to do one more final layer or whether this one's enough. I don't want it so complex and busy that you lose that sense of pattern. I want it to feel really playful and colourful and like that sense of dappled light through the garden as well. I might have to switch down to a round brush now because I'm getting some fiddly corners. And having that really, really nice fine point is going to be very handy. I'm going to do the same thing again and keep introducing some more of the blues and greens. I might even add a little bit of purple. It's going to help harmonize that in, because at the moment it's quite like green and red. And I need to just shift that totally down a little bit. I can either do that by adding yellow, which I've done in the stems of those. That helps harmonise, it helps bridge that gap between the complementary colours. I'll start by adding a bit of blue again though, because that was where I had in mind. Again, not painting anything, it's just the backgrounds of the areas. Not painting. Where I've put the pencil marks, one leaf starting to come through because I've put the sideways angles, leaves in, they're going to be a different shape. Again, I've put some of these shapes in there this time. And leaving a few more out. Ok, now a bit more. Maybe just like a ultramarine blue might be nice in there. Put it through the center. Do a simpler version of this in lessons. In layering, we do it without putting the negative shaped flowers in the first place. We just do the whole thing as a reduction style negative space exercise. That's really fun. It's one of my favourite things to teach because it's a bit of a choose your own adventure. And finding those holes and getting your brain to adapt to see the negative space is such a crucial thing to learn in water colour. All right? You can see them being a little bit more careful now because it's actually a bit hard to see. It gets more and more complicated as we go deeper into the layers. But I really wanted to show you that not all paintings have to be done in a single. You can take your time with them. You can really just consider layers. Layers are such a powerful tool in water colour. As you can see, it's all unfolding in front of our eyes. Where we got here. Yes, this side, It's probably not where you thought I was going to take this like pattern. You'd think, we'd just build this on. And I thought, now I need to give it a spin. I want to make it a bit more challenging. And I do definitely want to explore negative space somewhere in this course. And I thought this could potentially be the perfect little opportunity to introduce it. Okay, back over here. Went over my pencil marks, but I'll work around troubleshooting on the fly if you can get in the habit, like the mindset if something doesn't go to plan like not doesn't hit the vision in your mind and instead of beating yourself up about it and just go, that was the way it was meant to be. It was never meant to be the way that it was in my mind because that's not the way it happened. If you can change that mindset, you'll have such a more happy, pleasurable painting experience. Beating yourself up is so counterproductive to creativity. I don't mean physically beating yourself up. Mentally beating yourself up. Um, okay, I feel like I've forgotten to place one in here. I think there we need got there. Yeah, I've forgotten to place one. Yeah. Yeah, I've got my sequence and my sequence wasn't lining up. Yeah, that's fun. Second guessing myself, getting to buried in the work of blue. Again, really there with this one guys. All right, final touches there. Okay, What am I doing? What am I thinking? I think I'm going to do one more, but it's going to be a very minimal one. Just to create that extra layer of depth and really punch out that value contrast that we were talking about right at the beginning. What am I going to do? Should I do salt? Yeah, I think I might add another layer of salt. So a little bit in the hand. Well, I just did it again way too much. You just don't need that much at all. Sprinkle it on, it's only going to work in the wettest areas. If it's even remotely started to dry, you're probably not going to get a very good result. So that's something to bear in mind as well. All right. I'm going to let that do its thing, dry it off and be bear with me and I'll be back in a mini okay. I couldn't resist one final layer. And that's really going to enhance all that contrast work that we did at the very beginning. Cause you might have noticed that all of these things are almost inextricably linked. We can't really talk about some things without talking about other things. And in this case I've got a lot of contrasts in my mind whilst also producing a pattern. Okay, so final one. I'm just going to pencil in a few more leaves and may 7. Principles of Art: Repetition: The final of our five principles that we're exploring today is repetition. And you might be like, well, we did repetition in movement. Yep. And we did repetition in rhythm. And I'm pretty sure pattern is repetition too. Repetition is a really key ingredient in creating cohesive compositions. But it also, apart from each of those standalone concepts, it has a purpose all on its own as well. And it's probably in a way that you not necessarily expecting, because repetition can be repetition of a subject, but not necessarily identically. So it can be a cropped on a different colour, different angle, all kinds of things like this. But it also can drum down, right down to a repeated mark or a repeated colour all the way through the work. So it's a really great way to unify your work and really convey a strong message. So repetition is really crucial and I wanted to it as its own standalone thing at the very end so that we can see the difference between each of those four that sort of hinge on repetition. But this is its own thing in that there's no pattern involved, The rhythm is taken out of there. It's all about having those subjects or elements repeated throughout the work to make it feel cohesive. I've got a few examples to show us. There's four kinds of