Floral Fields - Create Enchanting Landscapes with Watercolor and Pastels

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I love the atmospheric, dreamy landscapes. I've done several different projects where I've visited the landscape subject but in this project, I want to do some type of field of flowers landscape. I want it to be a little more abstract, I want the colors to maybe not be traditional, and I just want to see what interesting abstract field of flowers that we can come up with. I'm Denise Love and I'm an artist and photographer out of Atlanta, Georgia. Today, I have been experimenting with watercolor and pastels, and pastel pencils, and some oil pastels, and just seeing what it is that we can create for a little bit of an atmospheric landscape with some dreamy flower fields in the bottom. I want you to to in today's class with your watercolors, you don't have to have the same ones that I'm using, I want you to experiment with your mark-making tools, and that can include a variety of different things such as pastels, oil pastels, or soft pastels, pastel pencils, your Neocolor II crayons, colored pencils, really the options are quite open once you see what it is that we're doing on top of the landscape that we create. I hope you get excited with today's project. It's not hard, it's another one of those. I wanted you to be able to sit at your table, create something and be proud when you were finished and be like, "Oh, I can't wait to frame this," because there's one or two in this collection that I got really excited about. I like doing more than one, so I'm going to paint several with you. The same technique, maybe we'll add a different spin to each one. Maybe on one, it'll be all color, maybe on one, it'll be all shades of gray, maybe on one we'll get some mountains in there throw in a path, maybe on one we'll have two colors. I want you to just come watch each one, see what really appeals to you, pull out your watercolors and pastels and see what you can create. I'm really excited to have you in class today. I can't wait to see what landscapes and fields of flowers you come up with, so come back and share those with me. I'll see you in class. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Your class project is to create one of these really beautiful landscapes and come back and show us what you did. I'd love to see if it's a one-color or a two-color watercolor and what colors you chose for your random flower fields coming off the bottom of that and just see what it is that you came up with. I'm looking forward to seeing those and I'll see you in class. [MUSIC] 3. Supplies: Let's just take a look at the supplies that I'll possibly be pulling from during this class. This class was inspired by those beautiful atmospheric landscapes that I created for the pinprick class, and I thought, man, I love those landscapes so much. What if we had a field of flowers down there at the bottom in the landscape you part, and man, I love these so much and I will show you how I make these. I'm going to be using watercolors for the landscape itself and I'm going to be personally using my graphite watercolors, some of the original set that I've shown you in some of these classes that I'm absolutely obsessed with. These are the [inaudible] graphite pans. It is a newer product out there. I so loved those that I then decided I can make some. Those are the original ones I made, and then I'm like, I can make some more, so I made myself a whole pan of yummy colors. If you want to use graphite colors and you want to make your own, check out the make your own graphite watercolors. That's what I'm going to be using. Any watercolor would work for this class. Don't feel you have to use that one type. I'm also going to be using some pastels. I'm going to be pulling from my yummy favorite pastel drawer. These are all half sticks of this anneleate soft pastels. I like using these. Then I also recently got some pastels and I want to just try them so I might pull those out. These are extra soft art spectrum pastels, and I'm just obsessed with the yummy set of greens. I might pull that out and use that because I haven't played with those and I want to see what they'll do and I just know they'll make something amazing. I also have some other yummy pastels here, which are die Townsend and they didn't come broken. I've managed to drop them on the floor and broke them, but doesn't even matter if their whole or broken. The colors are super cool. I'm obsessed with this pink color and I'm feeling like that could be really pretty in a landscape. I'm almost feeling like if we did one similar to this one that I did, that reminds me of being out west and maybe worth the Grand Canyon and maybe there's water flowing through the Grand Canyon. It reminds me of this color way. I feel like I want to maybe try those too. You may or may not see those, but I just thought I'd show you some other soft pastel options. I also like playing with pastel pencils, and I have this is the faber-castell pastel pencil set. This is really fun to add details and marks and maybe a little flowers and this is a fun set to play in. We'll be pulling from that possibly. You don't have to have all those things. Really the bare basics would be some watercolors and some pastels. I also [LAUGHTER] thought some of these oil pastels are also very fun to work in. Keep in mind when you're using soft pastels and oil pastels, that you might want to fix them. I fix these with the saniliate fixative. Saniliae has a fixative for soft pastels and a fixative for the oil pastels. I'm not as concerned about the oil pastels smearing as I am the soft pastels because the soft pastels just go everywhere. The oil pastels are very creamy, so they do tend to stay in place, but they don't seem to ever really dry. If you use that fixative, you'll usually just get a nice hard coating on top so they're less likely to smear. I do maybe use some of these things sparingly, or maybe not, but I do intend them to be framed fairly quickly if it's a piece that I love. But I did do a sample just to show you for myself and then show you, I did a sample of how much does this fixative darken my piece? This side has the fixative on it and this side does not. Even though the pastels are maybe just a hair darker, it's not enough that I would think my piece is ruined. I am pretty okay with spraying the saniliae on top of my piece. If you're not sure on your fixatives, if it's going to darken your piece or not, just do a sample piece, mark it off, and cover one side and spray the other side. Then when it's dry, compare and see if it bothers you or if you like it. I did that for myself. Then I also have some artist's tape because I like to tape my pieces off. I have my sketchbook so I can play in the sketchbook and see what different colors might be. Then today I'm going to be using this acquarello watercolor, Fabriano paper. It's 100 percent cotton paper and I've liked working on this stuff, so I thought I would finish off the pad that I had since it was such a good size and then I got a piece of scrap paper down there. The supplies can be very minimal, watercolor and then some mark-making for the flowers on the top and you could experiment with different items there. We could experiment with the