Design and Paint an Inspirational Watercolor Mood Board

1. Welcome: as artists and creatives. We love to explore color, fame and mood. We love to express feelings or ideas, and we love to be inspired. And mood boards are a great way to do that. Hello, Welcome to my skill share class. I'm Justin Sanders. Color me. Create art dot com In this class, I will take you through the entire process of creating a watercolor mood board. From start to finish, we will gather ideas, make choices and complete a watercolor mood board. Along the way, we'll learn about finding inspiration, choosing your thing and selecting elements for our own thing. Then we'll work through choosing a color palette with watercolor. Next, we'll talk about layouts, where to find them and how to choose them. And once all or most of the choices air made will dive into the process of sketching and painting our mood boards, I recommend this class for intermediate or higher students. Having some experience with watercolor is helpful also, if you have experience with sketching, if you're a beginner, you can still take this class, but please go easy on yourself. I encourage all of my students, no matter the level, to approach my classes with a spirit of exploration and fun. Now who's ready to create a mood board 2. What And Why: Let's chat about what a mood board is and why we're going to be using one in this class. The mood board is an arrangement of images, materials, text, etcetera, intended to evoke a particular style or concept. It's used to convey emotions, ideas and things. A mood board is a visual tool for inspiration, for organizing and for experimenting with color, shape and texture elements often included on a mood board or text images, a color palette and textures. They're arranged in a pleasing layout. Mood boards are used in creative design careers such as graphic design, interior design or fashion design. There have used to help communicate an idea, a theme or mood. So why would we create a mood board As artists and creatives? We love to explore color, fame and mood. We love to express feelings or ideas, and we love to be inspired. And mood boards are a great way to do that. For this class, we're going to focus on creating mood board for inspiration and exploration. Let's get started by talking about supplies 3. Supplies: For this class, you need basic watercolor supplies, plus a few little things to spice it up, so you'll need your water colors. I have the Sarge selection of Mission Gold. Plus, I've added some Daniel Smith to the mix in this class I am using. Also, some metallic watercolors just doesn't have to be this brand, but this is a brand that I like, and it's not too expensive for beginners. You need a variety of brushes. I have this big brush, sort of another big brush, but not as big and doesn't hold as much water. Then I have a small brush, a size four, and I have the spine round brush a size zero, and I used all of these in the process for painting. If you only have one brush like a big brush, you can still use that. It's just you have to be extra careful with the fine details. You could get away with having two brushes in this class, but I did use for you also need a pencil for drawing. You'll need a pin with waterproof ink. An eraser is nice to have. You may have one on your pencil. This pencil is HB, which means it's a hard lead, and it draws lighter lines than a normal number two pencil. But you can use a number two pencil, but your lines will show up a little bit more. You'll need some scissors. You will need some type of that, he said. It can be foam tape. It can be glued. It could be double sided tape, just something so that we can put our elements together and you'll need watercolor paper. Now this is a large sheet. This is 11 by 14. It's quite large, as you can see, but it's the perfect size to create our mood board. You could do 1/2 size of this and make it smaller. It depends on how you like toe work. I don't wanna work that small, so I've used to big sheet and you'll need more than one sheet because we also did our elements and cut those out. This is £140 cold press cotton watercolor paper, but if you don't have it, use what you have. There are lots of great watercolor papers out there, and especially if you use one that you're used to working with that will benefit you for this class. You will also need jars of water and a cloth. Your normal everyday watercolor supplies. Okay, we're ready to get started. 4. Finding Inspiration: Let's chat about three ways to find inspiration. We'll talk about going out to your local pain or hardware store and looking at paint chips . We'll talk about going out into the world and experiencing something that inspires you, and we'll talk about Pinterest. There are many ways to find inspiration for your mood board. You could go out and about and find inspiration so you could say Go to your local hardware store, paint store and pick up these beautiful color Swatch books that they have something that appeals to you that inspires you. You could pick up two or three of these just to use them as a nice inspiration jumping off point. You can go out into the world and do things. So this is a picture that I took at a recent beach trip with my family. I found it very relaxing and inspiring to be the beach. So go out and about and do things you like. Maybe you like hiking. Maybe you like going to the park. Maybe you like a more cityscape urban setting. Go to the coffee shop. Any of those things can't. You can find inspiration in all of those places take some pictures or write down some ideas way while you're there. Big inspiration for me or an inspiration. Gathering space is Pinterest, so I have a massive Pinterest page, tons of boards, art, inspiration, art boards, all kinds of things on my Pinterest page. Thousands of pens here. I really enjoy just finding inspiration here. So you could look at the pictures tone page. You could search for something that you were interested in. Short mermaid hair. How about that? Something I searched for recently, but something that inspires you. You could search for that. Say you like sunsets. You could just search for something like sunsets, something you find inspiring and pick pick images and put them in a mood board. Once you've gathered some inspiration, it's time to choose a thing. 5. Choose A Theme: So let's choose a thing. She's a theme that expresses the mood you want to convey, allows you to explore and inspires you. Ah, bubble, follow your bliss. My bliss took me to the beach. Not only did I find inspiration in hobby stores and local hardware stores, but I also found inspiration in real life trip to the beach. I had such a great time with my family. It was beautiful and inspiring and so relaxing, and I decided that was the mood I wanted to convey in my mood board titled By the Sea. So once you've narrowed down your idea for your mood board, you can create a Pinterest board that specifically relates to that. So I've created an art inspiration Beach Mood Board Ideas, Pinterest Board, and I'll share that link with you down in the description. And it has lots of images that remind me of by the sea just the thing that I have chosen. So I have mermaids and seahorses and seashells and starfish and beaches have some of my own photos in here, and I even have some photos from the craft store. So these air not things I'm copying. They're just giving me inspiration for my mood board at half thes mermaids. Look out pretty. There's a nice little tail. Cute Siegel. So it's a great idea to just sort of dump a bunch of inspiration ideas. In one spot, you may create a board that is less specific, and then you could have a section that specifically say for your chosen topic. Now it's time for you to follow your bliss and see where it leads you for your theme for your mood board. 6. Sketching Possibilities: Now that you've chosen a theme and you have an idea of what you want to include in your mood board, you can do an initial sketch of possible theme elements for this class. I've included a printable of the sketch of the mood board for your reference, which you can use if you choose to, or you can do your own sketching and your own thing. It's completely up to you now. This initial sketch is just to get our ideas out there. I tried not to spend too much time in too much detail, but I did. If you noticed use references from my Pinterest board and from real life in order to draw my elements and the ideas for my elements, I'm sketching out as many of these elements as appealed to me. So I'm doing the starfish. I'm doing the sand dollar, the novelas, the mermaid tail, anything that really appeals to me. I'm putting in this get. It's just for practice. I even included the sketch of the seahorse. Now all of these elements will not be included in my mood board. In fact, I know when im sketching this that they're too many for what I want to do for my mood board . But this is just a process of practicing, sketching and seeing what elements really appealed to me by spending some time with them. So I encourage you to spend some time sketching out the elements that you choose or you can always trace them. And as I said, I've providing unprintable for you if you would like to trace that as well, and I'll go more into the sketching process as we actually sketch on the mood port. But this is just to give you some ideas, and I will try to include some bonus content of the elements that I did not use on the mood board, so that you can see how they're sketched as well. Now let's do some color testing and color mixing to pick our colors for a mood board. 7. Warmup 1 - Color Test: Okay, so I'm set up to try out and test these colors a little bit. Consider this a warm up. There's nothing really formal about it. It's just testing out some colors that I like that I think will work. And then I'm going to compare them with my images that I've pulled that are my inspiration images for my mood board. So let's just watch these colors out real quick, and these are beautiful, fantastic colors. So I want to start with sort of, ah, thicker mixture there and then have it go to a little bit of water. So I'm just going to did clean my brush, tap it off and then add a little bit of water to see the light. How how life is going to get and my swatches air often, missy. And that's perfectly OK with me if you want them to be nice little squares and things, by all means please, do you? You do, you write. It doesn't have to be exactly the way I'm doing it. This is just an example. Now this is Indian. Thrown, blew. It is a lovely, super dark, super rich blue purple color. So again, I'll do the it can also get very white. Look, see how much it flowed out. Flowed out really well soon Something also to keep in mind if I choose it for my color palette is that it moves a lot. It moved more than the cobalt ill, didn't it? Okay, next is lavender. I did pre wet my pants. I spritz them with water a little bit so they would be easier to activate. Lavender is a little bit opaque. Also a little bit granulated ing cobalt ill is also a little bit regulating. And the lavender is quite light as well, especially if you compare it to the deep dark in the room blue. Next is Rose matter. Does this rose matter permanent? It's a nice bright pink. Want to see if I could deepen that just a little bit? There we go. A little bit darker now, these air mostly transparent or semi opaque watercolor, semi transparent. Rather so they The more water you add. Of course, they will become more see through, but they may cover up a little bit, So if it covers up my word, I'll know how transparent or opaque that pain is next is shell pink. You could always put lines on your paper and a black black. Use a black Sharpie or a black, non water soluble ink just to see just how opaque. But usually you can tell by looking at it, especially once you get used to it. This is quite opaque. You cannot see the paper, the light of the paper coming back through. But look how beautiful it is. Wow, it is just beautiful. Another teacher on skill share, Lisa Hetrick, who does amazing work. She recommended this color on her YouTube channel, and I love it. I'm so glad that she recommended it. This is another opaque color or semi opaque. See how hell Dark and Matt it looks. It doesn't have that vibrancy, but it is still quite beautiful. It doesn't flow much, she could see, could make a nice skin tone with that. Now the Aussie Rick Gold is Daniel Smith, and it is very vibrant. It is an amazing orangy yellow, and you pull out that color with water and you will see how nice and yellow and golden yellow it is. It's beautiful. It may be too strong for the idea that I'm trying to convey for this color palette. So next I'm going to do you should Go Peacock, which may be my favorite color of all time. It's his beautiful deep peacock blue. It's, it's It's a blue, green and aqua, and it is amazing, and it can also go quite nice. Light and vibrant. It's not as muted as the cobalt teal, so more vibrant, kind of blue green. But it still is a blue green, and it also can get much darker in the cobalt. Now let's look at the ultra marine blue, which is a purple e blue. I am using the shingle, but you sure use your own pellet, your own brands. I feel like I probably don't need the ultra Marine because I feel like it's sort of repeats what you can do within a drone blue. But I'm just watching it here anyway, just to decide, and then operas. Bright opera, which is a fabulous, super bright mission gold color. Look at that. It's neon bright again. This may be a little too much for the feel that I'm going for for this mood board, but maybe a touch here and there knows what I do notice about this palette so far that I've switched out as I have no greens. I only have blue greens, but no greens. Now I could get a green by mixing, drawn, brilliant or Aussie red gold with some of the blues. But I do have green in my mission. Gold palettes. So so now that I have those written out, I'm going to swatch this for you. Trust. I have Meridian, which is a blue green, but it's mostly green and not a lot of blue. But still it has those blue tones, and it does have a nice see feel being by the sea, a nice aquatic feel like sea glass or something like that. Then I have set green, which is bright in this case in the Mission Gold case. It's quite bright yellow green, and then I have a yellow green. It's called yellow green, and it's almost to me like a lime very vital, very bright and vibrant lying ring. It's very nice, I was thinking, I don't really have specifically a sand color, so I thought Burnt Sienna might work for that. So I'm just going to bring that in really quick now. It's very dark right now. That is a nice, earthy tone. And what happens if I lighten? It becomes a nice, like light tan color could