How to Paint a Humpback Whale in Watercolors with 24K Gold Leaf Accents

1. Introduction: Humpback whales are among some of the most majestic creatures to ever roam our oceans. Despite their powerful bodies, some as long as 60 feet in length, they move through the water with such grace and beauty and have rightfully earned their title of being the gentle giants of the ocean. In fact, some have been documented shielding humans that they encounter in the wild from potential shark attacks, making us their kin. My name is Alicia, and I'm an artist who works primarily with watercolors, and I can't wait to teach you how to sketch and paint a dreamy portrait of a humpback whale in watercolors with some beautiful 24 carat leaf gold accents. In this class, I will take you through some basic humpback whale anatomy before I simplify the sketching process. Next, I will show you how to lay down a base wash and sprinkle salt in to make some patterns on the whale's upper body. I will then take you through the process of laying down subsequent washes and strokes to build up color and dimension of the whale's body before using some white gouache to add water surface patterns on the top of the whale. We will then use some gel pens to add even more detail. To create a magical overall feel, I will demonstrate how to use some metallic watercolor paint for shimmery highlights and demonstrate in detail how to apply 24 carrot gold leaf pieces to accentuate the barnacles on the whale's body. We will then finish this class by creating a loose background to frame our beautiful whale. This class is suitable for intermediate to advanced watercolor students who already have a little bit of experience with watercolors and understand the wet-on-dry and wet-on-wet techniques. However, if you are a beginner, you are more than welcome to join in, as I will be demonstrating and explaining every step in the process very clearly. So if you are ready to create a beautiful, dreamy humpback whale portrait in watercolors with a few magical pieces of 24 carat leaf gold, let's begin. 2. Materials: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the material section of this class where I will be listing everything that I will be using for this class project. I'll be using watercolor paper by the brand Kansan and it's also a three size and has a weight of 300 grams/meter square or 140 pounds. You don't have to use the same brand of watercolor paper as me or even the same size, but please make sure that you use watercolor paper of a similar weight to get the best results. For the sketching, I'll be using a lead holder by the brand SlerT is a mass technical and it holds lead of about two MM thickness. If you don't have a lead holder, you are more than welcome to use a mechanical pencil or whatever pencil you have. I'll also be using a soft eraser. For the painting section of this class, I always have two jars of clean water so I don't have to keep changing the water. I'll also be using either a rag or paper towels to just mop up the excess water every time I rinse my brushes. I also love using a ceramic palette to mix my paints on. Now, let's get to the paints. You don't have to use the same colors as me or even the same brands of watercolor paint, but please make sure you use artist quality watercolor paint to get the best results. I'll be using lagoon blue, ultramarine, and quinacridone purple, these are all by the Brand Smink. I'll also be using some indigo by the Brand Holbein, later on, I'll be using a little bit of white gouache by the brand Windsor and Newton. If you choose to add a few magical touches and shimmer later on to your painting, you are more than welcome to use some white metallic paint and some gold metallic paints. I'm also going to be using some table salt or some rock salt to create some patterns on the whale's body, but you can use whatever salt you have at home. I'm also going to be using a white gel pen, a blue gel pen, and a black fine liner to add some detail to the whale later on in the process. I will also be using some 24 carat genuine gold leaf. This is to add some barnacles later on to the whale's body. I'll be also using this adhesive by this brand to stick the gold leaf onto the whale's body. Very finally, I'll be using the tip of a small spare brush that I have to put some of that adhesive onto my painting and just a very soft fluffy brush to just brush off the excess gold leaf once we have stuck it onto the whale. Those are all the materials that I will be using, so let's get started. 3. Sketching: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the sketching section of this class, where we're about to sketch a really cool pose of a humbag whale. Thank you so much for joining me. I can't wait. But right before I take you through the sketching process, I just thought it would be important to point out a couple of the anatomical features that are unique to this species of whale, which is the Humbag whale, just so you know what I'm talking about when I take you through the sketching process. So this will just take a very, very short while. And to help, to help me just explain a couple of things to you. I have this cute little model of a Humbag whale. It's a toy that belonged to my kids when they were very young and it's been through a lot of wear and tear. I think it got left out in the garden a couple of times, so it may look a little bit dirty. So I have this cute little model, and I also took some time to just prepare for you a few different views of the Humbag whale. And so we're just going to take just a minute or two just to point out the main features, just so you know exactly what I'm talking about. So this is our three D model here and it's a very cute model. But I just want to take you through my drawing first. So this is the above view of the humbck whale. So you don't really see much from the above view, but what you will notice are the double blowholes you'll also notice these round little projections which are called tubcles. These tubcles tend to be on top of the head around the mouth, around, you know, just the mouth area in general, but you will also see some of it on these fins that are called the pectoral fins, as you can see in this diagram over here. So yeah, these are just quite distinct to this species of whale. You know, I think it gives it that very characteristic look that's really cool and unique to this species. So obviously, in the side profile, we got the eyes. We've got this huge mouth, which we can see from this angle, which is just a slit, that goes all the way from the tip over here and it looks like it goes down to the very tip of the pectoral fin. When I say pectoral fins, they are just the side fins, okay? This model actually is being very cooperative and has opened its mouth to show you that if you can see here, it's probably covered with a bit of grid. This is what you call a balloon. Instead of teeth, they have these plates called ballens and it's really cool because it acts as a filter. When our whale opens its mouth really wide to try and eat krill, it swallows a lot of water. And the ballen or this filter just filters out all the rill for it to eat and then it can just expel the water later on through the blowhole. So it's all good. So the humbug whale is a species of ballin whale. Okay? Now, what you might also notice is for such a huge animal, it actually has a very tiny dorsal fin compared to the rest of its body. That's quite unique. I mean, if we compare them to, dolphins and, um, and sharks and even killer whales that have very prominent dorsal fins. Yeah, that's a cool feature about it. Also, something interesting is their pectoral fins almost one third the length of its body. These are very long fins. Of course, this is the underside that I've done here just to show you this cool view of the whale. We have, what you see are these grooves, and they're actually called ventral grooves or pleats. And so a whale typically a humbug whale would typically have 14 to 35 of these and they start kind of at the tip of the mouth here, and they go somewhere around two thirds of the body. So these pleats are actually really cool because when our whale opens its mouth really wide to swallow all that water and feed on krill, this really helps its throat to kind of expand and give it that elastic quality. So yeah, these are really cool features about it. And also another cool thing is that when you look at the bottom of a whale and you look at these beautiful flukes or the tail of the whale, the humbug whale has this very distinct, beautiful, massive tail, and I think we all have seen this kind of shape before in art, in jewelry, when you see, you know, someone I know actually has a beautiful tail pendon the humbag whale on a necklace. It's really beautiful. What's really cool too is that each whale has unique markings on a the underside of the tail, and these act as, you know, fingerprints. It helps scientists identify individual whales. So yeah, it's pretty cool that each of them have very different marks. I've taken you through. I think there's just one more thing I'd like to point out. So they are known for having boncles, right? Bncles are these things that grow on the whale and you can see them around the mouth, around the eye area. Even you will see some growing on the underbelly. I used to think like, Oh, poor whale, it has these boncles growing on it, poor guy, can't remove it. But believe it or not, because I've watched quite a few documentaries on Humbag whales, these boncles that you can also find on the pectoral fins can actually help it defend itself. For instance, if a killer whale wants to try and attack it, it might think twice when the whale puts out this huge pectoral fin covered with bancles that are very sharp. I actually serves the whale as a defense mechanism, which I thought was pretty cool when I learned that. Before I talk a lot, I just wanted to point this all out for you before we start the sketching right now. I will include a copy of this in the resources section of this class for you. So here is the paper that I'm going to use now. Now, I always use the same paper. I might just turn the sheet over because I noticed a bit of a spot on that one on that page. But here we are I might just put my little model to the side over here, and I'm just going to make sure that you can see everything. I might just zoom out slightly because I don't want you to miss out on any of my sketching. So let's begin now. So rather than just doing that side profile that I've seen in a lot of art previously, I want to take you through how to sketch a pose that is quite cool where we will see a lot of the features of the whale. We will get to see its eyes, its belly, its pectoral fins, as well as that beautiful tail. The only thing we won't be able to see is maybe the dorsal fin. We might only just see a tiny bit of it. But I just felt like this will be a cool pose that's a little bit different from all the art out there that already exists. So now, a Humbeck whale may seem very intimidating to draw. It looks like a very strange creature, some parts are small, some parts are very big. Let me really simplify this process. We are going to start with just a curve. Just a curve. I'm using my lead holder that I've used in quite a few of my previous classes. It's just a stateless mass technical two MM lead holder. I love using this because it helps me to get that initial shape of the whale. All I'm going to do now is I'm going to start from this point and I'm just going to just let my hand, I'm just pivoting my hand right now on the piece of paper, and I'm just going to do a curve that looks like this. We started here and we're just very lightly. I'm just doing this natural curve. And I'm going to get to this point, and I'm going to start kind of straightening it out a little bit. Okay. Believe it or not, if you could do that, you've already done a lot of your whale as crazy as that sounds. And from this point now, I'm going to just start forming a thicker. Well, I'm sorry, I'm meaning from this point and I'm just going to go up here. Now I'm going to start curving a little bit more and making this section here a bigger, a bit thicker than it was here. Don't worry, we can always adjust this later. I might just do that here. I just want to make this part a little bit fatter. Now we're going to start going more steeper. The line's going to be a little bit steeper and I'm now going. Now as you can see, this curve has become more of a straight line that's going at almost 45 degree angle and we're going to meet over here. When we get to this point, we are now going to connect the two lines. With a rounded edge, a rounded point like that. Let me just use a soft eraser to erase this line so I don't confuse everyone. If you can get a shape like this, you've already done the hardest part of this drawing. Okay? So let's start to refine this a little bit more. Right here, this is actually where your tail is going to go. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to start building a tail. The tail is huge and if you want, you can even amplify how big this tail is. You can exaggerate it, make it a little bit bigger if you want. But the tail tends to have a little pointed bit over here. Because this is going to be a bit curve, the center line is going to come down here. This is how I'm going to now meet here in this little line that I've drawn down here. It's going to look this is this is half of the tail that I've already drawn. We can refine this later. I just want to put this down for the shape. Now I'm going to do the same on this side. Let's see. I'm just going to repeat this. But I don't mind amplifying that tail because it's so beautiful and it's so distinct of the species. I don't want to do too many lines over this now, and I can always refine this later, but let's get this final shape going now. I'm quite. Let's just connect this. As you can see, I've made that part more defined. Now, I love this part that goes up here. I'm just going to darken it a bit and just define it a little bit more here. Now, as you can probably guess, this is where the mouth of the whale is going to be. We've got this beautiful shape here and I just wanted to define that a little bit more. We've got this beautiful shape of the tip of the mouth. I just want to exaggerate that a little bit. It's going to come out a little bit more. Now, I'm just going to go down here. This is the belly now that we're doing. Okay. All right. Now, let's start making our whale come alive. I think somewhere up here at this point here, I'm going to start doing the mouth slit. From this angle, the mouth slit is this straight horizontal line that suddenly takes this curve, this very sharp turn that goes down like that. Then it forms an almost rounded rectangular shape, if that makes sense. I'm just going to extend this line a little bit. I can always change that line later. If you're happy with your mouth line, just making sure. I might just make this go a little bit higher up here. Let me just use my very small thin as mechanical eraser just to erase that because I want to try and draw as cleanly as possible. Okay, that looks good. Now, I think I just want to place the eye. The eye goes somewhere over here. They have these eyes that can look a little bit sleepy to me anyway. I'm just going to draw an eye shape. We can give this a lot more detail later. Maybe I might just draw a little eyelid here. But I really want to we will put some effort in to make our eye look really good later when we paint it. Now it's all about getting that shape first. Now I just want to draw a very light line to distinguish, um, where the underbelly is going to be and where the coloration is going to change a little. This is just the line where the top and the bottom get distinct. So I'm just going to just that's just the Okay. So I think I'll do that later. I think I want to just put down where the pectoral fin is. So we're going to do a pectoral fin that looks this is the start of it, the beginning, and it's extending all the way down here. Because these pectoral fins are quite long, once more, if you want, you can extend them to be very long. If you want, you can exaggerate that. So we're going to see maybe a bit of the we're not going to see a very flat view of it. We're actually going to see maybe the sort of this view of it, kind of the very edge of it. Later on, maybe we could add a couple of lines. Actually, I feel like this part should be a bit thicker here and then it goes a bit thinner here. Okay. We can also do things we'll see part of the underside of the fin. So let me just draw two lines there. And on this fin, we can maybe just start adding really roughly some of these tubcles or barnacles that we'll see on the edge of the fin. We can refine that a lot more later, but, sorry, I probably don't like that I drew that right on the very. Sorry, I didn't like that I drew that right at that very junction. So how about I put the tubcles and banacles more a little bit on the top here, so that we can still see that distinct, um, that boundary between the top and the bottom. I just didn't want to lose that over there. Okay, all this can be refined later as well. So let's just get that shape going first. But so far, I'm happy with it. I