Food Illustration: Pastry With Watercolor

1. INTRO: Hi everyone. My name is Eugenia, I graduated as a graphic designer in 2010 and I worked in the industry for five years straight. While working as a professional designer I found myself missing traditional arts so I made a YouTube channel called Nianiani to share my watercolor painting journey and many beginner tutorials. But my favorite things to paint is food so I decided to do this class for you where we will be painting pastries. In this class, I will take you through the supplies that you will need and options that are available. Then we get straight on with sketching and if you want to skip this step you could also download the outline of the pastries which I will attach and then we can just move on straight to the next lesson which we'll be covering how to trace. I will show you two options of tracing so you can pick according to what you're comfortable with or what is available to you. After that, I will take you into a lesson that will cover the color palette that I use for most of my pastry paintings. Then we get straight onto the painting which I will separate into coloring the base, here I will show you two different approaches of coloring the base. Then we are going to paint the mid tones and adding the base textures. Next we will be defining those textures and how to incorporate darker colors into it and then we will be moving on to painting the darker tones and the outlines. Then to finish it off, we are going to have lesson with highlights and doing the final touches to a painting to balance it out. You will see that in the beginning there are two separate pastries that we will be painting. We will be covering the triangular pastry step-by-step and for the sausage pastry which is on top I will provide a speed paint where you can see a fast progression of this painting and I would suggest for you try to paint this yourself with the techniques that you've just learned. This speed paint will be your last lesson and after that we'll finish it off with the conclusion and the class project. So I hope you guys enjoy this class and learn something new from this. 2. SUPPLIES: In this lesson, I will list all the supplies that you will need for this class. To paint, you will need, water color paint. I'll use my 24 colors, palette. Brushes, I use reef size 14 and size two, but any synthetic brush will do as long as you have the medium size and smaller size for finer details. A White pen here, I have the unit ball signal, a palette, or white plate that you can use. Jar for your water, watercolor paper, I'm going to use canceling Excel because and it's easy to come across, it's scrappy prior to check your colors and tissue to clean and dry your brush. We will also be drawing and tracing in this class, so the supplies are paper, you can use any print paper or even paper from your sketch book that you can rip out. Tracing tablet, that this is optional as I will show you a way of tracing without this tablet too. Pencil here, I will be using an HB, and I still recommend HB, but if you don't have it on hand, you can also go for a 2B and an eraser. Last but not least, you will need masking tape and if you want to cut your paper with a cutting blade like me, you will be needing a ruler, preferably metal cutting blade and a cutting mat. If not, you can also just use scissors. 3. Sketch: In this lesson, we are going to go through the sketching process. I usually have my reference photo either on my iPad, phone, or on my computer, depending on where I am when I paint. For this particular reference photo, I actually took it myself. But a lot of times I do go through Pinterest or Instagram to look for ideas. If you decide to take your own reference photos, I suggest you find the best lighting which is usually natural light. For this particular photo, all I did was take a plate of pastries outside and walked around to find the best light. I just snapped the photo with my mobile phone. I don't usually do this particular step. But if you're not used to sketching straight, you can make thumbnails to figure out how you want to frame your painting. As an example here, we are going to paint two different pastries. As an option, you can paint both on one page or separate subjects on different sheets of paper. Thumbnail sketch is always small and with limited detail if any. What you want to get from this is how we are going to frame the composition of your painting. After you are done with a thumbnail sketch, I pick the one with both pastries on the page. Now, I'm going to start putting down the basic shape of the triangular pastry which is obviously a triangle. Then built from the basic shape then slowly adding layers of pastries and parts of the pastries that are sticking out. By the way, what I'm doing here is a rough sketch that I'm going to trace over on my watercolor paper when I'm happy with it. This means that it does not have to look perfect because we can erase all we want to without damaging the paper. Most of the time, I do sketch straight on watercolor paper. But you can see it does give me more pressure when you sketch and straight because of the limitations of using your eraser. You don't want to erase too much on watercolor paper as you might risk damaging the fiber of the paper. If you're not too confident with your sketching or drawing this is a much safer option. If you don't want to sketch at all and get straight to painting, I will also leave an outline of the sketch on the downloadable section so you can print it out to trace. I will get into detail on tracing method on the next lesson. If this is you, you can go ahead and skip to the next lesson. As you can see from my sketch, after putting down the basic shape, I slowly add on details such as layers and cracks on the pastry. I tend to sketch lightly then once I'm confident enough with that line. If it's placed accordingly, then I would go over it again to darken the line. When I sketch I usually like sticking to HB pencil as it's light and easy to erase. If you don't have a hard pencil on hand, you can use up to 2B. Keeping in mind that you should put less pressure on your pencil so mistakes can be easily erased. When I use reference photos, I never draw 100 percent accurate. So don't be too discouraged if you can't replicate a photo completely because you have photography for that. When you paint, you can edit as much as you want. If you don't want a crack on a particular side of your pastry, you can avoid it and replace it with a smoother edge. The more cracks you put, the more elastic the painting will look. Keep that in mind depending on the style that you are going for. As for me, I do put cracks on mine, but I select whichever one I feel stands out and then incorporating it into the drawing. Sometimes I also make my own details like adding more layers on the pastry if I feel the need to. To finish off the sketch, I'm going to add the seeds on top. If they're small details like this, I recommend drawing it last. If you want to make any structural changes, you don't have to erase the details that you've drawn. If you're happy with your sketch, we are going to go over it now with fine liner. Mine is 0.2. I find that it's thick enough to