Fun Watercolor Techniques: How to Paint Ice Lollies

1. Intro: Hi. My name is Sharone, from Sharone Stevens Design, and I specialize in watercolor, illustration, and modern calligraphy. This is my 12th class on SkillShare, and for this I have chosen ice lollies as a topic, because, not only are they a really fun subject to paint in the summer, or any time of year really, they are also a great subject for practicing a variety of techniques, whether you are completely new toward color, or you want to improve. In this class, I start by taking you through some project ideas, which can be anything from as simple as painting one or two lollies, to painting all 10, and then going on to practicing the techniques by making up your own. If you want to go a step further and make a more finished piece of artwork, I'll give you some inspiration for creating your own piece of all art with these pieces. I take you through all of the supplies I'll be using in the class, giving you tips on what to use and why. We then go through a practice session where we go through a variety of techniques which are useful, generally, for your watercolor paintings, and specifically, for painting these ice lollies. In this section, we look at values and blending, wet on wet, the kiss technique, layering, four different ways to create highlights, how to create texture with water drops and salt, and we practice painting details into the lollies. I then show you how to paint all 10 of these ice lollies, step by step, so you can paint right along with me. For each lolly, I start with a little overview where I show you the palettes and the techniques that we'll be using. We use different techniques for each of them. We start with the most simple ones and increase in detail, and complexity as we go along, becoming much more realistic with the final three as you can see. I love painting ice lollies, and I really think that, not only will you enjoy painting these too, but they will also increase your confidence with watercolor. Grab your supplies, and let's get started. 2. Your Project: Your class project is simply to use the techniques we cover in the class to paint some ice lollies. It can be as simple as painting one or two lollies, just for practice and fun. It's a great subject to really getting to know your paints, especially if you're very new towards color. You could paint all ten of them and then move on to experimenting and making up your own ones using the different techniques. The great thing about ice lollies is that there is an endless amount of possibilities for you to create with different colors, different fruits, different styles. They can be really loose and abstract or realistic. It's a great way to experiment with finding a style that you like. Or you can go one step further and make more finished piece of artwork, either just for fun or which you can hang on your kitchen wall, or even give as a gift for a family or friend. You can do this by framing an original piece of your work or scanning it into the computer and digitizing it. If you want to know how to digitize your watercolor artwork, then I have a comprehensive class for beginners which will be able to help you. Do go and check that out afterwards if you want to. In particular, for these ice lollies, I'd recommend videos on making color adjustments so you can get the lollies as vibrant as possible once they're scanned. The video on the Quick Selection Tool and then how to turn your selection into a mask and how to refine the selection area, this is the process I used to digitize these. You can add a quote to your lollies, something fun, maybe a play on words or something simple like summertime. If you have Procreate on the iPad, you can add some brush lettering like this one, or you can add some font in Photoshop. This is a mix of a font and my lettering. I'll start a conversation in the discussions tab with some ideas for quotes, if anyone wants to make a finished piece with some lettering. Please go and add any ideas you have to it to give everyone a bit of inspiration. Whatever you decide to do, I can't wait to see your work, so please do upload it to the project gallery so we can all see. 3. Supplies: For this class, you will need water color paper, this is my current favorite paper to use, Saunders Waterford, but you can use any that you have. I'd recommend cold press paper as we'll be using a fair amount of water and cold pressed is much more absorbent than hot pressed. Like this one, it may just say CP or not, on it, which means it's cold pressed. This is a 100 percent cotton, which I would also recommend as it's better quality, but more importantly, it should be at least 140 pounds, which means it will be thick enough to absorb the water that we'll be using. You can get your water color paper in parts, loose sheets or blocks. This is a block which I like to use when I'm using a bit more water with my work, as a paper becomes pre-stretched, so as you can see, is attached on all four sides, and when you're finished with your painting, there's a gap at the top where you can just put a palette knife in or something flat to just run around the edge to separate the page from the rest of the block. I've included some outlines for the lollies for you in the resource section, and they each have numbers inside which show you which lolly examples they relate to. They're really simple and you can easily draw these out yourself if you choose to, but I just wanted you to focus on the watercolor techniques in this class and not have to worry about making sure the shapes are right to start with. If you wish, you can download these, print them and other trace on a light box or if you using a block like me or don't have a light box, then you can cut them out and draw around them. To draw these, you would need a pencil. I like to use this mechanical pencil because it's light and fine, so whatever you use, make sure it's not too heavy because you can't always erase your lines once they have been covered in watercolor. You may need an eraser too or a putty rubber like this, which can soften your pencil lines just by pressing on to the pencil. You'll need some watercolor brushes, I'll be using round brushes, they have a fine tip with a full body which can hold a decent amount of water and paint, so they're great for both fine lines or edges and covering more areas of paper. I'll be using a size six brush for the large areas of gouache, a size two for some of the smaller areas, and my tiniest three zeros for the finest details. You will need some water and a paper towel for taking off any excess water or paint from your brush, so the way to use this is to either dab your brush like this onto its side, don't push it directly down as that will damage the brush, or if you want a really dry brush, you can gently squeeze again on its side. Again, if I've got too much paint on my brush, I'll just dab it onto my paper towel to take off the excess and then I'll start painting. You need some watercolor paints. I'll be using Winsor, Newton Professional choose, but you can use pans or whatever paints you have. The main thing you want to consider when choosing your paint is that they are vibrant, strong colors. For the main parts of the lollies, we want to stick to colors that are closest to primary and secondary pure colors, which will be the brightest and most fun. I'll be using Winsor yellow, Indian yellow, Scarlet Lake for the red, Permanent Rose for the pink, Winsor blue, red shade, and we'll mix these two together to get that purple. Sap green, and then we'll also mix up another green with our Winsor yellow and Winsor blue to get this more limey green up here. For the sticks, I used the burnt umber and yellow ocher, and then the ivory black for the pips and the watermelon and kiwi lollies. For a lot of the lollies, we want to use highly pigmented colors with little water so that we can achieve that bold vibrant color, and you can see with this orange and red how strong and vibrant they are, when there is little water in the mix. When we add more water, they become always pastry. Keep that in mind throughout the class that you really want to coat your brush and the paint to get the fun bright colors. Finally, I'll be using some salt to add some texture to the paint, and I'll take you through this in the technique section. I'll be using standard table salt straight from the mill so it doesn't have to be anything special. But you can grind some into a jar if you like, and use your fingers to sprinkle them on. For the later classes for the fab lolly and the face I'll be using masking fluid, and I'll be decanting this into a smaller container and using a color shaper to apply it. This has a silicon tip, which means it doesn't get damaged like brushes do, with the masking fluid, and when it's dry, you can just peel it off. Finally, I'll be using my Uni-ball signal white gel pen for some highlights. I love this pen because it's really opaque and works well even on top of the darkest of colors. That's all the supplies. Let's jump into our techniques practice session. 