Draw, Paint, Draw - A Landscape in Mixed Media with Water Soluble Crayon

1. Welcome: If you paint regularly, then you're already familiar with the value of consistent exploration in your sketchbook. This class is dedicated to the water soluble wax pastel. My name is Dina and Adams. I'm a landscape painter, and I've developed this class for intermediate artists based around techniques that I use regularly to move from idea to idea in between larger scale projects. Join me now as I walk you through from prime ING to finish so that you can benefit from the amazing flexibility of this material in your individual artistic practice. 2. Watersolublewaxcrayons: Okay, everybody. So this project is going to introduce you and your sketchbook to one of my favorite drawing materials. This is the water soluble wax pastel, and I find this to be probably hands down the most versatile art material that you can get . Um, I have direct experience with the following two brands. They're not the only brand on the market, and I'll cover some alternatives shortly. But neo color to is made by Caron Dosh, and it is pretty widely available, fairly easy to find. And I prefer it because it's easy to find them both in sets and as open stock. So I tend to buy open stock. At this point in my life, I bought a set of 40 what seems like a 1,000,000 billion years ago, so they have gotten a lot of mileage out of these. You'll see that I use nubby, broken down ancient ones readily and throughout the course of the video. So they're not pretty. They're not new, but they work great, and they stay working great for a long time. I also have a set of Derwent art bars, which I'm nowhere near is enamored of their somewhat less expensive. I cannot find open stock, but the set of 30 that I got had some really nice, subtle and interesting neutral colors that I feel the core induction. The other lines tend to overlook, so either of those are suitable. Generally, I prefer the Koran dosh. Let's all take a fast look at what these look like on naked, untreated paper. So I'm using a chorine dosh sky blue, water soluble wax pastel and just exploring the range of marks that I can get so I can work in a very light and subtle way. And I get a very colored, pencil like line, and if I add some additional pressure, really kind of muscle down on that thing, I get some really nice oil, pastel type marks and coverage. So these are blend doble, and I can use my fingers or a tort eon they can layer. Certain colors are a little more transparent than others, and it warrants some experimentation, but you get the general idea of what you can do with them and how they behave. So a comparable material is oil pastel. And here are some oil, pastels and action, similar colors, and they are blend doble, and they put down a really beautiful, opaque, oily coverage. The disadvantage to oil pastel is that whatever you dio, it never fully dries it. Work done in oil pastel needs to be displayed behind glass and work done in a sketchbook in oil. Pastel can be smeared and transfer from page to page, and that is just the nature of that material. Unlike oil pastel, I can take a damp brush and blend spread transfer color and basically, by adding water, my water soluble wax pastel will transform into a semi opaque but mostly transparent watercolor like paint. Clearly, my oil pastel will do no such thing unless I were to introduce solvents. But it has a few tricks up its sleeve, too, because I can use my water soluble wax pastel in concert with my oil pastel. If I leave it as is, it just integrates nicely with the color structure of the oil pastel. And if I add water and liquefy that material, you will see that the oil pastel then repels that paint and behaves as it would with water color and can be used as a resist. So simply because I do not have direct experience with a brand does not mean that it doesn't exist is an option and does not mean that it's not a great option. This is not a super competitive or saturated Mitch in art materials. So here are some other options. They're not all the other options in the world, but any of these should be fairly easy to locate. Unfortunately, there are not many really good bargain options in this category. The Crayola portfolio is a nice product with unfortunately few colors in its range, and I think the sergeant watercolor crowns might be a good budget alternative to some of the more expensive artist grade options. 