Golden Echoes: Byzantine Style Watercolor Mastery

1. Introduction: If you're searching for a source of inspiration, if you like Byzantium art or if you simply love gold and watercolors, then I invite you to this class. My name is Ana. I'm an Illustrator, teacher. I teach here on Skillshare. And I decided to prepare this class because lately, I've been to Sicily, and I rediscovered the Byzantium art and how great impact it had in my art. And I wanted to share the source of inspiration with you, but not only, I wanted to share with you simple tools that I use in my creative process. Order to digest inspiration and to show you how you could apply it to your art in order to improve your style and develop your artistic voice and all of it through simple steps, through exploring colors, exploring inspirations, and through a watercolor, fun, easy and colorful project. Join me in this journey full of inspiration. 2. Class Project: The classes project will be creating an illustration based on the inspiration of Byzantium art, and it will be made with watercolors and golden art supplies. To do that, first, I will show you a little bit of Byzantine Sicily, and hopefully, it will spark your imagination and inspire you. Then I'll show you the art supplies, especially we will see different possibilities. We have to paint with gold, and then we will explore colors. We will see how to create color palette from observation, Afterwards, we will see we will search for an inspiration. We will do a useful exercise that will help to explore your inspiration and apply it to your style. And then we will unite all those elements to create the final project, the watercolor illustration based on the previous exercises. Also be sure to check out the project and resources section of the class where I will leave you some helpful resources for your project. I will leave you PF with photos from Sicily Link to the Inspirational Mood board, List of art supplies. Also, I really invite you to see all the lessons before you will jump into the final project. First, it will be helpful for you. And second of all, I really highlight the importance of your own research, of your own inspiration. And the class will give you the tools for this in order to create your personalized and your unique final project. Once you've finished, remember to applaud your project to the projects gallery. I cannot wait to see what you came up with and remember also to like and to comment on each other's projects. It's very encouraging and inspiring to see what we created all together. And right now, relax, take a seat and enjoy a little trip that I will take you to discover mysterious Byzantium Sicily. 3. Explore Bizantine Inspiration: L et's discover together Sicily, mysterious, full of breathtaking art, mystical place of rich history, thousands of years, epochs, and its unique beauty comes from mixture of different times and cultures. And the special mixture of Byzantine, Norman and Arabic worlds, sculptured incredible buildings and filled them with art, which is one of its kind. You can discover quiet, pure spaces made of light stones, and silence You can immerse yourself, imagine the times that have passed, but still testimony the greatness. Then you enter to places like Capela Palatina, Palatine Chapel that makes you speechless, so rich, glorious, magnificent a place that represents the kingdom of heaven, and also the Kingdom of Earth since it was a King's chapel in Royal Palace, and it's all in the heart of Palermo. I'll leave you some images from this chapel and from Salajeo, which is Rom of the King in the same royal palace. I leave you with their uplifting mosaics and art, which is also a mixture of Byzantine Norman and Arabic styles. The Byzantine gold mosaics that glow with ums and colors and ornaments, geometrical, beautiful mosaics. Also caras, which are Arabic style ceilings, full of symbols and geometrical patterns. Sicily is also full of treasures that reflect the richness of great epochs, stone gems, gold, and this mysterious beauty of antique times. Something fascinating and so inspiring. There are so many things that can be a great source of inspiration for your art, colors, shapes, themes. Let us explore it together. Oh. 4. Art Supplies: Let me walk you through the art supplies that we will use in the class. So I will be working with watercolors and a little bit of gouache. Yeah, I will work with watercolors. I will show you some of the textures that I create, and the final project will be painted with watercolors. But you don't have to follow my steps. You can explore the theme of Byzantine art in Sicily with your own supplies. So this is my palette of blue of cool colors. I have also palette with warm colors. So I will use both of them. And as for the watercolors, I will also explore metallic watercolors, not all of them. I will work with golden colors, copper, and the colors that I will use for my project. If you have other metallic colors that you would like to use, obviously, again, go for it. There will be a separate lesson where I will show you different art supplies that I have at home gold art supplies, golden art supplies. So I want show you now all of those. You can watch the lesson where I explain better and swatch each one of them. Basically, I will use for my project golden watercolor