4. Tips & Techniques Part 1: In this section of the class, we will be practicing some watercolor techniques that are useful generally for beginners and that specifically relate to painting these ice lollies. If you're new to water color, then this will help you start getting to know how the paints and water work together, and how you can create different effects using different techniques. If you're a bit more experienced then I'd still recommend taking this part as you can never practices techniques enough. We're going to start by looking at manipulating values because it's one of the most important things you need to do to be able to make your paintings work, varying the amount of pigment, and water used to produce different strengths of colors. This will transform your work from being very flat to having shadows, highlights, reflections, and just generally being much more interesting and potentially realistic. For this, you're going to find a paper towel really handy. Pick one of your colors. I'm going from my winter blue and coat the brush as much as possible. We want to start by making this color quite dark, which means having a lot of pigment and very little water. You can see this is pretty dark, but we can make this even darker. I'm going to take out some of the water from my brush on my paper towel, go straight back to the paint without dipping it in my water, and pick up more pigment. I'm going to dab it again on my paper towel, the dryer the brush is, the stronger the pigment will be. You can see that's even darker now. We want the colors to be really bold in areas of the lollies, so it's well worth practicing getting this ratio right to make your colors as vibrant as they can be. Now, let's make it a bit more diluted. Add a bit of water to your brush, and I'm pulling this out a little on my palette so it gets more diluted, and there you can see it's lighter, so that has more water in the mix and less pigment. Again, I'm going to add some more water and dilute it even more, then take the excess water off of my brush. Keep going with this until you can get it as light as possible. If you want to make it lighter once it's on the page, just wash off your pigment, blot your brush a little, so it's just damp, and then spread the paint out on the page. These are the values we want for highlights. It's really important to be able to get these lighter colors in your work. I cannot recommend enough that you spend some decent time practicing this if you're not confident doing this yet, as being able to produce this range of colors will really make a difference to all of your work. Now, let's have a look at softening edges. When you lay down the paint onto a dry surface, it just goes where you put it. It doesn't run anywhere else and it will have a sharp crisp edge. If you want to soften these or blend it out, just wash the pigment off of your brush, blot it on the paper towel so it's just damp rather than full of water, and then run it along the edge of the paint. You can keep going over this to blend it out even more. Just practice doing this a few times with different amounts of water to see what works best for you. Be careful about adding too much water like this because it will push the pigment away towards the edges, creating harsh lines. If you add too much water, you can simply clean and dry your brush by gently squeezing it with your paper towel, then pick up the excess water and taking it off on the paper towel again. It's inevitable that this will happen sometimes, so it's really good to know how to do this and correct mistakes. Now, let's just practice blending out a bit more with a damp brush. With these isolates, we'll be painting a lot of different values as a base layer to get a sense of the ice texture and reflections. Let's draw a box and practice filling it in with different values from light to dark. Let's start with dark. Then use a clean damp brush to blend down the edges. Then add some more paint to the other side, and you can build this color up to make it even darker. Then just keep alternating between adding paint and cleaning your brush and blending it out. In the end, you have a box of a range of different values. I'm not working very hard at blending this in. It doesn't have to be too neat. The main thing is that it's all a little wet and the same amount of wetness so the paint is fighting equally for space on the page. Otherwise, any excess water will start to push the paint around. Now, let's look at the kiss technique, which is where you kiss the paint and water together on the page so it bleeds into one another. Add a strip of paint to your page, fairly thick. Not too much water. Then clean your brush and add some water to the page, then pull it in so it touches the paint and as soon as it touches that paint, it bleeds in. Let's do that again. I'm running the brush against the paint a little more this time. This technique is really for a much looser style of painting, it's a really fun and unpredictable style. We're going to use this technique for the raspberry swirl lolly which is example number four, so let's just practice this a bit more. Draw a box and then let's fill it with different values of paint using this technique. We want some areas of white, some areas of really dark paint, and then lots of shades in between. You start by adding in your paint, a nice solid color. Then add a new water and pull it towards the paint. Then add more paint and just alternate between adding paint and water, making sure to leave some white patches of paper, which gives a nice contrast. You can see this effect in these lollies. It's quite a fun technique to use if you want to paint some quick lollies with some really nice contrasts. Now, let's have a look at wet on wet, which is when you apply wet paint to a wet surface. Make sure your water and your brush is clear because we're going to lay some clear water down first. Then pick up your paint and try and get a lot of pigment on your brush because the paint will dilute even more once it's added to the page. I'm just going to add red to the top here and you can see it's spreading straight away, and just as a comparison, let's add some red to the dry area next to it. You can see that's more vibrant because it hasn't been diluted even more by that water on the paper and it's not spreading anywhere at all. Just keep this in mind when you're using wet on wet technique, and you want to get those bold vibrant colors that you have to make sure that you do get enough paint on your brush. Let's add some more clear water to our page now in a rectangle. How much water you have on your page will determine how much the paint spreads. I'm going to add some paint here straight away, and you can see that that's spreading. Then I'm going to wait about a minute so the water starts to dry a little and then add some more on the right. This isn't spreading as much because the paper is much dryer now. This is really useful when you want to build color and texture wet on wet. Because you can lay your colors so they spread less and less and get darker and darker as you build those layers, like we'll do in the raspberry lolly. With wet on wet, your work can look quite different when it's wet to when it's dry. It can take some time for the paint to get to its final resting place, so to speak, and it can be very tempting to want to go back in and over work it. Here are some examples of paint when it's wet compared with when it's dry. You can see it can be quite unpredictable and really look quite different. Whilst it's tempting to start moving around whilst it's still wet, it can be best just to leave it to do the work for you. Now lay down some clear water and practice making different strokes to see how they react to the water. Some swells, lines, gentle dabs with just the tip of your brush, and then you can go over some of the areas to build on that color. I hope you found these little practice bits useful. In the next video, we'll be looking at different ways to create highlights, ways to add ice textures to your work, and ways to add detail to the lollies and the sticks. 