How To Sketch and Paint Seals in Watercolors

1. Introduction: Hi, everyone. Seals, also known as pinnipeds, are semi aquatic marine mammals who are distributed throughout the Earth's oceans. Known for their playful nature, intelligence, agility in the water, and ability to form close knit groups, they have also been shown to form close bonds with humans that they encounter, making them beloved and even protected in certain regions around the world. Which is why I can't wait to teach you how to sketch and paint a seal colony lounging on a beach in a very loose and relaxed manner in watercolors. In this class, we will not be burdened by exact measurements and proportions and will simply sketch as many different poses as you like in a relaxed fashion. We will also draw a couple of lines to indicate the shore. After roughly sketching the seals, we will start painting the background using loose varied washes of color, followed by painting the foreground, by dropping in colors using the wet-on-wet technique, and adding texture using different brush strokes and splattering. We will then paint each seal using the wet-on-wet technique to drop in various colors and create textures in a continuous relaxed manner to create the illusion of fur and patterns. Finally, we will use some white wash paint to add foam and crest to the water, as well as highlights to the seal's fur using the wet-on-dry technique. This class is suitable for intermediate to advanced watercolor students, as you'll be required to already know how to use the wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques. However, if you are a beginner, you are more than welcome to follow along, as I will be explaining and demonstrating each step very clearly. So if you are ready to create a beautiful seascape scene with seals just relaxing on a beach, let's begin. 2. Materials: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the material section of this class where I will show you everything you need to do this project with. First, I'm going to start with the paper. I'm using this brand of watercolor paper, which is Canson, and it is an A three sized pad of paper, and it has a weight of 300 grams/meter square or 140 pounds. You don't have to use the same brand of paper as me, but please make sure you use paper of a similar weight so that you get the best results. For the sketching, I'll be using a lead holder. The one I'm using is by staler, Mass Technico I'm also using a mechanical pencil. This one is Pilot Super grip, and it has the size of about 0.5 of lead. I'm also using a soft eraser, also by the brand Sler. You don't have to use the same brand as me, but please make sure you use any soft eraser so it doesn't leave any marks. Also, I will be using musking tape. This one is about 1 " wide, and you can get it from the hardware store. Any brand is fine as I will be using it to make a border around my painting. Now, let me talk about all the materials you need for the painting. I always use two jars of clean water so I don't have to keep changing them. I also use paper towels or a rag to just wipe off all the excess water from my brushes when I rinse them and a ceramic palette for mixing paints on. Now let's get to the brushes. I will be using a three quarter inch flat brush. This is a square wash one by then Princeton. I'll also be using three round brushes, all by the brand silver black velvet, and these are in sizes 12, eight, and four. And to apply white gouache later on in the painting, I will be using the small size two round synthetic brush by the brand original gold. Now let's talk about the paints. As always, you don't have to use the same colors as me, but if you would like to use the same colors, I will be using French ultramarine, raw sienna, raw amber, burnt amber, sepia, Windsor violet and VeridianGreen, as well as Pains gray. Later on, we will also be using some white gouache paint. You don't have to use the same brands as me, but please make sure you're using artist quality paint to get the best results. Those are all the materials that you need, and I can't wait to start this class with you, see you in the next section. 3. Sketch: Hi, everyone, and welcome to our sketching portion of this class where we are now going to sketch the entire scene of our seal family lounging on the beach. And I just want to say, we're going to do this in a very relaxed and fun and loose way. Okay. So we're not going to pay particular attention to, like, a lot of details. Okay, 'cause we're mainly just after getting the rough shape of our waterline, as well as the sand. This is going to be very fun and loose and also very laid back. What I want to do for this is you can choose to use either your lead holder or mechanical pencil. But I just like using the lead holder to get the rough shape of stuff. But before I even start sketching, I want to use the masking tape first just to add a border around my um Paper just so when Is put this down as accurately as you can. I might just move the paper a little bit because it's near my water right now. Um, so I'm just going to add a border just because I prefer to do that if I'm going to paint a background, so I find it helps the paint to just stay in one area and not go off the page. But if you don't want to use muskin tape, that's fine too. If you don't mind your paint going slightly off the paper and onto your surface below. It's just a matter of preference for me, but I like to do a border if I'm painting the entire background. So in my previous videos, I've already talked a lot about how to put masking tape down, so you want to make sure I know I sound a bit like a broken record, but you want to make sure that you smooth out any air bubbles below the surface because otherwise, your paint will get drawn in there. And then it kind of defeats the purpose of making that border. So I'm just securing everything, and I put the masking tape down first before I started sketching because, obviously, so I can just sketch within the confines that I'm going to paint in. So I'm using one of my reference photographs to to do the background. When I took this photograph, I was on elevated ground looking down from a little bit of a distance away at the seals. That's why we see the water is from an above view. So that's just because of where I took the photo from. What I want to do first here is I'm just going to draw this very, very rough line and you don't even have to use the exact same line that you see in the reference photographs that I provided. Because this is just indicating where the water and the waves are going to be. And now I'm just going to do some rough little broken lines that are very like curvy. These are going to be just where the water breaks, okay? So see I'm not even I'm just very, very roughly doing this and just make sure that the bottom is a little bit curve. That's all. Because we want these waves to look natural. And this part that I'm doing is really the top of the wave folding over the crest and it's what we would say the white foam area of the water. And then I'm also going to have a little bit of another little curve of water. So this is just very shallow water that is Oh. Kind of just when you step onto the wet sand, this is just the most shallow amount of water that you have besides the wet sand. Now, we can start sketching our seals now that I've done this. We'll have a little bit of water in the background, which is cool. Because it sets the scene for our seals. Now to draw the seals, I might switch to a mechanical pencil now instead of using my lead holder because I've already done the background. And I'm going to start first with the seal right at the front for me. This guy is lounging and looking very relaxed. And what I'm going to do now, I just want to make sure you can see what I'm sketching. Great. Just looking at the camera angle. I'm going to draw in a very, very organic manner, meaning I'm just going to feel sketch what I see and just feel it. This is where the nose part's going to be and I can always refine this later. But the purpose of this class is for us to sketch in a relaxed manner. We're not going to get bogged down on details. Because everything about this class is designed to be relaxing and loose. Trust me, everyone will know that you are drawing a seal. There will be absolutely no mistake about that. I'm starting with the nose and I'm just really feeling my way, letting my hand just do this in the most organic way possible. Now I'm just going to go up here because this is where the body gets thicker. This is where you've got the ribs and so I'm just following what I see, getting that very rough shape going first because we're going to have fun doing this. All I'm doing now is getting that shape going. Now I think somewhere over here, I'm going to start putting these lines in because this is where you're going to get one of those pectoral fins coming out here. Onto the sand. Even now, we still don't have to do a really accurate drawing. This is just a nice, lousy, goosy sketch. And over here, we're going to start getting a bit of those flippers. Even now, see, I'm just going to draw what I see that shape. It doesn't even have to look accurate because we're doing such a loose painting. You don't even have to put a lot of details into the fin. Draw what you can see. I can see this part. This part is going to This part is going to be lighter than this part, this parts the darker part. I might just shade that very lightly with a pencil. Then we've got this part. You see this line here. In this particular painting, because we're doing so many of our seals and I want to keep it loose, I'm not really caring so much about the details. Obviously, the very obvious ones I will do. But I'm not caring so much about, is this like 100% accurate and stuff. I'm just drawing what I see and how my hand moves and feels, what my eyes are looking at, really. This is a nice and over here now, I can just refine this a bit. This pot should probably go up a little bit here, but I'm not going to spend a long time refining this because this is supposed to be very, very loose. Right now I can start doing things like adding that mouth line. This guy is really lying on his back and just like so I'm just going to do that mouthline and we see a little bit of the nose here, just a little bit of it. But his eye is closed. I just want to just make this part just a little bit thicker because these are seals, by the way, so they're known to not be very, very emaciated. So over here, I'm just going to start doing this other pectoral fin. Get that shape. There we go. We've already done one seal and that didn't take too long. That was good. Things like the shadow and stuff, I will add later when I paint it. But it's just good to know the shadow will be directly under it and there is our seal. That took really no time at all, because we're not doing a very detailed sketch here. We're just painting a scene. Let's move on to our next our next seal. For our next seal, I really wanted to do a cute baby seal that was in a different pose, just hobbling along here. Maybe we can put him over here because there's something also to look at in this corner. You can look at the reference photographs I provided and I'm doing this guy with his cute little well, behind, and um It's an action shot of him racing along as well as fast as he can go for a seal. Once more, I'm just drawing in a very fun, organic way where I'm not caring so much about exact measurements. I just want to get the action pose. Even when we paint later on, it will be very, very loose. So over here, I just have to maybe add a few details in this different pose, we have a little bit of a line coming down here where the color changes. The color of his body changes. He's darker on the top, lighter on the underbelly. I just want to put something like the ear. The ear of a seal is just so cute. I love the ear. It reminds me a lot of puppy ears, doesn't it? Then you've got the nose here. We can't see some of it because of the angle. Nevertheless, it's still very cute. I did do that. Now, I just want to do the final refinements of the so it has a bit of a role where its neck is, which is very cute. Then curves down here and then goes up. Let me just clean that up a bit. Yeah, that's looking really cute. Then down here, we've got some rolls, and then we see a little bit of that fin, but it's blocked in wit shadow. But that's fine because this is a loose loose painting. This is going to come down here. Okay. Maybe this is a little crammed here. I better do this. Let me do this fin first. That fin has a shape like this and then it curves up like that. Very beautiful. Then you've got that belly hanging over here. Then I think maybe my ankle was a bit sharp here, which is okay because it's still loose. Down here, we're going to now get these falls, these like little falls, and then we're going to have what is visible of the flippers at the back here kind of coming down here. Let's just smooth out behind a bit. Yeah. So that is an action shot of it, like, moving across the beach. I chose what I thought were interesting poses. Now on the same reference photo that I found there was a very interesting pose of what I think is a female. Now, just bear in mind, the closer you are to the front of the photograph, they should be bigger in general. It also depends on the size of the seal. This looks like a big seal, that's a baby and they're in the front. Then we've got a female too, who is um well, I think she should be a normal Well, bigger than the baby, even though she's at the back. Now, this pose is interesting. Let's just start off with what looks like a kind of a bit like a little mountain. Like I said, I chose poses that I thought capture the acute personalities as well as I wanted different poses for the scene because it's quite unlikely that all of them would be having the same pose. I'm going to start working on the nose and the mouth area. I'm going to start there. But once more, we're just sketching in a nice organic way. I like this type of sketching because it just feels fun and it takes the stress out of perfection, trying to be perfect. There are a couple of classes I've done where I was very focused on it being as accurate as possible. But to try and catch realism, but I feel like this will still look like semi realistic. But the difference is we're having fun and we're not trying to get everything perfect. I've already done the head here while talking, and so she looks a bit grumpy, but that's okay. And in this photograph next to her, she does have a baby we can't fully see the baby. So see, I'm just letting my hand kind of wander and follow what feels right. I know that sounds a bit weird, but just letting my pencil do very nice loose shapes that that still capture the seal? So there is our female m looking female m, our female seal looking a little bit kind of like a proud look, you know, kind of like a look my dog used to have. Yeah. I like this look. It looks like it has quite a bit of personality in it. Like I said, I'm not doing this really accurately, but I just want to get maybe just the shape of the bottom, correct? I think it should go under here, that, it should be round like that. I'm just wondering if I should put that seal that I see over here. I just have this little seal here, so I might have to just maybe I don't know yet. Let's keep an open mind first about whether I want to do that. But I'm just going to erase now the lines that I don't need. I think this mouth actually comes all the way down here. So let me just do that. Then we've got that nose that looks a lot like a dog's nose. Yeah, it's no wonder they call the young pups because they really do have faces that do resemble dogs, don't they? Sorry, the bum was, I just want to curve that a little bit more. All right. And now I'm done and I can move on from that. The next pose that I have is a seal that is emerging from the water. Let me just get rid of those marks. This seal is really cute and because he's emerging from the water, I just want to make sure that I don't I don't draw him too big because he is coming out here. He's going to be over here in the wet area. What I also in my reference photograph, this seal, we want to just make him a little bit smaller. I'm going to start with just the head. I think this will make a good size head for him. Also he's going to have a nose very much like a dog's nose. And his face is going to be quite dark, so we might not see a lot of details right now and we have an eye on each side. They really do resemble dogs when you look at the faces. We've got Once more, I'm not aiming for something really accurate here, but it should resemble it. I just drew that face like what I see. Also now let's just get that's good enough for the head. We're going to have a little ear sticking out here and over here. Yeah, there's the flipper. That took me a while, but fast relatively to just do the overall shape. What we're seeing here as well, is there is a bit of shadow here, But there we go. Also because guy is on a little bit of wet sand, we might actually see a little bit of a of a reflection. But we don't have to worry so much about that now. Yeah, we can do that later, but if you want, you can just sketch, there is a little bit of a reflection and that will be fun to paint later. We can definitely imply that there's a reflection here. I'm just very roughly just putting that just so I don't forget to do a reflection before I paint the sand here. I'm just thinking, I do think we need maybe maybe another guy lounging, but I saw a really cool, um, a really cool pose. We can see this guy lying on his back. Maybe we can have a guy lying on his front a bit. I might just go over that reflection a little bit. I want this guy to just be lounging over here. I know I just drew a bit of that reflection, but it's okay. We can go over it and his head's going to just be be here like that. Just looking very Because I just felt like when you're composing a picture, you don't want a very obvious gap, I've just felt like we could put something here. Maybe we can put another one here. But let's just focus on this guy first. I'm just extending this now because this is a big guy that's lounging and we've got that fin over here and um so just very roughly just that shape here and then it goes here. And then we also have the rest of the flipper on this side. And we see more of it on this side. And it also looks darker. Okay, I hope you've been finding this fun and it hasn't been too stressful. I feel really relaxed. Let me just do that back a little bit, refine that. Once more, I'm not caring so much about this being really accurate. We know they're seals. I'm just doing the just the bottom part now. Now I'm going to just start refining that head a bit more. This guy has a very pointed nose profile. That's the nose and the eye is going to be somewhere here. They have these eyes that can make them look quite drowsy or in the case of this one annoyed. Here's the nose. That's the eyelid. I'm trying not to get too bogged down with details like I said earlier. We're almost done. I think that the head should just come up a bit here. Then it goes flat here, and then we have that very obvious back. Let's erase the lines we don't need in the middle. If you need to take a break from sketching and pause the video, that's fine. But I feel like this was actually much more relaxing than having to do a lot of details. I'm just going with shapes and what I see. We've got one of the pectoral fins over here. I think I see. I'm just drawing what I see in the photograph, right? In this class, I didn't do a anatomy of the seal, what I did for a few of my other classes because I wanted this to be very loose and we know the main body parts anyway of the seal, so I didn't feel like we needed that. This is also going to be a lot of color mixing and having fun and playing around with textures and, you know, adding patterns in. So this is going to be a fun class, right? Now, I just can't help but think we need something small over here. So maybe another seal lounging. You know. But I'm going to try and do a different pose or maybe we can have part of a baby kind of, you know, kind of hidden a little. I'm thinking I'm just looking at my Now, actually, funny enough in that photo with the mom, we do see I'm just thinking, I want to put a little baby in. I think that will just take up a little bit of space here. I'm just looking very quickly through my pictures that I have to see if I can see a little baby. Actually, I do see a little baby's head peeking out past This is from a different picture, but I just think this is the beauty of art. We can incorporate it. Let's put a little head sticking out over here. This can be a baby behind the mom. And the eye of the seal of the pup is like that. We've got some rolls here. I just think the angle of the nose is a bit wrong, so I think it should just gum up a bit. I think that looks a lot better. And then of course, we've got the nose. We can do something cool for each of the seals. They can all be a little bit have a little color variation. So this seal is hidden behind the um a little. That's looking a bit like a dog, actually. I hope that, let's just try and I think the seal has to has to face chin has to come out a little bit to make it look like a seal that looks more like a seal. Yeah. I looked a bit dog like just now. Okay. So yeah, this is a seal, baby hidden a bit behind the mom. And I'm just taking a final look. I think I see a cute guy over here and this shouldn't be too. He's lounging as well, but this is a very cute pose. I'm going to start first with around the eyes here. I'm sketching very, very, um very