and wash. And also, this supply, I will talk a little bit more about it in the lesson about gold art supplies. I will also work with ah. Again, if you want to paint your project with Guash, go for it. I will use it to make some colors, for example, I will use white. Sometimes I will use blue. For the exploration of theme, I like to work with Wah. As for the paper, I will use both sketchbook for exploration of the motifs and the block of watercolor paper. This time I will use quite fancy watercolor paper arch or arches. Depends I heard different pronunciation, so I'm not sure which one is correct. So this is really good watercolor paper. I wanted to I used it because it really holds huge quantity of water, and I really love to work with this paper. So since the project is quite precious, I want to achieve texture, so I decided to use more expensive paper. If you don't have it, or if you or if you don't want to use good watercolor paper for this project. Then obviously use the paper that you have at home. You can use whatever watercolor paper you have at home or maybe mixed media paper, if you if you work if you work with other water soluble colors. And obviously, pencils. I work usually with synthetic pencils. This one is natural. I have it, I like I have some natural brushes. Or you don't have to use it. I use it because it's really thin and good for painting details and tiny tiny swatches, tiny strokes, and tiny spaces. I will use different shapes and sizes. This is medium. Those two are rounded like cut, tongue shape. So I like to work with them. And pencil, erase, obviously, and masking tape. And in the next lesson, we will explore golden art supplies. 5. Explore Golden Colors : Let's study gold. I will swatch with you the art supplies that I have at home, metallic and gold art supplies. In this way, we will see together how they work, the textures, they create opacity. Maybe it will be useful for you. I encourage you to find the supplies that you have at home and swatch them. Maybe you have something different. That's okay. I will show you what I have. Also try to use some things that maybe are not so obvious. Maybe there are some colors that you can use that you used for other things like maybe ceramics or maybe your kid. Your kids have some cheap metallic supplies, grab what you can find, and let's start swatching. When I say that you might have something at home and try to use it. For example, I have those two colors. I accidentally found them. I forget that I have them. I think I took them even in high school, and I'm not even sure what are they? It's not written, if it's guash or if it's acrylic. You know what? It doesn't matter. I will test it, I will try it and see how it works. It works fine on paper. And the color is cool. It's opaque kind of antique gold ipe. So I encourage you to test some colors. Maybe you will find something at home. For example, maybe something to paint on glass or ceramics. Why not? Maybe not to paint on entire paper, but for example, you could use it for details. So yeah, just search at how much you have watch it and test different textures, opacities, and see what will work best for you. After swatching the two colors, they're really nice. They have this antique old gold vibe and which is really cool. Maybe not to the colors are not too bright, but but still okay. L et's watch another color. I have a watercolor, golden water color. I'm not sure what brand is it. It was a gift from my friend, and it's not written, but I really love it. It's really luminous. And as you can see, the difference between the two, the previous two is that watercolor is more translucent. The other one was more opaque. I will try also wet on wet. Swatch out your materials also to see which one do you prefer if you prefer opaque layer, for example, or more translucent as the watercolor. Let's continue with watercolors. I wanted to show you this set of metallic watercolors that I have. It's nothing fancy. I think it's made in China. It's also a gift, but I decided to swatch it. To be honest, I don't have any good quality, metallic watercolors. Let's see how those, those beauties work. I will swatch the colors that I will choose from my project. I will continue with gold, but also this, metallic co. I will swatch only the colors that I think that I will need for my project. If you think that you would like to use some other metallic colors, definitely go for it. It's obviously your interpretation and your inspiration. Since I don't have really good quality metallic colors, I cannot see to do the comparison. But in comparison to the top one, the gold one, you can see the difference, they are less opaque, they have less pigment, but they are still good. Also, that's another tip or advice for you. If you have some mediums that you wouldn't try them, test them, Maybe you have some mediums for kids or something like that. I will test with you, other art supply that I rarely use or quite never. I would say I bought it in a shop, I saw it, and it intrigued me, so I decided to try it. It's Akashin from Schmincke. So basically, it's medium that you add to watercolors, and it's shiny, pearly, medium, and you add it to a metallic watercolor at least in th, so let's test it. You basically apply it to the color. I do it with a pipette tip. I saw basically that you