neon color to crayons. I'm going to be experimenting with pastels and see what I get there. Definitely look around at what you already have and see what you can do because we're going to make a really pretty atmospheric landscape with the watercolor and then we'll fill in with some dots and lines and color to get our flower fields and just see what we end up with. Also, I've got some water over here and also we'll be using my Raphael soft Aqua brushes and this is a size 0. That's the size I'm going to be using to paint my landscapes. This is more of a mop brush. It's got that mop shape to it, and I like that shape doing stuff like this because I'm just trying to get a really beautiful blend of the color, maybe pull up some color, and so that's the brush I'm going to be using in class. I just forgot to mention that. I also like to have one of these artists needing erasers handy because if you happen to get pastel in any part of your piece that you didn't intend, like maybe you got a piece off to the side, this stuff is great for erasing a little bit of pastel dust and then your piece is not ruined. You know how many times I've done that and had a little spot out somewhere, and maybe I wanted the whole thing clean. I could just pull this and just get that pastel dust right off of there and then still have a clean edge. I do like to always have one of these over here on my desk that I can grab. I'll see you back in class. 4. Sketchbook Play: Let's do a couple of things in our sketch book to get used to what we're working with. I've taped off just a couple of squares and I want to try to focus on one color landscape and two-color landscape. What I want to do is I want to start at the bottom and make almost mountains, or hills, or a pathway, so on the first one we'll do like mountains and on the second one let's try like a pathway. Also wanted to try one color, one color from the top to the bottom and two color from landscape being one color, sky being another color and that doesn't mean that the sky has to be blue and the landscape has to be green. I'm not doing a specific color. This is more like an abstract landscape, maybe we're looking at fields of flowers and the fog, or maybe we're looking at it at sunset, or maybe we're in a part of the country we've never been to and blue and green are just the only colors that are there. [LAUGHTER] Maybe just in our mind and imagination we have amazing colors that we can make these landscapes. I'm going to be using my graph white watercolors and I've got a little scrap piece of paper up here where I can just test out these colors and say okay what is this? I could also spray these down and just activate them a little bit so that when I'm coming over here with my brush they're already wet and active and ready for me. I'm just trying to see like what colors do we have? What I've already done? What would I want to experiment with? Check that out, that one super cool. That's like a dark grayish graffiti color. Let's just do that for giggles since I haven't done a landscape in that and this could be like all gray. I'm basically wanting to start off just pushing that color to the top super thin and then I'm going to come back and fill in with the mountains a little better. Because I want the top, I just wanted to fade into their being sky up there but not necessarily blue sky with lots of clouds that you can see what it's doing. I just want to imply up there personally, you might have some different thoughts there. Then I'm just very gently coming back here and throwing in what can be mountains, maybe trees up there and then I'm going to let that dry and do its thing. Then we will come back in there with flowers, or fields, or whatever it is that we're feeling. We'll just let that do its thing. If you think, oh I didn't put enough up top you could make it a little darker but it needs to be before now. You need to go ahead and do it and then do it darker and then if you're thinking, oh it darker, do it darker but don't come back after you've waited this long because now it's past the time that you can change that it's already started to dry so let's just say at this point we've missed that chance. Let's just let it do its thing and then we'll know for the next time or let's just do another one right here. We'll just know for the next time that maybe we want it darker. Let's just run that sky up and come back and put the landscape in. Maybe we want it darker. At this point we could let that dry a little bit, I could go ahead and come back in with some darker mountains, if it's getting too smeary I can wait a second because that's a lot wetter, I just wet that down pretty good. This is such a yummy color though and I do like the darkness up there that could almost be like dark stormy sky, it's really late at night and let's just let that do its thing and dry. We can hurry it up with a heat gun but I really do encourage you to resist doing that. Then I also have these microfiber cloths that I keep handy and that's what I use to dab stuff on, I love those in my room. I'm going to let these dry a second and then I'll be right back. Those are dry. At this point I would look at that and I think, what is it that I want to add to that? What look I'm I going for? I could get out of the pastel pencils, I could get out my soft pastels which I'm not sure that the green family is what I'm looking for for this or that red family so I could just go ahead and get out this my little ciliate like half pieces and just see, what do I want to make out of this? Do I want it to be blues and grays? Do I want it to be greens and pinks? What are we initially going for? Is it going to be dark and maybe we need to do some dark colors? The sketchbook is the place to play. At this point I'm trying to now put in maybe some details like how is this field doing? Is it covering mountain side so things are going up and curvy and doing something fun? Or are the flowers all laid out in the field? What is it that we're trying to add detail to? I'll tell you, I'll be the first to say on something like this I always overdo it. [LAUGHTER] It is a case of less can be more but I don't know, I just end up doing more is more [LAUGHTER] so do it the best, just see what you end up with. This is I think like a black not quite black it's got a greenish color to it because I actually have black right here and it's black so you can tell there's a little bit of green in there but I do not know what color any of these are because after you take them out of their little pan they're just gone, like that color is just gone. Now that I'm looking at that though I think this color right here is out of this I think it's this brown so let's just try those since it's a little piece like this. If you have broken pieces that's fine that does not hurt it or bother it or change it at all. The sketchbook is the place to experiment with color before we lock into colors that maybe we were not sure about. Like I'm not sure about this all gray color way so we're experimenting and maybe we want to pull blues look at that so that's fun. I'm just implying there's fields of flowers there, we're working so small, you could do like little dots of color, we could do like I did and like little runs of color implying hills or whatever it is that we're