show the lines through when we're going to trace later. At this stage, you want the lines to be as clear and crisp as possible. Avoid sketchy lines as it would become a distraction when you use it to trace later. Once you're done, go ahead and erase the pencil marks. At this stage, if you found a mistake, you can use whiteout to cover it up so you don't accidentally trace over the wrong lines later. For the second pastry, I used a different reference photo that I find most pleasing in terms of angle. You don't have to be worried about the angles because it was still look nice if the composition is set as two separate objects, not as two pastries as a whole in one plate. If you're not painting subject to suggest that they're supposed to be in one large subject, which is a combination of several objects, you can vary the angles as you like. This might sound confusing. As an example, say a table setup with different foods and plates on that particular table would require you to draw and paint the angles accordingly. Whereas if you're painting subjects individually like this one, you can combine different angles and it would still be acceptable. Again, as I've mentioned before, I always start with the basic structure and form of the subject first. Getting the whole outline of the object will suggest better form. This way you are helping yourself to look at your drawings as a whole instead of focusing too much on a certain section which might leave your drawing to look a little bit distorted or an even. Sometimes, it also helps to step back or look at your drawing as a whole from a bit of distance. If you find yourself being stuck in one particular part of the drawing. If you are stuck and keep making the same mistakes, a tip would be to step back and leave the drawing for a while before getting back into it. Give yourself a clean slate mentally and start working on it again when you're ready. I personally use this trick a lot and it's very effective. As you can see here, I'm also improvising a little bit. I drew the sausage larger so it doesn't hide behind the pastry as it is on the reference photo. You can take creative liberties such as this one if you think that it would make your overall painting nicer in the end. Do whatever you think look nicest. Going back to the sketch. As you can see here, I've placed all the markers to set a fairly good form and structure. Now I'm going to start to fill in the layers of pastries and then following it up with the cracks of the puff pastry. The same goes as the previous one. I only select cracks that are deep enough that it stands out to me and only adding subtle cracks if a particular place as two empty. I'm also not too worried over the placing and just place whatever I find fit well. I understand that in a way this method is more ambiguous to some people. But having the freedom to change whatever you want to a drawing and not having to draw so accurately brings down the pressure of drawing and sketching itself. You can still create something nice out of it. It all comes down to taste and personal style. If you are into hyper realism, you can take this a step further and draw as accurately as possible as you can. Just remember to put the amount of detail with the style such as hyper realism. You would be required to draw on a much bigger scale. Or else you would have to sacrifice certain details. Especially if you're attempting to paint this with watercolor later. Now I'm just going to finish off the sketch the same way as I did for the first one. Feel free to stick till the end of the lesson. Or if you understand the procedure already, you can go ahead to the next lesson. By the way, the sketch is sped up four times. But if it helps you to watch this slower, you can watch this at the speed that you want since Skillshare lets you slow down or speed up the video. I intentionally made it faster so it doesn't get too boring for some people, but not too fast that it can't be slowed down. Pick the setting that is comfortable for you. Anyway, I'll leave you guys through it and I'll see you at the next lesson. 4. TRACE: Now that you've finished sketch or you've downloaded the image, you are ready to trace it onto your watercolor paper. If you decide to just download the outline of the painting, I suggest to not print on your watercolor paper because the ink will actually lead out since it's water-based. So first off, I'm going to measure out my watercolor paper to fit the paintings that I have in mind. In this sketch, I made the drawings quite close in order to fit them on the page smartly. But I actually wanted it to be a little bit further apart, so I'm going to increase the height of the paper to fit both the drawings as I wanted to by just estimating it roughly, then I am just marking the size of the page with a pencil, then joining the dots together to create the dimension that I want with a ruler. Once you are happy with the dimension, then I'm just going to go ahead and cut it with a Stanley knife, you can also use scissors, but I personally find the knife cuts a bit neater. If you've drawn your sketch on your sketch book, go ahead and rip it out. If it's on a loose piece of paper, of course just skip this step. You can also trace straight from your schedule but I find it a little bit tricky to hold together so I don't like that option, but if you don't want to rip any pages of your sketchbook, I understand and that's completely fine. Going to the first option, what you can do is find the window in your house, by the way you would have to do this when the sun is out so the light from the window could help you see through the paper. Set the watercolor paper according to how you want the layout of your final painting. Then when you are happy with the position, go ahead and tape the pages together so it doesn't move around. You can also tape the pages on your window so your arms doesn't get too tired while tracing it. The second option is, of course, the light tablet, as you can see here, this is where I'm going to shift the position of the top pastry by just putting a little bit of space in between each pastry. Unlike the previous option, I like taping it down together so it doesn't move as I trace. Then using a hard pencil, I'm going to trace it onto my watercolor paper. I usually use HB pencil for this. Sometimes I use 2B if I don't happen to have HB on hand. But keep in mind when using a softer pencil try to trace it a little bit lighter so it doesn't show too much when you pain it. Of course, if you want the lines to show through, that's also fine. I also do that for lighter paintings. But for this case, that's not what I'm looking for. If you find it hard to see some of the cracks, you don't need to worry about it because cracks are quite random in shape. So you can always make up your own cracks as you paint and so don't be too pressured to make all the cracks too perfectly, if some of them are a little bit unclear as you're tracing them, that's completely fine. So I'm done here, I'm just going to carefully take off the masking tapes so it doesn't rip any parts of my paper. That's it for this lesson, happy tracing and I'll see you at the next lesson where we start painting. 