3. Underpainting: Okay. Hi, everyone. Before we jump in and paint, I want to cover the materials that were going to use in our foundational layer and a little bit about my rationale for choosing them. The materials that we use at this point are really going to set the tone and set us up for success with this particular working process. So it pays to talk about them just a little bit. Before we jump in, I will be working in my sketchbook, which is a larger format mole skin sketchbook. The paper in this sketchbook is a little bit then for these purposes, and I get quite a bit of buckling. This doesn't bother me, But if it bothers you, then I would use 100 £40 watercolor paper student grade kind of stuff. Um, Strathmore has a nice 400 Siri's sketchbook that you could use. Basically, it's important to have some surface area. I really do recommend working in a larger art journal or sketchbook for this type of painterly approach. The items that you see on the screen right now are too approaches to creating a mat toothy surface that will accept drawing that is really what we want to create and what we want to maintain throughout the process of this piece. So there are two ways to do this. I will use them in tandem, which is also an option. But you could use one or the other. In short, you can use liquid Tex Clear, Jess. Oh, and ordinarily, I don't really emphasize any particular brand. But in the case of clear, Jess Oh, I have not found anyone else making a product that works similarly enough to be identical. So I find this a very helpful add in or isolation coat to have. When I'm working in acrylic. I'll explain what those mean and how I use it as we progress through the project. But that is one option you can use liquid text clear, Jess. Oh, and or so you can combine this with your regular heavy body paints that have sort of a satiny plasticky finish when they dry. That's fine. Or you can combine your clear Jess Oh, with Matt acrylic pain. You can also use Matt acrylic paint. Whether you have clear Jess Oh or not. If you use that as your approach to getting a Matt surface that will accept drawing. Then your paint will behave a little bit different than as shown in the project, but you'll have enough overlap that I think you'll get desired results. So Matt acrylic paint is generally one of two things. Golden makes a very beautiful, very expensive golden e range of matte finish acrylic paint in their flu in range. So it's the fluid acrylic. You get a little more flow and you have a bat drying surface. So that's kind of the luxury option. I like these Blick store branded Matt acrylics. It's basically glorified craft paint. I use this in my sketchbook all the time. Also craft paint if you do not have access to the Blick range. I really like Delta Saran Coat for this purpose. It accepts drawing really quite well and again very, very inexpensive. So I will be using these two items in tandem, which is certainly an option if you have both. But if you only have one or only have the other, you will still get a good prime ing layer for our purposes. You will also need some kind of brush to apply your first layer. Me, I like those foam hardware store brushes. So that is what you will see me use. So any kind of prime ing brush or large brush that you would use to Jess? Oh, a piece will be fine. For our first layer, I am creating a somewhat translucent and intentionally streaky foundational layer off 1/3 paint to 2/3 clear, Jess. Oh, so I'm mixing these on the page just because I'm comfortable with that. Through experience, you can use a palette or a sheet of wax paper, and I'm going to cover my pages with a single even layer of coverage. Because the clear Jess Oh is clear, you'll get some texture in this foundational layer, and I like that for this project. So don't worry about streaking. This is actually desired in this case, and you can handle the edges of your coverage. However you choose. Let that layer dry once you are done applying it to your sketchbook 4. Sketch: So the first thing that you will notice about your clear Jess Oh, prime ing is how different it feels from conventional Jess. Oh, this primer has promise suspended in it. So it has a very sin paparelli feeling to the touch. We're using it so that our drawing material is adequately gripped by the tooth on the paper and deposited onto the paper. So that's one reason that we prime the other reason that we're prime ing And the reason that we're prime ing in this rust red color is something I want to discuss right now. So here's my reference image. I'm going to paint loosely from this reference and responsively toward this reference without being really, really tied up in making everything super accurate. This is going to give me a general skeletal idea of what to paint and where to put it. When you look at this image, you will notice that there are some beautiful Oakar yellows and rust reds in this painting , but they're not the predominant color. It is almost always a valid choice and a good strategy to paint in these rusty, orangish brownish undertones. At the first pass of your painting And the reason for this is that landscape paintings, which are predominantly blue and blue grey as many of them are. You're able to speed your working process by leaving parts of that under painted canvas or paper visible. You're able to speed your painting process by having this beautiful, rich brown layer available to you when you work in translucent layers on top of it. So you start to be ableto warm your blues, for example, without necessarily having to introduce lots and lots of color layers. But through making a translucent light blue and putting that on top of this glowing orangish under layer so it speeds the process, and it gives your blues in your graze a really