have to use a lot of it in order to see the effect. Maybe you can already see the mixture. To be honest, it's not really metallic color effect. It's more like adding Perly layer two watercolors. I'm not sure how to explain it, but the difference you can see between the metallic colors above, the blue color and the blue with this per liquid. Maybe it's something that you will like. If you have it at home, then test it. Try it. I'm not a big fan of it, but maybe that's something that will work for you. I decided to create a gold with it. Let's see how it works. I mixed some yellows, warm yellows and ocher to create this goldish color. Here's the color swatched. Well, obviously, it's not the same as the metallic gold, but you still can use it. I think as a good alternative, you can see this, this pery particles. I'm not sure if it's visible. I will show you at the end of swatching the reflection of light, so you will see better the metallic reflections. The next in my table is guh. I have gold Gach from Windsor and Newton, and let's try it. Let's see if it will be more opaque than our watercolor. You can use Gach in two ways. You can use it as a dense opaque medium with a high coverage, or you can dilute it and use it as watercolor. Let's test it. The last in the line are metallic pastels and pencils. Let's start with woody pencils. Those are basically like I would say, ox, pastels, they're very oily, have high coverage, and they're water soluble. Let's watch them and see how they work. There's metallic, but not so as water cools. Let's try to dilute it. Also let's test the silver one. Another pastel on my table is wax pastel neo color two from Caran dash. There are also water soluble. So let's test the gold version. I will dilute it. This is gold. But as you can see, it has this greenish tone, and it seems like really old gold. You can see that it's very different from water colors, the opacity is much more higher and it's not so bright, it's not so shiny as other water colors. Maybe I could use it, for example, for details or for some small areas. Maybe it's not so suitable for example, for backgrounds, especially if you want very shiny background. The last are oil pastels. I have two different brands, two different kinds of gold metallic pastels. The first one is again, Carns pastel. It's similar as the color, but it's not wax pastel, and it's not water soluble. I will swatch it underneath to see the difference. You can see they are almost identical. The difference is in the medium. The wax pastel is not so oily and it's water soluble. Now let's skip to the senala oil pastel This is really, very good brand, and I found this, I think it's bronze or red copper, something like that, and it really intrigued me in the shop, so I decided to take it. And it's really gorgeous. The color is really really gorgeous. As you can see, it's really battery. That's the characteristic of Cenea. And also the metallic reflection is quite good. Also, in this case, probably it's good for smaller areas, for details maybe, but the color is really very good at least in my opinion. If you have oil pastels, wx, pastels, metallic, colors, or even pencils, you can test them. Okay. That's it. For my art supplies. Obviously, there's a huge range of other art supplies. There are also gold leaves, for example, if you know how to use them. You can use them as well. I'm trying to show you here the glossiness, the outcome. But the best way for you is to swatch your metallic colors, your gold colors that you have at home. Obviously, if you want share it with us within your project, it's always great to learn from one another. For any reasons, you cannot use gold colors, maybe you don't have at home, or you just prefer not to use metallic colors or you don't have the glossy medium that I showed you. I will show you another solution in the next lesson. 6. Alternatives For Gold: In case you don't have gold at home or for some reasons, you don't want to use it. The first solution would be the one that I talked to you about in the previous lesson using Aqua shine medium, which, in addition to a normal color gives this shiny glitter effect. Or simply you could use just a yellow color. In this image, you see two illustrations that I did, and I used yellow for the background. I think if you use a right tone of yellow, warm yellow, it can also give you this impression of gold. So it's up to you. Right now, you have all the possibilities in front of you, pick one, and let's get started. And in the next lesson, we will start to explore the motives, the inspiration from the Byzantine art. 7. Create Your Color Palette: So Let's search for the color inspiration for our project. When we think about Byzantine art, when you look at the mosaics or at the treasures, at the icons, what strikes you most? What do you love? How would you like to apply it in your art? Well, L et's start from colors. So when I look at the colors of the Byzantine art, I'm just so amused by the boldness, the brightness of colors. So I will try to recreate it in my palette. I will search for intense bright colors that I can see in gems and in the mosaics. I will also try to some way and somehow recreate the light that is reflected in the gold in the mosaics and in the gems. Whatever colors you will pick. It will be fine. The most important