repetition that we can explore with our work. The first one is regular repetition. And you might have heard me say regular and irregular in pattern as well. It means the same thing. An expected less obvious way of repeating an item through there. And the only example I could find within my own work is probably borderline regular repetition. The flower is at the same angle from the same length, although the heads are on slightly different angles. I think this is, it's a good example of how repetition, this doesn't represent a pattern. To me, it is a singular work, but the repetition is within that. And that helps drum home that style of flower, the style of painting. It's actually a really fun way to work and I like subtle shifts between things as well can makes a really nice way to repeat things. Then we have an irregular repetition. I think similar to my use of pattern. I sit somewhere between regular and irregular. This one is an example of this is the paper daisy. We've got paper daisies at all different angles and all different colours and there's bud form and through to fully open. So it's the same flower, they're all repeated, but it's not a pattern. It's got a little bit of a rhythm, but in my mind it hasn't got a strong rhythm. It's that repeated element that's making it feel unified. Same with this spansia piece here. I've repeated a number of things here. I've used a triangular composition, and then I've used repeated bits of crayon in the same colour. That helps all the shadows talk to one another. But then I've also used that colour elsewhere that is helping that eye, it's actually using movement with the repetition throughout the work to help your eye travel around. It helps it feel cohesive, and then I've got little hints of pink. So it's these repeated elements that draw everything in, draw the viewer in, but then also help you engage in the work. In this little example here, I've got a landscape and it's these repeated wax marks that I've used underneath the water colour that is what I wanted to draw attention to here. And that's where your eye goes to. The repeated elements is often a way of drawing attention to an area as well. You can bring energy to a place by creating repeated elements altogether. Or if they were spread apart, they would help our eye move through the work. Similar to this one here, the repeated elements are all relatively the same colour, but the way that they drop down is the way that our eye falls through the work. There's bud form, open side, all of those things. I'm exploring the subject from all different kinds of angles, but it still feels cohesive and it's not disjointed. The final one I literally just got back from the framers right now, This is one that I've just completed. It's actually water colour and crayon on a board, it's on an ampersand aqua board. What I wanted to show was another instance of where I've used the same subject, but they're really quite distinctly different. So I've got quite dark rich coloured purple ones here, and the gum blossoms fade right out to a light yellow. Because I wanted it to feel like sunset when all the sunlight is beaming through and it's all back lit. So I wanted to have lots of variety of colour and like prisms almost coming through and then these other sizes. So you can have a large one, small one, anything. So you can play with proportion inside repetition as well. So I just wanted to show you that one too. I'll slide that down here. We also have conceptual repetition. Conceptual repetition is. When you are painting within a theme. In this instance, I've used the indoor plants in my studio as the theme, and it feels cohesive and repetitious because of the theme choice that I've used. So everything is an indoor plant and then this one here is all species from a similar family. They're all South African flowers except for the banksia, but they're all related to each other. They all are basically cousins essentially, in the flower world. In Australia, we would call this the natives bouquet, including the Leptospermaen, the leucadendron, protea, and banksia. By putting those specific few flowers together, that is making them feel repetitious because they are of a similar theme. I've also used similar colours all the way through and that helps your harmonize everything as well. So they're our two conceptual repetition and the final one which I didn't have an example for was radial repetition. And the best example I can think of is think of a fern unfurling or a sea shell. And they're patterns radiating off the seashell. The radial repetition is probably best found in nature. I couldn't find a good example. Maybe Georgia Keefe has something of that kind because she used a lot of that as her inspiration. But it's a gradual unfurling essentially of your repetition. That's just another way of doing repetition. Our flower of choice for this exercise is the Dahlia, the day Dalia. I love a Dalia. And I think they're having a bit of resurgence. I've got some photo references for us today. These are also included in your download files. I just love the way that they're a bit floppy. They hang on. They've got these funny little stems and their heads just look too heavy for their stems. They've got a little character. All of these things and all these observations are things that I want to try and imbue into the idea in the work. So I want to try and think about that and use that in a repetitious way to generate the idea on the page. So I'm just going to do a series of thumbnails. Where's my pencil gone? There it is. So I'm going to explore each of those styles of repetition. Maybe not radial, because we actually radial would almost be the flower in itself. If you went like that and you painted it out like that, that could be radial in itself. So maybe I will do a little example in the radial world. Let's do the first one, put it in those thirds. Now regular repetition is probably, there's two ways to think about it. You could do all the same size or all the same positioning. Could be just the way to do it. I might make it almost feel like a pattern. I guess