How to Paint with Acrylic Brush-Tip Markers

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone. My name is Jessica and I am a lifetime artist, illustrator, and teacher. I live in Southwest in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I like to paint the interesting plants that we see here. I just painted these and when you look at them, you probably think that they're watercolors or even soft pastels and they're on watercolor paper. But would you believe it if I told you they were done with acrylic markers? There's a new type of acrylic marker that has just come on the marketplace in the past year made by a few different companies known for other types of acrylic marker, and they have a brush tip and the tip is flexible and that is the difference right there because you can make a very thin line and you can make a fat line and you can do calligraphy. You can make leaves, you can make petals. You can also blend this while it is still wet and herein lies a secret to making acrylic painting blend and look more like a watercolor or gouache or even pastel. So in this class, we're going to use a combination of these new markers, water brush, and a Filbert type brush for blending. We're going to work on 100% cotton watercolor paper. That combination creates just a beautiful blended result. This class is for everyone at every level because it is all step by step. For each of these, I have a complete drawing lesson and then a complete painting lesson. Your project will be to paint these four fantastic plants with me and it's going to be a fun and very rewarding adventure. Let's get into the first lesson and get going. 2. What is an Acrylic Brush Pen: This class would not exist if it hadn't been for a very exciting thing that happened during 2025. They say there is nothing new under the sun. In most cases, that can be true. But every once in a blue moon comes an art supply that is actually new. Paint pens and markers have been around since the early 1900s, but they were mostly industrial for marking machine parts and so on. Then around the mid 80s sometime, a company came out Posca with a NIPASka set of markers. I got them in the mid 90s, I think, at an art expo and they were new to me then and I bought them and I bought lots of sizes and I did a few things with them, but it ended up that mostly I did craft items and I didn't paint rocks, although a lot of people use these to paint rocks and little flower pots. Lots of point sizes, from seven millimeter all the way up to like I said, you have them that come with inch wide nibs. Last year, a lot of the people on YouTube art people started to receive boxes from a company called I think you would say rtexs. It's ARR TX and it was a new kind of acrylic marker that was different. For one thing, you did not have to shake it to use it, you do not have to depress the tip, and it has a wonderful brush tip that is flexible. I'm just going to use a little extra piece of paper here to show that to you. You have your tiny point and you have your wide stroke, and you can make the leaves with it and you can do exciting things that you were not able to do with a bullet tip and fine tip markers. Nobody seemed to know what really could be done with these. I saw several folks try them out as a part of their mixed media and a couple of painters I admire, they tried them out in paintings, but they ended up thinking they were really good only as an add on. Acrylic painting is the one that is the most difficult to blend colors. And so I don't know how this happened, but when I got my hands on these brush pens, I decided that I would try to do something that would get them to blend. Because it was a watercolsque, I have a lot of watercolor paper around and I love to work on it. I thought, well, what would happen if you took the acrylic brush pens and you used them with 100% watercolor paper. Then I decided to get one of my trusty watercolor brushes out and see if between the marker and the watercolor brush, I could create a way of painting with acrylic brushes on watercolor paper, and this is the result. And I'm excited. I'm excited to show you how because this is a beautiful look. You would never see this and think it's an acrylic painting. You would think watercolor. You might think gouache used as watercolor, definitely think soft pastel. This has a look of all of that, but it's all done with these very marvelous and brand new art tools used together in a dance that turned out to create some beautiful harmony. 3. Supply List: As we talk about our supplies, I'm going to use a visual of Amazon on my iPad to point out what they look like and what they cost and one of the places that they're available. I want to make it clear though, that I have no affiliation with Amazon or with any brand that I recommend. When I recommend something, it's because I bought it and I use it and I love it. And I don't get anything from anybody if you love it too. With no further ado about that, I looked up my orders in order to tell you exactly what it is that I'm working with. Now you can see that I jumped right on December of 2025 as soon as I saw these things. I got the Artex set of 120 colors and they're very nice and they work very well. However, I found the colors to be very muted for things that I do and I can show you that. This top area is that set of 120 and you can just carefully take a look and they're beautiful and it's a great range of color. But I am just really into bright color. I turned around and I bought the other set here in January 4, I didn't take long. This was a set of 60 and it's the set that they label drawing cartoon, comic art supplies, blah, blah, like that. The colors are brighter and here's what they look like. If they're not backlit by the screen, you can see that there's more brightness and the range is also lovely. Those are two possibilities. Let's look at what the current price is of the set that I did buy. The 60 color set is 51 99, under $1 per pen. Coincidentally, right next to that particular set that I bought is another set that I bought that is a big favorite, and so I'm going to take us in to take a look at that. The brand here is Tular TOOLI hyphen art. They make all of the types of acrylic markers, and I have used them a lot over the years over the PASCA kind just because they sell sets that are interesting color ranges. This particular set, which I like very much is earth tones. There are 36 markers and 37 99, and again, around $1, a marker. What is lovely about these is the colors themselves. I'm going to bring that up so you can see it. They're earth tones. They're not I don't know how to describe it. They're earthy, but they're not dull. They're vibrant and I just love this set and I reach for more often than any of the others. Our next necessary supply is watercolor paper and 100% cotton watercolor paper. I'll explain why that's important. 100% cotton watercolor paper does a different thing moisture with water than any other paper. It's sized in a certain way. It allows a certain amount of wetness to stay on the surface of the paper and some to sink in, and it's a really complicated thing to explain. But it's always been worth it to anyone painting in watercolor and having any serious intent about it. And so it always was very, very expensive. Arch or arches, some people say, it was the king brand. I used that all my life. Fabriano, the brands at the top of the price range are all excellent. If you have any of that, you can certainly use that. That's great. If you don't and you don't have a big budget, a recent event is that a lot of 100% watercolor paper that is really, really nice has started to show up on Amazon, even in sketchbooks, which is great. What you see me using in this class and getting these results is this particular brand and it actually was five by seven pad, I think it's 20 sheets and it's 12 76. The brand, you can see right here is Tumrata. This is my favorite. I buy their sketchbooks like crazy. Light wish is another brand that is good. If you happen to be a sketcher, their sketchbooks are just awesome. Now, you want 140 pound minimum weight of the paper, and you want a cold pressed surface. That's what I've been using in this class and getting these results. A hot press surface is fine as well, but it will be a different blending situation. It will be a different look, part of the pastel painting look that we get in this class is due to the cold press surface, which is slightly rough. Anyway, if you want to use exactly what I was using, this is it. The five by 740 pound also called 300 GSM, it's 16 sheets, but still very affordable for this product. Our third necessary supply is what's called a water brush. On my YouTube channel, I have a wonderful little class on exactly what this is and how it works and why it works and what you can do with it. Basically, it carries water in its barrel and that water is continuously wicked to the tip in a very slow, low quantity. As you paint with this, you are continuously adding water. Can you see the little shine in my finger? You're adding water. Constantly as you go. This is very important in keeping the acrylic paint wet long enough to spread it out and blend it. My favorite brand is the Ni gi brand, NJ, and my favorite size is the small. Working on a five by seven piece of paper, a larger a medium would be too much water flowing out. I recommend the Niji in a small size, and that's what I used in this class. But there are a lot of other brands. I like the control I have from the Niji and that's why I use the Niji. These run sets are $21. Individual ones. Let's see if they have the individuals. Here's a small. It's $12.18. It'll last you forever. You keep refilling the barrel, you can carry it around. You