loosely, just like what I see here. I'll just talk while I'm sketching. I just wanted to tell you if you feel like you're happy with the number of seals you drew, you don't have to draw as many as me, but I just want this to be a busy I like the whole lots of activity vibe going on here. This is a weird angle, but I wanted to include it because like I said before, it's nice to have everyone doing a different pose because it just makes it a much more interesting picture, doesn't it? Now we've got that pectoral fin coming out here. It's sleeping in a way where it's looking at us. It's got a very big eye here. Yeah. I don't want to this is a guy that's in the background anyway, so I don't want to spend too much time doing that and ea he has a pretty dark coat. Then we've got that fin coming here like that. Let's erase this line. We see a bit of just the flippers at the back coming out here. See, it is a different sort of pose and I did this quite fast. But you can tell it's just a seal lying in from a different angle. I honestly think that's enough seals. I could keep going on and on, but I think we all want to get painting and have some fun. Um Yeah, let's let's stop. Okay, final look at the seals, and this looks really, really great. Okay. So what I want to do now is I say we should go take a break and get all your paints sorted next to you, get all your painting materials, is what I mean. And let's all have a break now. And when we come back, we are going to have a lot of fun painting this really cute scene. So I can't wait, so see you when we get back. 4. Background - Part 1: Hi, everyone, and welcome back. And I hope you love your little sketch that you've done and you've, you know, cleaned up whatever lines you don't need. Actually, while I'm saying that, I just noticed I have a couple of lines here to just clean up. But other than that, I'm quite happy with everything, and we are going to paint over it anyway. So before we start painting, I just wanted to draw another line that is just going to kind of separate the different sections. In the foreground, I'm going to have the sand that is the warmest color that is unwet so to speak. Then over here, there's going to be right in the middle here is going to be a wetter area. This sand is going to have a cooler color to it, like some blues in it. And so that's just an area where, you know, the sand is wet, but it doesn't actually have like, you know, a wave going over it. So it's just wet sand where the shallowest waves have come forward and receded. So I hope that explains it. I just want to section of this area so sorry, that line looks a bit too straight, so let me just curve it a little. So I just want to do this, just so it's interesting to look at as well to have like, you know, um, different areas and hence different colors, and the viewer will definitely see this as looking very natural. I've just drawn a little line here, we've got once more the ocean, a little wave, the shallowest water that's still flowing, wet sand where you will probably see some reflections in it, which I want to leave for this seal over here. And this will be the driest grainiert sand that we have. So we can add a lot of nice texture to that later. It's going to be very, very fun. Before I start now, I don't know what something about this line is just bothering me. Maybe I might just make it like even out a little bit more like that rather than go down. Okay? Yeah, I'm happy with that. Now, let's just talk a little bit about the colors that we're going to use, even though I've already covered this in the material section. Now, for a scene like this, rather than use 20 different colors, we are going to use a limited palette. I'm going to include, let me just show you the colors that I've decided to use right now that I've already pointed out. For the ocean, I want to use French ultramarine because it's one of my favorite blues, what we're going to do to give it that nice green, um field that the ocean has is we're going to mix in some raw sienna. It just happens we're going to also use the raw sienna for the sand, and also for the seals. I also have a couple of other browns like burn umber, raw umber, as well as sapia, which is the darkest brown because I want to add some color variations to the seals, even though I could mix different browns. I do want to make our lives a little bit easier too, but I am still using a pretty limited palette. I will include a purple Windsor violet. Just because I see a little bit of purple tones in the wet sand area and we can also use that on the dry sand and maybe even to add some color variation or shadows to our seals. I also want to use Pain's gray for the darkest darkest um uh, colors on the picture. For example, maybe to outline the eyes and, you know, the noses and the shadows of the seals. It's good to have a dark color. Okay. Those are the colors that I've decided to use right now, and I may add some later on, but it is a rather limited palette to paint a whole picture because if we can mix colors quite easily, I would recommend we use less colors rather than more because by using all these colors in a limited palette and mixing secondary colors from it, we do give our picture an overall color harmony, so to speak, rather than introducing 20 random colors in here. That's the reason why I chose to do this painting this particular way and use these colors, you once more are free to use whatever colors you want. I never ever restrict students to use the colors that I use. But if you want to follow along with me, yeah, these will be the colors that I'll be using. Let's just get right into it. I hope you can see my palette. I've zoomed out a little. Yeah, you can see it. I'm going to make some French ultramarine here. So what I want to do first is the background because I feel like once the background is done, we can relax and then we can really have fun focusing on the seals and adding really cool mixtures of colors and textures for their bodies. So I think might put a little bit more in here. That's my French ultramarine and then I have raw sienna. I'm just going to put my raw sienna maybe over here. If you can kind of leave spaces in between two colors just in case you don't want them to mix uncontrollably. Sometimes, your brush might get might mix them accidentally. Because of that, I always put a gap wherever I can. Also, I'm going to now mix the two to form a greenish blue. So just adding some water to it. As I said, French ultramarine is a very beautiful blue. I use it a lot for ocean scenes, for skies. You can just dilute it down. It's a beautiful beautiful blue. If you don't have French ultramarine, ultramarine will do ultramarine blue, I believe it's what it's called. I've got this over here. So what I want to do first is I'm going to wet this area first, for the ocean and maybe all the way up. I can actually wet it all the way to the wet sand area. Okay? So what I'm going to do is, first of all, our ocean is going to transition. We're going to have the colors, which is really nice and greenish blue on the top. Then we're going to start adding some more colors to make it have a more bluer, sandier tone. So it will all make sense when I actually demonstrate this. So What I should have done actually is put the blue over here, but I will mix it here. That's fine. We want a color that is ocean greenish color. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to mix in a little bit of the raw sienna. Now, you might have to test it out on a piece of paper. With this color, it is nice. As you can see, it does have a nice ocean feel to it. But what I want to do is I might not use I want to make my ocean look more bluer and gradually greener as it comes over here. I'm just going to use a flat 1 " no, sorry, three quarter inch flat brush to just wet this area. I'm going to wet the area all the way down to where our wet sand boundary ends when it meets the dry sand. Don't worry too much about, you know, try and avoid the seals wherever you can. Don't worry too much, you know, if a little bit of paint goes on your seal because we will be painting over it. Obviously, try to avoid the seals if you can because, you know, some areas of the seal will be lighter than others. So I might actually have to re wet this later and also feel free to tilt your paper if you can really see which part of your paper is wet because of the reflection of the light above it. Also, this doesn't have to be a very smooth blend because we have different zones, so to speak. All right. That looks good for me. What I'm going to do first is I'm going to drop in some of that blue. I'm making up my own ocean color as I go along. But I'm also going to now start to put some of that green in. I feel like the green is not as vibrant as I want it to be, so I'm just going to use this area over here to mix more, I want it to be green. All I've done is I've mixed. Now, with this area over here, where the waves are, I'm going to leave a little bit of white there. Okay, so this is all going to be the area where. Now I'm going to gradually introduce a little bit more of the raw sienna into it. This is a wet area here, where there's still water flowing over it. Now, we can always go over again if it's a little bit too light now, but this is where our water is going to be going over. But I actually feel like I want to maybe mix mix more green into this. I'm just going to go over this area here. Remember, where we drew our wave, we're going to leave that area unpainted, I want more green color. Then as I go up, I might just add a little bit of blue into it. This area down here, I'm also going to add a little bit more sand to it, so to speak. Because this is where the shallow water is. As we get down here, I'm just going to bring this color down here too. As long as you have something where it looks bluer on the top and it gets it gets a sandier color as we get to the bottom. That's great. Wow it's wet, I just want to put in more blue up here. Now I'm just going to make some blue with the raw sienna to make a greenish ocean color. Then as we get to the bottom and I'm just avoiding this wave area here, as you can see, we're going to start adding a little bit more sandy color here. This will just be our base layer and we can add more over here later. So what I'm going to do now is I want to let this dry completely first. Okay. So why don't we just take a little break first and we will let this completely dry and I will see you back here when it is, as I said, completely dried. Go have a little break, maybe go and rinse your brushes and change your water, and I will see you in no time. Hi, everyone, and welcome back. As you can see, this is my base layer, and I think it looks really cool, by the way, you can see that nice band of blue up here and where we left a little bit of white showing through. And then we dropped in colors below it. I really love the effect it has. And as you can see, colors like French ultramarine tend to granulate and I love that. It creates a cool effect as well here. Now, during the break, I had a bit of a thing and when this finished drying, I just felt like as pretty as it was, I felt the greens that we created that I tried to create with the French ultramarine and Raw Sienna was just not very vibrant. And because of that, I decided that I wanted to introduce another green in our next subsequent layer that we're going to paint over it, and I've chosen to use VidianGreen. The reason for this is VaridionGreen is a cooler green. It's kind of like a jewel tone green, and that's the color that I want to go for. I want to use I'm going to mix some of it with the French ultramarine and kind of layer it on top of this layer. And as I go along, I'm also going to maybe add more colors to the very, very shallow water and the sand here. Okay, if that makes sense. And some of the colors that I want to add next is going to be purple for the sand, because it has a cool feel to it. Also, we're going to start doing the sand at the bottom, too, and this will be the dry layer that I mentioned earlier. So to tell you the truth right now, we could actually start doing the dry area first. So for the dry area, what I want to do is I want to, um, get the raw sienna, the color here. I hope I didn't contaminate it too much here when I was doing that, but it's okay. I'm just going to add a little bit more raw sienna here. Like I said earlier, I want to use maybe a little bit of that purple, not just in the wet sand, but we can mix purple with Can you see this? Sorry, let me just move this along here. We can mix some of this purple. With the yellow too, as you know, purple and yellow, kind of complimentary colors. Well, it's not really yellow. It is a very yellowish brown. That will also create a darker brown that we can sort of use as a pebble effect. So I'm just taking a bit of inspiration from the and maybe I might also just want to have a darker brown on standby. We have a raw umber over here. I want to just put that down over here just in case we need it, we will be using it later for our seals. I've got raw umber and I don't think I'm going to need sapia at the moment, but maybe I could just put it on as well. Sapias a very dark brown. I was going to use that for the seals. We've got raw umber and, um I think those will be good. I don't think we need I'm just thinking of any other colors that we need. Uh, Perhaps we could use a little bit of burn umber. Burn umber is a more reddish kind of brown. I was going to use that more for the seals, but let's just have everything here. We've got sepia, we've got burn umber, we've got raw umber, we've got purple. Even though this is almost fully dry, I wouldn't mind just working on this area down here. So once more, I'm just going to use my flat three quarter inch brush. And the reason I want to use water, wet the entire page is just so it helps the pain flow better, and it stops certain areas of pain that are put down first from drying too fast. Okay. And even though this is sand, we don't have to do like a very smooth application because it is sand. It's going to be grainy and we're also going to emphasize that later with dropping in some color and some splattering. I love a good splatter. It's really fun to do. Let's do the bottom part first. Just try and make the water meet, um, at that line. Try not to go over the line, but it doesn't really matter if you do. It's not the end of the world. As I said before, the whole point of this exercise, well, this class is to have fun. We're not going to get bogged down, like I said earlier with trying to make everything as accurate as possible. We're just getting inspiration from the photos that I provided or from wherever you like. Maybe you have your own CEO photos as well or a beach that you really like that you want to try and um you know, get inspired by and use the same colors maybe. This is, I've avoided the seals as much as I can, but at the end of the day, the seals are going to have lots of shades of brown, so it really doesn't matter if you go over it a little bit. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to use, raw sienna as my base color. I might just mix it over here because I want to put the smallest amount of blue in there, just to dull it down slightly because I feel like it is very bright and I'm just dulling it down. I don't want to put so much blue that it turns into a green. I'm going to apply this quite lightly. What's going to happen is so I'm just going as carefully as I can here, but, you know, it's really okay. The flippers are going to be dark at the tips anyway. So raw sienna is going to be my base color, the raw sienna mixed with the slightest amount of blue. So, you know, this is all just applying a bit of color theory in this one as well. Okay? But see, I just went over the fin of this guy lying here, but I really it doesn't bother me because this is just going to be a very, very nice loose painting. And what I want to do is maybe just fade it out as it gets to the top. I'm not reapplying anymore color. I'm just going to let that fade out to the top. Okay. All right. Maybe we can drop in a little bit more color in certain parts over here. There will be some shadows as well, I'm going to switch brushes now to my large round, which is size 12, just so I can get in between that. I've used up all my raw sienna, but no problem. We can just put some more here. Now, what I want to do now and we're going to mix a little bit more of that blue in. I just want to maybe add a few random textures to make the sand look like like it's actually, not uniform in color, we're adding a bit of textures and suggesting, like, oh, look, the sand is a little bit, darker in certain areas here. This is all going to come together at the end and just look like the way I'm holding my brushes, you can see, I'm just holding it almost horizontally as strange as that looks. But this is how I'm using it to create these brush marks that are very suggests the sand has been stepped in shifted around and stuff. While this is going on now, I'm going to now add a little bit of even as you can see, if I add purple, I'm just wondering if I should mix the purple first. Maybe I can mix it with some of that raw sienna so it doesn't look too purply. I've gotten a little bit here and what I can do is see what I'm doing. I'm just adding some speckly looking things by just using the tip of my brush. Like I told you before, the reason I'm using purple is it's a complimentary color. So it's going it will end up being kind of u brown. I will look like just a slightly darker shade of the raw sienna, we're creating a different brown, but it's also giving us some color. What you can do is use your tip of your brush if you want to add little spots like that or you can start pressing down a little bit if you want to create larger shapes like lines as well. You feel free to look at some of those photos that I provided of the beach scenery. So we're making the sand look like it's lived in. What we can do as well with the purple is, let's mix some of that with with a raw sienna. We can even start doing things like, you can be bold and maybe start making it look like this is a different layer of sand, maybe this sand has different, you know, different pigments in it or it may be wet in certain areas, so it's giving off this vibe. That's all I'm doing here. This is fun, easy. See, I added a little bit of a stroke here. This is all fun. There's no right or wrong here, so I just say just have fun with it. As you can see, our sand is already starting to look like it's real. I don't have to worry too much about being about putting a lot of texture underneath the, um, the seal because we will have shadows that are directly under here. But if you want, if you're in that rhythm already, it's okay to just keep going. Just using my brush, either doing little tips, little round marks with the tip or just lying it a little bit more horizontal to make it look like there is, you know, some other patterns going on here. As you can see, as it gets to this waterline, what you can even do with the brush is, you could even go right up to the border all the way here and that can be where that wet layer meets the dry layer. We've only used the raw sienna with a little bit of of the blue. But as you can see, it's already looking very lived in. My only advice is have fun, but also just maybe don't do straight lines because nothing in nature is really straight. You always got curves and stuff. So as you can see, the sand, I'm really loving this and we've only used very few colors to achieve this. Do what feels natural. If you want to add some lines some little lines around the area where the boundaries meet, go ahead. See, I'm starting to add a bit of speckles here now. Okay, so don't worry too much about the areas, like I said, under the seal because we are going to paint shadow there anyway. But our san already looks so much better. And I feel now I want to maybe I've used a lot of the purple. Maybe we can now start doing a darker color. Actually, when I look at now, I don't really want to use the burn umber at the moment. I think I want to save that for the seals, and I want to use a brown, which is raw umber to just add a few darker specs. With the darker colors, you probably want to be a little bit more have a little bit more control, maybe not use it as loosely as I did for, for the purple because the purple was light. What you can do is you can be bold and use some horizontal strokes with your brush or you can use it more to create a pebbly sandy grainy look by just using it in certain areas. Like I said before, there's no right or wrong, you can see, no two beaches are going to look the same. But if you feel you've gone a little bit dark, I always use my fingertip as a blending tool to just lift a little bit of that up. Yeah. This is a very nice relax class where we're just having fun with playing with textures, using our brushes in different ways, holding them differently to get different effects. That way, when you're using watercolors, you don't need a lot of brushes. That's a myth. Just holding your brush in a different way can give you all the desired effects that you want to create. As you can see, I'm just speckling a little here and there, and it's you might have a darker patch over here. And the areas that are still wet, obviously, they're going to blend a little bit more when I put my brush down. And the parts that are dry, as you can see here, they're going to really the pains not going to move. It's going to be quite just stationary. It's not going to blend in and it's going to be bolder. I feel like this area, and this is just me, feeling it, like what intuition I just want this area to be a little bit more speckled here. It will look so good when we put shadows on these guys. Okay. So let's finish up here, and then maybe we'll take a break before we finish our background by adding in another layer. I already feel like the sand has so much life to it. It has so much character that I don't need to go and do another layer over this because the sand is also lighter, whereas the ocean and the wet areas are darker. So what I'm doing now is I just want to add a few more speckles and what we can do too is I can just also, like I mentioned before, I wanted to just splattering in a bit of texture for the sand. When you do your splattering, though, just be mindful that, you know, your seals might get a little bit of that. So but the truth is the seals themselves, if you look at the photos I provided, they also have spots on them, some of them. So I don't think it's going to be a huge problem if you want to splatter on some color. This is supposed to be fun spontaneous art, I'm like, go for it. Okay. I'm just going to take a step back to have a look at the overall effect and I really love it. I really do. I'm just thinking, what else can I do? Like I said, with the dark color, I'm mainly just using the tip of the brush and that's just a preference thing because I don't want it to This area looks a bit plain to me, so I just want to fill that in a little. And what you can do too is you can also use a clean damp brush to just blend. If I find some of the lines are too stock, too bold, I can just use my brush to blend it a bit. But I like a bit of a mixture of everything. I feel like this area here looks a little bit plain, so I'm just going to use some of that some purple mixed with some of that raw sienna to just like and then if I find it's too much, I can always just use a dam brush to blend that a little bit into the surroundings. That's looking really good to me. Maybe I might just use some of that purple over here just to add a bit more texture, color. Any part that I feel looks a little bit plain is going to get a little bit of treatment from me. But personally, I think that looks great. The very last thing I want to do is, I want to use a very small round brush. This is my size four, and my very dark color, which is sepia, I'm just going to mix a little bit of it over here. This is a very dark color. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to splatter, as you can see, a little bit of color. This is a loose painting. Don't worry if it goes a little bit there, that's right. But just try and angle your brush down. So it doesn't fly everywhere. A good thing is when you're doing splattering, I actually have a background like a towel here that's not going to stay in my table. These are all things to bear in mind when you're using this technique. I love it because it adds these random dots that add texture. So like I said, don't worry too much about it going on the seal. It will all look natural in the end. Also, the thing with this technique is it's easy to get carried away and do a lot, just be mindful of that, but have fun. So that is looking great. All right. I don't want to do too much, so I'm just standing back, having a look, and I think that looks like there is a lot of cool stuff going on already. I think we can stop with this. And every time I say that, I just end up doing a little bit more. At the top here, I felt it was a little bit, nothing not a lot going on here. So there it is. So I don't want to put too much because, remember, we're also going to have shadows, and these seals are going to be painted. Now, since we painted for a long time, why don't we just take a little brick, let this bottom part completely dry, but you've already finished the background for the bottom. So that's wonderful. Let this completely dry. And when we come back, we are just going to finish the top the top half of our background. And that will be really fun. So take a break, go rinse your brushes, and I will see you back here in no time when your background has completely dried. 5. Background - Part 2: Hi, everyone, and welcome back. And as you can see, my paper is completely dry, and I absolutely love the sand that I've created over here. Just look at all those different colors and textures. It looks so rich. It looks like it's really just alive, and I can't wait now to just finish off the background. And as I said earlier, I've decided that even though there's nothing wrong with this color, I love the look of a green turquoise, like jewel kind of toned ocean. And because of that, I've decided to use some Vidian green. Now, VaridianGreen is a cooler green, it's very jewel colored, think emerald. Because of that, I just want to use some of this and I'm going to mix it with a some of the blue as well, because the green itself is quite a strong green. As you can see, in the palette, this is very, very jellly toned, which is beautiful, but I want to mix it a little bit with the blues to just tone it down a bit, so it's more like a bluish green. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put some of this paint. I'm running out of little sections to mix in, I might just put some of this green over here, and then next just rinse my brush. I'm going to add some of that blue to it. To get the right color, I would really suggest you test it out on a rough piece of paper first before you apply it. I just got some scrap watercolor paper. That's a beautiful green, as you can see, very, very beautiful. What I want to do is as it gets I'm going to start with this green color near the top and as we get lower, we'll put it right where we see this barrier where the wave is breaking. And then as we go past this area, we are now going to add some of the other colors like the blue again, some of the purple to it will get less green. We'll probably have just a little bit of green from the reflections of the ocean. But just so I don't run out of this color, I just want to mix a little bit more of that over here. You know, it is harder to mix stuff when you're in the middle of doing a background. And that can be a little bit unsettling when you're doing it, when your background is already on the way. I'm just going to mix a little bit more here. But bear in mind, this is a top coat. We've already done the base layers, so we're layering on top. I just want a little bit more blue to this. Let's just try this out. Yeah, I like that and maybe just a little bit more blue. I just love the way the blue looks with the green. Yeah, that's pretty good. Okay. I like that color. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just wet the area here again, including the wave break here. Don't worry if your wave, uh, is a little bit colored and covered up. Don't worry about that all because later on, we actually want some of that color, and we will emphasize the white later maybe using a white gel pen. So we'll get to that later, but let's just repeat the process first. I also to tell you what I'm going to do, we're going to drop in some of that green here. And as we get lower down to the middle of the painting, we're going to start adding other colors in. It will all make sense later, and it might look a bit messy at first, but just trust the process. So here I am. I'm just going to use my three quarter inch brush to wet. Sorry, I noticed something. My brush actually had a little bit of paint on it, but that's really okay because we're actually going over it. So the water has also kind of turned a bit green, but it's all good. Don't worry. This has happened to me many a time. I've lost count where you get a little bit of paint on your brush. So like I said before, try and avoid the seals as much as you can, but don't worry too much if you can't because, you know, we will be painting over them anyway. This is going to be a nice fluid painting, and at the end of it, you're going to have a cool, beautiful painting. I'm just standing up now because the reflection with the overhead light is becoming really hard to just see what section of my paper is not wet yet or has dried a bit since I last supplied water. Okay, so what we want is when you stand up, you should see an even sheen. You shouldn't see puddles of water. That means you have too much water. I'm just going to use I actually think I want to use my round brush, my large round brush. I just feel more confident using it. Like, I don't mind using, look at that color. Beautiful. I don't mind using the flat brush to add water, but I feel like I've got more control with the round brush. Maybe it has to do with the tip. So as you can see, this color is so gorgeous. Good thing we made a bit extra, see where the waves are going to break now. I'm going to just go over that a little bit and leave some of that untouched. Maybe we can see a little bit of it underneath this wave that's breaking. Where you drew your curvy broken line, you're just going to add a little bit of that green under it. Okay? Just so we know where it is. Now, I might as well just finish whatever green we have on the paper. I'm going to start dropping in those other colors. I want to drop in some blue. Okay, so we're just layering on top of what we already have here, which is that sandy color. I know, don't worry. It looks like I'm painting the whole ocean here, but don't worry. And what I want to do is I'm just also going to kind of gradually I'm not adding any more paint. I'm just kind of using whatever paint is left on my brush to kind of come down here. And besides dropping in the purple, like I said, I wanted to, I also might drop in some other browns as well that we've used on the san. So there we go. That's looking very pretty. While this is still wet, I just want to mix a little bit more green and blue here because I want to just like while this is wet, I want to add a few more like strokes of color. Over here, as it gets lighter, I'm actually going to drop in a little bit of the raw sienna in here because that also gives it a green look and it also looks like it's getting shallower here, the land. Just using some of that raw sienna. The raw sienna actually mix very well with this vidian green mixture to, kind of show that the water is getting shallower because you're starting to get sand, so you're starting to see some yellow down here. And we can even bring some of that color, under here. All I'm doing is whatever paint was left on my brush, I'm also just dipping into the yellow. I keep saying yellow. Sorry. What I mean is raw sienna. Like I said, this is very loose a very, very loose painting. And we can maybe just add a little bit more of that yellow. Now it's raw sienna, it's getting stronger here in the shallows. We're using the reference photographs as inspiration, but we don't have to follow it exactly. Now I'm just going to drop in a little bit of purple. I know that seems a bit weird, but I see purple in the in the colors of the sand. I'm just going to drop in some of that purple because I also feel like it gives a very cool look to the beach. And this part is wet sand, right? So it's going to be cooler than the dry hot sand that we see that is painted, um in fact, I can just actually add a few of these streaks. I see that the purple is coming in almost diagonal streaks here. I guess it's because of the way the tide comes in. I thought when I also emphasized that. Using my brush in this diagonal pattern, I'm going to just add some of these brush strokes in the direction that the tide is coming in. Now, like I said, this might look a little bit messy now, but just trust the process. This is going to look beautiful. And I'm just wondering if I should use any of the browns, add any browns in. But to tell you the truth, maybe we can just add some of this. I'm pretty sure this is raw amber. But what's very important to me is maybe this can just dow down the purple a little bit. So I'm just kind of adding a little bit on the top and letting the purple and the brown kind of mix so that the purple doesn't look too strong, too overpowering. So this is just fun, okay? We're just having fun Anywhere that I feel like the purple is a little bit too strong, I'm going to add some of that burn umber. I mean, did I say burn umber, I'm sorry, raw umber. Okay. Now we've got I might just add some of that color here, but this guy will have a Oh, he will actually have a shadow. I mean, a reflection here. I might just leave this part of unpainted so that when we paint it later when we add the color of the seal, we can maybe drop in a bit of reflection color here too. Okay. Actually, I know it looks a bit messy, but believe it or not, this is a great layer that we've done. Later on, I'm thinking maybe when this is all completely dry, we are going to start adding some definition to the ocean. We are going to maybe use a few more strokes or bow color to suggest the waves. We're also going to emphasize the wave here that's breaking by painting some color underneath. But right now, what I want to do, the most important thing is, I just want to make sure that all this is going to blend nicely. If you need some help to make it blend, you can use a clean damp brush to get the colors mixing. But this is all fine with me because we're actually even going to draw a line later. I'll have to explain it as I do it later. Right now, I'm just looking at what else needs to be done. I think some of this blue green mixture, I'm just going to drop it in under the under here. But it's already starting to dry, as you can see, like I said, also, it's very important to have some of that raw sienna in here too because this is breaking in shallow water, we should have Yeah, this will be the shadow right under our crest of our wave that's breaking. Make sure you use some raw sienna in here. I'm just going to also just use my brush to add a little bit more of this here, this color. It will all make sense later. But in order for the crest of the wave to stand out, it has to have some shadow underneath it. That's all I'm doing right now. Bit of that. Then some of this color is going to come out here where we're going to have this shallow water. All I'm doing is using my brush a little bit with some of that raw sienna to just whatever pain is left on my brush, I'm just adding a little bit of these lines like that because later on we are going to just outline some of that of those water patterns. But for the time being, I think we should really let everything dry right now. Like, and yeah, just let everything dry right now. And when we come back, I just want to spend just very little time just also just adding the final bits on the background before we move on and have a lot of fun doing our seals. So I'm just going to leave that for now like that to dry. And when we come back, yeah, we will be very busy finishing our background. So I will see you in a little bit, just let your painting completely dry and see you back here in no time. 6. Painting the first seal: Hi, everyone, and we're back. As you can see, our background is looking more and more developed now that it has dried. As I said before, this is still a bit of a process because we're going to have to now start to define the waves a little. Because even though I said this is going to be a very loose painting, I also want to very loosely apply on some nice water patterns. I want to make this wave that's breaking a lot more defined. But we'll be doing this also, like I said, in a very, very loose, relaxed manner. I was also thinking of putting a bit of water patterns on. What has happened though is I've lost the line that I drew earlier underneath some of this paint, but that's okay. That's fine. What I want to do first of all, is I want to just define the water up here a little bit more. To do this, I'm going to first mix up some of that beautiful greenish blue color because I just want to layer on another layer of that color because I just feel that the white patterns that we want to put on top of that are going to stand out a lot more if we have a darker background, and some areas of this are a little bit light, but we can do that very, very quickly. And we also want to define this wave that's breaking. And to do that, what I love actually is that because we wet the whole area and then we had started adding paint, you can see, there's these beautiful colors here that actually enter this white pot and they do it in a very fluid way, which is beautiful because later on we will be just adding a few curved lines on the top to show the direction of the water breaking. That color has already added a really nice base for us to work with, and we will also be using some white gouache. This is in the very final stages of creating the wave. To emphasize some of that white areas, to make it look a little bit more natural as right now we just have something that looks just like a curve line. We're going to make it look a lot more natural with the white guash, the white gouache will also be used to add some water patterns. But before I get ahead of myself and confuse everyone, let's just darken the water a little bit more so that these white marks are going to stand out beautifully. So to do that, I want to take my flat brush again, but I'm not going to wet the entire area. I'm just going to focus right now on this very top area here. Okay? Because I just want to add my color here. So first of all, let me mix the color up again. So as you all know, I'm going to have to put a little bit more veridian in I'm just going to mix this color. Just the same thing, the Vidian mixed with the French ultramarine. I was just checking that you could see what I'm doing and the cameras in the right place. Here we go. We're going to take some of that beautiful blue. And like I said before, it's very important that you test it out on a piece of paper first just to make sure that it is the right shade that you want. That's beautiful. That's quite green. But to tell you, I'm okay with that, I think that will look quite beautiful. It's quite nice and dark. Just make sure that you make enough. I'm just going to make some more because when it's actually very wet, you don't realize that you end up using a lot of color to cover a large area of paper. Let's just test it out. I'm just going to get a little bit more blue. Yeah, that will do. That's very pretty. Let me just move that out of the way. The same thing again, like what I said, I'm just going to where the very top area so when you wet it, just be mindful that some of the pigments that have dried below might move around. So try not to go over and over back and forth over that area. I'm also going to, like I said, bring this water right down to the crest of the wave. I'm standing up now just making sure that the whole area is covered, and I'm just going up to that wave that's breaking. And now I'm just going to drop in my color. I'm just going to use I don't actually mind using my flat brush this time because I actually want to cover quite a bit of area. As you can see, so much of that color is already just used up in this wet area here. I'm leaving the wave breaking. I'm leaving it, but I'm also just going to let some of that just blend in. Now, I'm just going to mix up a little bit more of this color. I'm just going to use up whatever green we have here, some blue, mix it together, test it out on a piece of paper before we go ahead. Okay. And this is now going to I'm just going to add some way some lines here like that. This is just wave patterns because I want this area to be quite dark. Because I want the white to really stand out. I don't want to cover this part too much because this is where the nice where we get some of that nice raw sienna coming through because the water is getting shallower. I'll just let that just be there. This will be the last time that I go over this area. I know this is probably the third time we're doing it, and I'm just using whatever raw sienna is left over here because I'm just going to drop that in here as well. This can just be where we're starting to see a bit of sand this has hardened quite a bit. But that looks good, so I'm not going to touch it too much. I think that's looking really good. I think we can leave that now and later on we can add some white to it. Now what I want to do is I want to just switch brushes and let's just make sure that that's all covered up. I'm going to take my large round brush, just get all this color. Any parts that I feel are a bit light, I just want to cover it. Because like I said before, I really want those water patterns to really stand out. What I'm doing now is I'm also creating a bit of dimension by adding another layer of strokes. But what I want to do now is take a very, very quick break because we are going to come back when this is completely dry and then we are going to start doing some water patterns and working with this area. But actually before we go, what we can do in the meantime is while this dries is I want to just get that line has disappeared where we have the shallowest amount of water. I just need to draw it again. What I want to do is I'm very loosely just adding, it's just completely disappeared. Even now, I find it hard to draw. I think that the colors just blend a little bit too well. This is going to be where we have the shallowest amount of water. Just coming here it looks like I'm doing a lot of lines, but this is actually where I'm going to have that water coming in, don't worry, it will be covered with white, you won't see too many lines here. Okay. So while we're going to let everything just dry us, okay. And when we get back, I can't wait to just do the white water patterns with you. But in the meantime, I'm just thinking, since we've only been painting for a short while, we want to let that