be good for, like a sandy color. Okay, so now I have a lot of options for my painting, and I may use some or all of these, but there some that are going to be the main focus of our painting. So let's take a look at the inspiration photos that I chose for my mood board in yours. Keep in mind your photos, maybe different. So you're going to take a look at your photos? Of course, you're welcome to do the same as me. And, you know, copying is one of the best ways to learn, and I don't mind at all. So let's take a look at inspiration photos and these colors and see if we can pick out some of these colors from the photos 8. Warmup 2 - Mix Colors 1: So we've talked about different ways to find inspiration. And one thing I showed you were like thes color swatch books from the paint store and then Pinterest Pinterest board that I set up. Now keep in mind if you're using Pinterest images, they may be subject to copyright. I'm not using these two pink them or anything like that. I'm just using them as inspiration, and that's perfectly fine. So I printed out screenshot and printed out Pinterest images for ease of use for this discussion. And then I also have thes color swatch books so you could use this type. If your inspiration is something like this, use this to pick out your colors or mixed colors. But I'm just going to be using printouts of photos from Pinterest, and I'm really just pulling color from them right now. So this is amazing color, in my opinion, I love this beautiful blue. I see ocean. It's fantastic. And then has these lovely darks in here. I mean, they're just fantastic. They are rather muted when I look at them closely, they're not as purple as the ending thrown their arm or of a dark blue green, but I might be able to find something like that by mixing now. When I paint, I paid very loosely and intuitively, so I will be mixing colors as I go now. This is the inspiration for the Nautilus shell. I love the soft feel this and has a soft blue grays and has some yellows in here, and just the texture of it is very inspired. Feel like the cobalt Ill is very, very close with this color, especially in the lighter areas, and has that nice textures. So I would consider this, at least in this color range. Now I would have to mix the darker color. Then, if I look at my seashell, this has more of a dark green fields. So if I mixed this sap green in this and in drone, I might get a really lovely dark. So how about we try that really fast? We'll just try mixing a little and pulling out colors and see how they work together. So let's mix end and thrown right here, and you know me. I love Messi mixes sap green now because this is a deep, really almost black. In this image, I feel that it's going to take a lot of the ending thrown, and I haven't put that much of it. So now the green has completely taken over my mix, hasn't it? That's OK, because I'm just going to go back and pick up Mawr ended thrown. And you just keep working to get amazing color. Look at that. That can work very well for this. Beautiful, beautiful. So let me just wet it a little bit. See how it looks wet. Maybe bring in a little bit more ending, thrown here and just see how that please out. So that's also a nice, muted color. So look back here, See the stork color? That's this. So these are the same two colors this very dark blue purple mixed with this sap green for mission gold. So what I want to do right now is before I forget what I mixed, I'm going to write it down. You can write the wow, That's fantastic. Yeah, I can't wait to see how it looks when it dries. That's two colors from two different images. So it makes me already know that I definitely want to use in and thrown and sap green. That is amazing. color palette color right there and look at that. Deep, dark, deep, dark, almost black. A fantastic. But it won't be a flat black because it has all that rich blue and green color in there. So it's perfect. Okay, so another color that I want to try This is a nice warm yellow, and I'm not sure, but this might be too orangey to get this yellow. I'm trying to think of what I could do to get that. Let's look a little more closely sort of orangey yellow. So, um, I may not end up using the saucy rid cold. I do have in my mission gold palette How this permanent yellow deep, which looks really nice. Let me swatch that really quick. Now this is the full and actual process. I one reason why include lessons like thes is just because sometimes we see artists doing things and we just think it just somehow magically appeared on the paper or something. And it doesn't. It takes work. It takes consideration. But it's fun work. It's so fantastically fun. I love it. Okay, I think that might be the yellow instead of the Aussie Red gold. Because look, at how nice and soft that color is, and it really does fit this color really well. Now you don't have to have the exact colors, but I'm just trying to make some matches here because I think this is a good one. I'm going to be a little check. I'm going to put a check by sap green and by Indian thrown. I know want to use those colors now. Those colors may not end up in my color swatch on my mood board except combined. In this way, I don't know yet. I'm going to paint my painting and then pull out the colors for my color Swatch. Now let's see. We pulled out sort of that yellow. We pulled this color and then I really want because if you see they're sort of core rule, etc. We have coral colors. We have blue greens. We have a sandy color. I feel like this burnt Sienna is great for that, but I haven't know for sure yet. And this image I have, because it's a reference for the drawing. I'm not so much concerned about the colors on this one, although I may use colors from this but they won't make it into the color palettes. Watch for sure. And then this is a photo that I took of birds in the sky, and it has this ultra marine blue sky. I don't know if I would use that or not. It also has sort of this cobalt So But the main emphasis is really from this Nautilus from this image here, as far as colors are concerned, and then I definitely need a neutral and a coral. They definitely want a coral. So these are the main main color goals. I guess you would call them. These are the main color goals that I have, and this one actually has this color on it. So But it's just easier to see here for my sand dollar, and I pretty much pulled the colors from Miss already. Also, there's white in there, but we use white of the paper. Or you can use whitewash so I can kind of set this aside that I do like the combination of these colors really beautifully. And then I may also add some metallic. I don't know yet. So now that I kind of actually narrowed down my image images to pull color from. That's very helpful in this process. Now let's look for one more color in this, which is this same. See these have same color sandy color, the same sandy color. So let's look at the sand dollar. Then it's easier to see the color in the sand dollar. Now this is a very neutral color. It is quite warm, especially if you compare it with the blues. So I'm feeling like we can just use burnt Sienna for that. But let's mix a little bit of burnt sienna with the end and thrown. Since we already know we're using the end of the phone and it's a purple lee blue and this is a reddish brown. Let's just see what happens because we may put those on the paper together and we need to know we need to know what's going to happen. So we've got Francia and there, and we have ended. Thrown because thes air both can be very dark colors. It's especially helpful to know how they will react with each other. Oh, look, we get sort of a green because we have this sort of orangey and reddish blue going on, so but this has yellow in it. So we get a neutral green and it's very dark. So just like with thesis app green, we can get this really neutral green and very dark color. And what's just pull that out and see how that looks. So it's quite green. But what if I added a little bit from the blue in there? Oh, look happened that nice digital blue from here. So So I kind of have chosen this to be sort of the sand dollar color. And if we mix it with the end and thrown and we have a little more blue than we have burnt sienna, we get this nice, neutral, neutral in light blue and grey green area. Okay. I love that. Okay, that's I didn't know what would happen when I mixed those. I haven't mixed them before, so definitely we want been burnt sienna to really encourage you to try this with your colors so you can see what mixes you can get. Your colors are going to be different than mine. So you're gonna get different mixes and you want to see how your colors work together. Okay, so we have really all colors from this picture we pulled out. We have our sand dollar color here. What we mainly have left is our coral. And I also want to test the cobalt ill. And he caught blue together just to see how they look. So let's see what we can do about the coral. 9. Warmup 3 - Mix Colors 2: So let's see what we can do about the coral. I feel that a shell pink maybe mixed with maybe. Let's see. I'm trying to keep my color palette limited, a little more limited. I don't want to use all these colors. I want to use all these colors, but I don't need to use all of these colors. So I think I'll try the permanent yellow deep with the shell pink and just see what happens . Because I know already I want to use the permanent yellow D. I've already decided I don't really want this, so I'm just put on X there because I kind of already know. I don't want that because it was 21 g from what I was going for. So let's try the permanent yellow deep with the shell pink. Now remember, the shell pink is quite opaque, so let's just use quite a bit of water and see what happens there. I want more. I want more shell pink to see how it looks. Very Corley. It's kind of a little orange. So what happens if I put more yellow in there? He becomes a orange. And what happens if I put more shell pink in there. We have a great skin tone, but it is not that nice coral that I'm looking for. It's not that coral color. It's nice, but but it's a no for me. So this is, but I still want to label it. Okay, so I feel like this made it more. Maybe shell Pete more orangey. But I wonder what happens if I makes the shell pink with the rose. So let's try that mix next, and I'll put it here. So I have a better color comparison with. The one I'm just used is its nearby there. So this is the Rose, and this is the shell pink, so that gives us a nice soft pink again. That's not quite what we're going for. So then let's try the roles with the permanent yellow D. I label that in a minute. So is try permanent L. A Deep plus the Rose matter. The other one we can try is the upper right, but I think that's going to be too bright. So let's try the Rose matter here. So that did. It's kind of leaning in the direction I want to go. What do you think Pretty good, huh? Pretty coral looking. That's a nice coral color. Okay, I think this is our mix. So sometimes, you know, it's trial and error. Even if you know the colors. If you haven't used them together before, then you have to Do you know, test It's we have our coral color. We have our deep, dark colors. We've are neutralized. Bluegreen, we have our sandy color and we have the yellow from the show, this Nautilus show. And the last thing that I wanted to check was the peacock blue. So because my favorite favorite, I really want to use it. And I honestly don't know for sure if it's going to work with this. So I'm going to sort of going I've got this deep, dark, neutralized color already right in here. But I want to go for this light Bright. Now this cobalt till will do that. But I want to see how it looks mixed with the He got blue just because, like I said, I want to use the peacock blue so bad I love it. Okay, so up. Quite a bit of water. Look how bright and vibrant that is. Fantastic. So I'm getting my cobalt ill and oh, that's tell them to me. To me, this is magic. This is watercolor magic right here and then if I even just pull it out lighter. So now I have more variation of color, and yet I could use the favorite colors I want. And this cobalt gives you that nice granule ation texture so you can get varying club ALS of blues and greens. And of course, I could go really dark with the peacock blue. That's one reason why thinking I want you sick. I love it. I think it's perfect. I think it's gonna be great. And look at that nice Blue Ocean now. This particular image doesn't convey the feel of relax and calm, but it has just such beautiful color. That's why I chose it. It has the colors that I love. Personally, I feel like I want some metallic, and so let me grab that really quick, and I'll just do this quick, swatch of them tell. So these mermaid scales are my inspiration from the metallic. There's a range of metallics in here. It's also mixed with the other colors. We have the turquoise, the teal rather, the blue greens has the deep, dark colors here. So it fits and also has, say, the burnt Sienna groups. So it fits with what we're doing. And I'm thinking I may put mermaid skills on my mood board, as I said, is developing very organically intuitively, so I don't yet know, But I just want to swatch a few of these. These are the story colors by Ginza Champy, and I love them. And my favorite favorite is this one. It's light gold, and I'll just do a little swatch of that there. Look, it's beautiful and shimmery. Show you how fantastic. Now be warned. Once you put these on your brush, they may get in your water and they may end up in all of your paint, so just keep that in mind when you are doing it. So, like they're going to affect the color a little bit. I mean, I love it. Actually, I love that shimmery sparkle, so I'm okay with that. But if you don't like it, you don't have to use metallics, and I may just use the metallic specifically for some, like doodling kind of shapes. I also like this coppery gold color, and you could see some of that in this image as well. This is similar to the light gold's called Light Champagne. It's a little darker. You can see fantastic and shimmery. I'm just going to keep watching. It's likely that I won't use all of these, but I could use any one of them, so I'm just going to leave them. There are my swatch and I'm just since its story colors here. Okay, so we have a lot of colors. Ice watched out a lot of colors, but I've really only chosen a few to be the main focus. How many colors do we have? We have cobalt till end and thrown Rose matter because of here this nice coral permanent yellow deep mission gold peacock. Now, if we make cease to, we're gonna need a nice green. Also sap green and burnt sienna. So out of all these colors that I swatch that were potential, I picked a few. I narrowed it