Library: Painting With Acrylic

1. Class Preview: If you want to start painting, you are in the right place. Acrylic is the perfect paint medium for beginners and even professionals like myself love the flexibility and ease of using acrylic. I'm Nina Weiss, and this is startup library painting with acrylic painting is my absolute passion. And I'm here to get you as excited about painting as I am. I've been painting since I was 11 years old and I still learn new things. This class is filled with all the things I wish I knew right at the beginning. It's the perfect place to start. I've used all sorts of paints from oil and gouache, and I just keep coming back to acrylic. Now, let's talk about how to use your time. Get the most out of this class. We'll start by going over the tools and supplies you'll need to be successful, including what paint, brushes and supports to buy. Then we'll dig in and do some exercises to get you comfortable using the paints. I'll be teaching your color mixing and brush techniques. Throughout these lessons, we'll start working with just two panes, white and black. And as the lessons progress, we'll add in more and more colors. Will finish the class by doing a full-color painting, a lemon still life, where you'll put all of your new skills to the test. You've made it all the way here and it's the first step to your acrylic painting journey. Painting is meant to be fun, not scary. So remember, it's just a painting. No more excuses. Just press. 2. What You Need Paint & Palette: Let's start at the very beginning and talk about what we mean when we talk about acrylic paint. In this first lesson, we'll cover everything you need to know to get started. I'll show you how to confidently navigate the art store and I'll show you how to buy pain, pick a paint palette and choose your colors. When you think about art materials, the commonality that all of them have is the pigment. But where they differ is the binder which gives the paints its consistency. And all paints also have a filler. So the binder in acrylic is a polymer, which is what gives the acrylic the ability to dry quickly and to seal itself. The filler in the acrylic is water, which makes the paint water-soluble. And this is why it is such a clean paint. You don't need to use turpentine, you don't need to use solvents. You've just got a water source and you're in business. So ultimately, what this means is acrylics dry fast. You can layer them easily. You can use them on a wide variety of surfaces. And they're really versatile. They clean up easily because they're water-soluble. And so that's why they're so user-friendly. But you're walking into an art store and you're likely to see an aisle of paint that is ginormous and overwhelming. You're going to see a lot of different brands. You're going to see different packaging. You'll see tubes of paint, you'll see bottles of paint, you'll see tubs of paints, you'll see jars of paint, and more colors and you can count. So where do you start? First of all, let's break all of these paints down into two different types or qualities. We're going to call them artists grade or professional paint versus student grade paint. So when we look at an artist grade paint, we're looking at a wonderful buttery consistency and an opacity and a color that is exactly where you want it. So let's see in comparison what the student grade paint looks like. So I'm gonna give you a swatch of that. And there's a couple of things you'll notice right away. So you can see that as we swapped out the professional grade quality, It's a rich, buttery read. It's a primary red. It's opaque. When we swapped out the student grade paint, it's transparent and it's a completely different color. I would not use this to mix as a primary red. So two very different paints, professional grade, student grade. Other ways that you can tell that you're getting a student grade paint is you're going to see words like, of course student or basic or studio. And what you're not going to see is an extensive labeling system. When we look at our professional grade paint, we're going to see a lot of information on the back of the tube that tells you things like opacity or thickness or tinting properties. One of the most important things that you'll notice as you by professional grade quality is that they're sold in series. So on this tube of your primary yellow, you'll notice it's a series to pigment is priced differently. Some pigments are much more expensive. So for instance, if we look at the pyrrole red, you'll see that that is a series eight and this tube of paint is going to cost you more. So in the student grade paint, we don't have series number two. It's really not about the pigment. The labels will give you some information. It isn't the kind of professional grade paint that I want you to use for your projects. The other thing about this set of paints Is it looks really tempting. There's a lot of colors here, but let's see what actually happens when we think about what colors we need for our projects. What do we have? We have a white, we have a black. Fabulous. You're going to need those. What's next? It's a brown. I'm going to teach you how to use your paint to create a neutralized color, which is a brown. We don't need that. What's next? Look? It's another brown. We don't need that. What's next? Agreeing? A lime green. We can mix this ourselves. We won't be using this. A blue-green, same thing. We're going to mix it. Yellow. Great. This is a primary yellow. I'm happy with this. Let's leave it. Violet is a secondary color, will