Intro to Cold Wax And Oil Paint Abstracts

1. Welcome: [MUSIC] Hey, I'm Denise Love and I want to welcome you to class. So let me show you what we'll be doing. In this class, I'm super excited. We have several different kinds of projects to really get you comfortable; working with oil and cold wax. We're going to start small and just do some little junk pieces to experiment with a little bit with the wax itself and with color and with mark making. I'll be honest with you, out of the class, the junk pieces, which is this big one and this one, are my very favorite. Sometimes it just goes to show you that working fast and intuitively and creating without lots of expectation, sometimes you get things that you just never even thought you were going to get and you get really excited. So we're going to start off with some little easy mark making color experimenting pieces. We have bigger pieces, color study-wise that we'll do. As I was making these, I was questioning my color choices and my design and the way that I was ending up. Then as I walk away and come back to these, I love some of these pieces. So sometimes you have to walk away from your abstract pieces and come back to it with fresh eyes to really appreciate what you created. This piece here, I'm in love with this piece and I think maybe this could be the way that's up, I love it. So turn them around, look at them in different ways. I like it because these are not super large and overwhelming. Yeah, I think I had them all upside down. There we go. That's how I feel they should go. [LAUGHTER] I like these pieces because they allow you to experiment with color mark making. It's not such a big piece that you're getting bogged down in size. So those are super fun. We've got the next step up from that, that we'll then experiment with where we take a larger sheet of paper and create from that. I'm not even positive in my mind that I fully love this as it is. So I still reserve the right to maybe cut a piece or two out of it that I love as an abstract instead, which I always love that right there. I always reserve that right because that's my very favorite way to create and we'll also create a bigger piece than this, like a really big piece, and then we will cut larger pieces out of it. That's the one as I'm filming this welcome video that's still wet. So that'll be a surprise when you get to that video. Then with the leftover extra paint, I actually created this beautiful piece right here. That to me it looks like I'm looking through a waterfall out to a lush landscape and lake. This is what I considered my trash palette. It's where I put my extra paint so I didn't have to throw it in the trash can and it could be my very favorite piece that I've created during this workshop along with these, along with that one. So funny that everything is my favorite. But [LAUGHTER] it's like these are like your children, you create them and you love them. [LAUGHTER] But this piece was super fun and just the scrubbing of the paint to create that movement. I will probably hang this one up on the wall. I enjoy it so much and I actually on the second day after it dried, instead of coating more layers on top of it, I'm like this is finished. That's amazing when your junk pieces, your practice pieces, the pieces that we're going the fastest end up being the most intuitive and beautiful. So I'm super excited to walk you through how I use the cold wax medium and the different projects that we have in this workshop. I really hope you enjoy working with this as much as I do. I can't wait to see the projects that you come up with. So definitely come back and share those. I really enjoy seeing the different colorways you come up with, the different marks, the different ways that you work with the paint. It's just as exciting to me as the pieces that I come up with myself. [LAUGHTER] I definitely want to see your projects. Please come back and share those and I'll see you in class. [MUSIC] 2. Supplies: [MUSIC] Let's talk about supplies in this video. I've got lots of things on the table. Some of them are optional, some of them you definitely need to have. Then I also want to mention a couple of books that you could check out if you're interested in really going a little bit further with this medium. That's Wabi-Sabi Painting with Cold Wax by Serena Barton. This is a great book for ideas and techniques and just seeing different artists and the way that they do things, so I love that book. Then this book here, Rebecca Crowell and Jerry McLaughlin. They do the cold wax medium techniques, concepts and conversations and this is basically considered the Bible for cold wax painting. They've got lots of artist examples and it's so full of inspiration and techniques and different things. I really love this book. I've had this for many years, but it is still a book that you can get out there. I love Rebecca Crowell so much that I actually have an original piece from her that I got this year. I'm sorry if my lights are reflecting in there, but it's not a large piece. This is like five by seven that I've had taken to the framer, Rebecca Crowell, 2020, so this is something that she's done recently. But it's so beautiful to me. I love the colors, I love the depth, I love the marks. I just love everything about this piece so much that I bought it when they came up for a little art auction online. Just to show you something that a real cold wax artist has created and then this is some great reference books. If you really want to dive deeper and get more ideas and more inspiration and more information, these are great books to refer to. I just wanted to share those before I forgot. In this medium, we've got two things that we need at the minimum, and that's the cold wax and the oil because it's oil and coal wax painting. For the cold wax, I'm using the Gamblin Cold Wax Medium. There's a couple of different brands out there and depending on where you live in the world, you may have different options than I have. But this is the one I'm using and what I love about this one is this a 16-ounce can and this goes a pretty good, long way. If you decide that this is your medium and you love it and you want to create big paintings and really spend time with this medium, then there is bigger containers of this. But the 16-ounce can goes really as far as I usually want to paint in the year, so this will last a long time. I have a couple of cans in case I run out, but I generally stick in one can for quite a while because I just like doing stuff for myself. I don't do it professionally to sell things, it's just a medium that I particularly love. What I love about it is the cold wax itself is like frosting. It's like a beeswax that's really soft. It's shortening, like when you're cooking the Lord, people used to cook with. That's the consistency and we're going to mix that with oil paint and what it's going to do is it's going to make the oil paint a different consistency. It's going to allow that paint to dry a lot faster than it normally would, and it has a matte sheen to it, like it's not shiny anymore because oil paint is naturally shiny. This will make it matte. We have a product called Gamblin Galkyd which you can add a drop of this or so to your little mixture when we're mixing paints and that will put some of that sheen back in there and also speed up a little bit of that drying time. But generally, I find that pieces are dry to the touch by the next day. They may not be fully cured, but they're dry to the touch so you can do more layers and scratching into it and more things to the painting whereas if it were just straight oil paint, you could maybe go back to it next week and it would still be wet [LAUGHTER]. The oil, the cold wax medium is essential. There are a couple of brands out there. If you get it out and it's gritty then it's bad. It needs to be smooth consistency when you're mixing your paint and if you mix it and there's little granules in it or anything like that, the wax is either old or it's a bad batch, so it should be smooth consistently see you're using it. The Galkyd, I'll be honest, I hardly ever use the Galkyd, but it is one of those add on items that you might consider playing with. Just a little tiny bit goes a very long way like this might last you forever. This is a sample that I had gotten from the Gamblin company when I had visited their booth at an art fair. That's thing that they have, that I'm using, odorless mineral spirits for clean up if I need to clean any brushes or anything and I have it over here in a jar as my brush cleaner and that last for a very long time. You clean your brushes and then all this color settles to the bottom and you just keep using it until it's full of color and if you paint like I do, you may never really change out that jar, just last forever. But I'm using odorless solvent. Gamblin also has gamsol which is their brand of odorless solvents so something to consider when you're dealing with oil paint is you don't clean up with water. Nothing I'm doing is going to be able to run to the sink and clean up with water. But I have found just as a side note there, a really good way to clean paint off your skin and your tools if you're at the sink using water is the Dawn dishwashing. Soap, that blue soap that they use. They use that. I just discovered that really by accident they use that in places where they have ecological disasters, where they have oil spills and stuff and that's how they clean the oil off of the farm animals. They use that Dawn dishwashing soap and that stuff is fantastic. I keep a bottle of that under my kitchen sink. Then if I do manage to get stuff all over me when I'm painting and doing stuff, that's how I wash it right off my skin without scrubbing my skin off. Just a little side note there that Dawn dishwashing soap, It's great for cleanup of your skin and probably your tools. I just never take the tools now there. But it is a good kind of a non-toxic cleaner for yourself and your skin. [LAUGHTER] So odorless mineral spirits or that game Saul's really nice if you have to work with stuff. I don't like turpentine or anything like that, something that's going to smell so bad that runs me out of the room, I just try to avoid. Another thing that I like to have handy is painter's tape and you could also use artist's tape. This is so we can tape off our pieces and paint within the lines and then peel the tape because I gotta be honest with you, peeling the tape is by far my most favorite part [LAUGHTER] of doing the painting. I love to peel the tape and reveal what I got and it just is magical. It goes from a big mess to a little piece of art when you peel the tape off. So I do keep plenty of painter's tape around. They also have a purple tape which I've not tried, so I'm going to try it in this class. This is for delicate surfaces and our paper could be considered a delicate surface and painter's tape will peel off your paper normally without tearing the paper itself, it'll come off clean. If you're using masking tape you're going to tear parts of your paper off. It's too sticky and I don't recommend it. You could also use artist's tape that you can get at the art store. I have some but it's not of the size that I think I want to use. [NOISE] But I'll show it to you and they'll make a mess. [LAUGHTER] This is artist's tape. It comes in different colors and this is good for working on stuff for taping your pieces off to and I wish I got the half inch size and I really like this one inch size. I wish I had gotten a role of this in this bigger size. But you can use artist's tape too. I would just avoid masking tape or regular tapes like that because they stick to your paper and then when you go to peel the tape off they tear your paper. Always wear gloves with the cold wax because you'll see why as we're painting pieces my gloves will be filthy and if I didn't have the glove on that'd be all over my fingers. Unfortunately lots of art supplies are toxic so I don't want to be getting as much oil paint on my hands as I sometimes do other art supplies because it's harder to clean up but use the Dawn dish wash sink soap and it makes it easier and some of these are actually toxic. You can go nontoxic like if you want to mix your own oil paints with natural pigments and stuff like that if you're so inclined. But some of these colors that I've purchased over the years, they're toxic and I prefer to just be safe and wear gloves and it's so messy sometimes in the way that I work with these, the gloves are filthy and I can just take them off and throw the gloves out if I need to. So have a box of gloves handy. Sometimes I even use more than one pair during a sitting if I'm doing lots of paintings because they get to the point that they're so covered in paint that I need to just start fresh so that I don't get paint all over my clean edges or my papers or if I'm peeling the tape I don't want to get any fingerprints all over my clean edges. The other must have obviously is oil paint. I have lots of different oil paints and I have tried just so in case you're wondering, you'll find water-soluble oil paint out there also where these are not water-soluble but they do have those out there and I have a couple of tubes of it but I think I've finally separate them out of my oil box because I don't like them. Water-soluble oil paints, they're strangely waxy and less of that creamy oil consistent that my regular oil paints are. The one time that I tried them, I just absolutely hated the way that they looked and the way that they felt when I was using them so I veer away from water soluble oils and I've heard a lot of other people in the past say that they didn't really care for them either. So I'm sure they're good for cleanup but I just don't like them. If you're looking at oil paints, I would avoid the water-soluble ones and just go for some that you love the colors. I've got lots of different ones here. I've got M. Graham Company, I've got Gamblin. That's M. Graham, I've got Rembrandt, Winsor & Newton. There's lots of different brands. I do like to have a great big white and then little tubes of any colors that I particularly love and when you first go to the art store looking at colors it's super overwhelming so I would take a little bit of time and just think, what colors do I like? What colors do I want to work in? I also have sitting up here Charvin which is my very favorite. Some of my favorite colors come from the Charvin and this tropical green is one of my favorites, it's such a bright, pretty teal. Then this Richeson Oils, I think I got this at the Binders and I love this color but this has become unusable and look how much paint is left. I got to where I couldn't get the lid off so I'm sure I screwed it on with paint in the way of the lid, so basically glued it down. I cut the bottom off so I could scoop paint out of it. Then that starts to dry so now I'm just going to have to go buy a new container of this ice blue because I love this color so much and these little tubes have just become unusable. This is ash green. It's such a beautiful color too. I love these two colors and when I pulled them out yesterday to do some little sample pieces that I was playing on myself, these two colors I couldn't even use and they'd be really perfect in some things with oil and coal wax but these bigger ones seem to last a little bit longer because I go back and forth with the oil and coal wax. I will be doing tons of projects and that's my interest at that time. Then I'll take a little break and move over to one of my other interests, maybe watercolor or maybe back to my photography or something like that, so I don't play in one medium all the time. I like to switch back and forth between all my little art supplies because I like too many things [LAUGHTER]. These will sit for a while before I come back to them and then they're hard to get open so you need to be really careful. At some point when you're screwing these lids back on is to clean it up so that you can later get these lids off. Some of my favorite ones I may have just let go bad by letting those lid stay on there like that and I may need to replace them but I have had lots of these oil paints for maybe more than five years. It really is something that I come back to over and over. I may have to go shopping for some new oil paints but I don't recommend you buy too many, buy some of the colors that you like, buy in a price range that is reasonable. You can get artists grade colors. The difference in the pricing really on some of these artists grade ones have more pigment and lasts a lot longer. The student grade ones are less pigment and maybe not as smooth and creamy. But buy what you can afford and go from there and pick a handful of colors that you love. Definitely a big white, Titanium white is the one I have because the white I do use more than anything. [MUSIC] 3. Supply continued: This right here is the Messermeister silicone bowl scraper. You can find these on Amazon, and they range $18 to 20. I do have a couple of these, actually, when you get them, they're in a package like this and they're all nice and clean. But the reason you want it to be silicone is because the paint wipes right off of it, and they're easy to clean, and I could take a little bit of vegetable oil and just smear it on here and just clean all this right off of it. I got a new one at some point because I thought, Oh, I'm going to wear this out. But I still haven't worn out, so I have opened the new one that I had randomly over here. But I love this because it's got a really nice wide blade. It's flexible, more so than the catalyst scraper, this one's pretty common that you find in the art store, the catalyst scraper. I like that this is longer, and it has a sharp point, whereas this one has a rounded point, and it's not as flexible because it's a lot thicker. This, I feel like gives you a lot more control, especially if you're spreading and mixing and really blending. This is my favorite. You can get those on Amazon or kitchen. Nice kitchen stores might have these. You definitely want at least one of these. You can get the ones from the art store and play with those if you want. I also have some hard catalyst scrapers, but they're not good, in my opinion, for spreading the paint. I like the soft silicone ones, but they are great for mark making, so if you find some of these with the nice little teeth on them, really great for oil and cold wax with the teeth. Then there's also this particular scraper that I think I got online when I was searching silicone scrapers. It's okay too, but it's a hard scraper. It's not the soft, rubbery, malleable one. This is by far my favorite and the one that you'll find most cold wax artists using. You definitely want a scraper. Here's another catalyst one with teeth. You can see it's well used. I do like these, but I like them for mark-making, not necessarily for using it. Like I use that one. If you only get one, get this one. You'll also want to have a variety of palette knives. I have lots of different shapes and sizes and metal. I do like plastic ones because they're disposable if I ever get to the point where I'm like, okay, I've overused it, but let me tell you, this one is an older one, and I still haven't got to that point. But the metal and the plastic do react differently, and they feel different when you use them, just so you know. It is fun to experiment with both of them. They come in all different shapes and sizes, and then I found, which I still haven't actually used, but I found these on one of the art sites, maybe in an ad of different edges that the palette knife came in for mark-making and stuff, and I'm like, how funny are these and clever. I still need to get these out and play with them, but they came in all these different shapes, and I'm like, oh my goodness, I need to have those, and I got them at a time when I wasn't playing in the paint, but I didn't think I'd remember them later on. But these are great for mark-making and stuff, so I thought, well, those would be fun to play with. I haven't used them yet, so it's not like they're super important. A couple of, maybe a pie shaped one would be nice, maybe a longer spreader would be nice. I'm going to play with this one with the square edge. That might be fun. Then just different sizes. Really, the reason why you'd want some different sizes is the bigger your canvas that you're working on, you might want bigger tools, because if you're working with little tools, you get little marks, if you're working with bigger tools, you'll get bigger marks or bigger paint spreading. Depending on the size project you're doing, you might like to have a few different sizes on those palette knives. Then I also like mark-making tools. I have a whole little box of random tools similar to this. These are little tools that you get over there in the clay materials where they work with clay. Because in the wax, you want things to be mark-making tools, these make great marks. I've got just a whole set. At one point I bought just a set of clay working tools, and it came with all these fun options. My favorite is the one where it's got the little ice peak on one end because you can use that for all kinds of little marks. These are the two that I always have out to use with this. Just in case you're looking for different tools. I have also found these really fun things. They were by range, I've had them for a while. But they're just clear plastic pieces with different shapes on them from mark-making, I love things that make marks. I also love this little tool. It's got just this kind of fun, a little aluminum pieces, and it'd be good for scraping stuff. I do like having lots of little mark-making stuff and go over to the area where they work with clay and get a few clay making tools. If you just get one, get one with one of these long pointy edges, that's my favorite. Some other things that I use to make marks is cardboard. This really fun cardboard came in a package last week, and I'm