are on the go with it and not carry water with you. If you're using watercolor mediums, this is a wonderful thing to have. Next on the list is a couple of blending Filbert brushes. Filbert brushes you might already have, if you have bought sets of paint brushes for watercolor or acrylic, it has a soft shoulder rounded tip. Because of that, it is a great blender from a bunch of angles. And so these are wonderful. It doesn't really matter how expensive they are because really, we're working with acrylics and acrylics can really rack brushes. I would not say I would say for certain don't go for sable or any expensive brushes, but if you have some less expensive brushes in this shape or you can get ahold of them, they are fabulous for doing our blending, and you're going to beat them to pieces. If you see this one, it used to look I used to look like this. But I have pounced and blended enough and scumbled and so on that I have basically made a mess of this, but it's even better blender because of that, because it got even softer on the end. So these are wonderful. It should be a synthetic and it should be soft, not the stiff nylon. That isn't what you want. You want the softest ones that you can find. A sketching pencil and eraser. I use one of the H hardnesses usually a three or four and I do that because it makes a light line that I can erase easily. I use a vinyl eraser. This is for drawing. Our class is focused on desert plants. A couple of cacti, and a couple of succulents that pretty much might not be accurate succulents, but I looked at the plants around me here in the Southwest desert and I just chose something that looked like that. In our class, there is a full lesson on how to draw each one of our four subjects and a full class on how to paint that subject. No, some people don't want to deal with the drawing part. The drawing lesson is very good. It teaches you a lot. But if you don't want to deal with it, I have put a pencil drawing of each of the four subjects along with pictures of the finished paintings for reference. I have put that PDF in your resources in the resources area for the class. If you have a printer that will print on watercolor paper, it's a little bit heavy like a card stock. Then you could print these drawings right onto watercolor paper, to a sheet. And they will be the five by seven size that I'm working with. Or you could print them on regular paper and trace them onto your watercolor paper and you could skip the drawing stage. I don't recommend that because I think drawing is the most important thing that we do when we make art. But if you have no time and it's your wish to do this and just the painting, that's fine too. That basically is it for supplies, along with some paper towels and a jar of water. So let's gather these things and start on this very exciting path. 4. Painting with Brush Pens Part 1 : Sometime early in 2025, influencers on art influencers on YouTube started to receive big packages of these incredible markers from a company called rtexsH I think you would say it. They were a brand new thing, but people weren't sure what to do with them and we'll talk about that confusion in a minute. But the reason they were a brand new thing is this incredible brush tip. Now, on some versions of paint pens, there are several artex versions and they're also made by Tuarts another big company. Anyway, what made these so different from the acrylic paint pens that we're all used to is tip, the brush tip is just super flexible. And so I'm going to show you up here how many kinds of marks can be made with it and how much flex can be had. I move this in closer. Okay, so it has a tip that supposedly goes from they say 1 millimeter to five millimeter. That's going to depend on your pressure in your hand and how you use a paint pen, but very light touch with the tip gives you a mark like that. And a little heavier, you see the flex of the Tip is like a real paint brush. It's not many brush tips have been hard felt and this somehow is soft felt and you're able to do an actual paint stroke with these. That really has become a cool thing. With a lot of pressure and on the side, you can make a very wide line. The range of use is huge. Also, the Color is intense and lovely and paint markers have always had this valve system of shaking and pushing down the top and so on. It's been tricky and it gums up and stops working and streaks. You know the story because I know that almost everyone has had their hands on crylic paint markers. Well, these you still shake. This particular Artex set, this is 60 colors and they're quite affordable. This set shows you the color and a little window, and also it works better if shook, but the tip is not ever pressed into the marker to get the paint to flow. If you were to start to use your brush marker and it wasn't giving you a really solid coverage because they are supposed to be opaque, you would put the cap on and you'd shake it and you can hear little balls in there when you do. And that would mix the paint and make the coverage better. Okay, so when people got their hands on these and started to test them in videos online, they did the obvious thing, which was to fill an area with color, and it does it very nicely. And neatly. That's really a good thing when painting with acrylics is neatly because I always make a mess. I don't know about you. I only have to say the word acrylic and some spots show up on my desk and my hands. Anyway, this is a familiar look. This is the look of so much illustration in modern times. It's the look of a lot of work done in Procreate. It is the look of a lot of flat work done in gouache. So big difference, right? However, this can act differently and give you beautifully blended shading through a little process of wetness. This is a water brush and lifting. I'm going to show you that process. The very first part of it would be to be ready with your wet water brush and a paper towel. And when I say be ready, it's because when this paint is freshly applied, it is water soluble for a little bit of time. And so we're going to do this again. Fill it as quickly as I can. Then this is one of the reasons for using the watercolor paper is that it helps. I'm squeezing some water through my tip. It helps the paint to stay wet longer because it stays on the top of the paper. What I'm doing here is I'm wetting it while it's still wet then and make sure you squeeze your water brush out so no acrylic paint dries in there. Then with my Filbert brush, just damp. I can go in and I can lift color and beautifully blend that color. Isn't that pretty? That is one difference we can make and you can play with that. Unlike watercolor. You can play with this blending longer, but it's going to dry permanent and not a very long time. So we go from flat color to beautiful lifted blended color. Now we're going to try a two colored blend and we're going to act quickly again. I got my cap off of my water brush already and I squeezed it on paper towel to get rid of any color in the tip. I'm going to again start with my blue. And I'm only going to put it over on this side. And then I chose on a lovely purply color hair. And I'm going to jump into the middle of this with a wet brush. You can also go from one side to the other. But again, while it's still wet, you can do a beautiful blend of color. This is what we're going to be doing when we're doing our paintings in this class. Let's move down here and we'll just demonstrate a more dramatic color shift. Taking my yellow almost to the middle here. Probably should have shaken out a little bit, too, but and jump in there right away with the water and damp and everything. Now, if you go from the yellow side into the orange, you're going to bring that color into the orange and red and if you brought the red over this way, you'd have more staining power and less yellow. Now, the nice thing, even when it's still wet, is that you can go in and you can actually brush in some more of your other color to smooth out any transitions that you didn't like or if you didn't have enough yellow left over here. Okay. So that's a second blending of more than one color. And now we are going to lay down a color and let it dry and then show you how we can blend a second color over that. So here's my purple again. I'm not watching my edges here because they don't matter at this point. We'll go slower when we're doing our painting. I want to actually lighten that up a little bit, too. I'm going to add water to the entire square. Make sure the tip of my water brush is nice and wet. You can do a lot of lifting with the water brush itself. And then bring in my Filbert. I love filberts for lifting. They're just lovely using a little broom really picks up when they're slightly damp and thirsty. You can get a really nice range there of lighter color. We're going to let that dry and look at how we can shade over dry color with wet color. 