down to be the main focus. So now that we've got this watching done, we can start painting 10. Final Colors: So now that we've chosen all of our colors, I want to put that on a separate sheet of paper. I'm just watching out in those same colors just to make it simpler for me to pull out the colors and see exactly what I'm using and what I need just for this project, making sure that I have every color that I've chosen, that I have a little check mark by and then I'm going to label each swatch with the brand name and with the cover name. So it's useful for this project and also any future projects that I might want to use this color palette for. I also sort of put them in rainbow or reverse Rainbow Order, starting with the purple lee blue to the more green, blue to the green, the yellow, the coral and the pink so sort of a rainbow of color and shows how the colors work together in just this little color swatch. Uh, now that this is complete, we can really get started with our painting 11. Finding Layouts Pinterest & Canva: I need to find inspiration for your layout is, of course, Pinterest. I know I keep coming back to this, but it's such a great resource. And so all you have to do is search, mood, board layout, templates, inspiration. Let's do inspiration. And it shows many, many different kinds of mood boards, and you can get a feel for what type of move they're trying to convey. What she tackles she can't conquer. So this one makes me think of travel. Makes me think of relaxing. It's got nice, calm theme. I feel like I would love to go visit this place after looking at this mood board. It looks like a lot of fun to me, so you can take a look at mood boards, and you can be inspired by how they make you feel, but also by the layout of the mood board. So also have saved on my interest aboard for mood boards, and this is a collection of boards that I enjoy. I like the layouts or I like the colors or the theme, just whatever mood boards inspired me. But in particular we're talking about layouts, so some different kinds of layouts for example, this layout has the color palette. Here in individual squares, it has circles with images in there that convey the move they're going for and has smaller images. So that's one option for creating a layout. This is a simpler layout it. You could also use this for your mood board, one image and your color palette and maybe some text. There are a lot of different ways you can lay out your mood board. I like the mood boards that can that have a variety of shapes and colors. Now this class was primarily inspired by Sandy, all knock who created this beautiful watercolor mood board. You see, she has her color swatches. She has her theme or her text there, and then she has an image in the background. This was such an inspiration to me that she did this, and that's really the reason why I made this class. So I'm just going to peruse down a little bit and see if I can find a mood board that has a different layout that I like. So I find this mood board to be interesting. It has the circle. It has some text in the middle and it has the color palette here and different size and types of images. If you find one that you like, you can always scroll down and look Atmore. In that same, it could be the same color palette, the same type of layout, that sort of thing. So Pinterest is a great way to find mood board inspiration for your layouts. It's not only good for finding color and images and inspiration in general, but it's great for finding layouts. Look at this layout. Vertical layout has 123 123 images here, one image there. They all convey the same idea and color palette, and then it has the words at the bottom, red and aqua, so they have a red and aqua theme. They're trying to show maybe how these colors work together, so I think that's pretty cool. There's a similar one that's Aguan Blue, like this one that has a couple of quotes on and has individual images. It has circular shaped color palette here. This one has a lot of art images in it, and these are overlapping, so that's a little bit different than some of the other mood boards that had very distinct borders. These are overlapping. You could actually collage a mood board. You might want to just do things on different pieces of paper and then put them all together. Or you could do it digitally. But for the purposes of this class, we're going to focus on water color. I like this one a lot. It's got a circle color palette theme and nice, cohesive color. Strong color palette right there. Now let's talk about Camba. When you open up Canda in your Web browser, you'll see a menu on the left. Choose templates. So this will open up a window that shows lots of categories and weaken scroll down kind of far gonna go past posters and logos and infographics all the way down to photo collage when you open a photo collage. The first thing on the list is mood boards, so we go from templates to photo collage to mood boards, and that's going to open up a whole world of possibilities. So this is the free version of Canada, and there are many, many mood board layouts to choose from, from very simple to more complex. If you want to make a mood board with photos. Canda is a great place to do that, but we're just here today. Toe look at layouts, so just scroll through looking at the options. If you see a layout that you like, you can choose that and it will open up. Sort of like pinches does. It will have more like this section so you can be even more inspired. So think about the placement of things, the color palette, the images, the text and how those look and feel to you, and that can give you a good idea of a jumping off point for a layout for your mood board. So now that we found some inspiration, let's go make some thumbnails for our own mood boards. 12. Loayout Thumbnails: Now we have an idea of our layout options as well as the elements. We might want to include our mood board. We can do some layout thumbnails. A thumbnail is just a quick sketch to get your ideas on paper. So we already have some ideas in mind from our research that we've done before now. And I'm just sketching some of my favorites. I like the idea of including a circle in my layout. I want my title to be on a separate little rectangle, and I like the Nautilus circular motif that I have going on. So I'm also sort of thinking about that with the thumbnails, thes air, all just possibilities. Nothing is decided, really yet. Just some ideas and playing around a little bit with the idea of a portrait orientation. But I actually really don't like that very much. Once I drew it on here, I thought, This is not going to work very well for what I'm doing, So I kind of automatically dismissed that so kept playing around with the shapes, moving things around, trying things out, putting squares here, putting rectangles there, thinking a little bit about the Pinterest and the candle boards and then just my ideas and getting them out on paper. It took possibly 5 to 10 minutes max. I didn't spend a lot of time. You can see it's very messy. Things are overlapping. It's just to get your ideas out there. Now. If you haven't done thumbnails before and you feel like maybe it's a waste of time, I'm here to tell you it's more helpful than you think that it is. At first I resisted the idea of doing thumbnails, but I once I tried it, I found that it was so helpful and a quick way to get ideas on paper. And you actually come up with more ideas that way. It's kind of a brainstorming technique, and so I hope that you will try this out as part of your project. So once you finish sketching your thumbnails, then it's time to just choose your favorite and move on the sketching your mood board 13. Choosing Layout And Elements 1: Now I have my layout thumbnails and I have my sketches and I want to just sort of distill down into what I want to include and how I would think I want my layout. But I also want to just allow myself to remain fluid and work intuitively, so this is a loose structure, and I can change it at any point in time, at least until I get that paint on the paper and then the paints there, right? That decision has been made. So I'm thinking about my sketch and I'm thinking about the layout. I don't want an entire circular mood board, even though I have this big novelas shell sort of as a background here. I like that, but I don't want it to be the shape of my mood board. So this one's out. So for now, I'll just put like a little X here. I know I don't want that one. I don't want the vertical layout that doesn't say beach by the sea. To me, it feels too tall. I want wide like though the wide vista of the ocean. That's why I'm thinking no vertical layout, um, to too graphic don't like that one. Just not speaking to me, Not for this project. At least I'd like how this is down in the corner. This, like the simplicity of this. But I'm not sure how. Maney, I need to think about how many elements I want to include. Okay, so now I'm going to go switch back over to thinking about what I want to include. Now, I really don't want to use my little highlighter on this page. So how I want to indicate I want to kind of narrow down what I want to include for sure. I think I want to include the novel a shell, though it won't be this big. So I know what I can do. I can make a list, right? So I have my sub nail ideas. I know I don't want any of these three. I'll just cover those up, and then I have my sketches. I really am liking this eagle. I think I really want to include the Siegel. So so far, I have Nautilus, which is the spiral shape with Joe indicate. And then I have the sequel. So I'm thinking a loose watercolor. I'm sorry. Have color my hands a loose watercolor of the Siegel, not the whole bird. I like just the head. I'm going to remind myself that I'm keeping that loose. And then I like the seahorse. But I don't think I want to include this in the bite. It might by the sea theme. I also like footprint, something from my own photos from going to the beach. But again, I don't think I want to include it. The Siegel's lying like this. I can include it any point in time. I also have the idea, even though I didn't sketch it of doing sort of, Ah, Seascape ah type landscape which may include the birds. So again, everything is loose and impressionistic. I love the mermaid tail. I really want to include the Murray tell. But see, now I'm getting into having a lot of things. So I'll need to probably narrow down this list because now I have a lot of idea. The circle element I know I want to include a circular element, and I think what I want that to be is sand dollar. So the sand dollar here, I think, would be a really cool way to include the color palette. So I'm going to do right that circular color palette. So that's how I want to include. My color palette is by using the circular circular sand dollar. But I also have the Nautilus. I really love the novel. I don't know if it's right for this or not. I am going to include by the sea as my text. So that is my actual title. My theme. I'm going to include that for sure. And it will be rectangular beings or I like the way that looks. So I have waves on here and probably not going to include waves. I don't know. I'm struggling to narrow it down. Now I have the scales, which is kind of a nice little doodle. So the thing is in making this sketch, I love all of these things, right? But now I have to sort of distill it into what gives me that feeling, the feeling in the mood that I want to convey of being by the scene So this landscape Seascape idea can be sort of the background for my Siegel. Perhaps that's a 90 of the toy with, So this is just my my process of like thinking about it mulling it over. I really love the mermaid tail, but that's that saved by the sea to me and convey the mood that I want. So the mood that I want is that feeling of relaxing, of the wind and the waves and the i m just that feeling of serenity that you get by the sea . And I don't think as much as I like the mermaid tail, I don't think that I should include it in my mood board. Now I may change my mind when I finished the mood board because I haven't actually made the mood board at this point. I'm sharing, getting ready my actual process of getting ready to create smooth board. And so I don't know. I'm going to include yet. So this isn't this Israel, honest? This is the artist struggle, if you will, of narrowing things down, simplifying. You know that I love simplicity, and I know that I'll get overwhelmed if I have too many elements on here. So I think I'm taking out the mermaid till it may find its way back in, and I can't promise. But at this point in time, I think the mermaid tail has to go and I no want the Nautilus, and I'm not sure how to include that yet. And I made to actually some sort of painting that is similar to this visual kind of collage . But again, I want to keep it on the rectangular piece of pay if you can. On I'm struggling. Obviously, if you can narrow it down, that would be good. I know I have eliminated a few things I know. I don't want to see horse. I'm trying to take out the mermaid tail that I make no promises there. I know that I want to include some things like, I love the Segal. I love the Nautilus show again. I may incorporate that together somehow. And the sand dollar, for sure. This is a separate elements. So I have one too three. Now let's look at our layout. So this layout has one has the word. That's what this scribble is is the word or the title right? And it has this and this one has the circle, and the word on the circle is the sand dollars. So I don't that this would be in the corner here. The sand dollar. I'm thinking I think of golden rule kind of thing. Golden section or Golden rule is you have a layout and you divide it into thirds each way, and your focal point will be on one of the intersections. So I want my circle to be on one of the intersections. Not sure which one yet. I could put it at the top, and then it would be almost like the sun. And I'm thinking maybe a combination of these two so I would have Can you see? Yeah. So have my rectangle. Yes, this is messy. Sketchy. I would have my rectangle but have my circle in this top third an actual Long and Skilling there. So, like, this could be a painting. No, I don't like it. Don't like it like this better possibly the words here, or I'm going to have my words on a separate piece of paper that I'm going to add to my mood board so I could actually overlap. So, like, I could have my circle here in this 1/3 and overlap the word words right here. And if I wanted to, I could actually just have one big painting huh? I'm thinking now, well, maybe I could just do like this layout. It's a mood board, decisions, decisions. That's, you know, the hard part. So this would be words kind of like that idea. I'm mulling