like, oh my goodness, that's the greatest sway mark. It's just a piece of cardboard, so I tore these pieces. It actually came in a great big piece. I'm saving this and using it many times. But I like that. I also like corrugated boxes and I can show that. Let me go grab one. This is just some corrugated cardboard. I love that too, excellent for mark making. If I get something like this that comes in a package, yeah, you better believe I'm saving that. Look how much there is. I'm going to be mark-making and using this for a long time. I love things for cardboard. Look at your packaging when you get any kind of packaging and see if you've got some cardboard with some interesting shapes or some corrugated like I just showed you. Beyond that, you could go to the art store and get different stencils. These are really inexpensive like Styrofoam stencils were shapes on it. This is my favorite. It's got lines and you can see I use that quite a bit, it gives me fine lines on my piece. This came out of the children's art department at the Micheals. It was just a set of a bunch of different patterns that they could use to stencil on whatever it was they were doing. I've had them for a while, but looking around for something like these in the art store, something that's got a pattern that you like and can be used as something stamping into paint or something like that. Just look around and see what creative thing is you can come up with that you could stamp into paint because the oil and cold wax is the perfect medium for getting clean pattern when you're doing that, I love it. Different options there. Other things, we're going to be using. Let's talk about papers here. I am going to be using in this class, the Arches oil paper and you need to either use oil paper or prime your watercolor paper or whatever paper it is you're using, you're going to have to prime that paper. What I like about the Arches oil paper and I think there's one or two other brands you might google oil papers to see what comes up for you. It's got a nice texture. It's 140 pound, I believe. Yeah, 140 pound. It's a nice thickness. It is like a watercolor cold press weight and feel. But this has already been primed for me to be able to paint with oil paint on it. If you use just plain watercolor paper, it leaches all the oil, leaches into the paper and it's disgusting. It's really oily because oil paint is made of pigment and some type of oil as a binder. So when you have your paper that's not primed, that oil leaches into the paper and make stains and outlines and it's really terrible. If you're using a watercolor paper, definitely prime that paper with a gesso, a couple of coats before you paint and what a pain in the butt. I go ahead and get the Arches oil paper and I've used it from the very beginning and this is one of my favorite papers. It comes in a couple of different sizes. You've got this 12 by 16 inch, which is 31 centimeters by 41 centimeters. You've got 9 by 12 inch, which is 23 centimeters by 31 centimeters. For doing color sampler projects, sometimes I like the bigger pad because I split this into fours. Then I have four little color studies that I've got on here. Then if I'm doing one big little painting, I like this 9 by 12 because I tape it off. Then that's a nice sized painting to work on without being so giant that it's overwhelming. So I am using the Arches oil paper. Normally, in some of the other classes, you'll see me use my ceramic palettes. But for the oil paint, I'm not using a ceramic palette because, what a mess to clean it up. I am actually using disposable palette paper. I like a great big one for this type project because I want several colors out and I'm mixing them and I just like the biggest one I can get. This one was pretty large at 12 by 16 inch and the sheets in here are gray, you can get disposable palette paper in gray or white. But I think that the gray is fun because it doesn't distort the color for you. It is a little bit truer when you're mixing and I do like having that to work on. Talk back to surfaces that we can paint on. I like working on paper because I can store these. Every class you take, they talk about doing stuff on panels and things like that. After you do enough and maybe if you're just starting with this, none of them look great. After you do enough of them now you have samples and things that maybe you love or don't, running out your ears. Just about everything I do, I do on paper because I can store it. If I love it, I can mount it to a board and then use it that way if I want to hang it up. But that being said, I do have cradle boards and things here because it feels different to paint on the paper than it feels to paint on the board. I do recommend you experiment with that. Now, you'll notice here, I've got Canvas panel and Canvas. For oil and cold wax, I do not recommend you use a Canvas product. I don't like Canvas panel because when you put lots of layers on these panels, my experience has been they start to curve and I don't like that. It makes me mad. I worked hard on it. I don't want it to curve and distort. With the oil and cold wax, once it dries, if this curves and you try to flatten it, you'll crack the wax. I don't like that. I don't like Canvas because it's still pliable. If the piece is small enough and it's a really high quality Canvas, that may be a really super sturdy surface and you may decide to give it a try. But over time, this surface still moves. It's still pliable and you could crack your painting. I don't want anything like that if it's a piece that I really loved, I don't want do that. It's the wrong surface. So don't go with the Canvas is the point of that. So there's lots of wood panels that you could try. You could try these little artists panels. They come in different thicknesses and some of them are primed and some of them are unprimed. Those would be fine if you use the unprimed ones, you need to prime that with gesso before you get started. These primed one's maybe a little bit more expensive, but they are fun to experiment with. So I do have some of those in my stash. Then the cradle boards are my favorite. They are the ones that have enough wood side there that you could see the attached wood to the back. These are beautiful for creating a piece and then having it where it's ready to hang because I'd paint the top, I'd finish the sides, and then it's ready to go. I do like cradle boards, they come in different thicknesses. This is the three quarter thickness. I really love the inch and a half thickness because they look so rich. They're big and they're standing out, they're like a statement piece. If you're just getting started, get the ones with the thin sides. But if you get to the point where you're making things that you love and you want to gift things or put things out for sale, go for the thicker side ones because they look so rich and they elevate the artwork so much. Let's talk about what you can and can't use with these oils. If you're wanting to do mark-making underneath the cold wax and oil, a lot of times, I will do mark-making and some other colors and things underneath my acrylic paintings a lot of times. You can do that with oil paint too, but you have to consider what the material is and what can be layered on top of what. So if you're using pencils, pens, markers, watercolors, acrylic paint, anything like that, that can go on your first layer. If you're using oil pastels, which are different than the soft pastels. These are the oil pastels and they're very creamy. They're not chalky like the soft pastels that I like to use. If you're using oil paint, oil pastels, oil sticks, anything like this, that's got some type of oil in the name, that you can put under the oil and cold wax or on top of the oil and cold wax. Any of those acrylic, the pencils, the markers, the acrylic ink, the watercolor, any of those, you cannot put on top of oil paint, they won't stick. Just keep those in mind when you're doing different layering things. What are you wanting to do? If you're needing marks on top, here's a bigger fatter oil stick. These are R&F oil sticks and they're real chunky and they're not solid. Like you can just scrub this across the painting and draw with it. They're not as solid as these. These are a little more solid but still soft and I can mark pretty easy with them. But if you're wanting to do mark making on top of the oil and cold wax, like add color or something, it needs to be some oil based product going on top. Any water-based product can go underneath. Any oil based product can go on top. The water based products won't sit on top of the oil paints. That is all of my yummy pieces here that I keep around. You don't have to have all of it at the minimum, you need some paper, maybe some tape, oil and cold wax, and some marking tools and you can get started. Some of this other is just things that I have collected as I have gone along in my journey. So I hope you enjoy searching out and playing with some of these tools. If you've got some things on hand, start with that before you go buy a bunch of supplies. I will see you in class. 4. Prepping your paper: [MUSIC] I'm actually taping off one of my pieces of paper. This is the larger [NOISE] of the papers that I'm using because I want to do some color studies and I like to experiment with my supplies. I've gotten this purple tape, which is over in the hardware section near the blue painters tape. It set for delicate surfaces and I thought, well that would be very interesting to try and just see [NOISE], does it tear our paper when we're done? I'm going to do color studies on this sheet. I like working on several sheets at the same time. This is thick enough and I can move it around. I like working on several sheets at the same time so that I can then play with lots of different things. Let's see, I got 10 inches so let's just mark this. I want it to be mostly centered because a lot of times I'll have to leave a piece sitting overnight to dry so that I can then continue to add to it. Let's see what we got here. Half of that would be seven so let's put this right here. That is mostly centered. I'm just eyeballing it beyond there and I didn't want cut it even [NOISE]. I'm just going to eyeball. It may be completely crooked, but we'll see, close enough. Then you can tape it down to your board if you want. But I'm just going to fold those over so I can peel that back later. Is that even? Try like right there, that's close enough. Some of my papers you'll notice had great big double white lines in between them. That was where I had taken two pieces of tape [LAUGHTER] and taped two layers, but I don't like that. I like it where it's the bigger paint size and the little tape in-between so that I have just a white line around it when I peel these off. That's what I'm doing with these. I'm taping off my paper. I'm going to do color studies on this. If it's a piece and we'll do this piece with a blue painters tape because I got it here [NOISE]. If it's a piece and I want to do several different types of abstracts in this workshop, I want to do color studies. I want to do a piece where I just mark-make and do all my random stuff on the bigger piece of paper like I do with the acrylics. Then tomorrow when it's dry to the touch, I want to be able to then search out compositions that I like [NOISE]. I'm going to do one of these, tape up one of these papers for that. That'll be a project. Basically, you can say three different projects here. I've got the color study project. I've got the big [NOISE] pins where we're going to search out yummy compositions, so that's a project. I'll try not to leave any white over here because I might get paint on the tape and I want that to be a clean edge. Really a little tiny edge on this would be fine. I could have done this with the real thin artist's tape and have as much paint surface left over as I could. But let's just go [NOISE] with it and see what we get. I want to tape really three different pieces. We've got this one where we're going to get all yummy and messy. Now I've got that one taped. Then I have the smaller paper here where we can work on just an abstract [NOISE] piece in this size would be nice. This could go along with, say, our color studies where this would be a completely different technique with our [NOISE] messy work that we're going to do and then experiment and see if we get anything we like when we're done. This would be a little more deliberate abstract, which to me is harder. I've got plenty of them, I showed you in the sample [NOISE] video of all the different things I've played with and the samples that I've made throughout the years. I do find painting an abstract like this harder for me personally [NOISE] because my style has really turned into make a great big messy painting. Freestyle basically. Not worry about [NOISE] all the work that it takes to make a really nice composition piece. Then searching out pieces out fun pieces out of it when you're done. Whereas with this, you have to be a little more thoughtful and deliberate as you go. Which I find most times I don't love the piece I signed up with or I get frustrated in the process. Whereas when we do the great, big, messy one, I love it every single time and it took less thought and energy and it had pieces that I loved. I got my paper prepped. When you're prepping your paper, doesn't matter what size paper you end up with. Prep a big one that we're going to make a mess on. Prep a color study one that we can do colors on. Really, I like to prep a lot of color studies and just play and play. Then prep a bigger abstract possible piece. Then, true to my form, I may like it and leave it or I may cut a piece out of it now that I love that technique so much and I'm much happier with my piece [LAUGHTER] when I'm done. Paper prep, prep three pieces and then I will see you back in class [MUSIC]. 5. Mixing your paints: Let's talk about picking our color palette and mixing our paints. So I've got some colors that I've pulled out. I was very inspired by the color palette in the finished piece that I had told you that I got from Rebecca Croll that I had framed. I really love how underneath I can see bits of orange and green and teal, just showing through the marks. I don't know if you'll be able to see those or not, but they're very slight underneath, just a tiny bit that you can see. You can tell that the layers were really built up. I like that. I just love that. I can see different marks. I can see that there's this tan color out here. Maybe a darker raw sienna color and then there's this blue, maybe some darker blue or black. I was very inspired by this color palette. While I would love to paint that piece in many different colors, I would not make a very good art forger because it doesn't really matter if I use a piece inspiration or not, I can never recreate it no matter how hard I try. Everything that I create ends up being something totally different. But I'm going to be inspired by the colors I think I can see in that palette. So I pulled out some white, so that I can mix in some lighter tones of the colors that I see. I've pulled yellow ocher. I pulled a Van Dyke brown, which is super dark brown. I've also pulled a burnt sienna because maybe some of that was a reddish brown. I've pulled a couple of blues. I've pulled this indigo and turquoise. I remember seeing some green in there, so I've pulled a sap green. That lightest blue on top almost reminds me of this ice blue color. I can get that with the titanium white and the indigo. Maybe we'll mix some of that up since this one is basically toast. I could maybe even pull a brighter orange from that little bit of orange that we could see shining through. I could pull some cadmium orange. It looks to me like one layer was a bright colored layer and then it was left to dry overnight and then the upper layers were added to that possibly in two or three stages depending on how long it took to get the look that she wanted in the end. But I'm inspired by that color palette. That's one way to pick colors. Find a piece of art that you love and pull colors that inspire you from that piece possibly. Another thing I do is look on Pinterest and I search color palettes. Then you will find lots of things like this where there's a photo and a color palette underneath it. You can already see how those colors blend together in something like that. These are some books that I got from Ivy Newport. She's got two different volumes that had come out at some point. I love having these two reference. Because I do photography in my main job, I could definitely go through my millions of photos that I have literally and create some of these wonderful color palettes inspired by my own photos just by color picking colors out of a photo. I could make little circles and print that out and be inspired by some of my own photos also. I do like those ideas. I also like just picking out what are some of your favorite colors if you're already good at pulling colors together and stuff. Then pick out some of your favorite. You could also work with a color wheel if you are wanting to say, what color is going to look good. I have several color wheels that I like to use for different things. This one I like because it has different shades in here. If I wanted to use, say, something in this blue-green family and I wanted a complimentary piece. I told you at some point in the workshop that there was a piece I did with blue and orange, but they were very vivid blue and orange. Maybe I didn't love it, but if I went with a lighter shade of blue and light blue like this and a peachy tone like this, we'd still be in the blue, orange complimentary color frame. But I think those lighter shades would be more into what I love. A lot of color wheel like this that'll tell you complimentary, split complimentary, triad, tetrad, it'll just show you different ways to pull color palettes out. That compliment and contrast each other in a way that's been proven to be interesting and pleasing throughout history. I love this one because of the different shades it implies and shows me. Then the other side gives me color mixing. If I take red-orange and add some type of blue, here is the color I would get. It does get a little bit into color mixing on this side if you find that difficult. I love this color wheel. This one I like because one side has tints where you've taken white and added it to the main color to get lighter shades of that color. Then the other side has shades where you have basically taken the main color and added black to get different shades of that color. That's really fun if you want to reference for tints and shades. This color wheel I love because what it tells you is make the bulk of your piece in whatever color range that you've got here in this upper section and then you can use this little section here to be some analogous colors for these. Then you can compliment it with a touch of one of these to give it a little tiny pop. The bulk of your piece could be these, tiny bits of your piece could be these and then a touch of those, and you've got a nice color range of interesting colors that are going to go together. I really like that if you have trouble imagining what's going to go with say, blue and green, well, a pop of red would be fun and these colors would be in the group of analogous colors that would complement that really nicely. This is a really fun color wheel also. I just keep these handy in my art room. Sometimes I hide them for myself behind stuff, but I do just try to keep it handy. That's three different ways that you could choose or even four different ways. Pick a piece of art that's inspiring, pick some of your own favorite colors. Pick a color palette from say, Pinterest or use a color wheel to come up with some interesting color palette. Four different ways that you might consider coming up with a color palette. Let's talk about mixing our colors. I'm using the very biggest disposable paper palette because that's a lot of colors. I want you to be careful in the amount of paint that you squirt out. We're going to be mixing the paint with the cold wax in about a 50-50 ratio. About halfway wax to half color. I don't want to put a color out, say, mix it up and then put another color out and stick my dirty palette knife into my wax. You don't want to contaminate the wax with different colors in there. You'll notice even though I've dug in there a whole bunch. This is a pretty new can compared to the ones where I've scraped all the way to the bottom. Always keep your wax clean. What I do is I will just start. Hope I can get this green open. I may have to pick another green. We'll see. I will start with a little bit of paint. That is probably even too much paint depending on how many pieces I'm going to do because it goes a long way and I don't want to fill this up with a gigantic glob of paint and then get to the end of my painting and think, oh my goodness, that was way too much paint and I'm wasting all of this. Then I have to figure out something that I can do with the extra paint that I squirted out. I don't want to do all that, so I want squirt out a little bit. I can always mix more out, but I don't want it to be so much paint that it's overwhelming. That right there was way too much paint, shame on me. You want to leave enough space. That right there might not have been enough space. But I want to leave enough space so that I have room to mix that paint with the wax. I should have left a little more space there. Oh good, the orange will open here. That probably was too much paint too. Let's see if we can get this green open. If we can't, I'll pick a different green. I haven't even used this one that much, but it is glued on there. There we go. Another thing that I might not have mentioned in the supply video is that I keep a big roll of paper towels. These are shop towels like you get at the Home Depot over there with the supplies. But I keep a big roll of that handy because I'm using