Exploring Splashes - Magical Watercolor Forests

1. Welcome to class!: Perhaps you're one of those people who have all of your Christmas presents figured out by the end of August and they're all wrapped in color coordinated and you have your ribbons in your tags, in your cards, and everything's ready and in that case, applause to you. If you're not or would like to be really ready for next year and you want to make some beautiful, unique Christmas holiday festive, winter, flowy, splashy forest cards this is the class for you. Hello dear friends and welcome to class. I'm Elise and I'm a watercolor artist and a teacher from Norway. I don't know if it's because it's cold outside and cozy to be indoors and create something that I always feel more motivated to paint during the winter season. For this festive holiday card we'll be doing a beautiful soft, flowy, wet-on-wet background splash. Then we'll also be using the other most important technique of watercolor medium, which is our wet on dry when we're using our wet paints on dry paper. That gives us a lot more control and place the details exactly where we want them and they won't move and flow around. If you've taken any of my other classes here on Skillshare, you might already have noticed how I love working in monochrome, just using one color for an entire painting. That way I know it's going to be beautiful color coordinated. Also because watercolor is a transparent medium, you get a full range of colors from darkest to lightest, just by varying the amount of water that you put in your paint. Now personally, I use glittery and sparkly paints all year, but if you want to be extra festive for the holiday season I can recommend bringing in your sparkly watercolor paints as well. That's what I'll be using. But if you have a gel pen that has a sparkly glittery effect, or even inks sometimes have that, you can use those as well. Even though you might love someone very much and you wouldn't like to make them a card this size. I will also show you how to tear this up into smaller pieces so they're a bit more manageable and they also won't take us long to dry. I hope you're excited and that you'll go get your watercolors supplies, ready to paint these beautiful Christmas-y, wintry, splashy cards. I will see you in the next video. 2. Class Project : Now, I'm sure you're not shocked that your class project will be to make a splashy forest. I like this Christmas card or a festive holiday, birthday greeting for someone whose birthday is in the winter or any time of the year. It's just that I made Christmas cards like these last year when my mom asked me if I had any Christmas cards lying around and it was really easy to then color-coordinate it with the wrapping paper that she bought or the ribbons that she had because you can choose any color and it will work perfectly for these. Honestly, I've made brown ones and black ones and gold ones and red ones and blue ones and [inaudible] ones and purple ones. The thing is that even if you do exactly what I do even if you buy the same paper and the same paint and the same brushes and use the same amount of water, it will never look the same. That's the beauty with watercolor as well and painting and creativity in general that because you're the one painting it, it becomes yours. I think that's a really beautiful thing and I'm really happy that you're here and you've chosen to practice your art and that you're getting something unique to someone that you care about. Before you send it off where you attach it to that person and ship it off into the world, please take a photo and share it in the project gallery below. Now you can choose if you make one or multiple or all the same color or sparkly or non-sparkly I'm just really excited to see your version and I hope you'll share it with me and everyone else here on Skillshare in the project gallery below. In the next lesson, we'll be talking about our supplies so I'll see you there. 3. Supplies : These are the supplies that we'll be using for today's class. I'm just going to go through them and show you why I've chosen the ones I've chosen. First of all, we'll need our water for our watercolor class. I usually like to use two that way, one is with clean water and that stays as clean as possible throughout my painting session. The other one is for rinsing off my brush because we want that seamless splash. It's important that our water is clean. I like having jars, that way I could just close them up when I'm done. I can also use the inside of the lid as a mixing space in case I want to put my paint down on a palette first. Then we have our watercolor paints. I have this little palette here that I put together myself with watercolor tubes. But if you have ready-made pens or a palette like this, then you can also use anything that you have at home. Because we will be working in monochrome, you actually only need one paint. So you can also choose one tube of paint or one pen and just use that for the entire class getting to know that paint really well. Because watercolor is so densely packed with pigment, a lot of these look exactly the same in the pen like this. So I would always recommend having something like this to go with it, with swatches of all the paint so that you know which one's which and you know which ones to choose. You don't accidentally go in with a purple when you really wanted a dark green. So whatever paints that you would like to use. Because we're being extra fancy and festive for the holiday season, I'm also bringing some of my metallic paints. This is a really nice small palette. This one both has some normal metallic shades and some iridescent colors that show up better when they're on top of something dark. If these are on top of the trees that will make, these will show up as these colors, even though they look quite similar to this pearly one. Because I usually don't use a lot of metallic, I sometimes put them into a smaller tin like this. I'll be using both of these today. They behave a little bit differently than watercolors. We'll be talking about that later. Then I'm bringing some watercolor brushes. I'm using one to stay completely clean for the entire session. This was a bit of a softer one. This one holds a bit more water because we're putting clean water on the paper. Then I have a smaller detail brush that comes to a really fine point. This one we'll be using with all of our paints today. We'll both use it for the splash, putting in that big amount of paint at the beginning and then we'll be using it for our trees and our details and our birds later. Depending on the size of your paper that you're using, you can go bigger or smaller than this as well. But these are a good pair to have, one clean brush for water and one smaller for your details. Then I just have this brush rest. This is from H&M it's a soap holder and it's just to keep my brushes off the floor or off the table when they have paint on them so that they don't stain anything. Then I want to bring something to wipe my brushes on. This one has been truly loved. This is a piece of an old t-shirt and I recommend having something white, and that way when you're cleaning off your brush, you can see if there's anything left in your brush and double-check that it's clean. Especially if you're changing between colors, making different splashes, or moving from paint to your metallic sheets, making sure that it's clean when you go into another color. Today we won't be taping our paper onto something, but we're going to take that straight line at the bottom to get that clean edge of our painting. I'll be bringing both a washi tape and a masking tape. Sometimes you'll found that a specific tape tears a specific paper. So just make sure that you're really careful when you torn it off, especially if it's the first time using it. You might be able to use a heat gun or a hairdryer to warm it up and soften the glue so it's easier to peel off so that you don't damage your paper. Then our final and maybe most important supply is our watercolor paper. I'm using cold-pressed cotton paper and these are 300 GSM, which means they're thick enough to hold the amount of water we are going to put down on them. Cold press just means it has a bit of texture on the surface, which is really nice for this kind of splash. I have these that I've torn myself from a bigger sheet of paper. I'm going show you how to do that. You can make them foldable ones so you can