trying to imply there and then start mixing in maybe a little color palette that you think you like. I'm just going by feel here. You could go by color palette, you could go by specific color ways. If you've got something specific in your mind that you know you love give it a try there's no wrong way here. But I do use the sketchbook to figure out color palettes and colorways before I move into my bigger piece of art. Before I completely go let's add way too much to it. Let's just peel the tape and see what these little minis look like. I want you to resist going too far which I just have a hard time with that. I just want to add then I think that was too much. [LAUGHTER] Right now they are still powdery so I could have gone ahead and fixed them, but that's okay. See, when you peel all the tape, that's what make these look so pretty. That is really pretty for a yummy, neutrally. I do like the darker sky, so interesting experiment to figure out there. Now if you're working in your sketchbook with lots of pastels, you'll notice that then the pastels get on the page on the other side. If you're trying to protect the pages from that, you might put a piece of glass scene or butcher paper in there. I have to get some out. I'm going to put a tissue there so that I'm not ruining those pages as I flip over. Now we could do something else. I'm thinking that was one color. Just trying the mountains, did we like heavier sky or lighter sky? Here I want to try something that's not just like a black and maybe like terracotta, like we're going into the mountains. They're off this color right here. Now this color is a color that's the Chinese orange by Sennelier the watercolors. It's got the graphite powder mixed in it so you can take premixed colors and mix them with graphite powder and get these yummy graphite colors. That's what that is. This was the Chinese orange. It's a very beautiful terracotta color. I think I want to do another one of these where it's like we're in the canyons and a little heavier on the sky. Go ahead and run that color up and then come back in. Let's put some little mountains. You can play until it starts to dry a little bit and then you're locked out like you're done. Super fun there. Then what if I wanted there to be a passageway in those mountains? What if we did same thing? Let me get the color running up a little better. There we go. Let's get some mountains. But what if in the mountains, I want a little canyon way. Let's get some mountains in their little canyon away, pathway. [LAUGHTER] Let's get some of these and then clean your brush off. Now we can actually come back in, then pull some of this color off, make a little path, and then come back in and finish that off. We can pull some of that color off to give us that yummy path. If we've got some water pooling anywhere, we can pull that back off. Just some fun little techniques to experiment with on something like this. You don't have to go too fast, but slow down enough to get some details in there. Then think about things like, do I want a path? Do I want no path? Do I want one color? What one color do I want? Let these dry. Let's go ahead and take off one more page and try not to mess that up while it's drying. What if now we did two colors instead of just one color? I want you to fill your sketchbook up with ideas, different colors, different things that you're using for your flower mark-making. Then see what ended up being your favorite? What gave you the look you wanted? Then what big pieces did you create off of that inspiration? Because this is your play time here in your sketchbook. Then you worked out all the problems before you get to your bigger, nicer piece. I want to color, I feel like I want maybe a real pretty color up top. Let's see, that one's more red. Let's see what we got here. I like that color, but I want it to be real fine and slight. It's hard on some of these to get that. I do like that one. Let's use this one. This one is venetian red with the graphite in it. It's another civilly a color that I like. Trying to run that color up. Light. If you get it too heavy, don't think that you can dab it back off because you certainly can. Then we can also pull color back if we think, oh, I got too much on there, we could pull color back. Then I want the bottom to be more of a blue. Like this. This one's real blue-gray. It's real pretty. I even want a path. In that thought, let's just lay the color down like we had a path go and already like let's just leave a path in there and just see what we get. We can just plan for that right up front. I'm just playing there with the watercolor, making it do things I didn't actually intend to do there. [LAUGHTER] Just experimenting. Let's do another color over here. I don't know, let's try this crazy greenish color. Look at that. Let's do a blue-green. Let's just run the greenish color up. I don't know what color blue this is, but let's just go for it. That's not the color I wanted. Let's put some of this green in here. We'll call this two or three color. [LAUGHTER] Maybe we want some pathway. There's not really enough there in the sky. Maybe we could come back more in the sky. I want you to get brave with some of this and experiment on these. We can come back, add some other details in here. Then we want to let that dry and we're already letting this one dry. Let's let those dry. I'll be right back. [MUSIC] 5. Sketchbook Flop: [MUSIC] This one dry. I can't say that I like the way that this turned out on the sketchbook paper. I really like the way it turned out better on my 100 percent cotton paper. That is one of the drawbacks to doing stuff and working out problems and ideas in your sketchbook versus working it out and doing it on the nicer paper that you plan on using. This would be the perfect argument for going ahead and working on your nicer paper. Because actually, I don't mind this. I actually do not [NOISE] like this one at all. You're not going to know that until you do it and you think, "Gosh, why didn't that work out?" It probably did work out, and I could color the flowers on it. But in the end I just don't like it, and I wanted you to see that I could have just cut this out and re-filmed at all and not let you know that we all have some of these issues working things out and not everything comes out the way we intended. I like to work on [NOISE] the paper that I'm going to be doing my final pieces on a lot of times, because this exact reason. [NOISE] Different papers react differently to your paints. Once you get a feel for, say, your sketchbook, and you're coasting along, and you're loving everything you're getting, and then you move on to say the nice paper, because now you want to create pieces that you're like, "Okay, I'm in love with this." Then you start painting on that nice paper and you're like, "Why is this not working the same? I'm not getting the same results I figured out from my sketchbook." Most of the time the sketchbooks are not cotton paper. For instance, if I'm working on a 100 percent cotton paper here and my sketchbook is not cotton, it's wood pulp, the paint reacts differently and you get different results. Perfect argument for practice on the paper that your good pieces are going to be on, and I know it gets more expensive to buy the better