Get to Know Your Mixed Media

1. Welcome to Class: Hello skillshare. Let's get to know our mixed media art materials are the actual best. Why not use everything at the same time? This is why I love working with mixed media. I can use so many different materials to achieve different looks and textures and don't have to commit to one. I don't have to be a master of one media but can dabble in many. I also have very little self control when it comes to purchasing, trying new art supplies. So this is a great outlet to use everything up. Can anyone relate? Hi, I'm Christina Chants, an illustrator and surface designer from Mariefred, Sweden. I consider myself a digital artist because that's what I've been working with for the past decade. But I did go to art school back in the day, over 20 years ago, and I just thought it was the most glorious thing to be, paint splattered, and my hands were always covered in charcoal smudges. And it was really just the best. But digital art is really convenient. It's not messy. It's easier to work with clients and make all, you know, boring stuff like that. But I really missed working with traditional media, and I had neglected that practice for a long time when I was just working digitally. So in 2020, I rekindled my love for a sketchbook play and I started fun Friday. So every Friday I skip my other work stuff and I just play in my sketchbook all day long. And I cannot tell you how much this is brought to my creative practice, my creative life. Like my regular life, I just feel so fulfilled again. And art is my hobby at the same time as it is, and I just want to share this with you and that's what we're going to be doing in this class. We're going to be deep diving into our glorious art materials. In this class, I'm going to be taking you along as I showcase my favorite materials and demonstrate the properties of each one. We're also going to jump into color theory, but in a way that is actually helpful and not the usual red is the complimentary color of green stuff. Finally, we'll create a gorgeously textured mixed media landscape together for our class project. I really hope that you're going to learn a lot and be really inspired by this class. Let's get started. 2. Why I Love Mixed Media: All right, before we get started on learning all about our materials and color theory, I just want to share with you my journey and my love for mixed media and why I like it so much. In this section, I want to share with you a peek into my sketchbook and how I have come to love mixed media so much. Okay? I want to tell you about why I love mixed media so much. Mainly I love mixed media because I get to play with every single art supply that exists. I don't have to just pick one, I don't have to become a watercolor expert that makes beautiful just watercolor paintings. I can play around with different materials and I can just play and whatever material works best for a certain texture I can use when watercolor is great for maybe a sky or a wash or like the base layer. And then maybe a soft pastel is going to give me that creamy texture that looks like the hills in the background. And then maybe I need a colored pencil to get some details such as branches or little like the windows on a house or something like that. I love mixed media because we get to play, we get to layer, we get to play with textures of all sorts. Yeah. And I don't have to become an expert in just one thing. I don't have to become a painting expert or a colored pencil expert. I can just like fiddle around with all kinds of different materials. Here's one page in my sketchbook that really shows my love for mixed media. Here I have used soft pastel, water color, gas, neocolor crayons and colored pencils. I think that's it. I love how these turned out. I get granulation from the water colors in the background. I get like a soft, gritty texture from the soft pastels. I get some details in here with the colored pencils to make everything start defined and so you can see that they're trees and things like that. I love the layers of different textures and water based media and dry media, and this just excites me to no end. Let's see if, what else can we look at? I have tons and tons of pages and they do get messy because this is my sketchbook and I don't always fixatives, but I think it's okay. I'm just playing and learning. And if I were to do a piece that I really loved, I should probably fix it. Or I use pieces of paper in between my pages to protect them. Here's another work that I've done recently, a winter scene using the pinks during the winter in Sweden, we have very long hours of twilight and the skies can become so pink and gorgeous, the landscape becomes very pink and purple. It's not this intense, but it's fun to capture, again, with tons of different media with gash in the background and water color on top and pastels and new colors for more texture on top of the trees to show like the snow sitting on top of stuck to the bark and things like that. Yeah, in this class I'm going to be going through all my favorite materials and ways that I like to create mixed media pieces. We're going to be going through all my favorite materials in the next section and one of the next sections. Yeah. You're going to hopefully fall in just as much love with mixed media as I have become. So let's get started. 3. Color Theory That's Helpful: All right, in this section it's time to talk about color and color theory. I know this section is usually something that maybe you skip in other classes because we feel like we've always heard the same thing. Like we look at the color wheel, we make a color wheel together. I understand that it's red, Yellow and blue are the primary colors, but I'm going to try my best to take color theory to the next level so that you can actually use it and understand how you can use it in your artwork. Even if you don't work with primary colors and you use color intuitively, I swear this section is going to give you a little tidbit of more understanding of color. And I'm really excited about sharing this with you. So yeah, please watch this section. It's going to be great. All right, my friends, now we're going to get into color. And I'm really excited for this section, like I said in the intro, because I think color theory sometimes can be a little bit boring. And you just get the basics like red and green are complimentary colors, or this is when you mix yellow and blue, you get green. And that we learned in elementary school. But how can we actually use this as a professional illustrator or hobbyist, or want an art lover? How do we actually use this color theory in our artworks to make them better, more harmonious, more exciting? So let's get into that. To start off with, I did want to show you a color wheel. I printed this out from the Internet. And then once I realized, once I looked at it, I realized that it wasn't didn't make any sense. Like there's way too many pinks and blues over here. Orange is across from blue instead of N. And then where's the red is supposed to be against green? Complimentary to green. I don't know who did this one, but completely messed up. I made my own so we can take a look at that. Just to remember, if you forget, since elementary school, the basics of the color wheel. We have our primary colors, red, yellow, blue. Those obviously, they feel really good to us because to our eye, because we're used to that, we know those are the primaries. They look really good. Blue usually is a darker color. Red, it's like a mid tone, and yellow is a light. Then you have like that value there. We have our complimentary colors that we know a lot about with red and green and blue and orange, purple and yellow. But then we have the secondary colors and tertiary colors such as purple, purple and yellow. But then there's like the reddish purple that goes with the yellowish green. But for the most part, when we look at a color wheel like this, it's always in the super bright colors. There are lots of artists who work with this color palette. But that's not me when I've learned this information before. I'm always like, okay, that's nice. But I don't use bright red with green because that's gross. Was that just doesn't appeal to me whatsoever? Yeah, blue and orange looks good. Yeah, sure, But it's also still too bright. I want to take this color palette but then show you how you can do it with more sophisticated colors. I have my cup of colored pencils here and I'm just going to quickly show you some ideas around this. If we're going to start off with our primary color palette, which is red, yellow, and blue, you don't have to choose these brights. A yellow can be a soft, oh, that was dirty. A soft yellow that has like some creaminess, like almost a cream. And a blue can be, this is a Prussian bre, blue. It's a little bit darker than the usual primary. But also you could do a really dark blue as your blue and have a pop of red. So there's your primary palette. But already we're stepped away from this super bright also. When we did this palette, we even went a little bit further and thought about value. Here we have this red and this blue that are in that mid tones. And then we have a light tone and a dark tone. Then again, you have a really harmonious palette that's going to be easy to draw with because you have a light and dark, and middle colors. With this, you have so much more variety of what you can draw and create, which is really exciting. What else that we can have this here. So we can be reminded of the kind things that we want to do when talking about complementaries like this. Green and red can pick out a nice green that we like. These are all considered greens like the yellowish green to the bluish green. They all go with red. You can split complementary as it is called, technically the red, You don't have to go completely across. You can split it to go to this side or this side of the actual complimentary. It sounds complicated, but it's not complicated. Just think red goes with green. It doesn't matter what green here, we have tons of different greens that are a little bit more bluish, That are, here's a nice bluish green. We also can think red. What are different tones of red? Red mixed with a little bit of white is pink. Now, this color combination is a complimentary color palette. But it's not that Christmas red and Christmas green. It's a really beautiful, harmonious palette like this to start with. Then you could put in another pop of red. Here's a darker red. This is like a burgundy color that compliments this as well. I love thinking about monotone color palettes. If you have a green, that you should have like a light version and a dark version, if we choose here we have another version that's like a bluish green. It's good to have one dark and one light. You could even have a middle tone as well. We have the start of a really beautiful complimentary color palette. And then you can add some other neutrals just to have different colors. Like here's a neutral, warm gray, that could be interesting to have a nice lighter color or something to fill out the background. And then it's a dark, let's see, really dark green and that could be your dark, and it's almost black, but it still has some green in there. There we have a really nice palette then what else can we think about? One of my favorite color palettes is purple, purple, purple and yellow. Or like the red purple with the yellowy green. That's one of my favorite things to play with, this swampy yellowy green. Again, we can do a really sophisticated dark purple. It doesn't have to be that super bright purple. And then I have other light colors. Here's another