it's not something I really lean towards because it's not how they sit in. Nature necessarily is in this perfect regular pattern. Maybe I'll put one there. Maybe I make them feel like poker dots. That would be a regular use of repetition. Regular irregular is what I tend to lean towards a I really love the idea of having a exploring repetition, but maybe through scale and angle and bud through to open flower form. All of those things, different ways of playing with repetition. I was thinking about maybe creating a big, maybe another big one. Really working those thirds with my key flowers. But then little one, another one over there and maybe they're not even coming from usually typically we do flowers with their stems going up. This time I want to have them exploding forward at me. Instead, I love this photo reference here for all the different kinds of dahlias as these spidery ones and these really big, full lush ones and all the different colours. I really want to use that as well as reference. There's my, there's so many different ways to even play with just one of these concepts. Some nail it out. If you've got another idea, you're more than welcome to explore that as well. That's irregular. I've tried to think about irregular in a number of different ways for that one. Next we have radial, which I talked about. We could actually just paint out a huge flower and make it feel repetitious as the petals grow out. You'll find that actually in nature, that's a little bit like the Fibonacci Sequence, which is the optimal growth pattern for a lot of things. You'll get that radial effect. There's radial. I've really squished myself down here and I'm going to do conceptual, well, it's really raining now. Conceptual concept. If I just only had the Dalia, I don't think that's probably enough to illustrate that. So I'd have to introduce some other flowers, maybe some nunculus and some other things that are maybe related to it, things you associate with the Dalia. And that's how you're going to create a conceptual version to explore, I might actually go back to a stems down here and it'd be, Feel like a bouquet. And I've got al, I'm going to do a dahlia. This is repetition on a different scale. Maybe a bit of baby's breath for a different scale. Daffodil. Let's do bulbs. This is how we're going to explore, do a few, few more buds, and that's how we would explore our conceptual idea. What I'm leaning towards painting is the irregular one. But if you wanted to explore any of these other things, you're of course, more than welcome to. And I always challenge you to trial each one of these if you have the time and patience. It is a lot to take in, but even exploring one is going to benefit you more than you're just going to excel and be amazing. So from here I'm going to start with my painting. I'm going to go onto this sheet here, have a go at painting. My daily dailies are so fun to paint, and I know you're probably looking at them going, oh my god, where do you even start, I promise you. Pause. Don't watch me paint it just yet. Have a go. See what you come up with. Because the way you troubleshoot it may not necessarily be the way that I do. And you may come up with something genius. It's only worth a go. So give it a pause, have a go at this exercise, and then I'll meet you on the other side. We're down to our final project for course two, and I can't wait to share this with you. We're going to paint our dailies. I'm going to go for a very big, vibrant pompom explosion. Basically, that's the energy I want to try and get in there. And setting that intention, I think is really important if you're sort of winging it, hoping for the best that can often read on the page and it can look a bit lost. I usually like to start with my key flowers, the ones that are going to be sitting on, those thirds that are going to stand out the most. I'm kind of leaning towards a really big mixture of colours because I think that's going to enhance that big explosion feeling and All right, I hope you gave this to go first on your own as well. I think that's such an important way to learn. And of course, I'm never going to leave you hanging. You can watch me paint too, But I just think you'll learn more if you give it a go yourself. All right, here we go. Lots of little tiny, super clustered marks. Then I'm going to wash some of that off because I kind of want it to be like a pale one, but the centers are almost always darker. I actually think I need to go down one size. Keep those colours mixing as well. You don't want to have it 21 way or the other. A little bit of a variety is going to really give that a lot of playful energy. I keep wiping off a little bit more pigment each time I drop that brush in. Because I want to have lots of light and bright marks and want less and less pigment as I go further out, little bit of brown even might be nice in there, more of a dusty pink. You can forget about your shades. And if you're not familiar with your shades and tones, highly recommend getting into the magic of colour mixing. Because you just open up a whole new world and everything stops looking like lollipops. You can have a bit more sophisticated colour. All right. Just do a little bit more dark in there. Add a little bit more contrast, deeper value darks in there. All right, Now I'm going to go for a red one down here. Look for this exploding one down here. I want to have that quite a rich red. I want to kind of go for this more deep red colour. Keep that in mind as I'm painting, really trying to utilize that negative space. But also keep the brush moving and keeping it light is going to help not get too bogged down in the details. Don't expect you to paint this fast either, I promise you. That's not normal. I'm I'm very used to doing demonstrations, so I've managed to get things moving very, very, very quickly. All right? I'm going to throw a little bit of colour in here and maybe a stemmed because I want to kind of bleed them in as I'm painting, so that they feel like they're all talking to one another. Where am I going to go next? Maybe over here I'm going to do