paper. But it's going to react differently to everything that you do. Even though I started in my sketchbook, I'm glad that I had this example to show you, [NOISE] that it just does not work the same. This does not look the same as my cotton paper piece. It's almost better, which is what I always do, work on different types of paper, for instance, when I was making different landscapes I was working on. This is a handmade paper. I thought that was really cool. [NOISE] This is a piece of cotton paper that I thought, do I want deckled edges? Do I want the deckled edge to have a white gap before the piece? Do I want to spray it with the fixative? This was my play piece where I deckled the edge right up on the watercolor. I deckled the edge with the seam around it. I cut the paper in half, and I put fixative on half of it and left half of it raw. Just to see, what do I want to do with this, and how do I want to accomplish those finished pieces? I've decided I don't mind the fixative, because it didn't darken the piece and change it drastically. If I do a deckled edge, I like the white seam on it, or I like it with the straight edges. Very interesting to experiment and play on the actual paper I had planned on doing my finished pieces in. I encourage you to do the same thing. Now that we have played in the sketchbook and I got a stellar result and thought, "Oh, I do love that, I might try that." And got a 50-50 result, not quite what I was thinking, and then got something that I'm like, "Oh, that's just a blob." That's very interesting and I want to move on to working on the paper that we actually intend to work on. But if sketchbook is your thing, definitely do as many of these and as many different colors as you can and see what you can get. Then I'm going to do these techniques on the nicer paper with the results that I expected rather than the results I got from the lesser paper I had used. [LAUGHTER] But I wanted you to see the results, [NOISE] that not all of them work out, and that maybe you should be playing on the paper you plan on doing your finished pieces on. For this reason, I wanted to let you see that in my process. Let's move on to doing some of our better pieces on the better paper, and we could still call these practice pieces, but we're going to use our better paper to experiment on. I'll see you in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 6. Gray Landscape: [MUSIC] We've got our 100 percent cotton Fabriano paper that I'm going to be using personally, because that's what I was playing in and having fun with. I'm going to go ahead and tape out my shape on my landscapes. Like I was talking about in our sketchbook explorations, sometimes sketchbook work just does not work for me, because it's a different paper. Then even if I master what I'm trying to do on that paper, when I get to my nicer paper or whatever paper it is I plan to use for the nicer projects, it just does not work the same. The paper texture is different, the water absorption rate is different, and I just get frustrated that I did all that work in practice in say, one piece of paper or one medium, and then my final piece just does not look the same. Let's go ahead and do our practices on our nicer paper, and when we're done, hopefully we'll have some gorgeous pieces we want to try out. Here's my piece of junk paper. It's a piece of Canson XL, I think. Let's just decide, let's do the one color. Let's go ahead and do one color. I think in my one color, I really liked this charcoal graphite gray tone, so why don't we go ahead and get one of those going. I want to start off making some mountains and then going up into some sky, and we'll do just the one color. Same project that we just basically did. Let's go ahead and just run this up for the sky, and then you'll see how a nicer cottony paper. The absorption rate is just so much different than what we were getting with the sketchbook paper, which was a wood pulp paper. It was a moist skin and it's nice, but it was not 100 percent cotton. Let's just go ahead and get in some of our mountain range here, and then just clean your brush off. Then we could actually just come back in here and pull some of this back off, and just create some visual difference here with our mountain ranges and just see what we can get. That'll maybe give us some direction to go with the flower. Fields are options that we decide to do there. Then if I take too much off, I can just come back in and I can re-emphasize a hill or maybe a mountain flower over here. We could even be like, there's some little dark trees in there, you can put some dark trees. I like some of the differences that I just created with the lines and the movement there. Look, they're already feeling much more successful [LAUGHTER] than I was there. Got a little white spot there that's distracting me. There we go. Now, we do need to let that dry. But look how much better that already feels than it did on the paper that I didn't intend to use for my final project. I really do advocate and I didn't use too. I didn't even in my mind realize how different it was working on one type of paper and working your ideas out in your sketchbook versus doing your actual final piece on a nicer paper and seeing the differences. Then I'm just working it and I'm like, why do we do practice work on cheaper paper and then struggle when we get to the nicer paper? Because they're different papers. They absorb the water different, they look different, the color is different on it, you just don't get the same results. I know that paper is expensive, so I buy paper when it's on good sales. Michaels sometimes does that, buy one, get one free. [LAUGHTER] Let me tell you on those weeks, I'll buy some and I'll come home and think I got some paper. Then I'll go tomorrow, and then I'll think I need a couple more pieces of pads, I can't let that go. Then I'll wait two days and then I'll be like, crap, I need to go buy some more paper. When they're buy one, get one free, I just can't help myself, [LAUGHTER] I go buy them out. If you ever come across some deal on your favorite paper buy as much as you can, put it in your paper stash, and then be ready when you want to do a project like this to practice on a little bit better paper. That doesn't mean that you have to use the whole page. You could take one piece of paper, cut it up into a whole bunch of smaller pieces, and then practice on all the small pieces and then you'd be ready to move to the larger piece. I was talking the whole time, letting my watercolor dry. You want to resist taking a heat gun to it, but once it's almost dry, you could take a heat gun to a little bit of it. But if you heat gun the whole thing, it peels your tape and then it lets things seep under it, so you want to resist the heat gun if you can. But I wanted to go ahead and finish drawing that for us, so that we can now [LAUGHTER] come back in with our pastels. We're going to pull our pastel piece back out, and I'm going to play with the same similar colors that I did in the sketchbook. Because, again, sketchbook is good for working stuff out, but sometimes it's just not as good for really getting nice pieces finished and thinking, I love that. I've got this same, not quite black. Was that the right one? I think it was. Well, we're