sort of rest, perhaps in the meantime, we can start working on our seals so that we're doing something while we're waiting for a part of it to dry, just so we can be a little bit more, you know, A little bit more productive. So how about we start with this guy? This area is wet. I can't do anything with it now, so let's move on to this area. Now, this is the fun part. We've got we're finally going to use all our browns. This part has become a little bit dirty. So how about I move the raw sienna over here? Okay. And remember, we've got sapia here, we've got burn umber and raw umber. Now, I say, we have a little bit of fun and do our cute little guy over here. Also, at this point, I might put down a little bit of pins gray over here, for our very, very darkest parts of our of our seal. This guy over here, what I want to do with him first is I want to use remember, I want to paint this in a very, very loose way. How about we first wet him. Once more, I'm using a medium round brush. This is my size, no, this is a large one actually. This is size 12, I mean, but that's okay because I want to cover this entire area. I'm just going to wet him and I'm going to do this very, very loosely. First, I want to start with my lightest color. So I'm going to put a bit of raw sienna here on him. And just make sure if you want a semi realistic look, we want to leave a little bit of white showing at the top, okay? Like, some of the white of the paper, I mean. And I'm just going to cover him sorry, raw sienna. I'm leaving some of that white showing. This brush is quite big, so I'm going to swap to a size eight round. Now I'm already going to start dropping in some of the other browns. I got this beautiful brown here, which is burn umber, I'm already just going to wet my brush and drop it in. I'm doing this all in a very loose way. The bottom part is going to be darker. Like I said before, getting inspired by the painting, sorry, by the photographs, but we're not going to stick to it all the way. We're also going to just paint in a very loose way and note where some areas are lighter in the reference photograph because that's going to show us how to build dimension up. So that's our burn umber now. So that's cute. I want to use our raw umber now. Raw umber is darker than burn umber. Burn umber has a bit of reddish tones to it. So for the very darkest part, I want to try and concentrate that down at the bottom here near where we're going to get the shadow. So this brown, as you can see, the water that we put down is helping the paint to just like blend. We don't have to go with the exact same color that we see. I'm going to do a light coating there of this color. I'm also going to bring it out to This is our raw umber. I'm going to bring it out to the flippers and all the separate parts of the flippers. I don't know what you call that. Would you call that toes of the flippers. Okay. I can even use some of that color on the fin. Just note, it will be lighter towards the top of the fin, darker at the bottom. Here we go. I might even use some of this color up here in a very diluted. It still looks lighter than it is down here. While this is still wet, like I said, very fluidly, I'm going to just spot on a little bit more raw sienna because that's what it looks like to me. I'm using the brush, it's holding it differently to create different patterns, like what I did for the sand. This is still our base layer. We still haven't even done, the other layers yet. What I want to do while this is still wet, though, is I'm going to start using our darkest brown, which is our sepia and I'm going to very carefully put it over here. This is where the nose is. I'm also going to use it a bit like a shadow color down here while it's wet to just drop in these where the darkest browns are what we're going to see. Just using the tip, I'm going to just bring it here like that because my whole point is to create a very fluid looking seal. I like that these colors are just blending. It doesn't bother me. In fact, that's what I want because I want this to look very loose. Now I'm going to start looking at the reference photograph for where the dark areas, where are the light areas, and I'm starting to see how there is a lighter little area here, I'm going to leave that just using putting some dots here now. As you can see, it's very spotty here. That's what I'm trying to convey here. Even with the Sapio, I'm seeing this is where we got some lines and using it as a bit to outline some stuff. Now I'm just looking at the at the reference photograph and how Yeah, we got those flippers and I'm going to also just add a little bit of spots here and there. That is our first guy. I know I did this in a very, very continuous way, but that's what I'm trying to do now. I'm also going to now that I looked at it, I want to add a bit more of this drop in some of this burnt umber. This is what I mean by doing very fluid painting. We're doing it almost continuously and just looking at what we have there. It doesn't matter if we do it exactly the same or if we don't fine. This type of painting, I love it because it feels very organic, it feels like I don't have to think too much about it. I'm just painting what I observe. Now just getting back to the top color, I want to just go back with raw umber for this beautiful fin up here. While this is still wet, I'm going to use some sepia, just using the very, very tip of the brush. See, I'm going to just let that drop it in, let it blend up. And we see more of the dark concentrated at the lower half of the pectoral fin here. We even see some of that shadow come down here onto his body. We're just letting that drip in. I'm going to use that dark color to add a few spots here as well. So we try and save the highlights, but don't worry if you didn't get them all, we can always maybe add a bit of white gouache later. If you've watched some of my other classes, I love to mix media up because I feel like it gives an even it makes more impactful art and you can achieve all the actual effects that you want to achieve that you might not be able to do with just one of the media. Now, I'm just going to drag this color down here. This can come over here. This is where we have the other fin. Also, here's the shadow underneath this fin. Might as well just do it with the sepia now. We've just been painting in a continuous manner, but it's also been very fluid, as you can see. I'm going to use a little bit of sepia now that this area is not too wet to just drop in where the mouth outline is. Okay. We've been painting for a while now and I'm just thinking maybe we could stop now and let me just end by doing that outline here. We haven't even added the shadow yet, but what we painted already looks so semi realistic. It does. This is painting continuously, but very naturally in a very natural way. I'm just going to speckle on a bit more of this dark sepia to because that's what I see. Then you've got a lot of speckles over here that make up this bottom part. If you have to use more concentrated pain to go darker, so I'm going to put this down soon. We can come back to this seal later, but we've already almost completed it, in my opinion. I'm just dabbing on whatever paint is left on my brush. That's quite little of it now to just darken certain areas of the seal. This looks beautiful. Maybe a little bit of dabbling up here. And maybe we can just use a little bit of sepia to mark the eye over here, even though the eye is closed and you can't really see it. Okay, we've done a lot. I'm just standing up now and that looks really good. That looks really great. We've been painting for a while now. How about we just take a tiny break, but I'm really happy with how this turned out. We're already getting putting down our base coat that already looks so detail. This is going to turn out really, really good. So why don't we go take a little break now? When we come back, we are going to do the seals. But first, I'm really, really eager to finish the background and add some little bit of water detail. So please go have a little break, go rinse your brushes and change your water, and I will see you back here. 7. Background - Part 3: Hi, everyone, and welcome back. And as you can see, our seal is completely dried and it looks so good. And the whole picture is coming together so well, and we painted the seal in a rather continuous relaxed way, where we wet the seal and we dropped in the lightest color. We started with the lightest color. And while it's still wet, we slowly start adding our darker browns to it and finally just building it up with, you know, the darkest color, which is sepia. And while I was doing that and dropping it in, I'm letting the colors blend and I'm also using my brush, to, you know, turning the brush, how I like it to either apply patches of pain or just concentrated like spots. So I love the way this looks, and we haven't even added the shadow, but I thought I would add the shadows later when I finish the rest of the seals, so that we can keep moving on. Now, um, I might come back to the seal later, but it does look quite complete. Maybe I can add some shadows later, but what I really want to do is to finish this water scene behind before I move on to more seals because the whole reason I even did the seal was to wait for the water to dry a bit so we could keep working. What I want to do now is I want to talk a bit about um well, I already did talk a little bit about this, I don't have to talk a lot about it. Just using some white guash to add some water lines to really make our water like make more sense. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use some of this. I hope you can see this. I have a little like part of my palette over here. So, you can see it right in the corner there. This is where I'm going to put my white gouache paint. Now, white gouache is like watercolors, except it is so opaque and we don't really use it very diluted down. We use it to be quite if we want to make white markings, we want it quite thick. We don't want it, you know, like a wash. So to apply white gouache, what I like to do is I like to use a so I'm just grabbing it now, a synthetic brush rather than a watercolor brush. I'm sorry, I'm just looking through my brushes right now. I just have a lot of brushes and I'm just looking for, there it is. This is a synthetic or round brush. What I'm going to do is I'm going to apply the slightest amount of water to it because I want it to have a consistency where it's going to stand out against a a background. Obviously, if I water this down too much, it will not have that effect. So that's why we want it to be able to stand out, but we also want it to be able to flow. We don't want it to be very dry and hard to apply. So what I want to do is I'm going to use my brush in a very, very loose way with the slightest amount of water until we get the right consistency. You might have to test this out on your paper actually. What I'm going to do now is I want to just hold the brush quite loosely and I'm going to do these like little water kind of marks that look natural and also look like it's so I'm doing a lot of zigzaggy motions, but keeping it very loose is what I'm doing. Keeping your arm loose your wrists loose because this is supposed to be relaxed loose painting. We shouldn't have to think about this so much. I'm taking a bit of inspiration from one of the pictures that I put there. Closer to the wave in that reference picture, you can see that the white zigzag marks get thicker. And see how it looks like it's starting to look drier here. I actually don't mind that. I'm actually pressing down and not reapplying the paint to get this dried effect here because I'm just trying to build up that white area over there. But now I'm just going to water it down again if I want to do more of these smooth zig zag motions. So my advice here is don't overthink it. This is supposed to be just, you know, the ocean, the water, the foam, all just making a cool pattern here. Okay? So as we can see from the pattern, it's a lot more concentrated over here where where the waves are breaking. So my advice is used, see how I'm holding my brush. I'm using very loose zigzaggy motions, okay? Because this is water, you know, this is the ocean. And also, that's why I wanted the background to be dark enough for these water marks to stand out against it. So we see the watermarks more concentrated here. If you want thinner lines, you see what I'm doing? I'm holding my brush very upright, but also not pressing down too much on the paper, not applying too much pressure. That gives me thinner lines. And we'll see some of these lines are quite dispersed, some of them are thinner in other areas. So that's all just adding to our to our ocean in the background. The best part about gouache is, if you feel like the line is too thick or it's too concentrated, you can always use a little bit of water to blend it into the background. So it's not as stark if that's not the effect that you want. Over here, what we see is a lot of loose lines This is just the water. My advice is don't make the lines too straight because then they not look as natural as in nature. And over here, we have a little bit more concentrated white patches as it gets closer to the breaking wave. I guess that's just because of the wave breaking, maybe more foam around here. Over here, we actually have a little bit what looks like a little bit of a wave coming. I'm just going to keep the top thin up here and more concentrated white over here. Okay. So as it gets further away, I'm just going to use thinner lines that are shorter as well. Okay, that's what I see, and I'm trying not to make them too straight. Okay, so when I stand back, this looks great. This looks really good, and I'm just going to keep going at it. Observe from some of those photos that I provided that, you can see the water is getting whiter, closer to where that wave breaks. O. So here's a little bit of an outline. It's not a definite outline, but there is a bit of a wave shape going on here that I've noticed in one of the pictures that I've provided of all the whoops. That looks a bit dark, but let me just wait a little bit to see whether that blends in a bit more because like I said, it's supposed to be the waters wider as it gets closer to that wave that's breaking. So when I stand up and I have a look, the ocean looks like it's coming together quite nicely. I just want to add maybe a few more of these little lines here. And also, let's see if this is a bit more foamy here. So see how I'm just pressing down on my brush here a little bit more to add these marks that are more aggressive, so to speak, for a paintbrush. Yeah, so just going to press down there a little bit. So this should feel natural and loose and that you're not thinking too much about the placement, of the lines. I'm not going to follow the picture exactly the way it is. I'm just noticing little things about it, like how it's whiter closer to where the waves are breaking. And so, like I said, there's a bit of an outline here. So let's just, like, kind of keep that. Okay, I think that's looking good. It's just. Now, I can't wait to tackle the wave that's breaking. This is going to be very fun. You see how there is already a bit of a shape that we've left here. What I want to do is before I get going with the white gouache, I want to actually use my small round brush, and we're going to mix up a little bit of that color we used earlier, which is some of the Vidian and the blue. As always tested before we put it down, get a bit of paper. This will be fine and we don't want this to be too concentrated. What we want to do is where these waves are, the shape of the wave. We're going to outline it a little bit. Now we're going to start just doing a few curved lines with this color that's only concentrated at the top, by the way, at the top. We don't want it going all the way down. It should be in the upper third of the wave. Now, it may look a bit weird now, but just like I said before, trust the process. We're going to use some of the white gouache to make that look a little bit more natural. But while this is here, I just want to continue doing this. We're trying to pick up the shape a little with this paint. That's what we're doing. It's not going to be straight. We're going to some parts are going to be higher than others. But you don't have to be too neat about this either. Let's have fun. We're doing this in a very loose way. My advice is just don't make it too straight because this is supposed to be a wave that's crashing. As you can see, we've got that the shape of the wave is starting to be more defined. At some parts this wave is going to get a little bit smaller here. If you feel the lines are a little bit too harsh here, we can either add more paint or just kind of blend it a little bit. But it will look a lot better once we add some white gouache to it. Just going to pick up whatever paint I have left over here, it's kind of getting a bit small here. Because the shape of the wave is changing, isn't it? It's not all going to be straight. So why don't I just try and, like, Yep. We're just drawing painting these little lines from the top that show the curvature of the wave as it crashes. I'm going to have to pick a little bit more of this paint from here because I'm running out. Let's just that Okay, so there, as you can see, we've got the shape of that wave that's crashing. Before I darken this anymore, now let's start to add let's start having a little bit of fun and adding some of that white in. Once more, I'm going to use some of that white guash, and I'm not going to I need to test it out first. Okay, that's good. What we're going to do now is we're going to dab some of this white. What we're doing is we're breaking up this smooth line. We want it to look like it's splashy, like it's uneven and we're also going to be dabbing on some of that white and bringing it up towards the very top, but not actually at the top, maybe up to the top the top two thirds, if I have to be a little bit, mathematical, not all the way to the top whoops. I just did that by accident, but don't worry about it. I'm going to just also intentionally come out of the line a bit. As you can see, what this does is, it creates a more realistic splashy look. That's what we're trying to create here. And once more, I'm just doing this in a very relaxed way. This is not stressful, this is not, and I don't want this to be too well thought of, if you know what I mean? The whole point of this is to just get rid of those very obvious lines that don't look natural. As you can see, I've already done a lot of a lot of that already. So we want to leave some of that color there. We don't want to get rid of all the color. So we're going to just add some splashing. What we can do also is we can bring some of that color up here a little bit, but we want it to stay. We want that top definition to be there. But we can also bring some of it up there in certain places to just create a little bit of variation. So if your white gouache is feeling a little bit dry, that could be a sign that you need to put some water, a little bit of water and we gouache, we prefer it to be dryer rather than wetter if we're trying to lay a paint on top of a surface. You don't want it too watery. Okay. I also have to be careful of this pain because it's still a bit wet. Now we can maybe bring some of that water. We can even do a few lines going up like that to try and create some realism. But more importantly, let's just break up this line here at the bottom, the outline of the wave that we drew because this is what's going to make it look natural splashy and stuff. But try and bring some of that white, just flick it up a little bit. And we can always add a little bit more color later. But I also don't want it to have this broken this very obvious line. Even though I did paint that to outline it, I'm going to try and erase some of it as well, if that makes sense. At flick it up in certain parts. Maybe I might have erased a little bit of that too much, but I can get back to that later, so a bit of flicking up too and definitely some breaking up of the, that's looking great. We can also emphasize the bottom of where the waves are crashing later by adding a little bit more paint around there. I am working with the shape that we kept So if you feel like this feels like, you know, you want to take a break, that's fine. Okay. But for me, I'm just doing it in a very relaxed way, so it doesn't feel like, you know, it doesn't feel like too much work. So there we go. Flick it up a little bit sometimes for some variation, and Now I'm thinking I might have to redo the top of that wave, but that's okay. That's just small stuff. But that's looking more like a wave breaking now. I feel like this parts a little bit. I just want to smooth that part a bit. Let's just focus on one thing first before we jump to another. Let's just finish the white foam splashing. Looks good. Okay, so this over here, it gets a little bit I like the variation. It gets a little bit smaller here, this wave. That looks very natural. I'm just going to do the bottom now of it and just flick it up a bit. Okay. Looking good. We're almost there. If you feel confident to do this, you don't have to watch me do every part of the wave, but I'm just doing it for just in case somebody wants to watch the whole process. Press down and then flick up a little bit to create those waves. Every time I plan one of my classes that has a background, I try and do something a little bit different, which is why I wanted to put this CO family on the beach with the water just crashing on them. That way you also get