beautiful, warm, rich counterpart and counterpoint. So this orange blue pairing of complementary color is something that you can work with without necessarily going to. Just a straight orange and a straight blue burn Number and burnt sienna under painting are almost always a good choice for drawing or painting the landscape, so we're going to keep that color strategy at the back of our mind. We're going to draw on it later, but file it for later use in the interim, we're going to establish the really light stuff in this landscape and the really dark stuff in this landscape. So I'm going to use my neo color to pastels to do this, my water soluble wax pastels. And I'm going to use a light light and a dark dark to just sketch that information in using my reference photo as my reference. So the light line at the top of my sheet here represents where those distant hills, those little rises where they meet the sky so that lightest point of the sky, which happens low in the sky right behind those hills. That is what the top most white line represents. And I'm using my white pastel to sketch in the general shape of the water and the This is the way that the water seeps into that land mass. The little bit of landmass that's wet but not flooded that pokes up just drawing in some of that information. Those distant rises are one of the darkest points in this piece, so I'm going to handle my perspective with color choices later. Right now, I'm just generally shaping my piece by establishing where the lightest highlights sit and where the darkest shadows are. You could dissolve these pastel lines and blend them and move them around with water. And if you do that, they will travel and blend and behave like a really nice translucent paint. But if you do it with just water, they will remain water soluble. And whatever you do on top of that layer will alter the layer. It will get pulled up into subsequent painting. So because of this, if I want to blend my lines out and kind of, you know, integrate this sketching somewhat and just alter the nature of the sketch, what I can use instead of water is acrylic medium, because again, these are water soluble. They will react with the water in the medium to dissolve, and then they will be fixed in place because of the acrylic polymer in the medium instead of acrylic medium. You can also use your clear Jess. Oh, by using clear Jess Oh, to alter my line work that I've done with my sketching This gets sets up a more conducive foundational layer for me to do more. Drawing on top of it will remain gritty. It will remain met, and it will be able I'll be able to put down layers of additional neo color to on top of that dried, clear Jess Oh based layer with the same kind of grab and tooth that it had before. So that Little Dixie Cup of Clear Jess Oh, is the secret in this recipe, and here you'll see that I am just working additional white over the top of my page where that Skye is at its lightest point. I'm just altering the value structure of this piece in a very simple and direct way. And because I have all my mid tones established with this brown, it really doesn't take very long for me to get ah, good value map of what I want to see as I progress through the work, you can remove a little additional paint if you find that something is looking thicker than you want it to be while it is still wet. But you'll notice that once it dries, it is fixed in place because it has been filtered through acrylic polymer rather than just water 5. Paintinglayerone: So I'm going to quickly show you how I set up my palate, which is to put down some white in the center of my wax paper. And this could be a wax paper palette or a sheet. And then I just string warm colors to one side of that central mixing area, and I string my cool colors to the other side of it and some of my graze if I'm incorporating gray or black, and I add my translucent medium to this palette as well. In this case, the translucent is clear, Jess. Oh, if you have only Matt fluid medium, then use that. Instead, I start by blocking in color with with a mind attuned to value as well. So still thinking where my light lights were my dark darks and trying to keep that structure intact as I work. But now I'm also introducing a sketched in approach to where color is going to go. So I start with my sky because it is generally that light value area, the lightest value that I'm going to find in my piece, and I work from there. There are a lot of reflected areas where that blue in the sky is bounced back up, So I sketched those in very cursory very quick. I'm using a trashed flat 10 or 12 brush, so something really old and ratty. This gritty texture is really hard on brushes, so don't use your good ones for this process. And once that is sketched in, keep in mind that I'm responding to that reference image, but I'm not super bound up in getting the color perfectly spot on. This is because that color is going to get modulated by our drawing materials in subsequent layers. All of this is in flux, so it's a very superficial way of working. I'm incorporating a lot of my clear medium into