grayish purple, or here's a little bit more dark and rich. And then you could even, let's see, do I have a true purple? Rises purple. It's like a pinky purple. There's a start of really harmonious palette that's interesting. Again, we can add in those different neutrals. You can bring in something unexpected. Here's like a crazy neon color, all of a sudden like why not? Yeah, just continue from there. Just playing in this notebook, I have sketched out some color palettes. Let's see if I can find them somewhere. Here. I was doing some of this before. Here again, here's the yellow, blue and red palette. Here's like a creamy with a light blue, adding an unexpected colors. Fun. And some neutrals. Let's see also. Yeah, here I want to talk about, this is the color palette of, this is a red, yellow and blue color palette, but it doesn't have any of the typical primaries. Let's look at that real quick. I will re enact this for you. Let's see, starting with this beautiful light bluish color, that's our blue for the palette, I did this creamy yellow for the yellow, but also for the yellow. I can think about like a darker, like warmish brown, that also could be considered the red, then adding in those Burgundies. As our red. So we have the red, yellow and blue just feels really harmonious. I can't say why, but because we're choosing the darker, more sophisticated colors or grayer colors, it just feels more harmonious. Again, let's see you like a pop of pink. The pink is really, is a red as well. And then we're thinking about having those dark, let's see which one of these is like a really dark blue or this one's even darker. It's almost like a black. It's like the details. Yes, I love it here. Again, talking about the complimentary colors of red and green, using pink and green color here was with the bluish greens and like a moby pink or hot pink that works in thinking about having neutral tones. And the neutral tones can be greens or pinks as well. Having light colors in your color palette as well as darks. Here's another version of the pink and green, using a more like mossy green with a moby pink and a really like grayish green. There's like endless possibilities using this, and I think it's really fun to play with color. And I hope that maybe that awakens some ideas for you with how to use the color palette and thinking about complementaries again. But without having to worry about using these bright colors, just use this as a guide. And you can have the traditional palette to remember that you can use like an orange. Let's do one more together if we're using like an orange, which I don't use very often, but it would be fun to figure out how to do that. Let's say that this color is orange. It's a really warmish brown. It has orange tones and feels too, it's like a ly orange brown. That's more my style than this bright orange look. If we're going to find a color that looks good with that, that would be some blue, or bluish green, or even purple here. If we choose a purple, what would that look like? That already looks really sophisticated and nice together. We can see what the brightish blue looks like with that. And that looked really exciting. And like we had up here, that light blue again looked really beautiful with this tone. I like that here is like a pink instead of the purple. That looks nice, but let's see more like this color with the green instead like a greenish. Because the orange look good with like a greenish blue. This looks harmonious as well. All of these look great together. You can include that split complementary instead of we have all these colors that look good with the orange, that isn't even a true orange. We can add some ocher. Lighten it up. Yeah, that is my look and my take on how I think about the color wheel and how I incorporate it into my work. I think about it slightly when I am thinking about my color choices. But mainly I use just my intuition and my color loves. But also is grounded in sometimes feeling like, why do I like a certain thing? We can also think about color, temperature and moods. And there's so much more that you can think about with color, but that is like a whole other class. Okay, so that is my little lecture about color. I hope that you found that useful and maybe awakened a couple of ideas of how to think about color and the color wheel. And thinking about darks and lights and colors that are either the lighter version or darker version, or a little bit more grayer in tone. And you can think about not always doing a complimentary exactly across from that color that you like, but you can do one of the ones to the side also just pick colors that you like. And usually the colors that you like are harmonious. They're harmonious to your eye. At least then also when you're thinking about color palettes, make sure that you are picking colors that are like mid tones and then some lights, and then some darks. And then you'll be able to create artwork that has contrast and interest, and value and beauty. Yeah, that was really exciting to share with you. Yeah, let's get into the other sections. 4. Sketchbooks: All right, so now it's time to get into the best part, which is talking about all the materials. So to start off with, we're going to talk about sketch books. All right. Time to talk about all of our, my favorite materials. And these sections are going to be so much fun because talking about materials is seriously the best. In this first section, I want to talk about Sketchbooks. These are the three Sketchbooks that I am currently using. And there are two different types of sketchbooks, and these are my favorites so far, especially these ones. We can start off with this one. This is the Lestrm 19 1917 Art Creation sketchbook. Has white pages that are 100 and I don't know what do they say, 150 GSM. The super white. This is the square, obviously, I don't know what size it is, 22.5 by 22.5 centimeters. This one has a much thicker paper than the other sketchbook, and it takes paint quite well. Even though I've been filling these pages with a lot of different media, especially wet media, that it has been handling it quite well. And I've been filling the pages all the way to the edge. This is my pretty sketch book. This is where I do final final artwork. And not just every day sketches, I think because the paper is so white and crisp, I want to do more final artwork because Yeah. And then the pages do feel thicker. So it feels like yeah, just pressured to do something more final. The pages are really smooth and again, they take mixed media quite well. Not tons and tons of watercolors, super wet. But I usually try to use my watercolors quite thick or my wash quite thick and it's just like a base layer. And then I do other dry media on top. So it's been working out for that sketchbook and I'm excited to continue to fill it because, because this isn't my main sketchbook. It takes a while because I have to sit down and be like, oh, now I'm going to make a finalized artwork. That's that one? Yeah. It's a good sketch book and it comes in a couple of sizes. My other favorite sketchbook, or the one that I've been using mainly for the past couple of years, is the Royal Talents Art Creation sketchbook. I have it in two sizes. This is what is it, 13 by 20, 1 centimeter size. It's a little bit skinnier than an five. And this is the four size I like both. I do actually prefer the larger one. I feel like I have more space to move around and do things. The smaller one, I kind of feel slightly confined, but what I like about these ones is the price is really good. You get like a proper sketchbook with a gajillion pages. I think there's like 90 spreads or something in here. But this one I think for me in Sweden, like $77 and this one's $14 is that's a nice enough price where it doesn't feel like I have to be precious with every single page. And also, there are so many pages that it feels like I can do stuff in here without being like, oh, every page has to be perfect. Like the other one I showed you, the pages are cream colored and they're quite yellowy, cream. At the beginning, when I was so used to working on white paper, this felt really weird to work on, but now I've gotten used to it and I do also, that becomes like a barrier from the white page. It's already like cream and welcoming. I like it, the pages are so smooth and nice. And these ones I think are 140 GSM, so it's a little bit thinner than the other paper, but they feel quite thin. But even still, it takes a lot of media as well. I have a older one that I've finished and yes, it has buckled a little bit from all the paint and things that I've used, but it's not that bad. Yeah, I really like this one for exploring and testing out different things and messing around and playing with textures and color palettes like I showed you and doing. Yeah, just play some works that are finalized. But my main it's fun to decorate the covers also. That's what's fun about these ones, the royal talents, art creation. They come in lots of beautiful colors too. It's not just a black sketch book. They have yellow and pink and purple and mint, green and blue and coral and all kinds of different colors here. Yeah, again, in the larger one, I can have space to play with materials when I get new things finalized. Sketches finalized. And here's what I showed you before. Just play and figure out what kinds of art I want to create or test a different color palettes and figure things out. So if I were to create a finalized piece on a beautiful piece of paper, I've done all the work in here of exploring fiery things out. I really like this sketch book and I think I'll continue to use it, but it would also be nice to have. I do like having this one for play. And then maybe the next step is I would do a piece in this sketchbook with even nicer paper. And then the next next step, when I feel like I've explored enough in these two, I would move to a final piece of paper that could be, maybe in the future, sold as an original or just framed in my studio. Those are my favorite sketchbooks. 5. Sketching Tools: In this section, we're going to be talking about my favorite sketching materials. All right, quickly, I just want to talk about my favorite sketching materials. I don't sketch so much anymore. If I do, I'm just going to use a nice regular pencil. Here's my pencil case. Let's see where I have two mechanical pencils that I love to use. One has a fine regular, like, what is it, 0.07 nib. And then this one, oh, I don't remember what size this is, but it's like a bigger lead. You can get really thick lines. These are both from Coco sport luxurious. To me, it's nice when you get some Christmas money or something like that to buy something that fell. You want to sketch more. And just playing with this, it makes me want to go and sketch stuff in pencils. I forget about the humble pencil sometimes, but yeah, that's a really nice favorite. Also with this size, I purchase colored lead, which is really fun also from Vico, and those are really fun to sketch with, so you can switch these out and sketch in a different color. These have a really weird, hard, waxy feel to them, but I really like them. I have an example somewhere in here of a page of sketches. Where was that? Here we go, having a page of blobs of color, and then using a red sketching pencil on top, just made this so much more exciting to me than using a regular pencil that is one of my favorite materials. Then finally, for an extra bit of fun, I have they call progress magic pencils for those rainbow pencils that you've had as a kid. Those are fun to sketch with and write in your journal or whatever because you get different colors. This is just like for extra fun, the same thing. I think it would be fun to do a page of blobs of color and then just create some sketches of things using these silly rainbow pencils. Yeah, those are my favorite simple sketching materials. 