think I just want to extend it slightly beyond the body, just for some drama, just some dramatic effect, even though their pectoral fins are very, very long. All right, so we can work on that more later. We've done as you can see, our whale is already coming to life. And, um, I just want to now do the other pectoral fin. If we're seeing this over here, I would say that the other pectoral fin would be somewhere maybe just right over here. This is all me estimating it. But with this whale, sorry, with this fin that's on the opposite side of the body, I think we see a bit of a different view. With this one, we're seeing it just right edge on. Whereas this one we see it more like the broader the broader view of it. We get to see a little bit more of that shape. With the shape, it is unique as it starts from a narrow point and it goes outwards a bit and into this kind of curve. I don't know how to describe it. It looks a bit like a knife, sort of, you know, um, with a serrated edge. So something along the lines of that Let me just see. Maybe I might extend it just a little bit more just because these are, these are supposed to be around one third. I'm just composing this picture as we go along. But I've watched a lot of a lot of documentaries. I've seen a lot of pictures of them on the Internet. The Internet and Pintras are very valuable sources if you want to try and compose a picture. It doesn't have to be exactly the same as what you see in a scientific photograph. You're free to also have fun and play. Now, I'm just going to draw some of these are the tubicles that are sticking out. Okay. I might just do a couple more. I don't want to do too many. This is going to be the underside of the pectoral fin that we're seeing from this view. That's already looking really, really cool. I'm really happy with that. What I want to do now is, I just want to make sure I get the proportions. I don't know if I made my whale a little bit big on the top and maybe I might just shave it down a little bit here, because the Humbeg whales have these very beautiful curves about them. Yeah. I like that more. I just took off a little bit, very small amount of it. If you want now, let's start doing the underbelly. For me, personally, I feel like when I'm looking at this, I think maybe I want to maybe extend this part just a little bit more outwards. This is the time now that we've already got the rough shape. We've already got a good guideline going and now we can do things like just refine it a little bit more. I might not even have to erase any of this because this can just be another one of the ventro pleats. I just wanted to extend it a little bit more because I think it makes sense that we're going to be seeing more of the underbelly from this angle. Right now, I just want to take you through. This is a line I drew earlier that marks the distinction between the top color of the whale and the underside. Let's just follow this now very lightly. We're going to just follow that mouth line at this part here. Okay. I made a mistake there. They're all going to converge a little at this point here. Now, we can just start doing these underbelly ventral grooves now. Now, you don't have to do very specific lines. The lines are going to stop somewhere at the two third mark of the body. They don't go all the way to the tail. Now we can start we have these lines here that follow the mouth that are in the darker section. Now in the underbelly, they're just going to start up at this rough guideline here and they're just going to go down. I suggest that maybe try and follow the contours of the body. Don't do your lines too straight when you're going down, make sure they're following a bit of a curve. I think I'll just continue these lines over here. Okay. So there are whales looking really good. Right now, if you want to add this, you would add the dorsal fin somewhere down here. The dorsal fin is somewhere halfway, but it's so tiny and especially from this angle, you probably wouldn't see much. I'm just going to add the tiniest like dorsal fin there. Okay. So it would look like really almost nothing, right compared in this particular view as well. If you want, you can add that in. If you don't want to, you don't have to either. Okay. Let me just how about we add another line here just for, um just because this is where the fin is. Also, I'm just going to add a couple more lines around the eyes just to give it a bit of personality. The last thing I want to do now is just to add maybe we can always paint this on later, but maybe we could add some of those tubcles right now. I also have some ideas later on for how to paint this. I might tell you later because when I do a piece of art, I have a rough idea of what I want to do, but that might change as I go along and I look at the art and I reassess it and I start thinking, Oh, how can I make this look even more unique or more striking or more magical depending on my mood? We can add some of those. I also want to add maybe some barnacles growing on the underbelly, which we have seen in some I feel like maybe there should be another groove over here. Yeah. So we can even add some of that in the underbelly because I have an idea I would like to try later to make this art look even cooler and I promise I'll reveal it to you later when we start painting and you can decide if you want to do this or not. But so far, I'm loving what we're seeing. Myo now when I'm looking at the angle of this, I want to just change the orientation of the tail a little bit. I feel that because it's curving, I feel that maybe we should see something that looks like this where it curves a little bit more to this side. I think so because, um, I think maybe this side shouldn't look as big. I think it should just that angle where it's curving, I think we should maybe see a little bit less of this and I don't want to draw it too low. I also think maybe we should see maybe a little bit of this, that's the Yeah, I should curve more towards this side since the whales in looking this way, is curving more. I feel like this should be a little bit more towards the right side, if that makes sense. I hope that does. This is just a little detail that I've noticed and maybe this side should appear bigger. And we should maybe we should see more of the underside here and less of this line that I've drawn. This is just showing that this is the upper side of the tail. It will all make sense. I promise when I start painting it and you can see that for yourself. So I just thought if I'm going to make this look a little bit more realistic, I think it should follow this contour where the midline is going to be curving a little, okay? So there we go. We can also do things like maybe make the tail are a little bit more jagged, just a little bit to make it look a little bit more realistic if you'd like. Okay. So I think our whale is almost complete now. There's just a few things I want to do. I just want to add a little bit of I'm going to extend this line here, which is where the upper side of the whale meets the underside. I'm just going to roughly kind of bring that line down and it's going to be it's not going to be a straight line. You know where the dark coloration meets the underbelly. So we're just going to do a little bit of a of a rough boundary that's a little bit irregular, a little bit, because the color is not going to just be a straight line. So if you've got something that looks like this, you should be very, very happy. We've already done a lot of it. We've already done, yeah, the whale. So now I'm just looking and seeing I'm being a little bit picky and seeing if I need to do anything else, but I don't think I do. I just want to define that mouth line a little bit more before we take a little break and we start putting down the base wash for our whale. I'm just going to mark that mouth line very, very, um, very boldly now, so you don't get confused with other lines. But yeah, just standing up now to have an overall look at it. I love it. I love the way my whale looks. I hope yours looks you're happy with yours too. Yeah, I think we are actually ready to go. There is another section down here that we could add a little bit of a darker boundary if we want because that's just going to be again on this side of the whale where the upper side of the whale meets the underside of the belly. Oh, we can paint this on later. It's no big deal. I'm just coloring it in a little bit with my pencil just to mark that boundary. But I think it looks great. I hope you're happy with your whale. I'm just checking out that tail first. I just want to make sure that the tail is the angle looks right. So this side should look a little bit more like smaller than the other. Okay, I'm going to stop now. I hope you love your whale. So let's take a little break. And when we come back, we are going to start choosing a base color for our whales. It's going to be a lot of fun. So have a little break. Get your brushes, paints, and your water jars ready, and I will see you in a very short time. 4. Painting the underbelly base coat : Hi, everyone, and welcome back. And I hope you had a nice little break, and you've now got your painting materials ready, like your palette, like your jars of water, and your paint brushes. And, I just want to let you know, like, now would be a good time if you want to just fix up whatever, you know, clean up any lines you don't want or to just, you know, finish up on your sketch, and if you are happy with it, let's begin. I want to take you through the painting process. I want to talk a little bit about the paints that you could use. With all my classes, I never ever tell students what colors that they should use. I will only show them the colors that I use, but because this is your art, you can honestly choose whatever color you want. If you want a whale that looks very realistic and natural, then you probably want to choose a color for its top that is on the grayish side. But you see, even with humbag whales in the wild, even though they are considered one species, scientists now believe there are three separate subspecies because we do see variations in color. Some of the humbag whales, depending on what region they're living in, they can have a very grayish, a light gray top, and they can also have a pretty whitish underbelly that you see. They can also be a really dark navy blue color and even their underbelly can be dark. These color variations, not even to mention the rare occasion of getting an albino humbag whale, which is quite amazing to look at a completely white whale. So the reason I'm saying this is because, yeah, I've watched a lot of documentaries, recently to try and plan this class. And I noticed there's so much variation in color, which is why I'm just going to let you decide whatever color you want to do. So with me, I've decided to go and with a more traditional sort of, um, bluish gray colored top with maybe a lighter sort of underbelly because I wanted to add shadows and I also want to make these bancles stand out more on the underbelly. So I want to take you through the paints that you could use. So in the past, I have, um utilize things like granulating colors in some of my classes because as a teacher, I like to introduce you to things that are now available in watercolors. For example, this was a beautiful color called dust gray from a brand called Harmonia, and as you can see, it says granulating color. I've used this color before and it is a beautiful beautiful grayish color when I say granulating, the paint, once you apply it is actually going to clum together. Some of the pigments will clumb together and create the look of granules, which is really cool. So in a way that will just add to the texture of the whale body. But because I realize now that some of my students may not have access to paints like this or the same brand. And because of that, even though you can use granulating colors if you want, there are other brands besides Harmonia out there, I decided for this class, I'm going to mix my own color just using traditional watercolors. But I just wanted to talk about this because that's an option that you can use that would work beautifully in this project, I have used them in the past, but for this particular um, painting. I want to mix my own color and I can show you how I'm going to do it. You can also go mix your colors or you can also try granulating colors. That's the beauty of art. This is your own personal work. So for the colors that I've decided to use, I just want to show you right now. I would love to use this color. This is a sort of turquoise shade and it's by this brand Schminck. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. The Schminck's a German brand, I believe. So this is artist quality watercolors. Okay. And it is a beautiful color. Somebody gifted me this as a set. And it also came with this beautiful blue. So this is ultramarine. So sorry, this looks like turquoise, but it's called lagoon blue in the set that it came in, but it's by the brand Smink. This is ultramarine, which is also a color that I think a lot of watercolor students would use. I just want to add a little bit of this beautiful purple color just for a little bit of variation in there for, you know, the top part of the whale. And I'm going to use this beautiful color for the underbelly. Later on, we can create some shadows. I might. I'm not sure right now, but I might also throw in a bit of red. I don't know. When I mix it up, I'll just see. The red can be on standby. But this is a color from a different set, and this is one of my favorite colors of all time and watercolors, Indigo. I love indigo because it is the darkest blue that you can get. I love using this for shadows. I love using this. Yeah, I use it so much in a lot of my paintings. I'm also going to keep the indigo, you know, just on the side, you know, I'm not going to need it for this first layer, but we might need indigo later for the very dark areas, the shadow areas that are on the underbelly, as well as these grooves and stuff. So I love indigo. So before I talk a lot again, I just want to let you know what I'm going to do. I'm going to start with the underbelly, okay? I'm going to just wet the underbelly area and start laying down some turquoise in there. I'm also going to paint this area of the flukes and this area of the pectoral fin. That's a behind the whale. The reason I'm doing this now is I want to just have more control over the painting. I'm still going to wet the area that I want and I'm going to drop in this paint, but I don't want to do the entire whale at one go and put all these colors in because then there's a chance that it might get a little messy, a little muddy, and we don't want that. So how about I start with this beautiful gorgeous color called lagoon blue. I'm just going to stand up and check that you can see, look at that there's a bit of liquid in it because I haven't used this color in a while, but no worries, it'll be fine. Okay. So A, really important. Have a spare piece of paper that you can just test out your colors on before just to see it's the right intensity, especially if you are going to mix colors together. You want to just test it out before you put it on your paper. Just have a piece of paper handy with you. I've got one over here. All right. I've got the blue now. I'm just wondering maybe I might just put all my pins out to make it easier for later. Sorry, this was a little bit tight. It was screwed on a bit tight. This color, I might be using it later. I'm going to custom make my own whale color later on. I'm just going to put the colors on the palette. These are actually this brand, even though it is a little bit expensive, the colors are very smooth. The pigments are beautiful. I use a lot of different brands, you don't have to use the most expensive brand as long as it's artist quality watercolors. That's what's the most important. And you can find artist watercolors in other brands that suit your own individual budget. Okay. So what I'm going to do now is let me just get my brushes ready. So I might just use this large round, so that's a size 12, dipping it in clean water, and I'm just going to do the underbelly area. I'm just wetting this area. It's okay if you go a little bit over this boundary that we drew just now, the boundary between the top and the bottom of the whale. That's okay because we'll be painting over it later. Also, I want to say just have your sea salt ready or whatever salt you have. I think I have table salt. I used rock salt last time, but the effects were just very they were hard to see with the rock salt because each granule was just so huge. I've wet this area. I've only wet the underbelly. I'm not going to Well, I guess I could wet the tail now. That would be right too. It doesn't really matter if the colors go there. I'm also maybe I'll do the fin later because I don't want it to bleed too much now. So I just have more control. Okay? So I can wet the til later. What's important now is I'm going to use a much smaller brush, a size four brush. And what I'm going to do first is look at this color. It's beautiful, right? It's a beautiful, beautiful, turquoise blue. I'm just going to wet it a little bit. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to follow the contours of these lines here that we've drawn, and it's okay if it bleeds out. That's actually what I want. Hold the brush, however you want to try and stick to the line, but this bleeding is actually what I want because it's natural, it looks natural. Anyway, later on, we are going to go over this we are going to go over the lines when they're dry to just darken it. What I'm doing now is I just want a little bit of bleeding from the paints because this looks very natural when it dries and it's helping to disperse the color in a natural way that will also help to accentuate the contours of the underbelly of the whale. I see two lines here. It's okay if they get a little bit muddled together because that's what we want. We want a natural look about it. Okay. Yeah, that's looking good. I might just take some of that blue over here as well. Okay. Yeah, that's looking good. I think I can even do the very outer edge, even though we're going to go over it later, with a darker color that more whoops, I might have gone out a little bit there, but that's okay. Just be a little bit careful here. All right. This bottom part will be darker anyway later, so that's fine. Okay. Well, I might as well do this part then. So what we've done is we've followed the lines, but it also the way the paint spreads there, that also provides a bit of shadow, which is cool. Okay. Now, let me get onto the flukes, the tail or the flukes. Yeah, that's what it's called. I'm going to use this very same color. I just like to wet this area just to help the paint spread in a more natural way so it doesn't just dry in one spot because I'm going to use the the wet on wet method to just drop in paint this side is already drying because it's a hot day here. You don't have to be too neat about this. That's fine. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just drop in some paint along along the boundaries of it. I think over here, we should have a little bit more blue over here because it's folded a little with the angle of the whale. It's okay to put a bit more blue here, but I might just follow the contours, the lines that we drew. But I'm going to kind of leave most of the middle part untouched and just let the paint from the edges sort of spread to kind of spread a little bit into the middle. But I would like to leave the middle kind of untouched. So whatever spreads in there will be good. Okay. And maybe this part I just want to do this part a little bit, just to shape that edge of the whale's tail a little bit more. Maybe because this parts in shadow, I'm just going to drop in a little bit more pain. But as you can see, it's going to spread naturally by itself. I think that's enough. I think that looks good. We have these little I drew a little bit of a little serrated edge of the whale's tail, but that's okay. We can always emphasize that later. Now, I'm just going to wait for this to dry a little bit first because I don't want this part to bleed into this, so I'm going to let that dry. I think in the meantime, I can do this fin. Even though this fin we don't see a lot of the underside, but I might as well do that, too. I'm just going to use some clean water. As you can see, it's not touching this area that we just painted, which is why I want to do this first. Okay. So the colors are already looking so beautiful. The way it's spreading is beautiful. So what I want to do is I'm just going to maybe kind of, um, go a little bit around those tubcles that I was talking about earlier. What I'm painting now is going to be the underside that we can see of the fin from that angle. Yeah, I mean, I'm fine to just let this kind of spread there. That's fine because this is the top part's going to be the same color as the whale's upper body. That's fine. I just wanted to add a little bit of shadow there. I'm just wondering if this is dry yet. Let me just have a look. Now, I didn't put salt for this area. When I was talking about the salt just now, I'm sorry. I meant I was going to put the salt up here, because I feel like the underbelly already has a lot going on and the salt is going to look beautiful when we do the top part. Sorry, I hope I didn't confuse anybody, but we will be doing that later. I'm pretty sure this is dry enough for me to just very carefully put some clean water on. So this fin is towards the back and it's more in shadow in this photograph. So we're just thinking about that. So when I drop in the pane, I'm going to do the edge that this side that's closer to the whale's body will probably have more blue, right? And we're just going to let that spread because this is more in the shadow area. And we're just going to let this spread down here, but we'll probably have to use a darker color later on to emphasize that. I'm just going to let these I might just go around the tubicles Okay. I hope you guys are having fun watching your whale come to life. Yeah, all we're doing is the base right now, the base coat. I might just use a little bit of a clean damp brush to just kind of help spread this color a little bit more. But that's already looking very beautiful. I might just drop in a bit more of this beautiful turquoise color. Once more, it's called blue lagoon. Yeah. And maybe just just outline the tubcles a bit with it. I might as well just outline the whole thing. Yeah. We will do shadow later. So this is already we've already done the first layer of our underbelly, and it's already looking gorgeous. So why don't we just let everything just dry now? Let's just drop in a little bit more. Sorry, I just noticed this edge here looks like it's not connected. Yeah. So why don't we just I'm just dabbing in a bit more color here. Near towards the body. But I'm going to stop now. So why don't we just let this all completely dry first? And when we come back, it's going to be very exciting. We're going to mix a color for the top part of our whale, and we're going to paint it on, and it's going to be a lot of fun, and we're going to drop in salt when we do that. So just take a little break. Let this completely dry, and I will see you very soon. 5. Painting the upper body base coat: Hi, everyone. Welcome back. And I hope you had a nice little short break. Yeah, and I hope that underbelly and the fins of your whale are completely dry. So mine's dry to the touch. And now we're going to do this cool custom making color process for our whale. So I just want to make sure that you've got everything ready before we apply the paint. It's good to have everything ready like your salt should be just at the side here, ready to use. Okay? In fact, I might just put the salts over here and I'll just grab them when I need to. I hope you can still see everything. Yep, that's good. So, it helps to have your desk all organized. I'm working on a very small desk area, so I just have to make sure that only my necessities are here. So just have your palette ready, your clean water ready, as well as your brushes. So we're not going to start painting yet. I just think we should take this time right now. And if you have a spare piece of paper, I'm just going to actually yeah, grab mine. I just have a spare piece of paper here. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't dirty before I put it down. I want to custom make a color which is sort of like a bluish gray, but maybe with a bit of warm tones, which is why I have the purple already. I'm not so sure. This is a purple that's more on the reddish side. So it's a warmer purple rather than a cooler purple that's more towards the bluish side. I'm just going to take my size eight round brush. I'm just going to use a little bit of water. I also during the break, I also grab my paints gray, which is another color I use a lot, just in case the indigo isn't quite enough for the shadows. All right? So indigo by itself, as I can demonstrates just a dark blue, which would look great as well. But for me, I want to kind mix that a little bit with something else. I'm just going to put it over here. Let me just check that you can see that. Yeah. Okay, so I've grabbed quite a bit of indigo. Just be careful because indigo is a dark color. So I think first, I might just Maybe that's too much indigo. I'll use that later. I'm just going to use this little well over here. This is just French ultra Well, it's called ultramarine blue, but it's very close to French ultramarine. If you can't get this brand, it's the same or you could use ultramarine as well. What I want to do is, it's a little bit too blue for me on its own. I'm just going to start in this well, mixing a little bit of this indigo in here. What we get now is like sort of like a dark like it's a color that's in between, but I think that will look really good because once we put the salt in as well, it will really start to we'll get some beautiful patterns. That to me just looks like I just want to add just a tiny bit of the purple just to see what that's like. So as you can see, the purple, I like this because it looks a little bit dreamy to me with some purple in there. So this is something that you should do. I mean, I'm all for spontaneous art and putting colors on, but it's good to have a bit of an idea and to just test out colors before you put them onto your page. But, you know, if you feel confident doing this spontaneously, that's great. I think I'm just going to mix a little bit more of this purple in. And what's great is later on, you know, we can build up some shadow with the indigo. Yeah. This is a very bluish purple mix. Maybe I might just add a little bit more indigo in here to mute it a bit, but I like a bit of purple showing. I quite like this color. Okay. I just want to make sure that I make enough of it to put on so that I'm not stressed when I'm trying to, you know, put the salt in, cover the whole area. So let's just mix a little bit more of this. I'm putting more blue in here, and then I'm going to get some of that lovely purple which has some nice warmer tones to it. Yep. Grab a little bit more of it. I like that. The color itself will also and I'm going to grab some indigo just to mute it slightly, but we still have this gorgeous color. Now that looks a bit dark, I might just throw in a little bit more of that purple in. That's good. I think I made enough to go, I made enough to go around. Okay. And remember, when we're working with salt, using the salt patterns will stand out the most against a darker color. Right now, I'm just going to keep this paint on my brush since I already mixed it and I don't want to waste it. What I'm going to do now is I'm only going to wet the area or rather the areas that I want to apply this paint, which is supposed to be the top color of my whale. I mean, even though the eyes of the whale are dark, I'm going to try and avoid the eye in case, you know, I want to do something with it later. You know, if you can save lighter areas, you know, if you can before not painting on them, that's good rather than having to, you know, kind of lighten an area. So I'm also just going to I've wet the areas that I wanted, and this area down here as well, is going to get wet. Okay, that's looking great. There's this tiny little area between the fin and the underbelly too. I might as well do the dorsal fin. Just check that it's nice and nice and even. You should get a nice even sheen. If you feel like you've put too much, I'm also going to do this little area here. If you feel like you've put too much water, just feel free to remove it with your brush by just a just dabbing your brush on a piece of paper towel. Okay. I'm standing up just to have a look at this, and it looks quite even, so I want to drop it in already. With my brush, let's have fun. All right. Deep breath, and let's go. Let's have fun. I'm just going to drop it in over here. So this is looking kind of purple, but that's okay. What I can do now is while I'm painting this, I can also, just remember we have to drop in. I'm going to drop in a little bit more indigo at the top here while I paint. Okay. And remember, don't forget the salt step, all right? We want to try and cover this area as quickly as we can, but, try and do it as carefully as you can. I'm just kind of mixing a few a bit more like I'm varying the color as I go. If I find some areas are too purple, I'm just going to add. Don't forget this area down here too and where it meets the underbelly. That looks good. I'm just adding a bit more blue up here. Just be careful near these edges. It's okay if you cover the tubcles now, that's absolutely fine. All right. All right. That's looking beautiful. What I'm going to do now is the bottom part, before I put the pin in the bottom, I'm just going to put a little bit of salt. Look, I spilled a little bit, but I'm just putting it in my hand so I can control it a little bit because sometimes a lot of salt comes out or not enough comes out, there we go. We've put some salt there. All right. You probably don't want to be too heavy handed with the salt. Like, you don't want to put too much down. Okay, there was a lot of salt that I put here. So I'm just going to dust this off right now off my hand. And if you want, you can try to use the rock salt. But personally, I felt like it didn't it didn't really give a lot of patterns because they're quite big, as you can see. All right. So I'm just going to put some of the salt over here. All right. Now this is still nice and wet, so let's go and do this part now, and then we're going to do the same thing. We're going to drop in salt there. Okay, don't worry, just work at a confidence speed. You don't have to go super fast or anything like that, but you just want to bear in mind that, you know, it will eventually dry. The pain will dry eventually. So you want to get the salt in while it's wet. So I'm going to I decide I'm going to make this part a little bit more purple so I grab some purple. All right, feel free to vary the color. Even though we made a mixture, as you paint it, you can drop in some of the other colors that you use to make the mixture. This is how art is so fun. Maybe down here, I might drop in a little bit of indigo here, just like pure indigo. That's how I'm varying the color. And I'm just going to bring this tiny thin line. The line is just going to get a bit thinner down there. All right. So this is looking great and I'm just going to kind of use the tip of my brush to do a bit of the edges here, but I have to bear in mind, the paints going to dry soon. So let's get let me just do the areas around the tubicles carefully. But look at that pattern. We're already getting a very cool pattern. So I'm just going to try and close this salt. As you can see, a lot of salt out. It comes out quite quickly. I'm just going to put maybe a couple of these rock salts, but I'm not so sure whether this is actually going to make much of a pattern. But as you can see, when this dries, you'll really see the full effect. We've already added a really cool speckled look to our whale shark. It's looking really, really gorgeous. If you think the pattern looks a little bit too starck, don't worry about it because this is only our base layer. We're going to also paint over it later. While that's happening, I might use some of this color and just go over this part of the tail. You know where we can see some of the top side? Because I love this purple. I'm going to make some parts a little bit a little bit lighter, purply. Some parts are purply, more purply than others, some parts are bluer. That's looking great to me. Then we can just bring that line down again and I might just go up here with the pain. I think we can see just maybe a little bit, a thinner outline of this side of this part of the tail because the tails if I use my model, it's turned a little bit with this angle. So we're going to see more of the upper side of this half of the tail than this side, if that makes sense. Okay. Remember, this is art, so just have fun. You don't have to be so scientific. I just think it looks great if you outline the edge of the tail, gives it a little bit more definition. That's what I'm doing while this is happening. Another thing that I can do as well is I can re wet this area, this fin and I might drop in some of this mixture that I made while the top is drying. Now, when you're using salt, if you don't know this, you have to wait for the salt to completely dry. Okay? Well, rather the pain to completely dry before you start scraping the salt off. You want to do this because you don't want if I move the salt now, I'm going to end up just completely smudging my pain. I have to wait for it to dry. As you just saw me wet the entire pectoral fin on this side, what I'm doing now is I'm dropping in some of this darker color that we use for the upper side of the of the whale because this fin is in shadow. I just thought I might as well start building up some shadow layers by adding this painting, this color. I'm also just going to take this around the tubcles, but I'm not going to paint the entire thing in shadow. I think the shadow should be more concentrated up here closer to the whale's body. Because I don't want lines that are that stock, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a clean damp brush to just go around it like that, around the edges to just blend the edges in more. As you can see, you see some purple, you see some blue, the colors, diffusing a little and some colors of watercolor are actually quite naturally granulating, so we will see that happening too. Before I let everything dry, I'm just wondering maybe I could paint this pectoral fin very carefully too with some of that shadow color. I'm just going to wet the entire area here. Because my pain is already starting to dry, the salt is absorbing a lot of that water from that previous area. All I'm doing here is, I just want to take some of that color and we can build up more color later. Don't worry about it and just place it near the top of the whale or the top of this fin rather. Okay. And I'm just deciding just, you know, how to do this. But I do believe this bottom area, this bottom half here should be darker because it's in shadow. But the colors kind of spreading, but that's fine with me. I can always add the shadows in later, but I might as well just start I want to leave the very edge here a little bit lighter because this part would probably be catching the sun. These are little things you just need to keep in mind based on the lighting of the subject that you're painting. But it's okay. I can do the bottom half later in shadow. That's fine. So I was just trying to do some stuff while I'm waiting for everything to dry. But now would be a great time for you to just take a break, when this completely dries, you'll know, I think you might need like you know, just observe it, you know, if it seems like it's still very I would give it maybe a good half an hour, at least, okay? You should not see any moisture at all. So it shouldn't be shiny at all. But if you want to be safe, I would say give it an hour. Go do something, go and, you know, wash your brushes, change your water, go have a break, go take your dog for a walk. Yeah. And so when we come back, we're just going to leave this as it is to dry. When we come back, it's completely dry. We're going to take off the salt, and we're going to start painting another layer over. So see you really soon and go enjoy your break. 