tons of these, especially right here with the paint mixing. Now I've got all my colors down and I'm going to put my gloves on. I don't work with the paint without my gloves on. I'm just going to go through and dig through and put a little piece of wax next to each color. I'm looking for a ratio of about half of the wax to half of the paint. I want about as much wax to paint there. The wax is a little bit different consistency, so it may look like I'm putting a little more wax there than I really am. You don't want to really make it too much wax to not enough paint because then you're painting more. More likely, it will just crack because there's not enough of the oil paint in with it. I just put a little down with each color and then I put the lid back on my wax so that it doesn't dry out. Then I'm going to put my gloves on because definitely going to want gloves on when you start mixing and working with the paint. At this point too, if I think there's some other colors that I might want like I think actually that I might want a lighter color of this indigo. Before I get in too far, I actually want to maybe put another dab of white here. Then maybe a little tiny bit of indigo off to the side. I'm going to mix indigo in with the white before I add wax. If I do color mixing, I tend to mix up colors first and then add wax to it. I'm going to get a little bit of wax to sit to the side here though. Just so that I can really see the color I'm getting. But you could certainly mix them up after the fact. But let's just start. I've got a couple of different palette knives handy here. I have a whole bunch, actually. I just want to add a touch of blue to the white. The reason why I'm not adding the white to the blue is because the blue is very pigmented and I just don't think I'm going to get a color that I want. Now that I'm looking at this color, I actually think that it's too grayish and maybe a tiny touch of green would be nice. That was too much green, but I do like this color. Maybe more blue. Let's just go with that. I'm going to go ahead and mix the wax in. Not exactly the color I was going for, but I can continue to play. But look how much paint that turns into adding the wax to it. It's at this point too, if you think you want to work with the Gamsol with the Galkyd. If we wanted to, we could add just a drop of that to our paint. This is an old one. They do get old. I'll have to find my newer one. It's at this point if you want to add a little bit of shine back into your paint, just like one little drop of it, it's all you need there for your little dab of paint and mix that in while you're mixing. Then you will get that little bit of shine back in it and it will aid the drying time, but it drives to the touch by tomorrow anyway. I think I need to find my other container of that if I'm going to play in it, but let's go ahead and just mix our colors. This right here, is why I like to have these around, paper towels or shop towels. It doesn't matter, but I mix all my colors first and get them ready. I'm using the plastic palette knives. You can use the metal palette knives, it doesn't really matter. Your method of madness there, just go for it. You just want to get all your colors ready. This does not going to dry super fast. This is not like acrylic paint where if you put out too much paint and you let that sit for 20 minutes then your paint has started to dry, this is not going to drive that fast. But it's probably not going to hold over until tomorrow either. I want you to be careful to not put out too much paint to begin with because look how much it ends up when we mix the wax with it. So don't put out too much paint to begin with, start with little quantities and you can always make some more up if you need to. I'm just mixing it until it's all mixed. Start with smaller quantities, because you're going to get yourself into a mess. Where you're like, I'm going to have to waste all this paint and I don't want to waste it all. It's better to maybe you have to paint longer than you intended because you're like, I don't want to waste it. Let's do a trash piece. See why leaving a little extra room would be good, because if you're really messy with your paint mixing, you'll be all up into your next color when you didn't mean to. This blue is so vivid. I might just switch. If you get like some paint on here that's not coming off, you could put a little bit of oil on here. Or take it and wash it in your Dawn dishwashing detergent, and get that off pretty easy. Another thing too, for brushes, I'm cleaning, if you'd get most of the oil paint out of it. If you don't want to use mineral spirits or turpentine or odorless jar like a hive with odorous cleaner in it, you could get most of the oil paint out of your brush with a towel and maybe wiping it on paper. Then go clean it with the Dawn soap. I have brush cleaners to like there's that paint brush cleaner, but that Dawn dishwashing detergent really does work like the best and you can get your oil paint cleaned out of brushes with that Dawn detergent really nicely. It's like my favorite cleanup method now. Then when I get this so full, and you can see this is how my gloves gets so dirty, because I'm wiping my tools on my towel. When my towel gets so full that I'm not getting enough paint off, then I just get a clean towel. I do go through a lot of rolls of this when I'm working with this medium and I just know that's how it's going to be and I don't worry about it. Paper towels have at least a roll of paper towels, you get the cheap ones from the dollar store, doesn't matter. You just need something handy to wipe your tools down. That way, you keep them clean as you're going. Because you don't want to go back and have to try to clean all your tools later when everything's starting to dry. See how nice that works? Got all of our colors mixed. It's at this point in the mixing where you would add in a little bit of Galkyd if you wanted a tiny bit of shine put back in there and to work with their drying time. Again, it dries in a day, so it's not like it's a great big deal. That is mixing our paints. Now, I am ready to get started on a project now that I've got everything started and going. So I'll see you back in class. 6. Mark making: [MUSIC] Before we get started on our projects, I may have to mix up more paint, but I want to talk about, I've got a couple of small pieces of paper here. I want to talk about mark making and stuff. I just want to maybe put a little bit of paint on to my paper here and just talk about different tools that we could use for mark-making. I know I briefly covered them in the supply video, but I thought it might be fun to actually see what some of these do. I think I'm going to use some of this weird green color that I came up with. It spreads like icing. That's what I really love about cold wax is you're using other tools normally besides brushes. You're creating different thicknesses, maybe different patterns. As we spread other colors on top of this. Like maybe we'll just go for this other green. See I can spread more colors right on top of that and work for a little bit until I get to the point where I'm like, well, this is now too wet for me really to get any further. I'm going to let that dry till tomorrow before I can do more stuff. Let's put a little bit of white in there and then talk about, for a trash piece, this maybe the prettiest little trash peace ever. That's pretty right there. [LAUGHTER] Now, if I had wanted to do that with nothing underneath it, then I've got started. Now maybe I want to do some mark-making. Some of my favorite mark making tools was this one which looks like a little mini ice pick and this is in the working with clay tools. It's a clay tool. I like this because we can get lines and see how nice that created a beautiful line for us. I love that. We could also do things like, and I don't want to stick my arm in these paints. I got a habit of just put my arm over here since I'm right-handed. [LAUGHTER] But we can also then do different, interesting little marks like this. I could have done something like that. If we use something like a piece of corrugated cardboard, I like that because I could maybe stamp right on it and that would create a line for us. I could also use it to drag through, so something like that's really fun. This one super fun. Again, I'm going to use it like a stamp or a stencil and stamp right onto part of my piece and come up with a little bit of pattern. This I could use over and over. I might just wipe off the extra paint and then put this back in my supplies and keep on using it. Same with the corrugated paper. You can just wipe that off and keep using it over and over cardboard. These are some of my favorite tools, but my other really favorite one was these little foam stencils that I got at the Michael. You might look up foam stamps and see if you can come up with some interesting ones. This is my favorite. I like the little slight lines. Again, just tap it right on there. Then look at that yummy little set of lines that we created, love that. You can also draw through here and do different things on top like with the oil sticks. But you can't do it while it's wet. While it's wet, this is the mark-making that we can do. I also could have, if I wanted to do things underneath that, I could have done that first. I could have done stabilo pencil. This is charcoal, I think. I can do charcoal. I could do some stabilo. The thing about the different stuff underneath it. You can put way more things underneath than you can on top. I could have done that. I could have done this little oil stick because I can do some of the oil stuff underneath the cold wax. The only drawback because I don't want to be too much of this underneath because it's very oily and I don't think it ever really technically dries. I could also do some acrylic ink under there. I could do acrylic paint under there. There's lots of things I could paint on, let that dry and then paint on top of it. Then we'll come back. Then just like we did with the other piece, we can then add this layer on top of it. We could come back tomorrow and scrap back colors. I can keep on adding a little bit here, just on top. This right here is a beautiful way to do a color study. I now know that this little bit of green that I mixed up on top of this green, which was that sap green by M. Graham Company. Sap green is really pretty, I like sap green. Then that blue was the indigo, the titanium white and a little bit of sap green, but look how pretty that is. Then once we get it like that, we can now go and add texture to the top because some of the interests with pieces, like with the cold wax that we're doing. Look at that right there. Some of the interests is all things that you see in the layers. I like that I I see through that green right there to what I drew underneath. I like that I can then layer on top and then stamp through and add some texture to the top of this. I can drag a little bit of lines through the paint and just to create one more layer of interest in there. Then I could say, okay, this piece is finished. Look how beautiful I ended up with. Now one thing I do see that I didn't that I don't like is my gloves are dirty from the paint and I just put a piece right here of this paint that I don't like. Either I need to fix that now or because this is a throwaway piece, I'm pointing these things out. If you're working with gloves with a lot of color on it, you're going to take that off and put new gloves on so that when you're doing something like this, if it were really important and this is a piece that I was creating to say take to a gallery and sell. I need to keep the top white paper part of this as clean as I can. Pieces like that right there. I've led a little bit of some other color, get on there from my glove. That's not acceptable when you're looking to make some really nice fine art pieces that you can sell and maybe take to a gala or maybe frame. After you get past the practice phase like I'm in, I do want you to keep really in good mind like what do you have on your fingers and where are you touching your paper and be real careful about how you're touching the top of your paper. But for something that we were just experimenting and talking about mark-making, look how pretty those are. Those are maybe the previous first little abstracts that I've made. [LAUGHTER] This might be a case too, I could probably still save this if I added a little bit of white like I added on this first one, maybe I want to put a little bit of white in here. Maybe that white scraped all the way over. There are ways that maybe we could fix things that we've done. Look at that. Oh my goodness. I love it when I get something that I really like and then just be real careful as you're picking things up and moving it. Now we've covered that and now we have a clean piece of paper. I love it. Look at both of those. Very pretty. Maybe from mark-making, you pick two colors and a white, like I've done here. Just practice a few things. Practice dragging your sharp tool. This it could be a sharp metal tool like this. It could be a skewer that you get from the grocery store. That's wood, I love wood skewers? This is one of those that it's over there in the grilling aisle, it makes really nice marks too. You can see the metal one is a little bit sharper, finer line, and this one's a little bit larger, but it still really makes a great line. I love that. You can also, now that I'm looking over here, I have some random brushes that had mark-making tools on the end. That was really cool. I like this one. Let's just drag that right there. Love it. Oh my goodness, look at that. A little bit of a line that I just added in there, right here. I love that. I also have these fun little tools with the little lines on them. I could have gotten some little tiny lines in there with that, super fun. You could also with this tool come through, I like things that have writing on them. We could imply like a little bit of writing over here. When these dry tomorrow, I could actually write on top of this with the stabilo pencil. That would write really nicely on top. It writes on practically everything. Let me just look around and see if there's any more fun tools. There was one more fun thing that was in my box that I think I want to pull out. This thing right here. Look how fun this is, what the little metal pieces is, it's almost like a grill tool you use to cook with, love that. But this would be fun. Let's just look at that. Does really nice, crazy fun line. Look at that line. That is fun. Really fine metal line there on that. That's super fun. I hope you enjoy a little mark making exercise. I want you to mix up maybe two colors and a white. Just take your palette knife and just spread a little paint out there to get a feel for how it spreads, how thick it is or how thin it is. I kept these fairly thin. These are not so thick that I was having a big clump on the top. I was trying to spread it pretty thin but make them really pretty abstract out of it. Then practice with some of your marks. Find anything out in nature, a twig, something with leaves on it if you want or no leaves on it. Any household items that this one's fun. This is called a Kemper tool. That's fun. I got this at the art store. Checkout anything that you can make. You could do this with a box or like card stock, cut out something with little edges, work with card stock, any foam stencils that you might find. Look at any of your packaging to see if you've got some interesting textures in the box. You'll a lot of times too, if the box is flat on the top and the bottom, the inside usually hidden and maybe you can peel those apart to get to some of this corrugated part. Look around at anything that could possibly make a mark and really anything can make a mark. Be on the lookout around your house and at the art store at anything interesting that you could press into or draw with for these pieces. I hope you enjoyed that little demo. I actually really like my little samples here. I'm so happy with them. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 7. Color Study Examples: I wanted to do color studies in this little workshop here. So I want to show you just random things that I have painted over the years. No judging, I'm not saying any of these are great by any means, I'm just showing you experiments that I have done. Because I like to play with color and experiment. I still, to this day, don't think I have one certain colorway that's my colorway. Some artists you'll see and they'll work in a range and you can recognize it pretty immediately that that's theirs, and they've just developed that over years of working. But I like too many things and I in my home, I like too many things and I have a degree in interior design. I worked with home buyers and things like that for many years. it's very easy to pick color for other people because you're not really emotionally attached to it and invested in the decision. But when it comes to things for myself, I like too many things, I may love this blue and tan tone or I may love this super bright color and those might not match in an interior or something like that. I just like too many things. I just want to show you things that I have experimented with. I like doing color studies because then I can say, I love this or I don't like that, and then I can see why. Until you mix them, you don't understand why. You might like one over the other, but when you start doing things like this, you can go, I really don't like what that did, I really love what that did. This is that medium paper size that nine by 12. I told you we tape it off and maybe do a bigger piece. This is what I do with those. Maybe when I'm doing color studies, if I mix up paint, I've got too much paint to do one piece, and so a lot of times I'll work on several pieces at a time. Because with the oil and cold wax, you may not be putting all your layers on in the same day because this technique requires a bit of patience. Maybe you'll put a couple of layers on today and set that to the side until tomorrow. When I'm doing that, I get a little bit frustrated if I'm just working on one piece and maybe I want to be still playing at my art table for the day. I will have several pieces going at the same time so that I don't waste paint. Because when you start mixing up your paint and you think, well, this is not very much I mixed up, you may over-mix your paint quantities and underguess how far that'll go. You want to have two or three sheets available so that if you did this and you thought, that's a lot of paint I'm going to throw away, you could come back and do another piece or have a trash piece available to the side where you would put all your extra paint. At some point, that would be a nice little abstract painting when you have enough layers on it maybe, and a lot of people do that. It's almost like working in a set when you do more than one. But I really liked this teal, like this colorway. Definitely, again, no judging, I'm not saying these are great by any means. They were experiments on my part with color and scraping. Because another fun thing about cold wax, the next day after it's dry, I can scrape back these layers to get fun things underneath. You might do a whole bunch of solid color layers just to build up the piece. Then when you get to the top layers, you've got something to scrape and color that will shine through underneath. I really love that aspect of working with this. Here I was working with brighter color, I was mark-making with some of my catalyst blades that had a little teeth on them. I do tend to decorate with more muted colors because I find that that allows my mind free reign and creativity. The walls are painted a nice toke color, and maybe I decorate with colorful pillows that I can then change out when my mind changes. But I've discovered when I paint, that the things I like to paint and the ones that I liked the most are the ones with really bright colors. These colors really appeal to me. I don't like that there's a pair, and I could frame them if I loved them enough. Sometimes the things that are in your life that you'd like to live in might not necessarily be the things that you like to paint or that you're called to paint. The same thing I heard an artist once say that maybe this thing is that you collect are not meant to be the things that you create yourself, it's not what's going to come out of you. The things that I collect are a wide range too, because again, I just like too many things and I take a lot of stuff to the framer now because I'm at a point where I have some pieces that I think are so amazing that I want them framed in something more than just a gallery frame from target. I take them to the frame where I have things framed. The range of stuff that I've taken in the past year, the framer was like, wow, you have such an eclectic range of things that you love. I'm like, man I do, I just like too many things. Purple is not really my game. But I did love this little purple set where it has purple, a little bit of orange, some off-white paint. Can't think of buff a buff-colored paint. You can tell there are several layers here and maybe the upper layers, the under layers might have been the orange and the maroon and the upper layer might've been purple and then the buff on top of that, and then as I scraped back, we got all this yummy texture and lines and color shining through. I do actually really like these colors, even though purple's not really my thing so much. Just another little. This one actually, I do like the colors, but when I was done it looked like a garden. I feel like little abstract garden go in here. I like these bright colors. They're really pretty to me. Playing with blue and yellow. That was fun. I don't really like these colors as much, but when you see it far off, I actually like the overall look of it and it's very abstract. Playing in some blues with some marks