5. COLOUR PALETTE: In this lesson, I'm going to share with you how I choose my colors and how it makes a huge impact to the final painting. One of the keys to my pastry paintings are the colors that I choose. I use a limited palette, and I do a lot of color mixing in order to achieve the crisp pastry look that I'm looking for. I'm just laying out the colors here, don't be too worried about taking notes, I will leave these watches along with their names and the downloadable session for you to keep while you practice or paint along these lessons. The colors that I have chosen in the beginning are the colors that I mixed make the base colors, which are also the light parts of the pastry. So the colors that I use for the base colors are mostly lemon yellow, permanent yellow deep, permanent orange and yellow ocher. At times I would also put a very light tint of light red in the mixture. For the mid tones, I use a range of yellow ocher and light red. Then if I want to dunk in the colors a little bit, I use a tiny bit of black and an option of cadmium red or purple. Cadmium red gives a rider reddish tint, and the purple gives it more of a deeper and one tint. So you can play around with this and pick the colors that will suit your painting. For the darker choices I use a mixture of red and black then I mix in the small amount of other hues. So maybe a little bit of purple or a little bit of yellow ocher depending on the color temperature and the subtle here you're looking for. Last but not least, I use ceruluean blue to make more of mid tone for shadows. I will get into more detail later about this as I show you when I'm coloring mixing. I am going to divide the color mixtures in three different stages. The base or the light tones, mid tones, and dark tones. Within those three groups, they are going to be a huge range of colors. By practicing your color mixing, you'll get to see that just by adding a little bit more of one color or another, you are creating the slightest changes that can bring your paintings to live. The base colors are the colors that I use for a base of a painting, or in this case it's also the lighter part of the pastry. With watercolor, it's probably in your best interests to start with lighter colors and slowly building it up in layers. As you can see on my first watch, even if the mixture is of light colors, if there's too much paint compared to the water ratio, this would make it quite hard to build up because you're making something that's a little bit more opaque, or a little bit darker and richer in color. So on my first layer, I'd like to make my paints much thinner, this means adding more water compared to paint. As you can see, this is how I mix my colors. I just loosely placed them on my palette, and let it mix. None of my color mixing is completely clean, nor does it have definite ratio of colors that I choose. I just place the colors that I want to mix, and if I want the base to have more of a yellow hue, then I would add more lemon yellow, and if it needs to be a bit more of a light brown, I add a bit more of orange and yellow ocher. This comes with a little bit of practice and color mixing. It also helps to pay close attention to your reference photos, so get used to analyzing your reference photos a little bit more. The mid tone colors are made out of orange, yellow ocher, and light red. Like the base colors, I'm just going to put them down on my palate and mixing them together as I mentioned earlier. I also sometimes add a little bit of red or purple depending on the hue that you want to paint with. The mid tones cover a lot of colors, and also a huge range of paint to water ratio. We use darker selection of colors, and in the begging still a diluted amount of paint, then slowly building up to a higher concentration as you layer your paint. Throughout this lesson I'll keep showing you how I mix my colors so you get a fair idea of how I do it. Because for most of the lessons where I actually get to paint, I will do a lot of close-up so you get to see how I lead down the paint. I'd like you to get a good look at this lesson of how the color mixing goes before we get on to the painting lessons. Here, I'm going to show you the areas where I would let them mid tone color show through. The reason why I say show through instead of where I would place the mid tone colors is that, as we built our layers and watercolor, we keep isolating the lightest to the darkest colors. So mid tones can be painted where the colors peek through plus on the darker colors to give a good foundation for the darker colors afterwards. Here I'm just going to show you that mid tones can also be used as base colors. If you place it lightly like we did for those slight base colors, these mid tone colors are a great foundation when they're used in a diluted manner. However, you can also build up into really nice deep mortgage colors to make and define the textures of your pastry. Now I'm just going to show you the slight difference between using the red and the purple. Is not a huge difference, but these slight differences could give your painting and different feel. If you like the mixture with the red instead of the purple, but you want the total value to be as dark as the purple, you could, of course, add the slightest bit of Black to reach that value. The darkest tones are the burnt pastry colors that I'm referring to. This includes the deeper brown colors, which makes the pastry look crunchy, and also some burn edges. I personally really like including the burned edges, because I think it makes the painting look way more realistic. The darker tones consists of the same mid-tone colors, but this time with the slight addition of black. Also because the darker tones are on top of the other colors, I like to make the consistency fairly concentrated too, so the colors for pop-out. Be careful when using black, I actually avoid using too much black just because I want darker colors to still show some temperature, and it also keeps your paintings looking more vibrant. If you like more muted colors, then you can go ahead and add a bit more black to your colors, but as usual, this really depends on your style and preference. I mixed fair amount of different hues with the black, so even darker tones will have certain richness to it rather than dispute black. Here, I'm just watching to show you some of the variety of colors I can make with the mixture. You see here even the darker tones also lean toward different temperatures. This means that some black, when it look a little warmer, like more red or orange, or a little bit cooler, which means it has a slight hues of blue and green. So play around to get a good feel of this before you start painting. These colors are also the colors I used for fine detail outlines, or to define certain textures. For outlines, make sure you have them correct consistency so that your paints will glide smoothly. You want a fairly concentrated mixture, so the color's still pop out but not too dry so the paint doesn't transform paper. Finally, we're onto the shadows. Shadow colors are completely different to the dark tones of the pastry, please don't get the two mixed up. For the shadow I can add this and a slight bit of Black into all the colors that we just