thing is that they will inspire you and your art. Let's create our colorful mood board. I created this chart, and I will fill the squares with the colors, but you can work whatever in the form that suits you best. You can just swatch colors in a free way. It's up to you. I will start with my gold colors from the other lesson. I will swatch the colors that I liked the most from the palette. It will be most of the gold to colors. If you want to switch other metallic colors, of course, I don't want to repeat myself so switch the colors and in this case, metallic colors that you would like to have in your project. I will also swatch the yellow color that could fake the gold, and the color that I talked to you about in the other lesson, so I will search for this warm yellow. Now I will try to recreate blue colors blue colors from mosaics and the gems. If you observe mosaics, there's a lot of kinds of blues and turquoise and greens. So I love those colors, so I will go for them. I will s for them. And also the gems that are sometimes in the treasures. I'm not good at the names, so I have this little cheat sheet with names of blue stone gems. Some of them, I already know, for example, with I worked with azurite, Lapis lazuli pigment that I used to paint icons. And I will, I will try to recreate if it's possible those bright blues. You can also swatch the colors before you will paint them in the chart on a different paper so you can see if the color is good. For example, I found this lapis lazuli azurite, also as watercolor. This one is from Sena. I found it by chance in a shop, and it was quite expensive. So I think it has a real pigment in it. Let's watch it. So it's not so bright. It's not so intense, but it has a really good feeling and texture into it. Obviously, you don't have to search for real pigments right now. We will try to create the colors that will just inspire us. For example, I will mix this lazoita with stokise and with other colors, and I will create my blues for the chart. I decided to use a palette of colors that I had that I used for the other project about Sicily and the other class, since there are a lot of greens and blue, so I will use it. If you have also some dried colors that inspires you, you can also use it for your project. Oh Now I'm jumping into the greens since I finished the blues. Again, I'm watching at my photo references at the colors on the mosaics, but also at the stone gems. With the greens, I will also try to recreate the blending of colors. I want to create the effect of gem of the light that it reflects of different colors that are created inside of a em stone. Here I am painting the emerald green. This is a cold green. I'm adding a little bit of blue, and while painting, I'm adding indigo and other blue colors in order to create the different colors that are inside gem, especially when it reflects light. I'm starting to swatch this effect. So on the pres mood board that I prepared for you, there are those two photos with green stone gems, and I will try to recreate it now. Also with the light and the shadows that it has and the light that it reflects. So I want to include this kind of greens in my palette as well. I also have another pigmented water color based on the natural pigment, which is malachite, or malachite. Not sure how to pronounce it. Sorry. It's from the Polish brand, Roman Schmal Aquarius. I decided to take it and test it. It was also more expensive than regular watercolors, I really love it. It's very subtle. It's really delicate, but it creates a really lovely pigmentation, and the color is Yeah, I think you can feel when you paint with it, that that it's not artificial pigment. I will use it. I will also add a little bit of again, another color turquoise to add the blending subtle colors. Again, don't be upset because I'm using those natural pigmented watercolors. Obviously, you don't have to use them. You don't have to have them at home. As you can see, I recreated blues and turquoise based on normal regular water colors. What I usually do and a good thing to do is to separate the colors that you used for your color palette. So then you will know for your final project, what colors you used. Otherwise, if you remember them, then you don't have to do it. I usually do it otherwise, I get a little bit lot. Those are my greens and blues. So few spots left. Obviously, I can add more colors if I like, but I will add warm colors. So usually, I'm going for cool turquoise colors that's something that naturally strikes me, and I often very often use in my art, and warm colors are not so natural for me, not Istinctively, I use blue colors. For you, maybe it will be different. Maybe you prefer warm colors. Yeah. Anyway, the red that I see in Byzantine art, again, I'm watching at my photo references and also both from mosaics and gemstones. I will search for ruby colors, for example, Again, I'm trying to create the depth of the gemstones shadow and light by adding a darker red into the swatch. This is my color palette. I will call it done. I couldn't help myself and I added another green. That's because I remembered I have this granulating, multi pigmented cascade green of Daniel Smith, which I really love, and I thought it would be perfect for gem. So if you have any granulating water colors, I think it will be really great for creating the gem texture. I also created this orange, a warm color, which is also often seen in the Byzantine art. Those are my colors and I am ready with my color palette, more or less. Obviously, I can also mix those colors in between them, blues and greens. I can make them lighter, darker, the same with reds, but the bases is already there and I'm ready to go. So I cannot wait to see your color palette if you want to add it to your project or your final project and tell us what colors inspired you and why? In the next lesson, we will explore the themes. We will see what could we paint for our final project. 