6. Colored Pencils: Moving on, I'd like to talk about colored pencils and why they're such a versatile, great thing to use in mixed media pieces. Now let's talk about colored pencils. I've shown you quickly some colored pencils that I love. But to recap, I have this pencil role. I think my favorite brand of colored pencils comes from Derwent. I love the Derwent drawing pencils. These are the orange, they look like this. They're really thick, like fat pencils, which is just delightful to hold. But they're also super soft and creamy. They have those weird, dusty colors that are hard to find in regular colored pencil packs or what do you call them, sets I, these kinds of colors. Just the way that they both how they draw and how they feel in your hand. I really like those. I also, they have a set called Ink Tense. They have lots of really dark colors, which is also I feel hard to find in colored pencil sets. They're always so bright and light and these are great. They're also water soluble so that you can wet them and they turn into some really intense, as the name says, ink. That's also fun to play with with mixed media. These are really intense colors and those are really nice. But I think sometimes water soluble colored pencils don't feel really good to work with, but these ones feel really good to work with. And you can work over on wet media, can dip them and draw with them wet like that, Just like a really fun versatile kind of pencil. So those are the Derwent, those are my favorite, but like everybody else, I love the caran dash luminance colored pencil. They just are really, really creamy. Again, they also have really like a fat shape, really creamy. And they have all these sophisticated, weird colors that you don't get in the usual set. Lots of creamy and just nice colors. They blend beautifully. I don't really blend that much, but those are the, these are very expensive. I almost don't want to use them sometimes also has a set that is slightly less expensive, but I think they're just as good. I like that the coal pencil is the color as well. They're a little bit thinner. These are called Pablo. They also have a nice range of colors. I have the full set of, I think it's 40 here. Again, it's the main bright colors. But those are good to have as well sometimes. And I thought it was nice to purchase those that are in a slightly more affordable price range, rather than the alumina which are exclusive priced. Any other brands? I have two whole buying pencils. They're really good. I just bought the fluorescence. I've been testing out the range. They're called polycolor because again, these lumin so expensive. I don't want to use them all the time for some colors that I really like. I have tried those out and they're really nice as well. These were like a third of the price. This is, again, polycolor. That's a beautiful blue. I think it was cobalt. Yeah, cobalt. Here's a nice light ocher color. I have this nice burgundy that I showed before up here. Burgundy? Yeah, those are my favorite colored pencils. I think colored pencils are great. I don't like to use them on their own. I haven't felt comfortable doing that. I feel like I always still feels to me like a kids school project, but layered on top of paints or markers, or pastels or something like that, then they start to, just like I can get all the details that I want so they're really handy. Another thing that I want to mention about colored pencils, that becomes like weirdly addicting. Like you have to have all the colors. With paint, you can mix your colors to get the right color, but with colored pencils, you have to have the color that you want. And I feel like I constantly feel like I have to update my colors because I don't have that right color. I don't have that exact blue that I want. That's something that it's like a constant struggle and something that I'm trying to get around. Like I don't know, how do I have like hundreds of pencils right now, but I always feel like I don't have enough. So I need to get into the mindset of, okay, maybe I don't have that color, but I can use this color instead, or I definitely probably already have the color. Just use a different color or just use another color. Maybe you'll be surprised by it, but that's one thing I think that I get sucked into with colored pencils is that even though they are expensive, sometimes you get sucked into wanting to have all the colors or the full set even though you don't use all that. Yeah, I highly suggest trying to figure out the kinds of colors that you want and adding to your collection as you go by having some darker pencils. Because that's something it's hard to find in a set, looking for like darker colors or special colors that you really like in your work. And working from there and adding to your collection. As you go, when you create a piece, you'll be like, oh, I really need like a dark green. And how many dark greens do we have? Like this isn't dark enough, then we need even darker green. Here we go. So maybe one day you'll find it that's colored pencils. 7. Paint: In this section, we're going to be talking about paint. Now it's time to talk about paint, and I think this is like, so exciting. I love paint. I love that I can mix whatever color I want. And I love how tactile it is to work with. I love that there's different textures you can get really thin washes or really thick and gloopy. I just really love paint. The only downside to paint is that you have to wait for it to dry and waiting for paint to dry is like watching paint dry. It takes forever. It feels like it takes forever. That's why it's nice to have multiple sketchbooks or different pieces of paper that you're working on so that you can get more done. So the kind of paint that I like to use is wash paint or water color. We can look at my watercolor first. This is my I have a regular Windsor and Newton set that I have then added to. So it has the regular primary colors that I came in the set. I don't remember how many, 14, but I've added to it, so now I have a GaglianHwever many are in this. This is my color palette. If you're interested, I have from different brands as well. I have the Windsor Newton, like I said, The metallic ones are from Vango. I have lots of granulating watercolors from Schmik I even have now started to test out these big pans are from a Ukrainian brand called Rosa, and they're really good. I'm really into watercolor because I love how portable this tiny palette is and I have all the colors that I could ever need. I love that I can get slightly thicker washes. I love the granulation you get with watercolor. I also love mixing this with guash so that I get those washes, but also some areas that are thicker. Okay. Instead of just talking about it, I think we need to start playing with actual paint. So here, I want to show you the Ukrainian ones first because I was really happily happily wants it surprised by how beautiful these were. For the price, they were very cheap, I'd say. Like, for a full pan, it was 28 crowns, which is like $2.80 for a full pan, and they're so creamy and such a delightful color. This olive color gorgeous. These super granulation colors, I think, are delightful to watch. This is the tundra violet color by Schminke and it is so fun. Like It starts off looking like this, like grayish purple. But then it starts granulating and it has these warm brownie tones. We'll add some more water in there just to p with that. There's different tones. There's this forest green, I think it's called. Tundra green, sorry. That one also granulates beautifully. Glacier green is amazing. It's like a mermaid color. It's this beautiful turquoisy blue, but then it has these flex of pink in it. I really like watercolor for that. It's fun with stuff like metallic water color. Well that didn't show up. Here we'll do it darker. Here's a bronze to bring some sparkle into your works that I how fun is that. And Yeah, that is watercolor. I think we all know and love watercolor. But I think watercolor sometimes is used really preciously. It's used so like these washes or it's always like loose florals. But you can use watercolor in quite a grungy way. Use old brush. Use it quite sick, lots of layers, and then with mixed media, we can get on top of here with colored pencils and crayons and pastels and Yeah. All kinds of fun stuff. And are you getting you're starting to see the granulation happening here? It's pretty spectacular. So that's my love for watercolor. Here we can get some gorgeous granulation going on in there. Okay. The next step we have guash, and I have two kinds, slash three kinds. Starting off, I have this guash pan set, and it's kind of like something a hybrid between water color and guash, I'd say, because it is a pan. You can't get really thick colors, but it's still more opaque than regular water color. The only difference between watercolor and guash is that there's more pigments or there's a different kind of binder in gas you get more color. It's more opaque. I'll try if you just work the pan a bit, you're going to get more thick color, as you can see here. It's more it's opaque. It's not a thin wash like watercolor. With watercolor, you would have to do several layers to get that opaque. But you can also with this kind of watercolor use it as a wash, if you use less or more water. So that is this color this set, and I think it's really handy to use because it is quicker to use, and I do like the ability to use it as a watercolor set, but also get some areas that are thicker. Use it in conjunction with my watercolor. So I get those areas that are thin and have the washes and then some that are thick. Also, in this palette, I've squeezed out some colors that I enjoy that weren't available in here, like a turquoisy color, and then these are tube wash, so then of course, I can get a thicker consistency. But I just block plop them in here. I have a nice turquoise, a really bright purple and a super hot pink that are fun to use. When these run out, I think I will use this kind of water. I think I will use this kind of gas to squirt into the pan so that I have this kind of palette going. But having tubes like this gives me the ability to mix a lot of color if I'm going to do a big background or something like that. I also buy large tubes of white guash because that's one of the colors that I definitely go through a lot because I do like my pastel colors. This is a really quite cheap brand it's just like a regular studio guash, but I haven't noticed anything weird about it and I use it to mix with my other colors. So that's something that's good to have a really large white because these small ones, I would run out in a couple of days. Okay. That's good to have. Then we have this one, that's a gimmick that's, I don't know, been trending on YouTube or Instagram and that's jelly guash. But I quite like it. I have to say because it's nice to have a palette that is ready to work in. Everything gets wet, so you can just dip your brush into a color and use it immediately, and you have a sick coverage. But you can also water it down, can use the palette that it comes with to mix and create your own colors and use more or less water. And I've been really enjoying using these. They were also really affordable and it's fun. It's fun. They do dry out after a while, and I let mine completely dry out because I didn't know that if you just add water to them, they stay wet. But even when they