5. Tips & Techniques Part 2: Now I want to show you a few different ways that you can create highlights in your work and in these ice lollies. I'm going to start by using one of the templates to draw around just off of it, so I can show you how I do this. The first technique is simply to leave white space and paint around the highlights. The highlights can just curve around the corner and run down the edge of the lolly. You start by adding a thin line at the edge of the curve and then paint another line underneath that forming a white curve. Make sure this meets our point to each end. Just bear in mind the darker the color is surrounding that white, the more contrast it will have, the more that highlight will stand out. You can do the same down the edge. It doesn't have to run all the way down just a little, and you can also leave little specks of white hair in there for reflections like I've done here. The darker that color is around this highlights the more they'll stand out. The second way of creating highlight is by lifting the color off of the page. You lay you color down and then you remove certain areas of it with your brush. Let's lay down some color, and now I'm going to switch over to my size full brush because it's a little firmer than my size six, and the firmer the brush is, the easier it will be to lift with. Make sure your brush is clean and dry, and then just pick that paint up, and take the paint off using your paper towel. This can take a few days, so you may need little patience, and you probably need to clean your brush so often, and just make sure you give your brush and little squeeze to take any water around as you don't add any water to the page, as that would affect the surrounding paint. This is starting to lift nicely now. Make sure you are not dragging any painting when you start your strokes, it might be best to start a little way in. Now let's practice lifting this paint again with the curve and trying to keep it fairly thin. Lay your paint down again, and then just keep going until you've got a really nice bright highlight. Lifting is such a useful technique to know, not just for creating highlights, but also for correcting mistakes. It's always worth practicing picking up excess water or paint, as it's inevitable that you'll have to do this at some point to stop it from ruining your painting. Another way to create highlights is by using white pen or white opaque paint. Let's lay down some more paint and just wait for that to dry. I'm using my signal white gel pen. It's really nice pen, nice and thick. It's opaque against even bold colors and you can just simply draw in your highlights. Another way to create highlights is by using masking fluid. Just use your color shaper or brush, to brush and shape wherever to highlight, wait for it to dry and paint over it. Then once the paint has completely dried, you can gently remove it. We won't be using masking fluid in the class for highlights, but we'll be using it for some sprinkles and nuts in the last two lollies that we paint, just make sure when you're removing the masking fluid that you don't pull it here as it can rip the paper just gently rub at it. Now let's look at a couple of ways to create some icy texture in our painting. Two ways to do this are by adding water drops, and by adding salt. Let's just have a look at these examples first. At the top in the blue, this is just a wet brush that just touched the page, and the second one in red was a bigger drop of water and it's pushed all of the paint to the edges. For the salt in the blue, the water was only a little wet and in the red it was much more wet. It makes a difference with both of these techniques, how much water you have on the page. Let's start with water drops, add some paint to your page. You want this to be a fairly dry layer of paint and no excess water. Then clean your brush and dab it on the side of your glass, takeout any excess and just dab it gently to the paint. If you look closely, you can see that it's diluting the paint and pushing it away. I'm going to do the same to this bottom corner, note that I'm not adding drops of water, I'm just gently touching a wet brush to the page. Let's add some more paint and this time we'll add a little more water into our water drop to see the difference. You won't see the full effect of this until it's dry, and here's what they both look like when they're dry. They both look nice effects, but for me, the pink has a little too much water, I prefer this icicle effect on the left. You play around and see what works for you. Now let's have a look at the texture that the salt can add to our work. Add some paint onto your page, and I'm just going to grind the salt from my mill directly onto the paint. You can do this onto a plate and sprinkle with your fingers if you want a bit more control. The salt absorbs the paint and leaves little marks around it, but it does depend on how much water you have on your page. That was very dry that paint. I'm going to do this again and make the paint a little wet this time and add the salt again. Now you just need to wait until the paint is completely dry and then you can brush the salt off. You can see the effect that this has when it's dry, which is this lovely ice texture. Finally, let's practice some wet-on-dry details, we will be painting for the lollies, again, by laying down flat wash. We need to wait for this to completely dry so the details will be nice and crisp and won't bleed into the paint underneath. So while we wait for that to dry, let's draw in some Popsicle sticks and paint the base line of those, which I'm using yellow like before. Once we have wait for all of those to dry, we can practice painting a drip which we can paint on the bottom of our lollies. For this you just paint an upside down triangle which curves to a point and a little tear drop underneath. You can add next a little dip here so it really looks like it's melting. I think we still need a few more minutes for this to dry. Don't be tempted to paint any details in before your baseline is completely dry because it will blade and burn the effect of those nice crisp edges, as you can see with this line. Going back to our Popsicle sticks now. As long as you also dry, we can use a darker brown to paint in a thin line of shadow directly underneath the lolly, which is so simple, but instantly give it a sense of dimension. Then we can practice adding some detail to these sticks and simple fun ways like diagonal lines, horizontal lines, or vertical lines, or adding instance thinner, more Seattle lines as texture, which are a bit more realistic. Don't use to much water for these, we want control over these lines. The best way to have control is to have a dry brush. So you should paper towel to take out any excess water if you need to. You can also add a bit more color to the edges for definition, depending on how detailed you want to go. You can keep it as simple as you like. Now this is dry, we can go back and practice layering on a color. Let's add a strip of color, make sure not to add too much water. Then using an almost dry brush, you can blend this out. We don't want to add water here as we don't want to reactivate and disturbed the paint underneath. Then you can build on that darker edge with some more color, and this is something we'll be doing more of with I indented lollies. Lets practice painting with some neutral rods, relax shapes. and then some pips, so I'm using my small [inaudible] brush now and this is a pretty dry mix because I won't nice pips to be I opaque. I want them to be solid black and I'm just touching the tip of the brush to the page to make the small dots. Now we can paint some bigger pips, which we'll be using in the watermelon lolly and you can add some highlights into these pips with your white pen. That's the end of our techniques section. I hope you find it useful. I would love to hear your feedback and if you find these sections helpful at the beginning of the class is now at the start painting our ice lollies so lets move on to example 1. 