it over. That's why I'm sketching around, letting my brain just work out. Whether I like that or not much, I kind of I think I should least have this section that's two sections so that I would have my sand dollar hear my words by the sea. Then I could have money. Just put the Nautilus year so many decisions and then see you could break up each of these into thirds and that sort of thing. There lot of a lot of options if you saw the Canberra layouts. I hope you took a look at that because there are so many options and your mood board can fit you and your mood and your style could actually do this of a I'm really leaning toward more like this. So let me turn the page. Another piece paper 14. Choosing A Layout 2: okay. I know we don't want those on the side. I'll just do this. These air possibilities, right? These are possibilities. And I have this. So I'm really thinking This'll is This is crazy. This is not what I originally planned, guys, but I have to. I'm an intuitive artist, and I need to go with the flow for things to work for me. If I can't, if I don't go with the flow, things don't go well. So I need to do that. And what I'm thinking is a layout like this, but not necessarily All these elements, like it probably wouldn't have. These waves may not have the mermaid tail, right kind of thinking along those lines. I might, though I just might. So let's pretend I'm saying you see this now let's look at this. If this work in a layout similar to this except the words removed up here so I would have rectangle let's just make it. Let's just say we took our watercolor paper and did like ones on there like that which all may dio great. And then I would have my actual paper. Here we have this 1/3 owner circle of a sand dollar, right? It's got the flour. Little That would be my color palette. Right? Have been here. I could dio the Nautilus just like and done before, right? And I could have my Siegel please excuse these rough sketches. This is some baling cotton thing. A big seed all over here, right? There's his wing. OK, No, that's messy, but Or you could do the Siegel and then put down here something else. And then I may take and make a border somewhere, Or I may do just like I haven't hear the sections of the novelas. All right. So many possibilities. I like the bird facing this way, though. Say, I have my wants to circle here wants do the lines here. Let's do our bird here. And let's do do the Nautilus here. Do you beach here? Now where my words go using my words could go by the sea up here, Even with match on. I'm just going to keep going and thinking about what I'm doing and sharing that with you and seeing what looks nice. So then what if I have the bird much debating and deciding? I think I will go with this actually already kind of have this lay help. I'm probably not going to include, Like I said, as many elements is here, and I'm going for by the sea thinking of the ocean, the wind and the waves and the feeling of serenity and relaxation and fun. And I am trying to convey that with a minute board. And so I think that actually this kind of layout will work really well, I don't really have this ready laid out, and I mean, it's a rough sketch. Don't get me wrong, but I want to keep it loose in light and actually having a rough sketch like this. But it works pretty well. Okay, so I will do a sketch of my watercolor paper from this, and then I will also include the color palette. Now, I don't know. I may trim this. I may not, and I think I'm going to put the lines on my watercolor paper so it won't be the entire page that it takes up, but it will have a white border around the top and bottom. Still, I will extend this to this line because I like the idea that there's more and I think that's what I'm going for. I'll be using watercolor and eat. Probably I may draw are I may think my shell. I haven't decided yet. I'm just going to go with the flow with that. But I believe this design will work and I think also be able to include what I want to include. Now your design. You go through the same process. That's the idea, right? You go through this process of having your elements having some layouts that you did your thumbnails for. Shooted your thumbnails. You also did sketches or if you don't want a sketch, that's OK. You can use my page. I will have a printable for you of this page that you could use. And so if you don't want to sketch, that's okay. You don't have to sketch. It's good to practice drawing, though, or you could trace. So you go through the same process. You do lay up. You look on Camba for layouts. You look on Pinterest for ideas for layouts. Then you start Just thumb now, sketching some layouts, see which ones you like, see which ones you don't like, and then take your elements or your sketch, whether their photos or sketch or the printable and see how you want it toe work together in the layouts. Just like I just did all of these different options, right? I went through a lot of iterations of changes, and I did more thumbnails until I got one. That because of my sketch, this one fits what I like. I like my sketch. So I want to go forward with with this. I have also a second sketch that I did not record. That was similar. So this one is vertical and I don't want vertical. Huh? But I have also done this sketch, but I didn't show. I didn't record this. This was just, you know, sitting around sketching kind of thing. But I liked this idea. I like it here, and I want Teoh. I think I just wanted to go ahead, include that? Why? Why would I try and fight? What? I've already done anything. I think I was fighting a little bit of doing this idea of having the Nautilus encompass these things. I was kind of fighting it, thinking Well, I shouldn't do that. Shouldn't do that. So this is not about what you should or shouldn't do. This is about creating a mood, an inspiration for you personally. Now it can be used for other reasons. But this particular one is really for inspiration for you and for you to learn. So don't put too much pressure on yourself and I'll try not to put too much pressure on myself will go through this together, and we're going to create a beautiful food board. So I like this design. This is the one I'm going for. Got my starfish on there. Just here. And yes, let's see how it turns out. I would like for you in the project section. Once you do each section, so you do your thumbnails and then you can go ahead and start your project at any time. Just get it started. Even if you want to Just put your theme in the project section. That would be perfect. And then you can add to and as you go because this is a process, it's really not something necessarily the you would do in one sitting. It may take you an hour, a day for a week or or something like that. Just allow yourself to sort of and soak up your theme. Excuse me, And to sort of just take it all in drink in the thing that you want to convey and then you'll be able to pour it back out onto your page. That's the way intuitive painting works, right? So we're gonna keep it loose and light and fun. And, uh, I'm feeling like I've created an ambitious project for myself. So please don't feel like you have to include all the things that I'm including, or all the things that I included in my sketch include the things that work for you that include the things that speak to you. Now you can, of course, copy Mind for this class. That's perfectly fine. We all learned by copying. If you, you know, have small Children, Are you seen small Children learning to write? They have letters to trace so they can learn to make those letters. So please feel free to trace it and write it. But please also give me credit that you your mood board is inspired by mere. This class at Jessica Sanders aren't on instagram or wherever you share it. Let's move on to putting things together. 15. Setting Up To Sketch The Layout: So now that I have decided on my layout, I'm going to start putting that on my watercolor paper. The first step is to draw circles. I used the inside and outside of the tape roll and a small dish to cut several different sizes because I didn't know which size I was going to use yet and that also cut a small strip for my title. Next, I took out my base sheet of watercolor paper and I wanted a two inch border, so I marked two inches on each side. I'm using a T Square. You can use a ruler. You can use another piece, paper on top, whatever you need just to draw some lines toe layout where you want your move or to be. Now you have a couple of options here. If you wanted, you could the tape around the border, so you have a very perfect clean border without having to work too hard at it. But I think I want a more soft fuel soft look to my layout. So what I'm going to do then, is draw lines that air curved that are approximately two inches around. That's why Andrews, a border so I could do that. But you can. Like I said, if you want perfectly clean borders, you can take this with washi tape or masking text. You could use a Posca tin or you could even use a Sharpie to create your lines. I kind of just want it. Glue started further out and kind of went to curb into this area. And I'm just going to try to do it in one long stroke. And it doesn't have to be perfect, so I would turn it like this. Go. It's kind of too far further than I want to be there, but that's OK. Okay. Took in approximate. Okay, so I may go back. I'm thinking these up later, but right now, this is where I and I think that by the sea well overlap in this area like this. So this would be the word. Then I'll choose one of these size circles. Actually, I think this one is going to be the right size playing with the and I did not cut this out because this way, I don't have to worry about having perfectly clean edges here. This is going to be the shape of sand dollar. When I'm finished, I'll cut out a little notches and everything. But I don't wanna have to worry about getting outside the lines. Yeah, I'm going to do Won't have a white edge unless I layered it. I could layer it on top of another smaller circle, and then it would have the white edge. So that this this is about painting and layering and having lots of fun. 16. Sketch The Mood Board: So now I have my layout done quick and easy and nice. I could changing the moving around if I didn't like Feli. The Lions look, but I'm happy with it right here. I don't know exactly where it's going to go, but I want to indicate this. So I move that down. Second kind of have an idea where that's going to go so it won't put elements in those areas. So I'm just going to keep in mind as I'm sketching that those little areas will be covered . So now I'm going to be looking now at my reference sketch. But I made of my inspiration, and I'll be looking at this and using it to do my sketching again. Feel free to trace. Use a light table with a reading to do. There's no worries there were. I don't think I want the center of the novelist to be in the center of the paper, so I'm thinking about how I want my composition to be now where I want to focus. But the center of the Nautilus is not going to be the focal point. It's just going to move the eye throughout the composition, so I think I'll just go for it. As I said before, it doesn't matter if you draw where you're elements are going to be. No, I'm not going outside my wines that I made notice. I stopped at my wife, and I am also going to sketch it. Make it. I feel don't feel free that don't feel like your very first line has to be it. That's just an indicator. And yes, my pencil binds may show up in my final piece, and I'm okay with that. I think it has character to your to your drawings and paintings, if you can see essentially the history of the painting. So I'm thinking about this line. Help continue and to draw out there. But I want to race that. So that's how it would draw. Like I'm not putting my pencil down, but I'm continuing that movement of my arms. So follow it around and right then continue to follow it around. Now, if you wanted to, you could have this go outside the edge of your line. But I've already put my line here, so I don't really want to do that. Okay, so there's my Nautilus on the beginning of it. Now I feel like this is not even going to show. I don't think this is even going to show that I'm still going to move it because it's affecting the way I'm drawing other things. Okay, so right, so normalised is pretty simple. It's a spiral with wavy lines that go radiating from the center, so they kind of go out and there's kind of squiggly and go out toward the edge, and they're closer together at the beginning. I don't want this line to meet the corner in thinking about composition. I don't want this line to meet this corner because that will be a strange look that will draw your eye in a weird way. So we don't want that. So I'm thinking about that when I'm drawing my light to me, that's more important then the actual reality of how you see it on in real life, so going for loose and fun and free. So I'm not worried too much about getting it all perfect. I do want to increase the amount of space between the lines as I go around, so I'm just sort of doing that as I'm thinking about it again. I'm stopping at this line. So in this far, and then I'll go like this far. And I also want to think about my other composition. Now remember, it's going spiraling outward this way. So you want your lines to go around like this if you're sketching it yourself. Also, I did notice when I was sketching the Nautilus that this line from the inside would in there, and then the next one would start, just passed it and go toward that's That's the room way for that line to go. But it would start, just passed it and go out. So it's almost like it's connected, but it's not. So that's what I'm going to do here and here and even there and that I can actually, even I'm going to leave. That may fill these in. I might not. I don't know yet. So I have this nice little ship on my little sketchy lines. This is all covered up right here, remember? That's okay. It's not a problem. This is also going to be covered up. I just want my lines to go in the direction that I'm planning. Okay, so I'm sketching with the idea that I'm going to be painting water colors. I don't want a lot of detail here. I do want to think about how they're some little circles and kind of things in this line will be thicker when we paint it with water color. So it's a guideline. And so just put some sketchy bits in and here I noticed they're like little spots of something Mama on the Pinterest image, so I wouldn't think about adding a few tiny idea of details. And then I can just go with it later when I want to work up guy like the texture that these have. So like I might put some little circle. He bits and ovals and shapes in there. That's just mean, Okay, I