5. Painting with Brush Pens Part 2: While we're waiting for this to dry, I'm going to show you a paleted version of these markers of how they paint. Paleting means that you put the paint on a palette, and then you pick it up to paint with and it gives you a lot lighter wash still really blendable. Instead of taking the marker directly in here, I'm going to scribble it on a palette. I'm going to choose another color too. Just because we don't want to get boring here. I'm using one of my own glass palettes in case you wonder what this is. This is always around because everything including acrylic will wash out of it. I'm going to shake this Can you hear that weird sound? I think tiny little balls in there or something to shake the paint. I'm just going to scribble this and get my water brush and wet this paint and then go in and apply it. And look at that, you can wash it right out into a graduated wash really easily. This gives you an entire new possibility for pastels and pastel blending and light and dark so the same color. You can also lift this to adjust your graduation to be whatever you want it to be. That's already a lot of mileage of this paint. Now, what if this happened to you? I let this happen on purpose it happened because a little more drying was on this blue edge than this one. But what if you had this going on and it didn't make you happy? Well, one of the ways to fix it would be to palette whatever color you're needing to fix. And then get in here and make it wet paint. This isn't going to stay wet forever, but for long enough sometimes, and then we're going to go in and we're going to smooth out what happened there. This is not watercolor. Therefore, when you go back in with wet paint, when it's dry, it's not going to disturb the underlying color. So you can wash your color right over to take care of any problems that you had in blending. Now I think we have enough dryness here to try our shading on this. I want to show you up close that you have to really clean your water brush until clear water comes out of the tip. Because if acrylic paint dries in the bristles of a water brush, it's going to be toast because it won't come through it anymore. Can use a styrofoam plate. You can use sheet protector, a mat, finished sheet protector, something that's laminated, anything plasticy and waterproof. But if you use your plastic mixing palettes, it's going to be real tough to get the dried acrylic off of those. I would use a disposable thing or a palette that you know is going to clean really easily. These and the porcelain palettes will clean really easily. Anything with plastic in it when the acrylic meets it, I think they think they're cousins or something and they want to stick together. Anyway, we are going to do a little shading. With the same marker that we used here, only this time, we're going to put this is dry now. We're going to put a stripe of the full color and then spread it. Right away. Again, don't sit around and wait, take the whole thing. You can blend it out in the middle somewhere, you can take it to the other edge. It doesn't matter because it's not watercolor. It's not going to go back and make cauliflowers for you. You can also, if you didn't get it quite what you wanted, can go back and you can do the paleting thing. And just get a little bit and add it in until you have your absolute final touch you love. You can go back and lift some more. You're only lifting that top layer of shading. I'm going to try that with a little different color over this one and jump right in. And move that edge. Now, in this case, I don't have to go all the way over to this edge because this will blend away and dry right where I put it there in a very subtle way. You really like that because there's something that you cannot do with watercolor and yet you still have a similar look. Last but not least, I'm going to show you how you can add highlights in two different ways to your painting with your brush pen. I'm using my blue again here and quickly filling my space. This time, I'm going to just add the water in a specific area to make those highlights and then take my lifting brushir and lift the paint, lift and blend at the same time, you see, because of this being so soft and nice and have highlights. Now this looks like a little ripple thing instead of a solid color. That is one way to do it and another way to do it. You take a white paint pen. Now I will say that these brush tips all have a white, but they're not always as I'm shaking it too to make sure I have all the opacity I can get. But they're not always very opaque. That one's not bad. The idea is, I'm going to be more subtle here by using a seven millimeter tip white pen. I'm going to make my little stripes on here. My highlight stripes. And then I'm going to take my damp Filbert brush and mess with them, blend them a little bit, make sure that they get wet here. Once you're sure they're wet, you can make them as subtle as you want to. Sometimes you put a highlight on and dear. It's really a highlight and you want to pull it back. You can do that. With the dampness factor, you can even go in and blot and left with a paper towel. This has given you lots of ways to use these pens to paint and we're going to use all of these ways in painting our succulents and cacti. 6. Drawing Succulent 1: The great part about succulents and cacti is that there are so many shapes and varieties that almost anything you do suggests one or another plant and you have a lot of artistic license just to make pretty things and call them succulents and cacti because who's going to argue them? I'm starting This is a five by seven piece of the 100% cotton watercolor paper. And I'm going to use a common horizon line on my drawings so that my plants match if we're going to have four of them and they're all lined up, that's going to be a really good thing. You can frame them as a little set and lots of stuff. We're going to keep the size kind similar. I'm going to start this one with a round circle. You notice that I draw in little tiny sketchy marks and I have always done that. Because I'm finding my way. I call this hunting the line. And that's not a real good circle, but it's going to be I also really turn my paper and keep my hand comfortable while I'm doing this. But the idea is when I draw things, I hunt for where the shape is because my brain knows my brain knows what the circlepups to look like, and so it tells me when something is out of whack. That's not an inner critic. That is an inner guide, which is such a blessing to have when you make your judgments on balance and shape and composition. And so on. Okay, so I'm starting with a circle because this is a really roundy ceramic pot in my imagination. Then I'm going to come up here and I'm going to make an oval at the top of this circle because that's where the plant goes in and none of this is going to show because we have leaves in front of it, so I'm going to get rid of that patch. Now, basically, I have the shape of my pot. I'll get the horizon line out of there. You know I want this pot to be one of those ones where it's ceramic and then they pour they put a glaze up top that is so wet that it runs down into, you know, driblets. I don't know. It runs down in a nice liquidy way. Usually, there'll be a bump at the end when it's down like a drop comes down and then it dries with a little little edge of extra glaze. Okay, that's not the world's most beautiful spill, but I think it's going to do for our purposes, our decorative purposes. This comes down. I was like, I'm gonna clean it up a little bit, but first I'm going to put a plant in here. That's silly looking right there. So I'm going to make that a smaller guy. Like that. A little more real and we have to maintain the roundness here in our lines. I couldn't be just straight because it's a curved surface. Even the spill is going to be curved. Whenever I draw any plant, I start with the leaves that are in the front because they're going to hide part of what's in the back. And so this is going to be like a sword leaf plant made out of parentheses. Just like you would make parentheses and you'd put something in them, put them together instead. Okay. And I want height coming up there somewhere. So there's our first leaf and I'm going to divide these in half because I'm going to want to paint them that way. Two, really harmonious colors, but a little different from each other. All right, so I've got that one, and I'm going to put one over here. Might even be a little fatter. Put the vein down the middle. Let's have one come up not quite as tall in the middle. And one kind of back of that one. It's on the other side of the pot, but we see part of it peeking through. And we do the same thing here. We're just going to divide that and look for balance. I think that goes out too far, maybe for this composition. This guy's a little kind of straight, maybe more than he needs to be, so I'm going to let a little wonkiness happen there. Pretty much want symmetrical leaves here so that I can divide that color when I paint later. Okay. We're going to strengthen that horizon line, which in this case is probably the back of a tabletop or something. My procedure from here is that I go to clean up and I'm going to show you how I do it and then do not do it on screen because it's just too boring. But basically, I can have a soft eraser like this or a white vinyl. A vinyl eraser doesn't hurt your paper. I go in and I softly get rid of a lot of the messiness of my sketchy line. So you see the difference here already between the messy ones and the cleaned up ones. And then I go back in and I've hunted that line. I found it. And so now I go back and I strengthen it. Just with a little darker pencil. We are going to be painting without ink lines in this class. These clean lines after I make them would be if we were doing an ink drawing with watercolor or something, they would be the ones that would be inked in and then all the pencil would be erased. But this time, our paint is going to be covering things up for us and we're not going to need to have those inklines Because even acrylic paint doesn't always cover the ink lines without some work, so we don't want to work. We want to play all right. And then I just go in, you know, again, with the eraser, clean a little more mess away and then strengthen the good line. So I'm going to do that off camera and I'll be back. Okay, I think I finally got what I want. You will find when you go through this cleanup stage that your eye and your brain might be telling you to change this or change that. I felt that I had too symmetrical of a plant going on. I spent a whole bunch of time drawing and redrawing these lines. That's why the pencil is a creative blessing and not an enemy like some people try to say. Pencil. If I could only have one thing to make art, this would be it because I get to change everything as I go and create on the run, so to speak. So this is what I ended up with. If your brain tells you to make something shorter or fatter over here or over there, go with it. That makes it yours and it makes it please you, and that's what this is all about. So that's our first succulent ready for paint. 