my orange, yellow one if you wanted to. You can also throw colour into your thumbnails. I do find that can be beneficial if you're uncomfortable doing things super quickly on the fly. It can be a really good way to just feel a bit more comfortable about your approach with colour as well. I definitely still do that sometimes, especially for a commission or something like that. Having an idea of what to expect when it comes to colour is very helpful for the client. I really want to wipe off a lot of that colour now with the dailies, and I'm basically just doing a variated stroke up. We do in welcome to water colour, it's all about the direction that they go in bear that in mind. That direction is the way you're going to drive all that energy. Now, I want to do a really light pink one. I think I've lost my way with all my colours here. I might do a dusky pink one that'll look nice. Maybe down here. Yeah, always dark in the centre and you can let that colour bleed out and you're gonna get really nice soft pinks. I kind of want to go even lighter again and tie you in a couple of leaves, and then I'll definitely want to make sure I have like a bud as well. So I'm starting to explore some of the other shapes that could happen. Okay, getting there, I want to do a darker one in here, but it's really just going to be a hint of a one really rich colours, maybe a little bit of a, I actually love these spidery ones as well. Maybe I'll do something like that here. Quite a different shape. The petal shape is quite different, but that contrast of shape might be really nice. We might need to marry that up somewhere. Maybe do got a lot of red and pink. I need to get a little baby one in there. I think when you work fast or you get into the zone, it's very easy to overwork an area, just conscious of getting too carried away. I think need a orangey red. I do a little bit of just tying things in, that explosive feeling. I think I'm starting to get that explosive feeling. Do some of those lighter back ones there need a little bit more pink. Get out there and crazy. I might just, Do you like one? Just a bud. It's really just a hint of an idea of a bud. Okay, I reckon that it's feeling pretty good. I find these guys so much fun to paint because there is so much variety within them. But they're all the one kind of flower and they're super playful and you don't have to get too hung up on the tiny details. It's just having a lot of fun with your mark making, essentially. So there we have it. That's our last painting exercise. I can't wait to jump into the next topic with you, which is analysing your composition. But first of all, your extension project, which I actually found challenging to come up with an extension project that was quite different. But what I want you to think about is we've really relied on colour, we really relied on colour and mark making to create this particular version. What I would love you to do is try something similar to this, an accompanying piece, but remove colour. You're actually using your mark making plus tone value as your repetitive elements. Instead, I've done an example for you because I know that might be a little bit confusing. So I've done this all in turquoise. You can see that the mark making is all the same. But what I've done is the repetitive elements are the mark making, but also the high value items. So everything that's really, really intense is a repetitive element within that work. Once you take colour out of the picture and you're only working with tone, it is a whole different exercise, so it's a really fun one to play with from here. As I said, we'll get into analysing your composition, which is essentially bringing everything together. And I cannot wait to see how this affects your work. 8. Analyzing Your Composition: That's it. We've covered all ten principles of art over the part one and part two of our composed paint, create course. I hope this has rounded out your understanding of composition. And this exercise here is what's going to button everything up and help you. I work out how to improve, what to change, where are my bad habits. And that is analyzing your composition. And what I've done is I've put together a series of questions for you. There's a series of general questions, then we go into specific principles. And then the final page is to how to analyse another person's art. Because that is often how you learn new things. Identify what it is that is appealing to you. You know, when you stand in front of a glorious piece of art and it just like you just feel it in your whole body, that usually comes down to a brilliant composition. And if you are able to analyse it and work out what it is that's doing what is creating that, to do that to you, you can then harness that and use it yourself as well. So I think it's a super, super powerful tool. It's one that a lot of us are probably going to go, ah, now I don't need to do that. But this is going to help you get through that pile of works, help you resolve unfinished works, and help you see better outcomes. Everywhere you look. What I was going to do was I've got this series of questions, and I'm going to analyse two of my own works. And what my suggestion is, is to pick out of your ten paintings if you've done both part one and part two, and I am going to refer to part one during this section as well. But take those ten paintings, those ten projects we've done. Pick your least favourite and your most favourite, and we're going to analyse both of those. My least favourite was the very first painting I did, which was the balance painting. I wasn't totally happy with it in the end, although it feels balanced, I'm not happy with it as an outcome. What I wanted to do was analyse that for you. The first series of questions, I'm just going to go through the basic ones. And then of course, you're more than welcome to go into the more in depth questions on each principle. Because once you've identified a few of the principles, then you can easily follow down to that principle and ask those questions of it as well. So it's a bit of a flow on effect. The