completely dried out, I added I soaked each pan and water and the next day, I mixed them around, and they were goopy again. They're not quite as jelly like as they were when I just bought them, but they're still really good. So yeah, these are fun and they have fun colors and it's nice. I especially like to use these when I'm doing a whole background or want to paint a little bit more sick. Yeah. These are my favorite paints, and I really enjoy not only using the colors straight from the pan, I really, really enjoy mixing. I went to art school back in the day and I learned to mix, and it's really intuitive to me. I also like that when you have a dirty palette like this, you can find new colors and colors just like get on your brush that you weren't expecting to use and it just becomes a lot more artistic and I just want to do this all day, add colors and see what happens and layer, that's one thing to mention, because these are both water soluble types of paints, when you have a paint on the bottom, if you add water, you're going to be able to mix it together. Layering can be a problem if you're doing a lot of layering in your work. You can do it. You just have to be a little bit quicker. So if you wanted to lay a different color on top of this brown, you can. You just have to lay it down quite quick without mixing a lot. If you start mixing And blending, it's going to blend together with the other color, and that could start to dirty up your painting. So that's one thing that people complain about with traditional gush and water colors. That's just one thing to think about. But if you're doing just laying out some ground colors, and then you can add a couple layers, but you just do them thickly or quickly, like I can show one more time. Here's just a green and you just add it quickly without starting to blend it in with tons of water. Then you're going to be fine. Like here is starting to blend into the paper. Also, this kind of paper doesn't like being blended and worked so much. You can see that the paper is starting to peel a little bit when I did that, when I get it too wet and I start to mix too much. Be nice to this kind of paper just keep it quick and easy. That's my love for paint. I could talk about this all day, but I need to stop. 8. Markers: In this section, we're going to be talking about paint pens, watercolor pens. All right? I want to talk about a fun alternative to paint. If you aren't really into the color mixing and the layering and all the gorgeous texture that you can get from paint or you're out on location and you don't want to deal with bringing water or stuff like that. Then another option for getting down lots of color on your page is like a base layer. Are paint pens. I have water soluble, like watercolor pens from the brand Ecoline or Choline, and they are fun to use. You can get like big washes of color down on your page. And they do blend quite nicely. I don't do that so much. They mix into each other. Just keep working it and then your brush will be fine. Yeah. Give you the ability of getting down lots of color but much quicker. And they dry in a couple seconds rather than several minutes that this is going to take. They are water soluble because they are water colors, so you can work them a little bit with water as well if you want to push them around, if you want to blend them or something. But I think the main point of using these kinds of markers is so that you don't have to deal with water. I just wanted to mention that in case. Yeah, I prefer paint over marker just because of all the texture and the mark making that you can get with actual paint. And also that I can mix whichever color that I want with markers. It's only the amount of colors that this brand has. This brand has lots of brights and the usual, but they also have lots of these nice, neutrally kind of colors and gray. It's quite versatile. And then you can mix other colors on top. Another thing with markers is that you always get that marker line. I think it can be a little annoying. And also again, gives me those school art like a little kid art, but that's also like charming at the same time. And you can work over with other materials so that you get rid of those marker lines or they can be a part of your work. I prefer paint, but paint markers like this, watercolor markers are really nice. Another brand that's really popular is Tombo. I've never tried those. Windsor Newton have the same kind and fabric castel watercolor markers. There's also alcohol based markers. I don't like those because they bleed through the paper like crazy. These ones do not. That's all I really wanted to say about that. There are other kinds of paint markers like acrylic paint markers like Posca pens and Molto pens and what else? Ten, what are they called? Whatever. Anyways, I also try to stay clear of those because I'm not really interested in using acrylic paints. But they are good to have if you are finding that you want to layer more and you want thicker consistency. Yeah. I just want to mention that that is markers. 9. Soft Pastels: Ooh. In this section we're going to be talking about my new favorite material, soft pastels, and why that's so versatile, and yummy, and delicious. All right, now I want to talk to you about my newest love, and that is soft pastels. I think that they are just so tactile. I have a set from Royal Talents, is again like a slightly cheaper set with the primary colors. I have broken them into different pieces on my desk, in these smaller boxes. Since this box is quite big, I just have them like this. But these ones, they're just so fun to play with. Because you get, again, like the markers, you get tons of paint, paint, or color color down on your page and you could smudge them. You can blend them different colors together. You can layer them on top of your markers that you just created to get more texture. This is from Van Go. Like I said, I also have the brand or extra soft pastels and they're really beautiful colors. Again, look, you can just use them on the side. You can get a hole, lay down, tons of color like this. Could be a, a lake or water, and they're really beautiful to work on top of. Pastels are insanely dusty and messy. It's not a good idea to blow them off your page because it can go into the air and into your lungs. But if you tap them on the side into a trash can or go outside with them when you want to brush it off, that's a good idea. Also, you might need to use fixatives on top. You can use hair spray if you just want a simple solution or you can use a proper pastel fixative. I would use that outside, both of them. Hair spray too. I just really love how I can get tons of color down really quickly and I can mix them. I also love getting messy and feeling like a true artist by mixing together my different colors and get all tactile. I also have a set from Jackson's. They're handmade colors and you could pick 14 of your choice. This is the color palette that I chose. Again, I chose colors that appeal to me, that don't come in like a traditional box. I bought really like muted, weird greens and a purple, really muted purple. These are so creamy, they all have different textures. And they're all creamy. But these ones are especially like really smooth, um, really bright blue. You could put that over here with the blues. I like to smudge them in and use them like that, but if you had proper pastel paper, they get the grit better. This kind of smooth paper isn't really meant for pastels, but you can still use it. Yeah, I bought fun super neon colors because it's just exciting. This one got some dirt on it. That's a problem with like, yeah, they get all messed up, but it adds to your artwork too. Another thing that I find extremely exciting with pastels is that they are pigments, like smushed into a stick. You can use them as paints, you can add water and turn them into a painting. Some of them are easier to turn into paint than others. I feel these Jacksons are a little bit resistant to water, but once you get them going, you get some incredible paint textures. Here you can see they resist water look that became like water droplets there. But if you just keep going and force them, then they start to water soluble. This also helps with the dust problem and they be set. You get some insanely gorgeous textures when you do this. I love it. I love this so much. I have to say these ones that were the cheapest, the Vang ones are really beautifully water soluble. They turn into a watercolor immediately. This one was one of those. Those ones aren't resistant to the water at all. Just immediately see if I can show that to you. Let's do this brownish color. If I add water to that, it just immediately turns into this gorgeous paint. That's something you would have to test different brands to see how they work with water, if you wanted to, if that was interesting to you. But these Jacksons, and they extrasoft pastels, they do become water soluble and make beautiful textures. I love them. That's mainly how I've been using them because I feel like the regular pastel texture is gorgeous. But it's so messy using it with water, it just makes it somewhere in between like paint and pastel. I love that. So exciting pastels also come in a convenient pencil form and that makes it a lot less messy. You can get small details. These are also water soluble, you can work over your other artwork. This isn't completely dry adhering so well and it's going to rip up the paper. But I choose up here where it's drier, you can work them a little bit more. So that's a little bit more convenient if you don't like getting as messy as you do with the other soft, regular pestanshew. All right, that's enough about pastels and my love for those because again, I could go on and on for all day about this. 10. Neocolor II: In this section, I want to introduce you to neo color twos. If you've never played with those before, they're also a really fun medium. All right, now it's time to start talking about like the icing on the cake. Like these are the kinds of materials that I use only on top of these other materials. Like we have paint and markers and pastels that I use on the bottom layer, like the background. And then we have the colored pencils that I use for details. But then what other kinds of materials are there that you can use in mixed media? We can use one that is really fun and nice material if you like pastels, but you don't like the mess. Neocolor wax crayons. These are the neo colored two. They are water soluble but they don't have that oily feel of oil. Pestels, They're not chalky soft pestels. These are crayons for adults. They are just really beautiful and creamy to use. But yeah, again, they have a way better texture. These go over anything. They go over paint, they go over markers. Obviously, they go over the pastels. The only thing that nothing pretty much goes over N colors except for neo colors. You can use these, but you're going to have a hard time drawing with pencils over them. As you can see, there's quite a lot of resist because they're so waxy. But if you use this as like the last layer on your piece, then you get tons of gorgeous color. Here is wet There, I can show you how they're water soluble, so you can use them as a water color too, to get some wash when they are washed out like this. You can work over them when they're dry much easier than when they're thick and waxy. But it's still a material that is quite difficult. It's notoriously difficult to work over, but it has like a beautiful texture. You can get fine details too with them. You can sharpen them. One tip that I have, if you do plan to sharpen them, is to save the sharpenings, because those can be turned into paints. I took this old kids palette that I had that was pretty much run out. And every time I sharpen my new colors, I add the sharpenings into the different color sections. And then you just spray or drop water on them and they turn into water colors that you can use. I thought this was such a great way of not wasting the colors because these aren't super cheap. It's nice to use them here. You get beautiful thick. Like it's almost something like quash paints like that. Karen D set it feels like free paint almost. That's my little tip for the colors. But yeah, I like they have a gorgeous color range. I like that they go over paint gorgeously. But they're also like thick and have nice texture and they're not sticky and they don't smudge like oil pastels or soft pastels. These are really, it's like a crayon for adults, I think that's and you can get really sick. Yeah. I just really like them. Neo neocolor twos are my favorite. They also have a neocolor one version, but I've never tried that. That one is not water soluble, so that would also be interesting if you wanted to use that underneath things and let ca wax resist or something that's not Yeah, when you paint over it, it's not get watered down. I can't think of words. Yeah, that is neocolor. It's pretty interesting material. I have the 40 set and I've switched out some of the colors for other colors that I prefer from the main set. My kids love these very popular, fun material. 