7. Painting Succulent 1: The way that these paintings will go is that I will do a part of it step by step with you. For example, show you how I'm going to do one of these leaves and then I'm going to let you rather than watch 100 million hours of me messing around, I'm going to let the rest of them wait for you. I'm going to paint the two parts of the pot to show you how that is done. Then you can stop that video and you can go and finish your leaves. Color choices are totally up to you. I have certain ideas in mind of what I'm going to do. I make color charts for all of my paint palettes of all kinds and this one is crazy. This particular one is all of the Tuuli art colors. Like I told you, you have your run here of the primaries and green that is really great. This set here is the Earthtn set. The first thing I'd like to work on here is the glaze. I'm going to use a yellow base. This is my palette that I chose. This from the Tuliart earth tone set. If that's the one you got, you could have a matchup with me. But I'm basically going to apply this yellow to the entire area of the glaze and put a nice smooth covering of it. And we're going to shade it with the terracotta collars, sir. But when we lift it, we want a little blend that gets a little more Southwestern. Um, Sienna looking, I guess, is what I would say. Anyway, my entire area that is glazed on the pot is now yellow. Now, I don't have to wait for this to dry and I'm not going to because I'm going to take the top off my water brush. I want to make sure that I have the time to make this look like I want it to look. And so I can't yellow or the wetness of the yellow is going to help me with this because it's still damp under there and that's going to give me more time here. I don't want to spread this terracotta color, but not entirely into the yellow. I just want it to mix there and I'm reaching in and wetting. I'm going to just maybe run the water brush ahead of me a little bit so that I know I'm working on a nice damp surface. When I just use the tip of this and the surface is wet, it already starts its own blending. D, I don't want that mass though. I want this to blend and I don't want anything stripy here. I want it to all blend in like it looks like it belongs there. Okay. All right. Now there's no time to waste. The first thing I want to do is to get rid of any lines that we're going to have. If you go over like that, it is not a problem. We've got about 20 ways to fix that on the way through the painting. All right. I like it. I'm going to go in with a little bit of a darker shade too. But first, I want to lift. I'm grabbing and wetting and blotting, my Filbert. I want to do some lift and blend here. Well, I've still got all this going on and bring the yellow back here by lifting. But any place I see, it's going to be a hard line. I'm going to just blend and fuss with. We have to wait for this to dry and then I can do a leaf or maybe I can do these two leaves which aren't touching this. In the meantime. I want to choose a really subtle blue and a subtle green, let me see what I can find. I grabbed a darker green, number 27, which I just think is going to work better for me on my leaves, I am going to have both colors, both the blue and the green in each leaf and I'm going to keep if this side is blue on the leaf, I'm going to keep that that way all the way across. That doesn't really matter one way or another, how you choose that. But I think I'm going to have my green on the left side of each leaf. I'm starting by just making my outline there of the shape, filling the shape and jumping right in there with the water so that I will be able to lift some form of this leaf. For these little ones, I'm grabbing my small Filbert. Zero, I think, and using it to blend because larger ones too large. Just bringing that green down there. I'm going to have to make it darker later. Then I'm going to go over to the next leaf I'm going to do that is not touching my glaze area. Again, trace the shape. You can do a very thin or fat line with these and that's really so good. Yeah. You can use any brush you have to do this pickup, just that the filberts have this shape that is so nice in these little soft shoulders that blend so beautifully. I haven't found any other type of brush that's got those qualities exactly. Okay. I am going to stop with the leaves there and go back down here and it's dry. Probably isn't the way to check it, but I can tell from where I'm sitting, I can tell there's no gleam. We have our glaze on our pot. We have our plan for our leaves, and we just have to do this pot. Now, the base for the pot, I'm going to use what my mid tone was here because this is going to be a deep terracotta pot. I'm going to need even a darker color for my shading than I had with my number 20. Again, I'm going to take my lighter color of terracotta and take my time to be careful here and paint in the base layer of pot. I'm not going to take too much time because I do want to lift a little highlight as well. I over here and move quickly. I'm going to add some water here as we go because I'm going to want to pick up. I don't want it all so deep. I got to keep going here. I never put a timer on my art, but I guess it naturally has one when you're doing stuff like this. Hurry up. Otherwise, my motto is no hurry, no worry. I'm tired of it, you know? Most of your life, you have to run around being in a hurry, and I'm retired from being in a hurry. Okay. You still working some moisture into our thing here. You keep adding it in. I don't hold this paper will hold it for a little bit longer. Yet soak it up enough so that you don't have what happens on canvas when every brush stroke is showing what's happening. Now I've got all my basecat on, so what I do I have to get in with moisture here. Have to keep checking the camera so that we don't get off where we're supposed to be. That's really not bad already. But I am going to just add a little get out of here, Mr. Fly, and going to work. I had a hummingbird in here the first one of the year, flew right in the greenhouse a little while ago. That's really exciting and I'm going to have to put it in my sketchbook. Right on time every year they show up around April 19 or 20th. This is the 20th. Now I'm going to grab my Filbert damping, and then And then just blend it smoothly. Okay. And now I'm going to get that little shadow guy and see what we can do. The first place we know is going to be some deep shadow is around the bottom and the edges of this pot. So I'm not pressing very hard so I can get a smooth line. For my background, I just washed in some paleted color. I started with a yellow and I worked. It was still a little bit wet, but then I overlaid a green. Here is my finished succulent number one. Everything here was done with exactly the steps that we talked about here. Some coloring direct, some spreading, lifting direct, some adding in little bits from a palette. I'm wondering what adding back shading, I went in here to make the bottoms a little darker. I wanted more om. There's never enough oom for me. This really gave me more darks and that gives you more pop. Now, if that is still too pastel looking, and I mean, pastel the medium for you, you can add inclines. It's always an option. Before or after you do the painting, but I suggest after so that you don't have to paint so carefully to not go over your ink lines. If you wanted to see this really pop, you could use ink lines to define everything in the end. It doesn't matter. It's a couple of style choices. So if this is more to your liking, go ahead and add ink lines over the top. That's the end of our first painting. 8. Drawing Cactus 1: Now we'll draw the first of our cactus. I'm going to make the pot shape on the paper. This is going to be a pot that is not as circular and sort of come down and then curve in at the bottom. Have the bottom a little looking flat, but it has to. Whenever you see the top of a cylinder type object which all of these pots are, you're going to have the same curve basically at the bottom as you have here. Putting a straight line across here would be as weird as that horizon line looks right now because we know that the edge of a pot is the same height all the way around no matter you know, how it looks when we're looking at an angle. We know that the line here at the top has to have the same curve as the one at the bottom. All right. I'm going to leave that for now because I think that when I embellish this pot, I'm going to just do it with the acrylics and without any. It's going to be very random. So and we're going to draw a very interesting pad cactus called the Santa Rita, and it's so interesting because when it gets cold, it starts to turn pink instead of green, we'll address that when we're painting it. But it's very, very attractive. Again, like I did with the succulent, I'm going to start with the shapes that might be most forward in this pot and I'm going to put prickly para cactus hays, little knobs or sometimes ears or weird little things. Sticking out. I'm going to start at each corner with a smaller one. We're not going to