have my novelist now going to look back on my sketch and look at my elements, and I remember that we talked about the Siegel possibly see escape. I was debating on the mermaid tail, and we know we're going to include the sand dollar, so I think that I'll start with the Siegel, but I don't think I want the seal here. I don't want the Siegel to be in the center I think I'll put the Seigel here. And I think actually, this could be the top of the head of the Siegel. So it's going to cover up this line of it. So the C call goes here down and then has a beak because out, I'm looking at my reference, waiting more than I'm looking at my drawing. It's very important trying to get angles, thinking about angles again. Just get it. Just just feel free to trace if you like, But I just want to share the drawing with you. That way, if you want to do it can to speed up the sketching session here. This class is not really about sketching. It's really about creating a watercolor mood board. But sketching is part of that process, so I definitely want to show you that now. My first pass at doing this eagle here on the finished piece, I wasn't happy with it. The angles were wrong. The head was not the right shape, etcetera. So I did redraw this later on in the video. So you may wonder why I'm showing you this because I completely redid it right. But I part of my teaching is that. I want you to understand that artists don't get it right the first time, Every time, all the time. In fact, almost never do who we get it right the first time. We're all learning, growing, practicing. And unless we've done something a lot of times, we don't necessarily get it right every time, not even the best artists into The important thing is that we keep going. We creek learning and we keep trying. The next thing I sketched was the mermaid tail. And really, the thing about the mermaid tail is that you have a flow to your line. So I'm just drawing a long, curved line. That's sort of a sensor area of where it want that tell to be. And then I build the tail around that, starting as always, with light, sketchy lights. And then I can darken the lies I want to keep. And then I will actually erase the lines that I don't need in this case, because there are a lot of them and they're distracting as you're drawing, try and keep the lines of your pencil loose and flowing. Now I'm just checking the overlap of where my elements will be and drawing little skills. Just a few little details on the mermaid tailed indicate where I want sort of the scales to be, and it's just for fun. I guess I couldn't live without that mermaid tell I really wanted it in this painting. Now I'm thinking about how that tail overlaps the edge of the line. I like that it goes out of the actual border, and that's it for the mermaid tail. It's simple and easy to draw. If you want to sketch it yourself, I encourage you to give it a try. Let's draw the starfish first. I start with the top of a plus sign. Then we'll add two angled lines at the bottom to indicate where all the legs of the starfish go. I don't know if they're called legs or not. That's just what uncle and everything on the starfish is rather curved. So that ends or not pointy. They're just curved. The womens meet their curve. So I added curves, and I'm leaving that really sketchy line because it's going to add some depth to the edges to add more dimension to my actual starfish painting in the end, so you'll see that I'm just adjusting all the angles and trying to make it look more start fishy and, like the novelist and the Mermaid, till I'm adding little bits of texture, not covering the entire thing with texture but just small things that will add the texture that reminds me of a starfish. All I want is an impression of starfish. It doesn't have to be perfect, realistic. We're doing loose watercolor, loose sketching and but you'll know this is a starfish when we're finished, which is pretty cool. Now it's time to tackle that Siegel again. I just wasn't happy with the angles and the look. The beak was too slanted downward, and I also moved up a little bit on the mood board, so it's not exactly where the line was, but it's a little bit higher now, and I like this design much better. I have my reference photo next to me instead of drawing from my own sketch so that I can see better where the angles are and how everything lines up with the big in the eye and all of that stuff. So I admit I'm being pretty fussy with this little sketch. I don't know why it was just where it was in the process at the time. Sometimes I'm more focused on getting details right and sometimes less, But it is still a very light sketch. It does not include a lot of detail, and that will work for what we're doing on this mood board. I use the same process of doing a light sketch and then darkening lines did a little bit of erasing and correcting some of the proportions. So the beak needed to be a little longer that I needed to be kind of close to the top of the head. The breast of the bird needed tow line up with the end of the beak, and now I'm much more pleased with the result. Let's take a look at our overall layout. So far, I'm pretty happy with the way everything looks so far. I'm debating on whether I want to put the color palette on the sand dollar in the circle or on the place where I originally planned the title. Not sure yet, and I may also add more elements like the flying birds and the sea shells and the mermaid scales and all that stuff to the painting later, but I'm just not sure yet, and I can decide that later. I don't have to know everything at this very moment, but I need to just stop it. Take a break. I'm going to leave this and think about it for a little while and then I'll come back and we will continue. So if you get to a point in your mood board or in your sketching when you are not sure what to do, you've been working for a while. You may need to take a little break, have cup of tea of coffee and then come back again and were and see with some fresh eyes and see what else you think you might want to add. If anything at all off course, you can always add things later, especially if you're going to be using ink over your watercolor or anything like that. So let's take a little break and we'll come back 17. Paint Starfish: Now that we have the main elements of our design sketch, let's start painting. We'll start with the starfish. Let's mix that nice coral color from the yellow, gold deep and the permanent Rose matter. We want a nice watery mixture. It needs to have quite a bit of water and not too much paint, because it is a very light color that's going to look a little darker on the in the dish concentrated. Then it will on the paper. Wow, look at that coral. It is gorgeous. So here's my color. And I have, as I mentioned before, I cut this out. I'm not worried about going outside the age because I'm going to cut it out again, but same time I still kind of feel need to do that way. And I'm just putting on a nice based color here, a little bit lighter over there, a little bit darker over here. I want to add a little texture and drop a little water, and there, right in there this is going to spread out and adds some texture and then continue my painting. Now you don't have to cut this out ahead of time. I just did this so that I could work on my layout in a more cohesive way. Maybe a little more rose, a little more yellow, just guilt mix of color there. Maybe there's a little sun shining on it. Now I'm just dabbing in and dropping in, working intuitively back and forth to get the colors that I want Now. I could have just let these mics on the paper, but it's kind of fun. Kind of fun to do this couldn't. So I got a little more peeing in a little more orangey, and that all works and I'm dabbing it. This is going to spread out. It's still wet and wet, and I want this sort of areas where it curves to be darker because it's sort of a shadow there. So I'm just going to add a little more cold there. Little around the edge there still wets, going to bleed out perfect. The reason I'm adding this darker to the edges is to add depth to my painting, so that is just a quick little starfish. I'm soften this edge a little now I just need to let this dry. You see how it's like going up a little bit. I can fix that. See me do this many times, Just gets back and whiten out because it'll be more evenly wet. So well in London was try a little bit. I'm thinking about all the texture here, and I don't really want that much texture on my starfish. But I do want a little bit. Okay, so now I'm going to do some glazing and add a little texture first. I just want a deep in some of these areas and make them a little darker. I wanted to be light and sketchy, kind of around the edges there, as I mentioned before. Add some shadow and I've just using the same color, just making a little darker. It automatically becomes darker because of the layering because of the glazing, this one to be the darkest. I don't know why I just do that. I'm going to just tough in some little dots here. I feel like that's going to convey the idea that there's texture. Now I could splatter this, you know, but I just don't feel you don't feel like splattering, And I originally was thinking of using a small brush, but it just don't know if I want to do that, either. Do you see after on in a few little dots here and there? I'm only touching the watercolor paper where it is wet. I mean, where is dry for kids, with one of my thinking so tapping in adding texture. And I'm served connecting it to that wet area so that it blends out like it's not a smooth transition, like a man, a lot. And then maybe a little can use a small brush for this. Remember, it's kind of a star shape, a little bit of a star shaped here. You know, it's just a impression, and you don't have to do this. It's just me. Find most of my pants. I'm really liking that. I may go back with ink a little bit later. I don't know. I think I want to drop in a little more color there, just a little more here. Can I like that little bits of texture here and there. This needs to be a little darker right around the edge, just going to add some depth, okay? And I'm not having all soft edges. I'm not having all hard edges. It's a mix. Seven. I'm getting some nice color there. I think I might want it to be even darker. Some of his darker colors. So I think what I can do, I'll test it. So we have our our yellow deep here rose there, and it's It's not very dark, right. It's pretty light, pretty light color there. No matter what I do, it's going to be like okay, but I want to have some dark color that's similar, So I think I could actually add in my burnt Sienna and make it a little darker. I don't know, though, if that's really what I want to go for. So I'm gonna add more of this rose into the burnt Sienna. That's kind of working. So let's add a little more. Remember, I'm only going to add a little bit of this. Doesn't have to be perfect. I just want to be a little darker in some of these little areas, so I'm just going to tap, and that's a nice, darker color, said. It doesn't have to be perfect or anything. Just a few dots, a darker because it's going to dry lighter, right? No matter what, it's watercolor dries lighter. So just the idea that there's some texture and some depth. It's not very realistic, right? It's just fun. This is so fun. It may not be very realistic, but guess what you know, and I know it is starfish, and anyone looking at this will know that it's a starfish and that it accounts more tapping down in this area. Some of this is wet, some of its more dry. If it's wet, it's going to spread out and it's more dry. It's gonna be the same. So just a few darker there in the center star area Start ish area. We're just trying to convey an idea, All right, I like that A lot may or may not be finished, probably when I put the entire mood board together, I'll juice and finishing touches. I am going to cut this out, though, and it will not have this white paper on the edge. Okay, so that's painting are starfish, so let's pay the sand dollar next 18. Sketch & Paint The Sand Dollar: Let's sketch the sand dollar so we can see for my reference photo that the sand dollar has five sort of flowers shaped petals on the top of it, but a dot in the center of your circle to help you place your pedals. Turn the paper as necessary to get your placement right, but we do want to have them sort of space kind of evenly around our circle. Remember, the goal here is not perfection. We want to keep it loose and light and have the impression of a starfish. So hold your pencil loosely, make your lines light. Next, we'll sketch in the little notches that we see on the side of a sand dollar, along with the holes that we can see in this would now some sand dollars don't have holes. It's up to you if you want to include those details or not, this is your painting. So now that I'm finished with a sketch, let's move on to watercolor in the first layer of the water color. I'm using the burnt Sienna that I chose earlier. A very watery loose mix, not a lot of paint, quite a bit of water, and I'm using a brush that doesn't hold a lot of water. I started with the color, but then I clean my brush, and now I'm just adding a little bit of water and spreading the color around that I had. What I want is darker around the edges and lighter around the center in order to create the illusion of debt. I'm also leaving a bit of white of the paper toe. Add a little bit of sparkle to this sand dollar. Keep in mind we're going to cut this out later to the shape of sand dollars, so there's really no need to stay precisely within the lines. I wanted to add a little more depth of color so well, this is wet. I'm adding a little bit more color, especially around the edges. Now let this layer dry. Next we'll work on the pedals of the sand dollar. We need the burnt sienna and then thrown blue combination that gives us a nice gray color that worked perfectly on this sand dollar. We'll need a very watery mix. We don't really need very much pain, and I wanted to get that nice gray color, so you sort of work back and forth between the two colors until you get the color you're looking for and you can always test it. I'm using my smallest brush to make the little lines of texture that I see along the edge of what I'm calling the pedals. It doesn't matter if I go over where I already have the sort of sand dollar color. It's just going to change the warmness of the gray just a little bit because of transparency. But it's not really going to affect our entire painting, so work out perfectly and notice I'm not making one long stroke because I want to capture that texture idea. I'm making little small strokes along the edges of the pedal area, and I will just continue doing this until I've done all of the