11. Oil Pastels: Last but not least, we're going to be talking about oil pastels and how they're like the cherry on top in a mixed media piece. Last but not least, I want to, I want to talk about oil pastels. Oil pastels is something that I don't use very often, mainly because of how sticky they are. Then you really have to find a credible fixatives to make them not sticky in your sketch books or the pages when you put them together, they just squish together. Or you have to have pieces of paper or glycine or something like that in between your pages so they don't get all smoohed. But I still find them exciting to use. I have this set from crap that I bought, I think seriously, 20 years ago, but they're still going strong. I also have this tiny little pentel set with neons because I've been finding like neon colors really exciting at the moment. Then I've also been trying out ran dash. Since I love all their other products, I might as well try their neo pastels. I bought a few colors that I thought are nice. Again, with oil pastels, it's not something that I use as like a main thing. It's just like icing on the cake. It's like when you have tons of layers of stuff and you can't quite get that colored pencil to go over something like you want a bright pink and that's not bright enough. Then you have oil pastel that goes over absolutely everything and can be your pop of color. Because they really stand out over on top of everything. You can smudge them in as well and get another texture. But again, they have the stickiness that is a little bit annoying and it's going to make your pages really sticky in comparison to other materials. Like if you just use paint and new colors and colored pencils, there's not as much transfer. But when you start using soft pastels and oil pastels, they're really messy. But again, there is fixative that's also sometimes part of the fun of using textile, tactile materials that are gloopy. Let's see, I need to get this one out here. I bought like a beautiful green because I thought that would be beautiful on top of things. To make little details, these ones aren't as gloopy as these ones. I don't know if it's because these are 20 years old or if they are just like a, what's it called, formula. This is like a nice light pink to go over different areas. Or I thought like sometimes with ocean waves you want to bring in here white. And you can do like the crashing waves, like the white foam on the water. It's like a good texture like that is like that exact texture that I was thinking. And here's like a gray. Just to make shadows. Yeah. Oil pestels are another fun thing to play with. Again, if you have done a final piece and there's, you need a couple pops of color and there you can't get it with your colored pencils or your no neo coolors. You can try oil pastels to get that last like top of color. Yes, we're finally gone through all of my favorite materials and how I use them and every tip that I have. It's time to get into the actual class project. In the next section, let's get started on swatching and layering even more than what we've already done here. 12. Swatch Play: Okay, I know that we're itching to get into the class project, but before we do, we need to do some Swatch layer play. We did a little bit of that in the previous sections with the materials Deep Tive. But now we need to explore our materials, so we are ready to go later. And we learn new things and we discover new textures that we love. This section is really important and really fun. Let's get swatching and layering and experimenting. All right, before we get started on our class project, when we're going to be illustrating a scene in our sketchbook with mixed media, I thought it would be important to have some Swatch play. We did spend a lot of time talking about our materials, but maybe you didn't play along with me. And I think it's really important. This is something that I do all the time to understand my materials and figure out what kind of textures I like. I have prepared my page here with some swatches of different materials so that they could dry. We have one guash square, I used the jelly guash thickly, and then I have a watercolor wash. I have marker, those equal line brush pens. I have pastel that I wetted has that texture and then the neo color that I used as a water color, which can be difficult to go over but usually not when it is wet and a light layer, yeah. Now we're just going to take all of our different materials and see what goes over them. I'm going to just take a dark colored pencil and see how that works really well. On water color, it works just as well on guash feels really good. And the texture where the paint is glupier, you get more texture. I like that. And getting really dark in some areas in the marker. How does that look in the pistels? They're all going pretty much the same look. The neo color, you can see it is resisting. It doesn't like to have material that one you've learned, something you can try like a lighter color. This one's quite light, so the wash was light. So the white doesn't really show up on the guh. The white is really showing up on the markers. Coming up a little bit. The pestel is nothing, but this was very light. And the same thing on this new color wash. It doesn't really want to go on. That's something fun to play with. We can test out one of the soft pastels. I have these ones from the No brand. You can use them dry like this and just like smoosh them in to get some textures going, which I think is nice. They go nicely onto both the guash and the water color in the marker. I like when you put the pastels over the marker because it starts to blend away those marker lines so they're not so prominent. The pastel over the pastel works really good. Let's see if this feels over the new color. That's good to know, that can be used. Then we have the new color. I'll use the salmon pink, that usually goes over anything. The water color is fine and the wash is fine. But as you see if there's more texture to the paint, there's going to be even more texture with these. I'm not going to get like super little details. I like that. Then on the marker, you can also go over other stuff like the new color over the pastels and the marker became a little bit gluey guy, like it. Some resistance over the pastel is good and over the neo color of course is frying. You learn some stuff. We can also try the pastels. Let's try these nice green that I have from, and the neo pastel, they go over really smoothly on the water color and the ga, and the marker and pastel that I've wetted. And the neo color. So they go over everything, but like I said, they have a sticky finish, which these aren't the stickiest. But still, you get so messy. I'm still undecided about my thoughts about oil pestels. What else can we try? Of course, you can go over with paints and things. Yeah, just keep playing with different colors. Also, we can play on the other side with dry media. We think about color palettes and how we could mix colors together. Making a ground like that and then adding some color. Just playing with your materials, not having like your drawing, not particularly drawing anything. You can smudge out these oil pastels quite a bit with your finger or with one of those smudger tools. They become less go, all the glue is on my hands instead and you can test out what it would be like to draw over that. This becomes a surface that you can draw over in comparison to. If you did have the full pestel, you can draw over, it's almost like you remove the oil pestels. That's something that you can do. I mentioned the neocolors are difficult to color, so we do a larger layer. They're very difficult to go over with the pencil, but you get some marks. At least that's something you can play with. Continuing to work with your materials, to play with what you like layering and I think stuff like this is really, really fun. I also like to work on little like, I don't know what can we call these, like blobs of bushes or like a little mini mountain. And work on as if I was creating a little landscape or some kind of detail like a rock. Or how would I add depth and different textures and things when it's just like a little piece like this, it's fun to work on, see what kind of textures and things you can get on top of different materials. Unexpected colors together are fun. Spend about 10 minutes filling your page with different swatches, with different colors, layer different things, try to do as many different combinations as you can go to colors. Do you want to test if you have a painting in mind? Is there something that you want to try to mimic? Do you want to practice? Um, some flowers or there's like water that you want to practice. We can test out a little water right here. I love using pastels as water base here and we can add some blue. Then I love wetting pastels. Like I've mentioned so many times here, I can play with making it look like water. The blue one really leaves the marks and doesn't want to lift, which is also interesting when it's wet like that. Making more then using like water soluble new colors. What does that look like? When you add that, it starts to get messy. Yeah. What else? Another color like this, lighter blue. Some dark there. Yeah, there is plenty of things that you can play with and explore with your materials and layer. And I can go over this when this dries to see how can I get like the white of the waves crashing your like foam from the water. I could possibly use the neo color or I could do a little bit dry. Patel. Go Patel. I can continue to my layering and trying to fall in love with oil pastels. We'll see, it just feels so messy. But maybe one day I'll become an oil pastel lover just because I really want to look. This looks like moss on top of a rock. That's really exciting. You can make what's it called, discoveries. You make discoveries like this. All of a sudden I was thinking this was like a bush, but now it feels more like a rock covered in moss. And if I want to continue with that thought, how do I add to it so it feels more moss? Let's see, I had a gray also. Here's make it more like rock texture with the gray pastel almost like