this pain, and it appears cloudy because that clear Jessa has a very cloudy appearance until it's fully dry. So as you gain familiarity with using it and incorporating it into your painting process, that is something to keep in mind that a lot of these really sort of, um, sort of Gazi looking grays are possibly going to dry a bit more transparent and a bit lighter. There's some hotter spots, some yellows and some reds in the middle of this piece. This yellow does not match those at all, but I don't need to worry about that. I'm just making a visual note to myself that things warm up here in the middle and things lighten up significantly in that back portion on right where those hills are. So I'm just quickly swiping in some light value warm color and, um, it's warm, but I know that I'm going. Teoh handle that in a de saturated way later. So it's not about perfect painting. It's about quickly making visual notes to yourself that you can draw on so that you're able to stay in a relationship with your reference material just by working these colors. But you don't have to worry about constantly color matching and really being photo realistic with that ah reference material. Unless that's your bent, in which case you know that your process is going to depend on your photo to a large degree , and with that, your color is adequately blocked in 6. Drawpaintdrawpt1: Hello and welcome. So everything is dry and we have a color blocked layer that still has a lot of tooth and grit because of our clear just so extender that we've mixed into our paint. So because of this gritty surface, the sandpaper re surface we get really nice heavy lay down when we start drawing on top of our information with our wax pastels, which are water soluble. So I want to cover a couple of questions that seem reasonable at this point. Number one. Why are we using water soluble pastels instead of just oil pastels? Because those would work just fine. Chalk pastels would work just fine for that matter, or any pastel where we just draw on top of this layer and then spray a fixative. Well, there's a number of reasons that I really, really I prefer using a wax based, water soluble pastel for this type of mixed media work. Number one is that I can still move things around. So if this was an oil pastel, I would have to do this with solvent, and I would still wind up with an oil based layer at the top of my work if this were chalk pastel. I could do the same thing, so you know that would work. I just find that choc choc based pastels tend Teoh not have the same level of coverage even when I have the grittier surface. So been there, done that. It's fine. It's OK. Um, it gets harder also to work on top of them, and that's what really, really drives this decision. So when I mix my clear Jess Oh, or in this case, we can probably start working with, um that medium. And if you have Matt Medium only then use that. But I still like to use clear Jess. Oh, because I never know when I'm going to want to draw on top of that and tweak that further as you blend your wax past altogether. Using your clear acrylic medium of choice, you will notice that as it dries, it goes through different phases, and some of them are kind of sticky and intermediate, and you can draw on top of them at any stage. You risk pulling them up when they're not fully dry with your with your stick, so that's not necessarily a problem. It's worth experimenting. Withdrawing into your mixtures of acrylic medium clear, Jess Oh, and pastel at different stages and just seeing what happens and using that as a mark making strategy so you'll get your best coverage. Your best results if you're just looking for a straight ahead result when your layers air dry and then working on top of them. Which is why I'm still using clear Jess Oh, to make things translucent. Painting at this stage is a question of changing color temperatures and changing textures and sizes of marks so that we start to make some adequate transitional areas between these blocks of color. So what I'm doing is I'm using color temperature, and I'm using the in the saturation of color Teoh, soften and, um, just make those areas of transition more convincing and more comfortable for your eyes. So working a yellow ER and more neutralized gray in between the blue and the light yellow of the sky from its top to its bottom. By putting that mid range kind of Gazi grayish blue in that combines elements of both the light blue at the top and the yellowish white ish color at the bottom, bridging those in a way that makes us a little more comfortable with the transition. That is basically all that needs to happen here. So, um, it's important. I think Teoh do a couple of different things. One is not bridge all of those blocks in exactly the same way. So using different materials and different approaches in different places on your painting keeps things from getting a little too tedious in a little too uniform. So in that sky area, I used a very blended approach. And in this area where I want to emphasize that sort of hot spot where the light catches that landmass and really lights