outer edges of the pedals and I'll switch techniques when I get to the inside part of the pedals. For the inside part, I am using a longer stroke, which will give me a variety of texture in my fan dollar and in some areas I will actually make multiple strokes and the inside part of the pedal just to add more interest in depth and next. I want to fill in those holes. So I'm creating what is like a shadow with just a little small stroke that's curved on the end on the shape of one side of the little hole that I drew earlier. And last but not least, I am working on that center. As it turns out, the center is actually a star shape, which is pretty cool, I think. And so I wanted to just add a little bit of the darker color there to show where that is, just because it's fun and I like it and just a few more dots and a little bit more depth of color in those holes. And I'm calling this finished for now. I may change it. Some later. I may add more detail. We'll just have to wait and see. 19. Title Thumbnails: Now that we've made progress on painting armory board, I think it's time to figure out how we're going to do the title. So let's make some thumbnails will use the rectangle that we're going to actually paint on . Plus, I will put my elements on here to mark where those edges will be covered up to help me get a good sense of the layout. Now, I'm just going to try out some different placement of the words and see which one that I think works for me. You decide what works for you. I tried out a few different placements. Four to be exact, and I ended up liking the 4th 1 best. Now, if you're a Lederer, you may have, like a ton of different things you want to do here, and that is perfect. Make it as kala graphic as you want it to be. So once I had it narrowed down to the fourth selection, I wanted to add a little bit of a border and see what that would like and also try and figure out where I wanna put my color swatches. So these little petal shapes are where I'm thinking of putting my color swatches. I think it could work. And then I will still have my sand dollar and it won't have color swatches on it. Have some fun playing around with this. Lay out a little bit. Try different things. Add texture to your letters, anything like that that you're feeling like you want to do in this bit of a creative process. Once you're leaning toward a certain direction, you can move elements back around and just test and see if that is really what you like or not. Before you move on to doing your final part of the project. And remember, this is not set in stone. If you decide on one thing now, but then later you like something else. Better. By all means, change your plan. It is no problem to do that. This is your artwork, and it can follow your lead, your intuition, your heart. When you're satisfied with what you have, then you could move on to sketching the title 20. Title Sketch: Let's move on to sketching the title. The first step will be to Mark. Where are starfish and sand Dollar will be next. We'll use our thumbnail to sketch out the title. I'm going to start with the main word for my title, which SC and I'm creating large letters in just a neat handwriting. I'm leaving space so that I can build up the letters with a second line, as I'm doing on the S right now. I'll continue this for each letter, sketching lightly so that I can embrace if I need to and make adjustments as I go. I'm thinking of flowing water so I don't want super harsh lines. I want more curved lines, more like a splashy idea, and I'm erasing whenever I need Teoh. I'm adjusting as I go so that it looks nice when I'm finished. When the sketches finished will be water coloring inside the letters, I want to make sure that I leave enough space for the paint now. Once I'm happy with the way the world see looks, I'm going to go ahead and work on the next letters or words, which is by the which will go just above the words. See, I did make a little bit of a change here. From my thumbnail sketch, I decided to go with all lower case letters. I felt like that would work better, stand out less. I really want the words see to stand out and by the to just be some small letters. Then her, like descriptors. Again. I'm using neat handwriting on her. Racing is needed now These We're not gonna have watercolor inside. They're just going to be written with a small brush, so I don't need to add those extra double lines. I've made the decision that my color palette will be these little floral shapes that or seashells shapes that are around the edge. There really seashells in shape of a flower. So I think that's kind of fun. And some sketching that area in is well, and that's one reason why was important to draw in. Where are other elements would be. And last but not least, I added some little dots and circles and splash areas around the letters and around by little C shows. And that's it. The title sketches done. Now let's get our our elements and we'll cut them out more precisely and see how they look with our title. So all in doing here is cutting carefully around my ones that I made. I cut off the notches for the sand dollar and cut around the edge of the starfish. I'm removing white border now. If you want to keep a white blubber on there, that's perfectly fine is completely up to you now. I'm very happy with the way this turned out, so let's move on to the next step. 21. Painting Seagull First Layer: We've done a lot of work to get to this point, but we're finally here to painting the first layers. Let's start with their Siegel with my reference photo Nearby. As you can see, I'm starting with the beak. I'm using the permanent yellow deep with a light watering picks, and I'm just going straight for that beak. It is a small area, so I'm using my small brush. I'm going to add the same color to the I. If you've noticed in the reference photo colors for the I and the beak are extremely similar, so I can use the same color for both areas. Now I'm using burnt Sienna to do the outline around the eye. I'm using a very light touch with the same brush that I used to paint the beak. Feel free to use a smaller brush like a size one or zero, if you prefer. I switched to a size zero to continue working on the I and to add a little bit of detail to the beak, I felt I needed a finer line and just like what I was doing my sketch. I'm still looking at my reference photo, still looking for angles, looking for distances and links, like seeing where the lines end and where the colors belong. So that's something I want you to notice. Here you can see the first sketch I did of the Sea Eagle here. Rather than erase heavily and mess up the texture of the paper, I decided to leave a little bit of light pencil mark there. But when I paint over it, you won't be able to see it at all. It will disappear straight into the shadow because I know the paint will be a little bit darker than the actual leftover sketch. So let's get back to painting are big. I've added a little bit of burnt sienna, and now I'm softening the edge of that. I want it nice and soft and light there. But then I also want that hint of strong color, as in the reference photo. But it's not. It's orange if you notice it's the burnt Sienna. So the only thing really to paint on the Siegel are light and shadows. What? We already have the light. That's our paper. So let's just add some shadows. I'm using a very watery mix of our Indian thrown burnt sienna gray that we made from the mixes earlier. And I'm adding shadow where I see it on the reference photo, which would be underneath the head on the breast of the bird and just in front of the I is a nice shadow if you notice on the reference photo. Thes shadows have rather hard lines, and so I'm not going to be softening the edges here. But I do want to add on a little bit more dark, the closer it is to the edge of the bird, because it's going to be even a little bit darker there. There's a little shadow just under the eye and actually on top of the I so want to be sure include those as well. Now let's do some negative shape painting and paint the sky around the sequel. I'm not going for the same colors in the photo. I'm using a much lighter wash of our and then thrown blue with just a tiny bit of burnt sienna. Two Great out a little bit, continuing to use this small brush, but feel free to use a bigger brush if you want to. I want to leave a little bit of white area around the top to sort of capture some light and create texture of feathers around the head of our Siegel. And the further away I am from that edge, the more water I'm adding and the more loose I can be, I'm just trying to be precise right around the edge of the head and then loosen it up from there to create the idea of the sky behind our Siegel. It's not going to be perfectly smooth. We're not creating a flat wash or anything like that. I wanted to have nice texture and I wanted to sort of fade away at the edges and the way to do that. It's just to soften the edges. Now I'm going to continue to paint carefully around the beak above and below it and what to be sure and keep as much as possible. A wet edged my paint. I don't want a hard line there where that Skye is supposed to be, but I do want a hard line there where the biggest, so be sure to do a small section at a time and then come back and soften that edge before moving on and as I'm painting, I'm keeping an eye on all the edges, seeing how they're looking. If it looks too hard, I'll go back and soften that edge a little bit more with just a clean, damp brush. As I mentioned earlier, I do want texture in this area, So I'm dancing my brush around and moving it very freely to create that. And I also want to add a little more depth of color to really bring out the Siegel. So I'm going to drop in more color in the wet areas around the beak, and you may notice that this color is a little bit more blue, so I'm just adding in a little bit more depth of color, a little more brightness there as well. It's still a very watery mix because remember that into thrown is super dark since his very watery, but it's still a little bit more blue than the gray we were using. Now let's work on the I were going to use that in the throne blue plus sap green that makes that super dark, almost black mix instead of using black. If you want to use black, please feel free to do so So my mix is not very watery. It all. It's mostly paint and not too much water. And I'm adding in very tiny details with my size zero brush. I started with this really defined circle. But now I'm just softening it up and adding those lines that I could see in the eye of my reference photo and I still felt it was a little bit too much, and so I just blot it off with the tissue house. I wasn't happy with people there. I just decided to get rid of it completely and start back again by adding a little bit more of that first Seanna. Very watery mix with the golden yellow, and I'll revisit that people once the cyst arrived. So now that we have our first layer paint down going to speed this video up a little bit, I will be adding details and second layers that will be repeating the same process again. So I feel like that you can follow along pretty well with that, using my size zero brush, I've added a line where the beak comes together and I'm just defining that shape a little bit more on the beak and around the eye. Next, I work on painting the shadow on the breast of the bird. I noticed it was a little bit smaller than it should be, as seen in the reference image, some just painting straight over the edge. I had there before with the gray mix of color. Same color we had before, just slightly darker, which means a little bit less water, adding in bits of texture to indicate feathers and softening that edge a little bit. Us well. Continue to add a few details of shadow around the eye and sort of refined why they already have on the painting by adding a little bit more shadow here and there. A little bit more texture underneath the beak there There's a different kind of curve. Then I had before, and there's that people. It came back just like I told you that it would. I added it in and then softened it toward the top edge of the eye of the bird and still filling a need for a little bit deeper, richer color there on the beak for that warren G color. So adding a little bit more paint there. That's the beauty of watercolor is how you can layer the colors together and create such beautiful colors, mixes and textures. And now we're back to the negative shape painting. But if you notice I left a little bit of that sky, it was sky before, but now it's actually the back of the head of the bird. I felt like it was a little bit smaller than it should be. So I just left that little area, and I'm using my finger to just swipe the edges and make it a little bit softer. I just want to deep in dark in this color a little bit, which will cause our Siegel to stand out even more. Now it's time to add a little bit of highlight. I'm using acrylic paint pin. This happens to be a Posca brand to add that shine to the I, and now I'm taking a little bit of white wash, and then it just a little with water and how you use that to add the water line on the I and bring out a few highlights on the back of the head and in other areas where I felt like I lost a little bit too much of the paper. So I'm really defining and redefining shapes here and adding a little bit more texture as well. You see me tapping with my finger. What that does it softens the effect of the gua sha there no hard lines. Once that's draw, I'm coming back in and adding a little bit more of that deep, dark black color that we made and really defining this I. And while that color is on my brush, I'm going to add it to the beak as well. And then being really fussy here, I decided that was a little bit too much white on the eye. So I'm going back with a little bit of that yellow just to cover up part of that, And so are Siegel is done for. Now we'll move on to other elements, and then we may revisit this later 22. Painting Mermaid Tail: Let's get started on our mermaid tail. We'll be using four colors teal, peacock, sap green and ended, thrown to create a Grady int working from very dark at the base of the tail to very light at the end of the tail. Now we know from our color warm up that if we take in and thrown our perp Aly blue and we mix it with sap green, we're going to get it almost black color. And that's what I'm going to be going for here at the base of the tail. But I'm going to let those colors mix on the paper rather than mixing them in my palace. I'm going to transition from this really dark, almost black mix of into drone blue and sack ring into the peacock blue, which is not quite as dark as the end and from mix and then into the teal and then into an even more watery mixture of the