there. Here I had almost like a landscape. This was my bright sun. This one is again, another one that visually I'm really attracted to. I love that orange and that maroon and the pink that's coming through. I really love those colors in that. But I tell you, I have nothing in my house that looks like this decorative wise. If you come to my house, you wouldn't think that this might be something that really draws me when I'm painting. These are some fun blue-green, yellow. This is the blue-green without the yellow. That's fun to look and compare how that extra color added into our overall composition. Blue-green playing with marks and scratches. This was that same blue, green, yellow, but maybe I did it in a little bit different heaviness of the color and there's less of that blue showing. This was really fun piece. I actually like that ice-gray color mixed in with the brown and the ivory there. That was a fun colorway. Purple, not my favorite, but it was an experiment that I tried. Then going back here to the orange that I really like. That one's okay, I don't love it. Then going back, I do like orange and purple together. This one I really love, and it appeals to me and there's a lot of texture in it. If it'll focus on that. But you can see a lot of yummy texture showing through those layers. I love that. Then I'm also fascinated with red and teal. So I did play with the teal and the red here. I didn't really like this pink one, but I saved it because I've made it. This is one of my favorite things to do right here. I like color swatching. If you have seen any of my acrylic workshops, I keep a color swatch book and I save color swatches. This was pre-finding a fun book to make a color swatch book out of. Going forward, I might find another book like that one to create color swatching with these. But these are different pieces that I kept the colors because I want to know if this is a colorway that I liked. I want to know how I got there. I actually wrote down underneath each piece what brand and what color it was so that I could get back to whole being light magenta, then I would know which paint that was that I used. I highly recommend taking a piece of paper, and this is exactly what I was talking about too when I said, if you're using watercolor paper and the oil paint will leach out onto the paper. Look at this, I've had these now for so long. You can see that the oil has leached out and onto the bottom side of the paper. The next time I do some of these, if I plan on continuing with the strips, I will probably use a piece of my oil paper and cut it into strips rather than a watercolor piece that I had handy because we can see exactly, and if you look at my oil paper, that does not bleed through to the bottom for the most part. It has a nice prime surface ready for oil paint already. That's exactly what I was referring to when I said if that oil leaches out, you don't want your finished piece to be looking like that. But these colors, I love. Now they're all nice and dry. Then I was playing with mark-making and colors and experimenting. This is the color studies that I'd like to do in some different colors for this class. But I like taking that piece of paper, taping it off, doing all my messy painting, and then peeling the tape. I really love creating these. Then when I do a set like that, I want a sheet of colors to go with it. I store these with their colors. You see how many I've done. When you get started, working on paper is so much easier because you can do more with it and you can store it fairly easy. Here is some more that I did, and this was mixed media paper and you can see the oil leaches out of it. But I have my colors in here and different color studies that I tried. On this one, I was playing with different stencils and just seeing how the stencils work with the amount of paint and how wet the paint can get. This was a fun colorway. Blue and orange is fun. I don't like how vivid this blue and orange is. If I do blue and orange again, it's going to be like a pastel blue and a pastel orange. Kind of like a sunrise or something like that. But it is just a fun way to experiment. This didn't completely love the vivid teal. That just didn't appeal to me, but I did like this little color study and then I know what colors I used, so the next time I can look and see what those colors do. Again, purple and gray. I love these. We go right back to the bright red-orange colorway. There was lots of colors in this one. But I do like the yummy brightness, and this is that larger paper. You can see the difference. We get larger pieces, if we do color studies on the smaller paper, we'll go back to this size. They're smaller and they're fun, but you get more out of that bigger paper with these color studies. Although I do love these, this is one of my favorites that I've done with the colors as fun pastels of fun. Again, similar colorway. It might even be the same colors, but I loved it enough to just play again. Here's one where the colors are more in the Terracotta tones. I really liked that. Here we've got blue, green, yellow in that family. I do love this one. Blue and yellow, but not such vivid as some of the other ones that we did. This is more of a cobalt and maybe a ocher. Yes, ocher and ice blue and Prussian blue. This ice blue, that one that I showed you that I liked so much that I'm going to have to go buy some more because I can't get any more out of my tube, it's just a really nice icy blue-gray color. I love that color. Some more experiments that, not necessarily my favorite, but I just saved them because I did them. I loved this. Look how pretty that big pieces with the ocher and the pink. I really loved the pink and yellow colorways and I did several on that. I love every one of these. As you stand back, you can see the other way that colors can blend. As you get close, there's different mark-making on each one that I was playing with. Overall, I just think that's a really pretty set, and I could cut that out and frame that as a little set to hang on the wall. Then here's some that I don't necessarily like these but I was playing with oil sticks and some other stuff too just to get a feel for materials. I don't love these, but I hated not to keep them. This was really fun because I was playing with some oil sticks and some vivid colors. I actually love doing like this. This was oil sticks too. When I say oil sticks, it was these things and it was only these things just as color studies. I found red and teal. I just love the three. Not really like this one with the lines I left in it, but I just love how modern and unique those are, just playing in the oil sticks and seeing what they do. I know that was a long little spiel there of different color things, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what certain colors that we could be playing in might look like and to just show you different things I have experimented with for color studies along the way. Then we'll be doing some of these in class. I think you'll have a lot of fun experimenting with that and then peeling the tape and then just revealing what amazing piece you got when you were done. I'm pretty excited to be doing some of these in class. 8. Color Study - Color blocking: [MUSIC] In this video, we're going to jump into everything that we just learned with our color mixing and our mark-making and our playing with some colors with our color palette. Now we're going to do some color studies and so I've got that big piece of paper that I've cut into fours and this is the time to just experiment and play with different materials and if we get it dirty and wet enough, maybe we will have to come back, let that dry overnight and come back tomorrow. Lots of different things that we can do here. I think to start, I'm going to start by making some marks because looking at a white piece of paper is very paralyzing sometimes. [LAUGHTER] I just have some graphite here and this is a pencil, basically, it's just pieces of graphite. I might do some different marks. We may see him and we may not, and you can do this with any pencil that you want. You may see it and you may not. I'm just experimenting here creating some loose marks that may or may not show up in our finished piece. Then we could put other stuff underneath here. Let's see there's that. Let's just look around at what else we could use the neo color crayons, another item that we could mark underneath with. Let me pull that out and I'm going to be using these color palettes inspired by my picture that I've shown you. But just in case, colors inspired by this piece by my favorite cold wax artist. My pieces definitely aren't going to look like her piece, but it is fun to use that as my inspiration and I could pick a few colors out of here just to make some marks. Another thing that I just thought of is, let's say we're in a hurry for our first layer to dry, but still have a lot of color on it. Instead of waiting overnight for these, we can use acrylic paint on that lower level and I have some acrylic inks that I don't know. I randomly got a bunch of supplies from a sketch box subscription I had last year that sent me random things to experiment with that I really love. [LAUGHTER] I love Gin's art supplies. I thought, why don't we spread some inks around and this is very interesting actually. This one is an acrylic ink, but it's almost sitting on top of my paper. That was actually very interesting outcome there. It probably is the way the paper is primed so I'm just going to spread it around with a palette knife and just get some of that color on there because if you remember in my little painting, I pointed out that I could see some color shining through from the different marks that were made through the wax. You can see just a tiny bit of color coming through underneath. This is how we can get those colors underneath and maybe work a little faster than doing it all in oil paint. [NOISE] What a bright color. I may have overdid the yellow here on some of this. But this is a good way to figure out what do your supplies do. Let's try this one, and how do they work on different papers, and how much is too much? [LAUGHTER] Until you do this, you're not going to know and while you're doing it, you may doubt yourself. Look at that color. I doubt myself a lot, but especially with abstracts, we may end up with something surprising that we weren't expecting. Look at that. I love this color. Bright colors make me happy sometimes. [NOISE] I used to dress in bright colors with lots of pattern on it always like pattern to be on my shirts and one day my step brother was like, "Are you wearing the curtains from living room?'' I was like, ''No.'' [LAUGHTER]. It was hilarious. I was not amused at all. There we've got all that, goodness and yumminess go and oh my goodness. At this point, I'm going to drive this with a heat gun. That's what I mean about being impatient and drawing stuff. We can go ahead and just draw that right up. [NOISE] Whereas with the oil paint, heat gun doesn't affect it. You're not going to be able to use that to dry it. You really actually need to let it sit overnight for it to be dry to the touch with the cold wax because heat gun does not work. [NOISE] That's pretty dry, but I think what I'm going to do is go through and get the rest of the ink off with my towel. One thing I noticed too that I didn't have a piece of tape completely stuck down so if you want to make sure all your edges are going to be clean, and I usually like clean edges, so I may not get a clean edge out of that. Go through with your finger and just make sure all your little taped edges are taped down really good. Now we have some crazy color to start with and I think what I want to do is go over this. I may mix a little bit of white and this ocher and just start in one of these and start my coverage. Depending on how much paint you lay on here will determine how far your paint really goes. I may be mixing more paint as I go because these are fairly big squares, this will easily be a five by seven or something close to that. My goal may be to go ahead and mostly cover what's on the background because maybe I want to draw some marks and that color just shine through. You'll just have to play and experiment here with some of these and see what's your goal. How much do you need to cover? I could leave a little bit showing through like that. This is like spreading icing on the cake. I just love the way it feels. I love that you're not working with a paintbrush, you're working with other materials. This first coat I'm not being too careful with as I lay color on top of that, I'll get a little bit softer with how much pressure I put on my palette because I don't want to dig through all the layers while they're wet. That's what's really nice about this. You can actually lay full colors on top of other colors until it gets too thick or if you're just not light handed enough. Then you would do good to have it dry in between those layers. I'm putting these on with a palette knife, but I could actually be putting these on with my bowl scraper. Let me pull that back out too, because I may smooth this out with the bowl scraper, like get a lot of paint on it, but then come through and smooth it out. I just realized I don't have my gloves on and I'm about to make a mess, so let me put some gloves on. You can get a box of these gloves at the paint store pretty cheap. I just get whole boxes of them and then they last pretty good long time. [NOISE] I want this to be a little smoother than it was the way I put it on there. I might spread some more on here just depending because I can put all the paint on with the scraper, I didn't have to use my little palette knife. I like that as an underlayer, and then [NOISE] a towel ready to, as I'm going I'm going to want to pull this paint off my scraper so that it's ready to then do something else. We could do this several ways. This could be the first layer of this one, and I could treat all the other ones completely different, I could come back on this one and completely do a different technique. I could make squares of color, more like in our color studies, I could come back in. This paper is a little bit warped from the wet ink I had underneath it, but they will flatten them back out. You definitely going to be mixing some more of this yellow ocher. [MUSIC] This one, I think I'm going to let that be because what I'm going to do with these is let these dry overnight, so I'm going to create all four of the pieces on here, like the base coats of these pieces, and then we'll be layering things on top of that once it dries. Let's just go in with a different color on the background, I'd like to be able to see what are these different shades going to do when I scrape through them. Then when we peel that tape, that gets me so excited. That really is like my favorite part, the tape peel, the reveal. [LAUGHTER] Let's go ahead, I want get some orange. But notice I'll clean my little knife off before I dig into a major different color, and then this might create some interest tomorrow when we're digging through. We may not see it at all, but at least we have it to experiment with. It's on this layer too that I would start my mark-making. Let's go ahead with some dark brown here. One day might be all your prep work and laying a base layer, and then the next day might be where you come in with some other colors and you start doing the fun stuff, so some of it is prep work and that's okay. I'm okay with that. This is some crazy colors here, I don't like any of those that I've picked, but I know that tomorrow I'm going to cover these up, so I'm just going to go with it for today. I might actually smooth this out with my bowl scraper just so that my layers aren't too thick on this one. I feel like this one almost looks a bit like Halloween. [LAUGHTER] There we go. Let's go for that. I might do that over here too. Because I'm not going to see any of this layer, I already know in my mind that I want to lay some thin layers of other things on top, so my goal here is to not have a really beautiful bottom layer. That's okay. I'm just laying the groundwork for me to be able to smooth things on top of these tomorrow without something surprising getting in my way. At this point, we could come in and do some mark making, and then these marks will show through to the next layers, it'll make indentions for us possibly, so we might go ahead in here and just start adding in some interesting textures and marks. [NOISE] That's definitely an interesting texture. Then I might take my little tool here, I could do [NOISE] maybe some scribbles that look like writing maybe, that might be fun. [NOISE] I could go in and do some long marks, and then anywhere where I'm building up paint, I'm going to go ahead and take that build-up off with me, I'm not going to leave a great big blob in the middle of my painting. This one gives you a good indicator too of being able to see colors through your colors. See if I can lift this up so you can see that. Let's see how you see these other color shining through the blue and the green. That's what those layers make it so interesting for us, so I love that. Well, let's just see if there's anything else I want to put in here. I love this little squiggle. Yeah, look at that. We can just go through randomly, I like that right there. I like that. Now, before I just overdo everything [LAUGHTER] I'm going to go through now, I got some other color on this, but doesn't really matter. We move that back in, we can cover that tomorrow with a different color. I think I'm almost out here, we'll try this. What I'm going to do now, I'm going to go ahead and let this dry overnight and start on one of my other little projects, and then we'll come back to this tomorrow to add some more layers. At this point, we're going to have to stop and let this dry enough to continue adding some real thin layers of color on top of that to make an overall abstract that I have in my mind, you can do all the pieces in one day and be done and peel your tape and say, this is what I did today, and sometimes I do that. This time though I think I want to create some different abstracts with maybe some layers on top of this that I can dig into tomorrow and just see what we can create. Some of these paintings, you can work on these every day for a couple of weeks and just add another layer each day. Depends how into you get and the vision that you have. We're going to let these dry overnight and I will see you tomorrow. [MUSIC] 9. Color Study - Mark making: [MUSIC] Let these dry overnight, so our underpaintings are done and we're ready to start painting on top of these. I did manage to find my good container of Galkyd. If you ever get one that's super thick and basically won't even come out of the container, then it's no good. I don't really use the Galkyd. It simply going to add a little bit of shine to our wax. That's why it's still good, it's still sealed. It never did dry out [LAUGHTER]. But it adds a little bit of shine to our paint, makes it more satin rather than matte, and it makes the paint a little more flexible. Just to maybe try it out a tiny bit, you just want like a drop. It's not like you want a whole lot. You can do more than a drop, but I was always told just a tiny drop and mix it in really good. Then it also aids in the drying of your piece. Because even though these are somewhat dry, I wouldn't say they're 100 percent dry, they're definitely mostly dry to the touch because I did real thin layers on this one. One of the pieces where I did real thick layers, the paint's not as dry, but it's mostly stiff and we could keep adding layers on top of it today. Even if it feels dry to the touch, it doesn't mean it's finished curing. You want to usually let your piece finish curing for a few weeks at least before you're going to try to finish it with more wax and then buff it because you don't want to try to buff a piece a day after you create it, it's just not going to work for you. I think what I'm going to do is I want thin layers. I want it to look like we've built the paint up, and so even though we're starting on this today, we may have to visit this again tomorrow, if we're adding stuff and the paint gets too thick. Let's just see how it goes. Let me see if I can skip this up. I think I want to work on, say, this one first. Well, maybe the green one first, and then I may flip them around so that they're closer to me. I think we'll start here. I've got some colors over here. The ocher, this dark blue is this indigo. Let me get that back out of the paint. Then this is the Van **** brown. This is warm white, and this is white, white and white because, let me mix that up a little more, I want to be able to mix this into a lighter shade and the blue into a lighter shade, and I still want some white and warm white available. What I'm going to do is take a little tiny bit of the ocher and mix that in the white and see if that's the color I'm wanting. That's nice. I want to do thin layers, so I want to build it up into some other things. Earlier in the paint mixing video, I think I mixed the paint first and then mix it all with wax. This video I'm showing you that I'm mixing the wax ones all up together. You can mix paint either way. If you want to do it before you put the wax in, you can. If you want to do it afterwards, you can do that too. Let me just add smidgen of this blue. That's a pretty color, and I may want a darker shade later, but I don't know, let's start with that. I'm just wiping off my tools on my shop rag. I do have my gloves on today. You'll notice my gloves are blue instead of white. The blue gloves, just in case you're wondering, are nitrile, which are what medical people use, I believe, and I got these at the Home Depot too, so you can get them at the hardware store. The white gloves are latex gloves. If you have a skin allergy or sensitivity to latex, then try the nitrile because those are for people who can't wear the latex