it up there, I'm using MAWR, drawing on a little less painting and more, more heavy lay down of my pastel and quite a bit less translucency as my approach. I'm using a lot of the pastel to really describe kind of the geometry of some of that that land jutting out. And, you know, I kind of created a divot where in the photo there's more of a patch of reeds sticking up. This is where you can really start to use some of that creative license and depart from your reference as long as you stick to the overall strategy of color temperature that your reference photo implies, because that's based in reality, even if it's mitigated through photography, right? So as long as you use that as kind of a tentative sketch and stick to some of enough of those those color temperature guidelines as laid out by your photo, you're not gonna get in trouble like your audience will still be with you. They'll look at your piece and not think. Oh, this space makes me uncomfortable because I'm not convinced it's not so much that I want to wow everybody with my sense of ability to make depth happen and make them feel like they're in a place. That's not what I set out to do when I do this kind of painting. But what I do want is to avoid that I'm moving away from the negative outcome. So I What I don't want is people looking at the work and going, Oh, this is really off. And if expert level artists who are really obsessive about three point perspective look at it and think, Oh, this is really off, that's fine. That's a certain subset of the world that I'm not necessarily catering to. I just want normal people to look at this and not think. Oh, I'm really uncomfortable because something's crooked and in my subconscious hind brain, I don't know what it is, So if I can avoid that, then I feel that my work is done. So landscape illusionist ICS base does not have to be labour of really labored over. I'm creating that illusion of space because I'm putting more texture in my foreground. I haven't really dropped it in yet, but it will progress that way. I'm putting my most texture in my foreground, so that strategy mimics the way that our eyes focus. It mimics our sense of depth of field, so I basically can use texture and larger textures, more textures, rougher textures in my foreground to mimic our depth of field. The other thing that I'm able to dio is use color temperature, and things blew out and gray out as they go off into the distance. So that's just one of those tried and true rules in art that you can always use. Teoh emphasize that the idea of space you know in the landscape so I can always rely on that. And I know that if I d saturate just kind of dial down the level of color intensity in the back of my painting and or make things more blue that I will create a more convincing space that recedes. The other thing that I conduce do is use hot spots to lead my viewer around my piece in a satisfying way. So the light in this reference photo is very warm. That's one of the things that jumped out at me is appealing because I really try to use photos that are not so grand that everybody in the world will have use them as a reference when I'm when I'm just grabbing. Ah, royalty Free photo reference unspool. Ash picks obey. You know, the usual suspects of places you can get photos to use and not get into legal trouble with them. So I'm a big fan of those, but there are certain photos that kind of everyone's gonna gravitate. Teoh and I really look for things that might get overlooked, but I like a nice, warm light that always gets may. So this one had that. And what I'm going to do is is dial up the intensity of those hot spots. Those little warm spots were the light at the back catches things in the foreground. And what I find is that there's this shadow area at the lower left of the piece. I'm going to bump the intensity of that up a notch and really emphasize that area. And I can move my viewer from that dark spot to that hot spot in the middle, which I still haven't really, um, nail down the exact color and the exact intensity and the exact value of it. But I know that they were going to jump from the lower left to the middle, sort of slid towards the right, and then I want to take my viewer back to the edge of that puddle somewhere on my upper mid left of the piece. So it's a zigzagging, um, sense of emphasis, and this is just always a really nice compositional strategy. People are looking for it without realizing that they're looking for it, because it's something that we see so often. And so that is something that's a little bit implicit in that photograph. But it's not really there, but by by using my color temperature in a very deliberate way. I'm able to pull that little hint of it out of the photo and really kind of grab that and make it my own in the process of painting from my reference. So that's kind of long winded. But I really feel like it's important to talk a little bit about how to process reference images and or how, at least how I process reference images and what I think are some really good strategies for processing images, whether you take them or whether they're generously put out into the world for us to learn from. Um, yeah, I really I think those those reference image resource is a really generous and really fabulous, and they feel that we should all show our appreciation and support of those things as much as possible. 