6. Example 1: The first ice lolly we'll be painting is really simple. We'll be using the rounded template, which is the first one, and for the main part of the lolly, you will just need an orange color. I'll be using Indian yellow. Then you'll need a brown for the stick. I'll be using yellow ocher and burnt umber, as with all of the sticks. We'll be using wet and wet technique to get those lovely blends, and then we'll be adding some drips and painting the stick. The key things we want to focus on with this lolly are really coating our brush in that pigment to get this really strong, vibrant color, having a mix of values, so having these lighter areas, which contrast nicely with those dark edges and swirls and leaving some areas almost white. We don't want to overwork this one, as we want the paint to blend in randomly and let it be quite natural, so we'll let the wet on wet do the work for us. So start by drawing out your ice lolly, and then just connect that line up for the base. I'm going to start with my size six round brush. Make sure your brush is clean and your water is clean, as we're going to start by laying down some water first. Try to keep this as neat as possible around the edges. We don't want a pool of water on the page because it will start to gather in the corners, we just want an even spread of water across the lolly. See? You should be able to see a nice sheen of the water if you hold it up to the light. You can just go over any bits that have started to dry. Okay, now pick up your paint and really coat the brush with it so you have a really strong color. Then start by adding this to the top left of the lolly. Use quick, swirly motions in the middle, and then work slower and more precise around the edges. Just let the paint do its thing, don't overwork it. Add some more swirls here, but remember to try and leave enough white area for that contrast. We want the edges to be the darkest, so pick up some more of your paint, and you can just go over these bits and build up that color. They should still be wet, so it will still all bleed in. Again, making sure to keep those edges nice and neat. Then work along this edge here, adding a few little swirls. We don't need to paint all of the edges, the colors will bleed in and spread around. Any small areas that are left white at the edge would just appear as highlights. Now, it's getting a little drier, we can pick up more pigment and go over some areas to add more contrast, and these will spread less so that color will be more prominent, as we practiced in the technique section. Okay, so that's it for the lolly. Really simple. Now we want to paint the lolly stick, so for this I'm going to add yellow ocher and burnt umber to my plate, and grab my smallest size two round brush. I just want a very diluted yellow ocher wash for the base. I'm going to apply this all over, but I'm not going all the way to the lolly, as the lolly is still wet and I don't want that bleeding in. Now we just need to wait for that to dry before we add in the shadow and the final detail to the stick. Whilst we wait, we can move onto the next lolly. If you want to skip ahead to finish this one first, then you can find that towards the end of the next video. 7. Example 2: For the second lolly, you will need a yellow and orange and a red, or just the yellow and the red because you can mix the orange yourself. The colors that I'm using are winsor yellow, Indian yellow and Scarlet lake. For this we'll be using the square root template, which is the second one. The key techniques we'll be focusing on for this are roughly blending those colors together. We don't need to worry about it being perfectly blended. It still has a really nice effect. We'll practice leaving white spaces for the highlights, and then we'll add some water drops for extra little bits of ice texture. Again, I'm going to be starting with my size six round brush and I'm going to start at the top with my yellow working neatly around these edges. On that top right corner, I'm going to leave a curve of white for the highlight and this should be fairly close to the edge. You can leave a couple of extra small bits white too for some more highlights and just bring this down about a third of the way down the lolly. On that right side, start to leave another white line for another highlight close to the edge, and we'll continue this with the other colors as we move further down. Now I'm moving on to my orange, my Indian yellow and we just paint slightly over that yellow. Because it's still a little wet, it is going to blend in a little. When you get to that highlight on the right, just bring it down a little further. Now I'm going to move on to my red, my scarlet lake and this is quite a jump from the Indian yellow. So we'll have to work a bit harder to blend this in. So first let's just concentrate on lying down this color. When you get over to the right, you can leave another white space for some more highlights, particularly around the curve of the corner and along that right edge. You can see I've also left a couple of tiny white areas along the bottom edge. So now I'm going to go back to my orange and add in some more over that transition area between the orange and the red, so we can make that orange bit darker. Now if you clean your brush and dry it, you can use it just to move the colors around until they've blended in a little bit more. Keep cleaning and drawing your brush as much as you need because it will quickly pick up the pigment from the page and you don't want to be transferring that to other areas, especially other lighter areas of the work. Now that we're happy with our blends, we can add some little bits of water for that nice ice effect. So remember from the practice, we don't want to be adding big blobs water onto the page. So my brush doesn't have too much water in it and what I'm doing is just touching the brush to the page very slightly, so it transfers a little bit of water. So it's going to be quite subtle. So here you can see a couple of these water drops in those circles once it's dried. Now we can move on to the stick. So again, I'm using a very diluted yellow ACO with my size two brush and I'm not going all the way up to that red again, as I don't want it to bleed in. I'm going to add a little bit more color to the edge, so it bleeds in softly. While that one dries, we can go back to our first lolly and finish the stick. So I'm going to start with a shadow, which will be a thin line directly underneath the lolly, using my burnt umber and my size two brush. So we want this fairly dark. If it's not dark enough, you can layer it up when it's dry and that will build up the color, and then I'm just going to add a bit of texture to the rest of the stick using some more of that diluted brown. You can use any of those details that we practiced in the technique section to finish those off. So you can make it a bit more realistic or you can add in the lines in different directions. So I haven't got much water on my brush now because I want to have a lot of control over where the paint is going. I'm just going to add a little bit more brown to that shadow to make it a bit darker. Now we can add some drips to the bottom of this lolly, so I'm going to go back to my Indian yellow. I'm going to paint a triangle, coming to a point, with a little drop underneath. I'm going to add one on the other side, so it really looks that it's melting at the bottom. Now I'm going to use my even smaller brush, my size three zero, to add a few more faint lines into the stick for a final bit of texture using my burnt umber. That's the first lolly finished. Now I can go back to the second one and finish off the stick, presuming that it is dry by now. So I'm going back to my size two brush and my burnt umber. So I start with that shadow again and for this one, I'm going to use my tiny size three zero to paint some horizontal lines across the stick. I'm just going to add a bit more color to the edges as well and gently blend that in. So I'm not using much water, so it's not disturbing those lines. One thing to remember when you're layering, is not to use too much water because you don't want to reactivate that paint underneath and start disturbing it. Then if you need to, you can go over the shadow again to darken that up. Now we can move on to our third lolly. 