6. Building color and definition: Hi, everyone. And I hope at this point, your salt is completely dry minus, as you can see, it's dry to the touch. And what I want you to do now is I want you to just take your painting with you, go somewhere like your car porch or your balcony or even over a bin. And I just want you to very gently use your fingers, make sure they're nice and dry and clean. And I want you to brush all this salt off, like in any of these places I suggested that you don't mind, you know, maybe, like, vacuuming it up later. I don't like doing this on my desk because I don't want it to go all over my pain. So how about we all go do that now, and I will just see you in a couple of seconds after I do that, see you soon. Hey, and welcome back. And as you can see, all the salt all the extra salt has been brushed off, and it might still feel a little bit rough in some edges where the salts kind of, like, stuck to the pain, and that's fine. But as you can see, we have these very, very lovely speckly sort of pattern that is pretty cool. And also because the skin of the whale shark, I'm sorry, what am I saying? The skin of the Humbag whale. Sorry, I just did a whale shark class recently. Yeah, so I'm sorry about that. Yeah, so it's nice and, um, really cool pattern here. So what we're going to do next is now that this is completely dry, what I'm going to do is I'm going to just I noticed some areas are a little bit lighter than others. So what we're going to do next is apply a layer of paint that is going to just, like, go over this and darken certain areas. And for this, right, as you can see, my whale has beautiful purplish blue sort of color. But because it's looking quite light in some areas, what I want to do next is I'm going to just do the wet on wet technique where I'm going to wet this area and drop in just I feel indigo indigo is a darker color than this purple. I will just darken certain areas beautifully without taking away too much of that pattern, but it will mute the pattern down a bit. But before I do that, I just want to look at the underside of the of the whale. I love what we've done earlier, but I just want to now start adding a little bit more detail with what we call the pleats. These lines that we see. Now, what's really cool about these pleats or the scientific name is the ventral grooves or the ventral pleats. I they give that elasticity to the to the whale's throat so it can open its mouth and swallow lots of water and therefore feed and get the rill in. I want to start adding more dimension to that, and I think I would like to do this first before I do the top part of the whale. But if you feel a little bit intimidated right now, thinking like, Oh, maybe this is a little bit too light, a little bit too speckly, don't worry. When we do this next step, it will really mute it down a bit. We will see some of that pattern that we created, but it won't be as obvious as this. So I'm going to use my small size four round brush. I'm just checking that you can see everything. Good. You can see the palette as I do this. I'm just going to re web the same turquoise color, which is called blue lagoon in this set. I'm going to use quite a concentrated quite a concentrated type of, I mean, consistency of pain. I'm just going to start, as you can see, that's beautiful, we're adding some nice definition to our to the ventral grooves. This is going to make our whale just come to life. All these little details that we're doing now. Try and just use the tip of your brush. Okay? If you have to just start changing the angle or turning your page to just get I might actually start kind of maybe I'm just going to add another line here because it might have gotten a bit blurred over here. And then this also looks like, oh, some of those grooves are kind of concentrated in certain areas. So that kind of adds a bit of dimension to it. I feel like maybe we could sort of squeeze another line in here. Let me just put it there. So, just have fun with this. Don't take it don't get too stressed, okay? Because just the way my hand moves, I think I find it easier to start at the bottom and work my way to the top rather than down like that. That's just the way my hand goes, so I really can't wait to see the colors that you guys use for your whale. I'm just going to add another, this can meet up here, this line over here. Okay. So as you can see, we're already adding some nice dimension to this. It's okay if some of the lines that you're drawing, some of these grooves kind of meet, or they touch, that's okay. In some places. I think that looks more natural than if they all went parallel. These lines, like I said earlier when we were drawing them, they should be curved, following the contours of the body, if you want a more realistic look. Some parts it makes sense, they're going to be compressed a little bit closer and in some areas, they're going to expand more. That's just, you know, because of the contours of the whale. Maybe I might put one here. If you feel confident doing this, you don't have to watch me do every single one, but I just want to film the entire process of this whale. Whoops, that's a bit concentrated, let me just water it down a bit. And I might just start over here. I can see some of my previous lines I drew, but it's okay. I don't mind going over making new lines or going over part of the ones that I see earlier. That's okay. It looks a bit concentrated here, I might just but don't worry. We're actually going to paint, if you remember a bit of the top side. I'm just watering this down a little bit because I feel like it ended up being very dark. But it's cool. That area should be a little bit more in shadow, but don't worry. Let me just finish these lines. So we got some lines just over here now. Okay. That looks cute. And let me just finish um Let's just do another one over here. That kind of goes over this previous line that I drew. I'm just trying to use the tip of my brush, but I don't care too much if the line ends up a little bit thicker somewhere. That's okay. That's looking good for me. I think I'm going to stop here. And there are also little things that I want to do now while I'm still using the turquoise, I want to just maybe add a little bit of sorry, I don't know why the turquoise is a bit thick now, so I'm just watering it down. I just want to add a little bit of a shadow here where the ridge of the tail, where this part of the body meets the tail because I just feel like I think that part would be in a bit of shadow. And what we can do now is we can also add a little bit of maybe some dots to just add a bit of texture. So as I mentioned earlier, the markings on a whale, flukes or tail can sort of help people identify it and it's like a fingerprint of sorts for humbag whales. I want to just concentrate, do a few dots in the areas like the very tips of the tail and also maybe near this part over here where the where the body meets the tail. I just wanted to add maybe, you know, make it look a little bit natural and like, oh, this is our guys fingerprint. Yeah. But I'm not going to really touch the middle. I think I want to just leave the middle at a little bit bare. Maybe in those areas where we added we added some blue. We can just emphasize those blue areas with a few of these little dots just made using the very tip of my brush. I don't want to overdo it. Every time I say that, I end up just doing more. But, I think that's looking good, maybe just a couple more dots over here and yeah, I'm going to stop now because I can get carried away. But yeah, so that looks good. I also noticed that I forgot to paint this doors fin, but we can do that later. So I just want to maybe do whatever I need to do now with this blue before I um before I start, dealing with the top part of the whale over there. Umm I wonder what else we can do. Um, I think that's okay for now. Why don't we just focus on doing the top part? Like I said before, I already feel like my whale is quite light with purple and blue shining through. What I want to do now is just use some of the indigo just by itself. I'm going to just wet it and reactivate it because remember, always have your piece of paper handy to test it out. As you can see, this is a very dark color. So we don't want to completely cover it. I'm going to dilute this down a bit. Okay. So this is diluted down and it's already still very dark. So what I want to do is I want to first use my medium sized round brush, which is a size eight, and I'm going to very carefully wet this area that is above the pectoral fin. And what we're going to do is we are going to drop in the color, which is just indigo because I feel like we've already given it a nice purplish blue base layer. Now what I want to do is I'm going to add on top of that. So I'm just checking that I've covered everything. I can see there was an area that I didn't cover. I'm just going to focus right now. I might as well just paint the dorsal fin as well so it gets some pain now. Around this fin, try and do this gently without lifting too much of the pigment below. As you can see, some of that pigment has interacted a bit with the water. Do that gently and now I'm going to I'm just going to test up my pain first. Okay. What I want to do is I'm just going to start over here. Okay. So I'm going to go around this pectoral fin. As carefully as I can. We're going to see more shadow here around the mouth. It's okay. We will blend the line a little bit later. I don't want to completely cover this up, like the purple, but I'm just going to drop in some paint now. I'm just going to do a bit of a glaze over it, but I'm definitely going to let some of that purple shine through. I only did concentrate some color around them around the bottom of the mouth. But I just think that the top part, I'm going to leave that, I think. As you can see, I've darkened it, but I focused some of the pain mainly around this bottom half here because I feel like there will be more shadow down here than at the top. I've left the top quite light. While this is still going on, I'm going to quickly wet this area over here. It's okay. You don't have to do it so accurately. It's just because I have this paint over here already. This part is going to be a little bit darker because this is going to be underneath that pectoral fin that I'm painting. I'm just not painting the pectoral fin at the moment, though, because I will do that later. I don't want it to bleed too much into it. And now I feel like this part of the whale, which is very much below the surface can be darker. I'm going to concentrate some paint down here. All the way going down here to the tail. As you can see, we've toned it down a bit, haven't we? We've toned down It's dark over here where I drop this in, but I'm okay with that. I think that's right. I just want to drop in more of that color, but we can always darken it later. This parts in the shadow. And right under here, you would expect it to be darker. Sorry, sometimes because of the reflection, I can't see I can't see that area is dark enough, so I stand up and I think this is looking good. I don't want to darken it too much. I'm just standing up here and tilting my paper a bit just so I can have a good look. I think that looks good. I can always add more shadows later, but I just don't want to completely cover up this fin over here. Okay, so that looks good to me because this part is illuminated. So what we can do is maybe we can drop in a little bit more pain here to just give whale a bit of contours, to show, oh, yeah, there's going to be some shadow here under the mouth. We will do the same for the underbelly. I just want to let you know. Okay. I think that's enough pain for now. And while we're doing that, I might just drop in a little bit of pain. I'm not going to completely cover this purple part, but towards the bottom of this, I'm just going to drop in a little bit of this dark color that we're working with. Okay, so you can see it's not completely covering it. I'm also going to add a little bit of that dark color. I'm going to spot it a bit around the same areas that we did that we just put the turquoise in because I'm just building up that cool, sort of look of this it's identifying pattern, it's individual patterns. I'm not going to completely cover all those turquoise dots that we did, but I'm using the turquoise dots as a bit of a guideline as to where we want to put these. Just watch your hands, make sure you don't rest them on your wet pane. I've done that before. Yeah, I'm not going to completely cover it, but this looks good to me. This is just building up layers, uh, for our whale. Let me just stand up and have a look at the overall effect. That's looking good to me. Looking great. And while this is drying, I think I might actually just go and I just noticed something over here. I just noticed that the edge here looks a little bit funny. Like, we went out a little bit, so that's okay. I'm just going to use the very tip of my brush to kind of kind of height a little bit, it went out a bit. But that's okay. I think that looks good. And while this is still wet, you can take a very small round brush be size four. I'm just going to very gently go around the edge here with a clean damp brush because I want to make this transition look a bit more natural, so it's not just a hard line here between the underbelly and the um, Just at the mouth area here, I'm actually just going to remove a little bit of paint now by just using a clean damp brush. I'm cleaning it in water and I'm also just removing some of that paint because I just want a nice clean transition here, and I think this area can be a little bit lighter. We also have the tubcles here. Yeah, that's all I've done over here. That's just a matter of personal preference. I might just remove a little bit of that pain here because I just want that transition to look smooth. I didn't really want a hard line, but it's okay. I don't mind this area having a hard line because this is where we start seeing um a very, very clear definition between the top part of the whale and the bottom part of the whale. Let's just take a second to look at what's going on at the top here. I actually from my angle, we are letting some of that speckles come through. So we see some of that beautiful pattern and that looks a bit like the light from above playing a bit with the skin. It's not as white with salt as it used to be, but we still see some of that beautiful pattern coming through, which is what I like about this technique. Another thing I want to do right now is I want to use some of that I'm going to have to add a little bit more water to my indigo because it's a hot day and water is evaporating. What I want to do now with a pretty strong concentration that looks like this is I want to go over this part of the whale, the very bottom part of the underbelly and we're going with a dark color because this is actually, um some shadows and also from this angle, we see part of the um, the top color of the whale, where it meets the underbelly. What I'm just doing now is I just didn't want to cover all the tubcle I'm going around it a little bit, but that looks good to me. Before I start doing that top part, I just want to add a little bit of shadow