going to go with it. I'm going to do some movement there. With some of that movement I already created, and then try not to do the overdo. I'm so good at overdoing it. It should be like a Blue Bell field or something. I'll do some little dots and maybe we got a little brown in there, and then I might refer back to the sketchbook, just to see what colors that I use in there that I liked so much. Even though in the end our sketchbook is not what I liked doing, what did we like in this? Look at the difference in the two pieces, isn't that amazing? I also liked the light blue. This one just looks so much nicer and so much like a finished piece of art almost from the very beginning. I just feel so much better about it on the bigger piece. Even though you're thinking, I want to use my nice paper, nice paper so expensive. When you're doing the art, you feel so much better about the result when you're done that it's almost worth it just to bite the bullet and have some better papers handy, even for your practice work. Can't tell you how much of a difference this makes. To be honest, I'm doing that in a sketchbook and I'm thinking, why am I even making these? This is terrible, this didn't turn out. Then I wanted to show you that we all have those thoughts, [LAUGHTER] it happens to us all. Then come over here and immediately see the success on the nicer paper that I was seeing on the other pieces I was creating. I'm going to stop there. It's going to be a case of don't overdo it, because I can overdo it. I'm going to move my pastels, and I'm going to look at this. Do I have anything else in my oil pastels? Because look at this color over here before I call it done, look at this color. It's probably same with one of these other colors, but I actually love how creamy and slightly darker. I said I was going to stop, but look and I'm not. [LAUGHTER] I love how creamy and a little bit darker these oily pastels are. Look, just a tiny bit, it didn't even take that much. Look, how gorgeous this is, oh my goodness, about to have a little freak out moment here on with you. [LAUGHTER] Let's just peel this tape. Wow, look at this, oh my goodness, I could do a million of these when I get this excited. Oh my goodness, this is so beautiful. Look at that, it's a dark stormy night out in the flower field of say, Blue Bells. [LAUGHTER] So pretty. This is a really beautiful, foggy at night flower field. In the next video, let's do something a little bit brighter. But I just want to sign this, and go ahead and be like okay, foramen, it's perfect. [LAUGHTER] You see, I was really getting discouraged there with the sketchbook, I was getting mad at the sketchbook. Perfect reason to go ahead with the paper that you really feel you're wanting to use, because the results are a million times better. I'll see you in the next video. [MUSIC] 7. Green Landscape: [MUSIC] I want to do a brighter, maybe one color just to have a little play. I'm going to use this graphite watercolor that's made up of Sennelier brown pink. This one. Yeah, brown pink. I mix the Sennelier brown pink with the graphite powder to make this graphite water color. I'm obsessed with the brown pink. It's a little bit like a green gold, but slightly different. With this graphite in it, it's got that beautiful smoky quality that I'm obsessed with. Let's just go with the brown pink. I'm going to go ahead and start that. I'm going to run this color up. I want that to be the sky because remember these are more abstract flower fields, they don't have to be a perfect representation of a real scene. I want these to be more of something in your mind, a dream, something fun, beautiful. Look at that color. [LAUGHTER] I'm just insane with this color. It's gorgeous and it's a little deeper than a green gold. Sometimes I want to love green gold. Sometimes I just don't love it. I'll use it and I'm, oh, just not what I wanted. Let's just pull some color out of here and make some movement and then we'll come back in with some more color. Get more movement in here and just really given my front landscape here, my foreground, just some power, some strength, some movement, some excitement, something that says, oh, look at the rolling fields. Whatever you got going there. We can do that right there and let that dry. Then we'll come back in with some color feeling like greens and pinks. I want to even like this pink. I'm obsessed with that color. [LAUGHTER] It's not a 100 percent dry, but it's close. What if I tried out some of these art spectrum greens? I want to have implications like there's some grassy stuff there and then there's flower stuff there. Then just adding to what we've already got going. I want to not overdo it, so I'm trying to keep in my mind it doesn't have to be completely covered. I want to have just some interest. I'm just doing some little marks implying that we've got stuff going on out there. There's several different shades of green in this set, so it's interesting just to try them out. These are very interesting. This is a lighter shade. I like that. This one's olive green A. What was this? This was sap green C and this was olive green B. I'm trying to be real careful not to touch the white edges of my paper with anything that's got pastel like my fingers. [LAUGHTER] I really like these blues over here too. Let's see. This is colored green C, but it looks the most delicious color. Let's go ahead and let's throw some of that in there. That's different. Maybe not quite what I was thinking, but it's still pretty. We've got a little darker color here. This is sap green D and then Dog, a little darker color. Super fun. Let's throw some of this pink in here. That is Diane Townsend, and it's this light pinky color here that's all broken. I don't know if it's got a color on it. It's part of the Terrages set. But it's like this just light. Whoa, look at that. [NOISE] This one breaks up pretty good. [LAUGHTER] [NOISE] Very soft, but look at those yummy, crazy beautiful colors. I actually want to pull out my little half-pans again. Let's pull this back over here because this is my favorite set that if you get one of those big half pan sets that Sennelier has, you'll get all these yummy colors in there and it's perfect for doing little things like this and you've got enough choices. Fun. Let's do a little bit of this here. Now I'm just trying to dot in [NOISE] little colors of flowers, maybe a little bunches of colors in there. Maybe I should have spread that out more so I can come back and just start working it now as I need to get the colors exactly where I want them. Because now I've did like dot, dot of color, and I want to get that spread out of that level a little better. Like it's not really a disjointed scene. Maybe the flowers and collections go together a little better than I have managed to do them here. [NOISE] That's super fun. [NOISE] A little different there. I think my first one that I did, I actually spread the flowers out a little better. Just something to look at and think about and next time, consider different ways to do it. But I still do love the way the color did with the watercolor on this one. Let's peel the tape. Try not to make a mess and just see [NOISE] what we've ended up with. [LAUGHTER] Peeling the tape is my favorite. Somebody asked me in one of the classes that might not have needed tape, why did I do that because I didn't really need it. Sometimes I do it just for a visual barrier for myself. Just so mentally, I have a place to stop what it is I'm doing. Well, some like this, peeling the tape really does reveal the finished piece. Look how pretty that is. Oh my goodness. Now that is prettier with the tape peeled than I thought it was going to be. [LAUGHTER] Super fun. Again, if you have a piece of pastel that ends up anywhere on your paper that you didn't intend, your little eraser is perfect for cleaning off any stray pieces that you got, that you didn't intend. Look how pretty that is. Let's call that one good. Our two solid colors, one color pieces that with fields of flowers. How beautiful is that? [LAUGHTER] In the next one, let's try two colors. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 8. Blue Landscape: [MUSIC] This landscape, let's hop into two color. And I want to do a pinky sky. I'm just looking at these little code, that's pretty. Let's do a pinky sky and that yummy bluish base. Let's see which one of these are like. I like that first one I think, so let's do a pinky sky and a bluish base and I just mixed up two colors, but that's okay. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to go ahead and run this color up. That's not real thick. I actually want that to be pretty soft and I don't want that to run back on, I want a soft pink sky. We run this down a little bit and come back in with this blue. Look at that color. You know what, for giggles, let's throw in a pathway. I fill a path on this one. Let's just leave a space and just see. Well, we can do there is a path. I could have made it a better path, but I thought as [LAUGHTER] I didn't think fast enough and we can come back in here and pull color if we want. If you want to try to pull any color to make some extra movement, we could try that. Come back with some more color on top of that just because I love the extra movement and energy that we get when we can see layers in there. Super fun. We got to let that dry. We're going to give that a moment. We're about 80% dry and I think on this one I'm going to pull back out my pastel box here because it seems to be my favorite working on these. [LAUGHTER] Let's just jump in there. I want this to be bright springy, maybe even try one of these on here. That's about the same color I just painted with, but still very interesting on there. Got that in there. What if we put in some of these, this blue my fill on that. Maybe a deeper blue. I like this feeling of the flowers taking up this rounded, not all across the bottom like I did on this one. I've got it across. I want this to do a little U-shaped swoop there. That's what in my mind I'm thinking. Also keeping in mind that I have a pathway here and maybe we could make that pathway a little more of a path with a white or an ivory. We can just make that path a little more defined and out there, maybe that's a waterfall or something. I'm just thinking these things up in my mind. It's not from any specific picture that we may have already seen anywhere. What about tiny bit of this blue, getting a lot of blues in here and I know we're going to come back with some really pretty bright color here in a minute. Just soft little details. You can take your time with this part. You don't have to be in a hurry. Let's start filling this with some yummy, yummy color. I'm trying to keep in mind size of the landscape versus the size of whatever I'm putting on it. But in this original one that I'd played with, look at those big splotches of color. It's still pretty like that too. It's okay if we have some bigger areas which I might make a few in there and it's just that, that could be gigantic spots of color out there on the landscape. A little cluster of whatever is growing. I'm just spreading that color out really. There's no wrong way to do this. We're not trying to create a specific flower or a specific something. It's more like just intuition, if I squinting my eyes at a field of flowers, you know what might I see out there. You could look on Pinterest or Google field of flowers, or if it's spring and you've got some sunflowers, fields and things like that growing, go out and take a look and squint your eyes and say, "What is it that I see?" Take a few photos for your own inspiration. I do that a lot. Look how pretty that is. This is where it's very obvious that I'm like, "More and more and more." [LAUGHTER] You might look at it and think, "Oh, I don't know But let me tell you, resist judgment till you pull your tape. [LAUGHTER] That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to resist the judgment and think about it. Anything else I want to add. Every single one of these are different no matter how many times you try to paint the same exact scene, every single time, you'll get something completely different and I really love that about making these. Let's peel the tape. We can keep adding details. Once you peel the tape, if you think, "Oh, not done," you can go back and add some more details. I'm like, "Look at that. Just hoping that I'm done when I peel it." My goodness. Look how pretty that is. I doubted it, but look how pretty that is. [LAUGHTER] Look at that. I'm pretty happy with the way two color with a path. I love that. These are super fun to color with a path. Let's see if there's anything else. Let's try canyons. I really like the canyon one, like we're at the canyon, but look how pretty that is. Want to go to the canyon for the next project. I'll see you in the next video. [MUSIC] 9. Canyon Landscapes: So let's go to the Canyon. What I like about maybe doing a Canyon 1 is totally out of like a normal color zone that we might be thinking of in our local color area and maybe there's a lot of red rock and red dirt and not so many flowers so it's going to be like an imaginary Canyon scene. I'm just going to come in here with my yummy kind of red dirt color. I live in the South and we're basically everything was built on red dirt. [LAUGHTER] When you dig up the plants out front, they're all in red dirt. I don't even know how anything grows here. Let's go ahead and get our Canyon sky there our red sky and I want to get some Canyon mountains and here and maybe some Canyon pathways. So let's go ahead and paint some color on there and then pull color off. So I'm just going back with a clean brush and maybe putting some movement in here. Maybe multiple pathways is what we end up with. Then once I do that, we'll come back in here and put some of my Canyon mountains back in here. Just see, just play around for a minute and see what can we create here. What pathway can we get? Maybe we overdo it and we need to pull some more back off. Totally possible. [LAUGHTER] It's more of a push and pull that we're doing here. Now that I'm seeing this, maybe we have like a little too path thing forming. This is another thing too. We talked about paper, cotton paper really is way more forgiving of pushing and pulling and working a little bit longer than you are when you're doing things on like a sketchbook. Look at there, maybe we can go in a direction instead. But you do get a lot more give and take with a nicer paper. Going back to what we were talking about in an earlier video, I