see that line. We're not going to see that line anywhere, actually. So we can always get rid of it. This one will put another little ear. He. Okay, so now I'm going to move backwards to a larger pad shape that would be behind the one. It's up here in front and go all the way back into the pot. Get rid of that one. This one's going to have a couple of ear things on it. They look like little critters to me sometimes. I like it. And they are pretty round. Okay. And then back behind that one, I'm put another one. See how easy this is, right? If you're working right along with me, you'll see that this real time things pretty easy to do. Okay. Now, this cactus probably goes into the dirt back here somewhere, but that looks weird. So I'm going to put a tiny one, a more tiny one in here, which effectively hides wherever this one would go into the cactus mix. That's too big, I think for that smaller pad. Okay. Now, I want to adjust a little bit because these are very round. I don't want them to be too skinny of an oval because they are round pads. Again, this is why the pencil is such a great creative stick because you can just change anything, especially if you're working on good paper like this because the paper is not going to really care at all. About you erasing. Thinking maybe a baby right here. That makes things look a little more even, and I still don't like this. I think I want this to be rounder, this pad. And then maybe it's a little baby, if you will. Be off of that side. That's balanced. I like that. They're going to come up right against the top of the pot. I think there will be a little rim visible. I think this pot has some thickness to it. Debating about this, but I'm going to do it. My balance is really important. My symmetry. When you're trying to draw something like a pot like this, it's going to be symmetrical. You can help yourself out with this center and just make a very light guideline thing. I wasn't in the center. That's more of the center. Then, look at this line as it relates to the part that's drawn on this side of it, and as it relates over here. I see that this needs to be a straight or drop in order to match up with what's going on here. It's just that line makes, I don't know. Is your brain has a really hard time looking at something going that way and comparing it to something going that way. It takes a long time for your brain to learn how to do that thing. In the meantime, it's not as hard for your brain to match a shape against a straight line. That's the reason for doing that and you graduate from having to do it. But when you're beginning, it's such a helpful thing to have going on. Again, I'm going to clean this up and strengthen the main good lines. I've got my lines cleaned up. Now we're going to revisit these little ear things because what they really are on this cactus or it's a little vase on the top, and from those little vases come the blooms, which are beautiful. They're yellow. They're bright yellow along with all this purply pink. Uh, purple and yellow are complements. Those two colors just really set each other off. I'm going back to make little vase things, my little ear like things. Then we're going to add some flowers, some blossoms. Where these occur. There's a lot more of them usually on the cactus. Now I'm picturing when we paint it, we'll have yellow up here and there. I'm wondering for balance if we might need a little more yellow to happen in here. Because there will be a flower in those spots. We are going to paint our flowers in our painting process because using the acrylic brush pens, we will be able to quickly make the strokes for blossoms rather than have a lot of pencil involved in pre drawing them. We're going to strengthen this back table line here and call this one ready for painting. 9. Painting Cactus 1: There are just two major parts. Well, three, if we add the flowers to our first cactus painting. I'm going to start with the pot, and I want to do the pot as a decorative thing like this or like this. I'm going to decide that as I get through this. If I pick up and I don't feel like it's enough, then I'll go back with the white pen like we did and add to the whiteness. Now, this is a large area. And so sometimes unless you go really, really fast, by the time you fill this area, you are starting to dry out. So if you live in an area without much humidity, if you live in a real humid area, you're not going to have a problem. We make sure the tip of your water brush is wet and pre paint the area with just clear water. It's okay to take your time because we're going to let this soak in. We don't want a bunch of water sitting on the surface when we do this. We're going to let it soak in. But we're just pre wetting a little bit to see if we can get this acrylic paint to stay workable longer. Now, I I missed a spot there. I don't know if you can see the glare, but tip your paper to see if you missed a spot. I want to make sure I get my rim here. This is already drying here. I'll tell you, desert Southwest is real interesting as far as drying times. I'm going to go now I'm using an Artex pen this time, and I'm going to start to fill in. Right across that wet surface. This is going to give you a little bit lighter version of the color from your marker obviously because it is mixing a little bit with the water. Another thing I found that's tricky is when I just reverse and went sideways here, you got to watch that because you can get that stripe showing up at some point and we don't want that. If it's dried, we're going to be in a lot of trouble. Once you do this thing and go the opposite direction, you want to even it out again. I'll show you what I mean by that. Right in this area, I'm going to bring back my verticals and hope to skip any little issues with hard edges drying. I'm going to jump back to my water brush. And it's funny. It looks lighter when you go in chalkier, it helps because you can see what you're doing a little better. I've got this pretty wet and I'm going to come back with my pickup brush and get myself a few white stripes in the glaze on this pot. Make sure to clean your brush after that little intense endeavor here. I'm going to use smaller I'm going to start with my smaller pickup brush. And just make a series of white stripes. Follow the contour of the pot. It should not be just a straight line. I a little straighter when you get to the middle here. But what you really want is to define the shape of the pot. So I'm doing this through the drying process, enhancing my white accents. Until the blue has dried, I'm not going to add any outside white to it. I'm going to wait and that can be more of an accent. While our pot does its drying for us. It's a great time to tackle the Santa Rita a prickly pair cactus. It's a really, really interesting cactus because it starts out green and if it gets cold or sometimes even if it doesn't, it starts to turn rosy purple around the top. I went to the Artex set of 60 and found a green is a cold green that I like for the idea. I really suggest that you look up, you Google Santa Rita prickly pair cactus and look at the colors really carefully because you'll be able to pick something that works for this. I'm going to start out with our thing we did where we put a little bit of color and then spread it with our water brush into the rest of the piece of our pink there. So I'm going to start with this cactus right here and I'm not going to do that much color in it, something like this. Now grab my water brush, which is wet and just get in here at the edge first because that's where you're going to get dried first and we don't want those marks. Jump in there and I'm blotting my brush because I don't want too much green at the top. The green and the pinky purple are going to be right on the borderline of being complimentary colors, and they're going to gray each other out. If we let them be in there too much. Now your green at the bottom should be a little bit stronger than it is as it washes up. You can go back and forth here with this and add more color or less color. But up here, I would keep it really pale. Because we have to have that dry as well, let's just move over to our other one and we'll have a backup practice. I'm going to start the green up here and come around to here and then add a little more at the bottom of this one and jump in right away with the edge to get rid of the edge and come down to wet. This is the whole key to this blending thing is to not have any hard lines dry on you. This one's got more green at the bottom. We'll just see how interesting that is. This is almost dry and a tiny bit of dampness left is not a problem. Now, we're going to put I chose two colors here. These are from Artex and my green is a t517 and t358, which is a warm purple. I'm going to start because this is so staining and heavy duty. I'm going to start paleting it. This time, instead of my my glass palette, I'm just using a strip of laminated, it was a trim from something I laminated and it was a satin finish laminin, so it makes a great palette too. We're going to put that on there and introduce it, get it wet with our brush and introduce it from the top of the cactus. Pad, I guess this would be called and then clean up my brush and bring this color in in a subtle way. Because that's what this cactus looks like. It looks like it's turned pink, but it was green. That's the look you're going for. I don't want any hard line. I might want a little bit more red or pink up here. You see this is doing a lovely graying out thing when they hit each other, which is a perfect look for the natural cactus. Everything is not totally bright. You and I went out of the line over here and we're not going to let that bother us. Yes, we are. But