8. Inspiration: Let's search for an inspiration. We will do simple sketches, simple, quick drawings, small studies in this lesson. I think it's useful not only for this class, but it's very useful as an exercise in your everyday life as an artist to create very simple shapes and forms. And it is useful for multiple reasons. It takes off the pressure of creating final piece. And in this way, by having fun by doing simple shapes, you create without pressure, and you can find many fun solutions, and they can become your actual style or visual language. So I think it's useful. This kind of exercise is useful as an artist. So in this class, we will search for isn't an inspiration I will look at my photo references at the mood board on pin test that I prepared for you. So you can also have a look or search for your own photo references. So as I said, it's very simple. I will use just one color. I will use squash and brush, but you can use whatever medium you want. You can do it with pencils or With other mediums, I invite you just to make it simple to make it fun. So let's get started, and let's start exploring our inspiration. And remember, often inspiration comes to you by doing by working and painting. So let's have fun, and let's get started. The good thing to get started is to start simple. So Byzantine art has a lot of geometrical shapes, so I will paint them. It's good to warm up your hand and to get used to paint shapes. Also geometrical shapes, especially those Byzantine ones are great source of inspiration, who knows? Maybe you could use them for your final project. I will paint the photos, the and from the photos, the shapes that I see crosses and also geometrical shapes mosaics. You could, for example, also explore mosaics. To do that, you can sketch the shape that you want to draw and then fill it with simple little pieces and make your own mosaic. This is also a good exercise for precision, for example, why not try to do it. You can explore different patterns from mozics. There are lots of them. If you're into those kind of geometrical shapes, then maybe you would like to explore it more. Yeah, it's up to you. It depends what inspires you most. In the meantime, I drew also the shape found on the crown on the treasure crown, in the museum that I saw. Maybe I can use it now. Maybe I could use it in the future project. Since I'm drawing in my sketchbook, I can always turn back to those shapes, and if they inspire me for something else, I can use them in the future. I also am drawing the stars. I love this pattern, this starry pattern that is so often on the ceilings of Byzantine buildings. I'm also inspired by the floral shapes in the Byzantine art. They are so I don't know, simple, yet very inspiring and just beautiful. So I will also include them in my studies. Oh. So I finished also the floral explorations. Those are the shapes that I drew, trees, and some flowers. And what I noticed it is very interesting that those kind of shapes. I don't know if I already told you, I really love simplified shapes, so I really enjoyed it. But for example, this kind of tree. I already draw in my art. So this is incredible that I found inspiration. Obviously, I was inspired by this tree because I draw trees in this way in my art. Maybe I was inspired as a little kid. I grew up in Poland. So maybe I watched some Eastern icons, we also use simplified shapes. So yeah, that's very interesting. I'm curious if you will find some links in your art in the Byzantine art, if you will be inspired by something that you already draw. Yeah, that was fun to discover this. I've done geometrical shapes. I've done floral shapes. I already feel that my drawing is improving. I have bigger control in painting in brush strokes. Right now, I will paint animals. Again, I'm looking on my photo references on the mosaics, and I'm pretty I'm excited with this exercise because I really love simplified shapes, and Byzantine art is full of this kind of shapes, and they are very inspiring for me. And I think that drawing animals will help my visual language, my artistic voice to find the solutions. How to draw animals in general, not only for this class. I already told you this in the beginning of the class, that this kind of exercise is useful to explore your artistic style and voice. So right now, I'm painting fish, and then I will skip to other animals. If you observe the Byzantine art, it is full of different animals, and often you can find cats, for example, lions or geops, cat family. It's linked to the symbolic meaning of most of those animals. I love the ways. Probably They didn't know exactly how Lens was in the real life, or maybe not. Maybe it was the language. Sometimes