write on the inside or you can use something like this. These are pre-made postcards and they have that postcard print on the back as well. This one's a little bit thinner, but I've tried it out before. Again, it's all about testing your supply, seeing which ones work. So you can also use that if you have those available. Then if you want to for the exercises at the beginning of the class bringing something like a sketchbook or a scrap piece of paper. Although I would recommend just to get the most information out of it in a realistic practice, to bring something that has the same type of paper as the paper you'll be using for your cards. This sketchbook is the exact same paper as these postcards. That gives me a lot of important information for when I'm going in with the same type of technique afterwards. Those are all the supplies. Take a minute or two to go gather everything you need. I'll see you in the next lesson where I'll be going through some essential watercolor techniques and some vocabulary as well, just so we know we're talking about the same thing. We'll see you then. 4. Watercolor Techniques 101: When working with watercolor, we normally use one of two techniques. It's either the wet and wet, which means the surface is wet and we put wet paint onto wet paper, or we'll use the wet on dry technique, which is a wet paint put down on dry paper, whether or not the paint on it has dried or it's a clean sheet of paper. What we'll be doing today is using those techniques to get this splashy background effect, and the details in front. That contrast is really beautiful. I just wanted to share with you some of my favorite tips for doing that, and making sure that we have the same vocabulary when we're talking about our watercolor paints. I feel like most of us will automatically go in with the wet-on-dry technique, which is getting water on our brush, getting that into our paints. Let's use this nice dark green for that. Just mixing it up, and then we have our wet paint on our brush, putting it down on paper. We have our wet on dry technique. Now this is a very absorbent paper, and as you can see my paint has skipped over part of that texture, so this paper. [NOISE] This actually automatically gave us something that we often referred to as dry brushing. Then we can get some beautiful effects, we'll be doing that later for one of our trees as well. I'll be dedicating this jar now to be my dirty jar. Since I have paint on my brush, I'll go into this one, and then I can go back into that paint, so a little bit more water and see if I can get a wet on dry technique which doesn't skip the paper. Like that. Then we can keep going. As we're going downward, when my brush gets drier and it's releasing a lot of that pigment onto the paper, I'm also getting a lighter color, so the value decreases. When we talk about value in watercolor, we talk about the range from darkest to lightest. If I keep going, if I just keep adding water, you'll see that my paint gets lighter and lighter as I go as I'm releasing that paint onto the paper. Then I also get that dry brush effect when my paintbrush is starting to run out of paint. [NOISE] This is a great way of testing out your paint as well so you can get everything from this light past Delhi almost minty color. This really dark forest green. Then the wetter your paint is, the longer it's going to take for it to dry, which is good to know for our painting later. You can keep going with this. Get all of these different values, and then you'll see what I'm swooping now. I'm going to be holding my brush and run it flat angle towards the paper. That means I'm dragging and I'm painting with a side of my brush. Now if I want to paint something really specific and really small in detail, I'll use the tip of my brush. If this is my paper, I'll need to move downward towards the paper using just the very tip, should give me a lot more control. That's what we'll be doing for our trees. Whereas with our splash, we need more paint on the paper, and we'll be using this angle towards our paper instead. Details working it as a pencil, and I'll be showing you how to keep that water control, keeping that really nice pointed tip of the brush as well when we go into painting our trees. This is now our brush with paint on it. Now there's a really wet consistency [NOISE] of that paint on this brush. Then I'll be going into our wet in wet technique. The wet on wet is really interesting and is really unique for watercolor because we'll be using water just in our paper first, and then we put our paint into it, it starts flowing around, and watercolor will go wherever it's wet. Whether you put down a layer of paint first and then you put more paint into that, or if you put down water first, it will continue to spread and run around in that water for as long as it can. That also means that if we want the soft edges, we need to give the paint enough space to play in. Say if this is my amount of water, and then I put paint in here, it might spread all the way to the edge. Depending on how wet my paint is, if it has more water in, it spreads further. If it's creamier and denser, it won't spread as far. This is also something that we can control, and when we talk about water control in watercolor, we both talk about the water on our paper and the water in our brush, and the water in our paint, the paint is mixed with. We're talking about the ratio of paint to water. This has a high ratio of paint to the water and this has a low ratio of paint. With that dry brushing, the amount of wet paint in the paintbrush is much lower. Let's go into our clean water. With the same paint, let's make two different spaces. Let's make a space that's small, just making a square over here. What we're looking for when we're working wet in wet, what we want as our amount of water on paper is a sheen. We don't want it really wet. When I'll be pooling up, I'll show you what that looks like as well. But what we're looking for, a Goldilocks zone is when we can see a sheen on the paper. You can see a bit of texture, but there's no water pooling up anywhere. If there is water, you can keep blending it around. Or you can use a technique called a thirsty brush where you take your brush, you wipe it a little bit over on your rag or tissue, and you can soak up if you see those extra water pooling anywhere. A damp clean brush will work as a sponge and soak up that excess water or excess paint. There we have a little square. Putting our paint into that, you can see that it starts flowing around wherever it's water. That was quite a creamy consistency of paint. You can let that loan plane. We can also use gravity, moving our paper back and forth. [NOISE] This will hopefully give us a soft edge and it won't go all the way to the sides. Going into our clean water. Say we're given this a lot less space to play it. It will just give it a tiny little square. Then making our painting slightly wetter. Then putting that same amount of painting. Because it's going to continue to travel outward, it's going to reach the edges of that water, and that's going to create what we call a hard edge which is a really clear line like here. These are hard edges. There's a clear line between the white of the paper and the color. Some pigments flow further than others. Some are really flowy and they go really far. This is something that you need to try out on your paper as well. Your paper might not behave exactly the same as mine. Let's do another little square, and let's make this super wet. What we're doing now is we're making this very wet. Do you see that water pooling up on the side there and blogs around? We put paint into that, we won't get the same effect at all. Then the water doesn't know where to go and it is floating around on the surface. Very fascinating to watch. But it doesn't give us that splash effect that we're looking for. Also this will take incredibly long to dry. The paint follows the water. You can see now as well, this is starting to reach the edges of that little square there, and it's giving us that hard edge. More so than this one, which has space to spread out, go as far as it wants. If something like this happens on your splash and you end up putting way too much water on your paper, you can also use a thirsty brush technique we showed at the very beginning here, rinsing off your brush, dabbing it on your little rag or tissue, and then it works as a sponge, and we'll soak