and it's a good alternative. I think I want to have some real thin layers. I want to layer this up. Let's just get some thin layers on here. I'm using my great big silicone scraper to do that because I don't want it super thick, I want to build them up, and I want some of these layers to peek out from underneath possibly, or I may go back with some mark-making and then let it reveal some of the underneath. If we start off with thinner layers, we can work longer because once the paint gets too thick, then you're just pulling paint off, it doesn't really work that well for you. I am scrubbing it a little tiny bit to let some of these marks under here show through. I'm just adding a little more paint and a little more paint just to see. Let's get it where we want it. Then got a little orange tip there left at the bottom, I love that. I like that. Maybe on top of that, I might layer some of the ocher. It's almost too. If it's not giving you thin enough layers today, like if you're doing this and you're thinking, well, I want each layer to be that layer I was just laying on, then you may have to do one layer a day. Now because these are a little color sample sets, their practice pieces we're experimenting, I really want you to get some quick wins in there, and I'd like for you to be able to finish a piece or two in one or two sittings. But once you get to painting great big real pieces for yourself, you may spend months on those. You might just come in every single day and add another layer, another coat on there that it just takes the build-up. If I were wanting, say, the Van **** brown on here and then the blue on top of that, then I might have to wait for all that to dry to put the blue on top of that for tomorrow, so that the blue shows up. Keep in mind your layers. But I want these to be a little quicker wins. I'm going to continue layering some color on here. I am thinking a little bit about composition. What do I want the final piece to be? Because these aren't like the big one where we're going to cut pieces out. These are little pieces that need to be finished when we pull the tape, because they're small. I'm thinking, rule of thirds, I don't want everything right in the center. How do I want the colors to merge? I don't want them to be too tight and clustered, which is normally my style. On this size piece, it's really good to then practice some of the ideas that you have in your mind. I'm keeping in mind light and dark. Where do I want the light and dark areas? If I put in a dark area, I don't necessarily want it to be in one one. That didn't work there. Where else could I put it so that we draw our eyes around the piece? Look at that. This instantly got yummy yummy. We're going to leave that there. Don't touch that. [LAUGHTER] Maybe I want some of this warm white. Don't be afraid to move your paper around as you're working. I'm a little bit stuck here in my space that I'm using just because of my filming gear, my rig, that setup to show you what I'm doing. But as you're working, don't be afraid to move everything around so that you can get to whichever side you need to get to. Normally, I have a whole lot more table space to be working on. But then would be outside my little gears legs and I couldn't show you everything we're doing. So I'm trying to keep it where you can see. Look at this. I really like that. Let me add in a touch of white maybe here. Well, I might go back with a smaller apparatus. Let's let this one soak for a minute and we'll think about it, and I might come to a touch of white here. Think on this one I'm going to go ahead and do a layer of what I've got here on my piece. Look at that I already like just the peaking of stuff, peaking underneath. I love that. So we might come back with one of our brushes that I've got some of these catalysts brushes, I've got different things, but I've got some of these that are actually rubber brushes too. Does this need no more white? I mean, I almost want to be able to ask your opinion. [LAUGHTER] How about we put some mark-making in here? So I've got this yummy tool that I love. Before we jump into the second one. I've got my mark-making tool that I really love so I might go in and do some lines in here. Oh my goodness, I can see all those yummy underneath colors already showing through. Oh my goodness. Let me see if I can lift this up so that you can see exactly how yummy those layers underneath start to show through. That is like the goal. [LAUGHTER] We want what's in the under layer there to be peeking through in the different layers. Just add that interest for us. I love that. Because I'm working in a lot of wet paint, I'm trying to wipe my tip off so I don't end up with a great big splurges of paint here on here. Now if we do all that and we think, oh, that was too much or I don't love it. Just take our little spreader here and we can work some of these back in. We can push them back a little bit so that they're not as strong. Just some fun little details in there. We can come back with a little bit of the white. You got to be careful not to dunk on the paper here into the paint, which I'm really good at doing. [LAUGHTER] But I need to be able to get to this a little better here. Here we go. I like that. I don't want it to be so super dramatic. I wonder if I used my score tip here, if I could have got a little bit smaller line, I could also come in with some other marks. Maybe some little tiny. I don't know. I'm really loving that like it is. I almost feel like if I continue with it, I'm going to ruin it. So let's stop on that one. Let's just say we love that one. Let's go for it. We could add a touch of white somewhere else in there. But I think for the sake of this, we're going to call that one done. I don't want you to spend so much time on these that you're overthinking it like I'm trying to do right there. Then I think on this one, I may still go with the same colors because maybe this will be the series and just see what can I do to make this one slightly different? What can we do? So let's just go for it. That's pretty. So maybe on this one, I want it to be some blue and yellow coming in. I like that. Then maybe let's do this white. Let's see. What do we want the white to do? Let's go ahead and bring the white end right here. Again, if you don't want the colors blending in with each other as much as I have. Then paint your color on there and then come back tomorrow and do it again. But I'm okay with some of the color blending. We're going a little bit faster today with these to get just so you wouldn't get. Let's see. What do you want the dark blue, I like the dark blue. So let's see. Let's bring the dark blue in here. Oh yeah, like that. Let's do that. Look at that. Let's leave that one. Now I don't even want to touch it. [LAUGHTER] I do want to this little piece right here. Oh, here we go. Don't necessarily want that to be blue. I like that to be yellow. So let's go back with a little bit of yellow and let that blue be underneath. There we go. So now we could do some mark-making. So let's see. Let's use some of our foam stamps here. Because I like those. They're subtle, they're not as strong. Which I might come back. Maybe on this one we could do a few dots. Let's do that. See there. [LAUGHTER] Exactly what I wanted. Just a few dots. There we go. I like that. On this one because we did dots there, we might come back and do dots on this one too and I'm doing it ever so gently. But look at that that's exactly what I wanted. So subtle, not super-strong and then let's call that one good. I think I'm going to leave that like it is. I could come back with some lines. Maybe a few lines weren't straight, but it is pretty. [LAUGHTER] Let's leave that on there. I might put a few lines here. So real pretty. See if you can see the very subtlety that we just added in there. But I'm loving those. So let's flip them around and do these. You'll love some of these when we peel the paint. So let's see what we can do here. I might use these fun cardboard on one. They don't all have to be the same to be in a series, but when you're in a series, you want them similar. Let's start with this color on this yummy red. Because in a series they don't all look the same, but maybe you have some similar elements that time altogether. So it's almost like your goal here is to do four different compositions using the same one color palette to see what you can get. That'll tie them together, but they still all look like their own individual little pieces. [NOISE] So I'm loving that. I'm even loving this little bit of red that's shining through, our piece doesn't really have read in our color scheme. I do like that coming through. I always like it when you're working with a great big spreader like this because you're less precious and you get into doing some things that you might not be able to do with a smaller brush. Should be like this pretty ice blue that I mixed up. That's a pretty color. Let's do this right here. Let's just get this all the way over. Let's let this be the majority blue instead of majority yellow and then maybe I'll come back with a little bit of yellow. I like it. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, let's do that. Then maybe we got some brown here that I haven't used before, the Van ****. Let's just put this right here. Let's just get it right here in the middle. That's pretty. I love that. That's pretty I don't want to overwork it, but I do want it to have like a shape. [MUSIC] 10. Color Study - Finishing your studies: [MUSIC] I like that right there. Let's do that. Then I might come back in with this creamy white. I like that. Let's let that do its thing for a minute. Then we'll come over here to this one. Let's make this one. Let's just start off with say the brown, because I haven't started off with a dark color yet. Maybe we'll pull some of the blue in here. Just making quick decisions here, so don't think too hard about it. [NOISE] Look at that. That's really fun. Then I might come back in with this lighter yellow that I made with the ocher and the white. Fill in some of this, then we might top it off with the light blue. Let's just see what we get here. That's fine. Let's put some more of this blue over here. I'm not being as careful as I might be if this were a piece that I was doing for something really special. It is fun to work in this way where you're playing with colors, you're experimenting with something you've not played with before just to see some of what you can get. I don't think I want any white in here, but I might come back over here with this yummy yellow a little bit, just to give some touches. Let's put some marks in, that might be my least favorite. I do like working in a series because then I can see what I can get. Not all of them, I'm not going to like all of them and I'm okay with that. Let's do some of these yummy lines like that, and then come back with some dots maybe. That's pretty. Then we'll just look at it is or anything else we want to add or change, or we ready to pull the tape and set these to the side and let them dry. I like that better now and I flipped it over. Oh, I didn't put any in this one. Because I don't want you to think too hard about these, I want you to set yourself almost like a timer and say, okay, I want to spend 30 minutes on these today, 30 minutes on these tomorrow, and then I'm going to go with whatever it is I got and just see. It makes you work faster, almost like if you set a timer, it makes you go faster, it makes you think. It makes you not get into your own headspace because you're going much faster and thinking less about it. Then when you're done, the abstract piece is a little more organic and a little different than what you might normally have created. Let's call these done for today. I can trim these out of their little square after they're dry in a day or two. But let's go ahead and pull the tape because that is the most exciting part. It's usually the part where I end up with something crazy good that I wasn't even expecting. Let's just peel our tape and do the reveal. Oh, I do like this purple tape. It does actually give me hope. I didn't start with wherever I started. That's hard figuring out where did you start. [LAUGHTER] But it's actually super easy to peel off of the paper, and it's giving me a really clean edge. I do really like this purple tape. This is the painter's tape for delicate surfaces, which is nice because your art paper is a delicate surface. You want to be able to preserve that and not tear it if this is a nice piece of art that you're creating, or I will say that it looks like here I didn't have it stuck down for those under layers, which drives me a little bonkers. I like a clean, white age. [LAUGHTER] But that's okay. These are our practice pieces, and I can always, if I frame it, put that under a mat. I think I need to take off this tape and I need to be really careful because I've got blue paint on my fingers now and I don't want to get that on my white paper there. I'm just going to make sure that I've got most of that wiped off. Wipes off pretty good there. I'm getting it off of the tape because the tape is still wet. If I peel this tomorrow, I wouldn't be having any of this issue, but I want to go ahead and see what our final pieces look like. [NOISE] Look at these. I love this colorway. Even though I took these colors from my inspiration piece that I have from Rebecca Croll, you can see that what I ended up with is nothing like the piece that inspired us. I just liked using the same color tones because I liked those colors. Look how pretty these are, and I think I like it better this away. Now that's all done, if you did this and then you're thinking, tomorrow when you come back and you're thinking, oh, this needs a touch of whatever or some finishing top marks with some oil supplies on top. Because now if you want to put something on top of this, it cannot be anything water-based. If you want to put something, extra marks on top, it needs to be something oil-based. You could do that with the oil pastels, you can add a few extra marks if you wanted. You could scrape back, you could dig into the wax because once it's partially dry but not completely dry, you can still dig into it and you can scrape back. If there's an area that you don't like, you can actually take one of your putty knives and you could scrape some back. But I'm actually thrilled with the way that this turned out. I think I'm going to leave them like that. These three pieces really matched to me and then this is like the odd ball, [LAUGHTER] but I still love it. Hope you enjoyed this exercise, I really like. On some of these, you can see those under colors shining through, just tiny bits that add to the overall layers and interests when you get closer and look at your pieces. Do an ugly underpainting, it doesn't matter because the stuff you put on top is going to cover the most of it, but you'll still get little glimpses of the under color showing through. I love on this one, how, right here on this corner you can see the orange bits shining through. I love that right here. Just shining through a tiny bit. Super fun. I hope you love this little project. It's a little color study project that we can just let loose and experiment without too much involved in it. I cannot wait to see the ones that you create and the colors that you pick. I will see you back in class. [MUSIC] 11. Larger Abstract project: This is our larger abstract that I want to do in the similar way as I've done the color study. I need a little bit more paint out. I'm going to put a little bit of the white and a little bit more ocher, and a little set of four. That's your trial towards getting to this bigger piece. It's the way you can try out marks, and what color did you like on the bottom, and what do we want to end up overall on the top. Get a little more wax out. It's your place to play and get some things figured out before you get to this bigger piece. But I do think it's important to do the smaller ones before you hop into the bigger one because the bigger one you can then pull one of your smaller pieces. The ideas that you created on it, you can pull those together into a bigger piece easier than just jumping into the bigger piece. I'm going to use the same color palette for the bigger one that I used for the color studies. I'm just mixing up a little more of this ocher, and I'm going to mix up a little more of that white. Then if I have leftover paint, I may take a board because I actually have a cradle board that I can use as my extra paint palette. This is just primed in gesso. It's primed in black gesso rather than white gesso. You do get a different look to your piece if you start off with white or if you start off with black. Black makes the colors more vivid than the white base does. I find that very interesting. I'm going to use this as my extra paint trash palette. It may end up being a piece of trash when we're done. But you may end up with some abstract piece that we love when we're done. I'm doing this on a cradle board. You could do it on paper. But I do think it's fun to experiment on cradle board to see the difference in painting on this versus painting on paper. What we might do is this could be all our extra paint for our underlayers and then I might then be able to use this as a fourth project. That's my goal there. I do have a cradle board handy. It's already primed. You can prime it in black or white. We're going to put that to the side. That way I don't feel like I have to then paint another piece out of these same colors. I can start with a new color palette if I want to jump into my next project. But definitely, the reason why I say don't mix up too much paint, let it be a little bitty dab of paint because when you mix it with the wax, it goes so far and it turns into way more paint than you even think. This is another like we did with the color studies. We're going to paint this base coat on and then we're going to let that dry overnight before we come back with our coat tomorrow. If you're working with a bigger piece of paper, I find it easier if you'll work with larger tools. Instead of using the little bitty palette knife, like I used in little pieces, I'm working with a bigger scraper and I'll probably work with a bigger palette knife so that all of my marks don't end up tiny. I really have a habit of getting tight in on my piece. I get close in on my photography. If you'll work with bigger tools as you get with a bigger piece of art, some of that you'll be able to then maybe stop yourself from doing. It's hard to work in a little tiny cluster of lines if you're not using a little tiny tool. I could have started this piece off with mark-making, but I didn't. We're just going to go with it. That's great little extra paint there and then I'm going to clean off my scraper piece here. Could go ahead and do some mark-making, that might still show through our layers. You want to get in the habit of doing some mark-making with each layer. You end up with interesting things that shine through in the end that you might not have expected. Do it even if you think that it's going to be covered up because in the end, it may be just a little tiny piece that we see that makes the piece much more interesting than you thought it was going to be. Like on the painting, you had a little tiny bit showing in the upper corner of an orange. That's a surprise because you don't expect it to be there until you get closer. Let's just see if we come in with a palette knife with white. Almost looking for a glaze here more than like a stark white shade. Look how pretty that's turning out. I'm not being too deliberate with my composition there. I'm just adding color at this point because we're not in a finishing layer. So the composition could definitely change with each layer. I like things that look like they could have been writing, but you can't quite tell what it might've said. That's why I'm doing this little squiggle line right in here. You might think I had written something in there, you're not quite sure. Then we can smooth a little in there and then it's like hints of writing. It's not like it was really super vivid or hints of our line and stuff. I love doing that. Let's see. At this point, I'm not sure if I want to continue adding to this today as much as waiting for tomorrow, and then layering my next thing over the whole thing possibly and making some marks. I think for today, I'm going to stop and let this dry, and we'll come back to it tomorrow when I'm ready to layer on top of that pretty sturdily. I will see you tomorrow. This one's dry to the touch. We let this sit overnight so it is really pretty and dry. I think what we might do before we even lay paint on it is just to show you you can dig right into the wax that's dry the next day. We can come in here and make some yummy marks on our piece without damaging the paint or getting too far in there. Look how pretty those lines are, and we don't dig out tons of paint that is thicker and harder and, I don't know, it's easier to almost mark-make on top of dry paint like that. Look at that. It just makes the most beautiful, crisp lines and marks. I love that. Once you come back to your piece from yesterday, don't be afraid to come on here and go ahead and scribble on it and do some mark-making. You won't be able to stamp in like your foam stamps or anything like that. That's not going to work. That had paint on it. But you can do something like a little bit of mark-making in that wax, and we could scrape back if there's something that we hated. I could take a knife and I could actually scrape back some wax, and you can see it just comes off nice and easy there. I don't know if that was blurry for you. I'm sorry if it was. I've got my paint palette out from my little sample sets that we were just doing because I don't want to throw them away. I don't want to think super hard on this one either because I want you to get some quick wins. I want you to think a