to paint a different background. Okay, let's look at what we've got. We've got these waves breaking here. Let me just maybe go over some parts where I see the lines and feel free to make it come out as well, and splash upwards as well. Also like I said, do the flicky line that goes up. Creating a realistic wave is all about shadow and light. So we're going to let me just where I see that it needs more white Okay. I'm getting a little carried away here, but I think this area is looking a little bit like it needs a little bit more attention. I'm flicking this up. Okay. Adding a few more like splashy Let's take a little break from doing this for now. I want to go back to using the dark, the green and the blue mixture because what I want to do now with that is I want to just go a little under where these waves are breaking to just add a bit of shadow around where we added the white. As you can see, that adds a three D feel. To the waves crashing because now we've got some dark where the foam is. That helps to give it a more three D look. I'm also going to use the same color to go over this part because I feel like it disappeared a little bit, that shape of the wave. You can also maybe bring a few lines down if you feel, Oh, dear. Look at this. Now I'm touching. Don't worry. When something like that happens, stay very calm. The good thing about the white gouache is, like I said earlier, you can use a clean brush to just remove it. You can blend it and just remove it. Once more, I need to be very careful about where I rest my hand. Uh, it happens to everyone. Sometimes you get so engrossed in painting that you don't realize you're resting your hand. Look, I'm just lifting off some of that color now. It's really okay because anyway, this is supposed to be the wet sand. Some parts of the wet sand can be a little bit shinier than others. Just be careful. I've gotten rid of that. It's a little bit lighter, but we can always maybe throw some color in there later. All right. So let's just get back to our wave. What I'm doing is I'm going to use some of that blue green mixture. I seem to run out of it very quickly when I'm working with it. So once more, doing a check that you're not resting your hand on anything. Where I'm going to put it is, I think this is a little bit faint today. I'm going to put it right under where the wave is breaking, That looks good over there. Okay. I'm going This just emphasizes the whites and yeah, gives it a more three D look. See, you can already see it's coming out. I'm just going to have to get some of that. I might even mix a little bit of the raw sienna in here to make a darker green because after all, this is supposed to be near the shore. That way, see, we have a bit of a greenish color. Which helps it to stand out. I know I've been doing this for a while now and when we finish this, I will give you a break. Let's keep going now. It shouldn't take too long. Now I'm just going to work a little bit faster to add some of that darker color around where it breaks. See, can you see the difference when you use some of that color underneath to make the wave just pop? It gives it that three D look. And I'm just using that same color to just kind of outline the wave a bit, but I don't want to mess with it too much. Let me stand up. As you can see, yeah, that wave is looking a lot more realistic now. Another thing we can do to make the wave pop is using the same color, the greens and the blues, you can also go behind this wave a little, that just makes the kind of it outlines the wave in a more natural way because yeah, it still makes it like pop. I don't need to do that too much because we can already see this wave here. If you feel like the line is too obvious, bring some of it down like that. I'm just going to finally finish off this wave over here, I just want to darken certain areas over here where the wave is breaking. It doesn't have to be too dark. Like this is just that blue mixture again. Wherever you feel the wave isn't very clear, the breaking. Very finally, I just want to do really quickly just outline the top of that wave where we can't see it so clearly. But I think that's looking very good. Okay. So I hope if there anything that you feel like you want to this part looks a little, okay? I'm trying not to be too perfectionist about this, but I just want to, like, maybe add a little bit of blue color here because maybe that's a little bit white now, but it's okay to have some variation in the wave breaking. Okay? So let's also move on now and just do this part over here, which is where we see some of that shallow water. What we're going to do again is basically the same as what we did up here. But let's start first by applying a thicker white paint here. This is where our Oops, that's a bit thick, but don't worry. We can just like see pressure is everything when applying paint. You get thicker lines obviously when you press down. What I'm doing now is I did a pretty thick line to show this is where the water meets the sand. Behind that line, I can add a few little broken pieces, broken lines rather that show that, hey, this is flowing, this is water. Let's just look at this section here. Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the same thing I did just now. I'm going to very lightly. Kind of draw some water patterns. The water patterns look something like irregular shapes, you know. It's a little hard to see on this background, but that's okay. I don't mind. So if you want, you can maybe press down a little bit more with, um, with your brush, but I'm okay with it just being barely visible. Same thing holding the brush loosely and we're doing some zigzaggy lines to show that, hey, this is flowing, this is water. You can't see it as clearly. If you want, you can maybe take some of that color and darken it. Let's just try it out first. But how about we just do you see, even this white line seems to fade a little. I'm just reapplying it. As I said before, we don't have to do it exactly the same as the photograph. So white gouache with watercolors is just a marriage made in heaven. Okay. So that's the water. Well, the water line, I think I might have to go over it in some areas because it's just very not thick enough. Okay, but that looks good to me. And also, I want to just do so I know you guys probably want to break. So let's just do some loose zigzaggy lines like that, to show that this is water here. And some of it might just blend because into the background. So it's up to you if you want to build it up again by adding more on. Here, I'm also just adding a little bit of white dots and broken lines to just kind of indicate that there's some bubbles or something behind this wet area here. That We see a bit of broken lines dots right behind this line. We can even go further if you want and we could even use a white acrylic pen if you feel like this keeps fading because that's just the nature of the gouache pane. If you want it thicker, you just have to reapply it. So I might speed up this part just so we can finish soon because I know we've been painting for a long time. And I might actually kind of go around some of those Daka areas to just kind of, um very loose zigzaggy lines is what I'm doing here. They might not stand out as much because the background is light, but that's okay with me. I don't want to imitate the picture exactly. But one thing we can do here is, you see where these dark lines are. We can start to go a little up here, around here. As you can see, some of the waves right at the bottom, they got some zigzagi lines coming up here, all the way up to the wave. Here's another zigzaggy line that's going up here. Maybe that's coming down. That just adds a little bit of, you know, I just shows that the wave has a little bit of a height. I think after a while doing this, it's going to come very naturally to you to just be able to do zig zags and hold your brush like, you know, in this natural way. I don't want to do this too much, but I think we're close to finishing it. So all I want to do is this line, just make sure that this line is very prominent where it meets the wet sand, the water. I just want to cover up my pencil lines that I drew here. Yes, I think that's looking good. And if you want, if you find that this is a little bit, you know, too light for you, you can do this. You can use some of that color, the blue, the green, and the raw siana in it. And you can kind of, you know, do zigzaggy lines as well with your paintbrush and not just the white guash. So we can do that. And once more, I'm not thinking too hard about this. It's just, just try and think flow of the ocean, we're just doing that just so maybe the white stands out a little bit more. But I don't want to get like I said, the whole point of this class is not to get too bogged down with details, but I did notice that yeah, this part is a little bit light, but I love the purple that I see in it, so I don't want to totally cover that up. So I think that looks good, and the last thing I want to do is just use a little bit of the white gouache to just now that we've added the shadows below, you can just maybe put a couple of white dot splashes here and there, to just make it look like natural and dynamic. But you don't have to if you're happy with what you got, you don't have to do this. You can also bring some of that white dots up here into that green area that you painted. Yeah, it just makes it look a little bit more natural, right? Like, there's some splashing going on. But feel free to stop if you feel like you've already done it and you feel satisfied. So see just random dots below to just indicate that this is very dynamic splashing, right? But like I said, don't get too carried away. A tip that I once read and practiced is if you don't want to get too bogged down with details, you can kind of set a time for yourself to finish doing like, you know, a painting or a scene in a painting, I mean, you know, a step in the painting. So that might be helpful. Someone like me, sometimes I can get very, very bogged down on details, but the whole point of this is to have fun and kind of. Shake it up a little bit, be loose. Okay. Okay. I think this looks really good. One last thing that you can do. To make this ocean even more dynamic, you're going to water down the paint a little bit and just give it a little bit of a splattering. This paint is still too thick, so I have to just write where the waves are there. I can see some of it coming up. This is also a technique that you can use for looseness and also um making it look natural. Not a lot of paint is coming off, but some of it is and some of the specs are very small. See, I can see them over here. Before we finish this up, And I think we're done. I don't think we need to do anymore. So I hope you like your ocean that you've created. I really like mine, and I'm sorry. This was a very, very long step, and we will come back and do the rest later. But look at our ocean. It looks so much more alive than it did just now, and I love it, and I can't wait to paint the rest of the seal. So please go have a well deserved break. Go as usual, change your water, wash your brushes, and I will see you back here when everything is dried, see you very soon. 8. Painting the second and third seals: Hi, everybody, and welcome back. And I hope you all had a good break, a good stretch. And just look at how far we've come with this painting. Especially if you're like me and you did an A three sized one. That was quite a lot of work that we've put in. But as you can see, I love the way the ocean looks in the background. It's very different from any of the other backgrounds that I've had in my class. It looks dynamic with that wave just breaking here. And I know that took a bit of time for us to develop the wave and the background, but just look at it. It looks really, really cool. And earlier on, we had already done our first seal, who's just lounging over here because I was waiting for the background to dry. And I'm somebody who's like, you know, if I can work on, you know, a different part of the painting while waiting for this to dry, it's all good, you know, and we painted this guy in a very loose, relaxed manner where we just wet him and we just continuously just added layers of color, starting with the lightest color. Like, that was a I don't even like to say the method that we use. It's just because it was just my idea of what loose relaxed watercolor painting is where we even use that very loose approach when we were sketching, so we weren't taking exact measurements or anything. That's the difference with this class. I just wanted to paint this scene in a very relaxed way. Before I talk a lot again, there's just a little bit more that I want to do with just this very part of the background over here. I feel like it's a little bit light. And maybe later on we could even just add a glaze of blue to just darken it. But we also want to consider adding a reflection for this guy since he is on the wet sand. In one of the reference photographs, you can clearly see a bit of a reflection. But I'm going to leave that up to you how much of these details you want to add. Personally, though, I love the way this painting is working out. All right. Our background is almost already completed. I think, why don't we leave this guy for the very end? Because I want to do maybe a very, very suggest that there is a bit of a reflection here because I think that will help the viewer of your painting, when they see little things like that, I think it really just adds some, you know, kind of magic, some enchantment, and at the same time, a little bit of reality as well to your painting, if that makes sense. So before I talk a lot again, how about we start painting some of these seals who are still, um, yeah, in different poses. We've already painted this guy. Why don't we start with you can refer to the reference photographs, of course, that I've provided. I provided reference photographs for each of these seals. How about this guy over here that's doing a bit of an action, using his fins to well, hobble across the sand? Because that's exactly what I saw when I took this photograph of this seal hobbling along the sand in Seal Bay on Kangaroo Island, sorry, in Southern Australia. Okay. I get Southern and Western Australia mixed up a bit because I actually went to these two places quite um, just pretty close in time. But just for clarification, these photographs were taken on Kangaroo Island and the part of the island where the seals come is appropriately named SeO Bay. Let's just check that I turned my palette around just now when I was painting the very last section of this class just so my hand wasn't resting in paint and I wasn't about to make a huge mistake. Anyway, let's keep going. Now for this guy, what I want to do is I'm going to wet him and I'm going to start with the lightest color again, which is a bit of raw sienna. He's quite a bit darker than this guy, which I love because it's nice to see variations in the coats of the seals. I think it gives them more personalities and it's also much cooler to look at, in my opinion. What I'm going to do is I'm taking my size eight round brush and I'm just going to just wet his entire body. I noticed there's actually a little bit of an area here where sand should be. So how about I I'm just going to drop in. Like I said, in a very relaxed way, I'm going to drop in my lightest color, which is raw sienna that I'm using. I can see a little bit down here on the tip of the flippers. We see a little bit of that color too. We see some of it over here, some near the top. So very relaxed approach to painting, okay? Like, I'm not being super accurate or anything like that, putting some in the face. So if it's not exactly the same color match as my reference photograph, that's completely fine with me. I think maybe this guy doesn't have as much reddish tones, reddish brown tones, but I will drop in just a little bit of, um bun umba just because I want to. Maybe I want to see some reddish tones and I'm also just flexing my artistic wings a little and just having fun with this. Yeah, I don't mind adding some of that color here. Actually, I'm going to go back to the raw sienna and add some over here where you see those falls in the skin. And if you want now, you can swap to a smaller brush. I'm just going to make sure I give this a good rinse before I put it on my seal in case it has any blue left from just now. Now I'm going to start using the darker brown, which is raw amber. I'm just going to start now dropping this in in those darker areas. So that's my approach to, you know, loose painting of a seal, but which also still has some dimension. Okay, don't worry. What we're doing now is still a base coat. We're doing a varied base coat. And if we find some areas are very light, we can always top it up later. I noticed over here on this fin, we can see it's a little bit darker. And I can see it go up the neck here. The darkness is actually creeping up the neck here, which is cool because I think it adds it adds some dimension too, and I can always use a darker color later on to just do things like the eyes and the nose, but I'm just going to leave it like that and also going to drop in some more of that darker color up here. We can easily see it on the top of the head over here going down the neck. I'm going to leave I'm going to leave this bottom half of the neck area unpainted. Even though some of this paint is bound to flow a little into it, that's fine with me because I love that it doesn't have any harsh lines. There are no harsh boundaries. Over here, I'm just going to have fun dropping in this paint, letting it just mix a little. I notice down here we can add some more color too. H. That's a great base coat already. I'm just going to drop in a bit of that color right on the very tip down here. That's just our base coat. I might as well just take some of this dark color and put it where the nose is. Very cute. Maybe down here where the mouth is. But we don't see this guy's face very clearly, where the ear is. I feel like this is still wet and now I'm going to work with my darkest color which is sepia. So SapaOce more, don't make the same mistake I made. Make sure you know where you're putting your hand down. You don't want to rest your hand on a wet area. So I'm just going to now drop in a bit more of this darker brown down here where the flipper is, we can see that. We're just letting everything blend. Okay? So the pain won't travel I might not travel all the way across where we're dropping it. I won't flow all over. It will kind of flow in a very in the area right next to it. I love that. As I mentioned earlier, that just means you're not going to have any harsh lines and it's going to look very natural. We're just now all I'm doing is looking at the reference photograph for this guy and I'm just going to bring it down, bring that dark color down. It starts from the outside and it works itself in. Then we've got these little lines here, these little grooves where I'm just going to make sure that the very outer part has this dark color. Brings some of that color up here. It has a few light patches as you can see on the top. Like I said, I'm not following it exactly, but I'm just getting inspired by the reference photograph. So yeah, this guy has a much beautiful darker coat than the first guy we painted. We basically using the same techniques, though. See, I'm just dropping in the paint here. I encourage you to just do what feels natural with your brush, like, when you're looking at the reference photograph. We got this dark, we have the eye over here. We got the ear over here and a few markings on the face and the mouth where I'm just going to bring this color. It's going to also act like a bit of an outline down here. What I want to do is I'm going to just as you can see, it's dark there. I'm going to go back to my raw umber and I'm just going to dab on some of that raw umber color over here. And to avoid any obvious mocks, I'm just going to use a clean dam brush to blend it out a bit. There we go. That's already our first coat and it already looks so varied. Let me just use a bit of that sepia to just outline this guy a little. But he's looking great. We can still docken certain areas that we need to later. Okay. But right now, I feel like we've already done a really good strong varied base wash. I'm happy to move on from this. When I say that, I'm just going to drop in a little bit more color here on the neck of the raw umber. Okay. And now I'm just going to leave him as he is now and move on to the next guy. The next guy actually happens to be in this photograph and I'm pretty sure it's a lady. But I put another head over here, like a baby next to her because in the original reference photograph, we could only see part of a body of a pup lying there. I just thought it looked a little bit, you know, we couldn't really see the face or anything. So, it's fine to use your reference photographs and manipulate them a little, maybe put two seals that were apart together. That's what I did here. I just got a little bit creative. So with her, she's also got some grays, I can see. We do have paints gray down here. Maybe I could just activate it. As you can see, I'm just going to put it over here. It's a light gray. Maybe we might start using a bit of grays there. I haven't used gray yet on any of the seals. So this guy is dry, so why don't we just work with her? Same thing. I'm just going to put drop some water down over here. She has quite a proud look to her. That's cute. I'm just wedding her. I'm not going to do the baby yet. Same thing. I think I'm going to go with the asiana over here. She's