two to create a really light value of teal at the tip of the tail. I'm watching the edges. I go to keep them wet. I don't want anything to dry and have a hard edge except the edge of the mermaid tail that is it. So work back and forth between your colors to create a nice Grady int from dark all the way to super really light and direct. So you can see through the teal that I have a little bit of dried edges there where you could see the dark lines. But all I'm going to do is just paint right over that and adding a little bit more of the dark color. It's going to work out perfectly, and I'm just moving that pain around. I don't mind if it's a little bit blotchy or splotchy. We're not going to have this super smooth radiant. That's not really what we're going for. What we're looking for is a smooth transition of color, and you get that by keeping those edges wet for the lightest part of the tale. I'm just adding water, so we'll be using wet on wet technique here, but I'll add water and then I'll add a little bit of the cobalt teal paint. I could have just used a very watering mix of the cobalt eel, but I didn't really want to dilute down what I had in my palette and so chose to do this with them. What technique, instead, So paint carefully and refine the edges as you go, while everything is still wet. And then you'll have a nice line and flow to your mermaid tail to get a darker color at the very tips of the tail. I just dropped in more cobalt thio, concentrating cobalt ill at the end, and it will flow into that water and create a nice transition there. You may also notice that thesaurus of right side or the bottom side of the mermaid is a little bit darker than the left side, so that Issa conveyed the idea that the light is coming from the left side and it's a little shadowed on the right side Now, once that layer is dry, you can go back in with a second layer, especially to darken up those start colors, because sometimes the first layer just isn't going to get you a stark as you wanted to be. Sometimes it takes 23 or more layers, but you repeat the same process of working from color to color, going lighter as you go. I'm keeping that smooth transition of color by keeping all paint edges wet. I'm not letting anything dry for add that next color, and I'm just adding a little bit more water as I goes well in orderto lighten them. Brighten those colors a little bit towards the tip of the tail. During this, save the painting. You can also continue to refine your lines a little bit. If you see that you've missed the edge a little or something like that, that's fine. Just go ahead and paint to your pencil line and don't worry about it being perfect. But the same time, If you want to make that more smooth flowing line, you can do that. At this point, it's time for my favorite thing splattering. I'm using my fan brush, a little bit of cobalt ill and also a little bit of peacock glued. Add that lovely texture. And speaking of texture, we can use our small size zero brush to create some scale. I don't want to put these all over. I just want to put a few to convey the idea that there there, I also want to add a little bit of detail to the tail in the form of stripes. I'm using the peacock blue with my little zero round brush. To create that effect, I'm making some squiggly marks, which will also in the K kind of some scales there as well. And I'll continue to add a few more scales to the Murray. Tell the body of the mermaid tail. So this will just create some nice fishy texture. And I really love. Now let's get out. Our metallics were still using are small round brush and we're going to paint in a little bit of metallic on our mermaid. I painted in a few of the scales. I added a few more skills, and then I wanted to see how we want to take this gold a little bit further. And so I decided I would add some outlines to my mermaid tail around the tip of the tail and around the side of the body of the tail. Now for the gold, we really want to be an accent color. We don't want to take over, so try not to add too much to it. Even if you love gold is Bunches idea. Just just exercise some restraint. Hold back a little, don't add too much. Just add just enough to make it sparkle. So I got so excited with the Murray tell that I pretty much finished it in just this one. Painting Session six will work on painting the Nautilus. 23. Painting The Nautilus 1: Let's paint the first layer of our Nautilus. We'll choose colors from reference photo. This sort of light yellow is in both the Nautilus and the seashell reference photo and a neutral blue grey, so we'll use the burnt sienna and then thrown combination with a lot of water. Plus, our permanent yellow deep will also be using salt to create texture. Let's start with that very watery mix of gray. It's a little bit darker than what we used on the Siegel you noticed. I mixed up a lot in my dish so that I can cover a large area as well. I'm also using my large size 12 round brush so I can get lots of paint all at one Go. Now we're going to create a variegated wash, which simply means has more than one color in the wash. And you sort of added as you go, I'm using lots of water with this. There's not much color at all, and I'm leaving some small white spaces that show the spiral area of the Nautilus. I'll work back and forth between my gray and my yellow, and I'll work my way around the spiral following the Contour of the Nautilus. I don't want the paint on top of my Murray tail or my Siegel, but as far as the lines that create the the sections of the Nautilus, I don't mind painting over those they're going to show through anyway, and it will work out just fine. So my color is placed based on where I'm thinking the light is coming from. So if the light is shining down from the left side, then I'm going to have the graze over on the right side, and I'll have the yellows more toward the left side where the idea that the sun is coming from, we do get a little bit of greenish grey when that gray and yellow mix I'm perfectly OK with that. At green color is still a C like color. As I'm painting, I'm still keeping in mind that I'm making a mood board, and I want that mood of light, airy, breezy and calm to shine through in this painting. Now I'll put my brush down for a second, and I'm going to add salt to the wet areas of the painting. Salt doesn't work on dry painting to create texture, but it creates beautiful texture and star like patterns in the wet paint. Some of the paint that put it on it's already dry, but I'm not going to worry about that, because again, this is the first layer, and I know I'm going to be adding more color and paint to this painting. Some areas will have more salt than others, and that's just going to create a variation in texture. Now, while that section is drawing, I'll go ahead and pay the next section of the novelas again. I'm using the yellow. This time I'm adding in a little bit of our rose matter just to create a little bit more variation there. And I'll still be using the gray color and adding salt as well. Keep a nice wet edge and continue adding and dropping in color, working your way around the novelists. I'm actually also going to add in some of our Thiel just to start trying to tie the painting together a little bit, and here they're all drop in mawr color just repeating it and adding more texture as I go. I'm really going for a lot of texture. If you notice from our reference photo are. Nautilus has a lot of texture, and I want to keep that in the mood board. I think it's going to look really nice and pretty. Some parts of the area that I'm painting now are not even going to show in the finished piece because my title section and my other elements are going to cover it up. But I'm going to paint it as if it were showing, just in case. You never know you might change your mind, you go. So go ahead and paint it as if it were going to show, and then you can figure out the other things later. Now I'm going to add in that till, but it's going to be really watery, super watery and a little bit mixed with this gray. I just want to start tying in the splatters and splashes that I have in detail with the rest of the painting. I'm going to finish this edge by softening it and making it disappear into the white, just like it does around the sequel. I'm refining a little bit more along these edges, and then I'm going to add a little bit more texture to the area but the top. Next, the tale. I'm going toe lift out a little bit of water that was just too much water there and then drop in a little bit of color in that sort of dancing way, like we did over by the Siegel to tie that part together, and we'll add a little bit more salt in the area where it's wet. It will take a little bit longer for your painting to drive, but once it's Dr, then you can brush off the salt with a stiff brush or just brush it off with your fingers. Next, we'll add another layer to our Nautilus. 24. Chat - Getting Unstuck: let's chat about getting stuck. Why do you want to chat about this? You ask Well, because that's exactly what happened to me. You see, after I finished the first layer of the Nautilus and I took a look of my painting once it dried, I felt stuck because I had made the mermaid tail so dark and everything else was so light. Things just weren't working together. And I thought, I don't know how I'm going to put this all together. I don't know how I'm going to make it convey the emotion that I want and I don't know how I'm going to make it be cohesive. And I honestly thought I need to start over. There are a few things that I did to get unstuck, and I want to share those with you just in case you have the same problem sometimes. So the first thing I did was take a break. I didn't just take an hour break or to our break. I took a break of two or three days. It could be even a week. Now, if you're working in a small project, an hour to might suffice. But because this is a big project, especially since I'm teaching. I needed a bigger break than that. During that break time, you may want to just take a peek at your painting, but you don't want to go and study it. You want to give your brain in your eyes a break, and sometimes that's just the time you need to work out a solution yourself. Contest this sort of working in the background and figuring it out, even when you're not aware of it and you're busy doing other things. So if you're stuck, one thing you can try is to take a break and then come back later with fresh eyes. So the second thing you can do is to review so you can look back over your layouts, your inspiration, your color palette, even the elements that you've already painted that you're pretty satisfied with and just look back over them and become inspired again by those colors and ideas. Think about the moon and the feelings you want to create with your project and allow yourself to feel those while you're reviewing what you've already done so far, so taking time to review your plan will again give your self conscious mind. Time to process and come up with new ideas for your project, then come back to your project with fresh eyes and a new perspective. So after taking this break and reviewing my plan, I came back to my project with fresh eyes and realized that the colors that I had chosen would work. But I needed to do a little bit of color correction on the Siegel and the novelist to bring in that mermaid tail, which is standing out very drastically. At this point. I also realized that I had basically finished the mermaid tail, but everything else was still just in its early stages of being painted and didn't have the contrast and color that I was going to have the end. So taking a break and reviewing my plan gave me the space, especially in my head, to figure out what the problem could be and to determine that I didn't really need to start over. But I could work from where I am now and continue in this project could still be a success . So if you get stuck, then I hope that you'll remember that sometimes this is just part of the process. Part of that creative flow and process and paintings in the middle sometimes don't look very good. But we could take a break. We can review our plan and we can come back with fresh eyes and figure out a solution to our problem or just continue and see how it works out in the end. Okay, let's continue with our mood for now. 25. Color Correcting 1: so now that I have a clearer direction of where I'm going from here, let's add a little bit of those colors in from our elements, as well as from the mermaid toe into our novelists and into the area around the Siegel. I'm starting with the coral color, the same color we used for a starfish. So I think that's going toe work beautifully, and I'm also using a little bit darker value. Now I can layer right over the paint that's already there. It's no problem. It's a gray and light color and layering. Just add some depth and that color may shine through a little bit. But that's perfectly fine. In this case, we want the muted color. I'm also adding a little bit of till there in the center to the top over that great. I'm using the same techniques that I used to paint the first layer of the Nautilus. I'm adding a wash of color of dropping in color to add texture, and I'm also adding salt to create even more texture. The texture we created the first time is still going to shine through, but this will just add more. The next thing I want to sort of color. Correct is by adding that teal into the sky around our Siegel. I'm just adding a little bit to each side, and I'm using those same techniques that I used when I painted this guy the first time, so I had the dancing brush. I'm softening the color around the edges, pulling it out to make it really nice and light. I continue to work around the beak of the bird very carefully, keeping my edges wet also and pulling that color out. Like I said, I wanted to be nice and light, especially on the edges, and I went ahead and pulled that color all the way down to the edge of our novels Shell. There I was, being careful to leave a little white edge along anonymous shell as well, and I'm dropping in more color just around the edge of the bird just to really make that white of the Byrds really comes, come alive and stand out. Will continue painting. Are Nautilus in the next lesson 26. Color Correcting 2: out that the sky is better around my Siegel. I'm comparing the color on my starfish to the color on my novelists, and I can see it needs to be really kicked up and punched up mover. It needs to be deeper, darker and also brighter and less muted. So I'm creating a mixture of my rose matter and yellow deep, and I'm wanted to have not too much water in it. Sort of be sort of a medium consistency and mixture and be a nice coral color like starfish . So once I have that color