that backup again. I'll be demonstrating that later as well. Now, if you get a hard edge like this, and you would like to soften it like this, depending on how much space you have in your paper, you have the option to blend it out all the way to the edge. What I mean by that is, so saying we put down a little space for our splashy here, and then we're splashing from the bottom, you can also have that clean line at the bottom. Just letting it splash upward, but then my paint splashing fine upward. That has enough space for it to flow. But see how outward on the sides here it's not getting that soft effect. What we can do then is, I'll use my paintbrush because I'll be touching paint. I don't want to use my clean brush for that. [NOISE] Rinsing that off, trying to get it as clean as possible. checking again on my white rag that that one is in fact clean now, getting some clean water, and then wiping it again, and it's the same wetness as that thirsty brush. I'll just use it on the side quite dry, putting the tip of it into that edge of the paint, and then I give it more water to clean, some brushing it inward, rinsing it in between, not getting too wet. This can only be done while the rest of this is still wet, giving it more space basically. I'll keep going back and forth wiping off my brush, wiping it on the rag, crushing it outward. [NOISE] As you can see, that has now been given enough clean water to flow outward in, whereas on this side it has reached and made that sharp edge. This is something you can do. If you see that your water has reached the very end like this before it's dry, is now that it's dry, there's not as much that I can do to fix it. There is this one now, I could extend the end of it and then making sure you don't add too much water so it starts flowing everywhere, just leaving it wet enough, clean water space to get that seamless edge and that seamless end for our wet-in-wet technique. I'm going to leave this for about two hours to dry. Then if you want to, if you see that it continues to flow outward and starting to make those tiny hard edges, you can also use an even drier brush, and just bring those edges tiny bit, and scrubbing little bit, pushing inward, trying to get that seamless effect. The way to avoid that as well is to make sure that you give your paint enough space to flow. You put water on your entire sheet of paper and then it will maybe flow all the way to the edge. But it will look soft because there's nowhere to make a hard edge because there's nowhere that's dry. Then I just wanted to mention about transparency. Because watercolor is a transparent medium, so instead of acrylic where if you put on some black and you put a white on top of that, it will show up because it's dense and it's opaque and it covers it completely. Watercolors don't behave like that. Because I only have the same paint to work with, if I put the same paint on top of this, it won't really show up as much on this dark value, because this is already almost maximum value, maximum darkness of this paint. What happens when we splash is that where we put our brush down first will be the darkest portion, and then when it splashes outward, it'll be softer and lighter because it's mixing itself with more water. That's why we make our trees and our details on top so dark so that it'll show up on top of our layers of dry paint underneath. 5. What is this granulation thing?: Another really unique trait with some watercolors is how they granulate. Which means that the particles that watercolors are made out of have different sizes and they settle on the paper at different rates, especially visible if you're working wet in wet, making your paper wet first, and then putting that paint in and letting it separate a bit before it settles on the paper, which is more difficult to get if you're working wet on dry with a tighter packed paint, and it doesn't have as much time to dry and to flow around and separate on the paper. Some paints are mixed with a granulating pigment and a non granulating pigment, just really flowy and smooth, and when they get to play around in that wet water, they separate and really beautiful effects of different colors within just that same one paint, and that's why I really love working with watercolors that I can both play within the wet in wet technique, getting that separation or granulation that texture, and then also using the same paint with a wet on dry technique, putting those fine details on top, getting that crisp line, getting those tiny details as well and then it's really cohesive because you've just use the same paint. As you can see some of them have a really fine texture, and this is called granulation, and ultramarine is a very famous concreting leading paint where the pigment particles, watercolors made out of pigment and binder, which keeps it together and keeps it stuck on your page, and when you mix it with water, some of those pigments float around and settle quicker than others. That will be very visible because I'm going to use one of these granulating paints in my painting, not to worry if you don't have that in your palette, because you can also mix your own. If you mix this ultramarine blue with a pink for example, you can get granulating purple-y shade, if you mix it with the yellow, you can get granulating green, and it's really fun to just play around with. This is my swatch library where I have swatched out all of my handmade paints, and some of them I've swatched like this. I've made that tape line at the bottom and then added clean water and let it spread out and upward and nowhere I can see how they're behaving. You can see that these have that fun granulating texture, which is hard to see if you're making a normal swatch like this. I can highly recommend testing out these splashes on a page like this, I add a tape down the sides, and then I splashed these colors around. What we would ideally like to happen is that they have this smooth, seamless effect like this minual violet does here, at the very top of this, I don't know if you can see it, has a hard edge. What we want is a seamless soft edges where it blends into nothing, it's a matter of water control and brush control, having enough water on your paper to for it flow freely but not having so much that it flows all the way to the edge like has here, and also has here at the side here. Then it seamless here at the top. Testing out your paints like this can be a really nice way to get to know them, or you can obviously go directly in and I'll show you how to troubleshoot if you end up putting too much water down, or you have a super flowy crazy paint that wants to go everywhere. Then this is a continuation of getting to know your paints even better. Then remember how I said you'd mix your own granulating paints. This is a perfect example, and this splash swatch really shows off the way that you can see that burnt sienna pigment that's flowing further and it has more running space, whereas the blue will settle earlier and go into the paper if I let it have enough time on the paper to do so. This is a really nice way of testing up your paint, see if we have anymore in here. A lot of handmade paints as well which I love very much from around the world, and those often have that beautiful separating sector as well. This one I've taped on both sides, you can see that granulation stopping at the pink line, just letting them flow and play in water such a beautiful effect and I'd love for you to try it out. 6. Wet in wet - How to paint the splash: What are we going to start with first? Just going to tape this down. See, this is not super important that it's very straight. I think you can more or less see that it's, no, it's good, I think it's straight. Here we go. A little bump there. What I want to do is I just want to smooth my finger over the top, making sure my finger isn't dirty or very oily. I don't want that on our paper. Then just tear it off at the end. Because we're not making very large splashes, we're just going to make them in section. So I'm just going to use this smallish brush. Going to make clean water. Actually let's dedicate this one. Well, this will be my clean water and this will be my dirty rinsing water. Let's first go in with too much water. I'm not going to wipe off my brush. Usually, I wipe it off the side, getting some of the water off or I can wipe it on a rag. Let's put that there and get some of the water off. But if I'm using