a shine. That looks fun. See, you're starting to explore and realize new different things and making color discoveries. What does this look like? With that, as this starts to dry, we can go in with colored pencils to add more blue or different colors. It's still a little wet, but we'll try the white for the waves, like sea foam. That's Swatch play. I spend, I do a lot of these kinds of pages. We've already did this together just like layering and going over things and you're going to learn a ton from these kinds of pages. There's more playing with different colors and textures, Just figuring out layers of what does water color feel like with gash on top or how does it look when we try to do light layers. I love doing explore pages like this, especially because you make discoveries like I love this color that would be perfect for the side of a building, or this color would be amazing. To do this, I layer these things. You can make notes because this is your sketchbook. Sometimes it's really difficult to remember what you've done. Write little notes like this, is this watercolor mixed with white guash or this is this watercolor with this specific colored pencil on top. You can do lots of arrows to things and highlight things that you like. Make notes of what you were doing and why. Because in a few months, when you come back to this, you're going to be like, oh, don't really remember what I was doing here, but it looks like it was a fun time. Let's see if we have any more Swatch pages, then you can move it up a notch to try out doing the same scene but in different ways. Like in this way I have done, I tried out, yeah, different materials like this one I did mainly water color in the background. This one I did thinner watercolor with some wash. This one I did with just pastels. Now we're starting to I don't know what I did, mix of everything and probably a mix of everything here at the bottom too. I think it was a lot of pastels as well that were wet and then just add onto it, so you start testing out like drawing a little landscape in one way, try it in a different way with slightly different colors. I try it a third way, a fourth way, a fifth way, and you're going to learn different things. I want to show you another thing before we move on to our class project. I love this concept of doing the same illustration several times because you do learn so much. It's something that I don't do very often, honestly, because I get tired of doing the same image. But I need to remember to do this more often because you do learn a ton. Recently I fell in love with image on the Internet of a. A yellow boat and I had to draw it. So I drew it once. This is with mainly pastels and water colors. I did the boat and I really enjoy the texture and the water that I got this time. Because sometimes, you know, when you're painting it just feels like you're lucky get these textures especially working with watercolor, like can't really control it and it just turned out good. I like how the boat looks, but then I wanted to try a different version because there's a lot of different mixed media mixes that I like. This was beautiful with the softs, water color, a little bit of regular colored pencils for details and new colors too. Because I have to use all the materials. I got a nice mix, but I thought it was a little soft. I tried the next version, I did mainly with guash and I tried to really use it thicker. The background has a lot more texture in the greenery in the background. The clouds, I made it really moody with a darker sky, with clouds and more like a peach tone, maybe it's like sunset time. The water need to remember my words. The water is a lot more textured with the Gah paint, but I also did meal colors on top to get these scratchy bits. And I really like this one. This is my favorite out of the three that I did because I really like the texture and the thick paint. I'm really into paint right now. Then I did a third version where again, I used the pastels and the water color and I used neo colors, also wetted to do the boat. This isn't my favorite at all. Out of the others, I don't know. It just fell a little bit flat, but I feel like I could have worked on it a little bit more. The yellow also feels a little off. I really like this more orange, yellow that I used. I think I got more shadows in depth in the water. In the other two pieces, more shadow and depth. This one felt a little flat, but that's what you learn when you are testing out different things. In the next section, we're going to be jumping into our class project where I also want to be doing at least two versions of the same illustration in different mixed medias so that we can really play and figure out what we like. Also, you don't have to figure out what you like forever. For every piece, you can use slightly different media, whichever one you feel like is going to match the subject matter. Let's get into the class project. 13. Class Project: Reference: Okay, in this section, finally, we're getting started on our class project, and that will be to create a yummy textured landscape. Follow along in the next videos. My process of building up textures and layers of different materials to create a beautiful landscape. Oh, right now it's time to choose a reference photo for this class. I have picked out some images from Pexels. It's a royalty free site so that we're free to illustrate them and sell these images if we want to. And it's all good so you don't have to worry about copyright issues with these. You can, of course, choose to illustrate or sketch your own images that you take with your own camera where you live or on vacation, or choose your own images, but I just wanted to make sure that I had something available. You can feel free to follow along with the same image that I've chosen. I chose this one. I also made sure to pick out a few that were slightly less advanced. Also, you can choose to illustrate how much or how little that you want. It's completely up to you choosing a reference image is like what mood you're in. I really enjoyed illustrating those boats. The other day, I feel like I'm in a boat mood. I wanted to pick out some other fishing boats. They have some fun bright colors. The water is fun to illustrate and play with, texture. You don't have to worry so much about reflections if you don't want to. Yeah, I thought this image had some interesting houses in the background. If you wanted to attempt to illustrate a little bit of that. The water is beautiful, There's like the two boats and then even in the foreground there's some rocks that you could add and lots of texture and details to. I thought there was a lot in this image to work from. Yeah, it's pretty much time to get started, but before we get started, let's think about colors. 14. Class Project: Color Palette: Before we get started, we have maybe all of our art supplies. I have all my art supplies out in front of me, and that can be a little bit overwhelming, possibly. Before we get started, we don't know what colors we're going to reach for. Maybe thinking about a color palette would be good to begin with. You can pick out a color palette that has nothing to do with your image and use that as a challenge and parameter. I think sometimes having rules can make your creativity stronger. Let's see, I can show you like using a limited color palette here. I just chose purples and blues and created landscapes with that. When you have limited supplies or a limited color palette like this, then you're forced to think about how, which areas is the water going to be purple, or the blue going to be purple, Or in the mountains going to be dark or light. That is something to consider. Or you can try to mimic the colors in the image? Yes, I often try to use a limited color palette. You can mark it on your page, in your sketch cook, I think that's always a fun detail. Not only does it like design your page a little bit, but also if you want to go back, you can reference which colors you were using. Let's see, do I have any more versions? Here's also another color palette. This one has gotten dirty from materials I've used. But yeah, here, just choosing a smaller color palette, I think it would be fun to just go through this image and pick out some colors that I know that I will want to use. Let's find a Swatch page. You can use this page where we were swatching colors before. I know boats are super blue. We need a incredible blue color, I feel like don't. How blue is this? That's too dark then this one's too light in the neocolors. I could use this one possibly for some details, but I need like that. Like ultramarine blue maybe? Yeah, that could be good for that boat. We also I'm going to keep it to the side here so I know that I have I don't want to go digging for it. There are these the neon buoys and that could come in handy with my new non this pencil. I definitely need to sharpen that also, that blue, there was like a more turquoise blue that could be a better match. With that, I have my needle colors to the side here and all the blues, these lighter blues would work for the water. I really want to use my pastels. And I think this light blue with the green, maybe even olive color by the stones would look nice in the background. We also have some light colors, so I can use some of the light tones that I have in my pastels here. Like the light blue and cream and peach. Some of the robes are this nice color that could get messy. I might for the rob, this nice terracotta color. This one's called Mars orange. That one would be good to use for those roofs over there. We also have the background, the sky is a really light blue. I really like this pastel from an that's like that. It's like the exact same color as the sky there. We can also swatch of these, the water that we were talking about a little bit of that. Then the water gets a little do up to the top. Can gray also a gray gray in the top because it's quite grayish blue. I think having the gray mixed with all these other colors, it's going to look really beautiful. And then have the pop of the boats with the white and all these blue tones in that fluorescent is going to be really nice if I think about the background. Now just to think about that. We do have a, let's see, the green then with these peachy tones for the Lots of the buildings. The roofs, I'm going to look like this. Then There's different blue tones in there and that can also be with colored pencil later. Then I think I need some other, maybe this for buildings as well. What is this, French gray? 10% So it's a warm gray so I can get some details in the houses and then we need a really dark for all the windows. That one I think either may be one of these here. What's this All of earth and the details in those trees. Yeah, I like that. And it could also be used to make the windows, to keep that cohesive so we don't have too many different colors. And this one also could be used on those rocks in the foreground. Same with this? Yes. Okay. So we have this color. These are the colored pencils that I have picked out and then I'll be mixing in some paints. And what is that? It 1234561? Yeah. So those are the main colored pencils so I don't have to go through my stash the entire time. There's a little bit of yellow to in one of the boats. That could be fun. Could this be good? Yeah, I like that one. All right. I think we're set for the but these are all the same tone. The blue and this green are darker, I think I will. And then the pastels are going to be used as my light get off my page. They're so messy. I use hair spray a lot to set pastels that works nicely because not as horribly toxic as the other fixatives, and it's usually smells really nice. Anyways, Yeah, that's my color palette that I'm going to start with. The subdued pastel colors in the background that I'm going to be like, the gray blues that I'm going to be using for the water. Then I like bright blues that I'm going to be for the boat here. I have all my blues in the neo colors to make that pop. And I have a fluorescent and a little bit of yellow. I think this is going to be a great color palette. I can put away my oil pastels because I don't think that I'll be using those. I'm ready to go. Also, I was thinking about my boats and how it's fun to create different versions. I'm going to do two versions with you. You can follow along and try out slightly different materials on both sides. Maybe one will be more guache heavy and the other one is going to be more of my pastels and watercolor that I like to do, so you can see how those compare. So that's what we're going to be jumping into in the next section. Let's start our under paintings. 