watched because the shadow might also land on places where the pastry isn't cooked. I use really new for this to give a nice contrast in temperature from the warm colors off the pastry to the cool colors of the shadow. This is also one of the tricks that I find would bring your paintings a step further, because if you use only warm colors, sometimes I feel like the painting becomes a little bit to one-dimensional, As you can see here, when I'm adding the serial in blue and the black to the base colors, I try to use only the slightest because the base color itself is very diluted and light. So if you too much sirloin blue, it might turn to look to too green. This is as far as I would personally take it. So the shadow has slight muted green hue into it. Next, I'm going to add the ceruluean blue and black mixture into the mid-tone colors. What you can see is an array of muted browns. If you put your pain down and it doesn't look as cool of color that you want it to look, you can also add a tiny bit of the mixture while the paint is still wet, and mix the colors on the paper. Last but not least, we are going to add the same mixtures to the darker colors, these colors are very concentrated on dark. So make sure you mix in more of the ceruluean blue and black into your color to balance it out. Again, I'm just going to sketch it out so you guys can see what colors it can create. Here, I'm not making it as concentrated as I would usually use it, just so the colors are more visible to you on video. That's it for this lesson, I hope this would really help you guys figure out the colors so you can paint your very own pastry. I just like to add that there are really no set colors that are definite, but using the palette that I showed you in the beginning, you can create a huge array of colors that would make really good color combination to paint the pastries. I hope you give this exercise a go. Hopefully, this will help you out. 6. PAINT BASE 1: We are finally going to start painting, so get all your painting supplies, and let's begin. For the base, I'm just going to show you two methods of painting. One is a wet-on-dry for the triangular pastry, and for the top pastry I'm going to use a little bit of wet-on-wet technique, as the base. Both works well and we are also going to keep layering on it, so it doesn't really make any difference. I'm just here to show you two different methods so you can approach it however you please. Before we begin to paint, as usual I would like to activate all the paints that I'm going to be using by putting a few drops of water. After the colors are activated, I'm just going to put some on my palette, then mixing it together until I get the color that I'm looking for. You can use a scrap piece of paper to check if it's the right consistency that you're looking for. Here I know from looking, that I need more water to dilute the paint because I want a light layer for the base color. For the base, I'm going to show you two methods of painting. One is a wet-on-dry for the triangular pastry, and for the top pastry I'm going to use a little bit of wet-on-wet technique as the base. Both works well and we're just going to keep on layering on it so it doesn't really make any difference. I'm just here to show you two different methods of approaching this for the base painting. The first one I'm going to paint is the triangular pastry. Here I'm going to use the wet-on-dry technique. I'm using a mixture for the base colors, which are from the lemon yellow, permanent yellow, deep and yellow ocher, and then diluting it so I get the consistency that I'm looking for, and I'm just going to paint straight on the triangular pastry. While I paint, I want to roughly leave out little bits of white space, leaving small flecks of highlight around, not too much though, just a touch. This gives a nice feel of the texture from the very base of your painting. By the way, I find that using very diluted consistency paint can be quite tricky in the beginning. If you're not used to it, and you're unsure of the color that you have on your brush, you can check it by painting on a scrap piece of paper as I showed you before. After I paint the first one, I'm just going to leave it to dry and we'll get back to it later. While we wait for it to dry, we're going to go ahead to the second pastry. With this one I'm going to use a wet-on-wet technique. I'm just going to start painting from the bottom where the pastry is a little bit more cooked, and I'm just putting down very wet paint to keep it from drying as I paint the rest. After I finish this particular area, I then spread the rest of the paint from the puddles to the top, where the pastry is a little bit less cooked. You can also add more water to reactivate the paint if it's starting to dry out slightly. Just keep dragging the paint up, and you will see a nice smooth gradient from the richer color, to the more diluted base color, but the surface should still be evenly wet. Here as you can see from the top left of my frame, my reference photo is always in front of me while I paint, so I always have a good idea of what I need to paint. For this reference photo, I took it myself so I can share it with you guys and it'll be on the downloadable section of this class. As a tip, when I'm going to paint flat surfaces, I tend to make sure my brushstrokes still follow the direction of the pastry. As an example, as you can see where the pastry looks a little bit like a cage, the general direction of my brushstrokes, are up and down, not horizontal. That way when you create the highlights or the white negative space, those negative space will reflect the texture of the pastry better, and it follows the actual shape of the pastry. This goes for other paintings too. Personally I use this method a lot when I'm creating texture. If you look at the reference photo, for the top where the pastry looks a little bit more cooked, in terms of color, I'm going to start incorporating diluted mid-tones to separate the overall values of the painting, as the base even when I'm introducing darker mid-tones. Always take two diluted consistency so you are still able to build a layer on top of it. Here I'm just adding a little bit of light red to the light base colors and a little bit of orange. This way I'm creating more of a cooked pastry color, and I'm applying it to the still wet surface again. The transition would still be very nice and smooth, as the paint spread slowly across the wet surface. This is why it's called the wet-on-wet technique. For the part that I'm painting now, I'm adding a little bit more orange into the mixture. This brightens up the color by a little bit and I'm just doing the same thing on the bottom as the one before. Be careful though not to touch the white areas in this part, so you don't lose the highlight. I'm just going to keep repeating what I do to this area, and I'm just going to finish this off and I'll get back to you later. Last but not least, I'm adding a tiny bit of burnt umber, or you can add a very small speck of black paint into the mid-tone color that you already have on your palette, to create more of a muted brown color on the top left of the pastry where the tip is a little bit burnt. Then we are