8. Example 3: For the next slowly, we will be using a few more colors and painting this rain by a blend. We'll be using the square root template again for this. For the palette, you need a blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and pink but of course you can mix up some of those yourself, if you just have the primary colors. We want to make sure that we're using them in this order so that we are working around the color wheel so that they blend together naturally and don't get muddy. The key techniques we'll focus on, include blending the colors together roughly again, and we'll also focus on lifting the paint to create a highlight. I'm going to start at the base with my blue, my winds blue. I'm not adding this to high as we have quite a few colors to fit in. Make sure it's wet enough to react to me at the next color, but not too wet. It shouldn't really run if you mix the page around, that's one test you can do. Now I'm going to clean my brush and move onto my green, try not to pull the blue up towards the green as it would take over. Lay down the green fast and then move it to the blue. Next we want to add in our yellow and we should be almost halfway up the lowly, now, when we lay down this yellow. At the same, without touching the green to start with, and then you can start to blend two colors together. Just use your brush to move the colors around, cleaning the brush and drawing it with your paper towel as you need to clean up pigment off so that is just moving colors around rather than adding any more color to it. Remember, we didn't have to make this really neat, we do not have to blend it perfectly for these lollies because it just gives it that nice ice texture to have a bit more random. Now we can move on to our orange, and because this isn't a massive step away from the yellow, we can add this directly over the top of that yellow. Now we can move on to the red, but as this is a very strong color compared to the orange, we want to lay this down on its own first again, and then we'll blend in afterwards. For this, if you're using colors like this, we can mix a little of our red and indigo yellow together, to help with that blend, to get that orange, which is a step in the middle, and then we just add that in between the two colors. The final color is our pink, which is going at the top and I'm using permanent rise for this, and we can just add this directly next to the red as they are size similar. All that still wet, we want to leave some of the color in the top right corner to create a highlight. For this, I'm going to switch to my size for brush because is a bit far more than my size six and it's easier to lift with. I want this highlight to curve around that corner, so make sure you have your paper towel handy. I'm going to pick up that pink and then just keep taking the lifted paint off of my brush, either by washing and drying it or just by wiping on the paper towel and gently squeezing it. We don't want to add any more water to the page. We want the brush to be dry. Be careful that you're not pulling more pink into the highlight if you're making it bigger. You probably need to do this a few times to get a nice highlight, so be patient. You may find it easier to start halfway down the highlight and where corn half a time, and you can already see that's getting whiter as you're marking on it. Then just switch to the top of, I move upwards for this, So you're not pulling in any pink from this start or end. That looks pretty good to me I'm happy with that now. We can move on to this stick, so I'm going to match my size t brush on my yellow color, and I'm just going to cover this whole stick again. Now it's going to wait a few minutes, so that's dry before we paint in the shadow and the lines. Now this is dry, I'm grabbing my pen on buffer the shadow line. For this one I'm going to do my lines diagonally. Remember keep your brush partly dry to make those lines nice and neat. Then just add a little more color on the edges if you want to. Finally, let's add some drips to this, so I'm going back to my blue and I'm just going to do this on the right side this time, so starting with that triangle, and then the little drop. I'm just going to add a little bit more in there as well, and that's our third lolly complete. Next, we'll be moving on to one of my favorites, this raspberry lowly, where we'll be using the kiss technique to get this lovely swirly effect with all of those different values in there. 9. Example 4: The next one we will be painting is this Rose Brace Wiley Lolly. We'll be using a rounded template for this. For the pallet, you'll need a pink and a purple for the lolly itself and the brown for the stick, as always. I'll be using permanent rose for the pink and then I'll be mixing up a purple with the permanent rose on my Windsor blue, red shade. For this lolly, we will mainly be focusing on the kiss technique, adding paint and water on the page next to each other so that they bleed in and we get a wide range of values in there. We'll also be layering wet on wet to build up the color at different stages of dryness. We'll leave some white space for highlights and additional contrast. We will then add some final details, wet on dry, to get some really dark areas. You start by loading up your brush with your pink. We want this really strong and vibrant to start with. Start by running this along the top left edge. Then clean your brush and load out with some clear water. Add the soap page next to the paint and then just pull it towards the paint. Now I can pick up some more paint. Remember the key here is to have a wide range of valleys in there, from the white of the paper to some really power pinks to the really strong vibrant pink's. We don't want to cover the whole area with paint, leave some of the bits dry. Move your brush in random curves to get that swirly effect. Just mix up between adding paint on the page and then adding more water and letting them run into each other. Now we can go ahead and mix up a purple using our pink and blue. I'm only adding a small amount of my blow-in as it's quite empowering. We want it to complement the pink that we've already got down nicely. You can add this in gently just using small dabs with the paint brush. The paint should still be a little wet, so it should spread just a little. Focus on those edges, keeping them neat. Making the edges a little darker will help give it a bit of dimension, the illusion that it's curving round a little. I'm just going to add a tiny bit more blue into this purple mix to make it a bit darker, and then again add that in smooth dabs in a few places. I'm building on the darkest areas. You can think of it as having little bits of fruit in this lolly. Then the color bleeds out from the darker purple to the dark pinks and then to lighter one's. Once that's dry, we can add a little more of that deep purple in a few places to really give it some contrast. But for now, let's move on to the stick. For this one, I'm going to use a diluted burnt umber for the base. Once that's dry, you can add in your shadow and any details you want to the stick. You can also get back in dark and all the other shadows if you want to. Boot color always fades when it's dry, so sometimes you might just want to do some final touch ups when you can see how light or dark it is when it dries. Now for the final layer of purple for the lolly, I'm going to add a little more blue again to this mix to make it really dark and add this in with my size toothbrush in small dabs. I'm really just darkening up the center of these purple patches, so it looks like there's a little bit of fruit in there and the juices have run out around it, with a pale of purple underneath. Using the same color. I'm just adding a few small little pips into a few places just using the tip of my brush, we're finished. The next lolly we'll be painting is this lovely, vibrant waterman lolly, which looks so refreshing. I hope you'll continue to join me. 10. Example 5: In this lesson, we'll be painting the watermelon lolly. We'll be using the rounded template again for this. For the palette, you'll need a red, a green, and a black for the lolly itself, and a brown for the stick. I'll be using scarlet lake for the red. I'll be using two different greens. I'm going to mix up yellowy limey green with my Winsor Blue Red Shade and my Winsor Lemon, for the pale of first layer of green. Then I'll be using my darker sap green for the bottom. I'll be using Ivory Black for the pips, and I'll also be using my white gel pen to add some highlights to the pips and to the edges of the lolly as well. We'll be using wet on wet technique and then wet on dry to add those pips. Okay, as we are starting with wet on wet we want to make sure our water is clean, and then using my size six brush, I'm going to lay down some water. I'm not going all the way to the bottom, I'm only going about two-thirds the way down with this water. Remember to make it nice and neat around the edges. Okay, now pick up your red, we want this to be really solid and vibrant, so make sure you really coat your brush with your color. Then add this all the way down to the bottom of the water. As I want to leave space for it to spread and blend down gradually to the widest paper. Now I'm going to mix up my first green, which is a yellowy limey green. So for this, I'm going to start with my Winsor