too much water, see how that's just dripping off. If I'm not doing anything with it, just put all of that water on the paper. Blending that upward, making a nice area for our splash because water will go wherever it's wet and it will continue to travel wherever it's wet. This amount of water is a bit too much. It doesn't actually need to be this wet to be too wet. You can see that this is flowing around. I hope you can see that this is flowing around being too wet and pooling up at the edges. What happens if I go in with this paint brush that is now full of paint? Actually, that turned out not to be too wet. It turns out that my paint was creamy enough to not go super far, so it's thick enough to not go too far, putting that one back in the brush rest, keeping this brush always just clean. I want to show you how to pick up that excess water. It's pooling up. You see how that's pooling here on the side? I don't want that, my brush is clean and damp and it works as a sponge. Just putting that into. Hope you enjoy that sound effect. I'm just going to wipe that clean water that I'm picking up. Let's do that one more time, just picking up wherever that water is pooling so that we just have this nice sheen on the paper instead. You see that sheen? Do you see the texture of the paper? But there's no water pooling up anywhere. Actually, that turned out to be a nice amount of water . That gave us a nice blurred out effect. If I had a really flowy, paint that might have flowed all the way to the end even with this amount of water. Really it's all about experimenting. It's all about making your paints and your paper and your water amount work for you. We want the water area to be big enough for our paints to be able to flow freely. But we don't want it to so big and so wet that our paint is flowing all the way to the end. Now, again, we can see that sheen on the paper. That's what we want. No water pooling up anywhere. To go in with a wetter version of that indigo. Let's see what happens then. If I try to make just adding a lot of water. This one we started, let it flow to the end. Also, this is just super satisfying too much. As you can now, see how that's pooling up and then it'll try to go where there's water. No, it can't go any further than the edge of the water here, which means it'll start trying to go elsewhere and to flow around in our water. This is what can happen. Then we can, if we want to, use that thirsty brush effect again, so we're just going to rinse off this one. But I'm actually going to use the smaller brush that I have paint on so I don't soak up with my clean water brush water that has paint it. Soaking up a bit of that, rinsing again, tapping my brush. This is why it's called a thirsty brush because it drinks up, soaks up that excess water. What's happening now is if this dries like this, you get that straight edge at the top, you don't get the seamless blend into nothing. What we can do instead, if you don't want this, that edge, while it's still wet, you can try to blend that out with a damp, clean brush. Smooth out those edges a bit, and then blend it up and off the page. Then you still get more of that flowy effect, I'm going to do that on this side as well, I need to get that flow to go to the edge. What we're doing now is we're actually just giving the paint more water to flow into. As it spreads, it leaves pigment on the paper. Imagine that the particles are tightly packed at the beginning, and then they get more and more water in between them. The more water is in between them, the lighter it gets, the more of that white paper we can see through. Then it spreads and spreads and spreads and spreads into nothing and then space between the particles is so large that you see a lot of the paper in-between because it's a transparent medium. At the very edge here you left all of your pigments behind it. You can see from this one, this is more intense even though it's the same exact paint. This one has more pigment here. I gave it less water to travel in because I had a lot of paint on my brush and it really tightly packed on the brush. They wanted to stick together and they didn't have enough water to spread them all out. But here, there's more water. I went back and forth dipping my water in, and that gave them more time to spread, more space to spread and more water to mix itself with so that we get this more soft blurred out effect. Let's do another one with not enough water. Not enough water can both mean not enough space, which is what we fixed here by adding more clean water at the edge and then letting it blend out. What we want to do on this one is, the paint is quite clean and it's quiet dry on my brush, so I got to put that in here. It doesn't really spread that much. I'm going put it there at the bottom. It does spread a bit and I'm also tilting my paper, but this amount of paint is more than enough paint to both get this effect and this effect. So what I would like to do on this very last one is how I would try to do it perfectly. There's no such thing in watercolor illusion. Aim for perfection and perfection is an illusion, but to get that flowy splash that I was aiming for, sorry that it wasn't really aiming for, over in this one, but that's what happened. Let's get our nice sheen on our paper. If you have a very flowy paper or if you're nervous that your paint might reach the end, feel free to do the water all the way to the edge. Some papers are really absorbent and you might need to add more water because it absorbs it really fast. Just keep an eye on it, turn it in the light so that you can see that it has that nice sheen on it. Wonderful. Then get a semi wet amount of paint. I just want to drip that in starting from the middle to see how much it spreads. Then I can taut it upwards to get that fun forest effect. Yeah. Put the brush there. Look at those like 10 rows spreading out. I can see they have enough water for that to be a safe amount of spreading. While it's still wet, I can add in more. Say you want it to taper off on the sides here. This is our wet in wet where our paper is wet and we put wet paint into wet paper. What we're going to do next is our details. We're going to move on to our wet on dry, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is wet paint on dry paper. We're going to use our small brush for that to get those little trees and tiny birds. We'll see you then. 7. Wet on dry - How to paint trees and birds: We're practicing taping. I'm going to do a tape here as well for our little trees. Trying to stretch that out nicely so that it doesn't have any new waves and bubbles where the paint can sneak underneath. The paint is super sneaky and we don't want it to sneak underneath our tape. Then for this, I will be using this small brush and a round pointed brush. Round pointed brushes are my favorite. They can do just about anything. Let's keep this one for today. Lets add in a tiny bit more paint. What do we want to do is with our brush that's now not too wet, we want to go in and we want to make tiny little trees. What I'm doing is I'm using a very tip of my brush and I'm trying to get it quite like straight down onto the page. That way, the smallest point possible is touching the paper and using it quite dry. I like starting with the stem, and then I'm just with the tip of the brush rushing outward and I'm going back and forth over the sides of the brush all the way down to that tape. There is a tiny, what a cutesy little tree. What's nice with brush control is it doesn't really matter how big our brush is. I could make it quite large trees with this brush and I can make very small and the only thing it depends on is how much water I have in my brush. I can also make tiny tree. Just make three little branches out, very small one right there. You're making a bigger splash, allow your brush to dance back and forth, going a bit back and forth, going a bit up and down brushing outward not like a super precise way. Now, I wanted to start with quite a dry brush. Just want to show you what happens when my brush is running out of paint. See that? It's getting this skipping of the paper. Let me show you, it doesn't have enough paint to go into the paper. Because this is a bigger tree I can use this side of my brush more than I would on a smaller tree. Oh yeah, see that. Gives more texture. I see small ones, they're more filled out. That's essentially our trees. I want to fill out all the way down to the