15. Class Project: Under Painting: Okay. Trying to get started. I thought that this side will play with tons of pastels and watercolors and that sort of thing. This side is a little bit thicker because I'm getting close to the end. This side I will mainly do like a guash painting underpainting, but then we'll add more stuff on top of that. I have the reference photo open on my computer that I can see off screen. You can't see? Yeah. And then we can just jump in or we can do a slight sketch. I can use one of the lighter colors, this is that French Gray. I also like sometimes to use yellow, but let's see, can get in the sketches here. Oh my gosh. Okay, here's the horizon line, then boat again. Remember that this is your drawing, so you can make it your own. Down here, we have those rocks then in the background like this. See they already look different. Just sketching them. Slightly different, but I think that's just a good thing. Then the boat is like this. I'm going to simplify my image and I don't think it's necessary to get all the details mainly. I just want to know where the boats are because I don't want to put too much paint right where they are. I have that down. Let's get started on the messy. What are they called, pastels. I'm going to start putting in the blue over here. There was a lot of greenish in the, in the water. I'm not going to go all the way to the edge, I'm going to leave a little bit of a border. I'm going to try to the up here at the top, it goes quite light to use my lighter blue. Then it goes dark up here, but it's still blue. I'm going to mix that. I was going to use the gray gray here and some of the gray down here and a little bit of this darker blue around the rocks up here. And that's going to mix together and smudge maybe even a little bit darker green down here in the water. I think it's really fun to use the pastels because I don't know what it's going to look like. It's going to mimgetherh when I start to paint. And here, the rocks, I want to put a little of this color in there. And I also want to bring in, I have this neutral color from the Jackson's one. Maybe I'll bring that up into the water up here a little bit. Yeah, we'll start with that. I think that's exciting. Then up in the sky, I think this light blue, again, really stunning. Sometimes I like to use white gas to mix with the pastel. I could try that. I think I'll do the water in the sky first, then we'll go in and do this background when those two are dry. So I'm going to go in with a flat brush. Tens of water. And I'm just going to start to wet this down. Go, there's the sky. Try to leave some texture in there. So we something's going on now. I need to get these castells to work with me. I want these colors to blend together. I'm trying to keep the brush strokes going horizontally, so that it has the feeling of the water. So that I don't have too many brush strokes going in a random direction. But as you can see, look, I just love how the pestels turn into a paint and how they give these brush strokes. And sometimes you keep some of the, the scratchiness of the original, the original pastel drawing here. I want it to look like it's under the water. Incorporate some of that out. Okay, so that is my first under painting for this side and it's really dreamy and beautiful. I'm going to remove some of this dust with this paint, with this fluffy brush that I use for clean up. There we go. And we're going to let that side dry while we jump into the other side. On the other side, I think. Oh my gosh. Pouring out my water. All right. I had a little water disaster and then I started adding watercolor details to this side. But I forgot to press record. Very classic me. But anyways, I was adding some definition to these areas with, let's see, what color is this? It's one of the Schmit super granulating. It's the deep sea indigo and it has a really nice, beautiful granulation. And I'm just bringing it in to the water around the boats to give some shadow. It's also nice to do several layers with water color on top of the pastels because this brush has some nice texture in it because it's getting old and scraggly. Get some dry brush, look on some of the waves. We wanted to look good. I wanted to have different areas. Here is darker and darker up here if it's lighter over here, so we can bring back some of that lightness later with another material once this is dried. But I think that, that feels good to me. We have the water color going and when it dries, it's going to granulate a little bit more. That's beautiful. I might want to add a little bit more on these rocks, I think to show that there's water coming up on those. It's fun to play with texture. You could just continue doing this, but we're going to jump to the other side. I have my jelly guh over to the side here. With the palette, I think I'm going to switch to my slightly larger brush so we can get even more like Baker strokes. I'm going to get a nice white. And this blue that I have for this sky already, the blue that I chose is a little bit brighter and darker than the image or what I did over here. But that's just good and we're going to continue to use this color as a base. And then I'm going to start adding these greener tones that I have on my palette there. Okay, we're going to keep adding in different layers. And what's fun about working with a palette like this is that you can get the random colors mixed together. I really like that. I love these kinds of flat brushes where I can get a lot of texture and a lot of paint on. I'm going to try to get some more lights over here on this side, a little bit more blue. And then, let's see, we want to get a little bit of the darker blue up at the top, but I don't want it to be to blue. So I want to, let's see if I can get like this. That was nice. See, this is what's fun about paint. You can get really cool textures with a paint brush. I think that's some fun textures done there. Okay, we have to get these rocks that are kind of in this like creamy beige color hair. Get that in. There's some greenish tones in there too, on the rocks, get some texture in there. That's fun. Okay, I like that again. This is just the base layer, so this is just what we're working on. Now, I want to go back to this side so that I can work on the background here. There we had this nice like, I want this green in the background. Also with my other, this soft green color because that's like in the background that there's some kind hill and then the rest is quite creamy. And I thought that like this peachy color maybe mixed with this cream. And then I can go over with the other colors again. I will use the smaller flat brush. I'm just going to do the light colors first to get those in. Then scribbly, bring these colors in. There's also some of those greens down at the bottom, so I can use some of what's on my brush to bring that into the seam. And then on the other side, we'll do the same. We'll try to find like a creamier Beijing color. You can use this one that we were using before as like a base for everything. I think it will look nice and warm against. There we go. Then I will use these nice greens that I have, blue or green. And then again, add some down here, a little darker tone. We can always more. But to begin with, I think that is a good base for our paint to base. We have one that's thicker, more guache, that kind of look. And we have one that's more water color and pastel, so they both have completely different looks already. We have made the color palette slightly different because of the different materials and the types of colors that we have available. This is exciting to me to see what I like. I like things in both versions. I love the water in this side, we have a lot more texture going, but I do love like thick brush strokes like this. And I think that putting the boats, the colorful boats on top of this is going to be really fun. Let's let this completely dry and then we can start working on adding the next layer of details. 16. Class Project: Final Details: Now that these are both dry, we can go over with our dry materials to add all the beautiful details and everything. We're going to start I think I'm going to make these similar and how I create those, I might jump back and forth with the same items. Let's start with this little boat. I think it's really sweet. I have chosen different colors for the water. I might change the blue on this side to be darker. This one, I think would be fine to use if I bring that in. Again, this is a sketch. This is your sketch book. It doesn't have to be a finalized drawing, but I am going to mark in and make note of all of these fun colors. Then we have this blue also the colored pencil that I thought would be a perfect color. It has a stripe, a white stripe there. Could try to ice melt it into the water there a little bit. Add some details here into the boat. I had the yellow details on here. I missed that, so we'll just put it here instead. There are also some red items. Don't really know what these things are. And we had that red buoy in the water that we can add and it does have like a line to it. And then again, adding some details with the colored pencils and more of this to brighten it up. That's good. I think has went slightly darker by the waters. I'm going to add this colors well, to get more contrast and into the water to give that some shadow. Mm hmm. Like that. I feel like that boats looking good. I guess we can continue to this side to keep working on the same thing. I'll add this color to the bottom of the boat, then it has one of these. I'll do the Turquoisy blue has a stripe in the middle of the boat. Then this part of the boat, that nice turquoise blue, I'm going to leave, there's some red details here and here on the top of the boat, there's something going on there. But otherwise a lot of this color, then adding some details to define the boat. Again, the neo color is so difficult to color over, so you pretty much have to use another neocolor. Again, I want to add in some shadowing from the other boat Down here has a lot of other details on the boat with lots of things coming off of it, but it makes it messy. But I'm going to just add some sketchiness there so that you have an idea that there's something going on. I think I want to bring this blue up a little bit higher and the white is very white. So I just want to dirty it up a bit. Let me go, that's fun. I'm going to bring in some yellow here. It's not in the picture, but I just wanted to bring that in just to make it. Similar pop. I feel like this looks naive in comparison to all of the details going on, which is a bummer. What else can we add? There's