here. These are the grooves that will be quite dark over here because it also is where it meets the um the top of the whale, the color. I'm going to bring this down maybe over here to where the ventral pleats kind of end. I'm okay to go a little bit thicker now and make lines that are not so neat because this is just, you know, the where the colors meet, so that looks good. But I feel like because this is shadow, I might just take this line down here all the way to the tip of the tail and I might just do this. These are all things that I'm doing right now as I paint it. I'm changing. I'm deciding what to do now. So as I said, I don't always plan every single part of my classes. Sometimes if I get an idea on the spot, I might just leave that in. I'm also going to just darken these little lines here that are where the the shadow would be falling because of the sun right above it. These grooves, I'm going to just make them a little darker. I also feel like maybe we can make some of these grooves here darker too, but I feel like I feel like we could just add some very roughly. We don't have to completely cover the turquoise, but I feel like I feel like this part should be darker, so I'm just going to darken this part a little bit because this is where we're going to get shadow and the pleats. So I'm just going to go over this a little bit. Remember, we can already see the turquoise, so like, we don't have to cover it completely. But I just feel like I think the ventral grooves, I want to emphasize how deep they go on the underbelly. I'm just going to paint kind roughly on the top of that, letting some of the turquoise come through. I'm using pretty concentrated pain. I'm not just using light watery pain because it's okay to draw on top of these little circles that I drew earlier, which will be the barnacles, um, because I've got a really cool idea of what we can do if you want a very dreamy effect. I promise I'll reveal it in a sec, but let's just get through this first. Yeah, I'm just going to do all the ventral grooves actually. I started out with turquoise for the ventral grooves because like I said before, it's better to start light and build up the layers than to start very dark and then realize that, maybe that should have been left lighter because you can always build up color. It's much harder to remove color once you've laid it down with watercolors. So I'm just going to do this. I hope you're having fun. Don't get stressed. This should just be nice stress free work. Yeah, I think I might just do all of them because I think it also adds some cool personality to the whale than just those very light lines. Feel free to use lines that are not continuous. You just use small broken lines to make one long line. See, I don't really care if my lines are thick at some parts and thinner at some parts. This just all adds to the whale. Earlier where we did where I removed the color. Well, I'm just going to just do those parts again, those very edges, just over it. I feel like it should maybe curve here like that, the lines. Okay, so that's looking good to me. I don't know if this area looks a little bit light, but maybe later on, I might drop in some turquoise there, but let's move on now first. So there's also another thing I would like to do. So this is almost dry because I used very concentrated color. I'm just going to re wet this beautiful pectoral fin that we did earlier and look at the colors. They're so gorgeous. So I'm definitely not going to cover all this color up, but I'm definitely going to drop in some of that indigo as well because this part that is near the body should be darker, it should be in shadow. And so I'm just going to drop that part in here, but I definitely don't want to cover up all this beautiful blue turquoise and purple that we see. So just Yeah, making sure it's very dark, near the top. I'm just going to go over the barnacles and the tubicles here. I'm just emphasizing this a little bit here. Okay. I'm just also going to outline it a little bit because it gives our whale some nice definition. Yeah, I might as well just outline the whole That looks beautiful. I'm just going to finish up by putting a dropping in a little bit more of the indigo, and then I'm going to stop. And you can also just blend it a little bit with a dam brush, if you like. Okay, that looks beautiful. Just making sure it's blended well. I'm just wondering if I should maybe put a little bit down here more, a little bit just a little bit of color down there, but I don't want to cover this up and then just blend it out a bit. This is all personal preference, I'm just going to stand up and have a look at this just to see if it's the right color. I think that looks pretty good. Now, I just want to see what else I can do while I wait for this to dry. I always like doing that just so I feel like I'm doing something. But I think I can use some of this indigo again, and we're going to start painting the Bncles I'm just going to go around them as you can see, just like Surrounding them. But there is a line that I drew here earlier and this should be the bottom half of the Yeah, I hope that makes sense. I'm just going to draw another little tiny banacle here. This should be the bottom half of our pectoral fin over here, it might part of it might have gotten a little bit covered up when we did the shadow just now when we did the second layer, I mean, of the pain on the body. I'm just trying to retrace that right now. Yeah, it's somewhere over here. And then I'm just drawing that I'm just defining that very bottom part over here. Yeah, that's the bottom of our pectoral fin. What we can do now as well is we can start putting down some of those lines that we see some of those falls, where the where the pectoral fin connects to the body. We see a few folds here. Tell, maybe the folds should go a little bit further out when I look at reference photographs. Yeah. So that's my idea of how it should look. I'm just going to do that. I think the bottom half so I'm just going to raise that line a little bit where the shadow of the pectoral fin is because it just looked a bit funny to me. All right. If we have to, we can do another layer later to just make this area a bit darker. Okay, I'm just taking a step, just looking up and standing up to just have a good look at the overall view, which I highly recommend you do. Keep standing up, especially if you're working with a big painting because you can get a very different perspective of light and dark when you stand up. Now, this is almost dry at the top, so I'm quite impatient. I feel like I want to start using some of that indigo to start defining some of those lines, especially that gorgeous mouth line that I can't wait to define. Since the paint is dry already, as you can see, I'm just using some concentrated indigo and the very tip of my small round brush to just kind of trace that gorgeous line of the mouth of the humbag whale. And it's going to end somewhere over here. Okay? That's beautiful. It looks so beautiful and it's starting to look like our wo, isn't it? I also notice they sometimes have another line here that goes just some more creases on the body that also give it its distinct look. I also want to do, it's a little bit dark where I've painted over, but I think I can see the line. They have a couple of lines here, even on the that are not on the underbelly, just these nice lines over here. I'm just going to let them sort of fade fade over here. I'm just going to do very thin broken lines over here. I'm not going to do too many of these lines, but these are lines that I drew earlier. I just want to just kind of, yeah, finish them off. So now I'm just using little broken lines to let them just trail off over here. Okay, that's looking good for me and also the eye. If you look at photographs of I painted a bit over the eye, but that's fine with me. That's completely fine. I'm just going to do what looks like an eyelid. If you look at photographs of whales, they have it looks like a very heavy eyelid that they have. I will paint this in later as well. They seem to have quite a few creases around their eye, so I'm just going to do that. If we have to, I think we could use if we want to go darker on the inside, we could use maybe a little bit of pains gray later. I don't want to put too many lines around the eye, but that's what I've got so far. Let me just make this part a little bit thicker. Yeah. I just want to make sure that the mouth line is very, very distinct and it's not to be confused with the other lines. So I'm just going to go over that again. I love the mouth line. It's just so beautiful. Maybe this part can be a bit thicker and then Our whale is really coming to life now, as you can see, it looks beautiful. I'm just going to emphasize just the bottom half of these lines that are near the mouth, but I'm going to let them just fade out as they get closer to to this very edge over here. Now, I know we've been filming for quite some time now, so how about we can take a break? And let's sorry, I'm just deciding whether I should I just want to use some of that indigo now to just kind of paint over here, just to define that boundary between the dorsal fin and the back. So we're going to see only a very small amount of the dorsal fin. And, um, I just want to make this line look a little bit, like, thinner over here, like, so this is looking good. But because we've been painting for a really long time now, just going to outline that. Why don't we take a little break? And when we come back, we can start doing things like the Bncles. I just want to maybe add a little bit more color here. But I'm going to let everything just dry first. So why don't we take a little bit of a break? And when we finish when everything dries, we'll come back. We'll add the very final touches our whale to our humback whale. And after that, I'm going to tell you what ideas I have if you want to have a dreamier looking whale. So before I talk a lot again, let's take a little break, and I'll see you back here very soon when everything dries. 7. Adding more details: Hi, everyone, and welcome back. And I hope you had a good break and just look at our whale. It's looking so great. And this is my favorite part of the process where we're going to start really making this whale come alive. It's going to be really, really cool to just see the different processes that I'm about to do that's going to just really elevate this whale and by the end of this section, you're not even going to believe how cool this whale is going to look. Why don't we get right into it straight away? Now, during the break, I just noticed a couple of things that I want to fix up first before I start. For instance, I noticed I painted a little out of the line here. I'm just going to turn my page around just for a little while because I find it easier for me to just so I'm just going to move that whale out of the way. I just find it easier to, um, kind of just lift color from this angle here. So all I'm doing is I just want to lift the color with a clean damp brush and wipe the pigment on the tip of my brush off on a clean paper towel. This color is a little bit staining, but don't worry. I'm also thinking that maybe I could also maybe later paint some tubcles on the top because they also tend to have tubcles up there. But I think that's okay for now. I'm just going to leave that for now. I think maybe later on, I could just, yeah. Paint those tubicles. I just want to also tell you what else I want to do with my painting. Right now, to make it just come alive and make it pop, I want to just fix up the little things like I'm not loving the position of some of these bancles or tubcles that are on the fin. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take quite a concentrated version of indigo, and I'm just going to just really darken and define that fin. So what I'm painting now is the part of the fin that's in the shadow. So that's what it is. I hope that's clear. I just wanted to do that, and I just feel like maybe this is a little bit low and I'm not really liking that, but don't worry about that. I'm going to actually use a white gel pen in a short while to just kind of emphasize that. But I just want to fix this fin up once and for all. I'm just going to get that shape going. And then I'm going to let this completely dry that's looking good to me. Now, I just want to use the same dark color of indigo, just kind of define any areas that need it. I just wanted to fix that. I also want to do I just want to shape this a little bit more over here, this dorsal fin. I noticed it kind of ended a little early. So just that tiny little tip that kind of goes back a little bit. Extends back just in the slightest. Yeah. I think that looks good and I'm just going to leave that. Another thing that I want to do while I just wait for this to dry is I want to start, another thing I notice first is I find that this area is just a little bit too light. I want to reactivate that turquoise color and I just want to very gently just kind of yeah, just drop in some pain. That's dry brushing, but I'm just going to kind of use a clean damp brush to kind of fade it out a little bit, so it doesn't it's not just a stack like line. So I don't want to disrupt the pain too much because I don't want to, you know, lift off the lines that we did. So I just wanted to touch that up. I just want to show you all the little bits that I want to touch up. Now, something that I really want to do is the eye. It may be hard to see the eye of a humbag whale. You can just look on the Internet and there are lots of images of the eye close up. What they have their eye that made them so striking to me is they actually have a pupil, a dark pupil in the center like us, but they seem to have this light blue ring of an iris that's very, very striking. Because this is a small area to paint, I think it will be quite hard to paint this very accurately with a brush and paint. This is where I want to bring in. I've got a couple of gel pens. I use a white gel pen a lot at highlights to my watercolor paintings. But what I really want to do is I was hoping to use this for the eye just because I have a little bit more control over it. I also wanted to use a black pen which is a size 0.3, just to do the pupil, just so I can do it a little bit more accurately. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to free hand this blue ring. Don't worry, we can outline the I later. I think that's a good size. It has this beautiful blue ring. And I'm going to let that dry a little bit before I attempt to do the pupil on the inside. In the meantime, because you guys probably want to finish this up, let's see what else we can do while we wait for the eye to dry, shouldn't take very long. How about we start with defining the tubcles around the mouth. What I want to do first is I'm going to use a small round brush and I'm going to just take some of this paint, which is once more, again, indigo. What I want to do is just define those dots that we had earlier that we had drawn earlier. There were a couple that start right where this line the lines of the pleats go. We can start just kind of doing some of these little dark circles that maybe have a little bit of white in the center just to show they have a bit of dimension. These are the tubcles which are just projections on the skin. You don't have to do too many and maybe some can be a little bit lower or higher, some can be smaller or bigger than the others. I also want to maybe take this outside here where I uh, just a little bit. I just wanted to project out a little bit to look a little bit natural. And so with these tubicles, maybe we could put one over here. Okay, so that's cool for me. Also, I think the eye should be dry now, so maybe we can go back to that because I really want to finish the eye. So I'm just going to jump back in here. So I'm just using a black fine liner. And what I'm going to do is, and I highly suggest, I'm sorry, I didn't do any diving with whales, so I don't have a reference photograph that's my own, but I can just show you you can look up a painting or a picture on the Internet. So I'm just going to now just fill that in. That's our whale's eye. But around the iris now, I'm also going to go with some black. So it's actually a bit hard for me to see this close up. But with the black liner, I also want to maybe use it to do that eyelid on the top to make it very define. Wow. Now look at that. Our whale is suddenly, really coming to life now. So all I did was I used the liner to just very thinly do an eyelid. I also want to use this to just do maybe a little bit of the bottom. Just to show the boundary of where the eye is. But what I really want to do next is I'm going to use a white liner to really do what we see as the bottom eyelid, the reflection of white from the bottom eyelid. I'm just going to maybe extend this black around the eye a little bit outwards. I don't want to make his eye too big, even though this is fantasy art, but I think I also want to use the black liner. I don't want to use too much of it because I don't feel like I have to, but I thought that maybe I could just do this line here. That's the main line where the mouth is just to add that extra definition. Be very careful with a black liner because