very first one that I'd like to ask though is on first impression. Is it a successful composition? If we're not feeling it, it probably isn't. And I think that means for me, that that isn't necessarily a successful composition. Does it appeal to me? No, I've missed the boat somewhere there. Does it feel resolved? Yeah, I guess so, but it's only just hanging together. Then the next question is, is there something not working? Is there something missing? And for me, what I think is missing is that this really stands out. And yes, it's on that bottom right hand third, but it feels quite isolated and lonely. And the way that it feels quite gappy up here, I feel like I probably could have worked a second flower head in and that would have helped resolve this composition for me. Identify which elements of art you have used, which are line, colour, value, texture, shape, form, and space. Well, I've definitely used line and I've used colour obviously, value I think I could have done a better job of, because there are some darker values, but there's not enough really, really light values. And having that range of value is going to make a more interesting work to look at text. I've got lots of variety, which I'm happy with, but I don't have a lot of texture. The shapes are probably a bit bitsy. And that's the other thing I think is not working for me is I could have put some bigger shapes in and some smaller shapes in. And right now, there's a lot of S. I think that variety would have helped that work altogether. The forms I'm happy with generally the space. I think I could have improved my use of negative space in this one because I ended up with like a C shape. But maybe not quite yet. I just didn't quite nail this one and I wanted to share that with you. The most important question which is going to help us understand all of our learnings in composed paint, create is identify which principles of art you have used, which are balance, proportion, emphasis, unity, variety, contrast, movement, rhythm, pattern, and repetition. Everything we've covered so far, This was the balance exercise. Is it balanced? The I didn't quite nail it. I could have kept rejigging with my cutouts and I think I could have come up with a better composition. So for me, I would be going back to rework this and I'd go right back to the cutout stage and try and come up with a composition that I was a bit happier with. I think what happened was I had my cutouts and I got really stuck on how that looked and I didn't troubleshoot and it didn't translate the way that I wanted it to. So I should have been a bit more aware of what I was painting at the time and troubleshot as I've gone along and gone, this isn't working. How do I fix this rather than getting to the end result and going, yeah, not totally happy with that one. I think proportionally it's doing okay. It's just that these shapes are there's all too much of the same going on. There's definitely an emphasis. Does it feel unified? I guess so. The colours all kind of feel quite harmonious and it's all one unit. So it does feel unified. The variety is there definitely as well. Because there's plenty of different shapes and marks. Is there contrast? Yes, I guess because I've used colour contrasts in the greens and the red. So I've tried to use a softer green with the strong red. And that's going to create a more subtle kind of contrast in a colour sense movement. Yes, I've got little green dots that are going to help with my optical movement up throughout the work. Rhythm, totally lacking rhythm. I think that's the other thing that not really worked for me in this painting. Pattern not relevant in this case. And repetition, as I've said, the marks are probably almost too repetitious to make it feel like a resolved work for me, like the shapes didn't quite land. I would be definitely having another go at this one to try and improve it. The final other questions I've got were, which compositional structure did I use? And I used the rule of thirds because this was the example where we had the overlay of the rule of thirds. Does the work capture what I was trying to say? Not really, because I missed the mark. I need to rethink how that came together. Is there a focal point? Yes. Is the colour palette working? I'm actually quite happy with the colour palette. It was more just my arrangement of elements. How does my eye move through the composition? And I do think it naturally does follow that it's like not quite a successful S and not quite a successful C. And I think that's one of the things that bothers me. There's two exits. So my eye follows up like this, and then it gets a bit lost when we get up here. Did I use a leading line? Not particularly because there's no one distinctive line coming through there. And what would I do differently the next time? That's probably the most key question here for me and for me, it's pretty much, go back to square one. Rethink how I came up with that thumb now and troubleshoot some of the problems that I had pulling the piece together. And that's how I would approach that one. I'm pretty harsh on myself there, but I really wanted to show you that it can happen to anyone. And it is important to review this stuff and identify specifically what it is that's bothering you. Because sometimes you could actually resolve it the same work or sometimes it's just a simple fix. In the next time you revisit something similar, you remember how you did that last time, Then try not to do that. Again, just get out of those bad habits straight away. The other one I wanted to analyse was my most recent painting, which was the Dalia painting. I was really happy with how this one turned out. It was really fun, it was playful, it was everything I was talking about as I was discussing it with you. And I can simply run through the same questions on first impression. Is it a successful composition? Yes, I'm really happy with it. It talks to me, it's got my message down pat. The structure is good. Does it appeal to me? Yes. Does it feel resolved also? Yes. Identify which elements of art you have used. I've