lines going out into the water here. We want to have this one so you can know that it's tethered to something in the water. We can add some more texture in detail with the neo colors. I really like this light one. The light blue can add some of those lights, maybe made it too dark up here a little bit around this area. Also, when you give layers on top of paint, you get like the surface area of the water. And then there's deep water as well. Up here at the top, it's quite dark as well. We could add in a little bit of the darker blue. Okay, that's starting to look nice and scribbly. Down here at the bottom, there's some like sea urchiny thing that has fun texture. I might add in those with this blue, I want to bring in this olive earth pencil and get those rocks going. You can kind of tell that this is a cliff giving some texture down here. Real quick I get slightly stressed being on camera and having it rolling and I don't want to have like 5 hours of footage of me just sitting here like drawing little urchins forever. But you can take as much time or as little time on these drawings as you want. Is it just a sketch to realize the colors and it was fun? Or do you want to take your time and spend an hour on this with tiny little details and go in and painstakingly draw every little detail that you see in the boat. Or do you just want to just show like the overall picture here in the background? I'm starting to think about all of these buildings and I'm like, I don't really want to draw every single house and every single window, but we need to hint that they exist there. So I'm going to bring in this dark olive earth to bring in that there is the trees here in the background get that more texture and a bit dark by the coast there. And then we also have to figure out how to do the dock is lighter right by the water there. I thought that light color that looked nice. Then we can go in and start to give some hints that there are houses over here, some are a little bit blue. We can give some of them the gray color. We can set houses. I'm not sure how this is going to look, if it's going to just look silly and messy, and then we have all the little roofs. Again, like this could take forever. And I don't honestly have the patience to go in and do every single house. That's not my favorite thing to illustrate and draw, but let's see how this will look. If we can mimic some houses back here in the background, okay? Do some Al like windows and we can do some darker windows. I don't know, I feel like this needs to have a little bit more defining features. Unfortunately. This kind of looks random, like what even is this? I thought I could get away with not sketching so many houses. Mm hmm. Maybe. Okay. But for now, let's see. We'll move on to the other side and see what we can come up with. On this side, we can start with those houses again. On this side, this is a little bit darker, so maybe these colors are going to blend in more. It would be nice if this could just melt in and would hint at being a city. I don't know. Let's see. And adding in a couple of the windows in the darker Tom, then some of the houses are blue. We're going to bring in the, the shrubbery. And then there was bits within the city as well, quite a bit over here. Like I need another green color in here. I'm going to use another New York color, this like lighter one. Does that look like just to give Mgy green, maybe this is looking a little bit better, maybe. I'm not sure. I really liked how the white, really light blue looked there at the edge of the water. And I want to also bring that in here because I thought that looked nice to make that reflection look pretty. Um, we'll see the chalk up here. Also, maybe bring in a little bit of this green into the water. To hint at some reflections, it would be nice to bring that Beijing color down. Does this. So if I could find a peach to mimic the city that's going into the water, bring it down here just to have it another place as well, just to warm up the water. That is really pretty. Okay. I'm going to add a few more windows and things because I think it is when I start to add a little bit more, here's a little bit too empty. But if I'm starting to add a little bit more, I can get the houses to look more like houses in the background and I'm going to make some of the roofs a little bit more defined. Okay. A little bit more happy with that. We go and we could there was a little bit more of that blue around there. Now that I have this peach too, I can bring that into some of the areas to warm it up. Okay, that looks pretty good. Some of these areas, I'm going to darken a lot. Okay, fun. And then down here, I want to use again, this dark earth to bring in those rocks. And I like these blue, I think, the little sea urchins. Again. I want the water you to know that there's water over here. Let's see, the water goes on top. All right. I think that's turning out a little bit better. But yes, you can see like you learned some stuff by hinting that this is town. I think, I this one needs to have more of the greenery going on. So if we go back in here and maybe work more of these darks into it and nestle the houses a little bit more into the greenery. I think that's going to help adding a little bit more greens in here and a little bit more dark as I'm using it for all these windows going on again, maybe define a few more of the roofs, bring in the blues, that peachy color that we added. We don't have to do the same thing, but I like how that turned out, so I'm going to add a little of this peak into the water to help with that look of reflection without having to do a full on reflection. Has the warmth of the city into the water. Now we're going to do our boats over here. Again, this one I use slightly different color in the water, but I think it will still work. I'm going to try using this color that we used on the other boat. There we go. And then I had this cobalt blue for the actual boat. Again, we're going to use some of these that is nice fluorescent colors to add some fun details that are going to out of this. All right? And then we need I have the yellow, some kind of thing, and then adding some definition to the boat, so it looks more three D. Okay? And then again, the boat needs to look, I guess sitting in the water a little bit more. So I'm going to add more shadow and texture there. Then we have one more boat, very exciting. I have the cobalt for the bottom of it. And, and then we're going to try, I think I'll keep this darker line for the line. And shall we try this turquoise sat for the front of it. Here we have a nice could do, like a really red life preserver and there's some other really red details. And then the top, I'm going to make this nice red fluorescent or hot red. And then we'll add in this nice blue. I want to add in the yellow two because I thought that it was a good complement to all these other colors. And we'll do another stripe with this color, stylish. And then I want to define the boat a little bit. Should have a name here, let's see. Bring some ties, a little bit more shadow for this boat as well. So it also kind of feels like it's sitting in the water. Boy, maybe I want some. Okay. I think that I am pretty happy with these sketches. We learned some stuff we got to play. We have two different versions. I'm not sure which one's your favorite. I think there's certain areas that I like in both. Like, I really, I definitely like how my house has turned out up here and this version, I think I worked more on it and I made them come alive a little bit more in the background there. Water, I think maybe I prefer on this side just because there's so much texture going on the boats. I kind of feel like I should have added a little bit more love and detail to the boats since I feel like I gave more detail to the other parts of the image. But I can go in and already just add, define the boats a little bit more because I feel like everything else is sticking out of the image. But my boats which are like the main part of the image or not as important in the way that you see them. But yeah, I hope that you enjoyed watching my process as I think through materials and try different things and figure stuff out. And I hope that you will also enjoy this process. I can't wait to see your versions of these illustrations now. All you have to do is maybe write the date to remember when you created these. Just like looking at them more and more, I'm more and more happy with how they turned out and I'm so happy that I got to share this with you. 17. Next Steps: All right, so we're done with our class project and before we say goodbye, I just want to talk about your next steps for continuing with your sketchbook practice. I would love for you to adopt some kind of fun Friday. If you can't have a whole work day towards sketchbook play, could you find an hour or two on a Friday, or Monday or Tuesday, or any day that you can find time to just do art for you, rather than always do working on a project or a client project or something for your portfolio. It's really freeing and really wonderful, creating some kind of daily art practice or one day a week where you focus on this play. I highly suggest it if you also feel like you have a difficult time with coming up with what to do in your sketchbook. There are so many artists to follow on social media here on skill share on other sites that show art prompts that share art challenges. There's so many art challenges on Instagram that you can come, that you can join. There is October, October, There's Mermaid if you like drawing mermaids, there's so many others. Childhood Week by Beatrice Blue. Just research and ask your fellow illustrator friends, you can also start a 100 day project. Like self prompted or Yeah, just do all the challenges. Do as much or as little as you can. It's supposed to be fun. Yeah, just have fun with it. That's like my main advice. Just have fun with it. Just play, Yeah, it's no big deal. If you finish your 100 day project on day 99, it's about the process anyway. So you know what else can I give you for nuggets of really good inspiration. Motivation? Yeah, that's pretty much it. Just keep going. Just make sure that you're creating in some way, even if maybe you're not feeling like creating a beautiful masterpiece, do a scribble page or a page with lots of swatching and remember your materials again and what they look like. Or just like just do the swatching and write the name underneath just to remember what colors you have. It's not always important that every day you sit down to create a amazing sketchbook spread. Some days or about those scribbly pages or those quick sketches or getting those ideas on a page. Just remembering to have that art practice and cultivating your creativity on a daily or somewhat daily basis. 18. Thank You for Watching: All right, that's it. Thanks so much for taking this class with me and learning all about mixed media. I cannot wait to see your mixed media landscapes in the class project gallery. So please make sure to upload those so I can give you some feedback and cheer you on. And Google or glorious textures, because textures are the best. If you'd like to hang out with me outside of Skillshare, you can find me on Instagram at Matina. You can check out my website at Magstina.com if you love the Front Friday concept. In fun with me on Fridays, you can join my Patrion Group fun Friday and get monthly drawing prompts and follow along my process and get to peek at my sketchbook every month. It's a good time. Otherwise, make sure to follow me here on Skillshare so that you'll be notified when I come out with my next class. Until then. By.