this is permanent ink, so I'm trying not to make a mistake. All right. So there when that's dry, you can use a white gel pen like this one that I have here and I'm going to just do add some white here at the very corner of the eye. I also want to just very lightly extend that white underneath. Like I said earlier, it's going to be the inner bottom eyelid. Yeah. I don't want to overdo the eye too much. Now I'm going to just use my very small round brush and I just want to just reinforce those lines around the eye that we drew earlier. Leaving that white because I really want that to go at the bottom. But I also think I'm just going to very gently paint a little bit over that white. But I don't want to touch it anymore. I think that looks good. Maybe just a little bit of some creases around the eye, and then I think that's enough. Don't want to overdo it. Let's see what else I have to do. Now let's get back to I think the eye is done. I don't want to do more than that. I want to get back to my whale now and I want to do a right those tubcle. Some of them are going to be quite dark and some of them are going to reflect a bit of light, sorry, wrong pen. I want to use my white gel pen right now. I just want to add maybe a little.in the center, just to sort of give a bit of like, oh, this thing is reflecting a bit of light. And over here, we can also kind add a few white dots around these dark circles that we drew just to kind of give the impression that this is three dimensional, this tubcles they're kind of sticking out. I feel like they give the whale a lot of personality when it has these tubcles. Also, we can use the white gel pen to add little dots to show maybe these tiny boncles or tiny projections on the skin. You don't want to overdo this step too much. Just like I feel like it makes it look more realistic. We can maybe also put a few more of these dots around the eye. You can also do things like maybe some parts of these grooves can reflect light a little bit. Maybe we could maybe right under the mouth, we can just put a little bit of white there. Yeah. This really depends on you, but I was just thinking, I like a few white lines because I think maybe I'm going to add a little bit more of a of a line here that shows that there's a bit of reflection coming from the surface of the light, maybe a little bit under here, maybe in the middle a little bit. Yeah. These are just little things that bring our wheel to life a little bit. I want to also use the white gel pen now to just fill in some of these bancle Even though this is underneath, I feel like maybe the light would be reaching it on that side because it's further away from the body. Now that this has completely dried, I want to show you what I want to do. I want to now add some of these like Tubcle Barnacles with my white gel pen. Don't worry. I'm just marking their position now. That's why I felt like they should be more on the very midline between the shadow and the light. And I think I put them too low just now. These are little things you can always make changes to your painting later on. If you notice something during the break and you just think, oh, I don't think that looks right or I don't really like it, and I can make it look better. So I'm just going to wait for this white gel to dry before I start using some paint to just define it a little bit more. Now, let's look at all these little barnacles that are growing on its bottom. Well, not its bottom, sorry, on the bottom of the whale, I mean, as in the underbelly. What we can do again is we can use, some of the indigo paint to just I just outline it a little bit, but I leave the center sort of unpainted. I'm not being too careful about this. I can roughly see my pencil sketches of these ovals that I did just now. That's my guideline. So while I'm doing this, I just want to tell you something. Like, you know how I told you I had this idea that I wanted to do on my whale. And this is I want to tell you about it. So the Bncles that I'm painting right now so this creates more of a sort of semi realistic look about it, right? But I had an idea to maybe use a little bit of gold color for the Bncles to add a bit of a magical touch. So I'm giving you the option to decide what you want to do. If you want something that looks more realistic and traditional, then maybe you might just like to do what I'm doing with some paint, indigo paint or whatever colors you're using the darker colors to create this sort of bonical look. Okay. However, I was thinking of maybe putting some gold later in the form of either some gold gouache paint or even using a gold pen or even using gold leaf. If you haven't used gold leaf before, I'm very happy to show you how I would do it with this painting, but I'm still deciding right now because I just I don't want anybody who hasn't used gold leaf before to get put off or not know how to, um, not know how to apply it and then they might feel very intimidated to use it. Let me just decide first, but that's an idea that I wanted to do to add some gold to it. All I'm doing right now, sorry just watching where my hands are so that I don't rest it on a wet surface. All I'm doing is I'm just circling these ovals that I've painted earlier that I use the white gel pen to do, I mean, as you can see, these make the banacles of the Yeah, that looks good. What I'm noticing here is the pectoral fin, the very surface of it looks a little bit light for me. What I want to do is I just want to mix a little bit of this beautiful purple that we have. Yeah. Yeah, maybe I want to use more of that purple because it gives a nice That's purple mixed with a bit of indigo. I really like this purples quite bright. What I want to do is I'm going to very gently. I'm going to take most of the paint off my brush, as you can see on the paper, and I'm just going to very lightly in dry brush some of this color on. Just a little bit because I feel like it looked a little bit bare there. It looked a little bit too light. So I'm just going to dry brush a little bit on. Probably should have done this before before I did the white gel pen, but, you know, there's something that I just noticed. I don't mind if this pots a little bit kind of lighter because it's kind of catching the light. But I might just add. What I want to do is I'm going to use a clean dam brush to just fade this ever so slightly, even though it's a light color into the rest of the fin. I'm just trying to break down those very harsh lines. But that looks good to me. I like the purple a lot. That looks lovely. I'm just trying to see what else I can do first before I want to add that gold on because oh, yes, there is something I do want to do. Let's just use a little bit more indigo to kind of, Kind of maybe add some of that spotted sort of pattern to make it look natural here where the barrier is between the upside of the whale and the underside. These are all just little ideas that I have now to make it look more natural, yeah. Because I don't think the color will just, you know, I don't think that really harsh lines would just exist, but you don't have to do this too much, you don't have to get too carried away with it. I think that looks good. Maybe I might also add a few of these little dots at the very bottom of the fin. I just feel like it gives it a natural look. Try not to overdo it again. I might just darken this a little bit around that. Okay, I don't want to overdo that. What else do I have to do with my way or let me just have a look. There is something that I do want to do. But right now, let me just I feel like that's not dark enough, so let me just darken it a little bit. I'm also using irregular lines to just try and create a bit of a natural look. Just going over this again with indigo, but doing it intentionally messily, if that makes sense to just try and make it look a little bit more realistic, so they don't just look very, very white. But I think we've done this enough already. Let me just do one last bottom outline. Okay. I think that looks good. I'm just going to stand up and have a look. Yeah, that's looking really beautiful. Now there's another thing. Oops, I got a bit of a stain there. I must have rested my hand on something. I'm just going to try and get that off. Good. Don't worry. It's no big deal, but I just wanted to keep this one clean. This painting. So just having a look at what else I have to do, I think I might just add a little bit more shadow over here for where we see the bottom of the fin. I feel like it should have just a little bit more shadow. I noticed one of my hair brushes has come off, yeah. Shape that thing a little bit more, that fin. Okay, this is looking really good now. Once more, I just want to try and lift some of that paint off. I might just outline that later, but I want to show you something. I also had another idea to, um, create a few surface patterns on the top of the whale. I keep saying I was going to say whale shot, good thing I didn't. I'm just going to get out some white gouache paint right now. I use white guash sometimes to add, you know, some water marks that I feel will make the whale look even more realistic. Let's put a bit of white guash over here. Now, if you never use white guash before, it is a water soluble paint, but it is much thicker than watercolors. You might have to just water it down a little bit by so we want, so this is perfect because I've got some dark paint to work with. So if you have a dark surface like that, what I want to do is add some natural sort of marks like some curvy lines like that. I just want to make sure my paint isn't too thick because that's not what I'm going for. I'm going for and also it may apply may look very white when you put it on at first. But when you let it dry, it might actually fade a little bit into the background color. So that's what we want. We don't want something too too bright for me. Well, that's what I feel we want it to look like water. I'm just going to start over here. Okay? Now, you want some loose movements with your brush, and you don't want to do straight lines, you want it to look kind of curvy. I'm just kind of trying to do a bit of a water surface pattern and I also feel like it kind of kind of gives it a more natural look. We can also add some of these lines like maybe around the eye too, like, um around near the top of the mouth over here. As you can see, it's already starting to fade a bit into the background, which is what I wanted to do. I didn't want it to look too stark. So it's not too. I also think some of these watermarks can also go a little bit on the mouth. All this is just I also feel like I might use a bit of white guash over here because I feel like this area looks a little bit dark. I might just lighten it a bit with white guash. Yeah. With white guash. It's what I do with watercolor. I'm just going to fade it out a bit because, yeah, I just felt like maybe I want that transition between the top and bottom to be smoother. I'm just using a little bit of it to just lighten that area a little bit. This is all just personal preference, again, you don't have to do this step, but I just wanted to lighten this part a little bit where the transition is. Okay. But I don't want to mess too much with it. Also with the water lines, how about we finish that? So in the end, it ended up being quite light. Maybe if you want, you can emphasize certain lines more by going over them again with the white. I don't want to make it look too much like a repeated pattern, so I might just start going maybe up there. I just wanted to look a bit natural. Maybe we can have some of those lines over here. Yeah, see, it fades into the background. You can decide how intense you want the line the white to be, the water patterns. So yeah, I'm just kind of free handing this. I'm not really referring to any water patterns in particular. But yeah, I don't want to overdo it and cover up my nice. I feel like they should maybe a little bit on the dorsal fin, we might see a bit of white over here, maybe some of that water pattern over here. I mean, I think that looks good. I don't think we have to overdo it too much, but because these are grooves in here, we can also put a little bit of a highlight around the grooves to just show that our whale is three dimensional and that this part might be a little bit lighter. Maybe I might even go under the eye here because it just seems to also emphasize the mouth a bit. I'm going to let you judge how much you want to how much highlights you want to add on your On your whale. But I'm just trying to give you ideas of what you could do. Now, um, I think it's looking really good. I don't want to put too much too much water patterns on it. Okay. I do think that looks good. I just want to maybe blend this out a little bit so it just doesn't. Okay. That looks good to me. Okay. We've been painting for quite a while now. So let me just try and finish up. I think I want to use the white gel pen to just add a little bit of a little bit more of, maybe a bit of a reflection of the Bncles Now, you get a little bit of a reflection coming from that. I also feel like with the white gel pen, you can also add things like maybe some dots, or maybe even little tiny lines like that because the whales as they get older, they might have a few scars. You know, just from surviving. I'm also just going to use the white gel pen to just add a few of these little marks because I feel like they make them look realistic. Yeah, little marks that a whale might get from yeah, just living. I also want to just maybe use the white gel pen to just kind of go over the top of the eyelid, just to kind of add a little bit of just to bring the eye even into more focus. I also might use the white gel pen to add a little dot here to just let you see a reflection in the iris of the eye just so he looks alive. I'm just going to add a few more little dots that make it look real for me. Maybe we can add some over here and you can even connect some of these dots to make it look like a patch, a little scar here and there. I think that all adds to the effect that we're trying to create. If you feel like that was a little bit, the water patterns didn't quite you can't really see them very clearly with the white guash. You can either go over them again with the paintbrush and the white guash pain or you can just maybe use your white gel pen a little. Now, I don't want to make this look too much like a predictable pattern. So I'm just going to try and break up some of that a little bit. Okay. Okay. I'm just going to maybe extend that a bit, add a bit more white here. Yeah, just adding a few interesting marks with the white gel pen. Even down here on this dark part here, even over here. Yeah, just follow your heart is what I say. Maybe some here. I'm just going to just emphasize those Bncles. Maybe we might see a few white dots there. We can also maybe use the white gel pen to just go above these little grooves in the skin as well, just to look like it's reflecting light. All right. And I just want something is bothering me. I just want to use some of my maybe some of that. I don't have to use just a little bit of a mixture of paint here. I just want to try and do this outline here of where the head should be because I had painted a little bit outside just now. That can be a little tubical. I don't mind about that, but I just want to put the boundaries back of where the head is. Okay. Taking a step back, that looks really beautiful. Now, if you are satisfied with everything here, actually, the only thing I can think of that I might want to do a little bit more and you don't have to do this is you might want to just maybe, I don't know, maybe add a little bit more shadow under the fin. That's one of the few things that I can think of before we can finish this and before we want to add some golden. If you want, I'm just going to just paint this on wet on dry. I don't mind too much if actually, I might just leave the smallest little gap between the bottom of the fin and what I'm doing just to give it a little bit so we can just see where it starts. I'm just putting a little bit more shadow here. But honestly, I feel like it's quite done already. Let's have a good look. I think that looks good. But I might actually, I'm just going to turn this and I just want to just outline the boundaries of the whale because I feel like maybe the white gel pen has gone over it a little bit, but that's just a personal thing. Okay. I think I'm nitpicking a little bit now, but I think my whale my whale is done for now. So let's just do that. If you are happy with your whale and I really hope you are, there is one thing that I see now that I could probably do a little bit better. I think I could add a little bit of shadow just under here because, I mean, this is the eye, so I think it should be in a bit of shadow here, especially, that's what I think, maybe I might just fade that shadow out a bit. I also think maybe this part, I might just, this part might be a little bit darker. So I'm going to just.in some paint over here. But I really do feel like I am nitpicking a bit. I think it looks great. Maybe just trying to create a little bit of color variation by dabbing in a bit of dark here. I also think I want to just add a little bit more. I'm just going to dab on