bottom of that tape. If I'm doing this on top of a splash, it will already be tight towards the tape there just to make sure that smooth line at the bottom the clean tape peeled end. Then we can make smaller and bigger trees. What I like to do sometimes as well is to not make the stem all the way down. You make the stem and then we're just going to make the top of the tree like that. These are all really cute especially if you're making maybe a higher card, making it a vertical card instead of horizontal landscape card. These trees can be really be cute as well. Then I just wanted to show you because I was talking about brush control and water control. Water control is basically just controlling the amount of paint that's in your brush. Like we did earlier, like I was going back and forth you can see it dripping off my brush. We wanted to go back to this tight point for the details that's what gives us that control. I'm just going to show you that close up again. Up in to the sun. If I dip this brush in my water and I don't wipe it, it has a lot of water in it. This is the enemy of precision and that sounds dramatic just because it is. Even though I put the very tip of my brush on the paper and I'm trying to be as precise as possible, it leaves a lot of water and then I try to do my little rushes outward, spreading that water around. You can see how wet and blobby that is? Although in the sunshine right now it looks super pretty. let's just look at that for a moment. But it will not give us that precision that we're looking for, if we want those detailed trees. Obviously, you're free to do whatever you want. This is your painting. You can make blobby trees, if you think those look nicer. I mean I've made my fair share of blobby trees. I don't judge. But yeah, there we have our very wet tree. You can make it even wetter of course. Also, the more water we have in our brush, like we mentioned before, the lighter the value will be. What we could do then if we realize that it's too wet, we can use the same technique as before, the thirsty brush. Even just wiping off the same one, it doesn't need to be clean brush for this. It can also have good color in it because we're just going back into the color that we have picking up with our thirsty brush, wiping that. You can pick some of that paint back up. You see how light that tree has now gotten. But now you can see how much lighter that tree is because it has a lot more space between the particles of the pigment and the paper is visible through it. This is something you can do to try out your paints, test out your brushes, figure out which one works for you. Then I like to do, I always had liked to do. If you've done the [inaudible] any of my other classes, you might already know this. I love adding tiny birds. Something just happens when the sky with, in this case the swash, also has a couple of birds, it just brings a little bit of life literally to your painting because birds are famously alive. For tiny birds, again, it's really important that we have a very controlled amount of water and paint in our brush and just carefully dipping the tip of my brush over there. Then just making tiny v shapes or m shapes like that McDonald's bird. This will just make it so that it looks like the birds are in flight because birds, they flap their wings down and they flap their wings up and any point in this journey of flapping wings, you can paint them. The perfect demonstration, holding it like a pencil. Again, using the very tip of my brush straight down to the paper making tiny check marks or tiny m's or u's or little a's. You can also add a tiny dot in the middle where the body of the bird. Let's bring that closer. There we have the tiny birds. Again, just wanting to do tiny little birds like that. That's how I make my tiny birds. I just scattered them around. I like doing three or five. You can see those tiny birds out on the side there. Then there's also secret metallic birds into the splash. This is what we're going to end up with for our project. Wonderful. You ready for the sparkly party part? Now, you could be done with this. If you don't have metallic paints, you can always just skip directly to our project and do your beautiful background splash. Some lovely trees and some birds in the foreground and be done. But if you have metallic paints and you would like to know more about how to use them, either join me in that one or you can skip right onto our class project if you so wish. See you then. 8. Metallic paints - Sparkle time!: Are you're ready for our metallics? These are the metallics that I'm using today. Some lovely shimmery metallic shapes are quite opaque when you put them on paper and I made a little swatch map here in the back just to see what colors I had to work with. You can see that where I have a lot of paint, it covers up that black paper completely, and then you can blend it out with water into a more transparent version. What do we want to do today is use that most opaque version of them so I'll be using this gold and this pearl on top of my paintings for later. Usually what happens with metallic shades is that they need a bit more time to activate than normal watercolor paints. Instead of just putting our brush in and going right into paint we will usually need to work them a bit longer. What you can do if you know you're going to use them, is to add a drop of water. Using my clean brush, let's do that version over here. Red one just adding a drop of water, or if you have a spray bottle or something to spritz them with and they can start softening up that binder and activate so that you are prepped and ready to go and softened so that we can get that metallic shine. Otherwise, let's go in with our normal brush, let's get some clean water on that one. Double-checking that is clean. It's contaminated by gold. Then I'm just going to use not straight into the pen because I want my tips to be nice and safe. It's going on the side during that water around starting to mix in pigment, mixing up those little flakes, just going to leave that little water droplet alone to do something. That gives me a nice opaque amount of paint on my brush. Then what I'm doing is just the exact same as I was doing with the trees earlier. To make that line first and then going to my branches, just brushing upward and downward and then also the same thing with the birds. Just using that pencil, going upward and downward. If I see that it's getting very symmetrical, I do try to flap my brush around a bit trying to make it less perfect if that makes sense, because I don't want all my trees to look the same. Usually, if I load up my brush as much as you saw me do now, I'll have enough paint on my brush to go for quite a few trees and I can do a little cluster of trees, which is what I want to do and not to make them the same shape, not the same height because not all Christmas trees are of the same height or a perfect tic-tac-toe and just tiny, tiny ones. Again before or trying to get that transition from the paint onto the tape without any holes. Just nice and seamless. Let's check this out, a little closer. Super sparkly beautiful metallic paints and they still show up when I hold it like this then turning it in the light. You can see all that sparkly, sparkly metallics. These go beautifully on top of a dark splash like this. I love golden spruce, I'll love golden green. I also love pearl. They go with any color. Let's check on that red one, shall we? Usually, I'll add metallics at the very, very end of my painting process. That way I won't go into metallic paints and then put that back into my palette because like we know, metallic never goes away. After I've painted with sparkly paint, I usually try to rinse it in a different jar, but I'm going to clean this one out before. This one will rinse that off, and then say I did this at the beginning of our session and then this would have activated ready and see how that immediately gives me a lot of paint on my brush. These are the paints that will show up on their own. This reddish bronzy color and this gold, whereas these ones won't show up as well on their own. They show up better on top of paint or on colored paper. Just keep that in mind depending on what kind of splash you're doing, that these might not work as well on their own. They'll work really nicely on top of something else. Just taking this peak here, let's do our birds with this one. If you're going to see me wipe it a bit on the edge here, just getting that nice fine point and that water control. Then I'm just doing the same kind of birds as before. If I need to, I'll twist my brush if that helps me have more of a point or a more controlled bird stroke. Bird stroke sounds like a terrible disease. We have our little metallic birds as well. There we have it. We have all the elements we need to get started on our project. I'll just show you how to tear that paper and then we can get started. I'll see you in the next lesson for some paper tearing magic. 