anyway, just a little fix. I'm not even a recovering perfectionist. I'm just hopeless perfectionist. I think it's good to strive for perfect because you can never get there, but it gets you along the road anyway. I'm going to do this again and I'm going to start with a little fresh swatch here and pick it up and bring it in from the top, maybe a little more color on this one. Maybe this one is mostly pink. And then clean off your, your we brush and come in and work with the blending like that. Now, if you feel like it, you can also do a stronger thing and just put a little bit of the tip of the actual marker instead of paleted and spread that in and you're going to get a little more drama. Sometimes it's good to have darks and real lights amongst your values. That gives you some pizzas in the finished piece. Now, these little guys here, these little cups that will be flowers. Originally, they start out green. Before they flower, they turn to a purply red let's take a careful look here at what this cactus actually exhibits as far as color. This gives you the green. I wonder if we can get those bigger. We sure can. It gives you the exact thing that we were just doing with the little prickles on it. You see that some of the pads are a lot green still, and some are a lot more pink. Sometimes if they get really cold, the top ones get pink and purple entirely. I'm showing this so that you can just enjoy it. Here's our little things that become flowers. You can see that where they're going to flower like here, they turn a more reddish version of the pink purple that we were using. And here you're seeing the yellow at the top. Here's more and oh, I love this. I have a photograph I took that's like this, too. Those two colors together. Here's a close up of the little um I'm sure these have a name. I'm going to say buds, okay? These guys, here's a close up of them and they are very pinky there. So it's like, do we make them pink and then they bloom or we have them green? Here's all purple with just the yellow flowers and the same purple as a cup. There's a lot of choice, and I think my choice is just going to be to do these with the tip of a marker that's just a little. It's like this color, but a little lighter pink so that we can see it. Let's see how that works. So this is t333 from this same set, and I'm just taking a look at whether that is purple enough, and I'm feeling like it isn't so what I might try to do here is mix the color I want. If this isn't quite purple enough, and then just like mixing paint, I put some of this in and then I get over there with my water brush there I'm getting the colors just like I want. I have that on my water brush. I'm going to be very gentle and delicate about it because I don't want to blob it all over. But I like how that looks. That's a little pinker than the purple. That is how you mix these colors on a palette. Again, if you have humidity, you might have time. If you don't hurry up. To use your mix before it dries. Now on this drier one, I am going to put the little marks where the little spines are and I'll show you how I do this and you can do it anyway that you want to. I'm going to keep my wet water brush right here. I'm going to take my purple and go to the drier one of these and only touch with the tip just barely like so, and you're able to see this, I hope. Make tiny dots. Because what goes on is a little purply dot is on the cactus pad and then the little stickers come out of it. But I don't want it to look cartoony like that, so I'm going to jump right in and I'm going to blob it out. I'm just spreading it here. To give the idea. And then I'm going to soak it up with a piece of paper towel. And now we have something that's pretty realistic looking. Is this still too wet? Now this is good. I'm going to do that again. Make sure my brush is wet. Okay. And I'm just going to pop a little bits of colour all over the cactus pad. Smoosh them a bit. You don't have to be as violent as I was at first point through. The idea is that they're not little sharp points because that doesn't look realistic. Okay, and pick it up. That's even better than the first one. To add my spines, I'm taking 0.3 fine liner and the marks I'm going to make are going to be teeny Vs like this. Just if you looked at it large, it's like that, but you're going to make them nice and small so that they fit and you bring one out of every dot that's left. And this is going to give you a very realistic look for a Santa Rita cactus. So I'm going to show you how we're going to add the flowers. And I'm thinking that I'm going to take my little vase tops out of here because the flowers would hide them. But why have that extra pencil in there? I'm just going to do this particular one right now. Okay, those flowers are vibrant yellow because these are brush tips, you are going to be able to make a petal. Point press, point, press, just like everybody teaches you on Instagram and wherever else YouTube, it won't make the great petal that a pointed round brush will, but it's not bad. I'm going to use a bright yellow and make myself a flower coming out of these. Now, it is opaque acrylic paint, it will cover any little leftover pencil. Now, you're good there, but I feel like I would like a little more definition. This is a tulle art from the yellow set number five. I am going to look for something with a little more shading for a yellow. I'm looking at two of my different sets of stuff and it's going to be a yellow ochre. Now, what I'm going to do? I'm not going to blob, if I blob new things on it. I could lose the old one and I might just rather make little marks with the tip of the brush. Just to define a little bit that these are flower petals, make them show up a little. I'm going to add a little of this yellow ochre color. But you see how much more this shows as flowers now. So I'm going to add my flowers here to this one. Alright, now, I'm going to look for a little orange of some kind and see what happens with that. Here I tried a kind of a middle town orange and I like it a lot better than this. This just makes pop, and this is a little more dull and defined. I went in and put my little spikes on there so that we'd look at these two and it'd be a fair comparison. But I am going to go with that. We are back to our pot, which is nice and dry now. I'm going to add the effect that we've done already was this one where we picked up the color I'm going to add this one on top of that where we added a little extraneous white from another acrylic paint pen, and then we fudged it with our brush. Now, I'm going to go one at a time here because I don't want the first stripe drying in the meantime while I make the rest of them. I'm going to do this lightly and not try to be a straight line at all. I'm going to get in here right away and soften that so it doesn't look garish or a crack or something. And very light these thin markers, that's not a problem sometimes because they don't want to do anything but very light or make the mark it all sometimes. But anyway, that's what I wanted to do with my pot. Now I have combined my cactus painting with my pot painting. I washed in a little place for the pot to be sitting. These are abstract grounding things. You don't need the real table or whatever because really the um the whole emphasis is on the cactus plant. I shaded a little bit with a darker blue on my pot and did exactly on my cactus pads what we did in our lesson. I will point out one thing when I put the yellow flowers in here, it's supposed to be opaque, but it wasn't opaque enough that the yellow popped. I waited for the yellow to dry then I took the trusty extraneous white acrylic. And I did the petals in white and I let that dry. I think I might have even done it twice and that gave a white background to the yellow, that allowed the flowers to pop that were right in there. This is our SantaitaPrickly pear cactus. 10. Drawing Succulent 2: Our third plant is going to be another imaginary succulent based on several different plants from snake plants, sword plants. I don't know. But the reason that I'm doing it is for the painting, the little painting technique that we'll be doing would be very interesting. I'm going to start This is going to be a basket, and I'm going to start the top band of the basket. Just above the horizon line here. This is the band that goes around the top of a basket and holds it together. Now, this basket is going to be pretty straightforward and pretty straight sided. The bottom. Again, it's going to have to match the angle that we're seeing the top from. Is going to be a little bit curvy. I'm going to start it in here. Now, how to draw a basket? This might not have to be as curve. You've straighten that out a little bit. How to draw a basket that is convincing as a basket. We're going to start with horizontal dividing lines, not too curved but following the same feeling and trying to have the same spacing. No can I fit? Yeah. Somehow, I got that even. Let's see, one, two, three, four, five, there wasn't a better way to do it. If you got an even number of things, you can divide a thing in half and then divide the remaining parts. But now when you have five things, we'd have to do that differently. Here's where we're going to start. What these are rows of where some basket thing is woven in between. You'll see that in a minute. I'm going to make verticals here, which they would actually go down and be the things that you weave around. This will be sketchy. It doesn't have to be absolutely aligned, but somewhat is good because you're going to base the rest of them on this first row. I compare this and this. I think maybe I'll move this over just a little. And then move this guy over a little. That's our first row and