also got some In fact, I might bring the raw sienna all the way down here because I can see she's got some on her bottom, so we might as well do that too. I'm always starting with the lighter colors. Just because it's watercolor and obviously darker colors can layer on top of lighter colors more easily than if you had, you know, lighter colors on the top, they wouldn't stand out. I'm just going to Also leaving some white spaces. I'm just putting the raw sienna where I see fit. I also sees you see hints of it on her face too, so I don't mind putting that in. I might just put it all the way here. That's fine. Then we have going into this fin. Now I'm just going to change to the smaller brush just because I'm working with darker colors now. I'm definitely going to drop in some of that burn umber over here. We definitely see some reddish tones over here. All the way up here. As you can see, because I'm applying it wet wet-on-wet, it gives also a bit of a furry texture. What I want to do here is I'm going to just use some water to blend these colors a little bit together. I just want to drop in maybe some over here too. Like I said, I'm being inspired by the photograph. I'm not going to follow it exactly. I can change things if I want different browns if I want. But we've got a cool seal here that has quite a bit of color variation. I'm just going to drop in more of these browns before I go in before I go in with the darker gray. Maybe we see some hints of that color here. Even though it looks pretty light down here, fin, sorry. Well, I guess you could call it a pectoral fin or a flipper I think we can even bring this color over here even though it's quite a dark flipper that's in the shadow, but I don't mind just bringing it here and then we can layer on top of it. While this is still wet, let's apply some of that gray. With the gray, I would highly advise you to test it out first. You don't want it too dark. I think that would be okay, actually. I've diluted the gray down in a separate little well here. I'm just going to drop this in here as you can see the shadow right under the chin from the photograph. The water is still helping this to spread in a way that looks natural. We'll also do things like apply some darker shades later. We can also see around her eye, it's gray, but I'm going to leave the eyelid unpainted, down here we see gray too. Paints gray is a pretty strong color, so just be mindful of that. I see a little bit of gray here. And I'm going to just make up a little bit more gray here because we start to see it gets a bit darker here and I'm also starting to use the tip of my brush to give a little bit of a fur texture. Yeah. We can also use the gray to outline this fin a little bit, this flipper. That's quite dark what I'm doing. I don't want to take it all the way to the end, but you definitely see that there is some shadow down here. The gray can act as a shadow color too. Also if you feel like this looks a little bit too stark, use a clean damp brush to blend it outwards a little bit, even though I liked that fur look, but maybe it was a little bit stock. Back to using the gray, I'm just going to take a little bit. Put it over here on the chest and even drop in a little bit more under the chin here because it looks like it's darker there. We can even use the gray around the mouth line and on that nose, And just on the eye, not the eyelid, but just the eye. I'm already starting to add some details in using the gray while it's still wet. You don't have to wait for the final code to add details. We're already building up the details anyway as we go along. And now with whatever paint I have left here, you can see there's a little bit of lighter area down here. So why don't we just bring that color down here. I'm just going to use my brush to just blend this a little bit so it didn't look too stock. There our seal is coming to life. Down here, it's a very shadowy area, so I can add some gray here, down here, that's the darkest part of the seal. But I'm going to leave this middle part unpainted. Later we could use a clean damp brush to just, um blend that a little bit. I don't want to remove too much color though, so I just have to be a little bit careful here. But that area is darker and while I'm at it, we can hardly see this fin. Over here, it's in the shadow. I'm just going to just color that that can be dark because it's actually in the shadow of the CO herself. And let me just use whatever gray I have here to add a little bit of detail to this flipper over here. It has some gray in it, and Okay. Ta that's our other flipper. I feel like the bottom looks a little bit bare now. I'm just going to use some of that reddish brown to just fill it in a little because I felt like it was a little bit light. These are all little touches that you can do now, just using your own intuition. I'm also going to use some of that red over here, the reddish brown just to bring it up. Look, our seal has a lot of textures going on, which is really cool. It makes her look more realistic and real like a real seal. Actually, I shouldn't have removed this. I just want to maybe go over this part a bit more with the gray. I accidentally took a bit of paint off it when I blended, so I'm just dropping it back in here. If you don't like little areas like this where it looks a bit the lines are too harsh, you can always just use a clean de brush. I'm applying very little pressure to just break up that line a little bit. I might just use a little bit of gray to go over there. What else can we do? Maybe a little bit of reddish reddish tones over here. I'm just going to use a little bit of concentrated gray now because I see that there are some folds in the arm here and I'm just going to emphasize that with the gray. So this is where, you know, the rolls of her skin kind of, kind of, like, go I'm not trying to insult her, but they kind of, you know, the rolls of the skin are sitting there because the fat the fat's kind of resting on top of that flipper joint, which I think is very adorable. And I'm just wondering if I should do the shadows later, and just keep going with the um, with the seals. But I think I'm just going to use a little bit of gray now that I have on the very tip of my brush just add a bit of fur details here that I can see very lightly with my brush. But I don't think I actually have to do a lot. I think the seal is looking quite complete. The only thing I can think of is I just want to use a little bit more gray over here while it's still a bit damp to just try and, um, At that shadow in. And as an outline. Now, since we've been painting for a while, we just painted two seals, maybe we can take a little break. I'm just using that gray as well to just emphasize that beautiful chin. Okay, use your intuition now to just outline that year a little bit to determine how much pain you need to put down and, um, just kind of feeling it. I also think that I think she's quite complete. Let's just break up this line here by adding a bit of fur here because that's a pencil line that I could see. I just want to hide that a little bit. Not that there's anything wrong with it. I actually like seeing pencil lines sometimes in my sketches. I mean, in my paintings. I don't mind the pencil lines. I think it's part of the process, but in this case, I just found it too distracting. I'm just going to use a little bit more gray to just outline. I can see this whole part of her mouth is kind of quite defined. That's what I'm doing here. But I think we can take a little break now and come back to paint the rest of the seals because we don't want to get too tired. It also depends on how many seals you drew in the process. Maybe you drew less than me and you might be finished. Because your composition might look a little bit different from mine. But I'm sure it looks great. I think the only thing I want to do before we finish is I'm just going to use some gray now and add some little lines like this to indicate fur. It's also acting as a shadow color to just emphasize where the shadows fall. I think she's actually almost complete, but if you want, we can take a little break now. I'm just going to leave a little bit of that daria of hers not completely covered in gray. But everything else is looking great. I think she looks great. And when I said that, I just want to do a little bit more gray here because this is a whole shadow area that she's revealing by lifting up her head here. Emphasize that mouth. The eye and yeah. And the chin is a little bit dock to here. I'm just going to darken a little bit there. I think we're done. I think that is quite defined. I'm going to stand up and have a look. Yeah, she's looking really good. I think I want to take a little break now. I think probably you want to before we come back and finish the seals off. Okay. How long have we been painting for half an hour? Yeah, we did do two seals in this process. Yes, this is one of those paintings that's a little bit like um a marathon rather than a race because we do have a lot going on here. We do have quite a few subjects to paint. Even painting a really dynamic background like that takes time. So my advice is give yourself lots of breaks. If you get tired, stop painting, take a break, come back later. Okay? But why don't we all take a break now and we can finish the seals when we come back. And we really actually don't have a lot more to do. So have a break and I will see you back here in no time. 9. Painting more seals: Hi, everybody. So, as you can see, our nice seal is completely dry and she looks great, and so does this little guy over here. So what we're gonna do next is we're going to quickly and loosely paint these seals. Okay. And I want to finish these seals before I tackle this guy over here, because as I explained earlier, I want to work a bit on that reflection. So because of that, like, um, I'm going to start with this seal over here, just so, you know, I can gradually go across the page so I won't be resting my hand on wet surfaces, which have happened to me plenty of times before. So before I talk a lot again, I just want to start painting this guy. Now, this guy, um, I sketched him based on one of the poses in the reference photographs and he's a little bit in the distance, and I also put him towards the water. We don't have to put an incredible amount of detail with him, and he has quite some dark coloring. All I'm going to do like I did for the last ones is I'm going to wet him with just some clean water and yeah, pretty much just drop in those colors. He doesn't have a lot of light, so I'm just going to add a little bit of the raw sienna here. We mainly see that over here, and the rest of him is on the darker side. I don't see a lot of reddish tones with him, but I don't mind just improving a bit. Maybe I can put some reddish tones over here, and we can paint over him later with some darker brown, some sepia and stuff. What I notice is I might actually start using after I put some of the dark brown in, I might actually start using some gray on him. He's kind of in the back, just doing his thing in the back here. But I feel like I'm going to swap brushes now to my small size four round as I start putting in some darker color for him. Maybe I'm going to start with the face, we can see on the top of the head here. I also see it down here, the coloring is just darker around the face here. I might just start also down here, we can also start putting some of that color in here. Just building up that color. Also just going to leave some areas a little bit lighter than others. But there is not a lot of detail with this guy. You don't really even see the fur contours or anything like that. I'm just going to go all the way out to the outline here. I think we can do this guy pretty quickly. There's just dark here. Oops. I went out a bit onto the sand, but don't worry about it. It looks like sand. And now I just want to this is still wet. Let's drop in the sepia. So I can do the sepia for the eyes because it's quite dark. But don't worry too badly about it spreading because he is in the background. I can always All I'm doing now is just applying this dark color here. Maybe that's quite a bit over here, but I can just move some of that. It's okay. I'm just going to move some of that pain up here. Pretty from this angle, this is a pretty dark seal. I will still go over this area to do his eyes later once it dries with gray, some pains gray. Now, if you feel like you want more control over the layers of rather than this loose method that I'm doing, if you want more control, you can definitely wait for each layer to dry and then re wet it gently and then apply more pain, but you don't have to. The whole point of this is to do it loosely. I'm just going to move some of this pain here because I feel like the face is a little bit obstructed, but I am going to go over that anyway with gray. But I just want to, in case it's looking a little bit messy, I just want to define that a little bit more. The area still looks a little bit dark, but I am going to paint over that because if you look at the reference photograph, it is the face is quite dark. The eyes, all you see is the eyes and the nose. But that being said, I might just remove a little bit of paint over here. And maybe between the nose and the eye over here. He's already almost finished. Now I think I just want to let me just clear that pain up. I might just go and start doing the gray coat. So this is all still wet and I'm just going to drop in the gray and making sure that I leave a little bit of lighter color here around the neck. So I'm just dropping in that gray. He looks quite dark and that's cool because now we also have more color variation among our colony of seals here. So the way I'm putting the paint is, I am basically just dropping it in. Maybe I'm just using the tip of my brush to maybe create a few little spotty patterns. But ultimately, it is quite a quite dark looking seal. I'm also going to drop that in over here with this fin here or flipper, I keep calling them fin, sorry. Down here, it's going to be shadowy, so I'm going to just drop that into. Then the head here. That's how I paint the seals in a loose way. He's got quite a few dark spots over here with his faces. I'm just going to outline the bottom as well where the mouth is. He's still wet. I want to add more definition on the face. Let me just finish the rest of the body first before I go back to the face. So the face is almost dry and so I'm going to use a more concentrated version of the pains gray to do that nose. Yeah, I would I would recommend to wait for the face to dry a little bit before you drop in this dark color or as you saw just now with the sepia, it will just spread a lot. I didn't mind doing that just now because that isn't my darkest color. But here we go. There he is, and I also just want to do the ear of our seal. And just a little bit more at the bottom here. But that's all he doesn't have a lot of detail, but I'm just going to outline the nose, mouth area. I think there's a bit of an eye socket here. Then we've got the ear and let's just redo that head boundary. I think that's good and we can move on to the next seal. Okay. I just want to do maybe a few more little spots here just because I felt like his head was a little bit, a little bit bare. Then using a clean dam brush to just spread blend some of this out if you find it's too stock. Okay. But I think he looks good, so I'm going to leave him for now. If we're working this way, I did see in one of the reference photographs, there was a seal's head popping out. So let me just try and find that. If not, I can also just paint this quite easily. It's just, here we are a seal's head. This seal happens to be quite a light gray color. So let me just well before I do that, I'm just going to use some water to once more help this spread. So here, I'm just going to drop in some of that raw sienna. But this is quite a light seal. I'm just going to drop that in while while I get my gray sort of ready now. I'm just going to dilute down the gray a little bit. As you can see, we're going to just drop it in at the bottom here. All I'm doing is letting that pain just flow and also down here. I'm just using the wet-on-wet technique to yeah, give it a cute little gray speckled look. But like I said before, if you find that this is too, you don't have much control, if you're just painting continuously loosely, you can wait for layers to stop to dry first before you continue. But I just want to create a very loose look for this painting. That's what I'm after. So I'm going to let that dry a little bit now. Well, right when I say that I'm going to add a little bit more of this gray first. But what I want to say actually is, I might just put it on the eye area. I'm just going to let that dry for sac first and then start on another seal and then I can come back here and do some details because I can't do a lot of details while it's still wet right now. What I'm going to do instead is I'm going to start working on this guy who happens to be in another one of my pictures, one of my reference photographs. So this guy happens to be lying next to the guy that we painted just now. What I'm going to do is he's quite a mixture of browns, right? He's not as gray as some of the other seals like this guy. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to repeat the process. I'm going to wet him and then drop in colors where I see appropriate, starting with the light. Let's go. Let's um I'm going to leave areas a little bit unpainted, not cover everything with the raw sienna. It's nice to have a few highlights here and there. I might leave some areas unpainted. Maybe on the top is where I'm going to leave those unpainted. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my size four round brush and start again with the reddish tones. I see some over here. See, I'm just painting this very loosely. I'm not even really determined to follow everything that I see in the reference photograph. I just want to use a very loose approach to painting. See, I just say, it approximately ends here, this reddish tone. Over here around the face, we see some markings. Actually just realized I forgot to draw an ear for this guy, but that's okay. We can add that in later. Also I'm just going to add in a few more spots here and there. So I see I'm just doing a bit of spottiness here, but just very loosely, just applying it very, very loosely. For me, I feel like trying to do things loosely like this just takes all the anxiety and stress away from trying to do it perfectly, trying to do it so accurately and stuff. So it's an approach that I'm taking for this painting. In the past maybe my other paintings were a little bit more um I think I was aiming for accuracy and stuff in the others. But I just found that you can get the same impact and it doesn't have to be so rigid if you're going to try and copy everything. All I'm doing now is I'm just adding more layers of this color because I think this guy has quite a bit of reddish tones to him. I'm using the burn umber paint. I'm just now going to go with a darker brown, which is the raw umber. Let's start by I just want to mark the ear because I just so I can see it in the future. The ear is going to be somewhere there. I'm just going to spot the face a little bit and put some under here and over here and let some of that and just going to bring that dark color underneath. Also, I'm just going to now layer on top of this. This is all still quite damp, so we're getting that that natural blending of the paint on the wet surface. I might also divert a little bit. I'm not going to copy it exactly because this is art after all, loose art. I love the effect of the spots on the seals body. I'm just adding a few more than I see because I just like the way it looks. Now I'm going to take this color, the raw umber and I'm going to just do do some of those flippers. You can see how the tips are darker. We will also go over this later with a darker brown and maybe some gray and bring that color up here. Now I'm just going to use my brush. As you can see, I'm pressing down more. I'm not really holding it perpendicular anymore because I'm going for bigger splashes of paint rather than little pinpoints of it. I'm starting to run out of that on my palette actually. I might just put a little bit more raw umber on. Okay. So here we're putting on like Okay, yeah. That's his different coloring compared to the others. They all seem to have, sort of like a fingerprint of different colors and textures, which I love. Yeah, I just has so much variety in this painting with all their different patterns and colors. I also see that they got these little lines here. I can't really see it with this pain, before I apply the darker color, let's just try and I'm just going to try and freckle this guy up a little. He also has an eye socket there. I also just want to maybe before I go on with the darkest color, I'm going to just put a few like using whatever pain is left on my brush to just deposit some pain very lightly to just almost blend this together. Actually, I might have done that a little too much, let me just remove this because I can see there is an area here that is a little bit lighter. Finally, let's go with our sepia. Sepia is the darkest color, and I'm going to start at the bottom, I think. I also want to do I see these lines these little folds. I'm also going to bring it out to outline those flippers. Maybe put a few dots here for this guy. There the flippers and now let's just do the underside with it. It's the surface is starting to get dry. What I can do is also, I can paint the details and everything like that