9. Safe tape removal tips: Before we get our paper ready, I just wanted to show you how I tear off the tape. These are now dry. You can see how there's no sheen, there's no shine on these, except on the metallics. It's supposed to be shinny, but the paint isn't wet anymore, so it's safe for us to tear off our tape. What I do is, I'll start at the corner towards the edge, peeling that off, and then carefully peeling at an angle, peeling it as flat as possible. I don't want to tear it upward. I want to tear it on a diagonal sideways, downward motion, and then if you feel at any point that the paper is tearing, please go find a hairdryer or a heat gun. This tape works quite well with this paper, but if at any point I feel like it's tearing, which is why I'm doing it so slowly, I have an embossing heat gun that can help soften the glue. You get that beautiful straight line, and if I had trees on top of this, and then metallic trees on top, they would all be seamed out by that tape. This was a small test tree one, which is why I didn't pay as much attention, but this one has a tiny, tiny skip. It's not a huge deal but you can see that that's visible if we don't get the paint all the way down to that tape. I just wanted to show you so you see what that looks like. Otherwise, you see that the clean paper edge up towards that paint, and I just really marks off, and then it's easy for us to write something underneath, for example, if you want to write a greeting, I usually do my signature at the right-hand side at the bottom of the corner there. Let's start from the other side, this one. Again just tearing down and out, getting our edge easy, getting that clean edge. There we are. Then if you wanted to remember how we wrote something on the tape earlier, this was too wet, this was not all the way to the edge. Remember the thirsty brush. If you would like to put that back in again, if you want to leave hints for yourself to make it easier to remember tips and tricks from this class, feel free to do so. Then you can refer back to it, next time you want to make these cards. 10. How to easily tear watercolor paper : Let's talk watercolor paper, which is one of our most important supplies because it needs to be able to hold the amount of water we're going to put on it. Usually water and paper are not friends so what we need is watercolor paper. There are different types. You can buy them ready-made in different sizes. You can buy loose sheets or blocks, or you can buy them in full sheets, which is this size, which is gigantic and huge. I'll show you how to tear those up into smaller pieces. You can get a lot of tiny Christmas cards, you'll probably make all the Christmas cards you need from one gigantic sheet of paper, if you so wish. You can make them any size you want. Big ones, foldable ones, or tiny ones, you can make holes in them and make them into gift tags. But because this is a gigantic piece of paper, hello, I've already folded this once and I'm just making sure that it's really flat. I also really struggle to unfold this. But I make sure that my hands are clean and I don't have any oil, or food, or any paint on my hands, they don't get any of my paper. I like to fold it back and forth at least twice, usually three times, and really smooth over. That way I start tearing those fibers in the fold. Then it's slightly out of frame, but what I'm doing is I'm just holding both sides of the fold and I'm just tearing a bit of an opening at the bottom, we're putting that down towards the floor and then putting my thumb into the fold and my other fingers on top, my middle finger is pressing down on the fold, and my other hand is helping pulling them apart as I push into the floor. Look at this magic. It's so easy like that. Then suddenly we have two still rather large pieces of paper, but now we can start folding them down into smaller pieces. This specific paper has a watermark, which marks which side is the front and back. This paper is 100 percent cotton and it has quite a similar texture on the front and back, but not all papers do. For this one, it doesn't really matter if you paint front or back, but for some papers, it does really make a difference because of the sizing and the way the paper has been treated. I usually grab a pencil and then I just mark very lightly on the corner on the backside of the paper. Just in the corner there. Because I know I'm going to tear it in two, I'm going to mark both corners. That way I can keep track of what's front and back when I start tearing the sheet up into smaller pieces of paper. Then I'm just repeating the same process. I'm going to speed this up a little because I am doing the exact same thing. When it comes down to about this size, it's also possible to use a ruler to tear your paper. I like using a metal ruler, that way the edges will be sharp. I just do the exact same thing. I fold my paper back and forth to tear those fibers so the tear knows where it needs to go, then I put my ruler up against that fold and I tear straight upward. I fold it and then tear backwards as if I'm trying to fold it again. This takes a little bit of practice. You might tear your paper is a bit roughly the first times. Not to worry, that happens. But if you want to practice on a smaller piece of paper, it does give you more control the smaller your paper is. Then we have this tiny card. You can also write on the inside of that, just demonstrating that one more time. Then for our last little piece here, getting down to a very small size, you can also just fold it and tear it with your fingers like this. There we have our whole stack. This was all made from that one sheet of paper. You can either get two of this size, four of this size, eight of this size, 16 of this size, 32 of that size, 64 of this size, or a 128 tiny Christmas cards if you want to, from a single sheet of watercolor paper. Try that out, see if you like one technique more than the other. When you have your paper ready, we'll move into our class project and I'll be demonstrating one on a small piece of paper like this with the torn edges and also on a premade postcard-sized paper. Now I'll see you then. 11. Project - Background layer: First things first, I'm going to tape my paper and what I usually do is I tape one tape line across the bottom where I want my splash to start and then I don't usually tape it down on anything. I like to keep it so that I can turn it. Because I don't put water on the whole thing, it doesn't really matter that I don't tape it down onto a paper. It usually dries quite flat. But if you would prefer to tape it down, you can also tape it with double-sided tape or a teacher's, we call it teacher's gum tachette, Blue tach, or a kneaded eraser to attach it from the back. That way you have all this space for your splash. If you tape it to a board, it's nice to pick it up and then be able to see that sheen on the paper so that you can judge how wet it is and how much water is on your paper. But I usually just tape it as a straight line in the middle of this one, trying to keep it semi-straight. I don't really measure it, but you can do that if you would like to. Then at the very bottom of this landscape one, that way I have some space to splash. Then for this one, I mean, you can also write at the bottom of this, but here you have some more space to write whatever greeting you would like to add to your cards. This one first, a Christmassy green, and then we'll do this Christmassy red afterwards. Starting with this lovely paper here, this is still my clean brush. I swapped out my sparkly water. Just going in, dragging it downward. This is brush technique wise. For this one, we were adding lots of water. We don't want to put our brush straight down to the papers so I;m dragging it sideways. You always want to drag instead of push to keep your brushes safe and happy. Just checking that in the light, going