used line because I've used that brush really lightly and used lots of line in there. I've used colour, I've used value. I nailed the values a bit better in this one, using quite light tones, all the way through to very rich tones. Texture. I've got a bit more texture going on there because of the way that I've used the brush and that negative space generates a little bit more texture. I think the shapes I got down really well, and I was really happy with how all those angles came off. And each of those petal shapes has a really fun, playful, painterly feeling the forms. It's the only space that I probably could have improved on because they're a bit flatter with my application of pigment. I could have used a bit more value and that would have created a more formed shape. Like a more of a sense of its three denis. Then I was really happy with all the negative space that I've left around there and the positive and the way that they're falling. So I'm really happy with how the space was used. Now the principles identify which principles of art you have used. Balance, I think it feels balance happy with that. I've definitely used proportion because I've used different size flowers all throughout. The emphasis I think is quite clear and I've successfully put that right on a third that feels really good and obvious and everything, all the leading lines draw to that one point of emphasis. It feels unified. I think it feels unified because of its use of colour, the use of mark making, and of all the negative space. There's plenty of variety as well, because I've used lots of different colours and lots of different marks. So those two things like unity at one end, variety on the other end, that sliding scale, I'm really happy with the balance that I found there. Contrast, I do have value contrast going on. And then I also have a little bit of colour contrast because I've used quite a bright green to complement those reds and pinks that I've put in there. I think it has a little bit of movement, but it's more of an implied movement. With them sort of launching out at you. I really wanted that explosion feeling happening, so I wouldn't call it a direct hit with the movement. But I think there's a little bit of movement there. There's less of an optical movement here, I guess you could say. The green is the optical movement which leads your eye around. Which takes you actually around in a circle. But there's less of an implied movement. The rhythm, I think is maybe irrelevant In this case. I guess it has a little bit of rhythm, but not in the sense that we were talking about in this class. In this case, it was very much, I was trying to isolate the concept of repetition, pattern and rhythm. I tried to avoid when I was demonstrating this one. To stop them getting convoluted. Yeah, repetition, that was the repetition clas, I really hope I got repetition right for that one. What compositional structure did you use? And it was the rule of thirds again. It is the one that I lean on the most. But I do love it when the rule of thirds, I can use, say, the optical movement to create a circular composition as well. It's almost like two things happening at once. Essentially, I've got some key elements on thirds, but then with these green hits around here, it helps your eye travel in a circle. You've got two structures happening together. Did it capture what I wanted to say? Yes. Does it capture the feeling I was aiming to convey? Yes, I'm very happy with how that one turned out and then the rest, the colour palette worked. There's a focal point. Yes, I've talked about how my eye moves around the composition. There's leading lines because all these stems all lead back to our point of emphasis over here. And what would I do differently next time? I would probably just go back and really think about that form idea and try and get a little bit more of a three D sense in there. And I would have done that by adding more value, so I could have gone darker in the center of that one. I think this one worked out pretty well. This one worked out pretty well. It's just like the tiniest little bit of critique for this one. But generally, I was really pretty happy with how this one turned out from here. I would love for you to do the same thing. Go back to, I mean, you can go back to the pile of unresolved works in your workspace or in your cupboard, or wherever, Or you could go back to any of the ten projects that we've done throughout the two courses and pick your least favourite and your most favourite and run through these questions, most importantly, the general questions. And then if you've got to say, if you have a weakness and you don't really wrap your mind around say, rhythm or a particular principle. There's questions specific to each principle as well. So you can go to that one and go, okay, So if the movement wasn't really working, here are some questions specific to movement about how I could what was wrong. And it might just help you inquire and work out how to achieve it better next time. Other ways for you to analyse your work or decide whether it's resolved or finished. It's really, it can be a really challenging thing to see things objectively when you've created it yourself. So some of the easiest things to do is take a photo of it, take yourself to another room, put that away so it's out of sight, and then look at it on your phone. It's so bizarre, but it can actually completely shift the way that you're seeing the work. Just different context or something. It really, really helps just taking a photo of it. And then the other thing you can do is turn the work around. That's going to help you identify flaws, especially visual holes. Areas that are just like vacuums to your eye or anything that's not particularly working can be sometimes more easily identified when you don't have the subjects jumping at, at you or the context you flip upside down. And it just changes your perspective and you can see things a little bit easier. The other thing you can do is yeah, just basically it's just fresh eyes. I love having fresh eyes and sometimes I'll only do