be mixing that. We have a single blue. That's fabulous. We do need that. The red was wrong. I'll leave it in the set, but I don't know. This orange is kinda neon. I'm not sure what it's doing here. You'll be mixing your own and it will not be neon. And last but not least, I think this is supposed to be your Alizarin crimson. The color is way off. So we'll get rid of it. Let's see what we've got. Black and white, fabulous, and basically only three usable colors. So though you think maybe you were saving money by getting a whole set of ten. There was a lot of paint we don't even want. So let's not by a set and let's stay away from the student grade paint. We're going to concentrate on the professional artist quality paint. And you're still going to see a lot of options in terms of colors. But I'm going to give you a list of colors that I specifically would like you to buy. And it's really important that you stick to these exact color names. As you read the labels, you're going to see words like light or hue, or shade, or dark or medium. So for instance, if we look at your yellow, this tube of paint says cadmium yellow dark. And it's really important that you buy exactly cadmium yellow dark because what you'll also see is cadmium yellow light and cadmium yellow medium, and they are completely different colors. So let's stick with the exact name of the color. The paint that I think we're gonna do a fabulous job with is going to be good professional grade paint like Liquitex, golden. You will get the exact colors and the exact coverage that you need. So you'll find that good-quality pain is more expensive. But remember, you're gonna get the color that you need. You're going to use less of it because it has better coverage. And it's gonna give you the results that we want. So with all of those options in the store, now you know exactly what kind of paint to buy, and I'm going to tell you exactly what colors you're going to need to buy in a little bit. And remember, there are only eight. So another thing that you're going to want to buy while you're at the store is a palette for your paint. There are so many different options. Let's narrow those down for you. So you're in the art store and you're looking for a palette, you are going to see a lot of palettes. Let's begin by looking at the ones I don't want you to get. So right in front of me here I have what looks like a fabulous palette, has some of the things we want. It has little wells that we can squeeze our pain into an an a nice big mixing area. It's nice and white and shiny. Yay. Okay, now, this is what happened to that palette after I used it one time. What happens is the polymer and the pain adheres to the plastic tray and the moment it dries, you can get it clean. I like to start with a nice white surface to mix my color on. So this is no longer a very good option. Let me show you what else you're going to see. You may be tempted by this sweet little flower shape pallet. What it has that we'd like again are the little wells and it has a cover, but that is a miniscule mixing area. It's just not big enough. Let's get rid of it. What else? You're also going to see what's called a wet palette. The way that these work is you have a sponge underneath and wet that and then you keep replacing the paper palettes. I've had students use these palettes before. What tends to happen is the paint sinks in the color quality, the pink quality. I don't love it. You're constantly running out of or replacing the paper palettes. And it's sort of like mechanically allowed to fuss with. We could make your lives a lot easier. There are so expensive, so let's get rid of that one as well. Another option that you will see are disposable paper palettes. And I find these really unsatisfying. They're not that great to mix on. They're very thin, they warp and you're throwing away a lot of paper that you have to keep replacing. So not my favorite option either. The palettes that I do like that you're going to find in the art store are a white coated Mesa night palette that is very artsy because we can hold it. So if holding your palate and standing is something you're interested in doing, I would really suggest this palette. It fits very snugly into your arm and your thumb, and it's easily cleavable, has a nice big mixing surface. Again, we can hold it. Another palette that I absolutely love for acrylics is what's called an enamel butcher tray. You're not going to hold this, you're going to work with it flat. It is metal and it does have an enormous mixing surface and it's super easy cleanup. The plastic acrylic just basically washes off and lifts right up and it's white. So important, my absolute My favorite palette you're not going to actually find in the art store, but you're going to easily make is a glass palette. And what's really important about this glass palette, It's safely edge with duct tape and it is backed with a white, either foam core or in this case an illustration board because you always want to be mixing on white. And what I love about this palette is it's got a large area for mixing and we will scrape it to clean it. The glass is easily purchased at any hardware store. You just need a scrap of illustration board. And of course everybody has duck tape. This is really my favorite palette to work on. It's what I use all the time. You can't hold it, you're going to work with it flat. And for size, all of these pallets were about 12 by 16 " and that's a good size for you to work on. So we use the word palette in two different ways. One is for this, which