little faster. We're doing some abstract. I don't want you to get real bogged down in every layer being really hard to do. I'm going to work a little faster on this little bit larger piece also just to see what fun stuff I can come up with. I want to go in the direction of pink and ocher and this warm white more so than the blues because I like pink and ocher. It's one of my favorite colorways in there. So I like the undercolor that's here already. Maybe I'll come in and do some pink areas on top of this, and we could see some of our shine through of our bottom layers. It doesn't have to be super thick paint as we're going because if you like the bottom layer, you don't have to cover it up completely. You can work with it. I got some pink edges here. I like that. Already liking this. I think I'm going to come back with some of this yummy ocher white color. That's pretty. I like how this created some texture on its own. Look how that created this pretty bit of texture in there, just pulling from the texture that's underneath it. So pretty. Picked up some pink here. I don't know if I want that there. I'll go pick up some of this warm white that I mixed up. It's another light shade that I can layer on top of what we've got going and just add a subtle layer of difference in there. With that color change being a slight lighter shade than the ocher that we had mixed with the white. I like that. Now let's come back in with some actual ocher. Just to add that extra layer of depth there because we're covering ocher, but it's a little different shade because the other one has the white paper showing through it. So now we're adding that extra layer of depth there with this top layer and texture. Then I also reserver the right when we peel the tape, if I love a piece of it better than the whole thing, I reserve the right to cut out the piece I love because that really is my favorite technique on the abstract. If I end up not loving the piece, I can cut the pieces out that I love and then I feel like I've never wasted anything because I love what I've pulled out. Look at that. I'm liking that. Let's see if we go in with some mark-making. I've got some of the cardboard, so we might do a little bit of some cardboard work in here. Maybe I'll use this to pick it up. That's really light, but look at that extra tiny bit of detail. Let's go with that. I like that. I like the dots. Let's put some dots in there. These layers are still pretty thin, so the texture I'm adding in here is not so dramatic that were like texture. I like that. Now this is an instance where we could come in tomorrow and we could scratch through and add some more layers tomorrow if we wanted. If we get to tomorrow and we think it needs some more, we could do that. I'm going to come back now, now that I've added those, maybe a little more of the pink on top. I'm choosing to do most of this stuff with no brushes, but you can certainly do brushes and stuff if you want. But the cold wax is harder to control because it's so thick, it's not as easy with a brush, but you can certainly put some brush marks in there. You could try and just work it. It's spreading the pink around a little bit, tying that color all the way through. I like that. I'm going to go back and play with the ocher a little bit more. I'm not good with just a block of color. It's just not my style. It's not what ends up appealing to me so when I have just a splotch of color on there, I just cannot leave it alone. I have a feeling I might be cutting some out of this tomorrow, but we'll see. We could come back in and do some marks. Let's go ahead and just go ahead and add some interest to these. I love doing a little ladder. That's fine. Look how fun that is. Little ladder mark-making in there, so pretty. I might come over here and do some scratch through this little bit here. Look how pretty that is. It's got the yummy yellow showing through, super fun there with that. Maybe do some real soft lines right here, which I might mimic just above it and I'm just touching real light so I don't pick up too much paint. Maybe we'll have some fake scribble writing so it makes it look like something's in there. You can put real words in there if that's your thing, too. If you've got some beautiful words of poetry or something that means a lot to you, add that in there. Make it messy writing, but make it be something that mean something to you. I love the writing in there. That really set that off for me. Let's go and add some more up here. If you want to obscure it a tiny bit like you love it but you're like, let's make it even more obscured, come back with one of your spatula tools and just lightly work that in so that's it's almost like the writing is in it, not on top of it. I love that. That works out nice. I do love rubbing the line back with your catalyst. That's pretty cool. I'm loving where that is. I'm going to go ahead and take the tape off so we can see what the finished piece looks like. But I guarantee you all come back tomorrow and cut a piece out of it because I love this little scrap right here. I love this little scrap right here. I love that right there. I love little bits of it so much more than I love the whole big piece, which is the way I tend to create. It really just behooves me usually to just create a bigger piece and then come back and pull the bits out that I really, really love. I even love this bigger 6 by 9 piece. This right here, I love that right there. But I'm not going to cut this one up for this video because it's all wet. But let's go ahead and peel our tape off. Let me pull one of my gloves off so I can peel the tape and see what we got. Because this I want you to work a little faster, I just want you to think of it as a fast, fun, abstract work. I don't want you to think super hard about it. I don't want you to spend days and days on your first one, but when you get to the point that you're like, okay, I want to dive deeper into these paper pieces, are such a wonderful way to experiment with all your techniques. If this were a piece that I was wanting to really have those layers dry in-between, then I would do a layer, let it dry overnight. Do a layer, let that dry overnight. Then at some point, I would finally be like, okay, now my piece is done. Cut the tape on the back pretty good here. I'm going to get it where I can grab it. There we go. I make sure there's nothing on my finger before I touch the side of the paper because I've already got paint on this side of the paper. I can see it throughout right there. I might just take my paint rag, so move your paint a little further away. I can't move it so far away with the filming, but I do have it far enough out where I could trim that if I loved it enough that I wanted to use it for something. I'm just cramped in here with the filming, sorry. Now that we're done and I flipped it over, I love this. We can actually see what direction do we really love it best. But I'm feeling like this direction right here is what I love. I'm actually super happy with that. Maybe I won't cut anything out of that and that'll be my finished piece. If you're going to sign your pieces, too, I recommend you wait until the next day when it's dry. Then you can take your little marking tool and just sign your little signature on the piece itself. I could do it now, too, though. This is 2020, so I can put the year in there and then I have signed my piece. Just decided. It's easier the next day when the layers mostly dry, you get a nice clean signature in there, but that's how I'd sign it if I was done with it. But look how beautiful that actually ended up. I'm super happy with it. I may not cut any out of it and I may come back and just see, is there anything I like better? For some reason, this corner up here I'm just in love with. As a, say, like a five by five piece, I would love that mounted to a cradle board and then hung on the wall. But I actually love my big piece, too, so that one might just stay like it is. I hope you enjoy doing the bigger paper piece. Don't spend too much time on your first several pieces. Work a little faster with bigger tools and just see, get into the loosening up and see what can you create and how does the paints work and how do you enjoy working on a little bit bigger surface than the sample pieces, and just see what you can create. I'm looking forward to seeing your pieces, the colors that you pick out. If I didn't tell you what that pink was, it's light magenta from the Holbein one. That's the only color that I added onto my palette for this one. I'm looking forward to seeing your pieces. I'll see you back in class. 12. Random Abstract - Color blocking: All right. On this big piece of paper that I prepped, I have changed my colors, and I'm very inspired by the sample set that I showed you earlier, where I used the pink and the ocher and the white, a little bit of gray, and I had these colors with it, so I knew exactly what colors they were. It was a Portland Cool Grey by Gamblin. It was a whole bean, light magenta, which I love this pink, and the Winsor & Newton, yellow ocher, and a Gamblin warm white. This was a little sample I had been given by the Gamblin rep at an artist show. Then before I had pulled this back out because I was thinking I wanted to do orange and pink, I had put out some cadmium orange by Winsor & Newton. That's up there too, and I don't know how dominant that might be, but it could be something to add into this but I'm just really inspired by this color palette. I'm going to make one of my great big abstracts, like I do quite a bit with my acrylic paints, and then after it's all dry and we're done adding everything to it, the next day or the day after, once we let it dry overnight, we're going to then search out little pieces that maybe we found interesting. We're going to take our little viewfinder and see if there's any composition in the big one that we love. That's my favorite way to create abstracts because I can create without trying to consider my end result, which is very freeing. Then I put out a bunch of paint here and I don't know how much I'll be leftover because I don't know, I got super happy with the white and the orange there. I do have another trash can cradle board that's painted black because I had painted five or six of them, and so I just went into my closet and grabbed another one. The black is nice because it makes the colors more vivid than white, it is different in the look you get. But I have this ready, so if I have leftover paint, I can put that on here without wasting the paint and that can be the base of another future painting. On this part, I'm just going to take a big piece of graphite, I don't get paint everywhere before we get started here, I think this thing is hilarious because it's just a giant piece of graphite, like the inside of a pencil, but it's the whole thing and I got it in a sketch box subscription that I had and I never would have bought that but now that I've used it several times, I really like it. It's a nice silvery gray color and it's easy to work with, I really like using this thing, and since I have it, I'm going to use it and I'm just adding marks to the paper. We may or may not see them, it's something that sometimes we see and sometimes we don't, but it does get passed white page paralyzation. But this whole technique really gets past that white page paralyzation because of the way we do it, we're just laying paint on with no thought of what our end piece is going to be. The paper is so big, maybe I don't have enough paint mix, we'll see. I'm actually going to do something similar to what I've done in one of my little abstract classes, the Abstract Adventures 3, and try to work in larger color blocks here, just for a different technique than what we've done in the other ones and be a little more deliberate. We're maybe only going to work on this, the one day, this might not be a multi-layer piece where we multi-layer for days and days, if may, we'll just see what we can get today and tomorrow search out interesting pieces. In which then, we could, if we found something we really loved and then that piece needed more to it, we could always add to those pieces when we do that. After we cut out something interesting, we could then add the interest, if we needed something more. But let's just start with this and just see. I'm trying to work more in blocks of color because the little abstracts that I ended up with in the acrylic class are some of my very favorite and they're sitting over here, maybe I should show those to you real quick. I hate to talk about something and then you wonder what I'm even talking about. But you can see, I'm in that pink and brown and ocher color family again with a little bit of this rouge-y color. I really like it because these I was working in larger color blocks also and now that I'm looking at this too, I really liked this dark brown. I may come back with a little bit of Van Dyke brown and add to my palette because I really love how that came out. These little acrylic pieces are even just as much inspiration as that original bit that I was just showing you. I'm just going to lay a color down here. Let's just go on into our next color and then we'll search out fun stuff tomorrow once this has dried, just see what we can get. We can already tell it's going to look nothing like the inspiration piece because I'm working in great big blocks of color and that inspiration piece, the color was mooshed all around together. That'll be very interesting to then look at that and see, well how different did the different techniques create? I doubt these every time I do, I'm like, I don't know, am I going to like this? Is this going to turn out how I thought? I'm in that moment of doubt right now thinking, no, did I pick the right thing that I should have gone a different direction. Just know as you're painting these and you're having those thoughts, I'm having those thoughts right now. We all have these thoughts. I don't know. These are so much more vivid compared to that inspiration piece that I don't know, am I going to love this or not? I don't know why I just wiped off my knife when I went right back to the orange. To start with on these, my goal is to get the background covered, get all my blocks of color started. That's where I start with on these. That's my goal. Then I'll start going back thinking. Do I love this? Do I love that or can we add now that we've got some color going? Maybe I want two colors to mix together. Let's start making and stuff and just see what can we do in here. You already know that this orange is so overpowering that maybe that just needs to be a touch of something. Maybe smearing some of these other colors on top will make me like it better. Mixing on the palette knife as I'm doing this, might be taking away from my overall goal of making these big splashes of color to start with, but you've got to start somewhere, so I just figure. We'll start there and see what we can get as we go. See, look at that as this mix. Now, that is really pretty to me compared to these big strong colors out here. I really like that the oil paint takes a lot longer to dry because now we have the opportunity to go through and get these colors to mix and do stuff. I could still be doing this an hour from now if I wanted to just work on it for a long time. I love that. I love that I'm not hemmed in with a time frame. Might have to mix up some more paint. How about that? That's very interesting in there. Still have some gray here, so I might need to start pulling gray in for I break down and mix up more paint. Look how that just, oh, my goodness, that was super fun right in there. I'm going to need some more paint. Let's start getting out some more paint. Just as a reminder, mixing out a little dab of paint, and then I'm going to put some wax right next to each dab of paint. Then I don't think I want even more orange. Then we're going to try to mix that, and I say a 50-50 mixture. That's what we're going for. I like to keep these little pink keys handy. I always hide things from myself, so I have to have three or four little of the same tool. I have three or four of these little pink keys because I am always setting it down and then going, oh no, where'd my little pink go? But if we've got more than one, then I can just grab the next one. Then eventually, when I do a little cleanup, all the paint comes back out. Let's save that. All paint comes back out. I was not thinking and talking at the same time. When I started cleanup then all the little pieces I find where I hid everything for myself and then I can put it all back where it belonged. Got a little rag here. Mixing each color clean with a clean spatula. If you'd like to work with stencils, if you could do some stencil work here too, you could press the stencil into the paint to make a pattern like we did with these foam pieces that have texture on them. Let's start mixing some more of this color, let's see the white with it. In the end, you can't tell that I started with big blocks of color, but sometimes, you just got to go with wherever that feeling is taking you. I do like the way that this smudge together really prudently. I could smooth some of these layers with my bowl scraper just to see what we get before I start mark-making. Makes the color very interesting. Very atmospheric. Little more ethereal, almost, which I find interesting that may not be your style. Tomorrow, that might not be my style but every single day I set to paint, maybe I'm feeling something a little different. Look how pretty that is. Then if you wanted tighter color and more definition than I'm doing, definitely paint whatever inspires you. Another thing I like to do too, let's see if I can get this as some of the white, really fun scrapes and texture when we just pull white across or may not get it because it's still very wet. There we go. This texture that we can get when we add one color and just work it in a certain area. This is softly wet, it might have worked better dry, but I like this texture. I like that one right there. I like that one. I didn't mean to do that. Let's spread that back out. I'm just going through and adding some really thick, solid color on top of here. Just to add to the composition that hopefully will eventually search out and discover. No rhyme reason where I'm putting these and again, I'm still just playing. But I hope in the end, all the plane gives us interest that we just didn't even expect. Sometimes, these are too thick, like with that white is just too thick up there. I think once I use all this paint, I'm not going to mix anymore, so I might not need that trash palette for this one. Let's call that one good with all the paint. I don't know, we're going to end up with something that we like. I don't know. This is over so that I don't stick my hand in it. How about that? Now, let's use some of our bits and pieces and go in and add some pattern. I just did that where I spun it accidentally. Be really careful not to spin. I just smooth it out a little bit where still got our texture without ruining it. But be careful not to spin these or get so excited that you do that or something because it looks like you moved when you did it. It doesn't look like you did it on purpose. 