mixed, I'm just going to start laying on another wash of color on my novelists. I will have lighter areas and darker area. Some areas with more water, some areas with more paint. Now I'm also going to work on the starfish a little bit. Well, I have that paint on my brush so you'll see me adding a little bit of Jeff's color along the edges, just a little here and there to make sure they actually are really tied together. I'm also bringing in more salt to create more texture. I'm also going to really punch up that blue I've got in and thrown mixed with a little bit of sap green. And it's nice and dark and juicy, and I'm going to make the center of the Nautilus be about his dark as the mermaid toe. Repeating the contrast of the mermaid tail in the Nautilus will help to bring my painting together, and I'm really excited about it now. And if you noticed, I switched to my small brush, and so I'm using it to add lots of texture with that dancing brush technique. I think that name came from Jean Haynes that she came up with the idea of the dancing brush . I didn't come up with that myself, but I love the idea of it, and I love how you create beautiful texture with it. So I'm just going to continue this process of adding in that richer, more pigment to color from the starfish from the mermaid toe. I'm still going toe have that nice, breezy effect when I'm finished, I think, and I think this is going to work out well. I'm also bringing in some of the teal as you can see some of the ended thrown. I'm using some of the rose and really focusing on adding texture. One little trick that I'm using here is to use the natural breaks of the Nautilus. Those lines the spiral outward to create a stopping point for my painting. So I have time to put the salt in before it dries. I really love creating variegated washed this way. I also love creating all of this texture by charging in or dropping in the color. It really is nice, very pretty and creates unique mixtures of color that you can't really get any other way for the rest of the Nautilus. I'll repeat the same process. So I'm going to turn music on for you, and I hope you enjoy No, uh, - the final part of this layer is to add some splatters, sort of diagonally down from the mermaid toe. I think it creates a nice flow to the peace, and I'm really enjoying this now. We're going to let this layer dry, and then we'll add a few more details 27. Painting Details: Let's spend some details with white and gold I'm using. Why quash to paint the details of the Nautilus? I've lost this lines essentially, that I drew with the pencil. It's not that I wanted them to show up with the pencil, but I do want them to show in my painting. And so I'm going back over there with a very fine brush. This is that number zero brush that we've been using off it on. To add that spiral back in, you can use whitewash of this process. You could use a gel pin, but I'm using white ink and the small brush to start with your brush being wet and add even a little bit of water to urinate. Just make sure that it flows. Whether you're using wash ink whitewater color, just make sure you have a nice flow off of your brush. Once you've added white to your central spiral, you can add white two lines that radiate out from the center. Now this is also presents an opportunity if you want to add more radio lines or if you want to correct something that's there. For example, if you're not happy with some of your pencil lines. At this point, they're mostly covered up. They may show some, but you could put your white in a different space then, where you had your original pencil line if you wanted to. I'm keeping my lines nice and loose and flowing. I'm holding my brush with a loose grip, and that allows it a little bit more room to sort of wiggle in my hand, and it creates some really nice natural curved lines. I'm also going to paint around the outer edge of the novelist as well as add in those little bits of texture that we added with our pencil. So those little circles and ovals and just dots that will add texture to our painting. Once you're satisfied with the dots, the texture and the lines, then you can move on to adding some white to your elements of starfish and sand dollar. Since you already have white on your paintbrush, so think about other areas where you may need white, such as your Siegel's I your sand dollar, your starfish. Maybe you want to add a little bit of white to your mermaid tail anywhere you see that you would like to add a highlight or touch of white. Now's the perfect time to do that. What you finished with the white? You can erase any pencil lines that you don't want. I decided I didn't like that line above the sea Eagles head. I thought I would take it out, and so I did. Another detail I wanted to add to this painting were small flying birds, so I made them really tiny, as if they're far in the distance. And there just a little check mark and then you add a wing on the other side. They're super easy to make. I decided to add them on both sides of the mood board to create some balance, and I also feel it really enhances my fame. Next, that's s in detail with our gold paint. Once the lightest dry, you can start adding your gold accents. Now I'm using it specifically for the spiral. And as it turned out, this became the perfect way for me to tie my painting, my title and my elements all together to really make them cohesive and work together. And so gold became part of my essential thing. I'm using it for the spiral on the Nautilus shell, along with the texture that's there now. The mermaid tell section is bothering me a little bit. I'm really not happy with that part. And so adding the gold here in this section to sort of tone it down really made it look a lot better and blended it also into the Nautilus shell, which was what I was going for. So continue adding gold just to your satisfaction. You can even add a small, gold flowing bird of the distance if you wanted to. I chose not to do that, but it would be a kind of a cool accent, right? And when she's done your gold on the main part of your mood board, you can add it to your elements of your starfish and sand dollar. I thought it would be perfect to make these little texture marks on the flower area of the sand dollar. I also thought it would be nice to add a little bit touched to the center, as well as the little holes that are on her sand dollar. Next, I added it to the starfish again, just little touches where there would be some highlight and sub sparkle just to add a little bit of fun and a little bit more better. It's important to take time to look at your elements and your layout all together in one space and see how it's coming together. And so that's what I'm doing here. I laid my title, which is not complete yet. My starfish, my sand dollar on top of the novelist And I'm just doing a few more touch ups with Gold paper and Mawr splattering because I'm using this goal to really tie everything together very strongly. I want to also splatter some of that gold. When I took a look at this layout, I didn't like those empty corners on the bottom, so I painted them gray, just like I've already used the painting with the same techniques as before, adding lots of texture. Next, we'll paint the title and do the finishing touches 28. Painting the Title Element: the last element we have to pay is their title. So let's get started. Keeping in mind the theme of our mood board, I want to make my title feel light and airy, and so I want to create a Grady in of my letters. So I'm just filling in the shapes that I drew with cobalt ill in the top and then in mid thrown a very watery mix of ended drone on the bottom. The goals for these colors to blend together nicely in a Grady int as we moved down the letter from the top to the bottom. Now repeat the same process for each letter. In the word see keep the tops of the letters and nice and light and the bottoms of the letters nice and dark. And while I have that pain of my brush, I'll add my little splatters. Now these are actual splatters. I actually painted them just by touching the tip of my brush to the paper. Next, I'll paint the words by the with my size zero brush. I made a mistake on the E, and the colors were blending together so all I did was wet that area and lift that paint. Once it was dry, I came back with a little bit darker version of They've been thrown blue and did it all over again. And while I'm working with that dark color, I'm also going to add some shadows to be underside of my letters. I did this for each letter, and this will create a lot of depth to our lettering by adding a shadow. Once I finished my shadows, I'm going to add my color swatches now I'm using in enthrone blue and cobalt ill, as I use those a lot in the painting. But for some of these colors, I want to use the mix, for example, the peaches very prevalent in our mood board. And I want that to be one of the colors I chose for this watch. So when you're choosing your colors for your swatches, you need to look at your mood board and pull from there rather than just go by your original paint colors. You may need to create some mixes to create these swatches. For my last color Swatch, I went for the gold. It became such an important part of this piece. I didn't want to leave it out of the swatch. The final step in our painting is to add a few gold access to our letters and to this board that holds our title, along with adding some details to the sea shells to paint the edges of the section. Just pick it up and use the side of your small brush to go around. It will create a nice sort of uneven edge, which is perfect for our thing. Now that our title element is complete, it's time to put everything together. I am so excited. 29. Putting It All Together: So now I have all my elements finished. Have my main painting have my title element, my sand dollar and my starfish. And so now all I have to do is put my mood work together. I'm super excited to see really how it's gonna look in the end now. In order to put this together, I could use glue like a glue stick. I could use Matt medium, or you can use something more dimensional like foam tape. And that's what I'm going to use because I want mine to stand out from the mood board just a little. So all I will do is I'm going to get 1234 pieces for this part and maybe two and two for each one, So I'm going to cut those pieces. This is sticky on both sides, so worked perfectly and I'll be right back. So now that I have this double sided foam cut out, I can stick it on the back. It's sticky on both sides. Doesn't matter what peace I put where I just want to put one on each corner so that it will stick on each corner, have been on the back of each of these. I think I'll put to okay, before I take off this backing, I just want to double check my placement. So I have these Mark Lyons Mart from before I could decided I still want to keep it there or not. I may want to change it, but I'm kind of happy with that. This sand dollar has a light in the dark side. So I have the light coming from this area in my background painting. And I want to do the same for fear and starfish is pretty much the same way. I don't want this to be the bottom part of starfish, so I'm pretty happy with the way that all looks now. All you have to do is remove the backing from your double sided tape or phone, or if you're gluing it, all you have to do is glue it down Once you've tested it, I'm just going to push this down firmly. All the corners and thats done and the same for the others. Now I've added a little bit of dimension in this way and I really like that about this mood board. So now everything is attached This little bit of difference creates this shadow here, which I think is quite nice. And I am very happy with the results here, and I hope that you're happy with the results as well. 30. Project & Thank You: So let's have a little chat about your project. Now, this mood board class is a big class, and it has a lot of parts and pieces. So what I would love for you to do is start your project by simply sharing your inspiration . It could be a photo. You can just type out what colors you think you might want to use or what theme you've chosen. Just something small to get your project started and get the ball rolling. And then along the way it would be really cool if just shared your process with me. So I would love to see things like your layout, thumbnails and whether you've things you've chosen, what you've chosen anything, any images or pictures of things like that would be, think test. So inspiration thumbnails, doing the work of the creative process. Any of that would be fantastic to see or hear about. I would also love for you to do the watercolor warmups to test and try different colors that go with your theme and see how you like it and tell me if you enjoyed the process of doing that or not, that would be wait great to hear some people really like doing this kind of thing Is exploring some people? Not so much. So you let me know how that goes for you. And remember, you can always tag me on Instagram at Jessica Sanders Art or hashtag J s a skill share, and I will be able to see your work there on Instagram as well. And then finally, for the last part of your project would be to show me the elements of your mood board or the mood board itself once you finished. Now, this is a rather complex version. You can do a scaled down version. Perhaps you just painted the Siegel and, you know, you just have a smaller mood board. No Nautilus, just one image. That's perfectly fine. You do what works for you. I know we all have different time schedules and time pressures, and so you may not be able to do a big project like this, But if you work step by, step through what I've shown you, then you can get it done. But it may take you a little while. It certainly wouldn't be done in an hour, right? Unless you already had the idea in your head and your great painter and no even for a great painter. Even for someone who's experienced, this will take a little while to complete. So that was why I would love to see you share your progress along the way. That would be super cool. So thank you so much for joining me for this mood board class. I hope you've experienced some creative joy that you have found yourself inspired that you've painted something that you thought you couldn't paint before. But most of all, I hope you've just enjoyed being in the creative process and the flow. If you've enjoyed this class, please be sure to leave me a review toe. Let me and other students know what you thought and how you felt about it. I would love to hear. And also it helps me to improve my classes. As I go, I said thanks again for watching. I'll see you very soon. Please let me know if you have any questions. I'm always happy to help, but by