yellow because I want that to be the dominating color in the mix, and then just add a touch of the Winsor blue in gradually. Now I'm going to clean my brush so we can do the wet on wet again and add some clear water to the bottom of the lolly. I'm leaving a little gap between the other water and the stage to make sure it doesn't all blend in together. You can see there's quite a lot of water that is pulled at the bottom of this top part. So I'm just going to pick this up with my brush and plot it on my paper towel. Be careful if you pick up any of the pigment to wash your brush off before carrying on. Okay. I'm just going to coat that bottom part again with a bit more water, and then adding that green that we mixed. I'm going to gently bring up at the sides to connect it to the red. Now I'm confident that there's enough gap in between the two colors, I can fill in this little gap with some water just to make sure that there's an even spread. Okay, now I'm going to add in my sap green to the very bottom so that this bleeds into paler green underneath. Just keep building that color up at the edges, nice and gently with the brush. Well as we wait for that to dry, we can paint the stick. That bottom edge was to be wet. So I'm going to leave a little gap and we'll cover that with a shadow shortly. Okay, now we can leave that to dry for a few minutes. When it's dry, we can add in the shadow. The rest of the stick is a little wet, so I'll move up to the pips now with my ivory black. We want this to be a solid black, completely opaque. So use very little water on your brush and in the mix, and you just want to make little tear drop shapes. I'm using my tiny size three zero as I want these to be quite small and really neat and crisp. If it's not coming out as dark as you want or is a bit washy or gray then just build up that color once it's dry. So just paint over them again with the black. Now I'm going to use my white gel paint out a tiny dot of highlight into each pip, and next we can go back and add the final detail to the stick. Finally, using my whiteout pen again, I'm going to add some thin lines of highlight around some of the edges of the lolly. Okay, and that's done. We are half-way through the class now. I really hope you're enjoying it. Don't forget to upload your work to the Project gallery so that we can all see it. Ask me any questions you have in Discussions tab, and if you could leave me a lovely review if you're enjoying the class so far I would be so grateful. Okay, next we will be painting the kiwi lolly. 11. Example 6: For this kiwi lolly, we'll be using the same greens, again, that we used in the last lesson with the watermelon lolly. We'll be mixing up a yellow lime green with our Winsor Blue and Winsor Yellow, and then using our Sap Green for the darker areas, you'll need a black again for the pips and your white pen for the highlights, and we'll be using the rounded template. Once you've drawn your outline, we want to add in the outline of the kiwi, so draw a jagged circle in the center and a bigger circle for the outer edge. Now I'm going to mix up more of that limey green for our base layer, and I'm going to cover everything apart from that small circle, which is the inside of the kiwi, and this is a fairly diluted mix.This is really just the base layer and we'll be building on it with the darker green. You can see I've not made a completely smooth flat wash, it's quite a nice effect to have some dark patches. Now I can pick up a darker green and start adding that in and I'm mainly keeping it to the edges for now. I'm going to add a little and gently around the center of the kiwi too. I want a bit more texture in this kiwi, so whilst it's still wet I'm going to add a little bit of salt. We want to wait for that paint to completely dry before we brush off the salt, so whilst we wait, I'm going to go back to my green and build up this color around the edges a little more. I'm just very gently dabbing this onto the page with the tip of my brush. You can see it's still a little wet, so it still bleeding in a little. Just continue working around a few parts of the edge, don't go overboard, this will just give it the suggestion of depth having some areas of dark edges. You can also add a little in the middle just using lots of little dabs, and this will bleed in giving it a nice little bit of subtle texture. Again, I'm working really lightly with just the tip of my brush. Once it all dries, we can paint the stick. Once the paint around the salt has dried, we can gently brush that off and you can see that lovely subtle texture that it's given the kiwi. Now I want to start adding some detail to this kiwi, so I'm going use my size two brush to add in some lines coming out from the center starting with pale green then adding the darker green on top. Now we want to add some definition to the edge of the kiwi, so I'm using the darker green for this. Then I'm going to add a little water, only a little. It's really just a damp brush to soften this edge. Next we can start adding some pips in, so these are just tiny dots with our black and I'm using my tiny 000 brush for this. I'm just going to dot some groups of these around the bottom of the lolly and then add in some slightly bigger ones around the inside of the kiwi. Going back to this edge of kiwi we can add some more detail to this, adding some thin dark lines and then slightly darkening that green underneath the [inaudible] to make it stand out more. Next, we can move on to the shadow on the lines of this deck. Now let's add some high lines into the [inaudible] I'm just adding this to the curve at the top, a little on the right edge and then some dots in [inaudible] at the center of the kiwi as well. Then to darken up the green around the edges now, working around those high lines, I'm not using too much water as I don't want to disturb the colors underneath. Finally, we can add in a little drip at the bottom. We are done. Next we are painting [inaudible] which is a slightly different style. 12. Example 7: For this lolly, we will be concentrating a little more on highlights and shadows, but still keeping it pretty simple. We'll be using this square template again, I'll be using Indian yellow and a little bit of my scarlet lake to make the dark orange for the shadowy areas in the indents. We'll also be using the white pen for the highlights. So you start by joining the base up and then we want to draw in those indents. Draw them in line with the stick, curve them round to the top and bring it back down. We are going to start by covering the whole lolly with a very dilute mix, but we want a range of values in there. So start with a dark orange at the edge and then pull it out with some water. Once you've covered the whole lolly, we can paint the stick while that dries. Now, with the more pigmented orange, we can paint the right side of these indents, which will be the more shadowy side. It's bleeding in a tiny bit, which is fine as we'll build on that color, but you don't want that to bleed in too much. Let's paint in the drips while we still wait for that to dry. Then, we can add in the detail and the shadow to the stick. For this, I'm going to paint in horizontal lines with my small brush. Now that lolly is almost dry, I'm going to mix up a dark orange and add that in to the right side of each indent again. I'm just going to soften that and blend in with a pretty much dry brush. You can add a little bit of that darker color in a few other places to the lolly as well, so that it doesn't look out of place in the center. It will add more balanced to the piece if you have some in the edges as well. Finally, you can use a white pen to add in some highlights along the left edge of each of those indents, and also on the top right corner of the lolly. We are done. In the next three lessons, we'll be painting three slightly more realistic, more advanced lollies which build on the techniques we've been working on so far. Next we'll be painting a raspberry lolly, the same style of lolly as this one we've just painted, but we'll be approaching it differently using different techniques so we can add more realism to it. 13. Example 8: For this lolly, we'll be using a slightly bigger template, so it's the first one of the largest three template. We're making this one and the next two slightly bigger because we'll be adding a little more detail into them. For this you need a pink and purple, so I'm using a permanent race for the pink and the mixing it with a little [inaudible] blue, which will make the purple, and we'll be using that for the shadows. The