the littlest bit tour work, put it away to the side, maybe somewhere where it might be in the corner of my eye. And work on something else to distract myself and then look at it almost accidentally. And that has a huge impact on my perception of it because without having to put all those mental filters on, like I'm struggling with that bid and I just stuffed up that colour there, Dad, you can see it with fresh eyes and you'll have a whole new lease of life and understand what's going on there. I hope that really helps you find your feet in analyzing your composition. I do have the final page here as well, which is questions to ask of another artist's work. Take this to the gallery. Take it to a local art show. Take it anywhere you like, even just viewing stuff online. But it's always better in person. This can really help you identify what you admire or dislike in another artist's work, which is also a really powerful tool in your arsenal. From here, we've got the very final module and it's the one I know you've all been hanging for. It's the infamous Breaking the Rules. We all love them, We all hate them. So let's get into it. 9. Breaking the Rules: Now we've all heard that, to make great sensational compositions, you have to be able to break the rules. But I do really want to drive home the fact you have to understand the rules which we've just gone through to be able to break them. And some of those are going to be really simple breaks and some of them are far more complex. But I thought I'd run through when and how to break the rules as it's maybe not as obvious as what you might think. I've got some examples here that I want to show you. First of times that I've broken the rules, but maybe that you just think, well, that's just, you know, it's not so much of a significant break, but sometimes it's not so much breaking the rules, but not always picking the most obvious choice that makes something a little bit more obvious and I think, or not obvious, more intentional. Often when we have a two perfect composition and everything's placed immaculately, it's actually less interesting to view because it's more predictable. And having that element of surprise is what makes it so exciting to look at. So I've got a couple here to show you, which will come up on screen for us. This one here is one of my favourite paintings all time. But you'll see that the brunt of the visual weight to the balance is all tucked in the bottom right hand corner and the top right hand corner. That should not be the case. Normally you would be talking about following those thirds and really, really situating your key elements on those thirds. I really love challenging this rule of thirds concept. So basically the negative space branch that crosses that top third is the only thing that's really adhering to a third there. So there's not much holding onto everything that I've spoken to today. But this is, again, one of my most favourite paintings of all time. So breaking those formulas is often, and having the confidence to do that, actually one of the biggest shifts I think you'll see in your practice as you grow more and more competent in your compositions. This one here was a little example that I did. It was just a study for an exercise and it was a very loose brief. So what I wanted to do was challenge that whole idea of, don't put things in the center. This one I've put the main tree trunk, the focal point just off the center. So it really kind of bugs you. But then it makes you engage in that work and follow the rest of the composition around. So it's like a hook trying to get you in. I love playing with those rules and just shifting it maybe one step to the left to try and get people in. This one's really similar. So I've put the main focal point, the tree trunk, right up the center of the picture. And that shouldn't, in theory, work, but the way that I've situated the other branches and everything has helped balance that out and helps guide the eye around. It's almost like the far right hand main trunk and the central trunk even out and land on the third. It's like a trick of the eye almost. This one here is again a little bit like that first one, where nothing really should be where it should be. If we were following all the rules immaculately, the central focus is right through the center and then the visual weight is in the top and the bottom centers. There's nothing about this should work in theory. It could be considered a cross composition. I guess like a big plus sign. But with the spacing and the negative space through there, I don't think I would technically call it that. I love this piece as well. It's another one of my most favourites. I think when we can confidently break the rules that's, I don't know, you take ownership over your work and it becomes a whole other level. I really enjoy watching people develop enough that they can go. I don't need to follow that. I think this is going to be more successful like this. Now, this one here is called Wartar, standing tall. And you might think, well, it's sitting on a third, it should be all fine. I've technically broken two little rules with this one. First of all, there's two flowers and we love the rule of threes. Our eye loves having threes together. In one painting, any kind of odd number is going to be more appeasing to our eye twos. We don't know where to look. The other thing I've done is push these right up to those edges, crushing them in on the edges. Which is another thing I talked about blunders. But I love this painting as well and I think it's just that way that, that gives elongates the whole thing. So it leans into what I was trying to communicate. If I was trying to communicate that was short and stumpy, that wouldn't have worked at all. But because they crush right up to the top edge, that makes them feel very long and elegant. So it's just something that I wanted to play with. So there's some examples of me breaking the rules. My challenge to you is to go back to one of our previous projects and take a look and see what could benefit from breaking the rules. To add that extra