they're really funny. So I'm definitely inspired by this style, this kind of representation, which is not realistic, figurative, but simplified and stylized. So I'm trying to draw the lion here and then we will see what other animals I will draw. I think that Watching for the Byzantine looking at the Byzantine art can help me to draw lions and this animals. Again, to find visual style. For this family of animals. In this case, the trick here is to really simplify the forms. As you can see, the lion was made with just circle and val in this really funny face. You can look at the photo references, but also you can interpret it in the way you want, and I'm ski to paint my favorite birds. I will stop here. I finished my studies, animal studies and other. So you can proceed and do more of them if you want. I'm very happy about the outcome. Again, I think that thanks to this exercise, I animals in a way that I wouldn't draw them in other circumstances. So I'm about it and Yeah. I hope that you will find this lesson useful as well and that you will come up with shapes and forms of the elements that you will draw that you will find them good for your style. And When you finish, then pick one of the elements. It can be geometrical shape, it can be plant or animal. It can be one or more of shapes, and we will dive into the final project, and we will join and unite all the previous elements of this class and paint the final illustration. 9. Final Project: I'm very excited that we are beginning our final project, Let's gather all the elements from the previous lessons and unite them and make the final project out of it. Take your cool palette, take your motifs, and think about what you want to draw. You can do it in several ways. You can do just one illustration, you can do more small illustrations. In the last class about Sicily, I divided the sheet into multiple small squares. You could do it as well, or Yeah, whatever you feel right for you. I divided my sheet into two frames, and I will develop two motifs that inspires me the most. The first one will be the sky of the ceilings in the Byzantine chapels or mausoleums. I really love it, so I wanted to try to recreate this motif. And in the other square, I will paint a peacock. So I chose to paint a peacock from from the animals, and yeah, I was tempted to paint a tree, but I really paint a lot of trees. I also paint birds, it's my comfort zone, but still it's new visual language, new peacock. I will enjoy to paint to develop the sketch from the previous exercise. So pick your motives that you want to develop, grab your watercolors, and let's dive in. The first illustration will be the starry night. I will paint the sky. Right now, I already have the colors that I picked during the creation of the color palette. Rather than creating a flat blue layer, I wanted to do something more whimsical, more magical. The impression of the galactic sky may be that evokes emotions, the same emotions that I have when I look at the mosaic ceiling, very good emotions that sparkles my imagination. I wanted to do something more dreamy. And also on the other hand, I would like to do textures that evoke and remind of the gem stones. So something that includes light, shadow, different tones and values of colors. The colors that will blend. So I really invite you to explore your own inspirations. This lesson with the project that I will do is not tutorial for you to how to develop a night sky or the illustration that I do rather than painting with you together. I'm happy to share with you the process. I will explain you a little bit the steps as well. Yeah, but it's not the tutorial about watercolors, this kind of sky. I explain also how to paint this kind of sky in the lesson about the imaginary world painted with watercolors. But, shortly, it's about blending watercolors. First, I painted with watercolor on the dry paper, and while the color is still wet, I'm painting with different colors into it so the watercolors are blending. I proceed with blending of different blues and greens also in this case. Since I really love textures, watercolor textures, I will try to recreate it here as well. So I will speed up the process and show you the finished sky. So since I love textures, I will water into the painting. While it's still wet, I finished the sky, but I wanted to add this little sparkling texture and it's achieved by spraying the water into it. So let's try to do it. As you can see, there are little dots. Some sometimes it's more visible, depends on how wet the color is, sometimes it comes out better and sometimes not. So I will sketch the peacock. I canceled the first sketch because it was too big. I will help myself with very light with outlining, with pencils, the shape of the peacock. You can do it. Also as well, you can draw first your animal with a pencil. So I thought to use the color palette in this way that I will paint the gold stars onto the blue sky, and for the peacock, I will reverse the colors, the peacock will have the same colors as the sky, and the background will be golden. There is this space left on the right. Probably I will fill it with some other motif. Probably it will be flower. I will pick one of the motifs and use it as well, and somehow I will I will put it near the peacock. Well, I will look at my photo