7. Drawpaintdrawpt2: so a question that you might be asking at this point. Some of you may be asking this, and I think it's worth discussing. Okay, so why not just paint and acrylic painting? And then put down a layer of clear Jess Oh, on top of your acrylic painting and then pick up your wax pastels and start working on top of that layer in a really organized and logical progression, maintaining the idea of working from the general to the specific Why not just do that? Well, the answer. That question is that you absolutely can, um, if you are able to plan your process and and stick to the framework of process that closely and if you are somebody who tends not to have to backtrack in your work. If you're really just that good that you can commit to a mark, make it and that's where it is. And it does not have to be changed. It does not have to be covered. Um, absolutely more power to you. You know, I'm not that person, unfortunately, so when I'm making a piece like this, there's going to inevitably be backtracking. There's inevitably going to be instances where I want to switch from my fine tuned media of pastel at the end, back to my less fine tune brushes. They're going to be instances where I want to change the characteristic of my mark in a certain way that the new tool does not permit, or I need to alter the color structure or the color temperature structure that I'm doing, So any of those. Any of those problems solving issues will come up at any time. So for me, keeping that surface open. And when I say open, I mean gritty, toothy, workable, absorbent, receptive to media. However, you want to look at it that is beneficial to me and to the way that I work, which is this much more integrated problem solving on the fly back and forth kind of relationship to my materials. I tend to solve my problem through my materials. They loosen that problem solving part of my brain up just through the sort of meditative quality of making those marks. So, um, run your show. However you want Teoh when it comes time to clear Jess so it can be applied at any point in your process. Unless you have introduced media, which are not water soluble, So as long as your material is water soluble, have at it. I talked about using texture and amplifying texture and shadow in the foreground of my piece to really make it work. And that is what I'm doing here and what I want to call a little bit of attention to. So warm light, Cool shadow, right? That's one of those truisms that reliably works. This brown is a warm color, however. It's also a cool color relative to the instance of the orange brown that's poking through as my under painting. So that is why that Deep Brown is a a relatively successful shadow area and that Segways into one other thing I really want to cover here, which is going back to the under painting. So I talked about why we under paint when we applied our rust under painting to this piece , and here hopefully is I'm closing in on kind of the finishing touches to this is I'm sort of, you know, kind of zooming in on some of my finishing strategies here. Hopefully, now it's visible to you. Why this idea of the under painting and not completely finished surface is is made clear. White. Why I emphasize this and why I think this works so it's really easy. It is so easy, and I do it all the time to this day to keep working and working and working until you have diligently covered up every little stick of that under painting at the end of your piece. And if you do that, don't worry. Everyone in the world does that. So don't Don't worry if you sit there and wonder, why did I bother to under pain at the end of a piece? It happens all the time, but you will see, I think, the advantage to not doing that and not covering up absolutely every little fragment of that orange, even in places where there's a lot of coverage, like in the sky, especially, I think it shows that that's it. It's really successful toe have that under painting because there's something really satisfying about those little areas where the orange just peeks through the surface of that sky, and it would be different and less dynamic and less compelling without those little mosaic like fractures where you see that orange come through. So the under painting makes this a faster process in that you literally physically have to lay down less stuff, and I think it really enlivens the sketch at the end. So something else that I want to talk about is that none of the drawing that I've done here is really technical or sophisticated at all. Ah, lot of it is very scribbling. This is not sophisticated and complex mark making, and a lot of it is very raw and very rugged, especially for a sketchbook image. Close up or scanned is an illustration. This is a really rough image, and for me, that is fine. My purpose is nine times in 10 