now, the eye and the nose and stuff. But what I might do is, I will have to maybe do some blending later. And now using my brush quite putting pressure on applying pressure, I mean to just kind of spread some of this pain to cover a larger area. And I just feel like the face just looks a bit. I need to just blend that a little bit with a damp brush because it just looked a little bit messy. And also I think that these flippers should be darker. I'm just going to apply a little bit more paint on them and then just let some of the highlights shine through. Speckling on some paint in an organic manner. Just using whatever's left on my brush to get that effect. That's looking really great. I don't know if this guy really needs gray because he's not that dark, but maybe I might just put a little bit of gray right on the tips of the flippers. I might just use some of that concentrated gray on the eyes and the nose. If you don't feel confident doing small areas like the eyes and the nose and the ears with the tip of a paintbrush, you are more than welcome to use a pen. You can use a black pen. I use it a lot. Um, I think that over here, there's a very big dark spot on the head that's quite prominent. Then we got the ear hanging down here. I'm just going to use some of that to just darken the very bottom But I feel like maybe just using a little bit of gray, just on the top to just add a few of those dark spots because it's a little hard to the sepia, I've already used a lot of sepia and I just want to layer some of that on top, just a little bit of gray because it's much darker. Okay. I think that's looking good. I just noticed something maybe that's a little bit of a mark here where the ER is. I also noticed there's some lines coming down from the head and this part looks a little bit darker, the real snout area. I might actually come back with a pen later because I just want to do the eye more accurately and precisely. Um so far, though, I think this looks great. I think this seal is beautiful and I think we can stop here. I've been painting for a while now. What I want to do before we finish off doing that guy is, let's just do something very, very quickly. We can paint the shadows underneath our seals now that are done. Because we might as well. I know you could mix your own shadow color, but I think for the sake of just being quick, I want to just use the paints gray. So you want to be very careful doing this. You just want to outline that area directly under. See how I'm holding my brush almost like perpendicula because I want to be accurate and I don't want a very fat line. I'm just going slightly outside the boundaries of the seal. Because I don't even think we have much of a shadow here. I think maybe just like that because it's going to be on the wet sand boundary. So yeah. That's all I've done. That is all the shadow I need. I think I've gone a little bit out here, so I might as well just try and make that look a bit smoother. Watch where you rest your hands, as I said earlier because I've made mistakes before. All right. With clean hands, I just want to change the angle of my hand to try and do this smoothly. Okay, he looks good. Since this guy is on the same page, I might as well also do his shadow. I'm just going to apply. As you can see from the photograph here, there's a shadow right under his head, so just be brave and just come out a little bit like that. It's a thin shadow. It is from above, directly above the sun, and then I'm going to connect that shadow to the rest of the body. Big thick gray line underneath, right next to the body, even touching the body. As you can see, that already just adds even more realism to your seals. Remember, stay as close as you can to the body, and it should also be touching the body. There you got this shadow coming out which helps with the realism. The shadows are not as obvious. They might be a little bit subtle because it's right underneath our seals. Sorry, I'm just trying to find this little guy over here. So this little guy, let's do him as well. His shadow in the paper in the picture goes a little bit behind him like that. If you're a bit nervous about using a very bold color like this to do the shadows, you can always sketch it out. With pencil first so that you have a guideline to paint on. But I feel confident to do this because like I said, this is also very loose art, no one's going to be accurately measuring where your shadow falls. So there's a little bit of a shadow here right underneath where this flipper in the front touches the sand. Then we've got the shadow of the rest of the body that's just a little bit higher here and extends kind of under the head there. It looks something like that, and I might just go over it again because it looked a bit light. And that's a shadow right there. If I stand up, it does look realistic. Now, I'm going to do the shadows now and then we can come back and do we can add those final details, but I just want to finish the shadow first. Let's do this mama over here and I'm going to just do the shadow right under. As you can see here, there's a little bit of a gap here. And then that shadow pretty much comes right under her like that. Let me just fill that in. Then it comes out slightly here and right underneath that flipper that's sticking out here. Then we also see it go right under her here, and then it just comes out a little bit, as you can see that gives it a little bit of a three dimensional that area is sticking out, behind is sticking out and casting its own little shadow here. Let me just round this up a bit. And make sure that all that looks good. This s over here, not really casting much of Well, maybe I can actually do that, but like it would be maybe under her a little bit. Because I improved and added her in here, maybe we can just improv a shadow that's going to look something like that where her head is casting a shadow underneath her because it's right above her. It's is you have to think about this scientifically as well, where would the shadow fall. So here, how about we give her a little bit of a shadow. This part I noticed just looked a little bit light, I'm just going to go over it there. Finally, this guy, the very first seal that we painted, I might as well finish his shadow too. Um where is he? I'm just scrolling through my photos, sorry. So just give me a second. I'm just trying to find him. There were quite a few seals here. His shadow is quite easy to do as well. It's quite basically underneath him, but we do see a little bit where how about we start with the head first. So right under the head and then it kind of goes out a little bit here and it has a rounded tip. And then the rest is pretty easy. It's just directly under him. So right under here. I'm also using a little bit of it to just go over that and and then some shadow here too on top of it. We're going to just go here, and I noticed this parts dark and there's also a bit of shadow in between these two flippers. I might as well just bring that shadow under here. My flippers look a little bit different from the reference photograph, but that's okay. I'm totally fine with that. That's just shadow like that, and I should probably just go around that. So there, we've added some shadow, and when I stand up, it does give it more realism, doesn't it? It really does look more real. Now, because we've been painting for sorry, I've kind of turned the page while I was painting, I moved it. Because we've been painting for quite a while. How about, but you know what? I think actually we could finish this now. We could finish these seals by just adding those little details that I want to add. So I just want to use the darkest color, which is the pains gray to emphasize the docs that we want to do. So the eye is somewhere here, but it's closed. I also want to take this time to maybe just add a few spots, a few little speckles on this guy because he was the first guy I painted and also maybe add a little bit more shadow on this fin, this flipper. But if you're happy with what you've got, you don't have to add anymore if you really like what you're seeing. There's also something, I just want to use the the darkest color to kind of go between these, um, what would you call them? The flippers kind of have individual sort of like you wouldn't call them digits, but, you know, yeah, sort of individual sort of fingers finger like, um, I just want to just add a little bit more of these little spots here and also the shadow should go under here. These are the final touches that I'm just adding to each seal. It shouldn't take me too long. A few more of these dots. Now I'm starting to notice things like this area is actually darker, so I can just slosh on some of that gray pain that I have here. But overall, I like the look. I don't want to darken it too much. Maybe just start to notice maybe I could use a bit more sepia around this area a little bit where the eye and the mouth. And blend up a bit. That looks good. I'm just wondering if I should continue doing this or we should take a break because it is taking a little while. So how about we take a little break now to just stretch your back because we've been painting for quite some time. But as I stand up, I'm really, really happy with how this is looking. This is looking really great. I just don't want to have to rush right now to add those final details in. So how about we take a little break when we come back, just let everything dry us, take a little break, and when we come back, we will add the very finishing touches on these seals before we do our very, very final seal, and it wouldn't take us long. I just think we all need a break. So see you back here really soon. 10. Painting the last seal: Hi, everyone, and welcome back. And we are very, very close to finishing our painting. What I want to do right now is before I finish the last seal and do the reflection, just take a look at what we've done. It's quite incredible when you think about it. We've painted a whole scene. We've painted numerous seals. And if you have been watching all this time, but you haven't started on this, project, I just want to make it clear that you don't have to do as many seals as I did. You know, you could do a couple less. The only reason that I decided to do this many seals is because I'm painting in a pretty loose manner, so I'm not taking as long as I would normally take on just one subject. But if you want to do less seals, if you wanted to just do one of these seals, you know, if you're working on a size of paper that is smaller than mine as I am working on A three, you would probably take faster than me to do all this. The whole reason I did these many seals it's just because I like the look of, a whole, you know, collection of them like just lounging around in different positions. But if there's a particular position, I mean, pose that you like above others, feel free to just do that pose, you know, and also on a smaller piece of paper like A four size. So this was just, you know, my preference. But as always, I always encourage my students to do whatever they want to get creative, to, you know, adapt what I've done as well to your liking. So before I end up talking a lot, what I've decided to do is I want to just add the final details on these guys so that I can focus on this area because this is pretty much done, okay? The back is done as well. It's just this guy and this area here that's wet. I just want to make it slightly darker. That's just also a preference thing for me. So let's get started. So what I want to do now is I just want to finish up the details on these guys at the front, at the foreground, and it shouldn't take me too long because we have already painted like a lot of the details already by continuously painting in a loose manner. So how about I start with this guy? And what I can do is I can use a white gel pen or you can use white gouache if you'd like. But for me, I just want to add, like, to achieve, I might actually use white gouache instead of the white gel pen because I feel like that will achieve the look that I want. I'm going to use my small synthetic round brush again because as I mentioned before, synthetic brushes just work better with guash because gouache is a thicker paint that is applied using less water. This part is already light, so that's okay. I think I just want to add a little bit of white. Now, with the white gouache, it will get a bit lighter when you put it on. But if you feel like it will see, as you can see, it gets absorbed by the paper. I'm just adding a little bit of white there just because I feel that area looks a bit lighter. I'm also going to add a little bit of white here with the gouache. So let it just settle into the paper first before you try to blend stuff because I feel like it does get a little bit lighter when you apply it. It won't be as bright white unless you're putting a very thick layer on. And I also want to use the white to just kind of emphasize these rolls here, the rolls the folds of skin. But there is not much to do with this guy because we've already done it by saving the lighter areas and applying dark paint around it. That looks good. If you feel like you want to use your finger or you want to use a little bit of water to, kind of, um, you know, blend it a little bit. You're welcome to do that, too, but I like the effect that I've created here already. I might just use a bit of that white here just to emphasize where the boundaries of this flipper is. You don't have to follow like I said, 1 million times, you don't have to follow the reference photograph perfectly. I'm just getting inspired by it and changing what I want to change from it. This leg at the back here looks fine. The only thing I notice here that could use a little bit. I'm done with using the white gouache already. I think it looks great. I'm just going to take my small round brush for watercolors and I just want to use just the smallest amount of concentrated sapa to just outline where the extremity of that flipper ends over here because it's a little bit, you can't really see it and also just to outline where the tummy is and where the fins are that separates it from the sand in the background. Okay. But I think this guy is pretty much done. I might just use a bit of that sepia and drop it in where the eye area is, but it's quite vague. It's just like a darker area because his face is a little bit turned away and I'm just going to do an outline here where the mouth is. What you can do as well is you can use the tip of your brush to like pull out a few whiskers that they have. Once more, don't get too carried away with this step. I'm just going to use it to just outline the top of the head. But other than that, I think this guy is completed. That didn't take very long at all. Yeah. That looks good. We can move on to our next guy now. We have this guy that's lying down over here. But in my opinion, he looks almost complete. I'm just going to look at the reference photograph to see if I need to put anything in. Perhaps I could just use the smallest amount of white gouache. To just emphasize, whoops, one of those hairs came out of my brush, but that's okay. I can just brush it away. Just to emphasize those lighter areas. And like I mentioned earlier, um, just let your guash. If you've never used squash before, just let it settle a little bit in the paper before you start blending because it might turn out to be lighter than you expected. There we go. Also this area around his neck is also a bit lighter. This is where gouache can be a great tool to use a complimentary tool to use with your watercolors because the great thing is you can actually layer highlights on top, which you can't really do with just watercolor paint. I'm just going to use my finger a bit as a blending tool to just kind of, um, blend parts that I feel are a little bit too stock, but I think his face looks good. I'm also just going to go a little bit around the nose here. I see some lightish areas over here. Like I said before, this guy looked pretty much complete, but I'm just adding the very final highlights using some white gosh. Over here, um, we can also just add a little bit here. This is where the light falls and it also gives us a bit of the outline of this flipper over here. Maybe we can just take a little bit of that under here to just show where the boundaries of the chin are. I'm just going to use my finger as a blending tool over here. But to tell you the truth, I think I might I might have to use a clean damp brush because that looks a little bit too much like a hard line and just blend it into the watercolor pane. And what's great about using gouache with watercolors is, you can just blend it quite easily into a watercolor background. Whereas if you were painting with all gouache, which I do as well, you can end up lifting the paint from below because gouache um gouache is a medium that can be a little bit tricky to use. But you don't really have much of a chance of lifting any of that, um Of the watercolor below it. That guy looks completed to me, so I'm going to move on because I don't want to spend a lot of time doing this because it's already almost complete. We're just adding the very final touches to this before we move on with our next seal. So now we've got the mom over here. I feel like with her, she looks very complete. I just want to add a few gouache highlights. What I'm going to do is, as I can see up here, there's already a very obvious highlight here where her right above the mouth and right next to the nose on this side, and then I can see, you know, I don't know if these are actually whiskers. I could maybe turn them into whiskers. So that's just me getting a bit creative. I can see a little bit white over here, over here where the top of the Of the eyelid was maybe a little bit around the ear. We can also do a little bit of details with the white as well. But I don't want to overdo it because I think she looks quite complete. Wherever I see a bit of white highlights, I'm just going to add that in. Maybe we could just lighten this area here a little bit up here and just do a bit of fur sort of details because they actually do have fur, hairs and furs, it's okay to emphasize some of that. Over here, she has a bit of a spot that's lighter that I left kind painted with a lighter brown, but I'll just emphasize that as well. We can just randomly put some of these white strokes over here and blend them. So we're just giving her even more fur detail and how much of this you want to do is really up to you, but I just thought I would introduce you to how you could use some white gouache to add some nice details, a little bit of details. I'm just going to do a few here. Maybe it comes in like that. There's a white patch over here, one we just emphasize that. Another area that's very obvious is the white patch is between the folds of skin that she has here. I'm also going to use some of that white to emphasize the boundary of this flipper with the rest of her body. We can see those two lines here. Maybe I might just add a few little highlights here. I think she looks good. She looks good already. We don't have to overdo it. I'm just going to add a few more little furry details there. But I think she's done and she's looking great. I just want to emphasize that white here. Okay. She looks great. Now, let's just look at the baby. The baby was actually improvised by me from another seal to tell you the truth, that other seal might not have actually been a baby, but what I want to do with her is I want to actually paint a little bit more of gray on her. I'm going to go back to my watercolor brush. I just want to emphasize that nose and the eye. Because I felt that was a little bit light. And then I'm just going to go in here like that and emphasize those folds of skin. And what I can do with the concentrated paint as well is I'm going to add use the tip of my brush to add some speckly some spots on top of her. I keep saying her, but, yeah, I don't know why I think this is like a gold seal, looks like a gold seal. And yeah, playing around, adding some cool spots for patterns and textures to make her stand out and just bring whatever paint I have on my brush, I'm just going to put it dab it on and I think she's complete. Let me just do that nose a little bit more. I think she looks great. I'm just going to let her dry first before I add any more white Tojo Truf she looks pretty good. I don't have to do the white gouache, but I'm going to move on to I only got two more seals to add some detail to, but TjoTruf, I don't know. They look quite complete, let's just have a look at the reference photograph and see if I missed anything. I think with this guy in the front here just lounging, the only thing I would do is u I just want to maybe just add the smallest amount of white quash to emphasize this highlight over here that we see very clearly in the reference photograph. So that's a bit of a shine that he has. I'm also going to do it somewhere over here. Even though I did leave those areas like lighter. I think this can emphasize the texture of his skin and how it's actually reflecting light. As you can see, I'm doing another layer of white gouache over this because I felt like it wasn't white enough. That's why I always say, you have to let the white just um, interact with the paper first, let it dry and then see whether you've achieved the lightness that you want. I'm also just going to add a bit of that white to the folds of the skin and over here. I don't want to totally cover that pattern up, but this part should be maybe a little bit lighter. Maybe we can also add a bit of lightness around the mouth here. I feel like he's quite