really like practicing your pieces on the final paper that you really intend to use for your good stuff. For this reason, we have more opportunities. We have quite a bit more leeway with what we can do on here. Now I'm just getting to the point that I could be just overworking it. But the better papers do give you more options and more play time and a few more things than you're normally going to be able to do with a lesser student-grade paper. Okay, I like that. Canyon with the curved pathway? Definitely fun to try this. Because now I feel like look at that we can see the Canyon road coming down. [LAUGHTER] We're going to have to let that dry because I'm just overdoing it now and see what we get. I think while that's drying, I'm going to do another Canyon 1 also because I think my original Canyon 1 was a different color. Yeah, I think it might have been this color, which is I don't know, some yellowy tone in here. More browns and look how pretty that is. Maybe we can do a two-tone Canyon let's just do this. Put that in a little different. Maybe just not a solid. Maybe we have blue sky instead and get that working in there like that. Just see, do we like this two-tone Canyon with maybe a pathway? And now we'll just work that a little more. Well, maybe I want to work that. Let's pull some of this up and then work it some more because we're going to get some layers in here this way. Let's lace on. I can already see I'm going to be obsessed with this one. [LAUGHTER] Because look at that pretty sky. You could maybe even put clouds in there if you're feeling brave, maybe a little bit of gouache clouds. I'm not wanting any clouds, so I just want the implication there. Let that one dry too. This might be the better Canyon we'll see. [LAUGHTER] So let's see what we got here. Definitely don't want the greens in that one. Might want let's take a look at the pastel pencils before I come on here with some bigger pastels look at these, do love the pastel pencils. I'm feeling like maybe some darker colors. So let's just come in here with some dark shades. Get some movement going. Sometimes I'm glad that I do two. Instead of just one. Because then if one of these looks terrible, I have the other one that I know. I feel like I'm filling the other one. The other one's going to be amazing. [LAUGHTER] You just got to experiment and not all of these are going to work out. Don't ask me what these little lines are supposed to be they're just helping me throw some color in here. Let's try this blue. Look at that. We might say that this one's going to be a failure. But I want you to see my failures and my successes because if you just see that everything I make is a success, what good is that? Now you're thinking that you failed when yours is not a success. I don't want you thinking that we don't all have failures because we do. That's crazy. It takes a process you have to work through the different things to get to the wins. So all of us have to do that. We all have to do the work to get to the ones that were like, here's the one I love. [LAUGHTER] That's different. We're going to stay in suspense for a moment and go ahead and do this one and just see which one in the end we love. So I do actually like the colors in this one a little better. But now that it's dry, maybe it's not as successful or maybe it is. I got a path in here we could come back in here with that pretty creamy color and that's really going to definitely show up my path on this one. Yes, I like that. I'm feeling good about that. Might throw in a couple of brighter just because see I'm feeling pretty good about that. I don't know you think it something else. I need a little vote button and we randomly have something that could be a tree there. [LAUGHTER] I could actually come back, say with like a brown. We can have some structures up there. That's fun actually. It's like little things the trees at the top maybe. Oh, yeah, look at that. Now we've got some trees up there. Now I got pastels all over myself. Am I going to be able to peel the tape. Let's see. All right. Let's think about that one for a minute. We can come back with any little tools that we feel like we needed. But I feel like I'm pretty good. Let's just see if because I stick tape everywhere that just went over there and stuck. [LAUGHTER] It's a good spot for it. [LAUGHTER] Now that we're done, I'm actually pleasantly surprised at how that turned out. I can see a definite like road in there and maybe it's like the forest and maybe it's the fall and the Canyon and we see all the leaves and the things that are turning for the fall. But that's fun, like a nice drive in the mountains in the fall. I'm not as unhappy with that as I expected. [LAUGHTER] Let's peel this one's got some trees that look at that. Make sure there's nothing on my finger. Oh my goodness. That pretty. If you have any spots of little pastel, get your little artist eraser and come back and erase that spot. Then if you've got any that you just can't get off, you can always trim around this because that ain't coming off. [LAUGHTER] Oh, yeah, it is. There we go. Thought maybe we weren't getting that. But let's say that maybe you weren't getting that off. We could decal the edges of that. Look how pretty that is. I feel like I'm in a little fairy tale where we can see the little waterfall on the top of the mountains. We've got some hills there super fun. So let's take a look at all these, so I'll see you in the next video. [MUSIC] 10. Landscape Recap: [MUSIC] Let's do a little recap of these because look how pretty these turned out. We started out doing one color so I want you to try that, I want you to try one color like black and white like it's dark, it's out or in the fog, and think about what colors you could actually see in a dark fog, and then do the same thing, all one color and see what pretty flower fields that we could do. So I like the one color in the watercolor and come back with the pastels for the flowers and then two color. I like doing the two color with the flowers on either side rather than all the way across, super fun. Then one and two color with a path where we were practicing pulling up some of that watercolor creating a yummy path in our landscape and then flowers on either side of that path. I did a lot of those on some earlier ones that I was doing for myself when I was playing and I just love how all of these turned out. They're so beautiful, I also want you to think about whether you want to possibly deck the edges, which is just tearing the edges with a ruler, so I'll do that on one of these, and then whether you want to finish it with the finishing spray. So I want you to try some finishing spray, I'm using the sennelier to make those pastels stay down, but there's a couple of different brands, and do just a little sample one, draw a line and just spray half of it. I covered it with a piece of paper on this half and I sprayed half and see did it change the color? Isn't going to ruin your piece when you do a piece that is important? I want you to know right up front how your fixative is going to react to the materials that you decide to use and I want you to explore different materials whether that be some oil pastels, some soft pastels, some pastel pencils, you might explore neo color to crayons, that