just going to leave this to dry and we can go onto the triangular pastry again. Now I'm going to go back to the first pastry and using the mid-tone color, I'm going to add it around the tips and the edges of the pastry because those parts seem to be more cooked. I'm using the same mid-tone color on my palette. I'm just adding light touches to my painting and spreading it evenly. As I'm painting this, I see that the base colors still seem a little bit to light for the middle of the pastry, so I'm just going to go ahead and use the same color and spreading it out on the places where I think needs to be darkened. As you can see where the specs of seeds on top of the pastry are, I'm just going to cover it straight with any color that we're using since the seeds will be black in color, so there will be no problem when we paint it on top later. As the paint dries, it will tend to go lighter, so this is why I need to keep building up on the colors. Now after going over the mid-tone, I'm going re-paint the sides and the edges of the pastry again with the same darker mid-tone, so a mixture that is a little bit more concentrated than what we had earlier. Then I'm just going to paint some of the left edges too. Essentially what we are trying to do here is just to help ourself map out the groups of color and values, so it's easier for us to paint the layers afterwards as we build up on the sectioning of colors. Here this is where I start to change the tone of my brown from a warmer brown of the pastry. Now I'm mixing in the serially and gloom into the mixture, to create more of a muter tone, where this section is closed off, so that is where the cooler shadows will be. Then I'm also just going to add some on the bottom, as the light isn't hitting it straight. As you can tell because the paint is already dry on the first layer, when we add the second layer, the paint will not spread out like it did when the surface is still fairly wet, or damp. This is called the wet-on-dry technique, which essentially means you are working with layers on a dry surface. I'm just going to do the same thing for the other pastry. I separate the step because I want the shadow to have more of crisp edge, so the muted color doesn't spread out and contaminate the bright pastry color. When I do this I always check my reference photo again so, I can separate which parts are closed off by shadow and which parts aren't. At this stage we are going to do this roughly, so it doesn't really have to be perfect. As you can see here, if I want to smooth out parts of the painting to replicate the smooth transition of the wet-on-wet technique. After I put down the color while it's still wet, I clean my brush and then I dry it slightly, not too dry, you still want a little bit of dampness on your brush. Then I pull it from the color that I want to bend out. Because of the clean brush, the pigment will be pulled way slowly creating a smoother transition. Now I'm just going to go back to the other pastry again because I feel like I can still build up on the color here after it's dry. I'm just going to do the same thing as I did and adding more mid-tones and shadow color on top of the parts, where it needs to be darkened a bit. In this case I'm just going to paint around the edges, and bits of the top for a nice base to work on. Basically this is why it's safer to start with lighter diluted paint, because you can always build it up rather than being too aggressive with the paint from the very beginning, and not being able to correct it later on. Just go slowly step by step and you will get there. Also be very careful with the amount of water on your brush, when you paint in layers. You don't want your paper to be soaking wet until it warps. Warping means that, the pages become wavy due to excess water. When this happen, you would have to wait quite a long time to add a new layer of color. I've seen beginners' mistakes before like this, where assume tries to add diluted paint into a soaking wet paper and the paint just wouldn't go through because as the brush touches the paper, the paint is just going to spread out straight away. If this is something that you've accidentally done, as you're doing this, either pick up a heat gun or a hairdryer, if you have it on hand. If not, I would suggest that you leave the paint to be completely dry first before you add on any more layers. Now let's get into the next lesson. 7. PAINT MIDTONE 1: Now that we've finished painting the base, we are going to go ahead and paint more mid-tones colors as we layer more into this painting. As we add more layers, we add more details. So as we go we're also isolating more areas. What I'm doing here is increasing the contrast between the lighter pastry color, and the more cooked pastry. I imagine it as if the pastry is getting more cooked along the way. It slowly develops the crispy golden brown color that we all really like, and that is what we are also trying to achieve here with this painting. So as you can see, the base layer looks more of a yellowish-brown, like an uncooked pastry color. But with this part of the painting, we are slowly adding more of a reddish-brown color, and since the bottom layer is dry sometimes the paint on top will lay with the sharp edge. So to smooth that out, what I do is clean my brush slightly, and dab the excess water on tissue. With the little water we have on our brush, we just try to spread the color to smooth parts of the edge that we want to blend out into the base color. You will see me doing this a lot for this painting but since I do it out of the frame, I just cut into the next footage. So please keep a mental note of this as you're painting along. Here, I keep using diluted colors, but a little bit more concentrated than the consistency of the base colors. At this point, I don't want the edges to be too defined because I still want to make sure that I'm placing the colors and the textures correctly later. So I'm working per section of the pastry. I'm just roughly placing the reddish-brown color where the area of the pastry is a little bit more cooked but I'm not painting it to flat this time in each area. But I'm rather starting to add small amounts of textures. So instead of painting a whole section, I leave some of the base colors peeking through. Now, that we've painted that whole top area with the slight texture. Now, we are going to section out another part of the pastry on top of where we painted before. This time I'm taking a smaller section, and separating it from the rest to make the top look like it's starting to flake off. As usual, this really doesn't have to be perfect like the photo. Now, I'm going to separate out another space but since this is a larger area, I'm just going to outline a little bit of it. I also used more of the muted brown color than the reddish-brown since this part is covered by a shadow. So I'm separating at both by tonal value and also the saturation of the color. Make sure the lines are not perfect because you want to replicate a flaky pastry crust. So try leaving bits out, looking like thin layers are torn off. To add on to this layer I'm also going to define some of the lines. At this point, I am making my own lines. I'm not following the