complete. I don't I don't think I have to do much with him. The very last thing I want to do is I want to just use some sepia and I can see some whiskers here. We can just do a couple of those is what I see. We don't have to overdo it. I'll just leave that whatever sepia I have left, I'm just going to put it over here underneath. But I honestly think he's done and I'm just going to move on. We're doing this quite quickly because we did take our time to paint them to add some detail when we were painting them. I'm just looking for the last guy. The last guy looks pretty complete, but I'm just going to maybe add a little bit of highlights. But everything is just coming together very beautifully. I know I can see some pencil lines here, but they don't really bother me. I think the color is fine. Over here, what I want to do is I want to, um, the top of the head here, I'm just going to add a little bit of white to lighten it a bit. I think my pattern is a little bit different from a from the reference photograph, but it doesn't bother me too much. I really do feel like this guy is quite complete already. Maybe we can just go underneath the eye there to just shape the eye a little bit. But I think he's quite complete. I don't think I actually really need to do much with him at all. In fact, maybe just add a couple of highlights here and there, but he looks good, so I think we should just move on so that we can finish it. Yeah, I don't think I really need to do anything with him. Maybe I just want to use a bit of the pains gray to just emphasize the tip of the fins because that pot does look quite dark in the reference photograph. But other than that, I think he's looking quite good and there's a bit of markings here, but I'm just going to go very lightly over that flipper over here with the same pains gray. Just use your own judgment is my advice here. I'm just darkening the certain areas, but he just looks so complete already that I don't think I need to do anything. Maybe just give him some of those whiskers. I think he's done. I really do. Just coming back to this little baby, all I want to do now that the pain is dry, is I just want to give her the white highlights. This will just take me a second. All I want to do is just add a little bit. Watch where you rest your hand. This guy is still a bit wet. I just want to do those folds of the neck here. I just watch your hand. I can see just the corner of the eye here is a little bit lighter. Maybe we can just add a few white specs here. A few white specs around her eye here. But she's pretty much complete. I'm just um, I'm just overdoing it a little bit, but I think she looks great. I don't think we need to do anything more with her. I honestly think she looks great and everyone looks great. If, if you want, you could maybe just add in her dark eye, I could just add a little spot here to make her just look like she's staring out because her eye is quite obvious. Like, I don't think we need to do that with everyone. I think this guy is quite far back, so that's all good. Yeah. How about we move on now? We've been painting for maybe 20 minutes. I'm just thinking, why don't we keep going? Let's just do our very final guy. He's in the reference photographs and he shouldn't take long for us to do. But I'm just going to think very carefully first, he'll be fine. We can add this little background here. I want to darken this background later, but I can do that later, but how about we paint him first. Using the same colors and the same technique, I'm just going to use a clean brush with water. My size eight round to be exact. I'm just going to once more start with raw sienna, drop it in where I see fit. This guy is towards the back, so we don't have to do an incredible amount of detail with him. We can see his flippers are really dark. It's got prominent ears though. What we can do now is I just want to add a little bit of the reddish tone to him as I see some of the reddish brown. I'm using the burn umber here. I see some of that going into the leg here as well. I also feel like it adds some interesting patterns to look at. I've run out of it, actually. I'm just going to have to put a little bit more. Got the burn umber. Just a little bit more because we're not going to use a lot more. So the paint is still wet? Just dropping in the pain and also trying to add a bit of pattern as I do it. There's a bit of an outline here. I'll just do that. By the end of this class, I hope it becomes quite second nature and almost intrinsic for you to just know how to use your brush to add patterns, almost like a subconscious thing, how much pressure to put to do these patterns. Now, I can already start going in. I'm going to just swap brushes now to a smaller size for around. I'm just going to start with my dark brown, which is raw amber. I'm already going to start putting that in now maybe around the nose area. I know that this is going to blend a little bit outwards, which is fine with me because it's not my darkest color and I also see that this area is quite dark around here. That's not a lot of detail. So this guy is quite far behind. I'm also just going to put it here because even if it spreads, it just darkens the area around it before I put the very final dark color around to emphasize the eyes and the nose and things like that. I'm just going to do that. This whole mouth area is a little bit dark and we're just dropping in some of that pain. I'm just wondering if you like painting in this loose manner where we're doing it continuously because I find that it's more relaxing and it also produces some unexpected effects. It blends everything better than if I was going to wait for each layer to dry first. This is a leg will be quite dark here. I'm also just going to I'm just going to dilute that down a bit because I felt like maybe the pain was a little bit too concentrated and now I'm going to bring that colors down here and see this line here, I'm just going to use a damp brush to just blend it outwards here. But I'm going to use a lot of that dark brown now to paint the back of the seal that we can see is clearly dark. We're definitely going to need a darker brown, but let me just bring this color down here too so that we build up the layers. The fin goes somewhere here. I'm just going to take some of this dark brown and I'm going to fill in the flippers and stuff that you can see from the reference photograph are very dark. This flipper at the back here is also very dark. I think we got a tail here. Very cute. In the front here, I think we're seeing a shadow on the wet part, even though we've got a reflection coming down. That's an interesting effect. I just want to just paint that in as well. That shadow goes all the way back here as you can see. While this is still wet now, I'm going to start dropping in the darkest brown, which is our sepia. So I hope it's um yeah, I'm just gonna let this spread here. Um Yeah, there we go. I'm just going to bring a little bit of this color up here as an outline. Put it on the ears and also a bit on the top of the head here because this area is a bit dark. I'm just going to go in to the nose here. The paper is already starting to dry, but it's not completely dry, so you can still see a little bit of spreading here, which is what I want. If you want to do more controlled details, I would wait for the whole paper to dry first. But because I don't mind it spreading a little bit, I'm just going to put it in like that because it does give a natural look and whatever parts we want to darken further, we can just wait for this to dry and then go over it with maybe pains gray or something. I even goes down a little bit. Even this area, the nose and all, it's still a bit darker. But I think I might just leave that for now. Maybe we could do I do see a bit of darker tones here. But personally, I think it looks good. Whatever color I have left, I'm just going on my brush, I'm just going to add a little bit of an outline below, just so we see where the boundaries end. I'm also just dabbing on a little bit of speckly pattern because this is still wet, so it will blend a little bit into the background. I was adding a little bit of a few dots here and stuff just to darken that area a little bit. Maybe my guy looks a little bit more speckly than in the reference photograph, but I love it. I'm just getting a bit creative and I just want to also add some cool patterns to my seal. Okay. I think, while this is almost completely dry now, I just want to add a bit of pains gray to the darkest areas. I'm going to just use my pains gray quite concentrated. I'm just going to add it to that big flipper here. I'm also going to go up here. Those lower parts here where this shadow looks here. Then I think we should take a break, let everything dry first before I just do the very final thing, which is the reflection and just darkening this wet area a little bit. But so far, I'm loving the seal. I love the way we did this quite loosely and it all just comes together very beautifully. I'm just going to drop it into the eye area, maybe a little bit on the top because that looks quite dark. Into the eye area, the eye here is still a little bit wet, so I might just maybe do the nose first. Just standing up because the reflection of the water is just a little bit hard to see. But I think our guys looking really good. I'm just going to use a very light layer of gray to just go over this part a little bit because I see that it's a little bit more in shadow. Just very lightly with a light glaze of the pains gray. I think I'm going to leave the face. With a clean damp brush, I'm just going to smooth this area a little bit so that there's no hash lines. But I think this looks great. Very final thing I want to do. I just want to darken this leg over here. And the mouth area. Okay, I think our guy is done, and he looks great. So why don't we just let him just completely dry? And when we come back here, we are going to do the very, very, very final step in this class, which is just to do a light glaze over here and the reflection. Okay? So if you've gotten this far, I have to say, thank you so much for following along and getting this far because I know it was a lot of work, but just look at the overall, like, um in fact, it looks so cool. Like, you actually have a colony of seals here. It looks great. So why don't we just let everything here dry completely, and I will see you really, really soon to finish this painting. 11. Final Touches: Hi, everyone. Welcome back. And I am really, really psyched because we're about to finish this painting, and I know it took a long time if you've done as many seals as me to get to this point. But look at our guy, look at our whole little colony. They're all looking really, really happy, so to speak. Anyway, let's get right into it right now. The only thing that I want to do first is I want to very carefully glaze over this with a bit of French ultramarine, which I've run out of over here, so I'm just going to put some here because I just feel like it's a little bit too light. The this sandy area. Even though this is odd and it's open to interpretation and stuff, I just feel personally, I want to just darken it a little bit, with a blue glaze. All I'm going to do is I'm going to use my large round brush. I'm going to very carefully just wet the area. But if you notice pencil lines that I drew here, that is just going to indicate where the reflection of the seal is going to be. Because I feel like I want to do the reflection because it's going to add it will add something complex to our painting. So how about we do this area first because it's sectioned off and that way, we don't have to wet the whole area and wait for it to be to have that even sheen. This is quite blue, the reflections going to go somewhere there. All I'm doing is glazing on top. Some of the colors underneath should come through. Go as close as you can to that white gouache line. Over here is going to be the reflection, so we're leaving that untouched. I'm just going to go a little bit over here. So that's just our sort of wet sand area. But now the more I think about it, I think it looks a little bit light. So what I want to do is, I'm just spontaneously thinking about this. I'm just going to drop in also a little bit of that paints gray and just letting them blend. So this is all very, very loose painting. I'm just going to let that blend a little bit to just maybe tone down the blue. But then again, the blue could be a reflection of the sky above and stuff like that. Now let's do this section that's um on the left side of the seal. What I'm going to do is I'm going to wet because we've already done all our seals in detail, we want to try and avoid the seals, obviously. But don't get too stressed about it. Let's just do our best. Same thing. I'm going to just use a nice layer of clean water to help the pain, um blend nicely on this. Once more, I'm going to drop in some of that blue. But you can see the purple underneath and the raw sienna are coming through. They're not going to be completely covered, which is what we want. We want some of those colors to come through because I'm just darkening it slightly because I just feel it's a little bit bright. We're going to go all the way up to his flippers here. I will do the little areas in between his flippers later because I just want to do this big wet area first. As you can see, I was using the tip around the seal's head. Go as close as you can to the white gouache line. I'm also going to drop it in over here before it dries up. As you can see, looking very, very blue here. It's okay. I have the masking tape over there that I'm just painting over, going around his body. Just being very careful around her head because we did work hard on that and as close as I can to that body. If you feel that might be a little bit too bright, let's just use the slightest amount of gray to tone it down. Letting it all blend here. So just be mindful of the area that's wet so you don't rest your hand on it. Just dropping in a little bit of gray to just tone it down. But as you can see, those colors that we painted underneath, they're still coming through. That's the beauty of watercolors. I feel like that looks good. Right now, we're just going to let that dry completely. In the meantime, what we can do is I'm just looking at my little guy, the seal. I think he looks okay, but while that's drying and I can't do anything anyway on it, I'm just going to use a little bit of white gouache. Watch your hands, watch where you rest your hands. I'm just going to add a little bit of white gouache where I see, fit. But he actually looks pretty good. I don't think we actually need to touch him too much. So um, he looks good. I might just add a little bit of white here where this flipper is. While we're waiting for all that to dry, I might as well just drop in a little bit of that blue in here in the gaps between his legs and his tail. Once more, I'm also going to drop in a little bit of that gray to just balance it out. Maybe just mix it a little bit. That to me looks good. Now, this is almost dry this whole area because this is a reflection, it's okay if some of it blends a little bit outwards. It's not a perfect mirror reflection. So what we can do is we can start painting this as well. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to wet this area with my small size four round brush. Like I said before, I don't care if it blends a little bit out towards the brown. What we want to do is we're going to just drop in some of that light color so we're not doing a perfect mirror image of the seal. I'm just going to try and make it look like, there is a little bit of a reflection on this wet surface because like I said before, I think that will add something to the painting. I'm just now going to drop in, I ran out of burn umber, the smallest amount of burn umber to try and capture the colors of the seal. So let's just put some here. Mind you, some of this has already some of the reflection, not the whole reflection is even visible because I cut it off over here with the sand with the dry sand. We will not see the entire thing, but this will more than everyone will be able to tell that it's a reflection. I'm letting some of that go here. Now we can start dropping in our colors already. This is a vague reflection. I'm going to start doing the darker colors here as you can see, it's starting to blend a bit outwards, which is nice. That's where that big flipper is that we see maybe over here, we can start that's the boundaries of the body. But I love the way we're doing this in a natural way, so it looks like a reflection. Let's just bring some of that color over here. Anyone can tell this is a reflection, okay? Let me just put a little bit more of that color over here. Now I'm just going to use just a little bit of sepia around the very outer pot. Al right where the bottom of the CO is. And maybe just use a little bit of a dam brush to just kind of light. Smooth that over there. There you have it. That's all I'm going to do and that looks like a great reflection. It looks like this surface is a little bit wet and that's exactly what I want to do. I don't want to work too much on this because it's a reflection at the end of the day on wet sand. I think this looks great. I feel like it's already almost dry. What I want to do next, the very final thing to bring this to life even more. We're going to use the smallest amount of gray if your paper looks pretty dry, it may not be completely dry, but it's pretty dry. You don't see much a reflection on it. What we can do now is we're going to use the tip of our very small round brush, and we're going to apply a shadow right underneath the white gouache line that we painted. Once more just watch where your hand is what this does is it provides a little bit more of a three D effect for the foam line that we see that we painted with gouache. So this adds even more realism to the scenery in the background already. As you can see, it just looks like this wave is casting a little bit of shadow. You're using the secret to this is apply very little pressure and you're using just the tip of your brush. You don't want to make a really fat line because then it loses that illusion a little bit. So see, um, Feel free to do this in short broken lines. Because that will also add some realism to it, especially if you're not very steady with your hands. That way, it doesn't you have more control. This is just the very final touch that I want to do, um to our beautiful seal painting. I'm using broken lines. This line over here just looks slightly dark. What I want to do is I'm using a very, very clean dam brush to just very slightly just blend it a little bit more. My blended it a little bit too much over here, so I'm just going to reapply some of that gray paint. I'm just going to stand up now. I think that looks great. I honestly think that looks really, really cute. I don't want to spend too much time doing this. I was thinking of maybe using a little bit of the blue that we have here, maybe mixing a little bit of gray into it. I'm just going to use this part to just gently whoops that's a lot of paint. Gently go around some of these white marks that we made to just make them stand out a little bit. This is very, very doing it very, very loosely and casually. The mixture is just a little bit of pains gray mixed with French ultramarine and I'm just going around these little white marks that we made. And just like that, I honestly think the painting is done. And look at that reflection, how cool is that? That makes it just gives it a little bit more, you know, of a natural feel. And I think I'm done. This looks really, really cool, and I hope you like your painting too. Okay. So I'm just going to let this completely dry before I remove the masking tape because if I remove it now, this part might be a little bit wet. I might end up peeling some of the painting off. So I really don't want to do that. But I just want to say, I'm really happy with the overall look of this painting. I think it looks really, really cool. It's loose, yet I still see cute detail in it. And I really hope you had fun doing this. I know this was a long painting to do. But I hope you took many breaks, and I hope you also realize that, you know, we can achieve a cool result by using loose strokes and, you know, not caring too much about, you know, the drawing being perfect because at the end of the day, the overall effect is really, really gorgeous. I really love it, and I hope you love your painting, too. I can't wait for you to upload it in the projects and resources section of this class for everyone to admire. So thank you once again, for sticking it out this far with me for this class. And all I have is, the very final section to just give my very final thoughts on this class. So please join me there, and thank you very much. 12. Seals outro: Once more, as always, I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you for watching this class or any of my other art classes. It means a lot to me that you're taking time out of your busy day to do a creative project with me. I hope you are absolutely in love with your seal paintings, and I can't wait to see them. So please feel free to upload them in the projects and resources section of this class so that myself and other students can admire your beautiful work. I hope you've learned that we can sketch and paint using watercolors in a very loose and relaxed manner to create a beautiful painting, and of course, you can apply these techniques to all your future paintings in watercolors. Once more, thank you so much again and all the best in your watercolor journeys.