back over if any air are looking like they are drying, getting too dry, and then keeping that one dry, not dry but clean. Clean with the other one. It's next to our yellow there so it's easy to find. Getting a nice juicy amount of paint, and then I'm tilting my paper letting that paint flow. Let's get a little bit more water in there just to get that flow. You see I'm going back into some paint and then going back into some water. It can also start higher up. Then drag downwards if you want to, while it's still wet, we have time to move and play, ensure that bottom is covered. You can also, if you would like to make a treeish shape somewhere here at the top, or you just let the paint flow wild and beautiful and do its own thing just manipulating it around a bit and I try to make it go out on the sides equally on both sides. I'm just rinsing that a little making sure that that one has some space to flow. I felt like that one was in the edge like that. I like it when it's little bit unsymmetrical, one side goes up higher than the other. Then I don't want to mess with it too much. Just want it to be a wild flowy forest like this. That is our first Christmas background, [inaudible] background. It's not a snowy background, it's a forest background. Getting started on our next one, I put some red on this brush, water first and this is a different paper, it will behave a bit differently. It'll teach us something else. It'll flow differently. The texture might be different. It's all fun and games. Putting it back in its rest and then going with this juicy Christmas red and already, such a fun flow. Then because this is a new paper, new in a sense that it's not the same as the other one I'm just being a little bit extra attentive to see how far it flows, to ensure that I don't let it flow all the way to the edge for the look that I want. You can do that if you would like to. I'm keeping it very, very pigmented here at the bottom. It's really, really, really bright. This is pyrrol read from Daniel Smith. I don't know about you, but that makes me feel super Christmassy. There we have our two background slashes, just going to wait for these to dry completely and then we'll go back in for our trees and our little birds. Now what you can do if you're worried that while it's drying, it's going to go all the way to the edge. We see that the edge of the water is here now, I don't think it will necessarily but I can see where the edge of that water is. That's going to give it space all the way to the edge. The only thing I'm adding is a tiny bit of clean water. It's all I'm adding just to give it all the space that it needs to go upwards, so I don't get that ghost line of sneaky pigment going all the way to the edge which I did actually get on this one so I'm going to do the exact same thing like so. There they are, our beautiful splashy backgrounds. Stay tuned for the next one. Just going to wait for this to dry and then we'll go in with our trees. 12. Project - Foreground details: We're ready for round 2. We're ready to go in with our trees. This one is completely dry, carefully touch it, and you can also turn it in the light and sunshine if you have it. I'm just going to go in with my smaller brush and just pick up a bit of that sap green. We're not putting too much water into the well either because that will activate too much paint, and like I mentioned, I want it to be quite pigmented, that way it will show up nicely on our painting. Starting with the stem and then moving my way down dangling in those trees. This is a nice value, a nice dark shade for that, see how that shows up nicely as a tree in that background. Even though it's quite dark, I can add some more paint, it doesn't have to be perfectly balanced. It doesn't have to be perfectly symmetrical forest like I mentioned, and I do like when it's a cluster of trees, and then maybe a small tree, I'll draw one of the sides, for example. Then some trees that stretch into, not necessarily white part of the paper but stretches into a lighter part. Then for the front, insert a tiny tree. I'm sorry, it looks way too lonely, tiny, tiny tree friend like that. Then for me, that grounds it on both edges. Of course, you can make really big trees as well, and then this will be the background trees. I really like the way this looks with just some small trees then I'm going to add some birds up here. Up into where the sky is quite light. Tiny, tiny birds and some into that green. I've also tried to space this out perfectly spaced from each other. I usually make the bottom one feel like the closest one. That way it feels like they're flying towards us. The hand that's closer is bigger because the other one is further away. That makes it look that there's a bit of depth and balance in the picture as well in our painting. We're just going to let that dry completely, so that we can add some tiny little pearly trees upfront on this one as well. While we wait for that to dry, checking in our red one, it's a little bit thicker than the postcards. This one is actually not dry yet. I'm just going to cheat and use my heat gun to heat this up a tiny bit, and I'll be right back. Now, using that heat gun made it completely bone dry. That's much better for painting because the trick with the wet and dry is that it has to be dry. If the background is a little bit wet, then that means our trees that we put down afterwards won't be as precise because they'll start bleeding into that paper that's not completely dry in the background. Just a reminder to always make sure that your paper is super dry before going in with the precision of wet on dry, so that we know that we have the control that we need to put those in. Just because we've put our paint first on this one, we'll put our metallic after. For this one, I'm actually going to put our metallic first, and then we're going to add some tiny red trees on top of the metallic gold ones afterwards. This will have splash paint metallic. This will have splash metallic, and then the normal paint. Let's go into our gold. Remember like before, just giving it that time to activate, during that aggravate my brush too much. Getting some gold on my brush, just making those tiny trees. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add red trees on top of this. I'm making this a tiny bit bigger. Then maybe I would for painting at the sides, just keeping it trimmy but not too super thick. Your metallic paints, might paint differently than mine. It's also a nice way to get to know them. Like so. I'm going to add in some tiny birds as well. Now, we have our shiny trees on top of our red Christmas background. We're going to head back to our pearly color and put that on the green while that dries. This is why it's so efficient because you can move back and forth between your paintings. I don't want to overlap them perfectly into trees [inaudible]. We just want to stick them in between the trees that are already there. You want to add those tiny birds. I feel like this one is a bit of a strange shape. I might add some green trees on top of these other trees. That some tiny sparkly birds up there. Now, that our metallic color should have dried, we can add in a bit of red trees on top of our metallic trees. Some more of that red paint. This one is quite thick. They're nicely on top of the gold. Like that. That adds to the layering, adds to a little bit of that interesting texture of that painting. Then because I'm being extra, I'm going to add some trees in front of that parallel as well, but I'm not thrilled about in this, friends, I just realized this is what happen, sometimes we paint things that we don't really like, or if something happens and we're like, that's not how I wanted that to turn out. Sometimes we can't fix it, but sometimes we can adjust it. We can go with the flow and just try to make the best of it, turning it into something new. It's not exactly how I wanted this to go, but it's going to end up being a good Christmas card anyway. Yeah, yes it is. I promised here on this video that I will give this card to someone, it will be a Christmas card of 2021. Like so. Then you have those nice layers of paint. I would love to see your [inaudible] of this, whenever you try it out. Very carefully, especially edges can be quite tricky. Just making sure you're really careful because obviously here the fibers are open if that makes sense. Make sure those are tearing outside there, those at the very bottom. That's okay. See how that tore off a piece of my paper because the edge is open, and frayed, and that is easy for the teeth to grab a hold of. Then like this, just tearing it very flat on the side like that, giving us a beautiful clean line on that card. Lets do the same thing here. Again, being really careful on the side. There we have it, we have our Christmas cards ready. I would love for you to sign your work. You can sign with pen or a pencil. I quite like the look of pencil, but then it's also nice, crisp, and clean with a pen, so I'll do both. I actually signed with my initials down there at the bottom. There we have it. There are our cards. 