photo. It's too detailed to completely copy for a painting of this size. Again, I'm also using the muted brown because I'm still at the section where it's covered by shadow. The lines that I'm making right now are also a mixture of thick and thin lines. You're just looking at the overall value since the fine details are what we'll be doing last at the final touches. I'm sectioning this out to also create some negative spaces. So where some layers of pastry are protruding out, that is where I would leave some negative spaces. As usual, I'm varying the shapes so nothing looks too symmetrical. We want everything to look as naturally placed as possible, at this point. Wherever the paint starts to dry, and it's looking a little bit too light than what you want it to look like, at this point, you can slowly add on the layers. It could also mean that your paint is too diluted. So if your layers keep looking too light, try to add more of paint compared to the water. Then swatch it first on a scrap piece of paper so you don't accidentally make the mistake of painting on a color that's too dark, at this stage. But if at one point you accidentally place something that is too dark while it's wet, you could also go back to it with a clean damp brush to spread out the paint, or if you don't want to spread it out, you can also use a dryer brush to absorb the color. Here, as you can see, I'm outlining another area. This is for me to remember where I would like to define certain areas later. Now, I'm going to increase my concentration of paint as we slowly build up onto another layer. So as you can see from the reference photo, the left side of the pastry looks more baked in general, so I'm just going to use more of the burnt color by adding a little bit more black into the mid-tones. I'm also creating random shapes to represent the texture of the pastry, and I'm just going to slowly add this on, as a new layer. Now, I personally think that this is one of the more important areas. I want to make sure that I have a separation, at this stage of the painting from where the pastry looks more cooked, and where the lines are. This is where the filling of the pastry is, because the pastry has a filling the area, where the lines are looks like it has a slight bump. So by defining this tip here, of where the filling stops, we can create the illusion of volume. Now, I'm approaching this from another direction, and I'm using more of an orange-brown this time because if you look at the reference photo again, this side looks more like a golden brown color, and the left side looks more cooked, or a little bit burnt. At the end of this lesson, I will show you the slight color division of this pastry, that you need to achieve at this stage of the painting, to help you out on the next lesson as we define the textures. So you can take a screenshot of that to help you out. As you can see, I'm starting to begin sectioning out more spaces, and I'm just making random shapes here to suggest cracks and the layers. I do this by making something like geometric shapes, and then making sure the edges are very jagged, so it looks very flaky. I'm also mixing in jagged lines along with large and small shapes. You want this to look as random and as natural as possible. I take some shapes from the reference photo to, but also adding in my own. So pick the shapes that stands out to you the most, and roughly place it where you think it belongs, and keep repeating the step until that section is quite filled up with those shapes. If you come across a section and you're confused of how to use the reference photo because say, no shapes stands out or parts of it are already covered, just fill it in with any random shape that would fit in between them. Another thing to keep in mind is that you should leave the base color between each of the shapes that you are painting. This way it looks very defined and not joined together, so as if each shape has a lighter outline, rounded. Just go slowly and you'll get there. As you travel across to the left side of the pastry, make sure you include a little of black into your color. Make sure so there's a slight gradation between the golden brown and the darker brown color on the left side. Now that we're done with the crust, we are going to go through this section where the fins are, and this part, to me, looked like it has more of the same golden brown as the right tip of the pastry but this time it looks less cooked. So I'm going to add a little bit of the permanent yellow deep, or a little bit of orange into the mixture that you've been using to paint that side of the crust. Remember that these are only subtle color changes. So it looks like one shape as a whole, but slight changes to look like the pastry is cooked unevenly, and those imperfections are the key to making your painting look a little bit more realistic. You see where I'm painting now, at the bottom of the transition between the crust and the section with the filling, the colors are a tiny bit lighter, so I'm going to mix in a little bit of the muted yellow-brown color. So just to add a little bit of additional texture, and I personally think it looks nice against the golden brown pastry. Now, I'm adding a small amount of diluted muted brown color to exaggerate the lines that we painted earlier, to define the layers of the pastry, and make them look like they're sticking out as they're baked. Then I'm going to add the smallest touch of orange into the mixture that we just used, in a very diluted consistency. We're just going to define the other side of the pastry, which we left out this whole time because that side is much lighter than the rest. I'm just painting it in the direction where the pastry is baking, so the layers are still visible. Last but not least, I'm just going to do a glaze. This means I'm covering areas that I've painted before, over with one color. I'm just going to add a touch of the reddish-brown color because I find that the overall color in this area is a little bit too light for my taste. I'm also being very careful around the top by darkening the side of the pastry. I also want to define the crusty edge of the top part of the pastry. So we're done with this lesson. I hope you guys are keeping up well so far, and don't forget to take a screenshot of the color chart right here. 8. PAINT TEXTURES1: Now that we've placed some textures on the previous lesson, all we are going to do now is redefining those textures that we made by incorporating darker colors. So around a couple of shades darker than what the color of the painting is right now. I still look at my reference photo at this point, but the further I get on with my painting, usually, the more I liked to interpret my own things on the painting. What you see me doing now is that I'm sectioning out another part that we've made on our previous lesson, and I'm going to place the darker shade and suggesting that there are more layers of the pastry right there. I work around the sides a lot at this stage, and I'm just redefining it a little bit more and basically increasing the contrast from the light base color to the darker tons of brown. Where some areas look a bit dull I like to glaze it or put additional texture on top with a