when I'm dealing with landscape imagery. My intention is almost always for the work to go vertically on a wall surface and be viewed at a comfortable 5 to 10 foot distance. Most of my work that is landscape based is intended for residential market, and it is viewed as an original piece, so satisfying textural marks, gestural marks. All of those things are expected and beneficial for how well the final piece works. Could I use this technique for other purposes? Of course. If I was an illustrator and I was looking for ways to broaden the vocabulary of marks that I use for landscape or broaden the diversity of background imagery that I was able to introduce to my illustration practice. This would be a fine technique. I would modify it by using smaller brushes, and I would modify it by maybe finishing with a little layer of colored pencil floated on top of all of this clear, just so grabs on to colored pencil beautifully. And so that is a wonderful way to finish off this type of imagery in a very detailed and tight way. So that might be an adaptation I'd use in that case to develop my and and broaden my imagery was a mindset towards using it in an illustration practice. If my purpose in sketching the landscape is from my own gratification, my own study and maybe my own deepening with my relationship of an actual place that I can go and visit and work from then this is the perfect tool kit. In a way, it's wonderful for plan air because I can throw down my under painted layer and then take a box of pastels, maybe a water brush. And if I really want to go, you know, take it, take it to the next level. I could take a small container of clear Jess. Oh, and a brush along with May and I have this beautifully compact kit of nontoxic, easy to carry, easy to use materials that I can take with me on site. So if you if you keep a sketchbook in a more traditional sketchbook focused way, this is a really fantastic way toe work on site, whether your subjects is landscape or architecture or whatever it might be. But for me, this ability to scale down the kinds of marks that I would be making if I were painting a large scale painting and scale those marks down in a way that is intelligible and readable to me later, that just makes sense intuitively with how I would paint if I were scaling up my brushes. That is part of the real value of this particular Siris of materials, and that is part of the part of the learning that I gain from using this grouping of materials when I work on developing my my capabilities and extending my capabilities as a landscape painter. I find that no matter how many times I do this, there's always something really off about some of my values at the very end. So when I like to, Dio is, take that step back or shoot a quick camera phone photo of my piece and then look at it through that lens, Um, and then I couldn't kind of squint at it. Take that little step back from it, that little mental step back from it by photographing it and automatically. Wherever I have lost my value scale, wherever my values have, sort of fallen out of lack becomes very apparent, and I can kind of go in and make some adjustments to those values at the at the last bit of the peace. So I wanted a little more variation and dimension in the distant tree line where things are vertical and I wanted some more mid distance shadows, especially mid distance cool areas to really light up that central yellow patch. So at this point, you'll be making these little adjustments, and my advice is not to get too caught up in them. See them as tweaks. If you don't love everything about your piece, that's why we're sketching. It makes it easier to move on. And the strategy of trying again next time, rather than laboring everything until you feel you can wrangle it into shape is probably a better strategy for your development, - okay ? 8. Thankyouandproject: thank you so much for joining me today. It's been really fun painting with you on this deep dive. So your project is to make something using some of the techniques that you've learned today and incorporating some water soluble wax crayon incorporated into your workflow as it naturally would occur. Or you can make something heavily influenced by the demonstration piece from today and explore the landscape subject in your own way. Here I'm making some small experimental abstract test pieces in my sketchbook, and while this is very exploratory, I think it's exactly the kind of work that you should feel free to post in the Projects section. It's really nice to just see how far you can push this material and what will happen to it under different conditions of delusion, different conditions of lifting and wiping. Really, just push things as far as you can and see what you get. I've had a great time painting with you today, and I really hope that we get to paint together again in the near future. You can keep up with my projects and my classes on my website. Dina draws dot com. I encourage you to give me a visit there and to follow me on Instagram backslash Dina draws so until next time, take care and have a great time painting.