reference of the Peacock. I will try to recreate the colors, but I won't look at the photo anymore. I'm trying to memorize now the colors, the patterns of the tail, and from now on, I will work with my memory and my imagination. It's also a good exercise for you now to work more on previous sketches and with your imagination. I'm canceling the sketch not totally, but I want to lighten the lines, so it won't show through the water, and then I will start to paint. As I already told you, I want to use the same color as for the sky. I will recreate this blues that are blending inside the shape of the peacock. The wing will will have warm colors. I waited for the blue colors to dry. So the red colors won't blend into it. I wanted to separate the w from the. I will paint it with the same technique by blending colors, but it will be warm colors. No, I decided that I will draw a flower that's coming out of the beak. No, that the peacock is holding in his, it will have the same colors as the pack. While the colors of the peacock and flowers are drying, I will start to paint stars. I will paint different shapes and sizes was based on the shapes that I saw on the Byzantine art. I will play around with the forms and the scale. I'm using the water color in the end, it's opaque. It covers well, the background color, so it's basically almost the same as squash. I finished the stars. I used the gold, but I also added in the end, the other gold from the other set, which is rose, pink gold, something like that. I think the effect is interesting rather than using just one of gold. Now the peacock and the flower are, they are. I can paint the background, and in this case, I will paint around the peacock. I will also blend different gold again to create this blending texture. A little bit of precision here is needed. But I don't have a lot of details, so I can manage it. Also, a good thing is to change your brushes. When you go to smaller areas, you can use smaller brushes, then it's easier to control the precision and not overlapping with color. The other elements. So as you can hear, as you can see, I'm blending different golds. So in this way, it will be similar. The effect will be similar for the sky. H. Here's my sparkling gold background. There's a little bit of s, so I will show you the shiny effect of all the textures. As you can see, I added also a little bit of gold to to the wing, those are the stars with different gods. It's all very shiny and I like this effect. It's time to finish the peacock, I will paint details. I'm trying to remember the patterns that I saw, but also here, I can play around and play with my imagination a little bit and let my style show a bit even more when I'm not looking just at the photo reference. I invite you obviously to do the same. M Well, I will proceed with watercolors. I think I will add some tiny details of gold as well, but there's already a lot of gold, so I'll try not to exaggerate. Even if it's difficult, I often exaggerate with details. We'll see. We'll see. If you want, you can use your favorite art supplies to apply details. It doesn't have to be watercolor. It can be pencil or markers or whatever whatever you wish. 00. Oh. Who. Oh. I will call it doe for now. I think I exaggerate it a little bit with details. I think I could have done it a little bit less, but that's fine. That's okay. I like it anyway, and I must admit I really had fun with this project. I really had fun with painting the stars, and especially with painting the peacock, because it's a new way. I never drew bird in this way. I always tend to stylize, to simplify, but it is a new way and I really enjoyed the process and that I discovered new ways of for example, of applying details, to tiny patterns which are different from the things that I usually do. And I hope it will be the same for you. I really wish that you will discover new ways of drawing with this class and that you will paint fun elements, whatever it will be geometrical shapes or plants or animals, and that you will enjoy it as well and that your project will be gold. Obviously, I'm kidding you can use whatever colors you want, but I'm sure it will be glorious, and it will shine like Byzantine art. That's it for the final project. I cannot wait to see what you came up with what ideas and what inspired you. Let me know if you enjoy the process, if you liked the idea of being inspired by Byzantine art, and if it changed for your art, for your artistic voice, And I invite you to see the final lesson where I will share with you some final thoughts. And yeah, I cannot wait to see you in the project gallery. 10. Final Thoughts: So thank you so much for joining me in this class. Congratulations. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was super fun and inspiring for you. And I would like you to share with us your final project, share with us your illustration. And also, it would be lovely to see the colors that you created. What inspired you share it with us also you the subject that you painted and the studies. In the end, I would like to ask you to leave the review. If you like the class. It would be very helpful for me. Share it with your friends, if you liked it. It will help my channel grow. So I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope to see you in my other classes. Te T.