would be a good choice, colored pencils will color on top of watercolor. That's another good choice, so I want you to experiment with some different mark-making tools on top for your splotches of color that implies the fields of flowers. I hope you have fun doing this project we came up with some really beautiful landscapes. I hope that you love yours as much as mine and not all of them are a success. I also want you to do this little sketchbook experiment and possibly do one on here and do a big one that matches and seeing how different the art looks from the student grade paper to the nicer paper and think about what we talked about with the practice pieces being on the better paper. Because several of the ones in my sketchbook, I just was like this just is not working and now that I look at it now and truly I judge things too fast, I actually do like this one quite a bit and with the flowers, I might like that one. I just don't like those two at all I feel like they're just duds and if I had started with that, I might not have even tried making bigger beautiful landscapes and I would've gave up so practice on the good paper. That's my argument for that because it really is important to learn what the paper is going to do and how it's going to react to different supplies and materials and pigments that maybe you're using on your projects. Then be really careful when you're using the soft pastels that you don't have, pastel dust everywhere, then gets on your finished pieces [LAUGHTER] I have that happen a lot. Hope you have fun with these projects, I had a really good time showing you how I created some of these. I can't wait to see yours and I'll see you next time [MUSIC] 11. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] I hope you had fun experimenting with me today. How interesting was it to see the differences of what you create in your sketchbook versus what you create with your better papers and side with me a little bit on the argument of practice on the better papers. Maybe it's a case where you can buy some big sheets and cut those into a lot of little pieces which you then have more pieces to practice on, and larger sheets are generally cheaper than the smaller pads. Get a bigger pad or a sheet, cut those up and then we have lots of practice pages to practice on. But nine times out of 10, my practice pieces end up being so good that I'm like okay, I love it even though I'm practicing. Because they're on the good paper and I'm playing with supplies that I love, and maybe I'm experimenting to see what I can come up with. The pieces that I do in my sketchbooks, some of them work out and some of them don't. But the pieces that I do on the better paper, nine times out of 10, I'm like I love this. [LAUGHTER] I want you to get in the habit practicing on the good paper. Whatever that good paper is to you, it may be a different good paper than whatever paper I'm playing on in class, it may be a different paper than the one I normally gravitate towards when I create. It doesn't really matter what you think is good paper. What matters is, what is that good paper to you? That's what you need to be practicing on so that when you go to do your good pieces you already know the properties of the paper. You know how it's going to soak the water, how the colors are going to blend, how things are going to react, how your tools work with the paints that you're putting on the paper. It's not going to be a surprise because it is a surprise when you go from sketchbook to nice paper. I left in my sketchbook segment in this workshop so you could see how different that really is, and how in the middle of creating, I was like, okay, these are just duds. If that had been where I started, I might not have done any more of these or done this project or created this class to show you how fun these are. Because I was disappointed in the pieces that I painted in the sketch book to the point where I was like, I'm just going to turn the page, I didn't even go any further on this one. I wanted you to see that. I want you to know happens to all of us. I don't want you to get discouraged at that point. If I had done my practice pieces on that sketchbook to begin with, because a lot of times I'll be up here just creating and I'll be on my better paper sometimes because I'm like, I think I'm going to like this idea, let's just do it on the good paper. When it turns out and I'm like, oh, yeah, really great. Then I started class and I'm like, let's start in our sketchbook and I'm like, why is this failing? That's why. A sketchbook paper, a lot of times you can get 100 percent cotton papers and some sketchbooks, but they're the expensive sketchbooks and so a lot of times you're just picking up your watercolor sketchbook that maybe it was on sale and that paper is usually like a wood pulp paper. The good paper to me is like a cotton paper and I like working on cotton papers, and when I go from that wood pulp sketchbook to that cotton paper, the results are completely different. I wanted you to see that, I could have just left that whole segment out and then you could have just tried in your sketchbook and wondered why this wasn't working, or it didn't look the same, or you weren't getting the same results as maybe you were getting in the class or another class you're taking or whatever it is. You're wondering why is this not the same results that you're seeing on screen or that you thought you'd get and that's why. I want you to get into the habit of working in the paper that you're going to be working on for your better pieces. I want you to know the paper, how it reacts, how it works with your paints and your tools and really learn the ins and outs of that paper. A lot of times what I will do, if it's an expensive paper [LAUGHTER] I will buy several pads of it, preferably when it's on sale. I'll put it in my paper stash until I forget how much it cost. Then I'll pull it out [LAUGHTER] and do a class or do something with it and I'm not even worried about the cost because the cost is a big inhibitor of creating a lot of times. If you buy a paper that you like, this is too nice, I can't use it, well then what good was it? If price is a barrier, buy it when it's on sale, stock up on extras. A lot of times Michaels has a buy one get one free week. Let me tell you, on that week I went and bought like 20 of these Canson XL pads that I love to use. Now I can feel like I can do anything because I got plenty of paper. [LAUGHTER] Buy when it's on sale, consider buying bigger sheets or bigger pads and cutting those into smaller pieces because it's cheaper. Then practice on the better paper, so don't go from the sketchbook thinking this is what I want and then being disappointed in the nicer paper because everything works different. Don't go from the sketchbook thinking, I don't like this it's failed because you're working on a lesser paper. Just give the different options a try. But for the argument of working on paper that you plan to use for the better stuff, practice on that paper because that's going to give you the better stuff even when you're practicing. I've really enjoyed having you in class today. Can't wait to see what you're creating and so please come back and share those in the projects, and I'll see you next time. [MUSIC]