13. Random Abstract - Adding Details: [MUSIC] Then I've got the one with the dots here. I love dots. I'm just going to be real careful, tap some dots in with hopefully, not moving it around. I don't care that it has paint on it, I just let the paint on there. It just dries and it still works again the next time. I really like this one with the stripes. I'm going to stamp down a few of these with some stripes. Look at that. I love that. It could come back in with a little drag tool and just see. At some point, you have to decide, do I have enough going on? Am I ready to stop? Maybe I do have enough going on and we can just see, are we ready to let this dry? I just might look around with my little viewfinder and see, is there going to be something tomorrow that I think I love? Or am I just overdoing it with the color? Tomorrow, do I need to come back in and really do like a white or something over here so that bits of this shows through and it's not so chaotic? That might be something that we do tomorrow. We may spend more than one day on this by then editing out different bits of this to make it really be something that we can pull a composition out of that's not overly busy because some of this really not what I had in mind, so we may then work on this tomorrow. Let me let this dry overnight and we will revisit this one tomorrow too. I'll see you then. Here is our big junk palette on the next day. I will say this is probably 80 percent dry because some of this paint is super thick and you can see if I touch it, it still gets on my finger. You definitely want to be working with gloves. Let me put my gloves on because some of these paints like the cadmium and stuff like that, they're toxic to be on the skin and I just try to keep as much off my skin as possible, but I'm not afraid of the paint. If you have problems with paint fumes, then consider a little air purifier, a fan, maybe a window open, consider some of those things. I'll be honest and tell you, the fumes don't bother me, so I actually just can't even smell them. Maybe in my old age [LAUGHTER] I'm losing my sense of smell. I don't know. This is our underlayer and it's got lots going on and then we'll put another layer on top of this. I'll definitely have to let this dry another day before I then take my yummy little viewfinders and pick out pieces that I love. This is my favorite way to create. While this paint is in a semi dry state, it's dry enough for us to layer on top of it and it is the perfect time to add any additional mark-making that you think you may want because you get such a nice clean edge in the semi dry state compared to when the paint was wet. We don't have to add too many marks, but we may just like a few in here. I like to scribble writing, so I might put some of those. I also like it when there's a random ladder [LAUGHTER] like you have a mark and another one. Then we have just some nice cross hatches in there and I call that the ladder. I found this little tool too that this paint is still wet enough for me to create some little circle marks. This is a rubber spout funnel, [LAUGHTER] but just think of things that have shapes that would make interesting designs. Because I've got such thick paint on here, it was still wet enough for me to make little circles in here. I was just looking around at different things that I could mark make with and just seeing anything I wanted to add to this layer before I now start on a top layer. I'm going to use the paint that I've already been working with. I'm going to try to use all my paint that I've got out and just see what we can get. I'm going to actually maybe start with some white and start editing out some of these areas. I say editing out because right now there's too much going on and there's almost nothing for me to look at as focal points within some other areas that can shine through. I almost want to edit what's going on here, not really thinking about how I'm editing though. I'm still very much working intuitively because this is not my composition. I'm going to be finding compositions out of this. Will be today because now on top of the wet paint, there's no way that I'll be able to cut these without getting paint on everything, but I do want to at least get that next layer on. Then we'll have to let this dry and then we can start searching out compositions that we love, but I do want to edit some of the busyness out of it. I actually like how this is turning out now that some of that white is toning down the busyness because I want it to be not super overwhelmingly busy. We'll come in now and we'll use this almost as my trash palette and fill in with some of the paint that I've got left over. I could be more strategic with specific colors too, but these are in my color palette. Let's just see what we can do here with the paint that we've got out before we start mixing any other paint if I want to do that later. Let's just take a look before we go any further. Now, I could then start thinking, what do I love here? Are there enough dark and light? Do I have enough showing through of the under layers that I like? Nothing standing out to me yet, so let's just keep going, but if you did your little viewfinder, which this is just four strips of watercolor paper that I've cut up and taped together to make a five-by-five square, and then this one I think is a five-by-seven square. I've done the same thing. Decide what sizes you want your finished pieces to be and then you can cut some squares out of those pieces. We don't have to be so square here with our paint putting on this. We can start doing some little shapes and things. I could use other things to put the paint on with if I wanted to work with a catalyst tool instead of the big tool, I could do that. Let's do that just to see the difference. I want you to experiment with the tools that you use to put paint on so that you can get a feel for what some of these different things will do. Let's go in with some yellow and maybe I want to get some other marks and streaks in there instead of everything being so straight. That might be fun. It's got a lot of paint on it. Let's keep that paint. This tool is a completely different field to work with than the bigger tool. This is by far my favorite. I'm almost scared here, but let's dive in with some dark color. Maybe we need some darkness in here so that when we go to pull compositions out, I've got some dark, I've got some light areas, I've got things of interest I can pull from. That's not all one tone, or one shade, or one color family. I don't know what part of this I'll love, but I'm definitely adding different shades just in different places. I like it when it does this yummy mixy thing. That's really pretty. It doesn't all have to be completely solid color. Let's see. Did that give us any areas of contrast where we're thinking, "Oh, I love that." This, you can almost too start thinking of an area that you love and then think, "Oh, I need more of this or that," and you can start working towards a composition in this way. Maybe that needed some dark. Maybe we need some of those little lines that I love. I love these lines, I love doing that in pieces of art. The paint is so thick right now that it's not necessarily a completely clean line. If I put this paint, do this technique on dry paint, it wouldn't be going all the way through to the base color, but I like that it is doing that on the base color for this. If I go softer, I get less down to the base, kind of fun. See, now, I've got some spots where the color is a lot darker, maybe I like that, maybe I don't love it, maybe I love it completely. Who knows? This is definitely experimental play. It's an excellent way to experiment with color, blend things that you wouldn't normally have thought would go and just see what can we get. We've got brown here, but I don't know if I want to introduce another color. I might go back with some of the colors that we were already working with and just add some in here. Then when you're looking for compositions tomorrow or whatever day you're doing that, you don't have to call at the end if you've got something that you're like, okay, this is almost here and this needs one more thing. Don't be afraid to cut it out and then add that element that you're thinking it needs. Let's come back with some light. I like that. Let's make it do that again. I like that. Definitive line of lightness that was fun. I do like that. Completely different color palette than what I had imagined in my mind. If you're wondering there. [LAUGHTER] That's the fun of working this way. You just get things that are yummy and surprising and I didn't expect that. It's things I could never recreate again [LAUGHTER] I can guarantee you this is not something I could recreate a second time. These are one and done. These are custom one piece things. You're not going to be able to do this over and over. Which is what I like about working this way. Then you get fun ideas of compositions and colors to work with later. I love that. I love using these as samples for future larger projects maybe. I like these little bits of pink. The thicker you put this paint on, the longer it will take to dry, just know that. We may or may not be able to come back tomorrow and cut this out, because now we've got many, many layers of very thick paint. Let's just see, is there anything in there that I'm thinking that I like. I'm thinking I like that. I'm looking up in my camera, viewfinder the camera that's filming because it's almost like I'm standing back to look at it. I really liked this piece right here and I like that there's some light and some dark and some other things going in there. I almost want to be able to cut it up right now. With acrylic paint, we can just wait a few minutes. It'll be dry. I'm not liking anything right in here. I don't think I love that piece. I might go back up here and add some more stuff just to see if later I'll like it. With acrylic paint, oh, I didn't think that made that. Well I like that quite a bit more. With acrylic paint, I like it right there, we could be waiting an hour and then we can come back and cut this out. I really like this down here and I really like that up there. I like that they're in the same color range, but they're not exactly the same. I like that. Will we like it tomorrow? I don't know, but with acrylic paint, we wait an hour. We come back and cut this out but let's put some darkness here. We're not going to be able to do that with oil paint because you can't just put a heat gun on oil paint. It doesn't work that way. It won't dry it for you like you expect it to do with the acrylic paint, just doesn't work. Maybe if we put the dark like what's going on in this little area here. Tomorrow, I hope I remember I like that. [LAUGHTER] This is that yummy little bit of gray that we made with that pretty blue and the white. I don't want it to be a line that we went that way. I want it to be a little more organic there. [NOISE] Now, my goal is just to use up as much as this paint really as I can. I want to go ahead and not leave paint sitting out over here and not get it all over myself. [LAUGHTER] At this point, I'm going to think, what other marks can I make on here before I call this one for today? I've got my yummy little wire thing so let's just go through and maybe add some little lines. That's fun. [NOISE] That's fine. I like this little wire things and we can go squiggly. We don't have to do straight lines. These little tiny wiry pieces that were perfect for making fine little lines. I love that. Looks like a bunch of writing. I like a little extra thick paint then out. Of course, if you stick yourself, that hurts. [LAUGHTER] I do love these yummy extra little scribbles that we got going on there and I like the dots so let's put some dots in there. This paint's real thick so I'm being super careful not to move this all around. I just want to just have a finger's worth of dots. Wherever I tap my finger down, that's probably the dots we're going to get. I don't want the whole thing. I don't want it to be one big square dot thing and I don't necessarily want it to be a bunch of paint that I've just laid down on here on top of another color. I'm moving it all around. That's fun. The underside of this would make a bigger dot. That's fun. Let's see if there's any. [NOISE] These are really fun. It might be fun just to scrape a whole area of paint off. [NOISE] That's fun. That will element down there. [LAUGHTER] We just revealed some bright orange. That was pretty exciting to reveal that. I don't know if I'm going to love that or not. Then of course, I'm cleaning it up as well as I can here with my dirty paper towel. Let's just get a new paper towel and then I can just clean that up pretty easily and put that back away. Let's just see, did I just overdo it with those lines down there or did that add to my piece? In this case too, what I could do if I decided, some of this is too much or I've got some weird paint sticking up, I can come back through and soften some of these. Those were definitely vivid there. I don't know if I'm going to love those or not, [NOISE] but very interesting little experiment there. We could even now come run through here and soften these up a little by just smearing some paint back over them. We got texture there, but it pushes it back into our piece so it's not so vivid on top. [NOISE] Then, let's take a look. Do we still love that piece? I think I still do. There's still enough light and dark in there. This piece up here is still pretty fun. Tomorrow when this dries, I'm going to hunt some pieces out of here and this colorway is way different than I expected, since I threw that dark blue in, but still super fun and I think we're going to end up with some interesting pieces that I didn't expect. Got to let this dry for another day. There's no way that I can do anything with it today and even tomorrow, it may still be slightly too wet to cut because I want to be able to put my big ruler on it and cut out. This may be a project that I come back to in two or three days because the pain is so thick, I may not be able to cut it out tomorrow, we'll just have to see. I'm going to set this to the side and let it dry. Then I will come back after we've got it to a point that I can search out and cut some pieces [MUSIC] 14. Random Abstract - Cut outs: It's the next day and this piece is dry enough for me to at least touch it. I think for the moment, I'm not going to add any more elements to it. I'm going to go ahead, peel my tape off. There's a little bit of this ocher, I think I just cut it off the tape. I will be real careful as I'm peeling that you're not touching any edge that I don't want to get dirty. But because this is a piece that we're cutting pieces out of, it's not so important, but I just thought I'd mention that. This stuff is not dry like acrylic paint, how pretty some of this is. When I cut these pieces up, that's when I really love [LAUGHTER] what we end up with. If you end up with a great big piece that you love, then definitely feel free to leave it as a big piece. I do actually love this pretty good. But there were several in here that I liked. I think I'm going to take my five-by-seven piece. I have a five-by-five piece. I can do five-by-seven and pull out maybe one composition, but if I had gone further to the edges, I probably could have got two out of that or I could do two here. But I like the five-by-five. I think I'm going to use the five-by-five. I have a cutting mat down here. I'm just going to search out yummy compositions that I love. For some reason I love this because of the dark. I'm just going to place this around and see, and don't be afraid to turn these. I really like think that right there because of the dark. I like this. That's even nice there. I liked this one up here like this because we had the dark corners there. Let me start cutting out the ones I know I love. I'm going to start with this one right here. I can either use some type of cutting piece, this as a quilting ruler, but it's really nice edge to cut with. I can also just draw this out and cut it with some scissors. I usually like to just have one of these wood panels that I use for doing art in the same size. I usually just cutting around that because it makes it so easy. I think that's actually what I'm going to do. I'm going to get that right there lined up, and I'm just going to cut around this piece. I have a very sharp exacto knife that I use to cut with. That just makes it easier, I just line it up and use the wood as my guide and makes it very easy to cut these out. This is wet too. You don't want any of this to be super wet, because if you're using this as a guide, I'm pressing down on it, and I don't want to pull a bunch of paint up when I pull my piece up. I may because it might not be dry enough. [LAUGHTER] But the goal is to not pull a bunch of paint up. Look at that. I love that. Let's cut another one out. This is my favorite part, these little reveals. I can tell here that the blue was not as dry as it could have been because I can see a little tiny fleck it pulled up right here, but it's not anything that bothers me, it adds into the composition. But you just want to be careful if you're working these faster than it intended. I liked this one, right here. Do I like it right there? I think I do like it right there. I like that too. I think that one could be the winner. Let's do that one right there. This is yummy. All right, so let's just eyeball it right there. There we go. This is my favorite part. This is as good as peeling tape. It's the reveal for what did you get? Like unwrapping a Christmas present. [LAUGHTER] I can feel that the paint under this one might not have been 100 percent there, but actually it's fine. Even that piece right there, there we go. Add to the texture. Look at that one. Let's see, I think it goes this way. Look at those together. Oh my goodness, I'm loving those. I set those to the side and see what else we've got because there's one more up here that I liked right right here. See we might even at this point say, do I have enough for a five-by-seven? Is there anything in there that I like? I like it as a five-by-five. For some reason I'm just obsessed with yummy squares. I think I want it right there. I'm going to go ahead and line this up basically with the corner because that's about where that went. There we go. Make sure I've got it in where the paint is, there we go. Don't cut yourself. [LAUGHTER] Just poked my hand. Let's pull that one to see what we got. Look how beautiful. Now, this did pull a piece of paint off of here. You might wait an extra day. You want to make sure it's dry before you pull that off. We can go back and fill that spot in with the paint we peeled off, or I could just come back later and add some paint in there. Not a big deal. That's definitely why you want to make sure it's dry enough though. But I still love it. Let's look at these three pieces that we got out of here. Actually now that I'm looking up there, there's a fourth piece I might like. Look at these three. Loving those, such a pretty collection. But now that I'm looking at this last piece up here, these are nice for collage elements, almost like this one. I just want to view it real quick and see. I think this is one that I'm going to go ahead and cut out. I love that too. You know what I could do just because I know it's wet, is I could try to line this up and cut inside this line and just see if that works just as good. [NOISE] That I'm not actually holding this hard thing down on it, but I'm almost afraid now that I've done that, I'm going to cut the piece smaller than the other three. Maybe I'll just go right back to using my piece of wood and be real careful. [NOISE] I was pressing down on the wood, not intentionally pretty hard on the other ones. Maybe if I press less hard because, I'm pulling this probably a day early. There we go. See that one's just as pretty too. Then what we have left over, super pretty bits. I can use these bits for collage pieces when we're done and I can just cut those out with scissors. [LAUGHTER] These can be pretty collage elements. This one right here, I love this little strip. This could also be a strip that we could use if we save our color palette in a book like I do with some of my other classes. That could be the piece that I use in my color palette book that I keep. Let's just go ahead and cut these out. Then we see what we got left but I actually like this. As a little mini piece of art that might make a nice framed micro piece of art because both of these are pretty too. But this one is appealing to me. It might be an inspiration, might be a collage piece later. Here's our four pieces that we cut out. I am in love with those. I doubted the color palette, but now that I've played with it and used it, it speaks to me now that it's done. This technique is one that every time I do it, just about no matter what I use material-wise, I get something out of it every single time. I'm pleased when I leave my table, I get little pieces of art that I can feel good about that I did that day. Instead of getting up and leaving mad because I didn't create anything I liked, I leave pretty happy for the rest of the day. [LAUGHTER] I hope you enjoyed this technique. When you get to the cut-out stage, maybe let your piece dry two or three days rather than the next day if you're using thicker paint here because I was trying to finish up my little workshop. I went ahead and cut the pieces out, but it is not completely dry enough for us to cut on it like we did with the one that had a little piece of paint that came up but I could tell I should have let that sit for another two or three days. Just make sure if you're doing this piece, do all your bottom layers, and then let that dry overnight, and then do your top layers, and then let that dry overnight. Then if you do anything the next day, then let that dry [LAUGHTER] until you get to the point where you think, I'm ready to cut it out. Then set it to the side, maybe wait three days and then come back and test to see if it's really dry enough to be leaning on it and picking out and cutting out of it. I hope you love this technique. I can't wait to see the ones that you create. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 15. Abstract on cradled board: In this video, I'm going to use this piece as my trash paint piece. What I mean by that is rather than waste all the paint that I've put out for today, I want a surface to be able to use that paint on rather than just throw it away. So I thought this would be a great time to just experiment on a piece of cradled board. It's painted with black gesso because I painted a bunch of these at one time intending to do all kinds of fun stuff and then they sat in my closet. When I was doing this piece thinking I needed a board that I could use for my trash palette piece, and that's the ones I happened to grab. That's black gesso painted on there. You could paint yours with white gesso because unfinished board, that oil leach into the board instead of staying on top like we want and you need to prime the board when you're doing the oil paint. I have taped off the sides because when I'm done, I want to be able to just pull the tape off and the side to be clean because on the off chance that I love the piece, I want it to be nice and finished. If you were to paint this and you didn't cover the sides and you had cold wax and oil paint all over the side, you could clean that up with a scraper and sandpaper and sand it down. But let me tell you that's a lot of work when you could have just taped it off and been done. So this is the board that we're going to use as just our leftover paint trash palette so that I don't waste anything. We can make this an abstract, we can make it several layers and dig through and in the end, end up with a pretty abstract because on the top layer in the end, you may have all these layers underneath it of different things but maybe that top layer is a finished painting that you add after everything was dry. My goal here is just to use all my paint. Getting it on this first layer, I'm not looking to do anything specific other than not waste the paint and throw it away. I'm just trying to cover the surface and then this might be something that we dig through upper layers then we'll find these interesting things underneath it. When we're all done, it may not be anything pretty. You may be a better painter than me and just end up with something beautiful on everything you paint. Mine takes effort. It doesn't help though that I'm using all the leftover random weird onus in such a way that I'm not trying to get something exact. You could certainly be much more specific about this than I am. Let's grab this green. See? I don't really even care that they're all mixing up, I just want to get the paint on there and then I will pick a different color palette for something else. When we do something on top of this, these underneath layers may be what adds the extra bit of interest to our piece, so it doesn't really matter how ugly it is. This may be what gives us those interesting peek-throughs. It's really thick so by the time I come back to this, I'll definitely be glad these layers have dried a bit. I think I've got all the paint off of here and I may smooth this out with my silicone knife just to get my layer a little more even for the next coat. I don't even care that I'm mixing the colors in here. It's actually prettier now that I've mixed that. I just want it to be more of an atmospheric look under there not anything special, really. Now, look at that. See? Sometimes you surprise yourself with what you get. Look how pretty that is. Almost like a scene at the ocean, maybe when looking through a waterfall and this is the color shining through the waterfall. I just like this a whole lot better now. Look at right there, doesn't that look like a waterfall? That's so pretty. What started out as questionable and I wasn't liking it at all, has turned out to be really interesting here with our colors. Then I'm just going to wipe the edges so I don't have a big glop on here to have to do anything with later. Here is the beginning of our extra palette that just used up all my paint. I didn't throw any paint away and that's the first layer that's going to be under there. Look how pretty that layer turned out as I was painting all those terrible colors on there. We're going to let this dry. I could do some extra marks in here or some things if I wanted to, I could go ahead and use this as my experimental thing. That was real pretty actually, I'm really happy I did that. Let's put some dots up here. Look at that. I just moved them. When you're doing these dots like this, be careful that you're not so excited and you're pulling it a little bit. Because if you'll notice up here, I got a nice little dot, down here I got a smear. In a case like that, I would probably come back with my palette knife and maybe spread those back in a little bit and let them still be a little bit of texture, but not quite that smear that look like a mistake. Well, we could actually paint some botanical right on top of that, like a white edge botanical. If we were doing this in acrylic paint, that would be really pretty. I can also take my little knife here and I could come through with a few little marks and my paint is so thick that I don't want to do too much on this. Let's see. I like it like it is. I hate to even do anything else to it right now. I like the texture. I like what I have going. I like the marks that we have. I like the yummy waterfall look that it created. Let's let this one dry until tomorrow, and then we will decide what we want to layer on top of that to continue our abstract. Look how pretty that is. So working on a wood panel, little different to working on paper. I do encourage you to try at least one even if it's your extra paint panel like I'm doing. Because in the end, that could just be the bottom layers of something fabulous that we put on top. Let's let this dry overnight. I'll be back tomorrow. Our trash piece is dried. I'll be honest with you, I love this one so much just like it is that I don't want to paint on top of it. I thought because I feel that piece is where it needs to be. I could come back in today and do some scratching on it. I could sign it if I wanted to sign it. Which way is down? I think this way is down. I could come back over here and sign it. I put the year on it. See how beautifully that signs if you decide to sign like that? You'd wait until the next day, it signs beautiful. I would not say it's 100 percent dry because this had real thick paint on it. If I went to dig my finger into it or anything like that, I would definitely damage it, but I don't want to change anything about it. I think I love it. I could come and add a few of those scratchy writings in there if I wanted it to look a little bit like some scribble. The paint is still pretty thick. Even though it sit but not dry, I almost don't want to even scratch into it right now. I wanted to show you how I might finish the sides of a piece that I like like that just because we're on a cradle board. I'm going to pull the tape off, I'm not going to add any more paint to the top. I'm going to pull my tape off. It was painting with black gesso, so that's why the sides are black. At this point, I could go back now with some black paint and definitely paint the sides really nicely and make sure that it's exactly perfect like I want it. If I had any paint on the side that I wanted to scrape off, I could get one of my clay tools and do a little bit of scraping if I needed to like one of these, that's got a little scrappy edge on it. Let's do this one. I could come right along the edge if I had any clay that was overhanging because sometimes you do and pull that right out. There's a little bit that came off. That's how I could really easily just clean the edges, just run along there with a little tool and clean that edge off. I could also very carefully with my fingers, I could smooth that down and make that a nice finished edge without any trouble at all. Then that would be set. I actually like it like that too. I'm just loving this piece. I don't even want to change it, but look how pretty it is with the black edge. That's one choice. We can be ready to hang that. Another choice that I really like is using metallic wax on the side. I have metallic luster by DecoArt. I have gold but apparently I've had it for so long and it's been not sealed as well as it could be that it's now hard. When you buy the waxes, they don't stay good forever. The gold would've been pretty on the edge of this, piece of that gold just fell on my painting. Hung on, let's get that off. It doesn't last forever so you got to be real careful when you buy it that just know that eventually it's not going to be as good. Here we go. Until you could probably add some of this wax, because this is a wax. You can add wax details on your piece if you wanted to. Then I also have art alchemy metallic. This is a copper color and it's not too dry. I do like this pretty color is pulling out of some of the color that I already have in this piece. I could go through and add some little decoration in this color or I could even, maybe if I wanted part of a stencil on here, I could do the stencils and a wax because it's wax. I think it'll sit on top of the wax nicely. But what I'm going to do is take one of my shop rags, my blue towels here, put a little bit of this on here. I'm going to finish the sides with this copper piece, copper wax. You just put it on there just like that with your finger to the consistency and the thickness that you want. Then we just let that dry just like we did the cold wax on top. We just let that dry for a bit and it's finished. We don't have to really do anything else to it. We could come back with a rag and buffet it if we wanted, but this is basically painting on the side with metallic wax which I think is so pretty. Look how beautiful that side is. It shines really pretty. It's a nice finish to our piece that we've created. I do like these extra touches when you go to finish these extra details that just elevate it. Make somebody excited as they're looking around the piece and discovering all the different elements that you added. I just love that. I love that as an art collector because I collect a lot of art from other artists. I like supporting other artists on their journey to be a full time working artist. I just love collecting art, being inspired, having it hanging around my house, and when they have such fun details for me to look at and discover, really makes me appreciate the hard work and effort that they've put into the pieces that I have collected. It's the extra details that really complete it. I'm being very careful not to get this on the painting itself. I don't want the metallic on the top, if I can avoid it. At this point, the top is still wet and so I really wouldn't consider taping off or anything. Not that I'd consider putting tape on the top of the painting anyway, but just in case you're wondering, can I tape it off? I wouldn't even consider that. I would just do this slowly and carefully. Or if you're painting the side with a color that you think will complement your painting or with black, just be super careful with your paintbrush as you're painting the side. Because you could use black acrylic paint and paint the side and that'd be just fine. I'm wearing a hole in my rag here. Let me just pick another spot to finish off here. You got to be careful touching it. It's not like you can touch the sides of this with your fingers. You'll have a fingerprint. Be real careful after you've wax the side that you've got this in a place that you cannot touch it or awhile until it's dry because you'll put fingerprints on it. It's just like wet paint at the moment. It's not dry yet. Not set. Then tomorrow or few hours from now at least, then you'll be able to touch the sides, but for the moment, just consider it wet paint. If you do accidentally touch anything, go back with your rag and touch it up real quick before it's set. I really didn't expect to call this one done without adding more paint to it. I'm pleasantly surprised myself that it's so beautiful just like it was the one we spread our paint on it yesterday. Don't be afraid to call a piece done before you thought you were going to be done with it either because I just love that. I don't want to put anything on top of it. I love how it looks like. I'm looking through a waterfall to a lush landscape beyond. This is maybe some water, or maybe I'm in a cavern and looking through the waterfall. It just looks like a waterfall to me and I'm just in love with this. Now we have beautiful copper finished edges that are going to have a slight sheen to really set that off when we hang that up on the wall. I hope you enjoy your trash piece as much as I did. This is our leftover paint piece. Once I'm done painting today, if I have leftover paint over here, like I've gotten now from the different projects I was doing, I will get another one of these and spread paint on it. I may like that first layer or I may decide tomorrow that it needs many layers. It's very serendipitous on these pieces when you've got leftover paint, what you're going to end up with and if you love it. I can't wait to see your leftover paint pieces to see what you get. Those are unexpected and fun. I'm looking forward to seeing those. All right. I'll see you back in class. 16. Finishing your pieces: In this video, let's talk about finishing your pieces. If you're going to do little pieces like this and cut them out, you can frame them just like that. I'm going to pull a different little product over here. But you can frame it just like that or you can mount them to cradle boards. I really like mounting stuff to cradle boards when they are paper mix like that. It's very easy to do. If I'm going to mount those, these definitely have to be super dry. I would probably cut it a little bit bigger than my piece or cut it out, glue it to the piece, and then flip the piece over and trim off any edges that you had, even if it's supposed to be the same size unless there will be a tiny piece you have to trim. To glue the board, I use Yes paste. I put Yes paste on the board and then I put the piece of art on and then I take a piece of wax paper which is like a parchment paper or deli paper from the kitchen and then I spread those out really good, make sure it's all stuck down and then I would let that dry and then I would paint the edges. If I'm going to use a paper piece that I'm going to mount later, that's how I would do that. These I have not cut out, but I really love this set. You can cut them out and frame them under glass. You do want this to be really dry because as the oil paint in this dries over time, it gases, like it puts out a little bit of gas, and if you frame it too soon, which I had this but I got to tell you my experience has been a tiny bit different, but I've heard if you frame it too soon, then it could gas onto the glass and make it foggy, so then you'd have to take it back out, clean the glass off, and then put it back in. But I got so excited with one set of wax things that I was creating that I framed one that was practically still wet and they're still hanging in my downstairs desk area. They look great. You're just going to have to experiment with that. Let them dry for a couple of days before your frame it if you can. But I have framed one practically as I finished it and stuck it in just so I can be like, look, I've done all four of these. If you have glass that fogs up after the fact, just know that's what happened. The oil paint gassed, and you just need to take it out and clean that off. Now, as far as the finish on top goes, if you don't add any other materials on top of the wax paint concoction that you have here. Like if you don't put more wax crayons or something on top really it's finished. You don't have to do anything else to it. But a lot of people like one final coat of something on top like a Varnish on their art pieces and for this, I wouldn't necessarily recommend a Varnish, but you can try the Gamvar. It's made for the top artwork and it brushes on. The problem with the Gamvar is if your oil paint mixture had more than 30 percent wax and I was telling you I used about a 50/50 ratio so mine was about 50 percent paint to 50 percent wax. That ratio is too much wax. If you put the Gamvar on top of these with the larger wax ratio, then it actually starts to break down the wax and it ruins your piece and so I don't personally use Gamvar, but if you're going to use a very low wax consistency and you want to finish with the Gamver like you would an oil painting, then you could. But Gamblin says, it's got to be less than 30 percent wax in that mixture. If you want to coat it with something, you probably want to be very careful and go ahead and cut these out. But you could put a clear coat of cold wax on top of that. This stuff is just basically some bees wax and some resin. It's not really bad for you and I. Just basically stick my fingers in it. It's like shortening. I just get a glob out here and then I just rub the wax right on there. You could also rub the wax on there with a lint free cloth or like the shop towel that I like to use. The shop towels which come from the paint department in the hardware store. Because painters like these and I like these because they're lint free and they're a little sturdier than a paper towel. Coat the whole thing in a clear layer, then let that dry for, I want to say, more than several days because these pieces that I have that are not quite dry, you can't do that. You can maybe add the clear wax on top of it, but I wouldn't be rubbing it in like I normally would because these pieces aren't completely dry yet. I'd want the piece completely dry then I would take a layer of the clear wax and then let that completely dry and that would be my top finished coat. Then what I would do is come back with a lint free cloth or a t-shirt or something and lightly buff the surface and that will give you a satiny sheen and a final finish to that piece. You can just buff it just like that. Now these don't have a coat to clear on them and you can buff them also to get a final finished coat. That's how I would finish the top of these. If I had to have something on top, a clear coat of the cold wax, let that completely dry and cure for awhile and then buff it. You don't have to add anything. These are fine, just like they are. They're wax and color. The other way that I would finish if I were mounting it to a board, you can either paint the sides like I was talking about with the smaller piece that I had out here. You can paint the sides a color that you want or in this project, I show you how I wax the sides with a yummy metallic wax to give the sides a nice finish. That's another thing that I think is really fun for finishing, is some of these metallic waxes. I do show you how I use that wax in this project and it is something I find really beautiful on the side of pieces that you might want to consider doing but if you don't want to do that, you can just take any color of acrylic paint that you love and paint the sides and that piece would be finished. Then I would always in the bottom corner, come down here and scratch your name. This is a clay tool that's got a nice pointy thing, but before the wax is too cleared, I just sign it in the corner. That's where I like to sign. You choose what works best for you. Then if you can't see it or you think I don't want to sign the front or whatever, and you can definitely sign the back, put a year, put a quote, something that you'd like to put on the back of your paintings, that's perfectly fine also. But if you're going to glue this down to a board, then I would wait and put that information on the back of your board back here. Hope that gives you some good ideas on ways that you might finish these. There's lots of different opinions for ways to finish art and do things like that. But with the cold wax, you are a little more limited on things that you can put on top of that and I don't want you to ruin it by using something like a Varnish that's not going to be as good with a heavier wax mixture like most artists do with the cold wax. Most artists do cold wax medium on top, let that dry for awhile and then buff it and then Dorland's is another brand of cold wax as the Gamblin. I have tried both and it's about the same exact thing so either one works just fine. I can't wait to see some of your pieces finished. That would be amazing if you frame it up or do something on a nice cradle board. I'd love to see those projects. Come back and show them to us in the projects area and I will see you back in class. 17. Color palettes: [MUSIC] I want to remind you, as you're going, to start collecting some of your color palettes to refer back to. I know we saw some of these in an earlier video, these are some color palette collections that I have played with. I'm not saying they're great or anything like that, it's just color studies that I have tried as I was experimenting with color, and mixing color and marks and what I want you to do when you do those color studies in class, is I want you to take a piece of scrap paper. You can do this in your color study book like I've shown in other classes. This is my acrylic colors. You could do this with oil paints and a pretty little book like this. I like to keep color palettes of things that I have tried and experimented with. With the oil paints, I will write what brand it was like Winsor and Newton, Lamp Black and then titanium white. It's pretty much titanium white. Then if I created a color out of some other colors then I noted what I used, so that I would know, Charvin tropical green. M Graham quinacridone violet. Winsor Newton Payne's gray. That's how I came up with maybe these reddish lavender colors for this particular color set. So I want you to get in the habit of having some little scraps of paper around. I like little scraps like this and then I keep these with this. They were very easy to pull out to show to you because they're handy and I just keep it stored with it, which is why I like working on paper pieces. If these aren't some masterpieces that I'm creating, it's nice to work on papers so you can store it and refer to it later. But get in the habit of creating yourself a little page and put a little of each color on there as you're going, and write down what they were and save that. So if this was a color palette that you're like, "Oh my God, I love this and I want to revisit it a couple more times," now you remembered what you used, because I guarantee you, if I came back to this a year later, because these are definitely some that I made last year or the year before. There's no way I'm going to remember what it was that I used. So I love having these little bits of paper. I created lots of these and I will create them for the pieces that I did in class also, if I didn't mention it throughout class. I just like having samples in colorways of things that I love, and I love seeing the colors that you use too. In class, if one of your projects that you end up doing are the little set of four color pieces, do your color samples with it. I want to see that you did your color pieces too. Like this, I've revisited a couple of times and I wouldn't have remembered these colors after doing the color study if I hadn't put it down, but then I could revisit that on bigger pieces and different mark-making and seeing what did I love. I love this set is such a fun, happy color set. I love this with the whole being light magenta and the ocher and the cold gray and the warm white. You'll notice in class, that's the colors that I used in one of the projects. I got that inspiration from this color palette. Even though what I ended up with might not look identical to what I did here, that's where the inspiration came from. It's a color palette that I know I love and I'm going to want to revisit it again and again because it makes me happy, and I'm going to want to know what those colors were. So I have that. As you're going, definitely make yourself some color palettes to put with your pieces when they're dry so you can refer back to them and figure out how did you get to where you got when you created your pieces in class. I'm pretty excited to see what color palettes you choose. I like trying out things that others discover and so, if you find an interesting color palette that you wouldn't mind sharing, all of us would love to see that too and maybe that's a color palette we could play with too. [MUSIC]