you're already familiar with, the palette, what you put your paint on. However, another use for the word palate is to describe the array of colors that you're choosing to work from. And I'm going to introduce you to what we would call a limited palette of colors. This palette of colors is wonderful to work with. From these colors. We're going to help you mix any color you need and will help you avoid muddy or dirty colors when you're doing your mixing. Now, we call it a limited palette because you're only going to use six colors plus white. But the colors you can mix from this palette are limitless. You can mix just about any color you need. So limiting the colors that you start with only means that we have fewer tubes of paint. You're spending less money. But the best thing about it is you actually have more control over your mixing. So here are the six colors that we're going to use plus white. And as we squeeze out our palette, We're going to pay attention to the order from light to dark. And pay attention to where we put our paint. This is our light yellow or our primary yellow. We also call it our cool yellow. So our palate is made up of the primary colors, red, yellow, blue. However, we're going to have a warm and cool of each primary. So we've got our cool yellow and now we're going to squeeze out our cadmium yellow, dark, this is our warm yellow. Next we have our reds. The warm red is your pyrrole red. This is also your primary red. And next we have our cool red. If you are purchasing golden, you're going to be looking at an alizarin crimson. If you're purchasing Liquitex, it might be called quinacridone. Either one is fine. They are both your cool reds. Look how gorgeous these are. Next we move into our blues. We have a warm blue that is your primary or cyan blue. And last on your palette will be your ultramarine blue, which is your cool blue. It may also be called French ultramarine and that is fine. So there's our palette. And you'll notice that I squeezed the colors out very close to the rim because we want all of this area here for mixing. So you'll notice that I didn't squeeze blackout onto my palette. You're limited palette is the six colors plus white. I did ask you to buy black and we will be using it for our value studies. But for now I'm not going to put it out on the palette. So let's talk about pallet management. Again. Colors squeezed out along the rim. I have seen students very haphazardly squeezed, paying out all over their palate and then they don't have room to mix. Another big question is, how do I work with my paints so that I can keep the blobs fairly clean. So this is called pulling paint. And if I'm going to mix, say an orange, what I want to do is pull the paint in one direction. Always it leaves the rest of the block clean. And in this way, I have the rest of the blob is not getting any other paint on it. You'll notice that I am mixing with a brush and not a palette knife. I have had students mix with palette knives. They tend to mix a lot more paint than they need and you have a little less control or I of, I feel like I have a little less control with the knife than I do with the brush. And actually I love the feel of the brush. For me. It's kind of like a touching experience, so I love mixing with the brush. You'll notice that when I mix with the brush. I'm also always using a little bit of water That's important. You rarely if ever, are going to work with paint straight out of the tube. It always needs to be thinned with a little bit of water. The other thing about your mixing area, if you're mixing a paint, try not to geographically cover your entire palette because you're going to have trouble like hurting it back into a blob. It'll just get thinner and center and center. You'll also notice that to maximize my paint usage, I started with the lighter color, which is the yellow. It takes a very little bit of red to affect the yellow. I would use half a tube of yellow to change the red. So you always want to work with dark to light. Another question that students frequently have is, how do I squeeze my tubes? How do I get that last bit of yellow out of my tube? So we have a wonderful little device. It's called a paint key. And we thread the end of the paint onto it and we just squeezed as we go up. When we get to the very top of the tube. Sometimes what I like to do is use a pair of pliers to crimp that down. So I don't puncture the tube. I'm gonna put a little rag over it because this will only roll up just so far. Another product that I like to use that's really effective for getting the very last bit of paint out of your paint tube can be found in a hardware store and it's a heavy-duty metal, pink cream per thing. I love them, but these will work for you as well. And you can find these in various sizes in the art store. So regarding your pink tube, another thing that's really important to do and you might not think about it, is let's keep that paint cap clean. Because what happens is the pink cashes out, the acrylic dries and hardens. Eventually that tops not going on and you end up using masking tape for a cap. So instead just give it a quick wipe. You can even wipe out like along the inside of the cap and then securely fastened that back on and you're good to go. So pink tube management, The other thing I want to talk to you guys about is something really important when you're working with acrylic paint. Acrylic paint is water-based, but remember that the binder is a polymer, That's a plastic. So imagine that we wanted to thin down the paint and we keep adding