main techniques we'll be using for this lolly are the kiss technique and wet on wet paint a range of values in there. We'll be leaving wide space for highlights, particularly along the right edge and on the left side of each of those indents, we'll be using sour to get some of that lovely ice texture, and then we'll be building up the color with layers will also be using highlights and shadows a bit more intentionally in this lolly to add more dimension and make it look a little more realistic. Once you've drawn your outline, we want to add in an extra line along the bottom edge to give it some depth. Then we want to draw in those indents. I'm drawing a line in line with the edge to the stick, curving around to the top and bringing it back down. I'm going to add in an extra line along the left edge of these indents and at the bottom, and this is where we want to leave a highlight. Now we can start painting. We're going to paint around these indents to start with, so grab your pink, run it along that edge, and then add some more touch blend out. I'm going to alternate between adding in paint and water as I want to get all these different values in there. You can see I'm constantly making ease of my paper towel, taking out any excess water or paint from my brush, or cleaning my brush and then drawing it before I continue depending on what is happening on my paper. I'm trying to keep this edge nice and neat next to the highlight of the indent as we're going to leave that white. I'm leaving a couple of little specks of white to give it some contrast and suggest reflections. Generally just working a bit slower on this one to build up these different values of dark pinks and light pinks in there. Again, I'm leaving a little bit of white along this bottom edge for a highlight. The great thing about practicing watercolor with ice lollies is that these blends really doesn't have to be perfect or neat, it will just add to the ice texture. As long as you keep those edges neat to keep the form of the lolly, then it should still look good at the end once you've built up over the ice layers. I'm going to add some salt into this middle area for the icy texture, I'm just drawing it straight from the male onto the paper. You can use your fingers if you want to have a bit more control over where it goes. Now I'm going to continue painting onto this right side, and when we get to the edge on the very right, make sure to leave a thin white line for a highlight. I'm not going right up to the edge with this paint because I want to leave that gap and I'll paint along that line in a moment. Now starting from the top, I'm just going to paint that edge with the very tip of my brush, so it's nice and thin. So switch smaller brush if you need to. The dark of that color is on either side, the more the highlight will stand out, so you continue to build up your color if you need to. I'm going to add a little more salt to this right side to give it a bit more texture as well. Now I can paint in that point and just need to know these ideas around this indents. Let's wait for it to dry so we can remove this out. As we're waiting, we can paint the stick and the bottom edge. Now I'm picking out some pink, which has got a lot of pigment in it, so it's nice and dark for that bottom edge, as we want that to stand out. Again, switch to a smaller brush for this if you need to, and just paint a bit of a jaggedy line underneath, which will help give it a bit of dimension. Now that it's dry, and we've removed this out, we can pick up our pink. We want this full of pigment, really dark, and start painting in the indents. We want this to contrast with the rest of the lollies, we want nice and dark. But we will be building up on this. Start at the right side of each indent, as that is a part that's more in shadow, so we'll need more color. Then clean the pigment off of your brush and blend it out. Make sure to leave that white gap for the highlight along left edge at the bottom. I'm just going to add a little more paint at the bottom here to neaten up the edge. Now let's mix up our purple using the pink and a little blue, and we'll use this for the shadow in the indent. Just run this along the right edge and it'll bleed in. That's bled into the center a little, so I'm going to clean and dry my brush, and pick up that paint. I want to use my paper towel to grab a little more of the up. I'm going to make this purple a little darker, and then by again to build up that shadow. You can add this purple mix around the hound to enter the lolly as well, to help give it that dimension, so it looks like it's curving around a little at the edge. Now let's move on to the right indent. We'll start with the pink again on the right side, and then blend that in. There's a lot of pigment in there, so I'm going to keep cleaning and daubing my brush so that I don't get completely flat wash of color in there. Now I can use a purple to start to add in that shadow. Mix up an even daub up now with a bit more blue, and add that into the indents. Be careful with this. We don't want it completely overwhelming and running in too much, so add it gently along that edge. Then we can use this color for some detail around the rest of the lolly. Once the indents is dried up, we can build on that shadow again. Then we can just go around and add any more details that we want to, neating up edges, dampening up any patches. Once we are happy, we can finish painting the stick. We're done. This one was a bit more complicated. Hopefully, it's looking a bit more realistic, and hopefully, you're happy with yours, and you've managed to capture all of those highlights and shadows and these lovely ice effects. I can't wait to see it. 14. Example 9: In this class we'll be painting the fab lolly. For the template, it's the middle of the three larger ones. I'll be using masking fluid to protect the sprinkles, but if you don't have any or don't want to use it, then you can just paint around them instead, which is fine. As for the colors, you'll need a brown for the chocolate part at the top. A variety of colors for your sprinkles like red, orange, yellow, and pink, and red for the bottom part. For my brown, I'm using burnt umber mixed with a little bit of winsor blue to make it darker. Then for my sprinkles, I'll be using scarlet lake for the red, permanent rose for the pink, Indian yellow for the orange, and winsor yellow. Then for the base, I'll be using scarlet lake again. Once you've drawn the outline of your lolly, we can just connect that base up, and then we want to divide the lolly in three. Use very light lines here, so they wouldn't be seen. Now we want to draw it in the sprinkles so that we can either paint around them or mask them out with masking fluid. These are just tiny rectangles all facing different directions, you can draw them overlapping each other and touching as they're usually all grouped together, add some slightly overlapping the edge of the lolly as well. You can add a couple that have fallen down the lolly into other sections. Now we want to add in our masking fluid, I'm using my color shaper for this. It can be quite tricky to work neatly, especially this small and with masking fluid. This isn't amazingly neat, but we can neaten up the edges around the sprinkles later, so I'm not worrying too much about that. Now, let's wait for that to dry. Once the masking fluid is dry, we can add our brown layer for the top. I'm going to use my pen on both simply to make it darker, and I'm using my size two brush. You want this to be quite thick. I want the edges to be a little more diluted to give a suggestion of reflection. I'm adding a bit of water to this side, I'm pulling that brown into it. Now with a clean and a slightly damp brush, I'm going to to pull a little of that brown down into the middle as a bit of shadow. This middle section will be white, but we want to give it very light bits of color to give it some depth. I'm doing the same on the other side, and you can see how subtle this is so, be very careful, you don't want to overdo it. I'm just going to add a little bit in the middle as well, and this is pretty much just tinted water as I want this to be so pale. You can add this over to the right side, and we can add a little bit of the red on top. Add on to your brush, you can use your water and paper towel to take some of it out. If you have too much, then add a tiny amount very gently. We can clean our brush and just spread this out with a damp almost dry brush. Keep in mind we want this middle section to still look white, but just with some very pale washy