then they're going to alternate because the band of basket stuff, I don't know what you would call that. I really don't it does weave in and out and we're going to make it look like that. On our next row, we're going to put the weaving sticks, just made that up. Between where the other ones are. When we get in the third row, we're going to go back to match the ones from the top. See how this already starts to look like a basket. The next one would be way over here. This row matching this one. And then the bottom one. This is the same stick coming down, it has to look like it's the same stick. Now, I'm going to go back and make this a little less harsh. First of all, you don't like that bend going up there. To make this top a little bigger and a little rounder this collar on here. Then we're going to make it look a little more baskety by making these sides actually round. Now, it is really starting to look like a basket. And we can put a plant inside our basket. This is going to it's going to be similar to our sword leaf thing, but a little more roundy. I don't know whether it'd be a succulent or not or if it's just a mother in law's tongue plant or a snake plant. But again, I'm going to put a little curve to the I'm starting with what would be in the front. It is always what you want to do when you're doing a plant because some stuff's in the back and then maybe here is one and one behind this one or here. A little bit of personality curve there. This will maybe go out like this and come in like this and still making stuff up here, maybe a little one here. I'm going to take one leaf over this direction to balance out the composition. So there's that one. Then that leaves us with we could be having one behind this one. But what I'm going to do is make this one fatter so we don't have that odd space there. Cleaned up here and I decided that these sticks when they hit the bottom, they had to be connected to something. Even in my imagination, they did. I added this little bottom something. I don't know whether it's a round piece of wood or what it is. But anyway, it's a place for the sticks to end up. Then this succulent is ready for painting. 11. Painting Succulent 2: We have gotten a lot of painting progress under our belt and so it's going to get easier and shorter videos from here on out. Our second succulent, which might not be as succulent, it's got fat leaves though I'm going to say so is sitting in a basket, and this is going to be fun to create this basket because it's easy and it really looks like a basket when we get done. Let's take a look at it. There are going to be two colors here. There's going to be a more rusty brown, it's going to be the rim. And all these little, I don't know what you call them, little spine things that I don't know what you call these either. I'm not a basket maker. But anyway, the fiber that goes in and out and weaves in and out of these little stick things is going to be a yellow ochre color. Let's see. I'm looking right now at whether these sticks go straight up and down because if they didn't it wouldn't work. Right here, I have a problem. I'm going to move this over, it makes more sense. It all looks like it could hold together. Even though I'm not a basket person. Let's take a look at how we're going to paint each little section of this. This is a number 14 from the yellow set of Tuuli art markers. But anything that's close to a yellow ochre will do or light brown. I have my water brush at the ready and I'm going to use my smallest filbert for pickup here. I also have that dampened and sitting right here. As simple as this, I'm going to start with the larger one right here and we are going to color the square add a little water brush, which is already picking that up nicely and get our little Filbert and pick it up in a real blendy fashion. I'm going to do one more of those with you here. Then I will go off camera and finish them and you'll see how nice they look. This will be mindful and meditative for you for a little while and for me because it's like a coloring book, water, yeah. Picking up, I don't even really need the Filbert brush, I don't think I'm getting a lovely pickup from this marker. So I'll be back with my basket weave. Before I go, I'm going to mention that this didn't occur to me until a minute ago that I'm going to do the first row, then the third row, then the fifth row in order for our tops and bottoms not to touch while they're wet. This band and the bottom band are going to be the same color as the uprights in the woven basket. So I'm going to make this, fill it with color so that I can come back. I don't like my edge there. I can come back and lift it, give it a little form. This holds the top of the basket together, and I've got to get in here with water real fast in order to be able to move it and lift it. There's the top band. And then I'm going to pick the brush up straighter so it doesn't make too fat of a line and put this bottom in. I'm not even going to try to lift that because it actually is supposed to be dark down there there. So now we have our top and our bottom on and we're going to use the tip of the brush to make these sticks. Just a little bit of pressure is going to give us the right line for that width. You might have to double stroke it just a little bit. But the idea is to put the uprights in. Now, whether I'm going to get any reaction from lifting here. I don't know, but I'm going to use my little filer and C. It's possible to just give them a little roundness so they look like those sticks, but they're not just flat. We can go right to the next row because we don't have wet touching wet. I'm going to finish that and then I'll be back. I'm back with my done basket, and I filled in all of these and lifted a little bit, while I was at it, I painted the leaves with a nice green that I found because the next thing I want to do is show us the result when we add a darker color. And do a little of our. But that's called a scumbling. I don't think I mentioned it before. I comes out of oil painting and it means a dry brush, scumbling. I guess that's what they call it that. But that's what we're doing with a web brush to paint that wants to dry really quickly. But the result is the same thing. It's a mottled effect. We're going to use a really dark green. It's the darkest one I have, it's number 22 from the green set. From tuliar but all sets will have a darkest green. We're going to look at the shape of the leaf and want to put shadow a variety mark, which we'll see on a lot of leaves like this into places where it would bend away from us. We're going to do something like this in that shadow area and I'm not just going to leave it stripy. Going to scumble it looks a little more natural like that. Part of the leaf just has darker green there here it's coming back out towards us and so it's going to be light there. But down here, it would also have those markings of dark green and probably at the tip. When you look at that, I think you have seen plant leaves that look just like this. I like to look. The nice dark is a contrast with the lighter basket and so on. You have to make your own decisions here for light and dark. This is really the same procedure that we were doing here and here on our painting lesson. But instead of going light into dark that way and just lifting and putting white in, we are adding a dark and getting a really similar effect. On this one, I'm going to show you I approached making this little vignette background here and you start right at the wine you made. This has got water coming out of it the whole time. It's water brush and you want to make sure you squeeze it over a paper towel. You're going to work this blue color in here. You're going to come down at an angle, go around the bottom, and you just scribble some more. Okay. W more color coming down and you want to guys wash your color out to white. That's how you're going to make that Vignette. And we're getting our paper nice and wet in the meantime and that's a good thing too because when we put a little darker of a cyan or a little turquoise color, you want to have this all blend. I'm looking from an angle, I can see I've got pretty wet area going on or paint. This way, using the paleted version, you have much more control than to try to come in with your mark or and put a heavy mark in there and think you're going to blend it out without it doing its own blending. But what I am going to do is the tiniest touch now that it's all wet and bring that down. Because that's going to give me a little deeper value there. Paper has soaked up some water so the paint can't dry quite as quickly. See it's getting a lot drier over here on the pallet because there's a wet paper under it to keep it to flow. This is the way I've done all the backgrounds on this and I'd like to look. It just gives the basket or the pot a place to sit. I want to make sure this is all still wet because I'm going to take in I'm going to palette a little darker version here and pick that up and add that to the flow. It's going into the lighter color. It's going into the water. You have a high quality of watercolor paper, you shouldn't get into the problem of damaging paper because you have wetness that you're using. I'm going to squirt more out of my water brush. I mean, it's wicking moisture all the time, but maybe sometimes we need more when we want to wash something into a white eventually, you have to have something contrasting with that white. All of this is working around this is wet. I don't think I'm going to go. Much further with this. If it dries and I decide something has to be deeper, I can come in with a wash over the top. Here is the finished succulent number two in a basket. I added by putting a dark blue on a palette and using the water brush, I added a background here to ground the container and finished my leaves. I wanted a little more warmth in my highlights. I added yellow to a palette also and used the water brush just to glaze, I would call this because remember, this is acrylic now, so when it's dry, you can glaze over it without disturbing the bottom layer. I just glazed a little bit over the highlights in the leaves and the basket just to give it a little more light, a little more warmth. That's that on this plant. 