with the tip of my brush some of that indigo pane, just to kind of I feel like maybe this is a little bit light here. So let's just try and add a bit more shadow here. So very roughly doing that. But if you are happy with the way your whale looks, you don't have to do this part. I also feel like maybe we should have a little bit more shadow here. I'm just going to dry brush on some of this paint of the indigo. The only color I'm using now is indigo. I feel like maybe this part should be in shadow because it's right below the whale away from the light. Just dry brushing on with my little brush. And lastly, I just want to redefine those lines. I might actually kind of like I am intentionally going a little bit outside the line just to add, just a little bit more of a shadow to kind of suggest that these grooves actually casting a shadow. So I'm just pressing down a little bit on my brush, adding more pressure when I do this because I think this area could use more shadow, but I don't want to completely darken the bottom part of my whale. So Okay. I'm just wondering I'm just looking and wondering if I should um, if I need to do anything else with my whale before I let you decide if you want to do the next gold step or not. So, um, I'm just wondering if I want to do more more of the watermarks to maybe I just want to make it look a little bit more it goes down a little bit because I feel like it just looks like it's a pattern on the top. Maybe um now on second thought, I think I might want to just blend this out a little bit. I think it looks a little bit too defined now. I'm just using a clean damn brush to soften these lines a little bit. Yeah, to kind of add that kind of glow. So look, it's okay to change your painting if you feel like, oh, you could do something better. I'm also just thinking I want to just add a little bit of highlight here where the groove is to just kind of show that the Yeah, all these little steps are going to really help adding a bit of a highlight around the mouth. Let's just finish up by adding some boncles In fact, I might just add some on top here too. I'm sorry if I seem a bit indecisive about ending this, I just want to try and do. I'm also just going to add a little bit of a highlight over here where the top of the fin is because this is where it would strike sunlight. My white pen has just died a little, good thing I've got another one standing by. Okay. Just adding some of those white marks before I stop. Yeah. You can add little white marks with a bit of a scar too because they're going to get nicked by certain things like rocks or boats. Okay. I think that looks good, and I think I want to stop now. So if you are ready to stop and you're very happy with the way your way looks now, yeah, you are welcome to paint a background after that. But actually, I just think, why don't we take a break first? Because I think maybe I might paint a very rough background that you can still do if you want a realistic looking whale. But if you want to do a more dreamy effect, we can add those dreamy touches later. But right now, let's take a break because you've been painting for a really long time. Let everything completely dry. And when we come back, I will teach you how to paint a very rough background, as well as whether you want to add some magical touches in. We will do that later. So see you soon. Have a nice break, and I will be right back. 8. Applying metallic paint: Hello, everyone, and welcome back. I just want to say, if you have stuck with me this far and you have a picture of your own whale in front of you and you've done all the steps, I just want to say congratulations and you've done such a great job to get this far. And as you can see, our whale it is almost completely done. In fact, at this point, I would tell people who want their whale to look realistic, semi realistic. They can stop here if they want. But I just want to tell you what I want to do because I'm, you know, I'm an artist that is very inspired by nature, and sometimes I like to get a little bit playful and make something look a little bit magical depending on my mood. And because of that, I've got a few ideas that I would like to do. Whether you want to do a background as well, I was thinking a very loose background which is putting down just some patches of water and dropping in some of the paint, the colors that we've already used, that would make a cool background as well. I'm still deciding if I want to do that now. But what I really want to do first is I want to add some magical touches to my whale. So I'm thinking of using a bit of metallic watercolors to give off to add a bit of shine to these surfaces that I feel are going to be smooth and reflect light. And also because personally, I just love playing with metallic colors. Yeah, it's a bit of an addiction. And after that, I was thinking of adding a few touches of gold onto my humbag whale because I love the way gold looks, the way it stands out against blues and purples, which we have here. Like, I just think it's a marriage made in heaven. And because I feel like being a bit playful and whimsical with my piece of art here, because I always associated the Humbag whales with a very dreamy feel. So I want to try and just, like, yeah, tap into those emotions that I'm feeling right now looking at my whale. So I love my we, but I just really want to do this. And this is all optional, these steps that I'm doing now. It really depends on what kind of look you want to create. So what I have here is a little box that I got for Christmas of a brand called CSY Art Gallery. I was purchased online. So I just want to show you, these are a couple of colors that were in this set, and I'm loving this white over here that has a little bit of, you know, kind of like a blue some blue sheen to it that I think will go perfectly with this painting. And if you want, like, you know, you don't have to use the same paints as me, obviously. But if you buy any sort of metallic watercolor set, it doesn't even have to be expensive. They will usually have a white option in it, a whitish color that may have a bit of, you know, gives a sort of iridescent sort of, uh, look to it. All I'm going to do is I'm just going to use some clean water and my small brush, and I'm just trying to reactivate this pain because it's quite dry metallic pains when you first start using them. I haven't used this often at all. So right now, I just want to get my spare piece of paper to try this out. I've lost my original spare piece of paper, but I just want to show you on I don't know if you can see this, but maybe I should use a lighter surface, but um Okay. Let me just put it over here. So I hope you can see that. It's sort of it almost it's almost invisible, but then you start seeing that sheen from certain angles, and that will be yeah, that's great. That's the look I want to do, so let me just get to it before I talk a lot. So I'm just going to add some of that over here. I'm concentrating it in the middle. Let me just stand up and see that you can see that. You might not be able to see it from this angle, but later on I will just move my paper around for you for the camera. So it's kind of subtle. It's not like, you know, it's not really too bold or anything, and you only notice it when it catches the light. So I just thought, you know, this is kind of going for that dreamy, whimsical, magical look, or at least adding just a little subtle hint of magic with this. I'm not going to bring it all the way down to the really dark areas. I'm just putting this right in smack in the middle on that lighter area that we kind of left unpainted. Oh, that's beautiful. I haven't really used this new set of paint, so I'm glad I finally got the opportunity to use them. I only just tested them out but never actually used them. So here, let me just try and Oh, can you see that? Yeah, I can see it now. So it's just a little bit subtle, but it still adds a bit of magic to this painting, I feel. Okay? And I want to do that also for maybe this fin over here because we're seeing the underside of the fin. These paints actually take a while to activate if you haven't used them before. I noticed that with metallic watercolors that once they dry as well, you just have to move your brush back and forth to try and get the color to lift. I'm only doing the lightest areas. I'm going to leave the shadow untouched because with metallic watercolors, we don't want to cover everything and make it all shiny unless you're really going for that look, which I'm not. I only want to highlight these parts of the whale that really stand out to me. I'm also thinking maybe we might want to just put a little bit just on the very top of this fin here. I did go over that with the white gel pen, but maybe I can just go over I'm trying not to lift the white gel pen off, but I'm just going to go over that part because quite frankly, I'm addicted to using metallic watercolors and I try and put as much as I can into a painting when I decide to use some of it. It's quite addictive. But I don't want to do that too much. I might just do these little bits over here. Okay. I think that looks good already. So I'm going to reluctantly put this away. So I think I achieved what I wanted to achieve, and it has that nice, as you can see, Nice glow to the fins too. Actually, just when I said I was going to put it away. I think I want to just highlight maybe a couple of the areas in between the grooves, if you know what I mean, that stick out. I won't do everything. Famous last words. But maybe parts that are the lightest here, that really stand out, maybe we can just go over them a bit. I'm going to have to take this out. I just think maybe the areas that are the lightest. I can just add a little bit. I'm not going to do everything, those light areas that are showing up. Yeah, I love metallic watercolors. I just feel like they can really just a little bit of sparkle can really make your painting just look that much more, you know, interesting and also magical if you're going for that look. Okay, so I don't want to get too carried away, so just where those lighter areas are. This one's clumping a little bit on my brush, as you can see, that might be a sign for me to put it away. I just want to do maybe some of these areas around the mouth. This part here is illuminated, so I'll just do that. Maybe this area here. Let's see. Let's just move the paper a bit. It's looking beautiful. Okay, but I'm going to stop. Let me just, this part was a little bit lighter. Okay, I'm going to put this away now. All right. Sorry. So rinsing my brush. Now, I want to talk to you a little bit about the gold effect that I want to put in to my painting. So there are different ways to go about it. So my idea is, I want to put gold. On these bancles that we painted. This is something I just decided, I just want to put a little bit of gold right in the middle where that white dot is, I might leave a little bit of that dark ring around them. I might just let a bit of that show to give the impression that that's a little bit of shadow that it's casting and to also make it look a bit three dimensional. I might put just a little bit of gold on some parts of the body. I won't go crazy doing this, and this is up to you as well if you want to do the step. So like I said before, the goal I feel they can represent banacles that are growing on our whale. And I just feel it will really complement the blues and the purples and it will just really make our painting look very whimsical if you want to go for this look. If you don't perfectly fine, too. Okay? You can stop. You don't have to do this step. I'm really sorry, but right? I just noticed something right now while I was talking. I just want to end the metallics by just putting a little bit on this tip of the fin here that's illuminated. And now I'm going to put it away forever. Okay. So there are many ways to achieve this gold. The easiest way, in my opinion, is to use a metallic gold pen. Now, this one is I got this just from my local stationary shop. I live in Australia and there is a huge franchise of stationery that's reasonably priced, very reasonably priced. It's not an art shop, but it's a place called Office Works and they sell everything from printers and furniture office furniture to stationery. Easy way of doing that is you could use a gel pen. So on this doc surface, as you can see, that's the gold, and that's it standing out. That's the easiest way to add gold. Okay? If you don't have a gold pen, another way that you can do that is to use gold ink. Obviously, close it very tightly and give it a shake before you use it and use a dip pen. This was bought from an art shop, this brand Windsor and Newton. It's quite a common art brand. This dip pen, I think I bought it quite inexpensively as well from art shop. You're just going to open it, dip it in, and you're going to just very lightly put dots wherever you want. So that's another way to add gold. You can even use something like this, which is gold guash. And the gold guash actually stood out quite well. This is an example of the gold gouache when I tried it out. So as you can see, it stands out really well, too. So these are all options that you can use. But what I wanted to do today is, I actually really wanted to try out gold leaf. So gold leaf is a medium that can look quite striking because it actually uses sheets of gold. But if you've never used gold leaf before, I just want to take you through it, and this is probably the first, this is the first class I've ever introduced gold leaf too. But like I said before, I love introducing my students to all the different media that can complement watercolors. So first of all, this is what you get an adhesive. So this is just basically your glue, and this is the adhesive that I use for applying gold leaf. So I have that I also want to talk to you a bit about gold leaf. If you've never used gold leaf before and you're thinking of doing it, then this is the right opportunity to do it. But I just want to take you through a bit of advice. Gold leaf can come in different forms. So this is gold leaf that is actually stuck. It's stuck onto the paper to this white paper. What makes it really good is when I put the adhesive down and when the adhesive has dried, I can then hold this quite easily and press it down to deposit the gold where the glue has dried. If you've never used gold leaf before, I highly recommend getting gold leaf that's actually stuck onto a piece of paper. I would highly not recommend getting gold leaf that is loose. For instance, I got some over here, and yeah, I just really wouldn't recommend it because sorry, it's a little bit tricky for me to show this to you, but my advice is please use gold leaf that is actually stuck down because otherwise, some gold leaf is so fragile that when you just breathe a little bit of a breeze from a fan blows, it's going to just blow everywhere and make a really big mess and then you start losing control over how to stick the gold. So please get gold. I'll include the brand of gold leaf that I bought. This is some time ago because I don't use it very often, but when I do, I just love the way it looks. So please get gold leaf that's actually stuck onto a piece of paper to make your life a bit easier. Now, I just want to show you very quickly how we're going to apply the gold leaf. So I like to use this method. If I want to use very tiny bits of if I only want to put down very tiny, tiny spots, I actually use the back of a brush. You can even use the tip of a chopstick because you can use a brush the tip of a brush, but I just feel like the adhesive might ruin a brush and I'm a little bit precious about brushes. I try and use them for as long as I can. What you can do is you can use the back of a brush, and I will show that to you right now. I'm just going to because too much of this might flow out when I try to use just the tip of it. So I've got just this little spare ceramic dish over here that I'm just going to put over here. And what I want to do is make sure, of course, that your adhesive is very, very tightly screwed on before you give it a shake. I'm just going to open this and put a little bit down here. Whoops, that's a lot that came out, but that's okay. That's why I don't like using the tip directly and putting it onto the paper. I prefer to have it on a little ceramic a little ceramic. I think this is a sauce dish. I'm just going to use the very tip of a brush that I have. That way, I'm not destroying the brush either. As you can see, this adhesive has its own cool light reflecting qualities. It looks almost like the metallic paints. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to use the tip of my brush to put it down on the boncal spots. Once more, if you don't want to do this step, you don't have to do it. This is just something that I want to suggest to you because I think it looks kind of cool. I might put it over here. What's very, very important, I might just talk about this before I put down the gold is you have to wait for the glue to dry before you touch the gold leaf to it. I think I also want to put some maybe maybe just around the mouth. I want to put one over here. I don't know whether this adhesive is colored this way so you can see what you're putting down. I don't know if that was why it's colored this way, but how about a couple around the mouth? Or maybe one up here. So as you can see, I'm just using the tip of my brush. Maybe we can put some How about one around the eye here. But not too many. I don't want to overdo it, so how about one over here too? Maybe just for a bit more gold, I might put some maybe maybe a couple. This is the neatest way that I can think of using it if you only want to put down small little spots of it. I think I might put one just right under the eye here. Okay. Try not to get carried away. So like I said before, you really do have to wait for it to dry. Should we put one maybe there's some on the tip of the tail? The effect is going to be very, very cool. I just want to let you know that. So maybe one on the fin here. I want to put it on the darker areas because I feel like that will have the most impact. Maybe we can put a couple on this fin too. Just varying the size a little bit of the dots I put down. Okay. I think that's cool. That's enough. I might just make this one a little bit bigger. Obviously, the more glue you put down, the larger the surface area that the gold will stick to. You may wonder why am I using gold gold leaf when I can use a gold pen. Another reason that I want to use this gold is because, I also feel that it kind of gives a little bit of a three dimensional feel to it because we have the layer of glue below, and we've also got the um the sorry, this one's quite small, so let me just get that. We also have the goal sitting on top of it. I adds a little bit of a three dimensional effect. I'm going to stop now before I go a little crazy with this. Right when I said that, I'd put another one and let's stop now. I think I have one right smack in the middle somewhere here. And let's put one down over here. Okay. So now you can go and clean your brush. You can go wipe it or I'm going to use a paper towel, just a bit of it to just clean off that edge a bit. Or you can go now and wash your hands because ideally, we need to leave this for 20 minutes to dry, okay? The worst thing you can do now is as you can see, it's wet. The worst thing you can do is put the gold leaf down right now because what's going to happen is the force of putting the gold leaf down while this is wet will make your glue, your adhesive billows spread to a larger area than you intended. And that's what makes gold leaf tricky. That's the only thing. You just need some patience and before you know it, this will dry completely. Because we're only using very, very tiny areas for gold leaf. So because of that, yeah, just give it 20 minutes. Maybe you can set a timer. Right now, just go have a break, go walk around. You know, you can go and rinse your dish if you want. And how about we take a little break? And I will meet you back here when the glue dries in 20 minutes, and we can continue from there. 9. Adding Gold Leaf and a background: Hey, everybody. We're back, and 20 minutes have gone by. And I just got my gold leaf ready here. So that was the gold leaf I was talking to you about, and I actually, I just want to show you what the brand is. So I bought this online, and it's LA gold leaf. It's a wholesaler, and it is 24 carat genuine gold leaf. Okay. And so even though it says loose transfer here, it just means it's not loose sheets. They actually did come, as you can see, stuck to a piece of paper for convenience. As I said before, please don't get the loose sheets as if you have no experience working with them, they will go everywhere with a gentle breeze or you just talking. I will just start tearing up and going everywhere and it can be quite a nightmarish. As you can see, I'll just demonstrate to know that your adhesive has dried and is ready to be used, you just should be able to feel it. So it should feel sticky to the touch, like the back of a piece of sticky tape, but it should not be sticking to your finger. You should not see any liquid residue on your finger because that would mean it's not done yet. And that's when you're going to end up spreading it if you try to put the gold leaf down. I'm just going to do a general check in all the places that I did it just to make sure that it has fully dried. Okay, so let's have fun now. All right, so this is a piece of gold leaf that I I don't like wasting. This is some gold leaf that I used from a previous project, but I'll just have this on standby just in case. So let me just show you. I'm going to use this section of it now, and I'm going to put it down over here where the mouth is, let's have a look. Gently touching it down. I think I did put down quite a few there we go. Okay? Now, I just want to let you know this is absolutely fine. Okay? I just want to I'd have to use just a different side. I think I have to use a new sheet because that's missing too many pieces. Over here, I can see another sticky spot over here, so I'm just going to press down over here. As you can see, it should come quite easily off if you have put it down and you waited for the right. Now, don't worry. I know this looks a bit untidy, but what's happening is part of the gold has come out, but the part that is stuck down, that's stuck down later on, we have to use a little step where we're going to put we're going to use brushes sorry, a brush to just a brush away the extra bits that are stuck to the places where we put the glue down. I'm just going to very carefully lift that off. As you can see, this is exactly what we want. I will do the body in a sack, but how about we do the eye area that I put down just now. All you're doing is just touching it to the sticky area and just very carefully, very carefully taking it off. Okay, don't be scared. If it gets a little bit stuck, just very, very gently, just get it off, okay? Oh, look at that. Can you see how it's coming to life? And I think we have one long we have some bits on the tail over here. So just very gently just tear it off. Well, not tear it off. I mean, just very gently peel it off is what I mean. Oh, look, we got a loose piece here. Oh, did I put a gold there? Maybe I must have. I must have put some glue there and I didn't know. All right. Now I'm going to do this side of the tail. Peel it off very gently. Okay, that's looking good. Where else did we do it? Oh, yes. I see a little bit over here. So it can be I have spaced mine out a little bit. I might as well just put this down here because there's some on the belly as well. So very gently peel it off. A big chunk came out there, but don't worry, it's not stuck down. Later on, we will use a brush. As you can see, I've got some stuck to my hands, but that's okay. I can wash that later. Gold leaf, my advice to you is, if you've never tried gold leaf before, you might want to practice on a piece of paper first on a rough piece of paper. Put down some glue. And just practice first to see I'm just transferring the parts that were on the fin. That's looking good and I will brush these off later. I think I see another banco over here. I'm running out of little bits of gold. I'm actually going to take this piece. As you can see, it may look a little bit messy at first, but don't worry. I'm just putting that loose piece of gold leaf over there. Yeah, my advice is if you've never done this before, you might want to just try it out on a spare piece of paper, just like how we try paint out. Try it on spare piece of paper first and wait for 20 minutes and then remove it later very carefully. Okay. What I'm doing now is I'm just using my finger to just gently press down on the parts that have the adhesive. But overall, this is looking very good. I'm also using my finger to gently kind of remove the parts that are just loose parts that are not actually sticking to the glue, but just came out when I put the paper down. But I will also go over this with a brush. That's looking really beautiful to me, but I just want to let this just dry a little bit before I go over it with a brush. But to tell the truth, I used to do the brush method, but it looks like just manipulating it a bit with my fingers seems to get all the loose parts off. As you can see, I can already see under this light, there is a little bit of a three D effect because it is sticking out of the paper. Maybe I might not have to use a brush. If you're going to use a brush, you want to use a very soft bristle brush. You don't want to use anything too hard and abrasive. Like a brush can just be something like that, and we want to just very gently just sweep over that areas that we put the glue down. Okay? See? So do not use a synthetic brush with really, really don't use a hog hair brush. That might be really too rough. This is actually looking very, very pretty to me, and, yeah, I really love the overall effect. I think that's a little bit on his eye. So I'm just going to very carefully just keep these away for another time. Okay, so I hope I've demonstrated to you how you can add gold leaf to your painting to complement it. So I'm just going to keep this away, and just giving it a light blow. I'm just standing up. Look at that. I mean, that is so cool, right? The effect is that you now have this beautiful whale, and now it looks even prettier. So That's gorgeous. Just look at this. This is the overall effect, and you can also see that gorgeous metallic paints at work. And as you can see, we just created something very, very dreamy. And right now, I'm just wondering if I should just frame this with a very light background. Okay? Because I don't want to take away. I'm somebody that loves that bold look of a dark, paint a subject against a white background. I think that's quite bold. But I think in this case, let's just add a little bit of paint around this. But we're not going to steal away from we're not going to do a very dark background. All we're going to do is we're going to use our large round brush, which is a size 12, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to drop in some water Around it. So you have to if some of the water ends up in we might have to re outline the we might have to re outline the bottom, well, the boundaries of the whale if we do this, but we don't have to be so accurate. So what I want to do now is let's do this side of the whale first. So we're going to do a very loose wash background, right? I'm going to use the colors that I've used previously. Let's drop in some of the gorgeous purple reactivating the pain we used before, and I don't even need to completely surround the whale. I think that's looking good and just bring some of that purple right close up to the fin. I'm also going to do that over here. But then I'm also going to drop in some of the other colors that we used as well. I'm trying to go as close as possible, but I don't want to like We don't have to completely cover it is what I'm saying. Okay. And now let's put some of that beautiful going to reactivate this paint, some of that beautiful blue as well in there. I'm just doing a very loose, dy sort of wash, and I think this also kind of adds to that whimsical that whimsical feel. All right. I don't want this to look so sharp over here, so I'm just going to use some water to just kind of yeah, just blend it out a bit. And what I want to do as well, I think, is because we've got this beautiful gold thing going on, I think I want to just maybe add a little bit of gold into the background. So there we got a pretty cool, whimsical sort of thing going on over here. How about we just? So I just happened to have some more gold metallic watercolors, just handy because I thought I might use them later. So how about we just Let's get this going. All right. I'm just going to drop in some gold in there. I'm just tapping in some gold. It's okay if a little bit goes on your whale. Don't worry, it's no big deal. That's what I want to do. I think I want to just also that's looking very whimsical. I'm just standing up and having a look. I think we should just do a little bit more of a background around the back of the whale, but we don't have to surround the entire whale. I think this is a nice loose wash that if you don't mind, I'm just going to turn because I'm right handed, I just tend to some actions just seem to be easier for me if I rotate the paper sometimes. I just feel like it's more natural then. How we don't have to go all the way to the top of the whale. How about we just stick to this area down here. Let me start using some other colors that I didn't use previously, maybe some of that gorgeous turquoise. Let's reactivate that. That's gorgeous that color. Okay, I think I can turn my paper around now. It's just that I don't know, I find it a little bit difficult sometimes to do certain angles. Okay, so I'm just going as close as I can, but I don't really want to have to re outline the whale. So some of that beautiful turquoise near it. Maybe we can spread it out a little bit more over here. I I don't want hard edges here, so I'm just going to use a bit of water to just kind of yeah. Okay, so that's looking great. I'm just going to drop in more turquoise. And also maybe some of that blue up here. This is just an example of a loose background that I'm doing that I feel will add to that dreamy effect. I don't think I really want to put maybe just a little bit of the indigo because the indigo is quite a strong color. And I think to tie it all together, why don't we also put a little bit of that purple? Because I also just happen to love the purple. Okay. Now, if you want, we can just kind of blend it a little bit. Even though the paint will spread, it is kind of blending on its own, but just helping it out a bit. Don't forget that gold. I'm just going to flick a bit of gold in there as well. So, if you have an opportunity to use Metallics, take it. There we go. I don't mind, well, look at that. I don't mind if some of it ends up as gold splatters. I think that looks cool. We're just going to let it dry now. I don't really mind these hard edges. I'm just standing up to have a look, and I think this looks really, really cool. I think when it dries, it will become a lot lighter than what it looks like now. But yeah, I think this has been really, really cool. I don't really mind a few of these white lines showing around the edges because I didn't want to have to re outline my whale. I think this looks so cool. So what we have now is a very, very dreamy looking way painting. And I just want to say thank you so much for sticking this out with me. I think I think it was a fun class. I hope it was fun for you. I didn't feel like this was too stressful at all. I think because first of all, I think we're doing a really cool subject. And yeah, and as we went along, I kind of also just decided to try some new ideas out, and I honestly think it paid off. So my background is still a little bit wet. Maybe I might just want to just throw in a little bit more gold. I might need a little bit of water for that. All right. But I hope I don't overdo this. Nothing's coming off, but right. Maybe that's a sign for me to stop. There we go a little bit. Okay. I really think I should stop now. So let's let this completely dry. But I have to say, I'm loving the overall effect. I think this looks so cool and dreamy, and I hope you've had fun doing this class with me. And thank you so much again for watching this far and for participating in this class. I hope you love your whale. And I only have one more short note to give you at the end of this class, which is in the final thought section. So please join me then, but thank you so much for doing this class with me again. And, yeah, I can't wait to see your paintings. Please upload them. Thank you. 10. Final Thoughts: Once more, as always, I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you for watching this class or any of my other classes. It means the world to me that you've chosen to use your precious time to watch one of my videos and to learn a new art skill. I really hope that you are just in love with the humpback whale portraits that you've created in this class. So please, please upload them by clicking the submit button in the project and resources section of this class so that all of us can admire it. I can't wait to see the colors that you've used and the effects that you've created. With all of my classes, I like to try and introduce students to different media that can complement watercolors. For instance, in this class, using gold leaf, I felt that this is a very valuable medium that you can use to just add some magical touches to your watercolor paintings that you do in the future. I know it can be a bit tricky if you've never used it before, but the only thing you really need to remember is, please make sure you wait for the adhesive to completely dry before you press down with your gold leaf. And as I said, numerous times earlier in the previous videos, please try and use gold leaf that's actually stuck down to a piece of paper, as loose gold leaf can be a bit of a nightmare to use if you've never used it before. So once more, I just want to say thank you so much again for watching this class. Please feel free to follow me on Skillshare or on my social media, which is Alicia Puran at Instagram to get any notifications of upcoming projects that I have. So thank you again and all the best in your watercolor journey.