reflections from the top and bottom sections, so don't go overboard. This is a great way to practice, really diluting your colors down to almost nothing. It can take some practice, but it's well worth spending some time doing, less can really be more in these cases. Now, let's move on to the bottom section which will be red. I'm using my scarlet lake now, but we want this to be bold and vibrant, so make sure you pick up enough pigment on your brush. Start the edge, keeping that nice and neat, and then just add a little bit more water to your brush to pull out. The edge will be a little bit darker, then you can add some more paint in. Again, we don't want this to be a flat wash, we want different values in there, so alternate between adding your paint and your water. Try and make this right side slightly lighter for a highlight. Just keep building the color up until it's as vibrant as you want it. I'm going to add a little shadow. At the left side and at the bottom, by adding a little bit of green to the red, which is it's complementary color so it will make it a bit darker. You don't need much, otherwise it will turn brown, but this would just help to suggest a bit of dimension to the lolly. I'm going to get back to my brown and darken at this edge at the top as well and I'm going to add a tiny amount of red to the middle edge. Be very careful here not to overdo it. This will just help it make it at that shadow runs all the way along from the top to the bottom on that left side. Okay, now we can paint in our stick. Once that is dry, add a new shadow and then your choice of detail to the stick. I'm going to make this one a little bit more realistic with some subtle details. Once the paint is dried, we can remove the masking fluid, so make sure you rub this off gently, don't pull a tear as you're likely to rip the paper if you do that. As I said earlier, you can see that not all of these sprinkles are particularly neat, but we can neaten those up shortly, so don't worry. Now I can start painting in this sprinkles, so we will have yellow, orange, red, pink, and white sprinkles, so let's start with yellow, and we can paint one of these sprinkles down here in yellow as well, so it stands out against the red. Now let's paint some of them pink, we want this quite diluted, and the paler this pink is the more it will stand out against the brown. Now let's move on to orange and finally red. I'm going to paint this one down here red as well and make sure to leave some of the sprinkles white. Now I want to neaten up the sprinkles to make them more rectangular, so I'm going to use my brown, quite strong mix on my small brush and just neaten up those edges. We're finished. The next and final lolly we'll be painting is the faste. 15. Example 10: For the final piece, we'll be painting this chocolate faced, which is covered in nuts. This is the last template on your result sheet. For this, I will be using burnt umber and winsor blue again to mix up my chocolaty brown and I'll be using yellow ocher for the nuts. We'll be using masking fluid again for the nuts. Once you've drawn around the template, we just need to fill in the final parts of the sketch. So connect that chocolate center up with a curve, and then connect the main ice cream up too. Now we can apply a masking fluid. These nuts are random shapes and sizes, all quite small. So you don't need to worry about making specific shapes when applying this. Just make some smaller than others, have some clumped together, but generally we want to cover quite a lot of the lolly fairly evenly. Some of the nuts can hang over the edge and that will help add some realism to it. Sometimes it only takes some little details to really transform your painting into something much more realistic. Whilst we wait for that to dry, we can paint in the stick. Once the masking fluid is completely dry, we can add our brown over the top. I'm going to add a little of that blue into my burnt umber ban to make it darker. Lets start at the top left and very delicately at this end to that line, which curves around to the back. The bit in between this chocolate coating and the chocolate center is going to be ice cream, but we want to show that there is chocolate at the back as well. Then just bring this down along the edge. Now we can add little bit of water to our brush and pull the color out from the edge, make the edge nice and neat. Now lets start covering this brown in the middle and as you get to the right edge make it a bit lighter again. Having those sides a bit lighter than the middle really help it look more dimensional. You can add a thin line of color at this right edge to define it a bit more. Now lets paint in the chocolate center and for this we want to leave a little bit of white for a highlight along that curve. I want to build that brown a bit darker, I'm going to mix a darker brown and add it into that center. I'm also going to build this brown up at the top point of the edges and at the base. I'm just going to bring this chocolaty bit in the center down a bit, it looks more like it's sitting in the center of the ice cream. Now I'm going to use a very diluted brown for the ice cream. I'm not covering it all. It's just for a bit of shadow in there. Now once that's drying, let's paint in the shadow and details to the stick. When all the paint is completely dry also make sure there isn't paint that's still wet on top of the masking fluid. Otherwise, that will smudge. We can then rub it off. Again gently with this, don't pull at it. Now we're going to use the yellow [inaudible] to add some color to the nuts. We don't want to cover all of them, aim for about 50 percent of each nut. It's just adding a little bit of shadow, a little bit of color. We want some of the white in there as a highlight. We don't want them looking flat. We can start adding a little bit of shadow to the nuts. For this, I am going to use my dark brown mix and my smallest brush and just paint a thin line of shadow underneath each nut. This is really going to help make them pop out from the page. I'm just going to add a little bit more brown to this ice cream in the center as its quite pale. But again, be careful not to make this too dark. That is our tenth and final Lolly, complete. I really hope you've enjoyed the class. Don't forget to upload your work to the project gallery so that we can all see it. Also, any questions you have in the discussions tab. It would mean so much to me if you would leave me a review. It's so encouraging as I work on more classes. In the next and final video, I'll just be going over some final thoughts and some thoughts on my next classes. Keep watching. 16. Final Thoughts: Hi everyone. Wow, so Azure here, I'm assuming you made it through the whole class. What did you think? I hope you liked it? Lollies are so much fun to pain. You can make them as loose or as realistic as you like. They're a really good subject for just practicing all of those different techniques, because they can be so simple. They're a great way to spend some time getting to know your paints. I really hope this class has showed you how you can build up on all of those techniques to add more and more detail to your work and improve your confidence. All of these techniques are so incredibly useful to practice and can be applied to other Ward color work as well. My next class will be a similar subject while Switzerland summer, and we'll be painting ice creams. Then we'll be heading back to my watercolor greenery series with a cross on trays. The mixing greens class will be particularly useful for that one. If you haven't seen already and are interested in painting trees, then I'd recommend adding that one to your to-do list. If you have any questions, please leave me a message in the discussions tab, and if you enjoy the class, I'd be so grateful if you could leave me a review with your thoughts. I love to read them and take them all on board. I put a lot of hard work into these classes and hearing that you enjoyed them or that they helped you with your painting. It really means the world to me. Don't forget to upload your work to the project gallery, whether it be your practice work from the technique section, to the isolates to your finished art piece. If you decided to go the whole hog with some more lot. If you're on Instagram, tag me so that I can see it, and fit your work in my stories. You can also use the hashtag Lama Sharon, where you'll see more of my students work. A final, big, big thank you for taking my class and supporting my teaching. I hope to see you in the next one. Happy painting, everyone.