bit of dynamic energy. It could be the one that you either love the most or hate the most. Because either way, you can just play into one of those feelings. The thing that I recommend the most, it's almost like a choose your own adventure. You pick your focal point or a key element within the painting and place it where it shouldn't go. Ideally, not on an intersection of those thirds. And that will be a really interesting way to play into breaking those rules. If I do this, typically we want to put things on these ones here. If I went and put something here that's breaking the rule of thirds. And then for you to keep working elements in there, maybe a secondary focal point goes over on a third. But the key one isn't, that's enough of a break of the rules that's going to help create that little bit of magic in the painting. And I think that's what breaking the rules does, is it gives that confident magic in the work. What I do want to say as well is the works that we button up so perfectly often, the ones that we don't really love as much, the ones that we have to strive for and really challenge for are the ones that we end up loving and appreciating the most. And they're the ones that often we have to do the most troubleshooting with. And if you close everything up and make it all perfect, it doesn't leave that door open for someone to inquire to engage with to invest in. So I think it's just something to bear in mind so it's not like significant. Let's chuck the whole rule book out. It's more just a little tweak here or there. Even just working with two things rather than three things, or four things rather than three things is going to challenge that sense of rules and our expectations within the work. So I really, really recommend giving this one a go. It's definitely the best thing to do at the very end once you've wrapped your head around everything. Because we do have to learn the rules first before we can break them. But I do think it's an absolutely essential ingredient in your composition learning. And that's why I've left it to last. And that's it. We've done it, we've reached the end, and I hope we've covered everything that you need to know about composition. And from here, you'll be able to carry on and create some beautiful artworks. 10. The Final Project: That's it. We're at the completion of composed paint, create part one and part two. My final challenge to is go back, review all the work. We've done, the analysis, we know how to break the rules. Now what I'd love for you to do is to start thinking about things in a little series. Find your most favourite exercise. It could be part one or it could be from part two. Here's some of part one, I would love for you to take one of these concepts used to reference photos or some of your own. It's entirely up to you and create a little mini series. Now, two is nice, but as we've learned, two is not optimal for our viewing pleasure. So I would highly recommend going from doing a little mini series of three and exploring these concepts out further. Seeing just how much range you can get from even just the simplest little few elements that we've been playing with today. And I really hope that you don't just take this with your watercolour painting or your floral painting or whatever you've got going on. This is going to influence and have a ripple effect through your entire creative experience. So that's my challenge. Then we've just got to do the final little wrap up. And I can't believe we finally did it because composition was such an ambitious subject for me to try and teach you. I was really, really, really sure that this is what I wanted to teach, but once I got the ball rolling, I was like, it's complicated, it's convoluted, it's subjective. I hope I've broken everything down into a really digestible way for you. And you can just get so much out of it because you could go back, pause, rewind, revisit this course so many times over and get like so much value out of it. I can't even explain to you. I've tried to give you lots of little rabbit warrens to explore all the way along. Your reviews mean the world. I cannot express to you how much they have an impact on everything that I do. It helps me shape future courses, but it also helps your fellow students work out whether that's the course for them. I also have my student Facebook group called Natalie Martin's Student Forum. It is a beautiful community of like minded students. We all love to learn together as ask our silly questions, the one that we, you know, might be a little bit uncomfortable to ask, but it's a perfectly warm, friendly place and a lovely community to be a part of. I give everyone a monthly creative challenge and it's a total open book for everyone. There's a share file of photos and all kinds of things. Don't forget about your e-book as well if you've made it this far without the e-book. Good on you. Because you actually, I think you'll really find the value in it with this course in particular. It has links to products. It has all of your course notes, extra diagrams and notes, tips and tricks, as well as helpful links. You'll find it in the download section if you've purchased the course through Teachable or my website, if you may have heard me mention along the way. Some of them are other courses. If you want to go right back to fundamentals, you've got welcome to water colour. But I'm sure I've probably met you there before. There's the magic of colour mixing which is going to make you a super mega colour boss. I cannot recommend that one enough lessons in layering is going to take us through some of the, like, a simpler version of some of the concepts we've gone through today. And how to create depth and interest in detail in your work. And then if you've got this far without part one, I would definitely recommend going back to part one of composed paint, create as it is, although there are two separate courses. Part one sets us up for part two. I hope I've covered everything and you have a beautiful painting experience from here. And thank you so much for choosing my courses. Happy painting.