12. Drawing Cactus 2: So let's draw our second cactus in yet another a container. This is going to be a round and square kind of pot. I'm starting with a rough sketch of a square, and that's where its bottom will be. I wanted to go above the horizon a little bit. But then I'm going to go back to the square and put that oval in. That defines the top of what this pot really is, and then I have to match that oval down here. I'm curving like that. Get this line out of here, so it doesn't confuse my eye, get my guidelines out the side to be straight up and down. I want this to be a coiled pot. I'm going to show you how you can space something that has odd number of things. In this case, coils. You've seen videos and stuff of people making coiled pots, where you have a rope of clay all rolled and you just pile it up on itself. That's the pot that we're making right now. So I'm going to put my first coil is I'm going to try and find the center here, and I might even use a ruler a little bit, that's about 1.5 and about three quarters of an inch would be the center. Let's see. This is actual center of this. I'm going to make that into my middle coil. And my coils are going to be that wide. I've got that on either side of that center mark. This coil is pretty much in the middle of this pot. I'm going to divide we want our coils up here to be just a stick, then all we have to do to get five coils is to divide those two spaces in half. Is to divide these two spaces in half. Now, this is a coiled pot. That means that each of these is going to be round and not flat like that. Our cactus is going to be a little more generic this time. Let me start with the first one that would be in front here. Basically, it's a big oval. Let me shape this out should be rounder here. Then it's divided into two parts. All right. I'm trying to figure out is that as fat as I want it? Maybe not. Maybe I want it to be more fat. All right. Something like this, like this, like this. Then of course, we're going to have to have somebody coming out of the back here. There are three, we're going to say there are three arms or whatever parts to this cactus. Now, the thing about these that is fun is they have really cool blossoms right on the top, and I'm going to start those with a little center of the flower and we're making up the flower. I'm just going to make it a four petal flower by adding those. We'll keep it a little bit simple because the body of the cactus is not, especially when we get some spines that we'll put in there and so on. Okay. I don't know. I don't know if I want to make them a little cadiwampus and give them more petals. Yeah. I think I'll just add a bit. Make them a little more fun. Because we're making this far up. I could go look it up and try to be realistic, but why do that, right? So some nice fat ones. Now they can get a little shaped differently and you can pretend they're going at an angle. And that's how that happened. Can do something like that. I want this bigger and I want this whole cactus bigger. Back here. This is all for the balance of the composition. Now I'm still looking at it. I think I want that rounder and I do we like it? I think so. I'm going to clean it up and we'll see. Here's our barrel cactus already in flour and ready to paint. 13. Painting Cactus 2: Our second cactus in our final painting is just going to be a piece of cake and going to breeze right through it because the entire thing is created with things we've already learned and we've already done, and now we have learned where the pitfalls are and maybe mistakes and so we know how not to do that. I am going to start because I want a blue vase or pot on the bottom. I've got my dark blue marker. I've got my paper towel. I've got my full water brush ready. I've got my two sizes of Filbert brush ready. All right. I'm going to dampen them also just so I can grab them to lift. The first thing, I'm going to do the bottom row on my pot. I'm going to trace around the shape trying to be as accurate as I can. I do this first because this is going to be dark anyway. It's not really going to be lifted along the edge. I figure if I did that first in my middle second, the middle of it is going to be liftable because it's going to be not as dry. This brush has a lot of water. Here comes the lifting brush. I'm going to that on this because it's such a deep, deep color. I'm rewetting the lifting brush and adding some water back here a little bit. I'll have to fix that line later, but I don't stop to worry about it now. Okay. That makes my coiled pot look a little more like it's actually coiled because it looks round once we pick up the lifted color. That is what you are going to do in whatever color you want to do it. I would again suggest doing this one and every other one. Um, so the third and the fifth so that wet doesn't run into wet. Because even if it's just a little leftover wet, it can make your edge bleed over and that isn't what you want. All right. I showed you one of those for my cactus. This is more of a barrel cactus and they're segmented in a vertical matter. The look that I like for this is two tone green. I'm choosing a number 26 and number 27 from the Earthtne tuliar kit. But I'm going for a lighter yellower green and a deeper bluer green. Whatever your set has, you can see if it has anything like this. I'm going to put the lighter green in the middle section and left the light is going to hit the inside of the section more than the edges. These edges are ridges and they won't be hit by the light as much. I'm not sure this dark is the one I want, but there's one way to find out here. Because if it isn't will only go darker. I'm safe doing this knowing that I could paint over it. Let's see how it looks. I think I like it. Let me grab the Silbert here. I think that's going to be nice. It's not too severely different, close values. I think that that is going to combine really well. Then I'm going to choose a bright red for my blossoms and probably a bright orange yellow for the center of the flower. I was able to find a nice orange red, which is just what I wanted and it's a number two from the red set from Tuuli art. Just find not a cool dark red, but a bright orange red because that's what these blossoms really do look like in real life. Again, I'm going to use exactly the same procedure edge first, middle, second, and attempt to lift here. Don't lift away too much on the red because red can just go dull and boring really easily if you lift too much color from it, just gets flat. And I think for my tabletop this time, I'm going to be choosing probably the yellow ochre sienna kind of thing that we did. I was going to pick this orange up and it's just going to be really nice against the blue down here. I am off to spend the next half hour or so enjoying the process of the painting and I'll be back to show you the finish. 14. Final Thoughts: Here we have our last painting, our cactus number two, just like we talked about, I painted it exactly the same way. The outline the fill and pick up wetting and pick up. I put little yellow centers in my flowers and just a dot of the color from the flower petals and debated a while on whether to add a highlight with a white marker and then smudge it, but I thought I could get in trouble, so I didn't do it. And then I put in a yellow base background with a burnt sienna over the top. I took my fine liner and I went in and made our little Vs for the spines on the cactus and then I thought, I might like it because they sometimes have a reflection. I thought I might like it if it had a little white reflection on it too. That's it. Yours might look very different, but I'm sure it's beautiful. This is a nice little set here. Let me zoom out a little bit so that we can see the four of them together. So very handsome as a set. I might even frame these originals in the same frame. These are five by seven inch pieces of paper. And the drawings I provided you in the resource section are also five by seven. So if you have a printer that will put through a piece of 140 pound watercolor paper and give you a waterproof ink, then you can just go ahead and print those drawings out and paint them if you don't want to draw them. But of course, it's more fun to draw them and paint them. So I am very excited to see your paintings in the project section for a couple of reasons, I always love to see the students work and talk about it. But this is a brand new paradigm in painting. You just haven't been able to do this particular thing with these particular tools before. So it's challenging and exciting, and I would love to hear from you where stumbling blocks might have been. Now, this is exciting as well because it's so unusual to have a permanent medium like acrylic blend so beautifully and be able to have transparency and look like watercolor. Also look in some cases like a soft pastel piece of artwork. It does not look like acrylic at all. It's so I don't know, non plasticy, I guess. But it's also so well blended and that is so hard to do with regular acrylic paint. I hope you've enjoyed this class. I have really enjoyed it, and I'm going to pursue this medium and see what else we come up with in the future. Have fun doing this.