richer golden brown. So you see the two contrasts of the dull and the richer color. I'm also increasing the paint ratio as I go because I want the richer layer colors to pop out more. This part in particular that I'm working on right now, or any parts of pastry that you're going to paint that shows fine lines for the layers, I tend to only use the reference photo for the overall values only and I'm just painting lines at this stage and redefining what I already painted on the layers below. Because there's no way of a 100 percent replicating a photograph for such a tiny scale painting. I personally also like putting my own touches and my painting, so all you have to do is basically follow the direction of the layers of the pastry and that's it. Just create your own lines and define it by building up on the colors per section. The section I'm going to paint now is a part of the lines of the pastry that we've painted before but this is more of an imperfection of the pastry while it's being baked. In this case, I like to usually include imperfections like this one because it brings more life into the painting in my opinion. Because pastries can't be a 100 percent accurate and symmetrical, so including things like this is what makes a painting look a little bit more natural. Now I'm just going to continue defining that small section until it looks like it's sticking out enough and I'm also going to fix up the layers above by darkening it a bit more until the paint dries on the current layer. After this, I'm just going to move back to the triangular section of the pastry to balance it out again. Don't worry if you're painting doesn't look the same as mine because it is your own interpretation of the subject. I know for sure that I would paint something that will look completely different if I repaint this again, because this painting is my interpretation at this point of time. So never be discouraged if your painting doesn't look exact because no pastry also with the exact same. The obvious section that's still looks quite untouched compared to the other parts are the lines in the middle where the pastry is cut. So I'm going to add the midtone brown mixture and mixing it with a little bit of cerulean blue and a tiny bit of black. I also want a medium to light consistency to add on to this layer, since it doesn't have many layers on top yet and what I want to suggest in this area is that those lines are deeper than the rest of the pastries, so I'm going to build it up later after I balance out the other sections too. Notice that when I'm working on the pastry part of the painting, I want to keep going back and forth to certain sections. This is because if you forget to work on certain session, it might look less work than the rest so the value might be off. Even if I section out each area, when it comes to one whole subject, I keep going back and forth to make sure that everything is balanced as a whole. Like this part right here, which I'm working on right now, I've been leaving this out quite a bit so I'm going to keep up with the same consistency paint as the rest. It looks as worked even though it's light and color compared to the rest. To do this, I'm adding the thicker consistency paint as lines just to suggest the texture of the Pastry. But by doing this, I'm also balancing out the colors. Now I'm quite happy with how this looks. I'm just going to add additional touches with a consistency dark brown colors because I don't think the burnt area is obvious enough. So I'm just going to apply them where the area looks more burnt, I will add a little bit more black into the brown mixture to define it and where I think it's less burnt. But I still wanted to stand out. I just use a touch more orange unlike red so it looks a little bit more golden. I also want to define the crack close to that area. I want that crack to look obvious. I want a crisp edge and not smoothed out. Now I'm going to go back to those cuts and applying the muted brown, but this time in a much thicker consistency than before and I'm applying it in the same direction of the cut. So if there are any white space left out, its completely fine because it will be in that direction and in fact, it adds on to the texture. As you can see now, I'm using a thinner consistency again for the shadow color. That's because I want this side to look like it's covered in shadow and this has to also separate the side surface of the pastry and the cut itself, which is the deepest part of the painting. So I want to make the cut darker than the shadow on the pastry. Then I'm adding the thicker consistency again just to add extra thin lines for the layers. Because of this, the pastry now looks more bumpy because we've been creating volume by suggesting shadows and highlights through the colors, which is what I always tried to achieve in paintings. I'm going to go to the area where we haven't worked on so far in this lesson and that's the intricate texture on the right side of the triangle at the two points. I'm just going to add more random shapes and thick consistency paint. I'm also just going to redefine some textures that we've already made by redefining the size, making sure that the light outline is more visible by putting darker colors fixed to it, and just increasing the overall contrast. I'm also placing smaller shapes on top if you want to. At this point, I'm really not looking at my reference. I'm just adding my own personal touches to look out for certain sections and defining those textures to make it look more crispy and flaky. The same colors still apply like the previous lesson, the grounds on the left is much more dark and muted because it was probably exposed to more heat and the right side has more of a reddish orange color and is more golden brown. So just follow through with the previously used that we've painted on that section before. At this point, I'm not going to work too much on the center of the pastry anymore because it is supposed to be lighter and also I want those pencil marks where we've left the outline of the seats to still peek through to help us paint the seeds on the next lesson. For the final touches on this lesson, I'm just going to re-glaze the side of the pastry again to make it darker, even though I know it's not as dark in the reference photo. But I want to increase the contrast of value. So the flaky pastry on top can stand out a little bit more. Then I'm just going to add a few lines to redefine the layers of the side of the pastry. That's it for this lesson, I will see you at the next one where we will be painting the seeds and do final touch ups before we finish off with highlights. 