13. Travel kit - Splashing on the go: I thought maybe some of you are like me and you need to travel somewhere to go home for Christmas. If you are and you would like tips on how to pack a travel kit, this is the one I usually think. It's not very large. It's just a little bit bigger than a postcard so that I can put those postcard size papers in, but it fits everything that I need. This one opens here on the side. Here I have my water brushes and a mechanical pencil, and then in here are my art supplies, my papers and I like to have them in a little cellophane bag, and that way I know that they won't get wet if something spills in my bag. Then I have a little rag to wipe my brushes on. Clearly, I've been using purple. This is the same palette as before. This palette actually has a mixing space as well. I have my paints here, my swatch, and my palette. These are the small tin of metallic paints. It's not essential to put in your travel kit but I have it. Then I have a little roll of washi tape. Just getting out my brushes. Rubbing our water brushes. I'm going to keep this one as my clean water brush because this one is the biggest one. This one is just a bit stained, but this water is completely clean, I can double check that on our white rag as well, and these will be my detail brushes. This one is going to go into that indigo that we used before, just activating that a tiny bit. Cleaning at the outside, and then just using my clean water brush. Then when I squeeze, the water comes through the barrel and comes out on the upside. I just drip some water on my paper and then I'm turning it in the light to see that it gets that sheen that we want. These water brushes, I find it quite tight which is nice because then it doesn't leak any unnecessary water. Like that, see that sheen. Then I can just add the paint directly, then more color, and just totting them in. I see that it's going towards the edge, I just flip my paper downward again so it doesn't fall. Then gravity helps us keep it there in the bottom. Then we can also use water brushes as thirsty brushes. How to clean them is to squeeze our brush. Squeeze more water into that and then wipe it. Then I can use this brush and pick up all that paint that's pouring at the bottom. That would be too wet. That's okay. Then I want to go fix that edge over in that corner, you see that there's no water here at the bottom. I'm just going to extend it to the edge, and then pick that excess water back up that way it has that smooth line. Got a bit of a windswept feel over here. Then it's still soft at the top even though it has reached that end. While it's still wet, you can keep manipulating as well. Then that one stays clean. We have our splash. Now I'm going to use a heat gun on this just because I'm here and I can. But usually I'll just let this dry or you can make another one at same time. Then we'll go back in with our details with the same one, and also I'm going to show you how to make sparkly snow on the branches of the trees, we'll do that in just a moment. Now we have dry paper to work on. Like before, since we want to go in with a rich color of that paint, not actually putting it down on the palette. I think just going back in with that same brush using our wet and dry. I'm just doing the same thing as before. This really hold the point very nicely. We have our little clustered trees. Then let's use our smaller detail brush for this. Just making sure that that's clean and then going into this beautiful icy sparkly snow clean palette. Then just wiping it off to the edge. This is how I shape it back into that point, getting a lot of that beautiful sparkly color on my brush. Then what I want to do is I want to make little outward strokes almost the same as the branches, but to put snow on top of those trees because I know there's a lot of my brush down. I'm going to start at the bottom going outward. Took it two more or less go on top of the branches that are already painted. It doesn't need to be super precise because snow doesn't land perfectly, some actually fall on trees. As you can see that gives it a bit of extra life and sparkle. You can absolutely be done with it like this. I'm just going to show you one final trick, which is add a little bit more water into your brush. Then I'm just going to add tiny bit of color. Then I'm going to use that. I'm going to splatter it onto my painting right here. You may need to add more water into your paint. Since we have our rag here, you can wipe my finger on that and also clean off my brush. Squeezing out more clean water just make sure that this one is completely clean. Even though it doesn't look clean because it's been stained, and I always make sure to clean my bush up before putting them back in the kit. There it is. We got some nice sparkles on there. Just going to tear off that tape like before starting on the edge. Then we have beautiful wintry splashy forest made with only a very small travel set. 14. Before you go!: [MUSIC] Here we are at the very end of the class, and I'm really happy that you took some time out of your busy schedule. I know we all have lots of things to do all the time and it's easy to not prioritize making art. Of course it is, but I think it's so important and I'm really proud of you for having taken some time out of your day to be creative, to use your paints. Your paints are so happy to have been taken out of the cupboard or out of the closet and being used for what their destiny is, which is to be used by an artist like you to create something lovely that will spread some some and some joy to whoever receives it, even if that person is you. For me, the most important thing is that, we enjoy what we do. If you find something that you enjoy this class, keep it. If there's something you don't enjoy, leave that behind, and then you can combine when you do different classes, you just pick and mix from all the teachers, and all the people, and all the supplies that you have. You are like, oh, these are my favorites and maybe you narrow back in on what brings you the most joy and the most fulfillment when it comes to your artistry. If you would like to share your work on Instagram, I would love for you to tag me there as well. I've put my handle somewhere on the screen so you can see it. If you enjoyed this class, you might enjoy some of my other classes as well. They're mostly based around painting in monochrome, just to keep working on that painting with just one color and enjoying bringing that creativity and that art back into our lives. Until next time, happy splashing, and I'll see you soon. 15. Jingle bloops : Take 2, the second version. But now, we've warmed up, so now we're feeling better because I don't live alone. Why am I not breathing? This always happens. I don't want it to be just a seasonal class. Can be painted all year round. Last time I checked, forests exists also in summer. Exactly. Hello, right this way. Not saying sentences. Am I? Swim in the water. I think we have established that water is wet. How about we also sit on this sweater? You like my Christmas Eve shirt? Texture interests. What is my point? Are we tearing up? Are we're tearing down? Outer space, inner space. Is my throat so dry? There's no water in the bottle. No kicking the bed, the camera's on the bed. Have you tried making items? No. Then what? Very at the end. Don't do it at the beginning, do it at the end. Does it matter? Is this shadow distracting you all? These are my gestures. Fake plant, real plant. What is this gesture? Hello, dear friends. What? That was not where we were going to start today. Do we though? It's in wraps and wraps, wrapping paper. What was that? Human working with 100 percent cotton. I think we'll call it a day, guys. Yes, I will. Hello, lamp. You know what I mean? This?