9. PAINT SHADOWS: I'm going to start this lesson by painting the seeds with a very thick consistency, ivory black. I'm just going to follow my pencil marks and fill in those spaces where I've drawn out the seeds. It's pretty straightforward. Just use fine detail brush; mine is a size 2, and it's a synthetic brush, you can really find it anywhere. Basically, just use any small brush that you're comfortable with. After we finish painting the seeds, I'm just going to outline the crust and the layers again on the side of the paste tree. Make sure you use a very thick consistency, dark brown, so the outline of the layers look really nice and clear. I'm also adding additional details just to increase the texture and redefine the cracks in between. You can also use a smaller brush for this if you're uncomfortable with controlling the thickness of the lines with a larger brush. But sometimes I don't like to gauge my brushes too much, but please do whatever is comfortable for you. If you feel like any areas need redefining, just go over it again. For this case, I want to just add some really dark brown color or even black in the center of the bread pastry area, and some of the cracks. A lot of these adjustments at this point are really just personal aesthetics, because we've already established the basic structure of it. Now it's more like balancing everything out and adding additional touches that you want for your painting. Now, I'm outlining again this time for the other side, and I'm just going to go over it again like we did for the front of the pastry. I'd like to make sure that the light areas are still visible in terms of texture, that's why I always like to bind the lighter areas. But I'm more careful in this area to make sure that the lines are very fine. Then once you're happy, go ahead and outline the rest of the pastry. Note that I keep rotating my brush to always make sure that I'm using the very tip, because as you use some brushes, the tip might be slightly bent. So always move it around to see that only the tip is touching the paper. After you're happy with the outlines and satisfied of the stage of your painting, let's move on to the next lesson. 10. PAINT HIGHLIGTS: We are so close to finishing this painting. In this lesson, I'm going to take you through how I add my highlights with this white uni-ball pen. First off, what I like to do is outline some of the seeds on top. If it's gets a dark surface, so as an example, if there are two seeds touching, I would outline it with this white pen just to separate the shapes. This also applies when the surface of the pastry is dark. I would still outline seeds just to redefine it. I also add one or two dots or small strokes inside of the seeds to highlight the shape. Looking at the reference photo, I take a look at where some of the highlights stands out, so pick those places and then I just paint them on. But this time I'm going to go over it quite a bit since the size of the pen is very small, but you want to cover a fair amount of areas, so I just keep going over it, doing circular motions on the tip of my pen, so I can cover quite a bit of area. I like to only place the highlights in darker areas of the painting, so the white really stands out against the dark background. I tend to skip highlights in areas where the painting is quite light in color because I don't think the white pen would have much of an impact, but this is really just my personal take on it. If you feel like you want to add on highlights in different areas that I've painted, that is completely fine. In fact, I really encourage you to just express what you want to paint. The final step that I usually do after working on a painting for a long time. After I feel like I have finished or close to finishing, I like to take a step back and look at it from a distance. Sometimes I also like to take out my phone and take a photo of it because I'm looking at it from a different view or perspective will help you add on final adjustments to balance the painting as a whole. After you take a good look at it from a distance, I like to finish it off by adding extra outlines or highlights or even a small glazing of shadow in small areas to really bring it together. But if you've done this step and you feel like you don't really need to take that extra step of adding more cracks or painting certain areas or outlining it then that means you're finished. Congratulations on finishing your pastry painting. Now, as we've drawn out two pastries in the beginning, I'd like you to try to complete the second pastry yourself. I've also added a speed paints of this in the next lesson to guide you along certain areas that you might find tricky. 11. SPEEDPAINT: Welcome to the last painting lesson of this class. I decided to make this one a speed paint just for you to get a basic idea of the process after watching the step-by-step tutorial. I use the same steps for this paintings. So where I made the previous lessons to be followed as paint along videos. For this one, I would like you to watch this to get the overall techniques and steps and having to go paint this yourself after watching the speed paint. This is four times faster than the original speed so I think you would still be able to watch the steps quite clearly. I'm just going to put music on and I want you to relax and watch and try to analyze the painting yourself. It would also be a good idea to have the reference on hand so you understand the interpretation and how to break down the images from the reference rather than copying from a finished painting. I personally enjoy watching be paintings because I get to understand other people's different approaches in paintings. So I hope you guys enjoyed this one. As you see here, up to this point, I've only just started painting the sausage. That's because I like sectioning out subjects. So if there are two separate ingredients, I'd like to work on individual ones up to a point where I'm a bit more than halfway into the painting. But I always like to do the finishing touches together so I get the overall balance of value and colors correctly by the end of it. So the final steps of doing shadows, outlines, and highlights is a good opportunity to bring the painting together as a whole. You can also see that I've also interpreted the sausage shape myself because I wanted to make it more visible and appetizing. I've also decided to change the color to bring a little bit of a different hue into the painting. So I decided to paint this one a pinkish brown color. You can pick your colors yourself. If you like those cartoony read sausages. That will also be cute for this painting. I hope to see your own interpretations of this in the projects session. After put him down the colors off the sausage, I decided to go back to the pastry region because that's the main feature of this painting. I want to make sure I incorporate the details and texture that I wanted to portray. So I will go back and forth between the subjects until I'm satisfied with the final outcome. Now I'm just adding the final touch of highlights throughout the overall painting and we are finally done with the last painting lesson. 12. CLOSING: Congratulations on finishing this class. It was quite a long one, but I hope that you got something out of it and you can now paint your own pastries. For the class project, I suggest that you paint along to this class. You can pick either one of the pastries to paint or even both. I will link both of the outlines and the color palette for you to download along with the photo references, so you can use it when you paint along. When you've completed the projects, please feel free to upload them on your project section so I can take a look at what you've created. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you again next time.