in water. That water is diluting the paints ability to cover, and it's diluting it's acrylic properties. So the gag is an acrylic primer and extend her and basically it's like we're putting the plastic back into the paint. We're putting body back into the paint. When you just use water, you are reducing its acrylic qualities. And the rule is kind of like no more than 50% water. So you're using water and gas all the time. So it is keeping the viscosity, the body and the flow. So the way that I use this is I would put my GAAC into a receptacle. I don't like to squeeze it down onto the palette because then it just kinda gashes all over the place. And the way that I would use it to mix is I would dip a little water, then dip into my GAAC. I'm not a very mathematical person. I'm just saying a little bit 50%. Another way to control the water flow would be with a spray bottle to add some water in a fine mist. So remember that you're never using paint directly out of the tube. You're adding a little water. You're adding a little gag. So we're almost all set up and ready to paint. But we also have to talk about keeping the pallet itself clean. And I happen to really like this part. So this is a scraper. It's from the hardware store again, but I think that you can probably find this in the art store. It's got a blade on it, so be really careful with it. It does retract. And what we're gonna do is I'm just scrape that paying off our palette. Even when it's dry, it comes off absolutely perfectly. And then we can very carefully wipe that blade off. And when it gets ridiculously thick and full of paint, you can view very carefully changed the blade. Most of these scrapers will come with additional blades. So we're all set up, our palette is ready to go. We've talked about the gap, we've talked about the water, but we haven't talked about something really important, this tool that we've used, but we haven't discussed. So let's talk about your brushes. 3. What You Need Brushes: Brushes are another one of those tools that can be really overwhelming. When you walk into an art store, you will see literally hundreds of brushes to choose from. So where do you start? Let's start breaking down your options so that you can successfully pick the perfect brushes for your projects. The first distinction that we're going to make is a synthetic brush versus a natural brush. So one would say that these are natural bristle brushes and you would think, Oh, natural bristles, those must be fabulous. Not so much. Let's look at why. So a typical inexpensive brush that you might find would be like a squirrel hair brush. This is a brush that will not hold its shape. It's hard to control and it just completely smashes out. We don't love this one. Bye-bye. Another one that you might find is what's called a bristle brush. And these would be boars head bristles. And what you'll see is they are really stiff. They frequently will break off and you will find little brush filaments throughout your paint. We don't want that. So we're going to say bye-bye to that as well. This synthetic brushes are where you wanna be. Obviously, we haven't harmed any animals to make these brushes. That's always a bonus. But also the responsiveness and the longevity of these brushes I think is optimal. You aren't going to get those broken filaments in your paint. Very, very responsive. And the technology has come so far that they actually have synthetic brushes that can mimic the best quality of the, quote, unquote, natural brushes. So I'd say just go 100% synthetic brushes and you're going to be very happy. The next big distinction that we have, and I think that you'll see right here is that I have some long handled brushes versus some short handled brushes. Most of the time you're going to be painting vertically. You're gonna be standing. And you're going to want to get a kind of a gestural distance from your painting. So a longer handled brush allows you to hold that brush further back. You have a looser gesture. We don't usually paint, like we hold a pencil with a tiny little gesture and holding them all the way tight in. So I absolutely recommend the long handled brushes. You can do everything you want with them. And it's better than stocking up on the short handled brushes. So I am recommending that as a beginner, you get long handled synthetic brushes. Even though we have now narrowed it down to just synthetic brushes, you still have a lot of options. There are a lot of brushes, they're in the art store. So let's break that down a little bit further. We're going to talk about the shape of your brushes. So this is a flat bright brush. And although it is flat, it is specifically called the bright because it is shorter. If you just ask for a flat brush, they might tell you something that's almost twice as long and that's really hard to control and it tends to split. This is called a bright and this is a round brush. This is the other shape that you're going to want. The shapes that you do not need to buy our daggers. And that has that sort of angled shape to it. But there's nothing that we can't do with our flats that you would need a dagger for. So you don't need to buy it. We're going to get rid of that one. The next brush that you may be looking at would be a fan brush. It looks like it's gonna be a lot of fun. I've never used one. I'm not really sure what you're going to need it for. So don't waste your money. We're going to get rid of that one. Then the last shape that you might see is called a filbert. Of filbert has kinda like a rounded tip. And again, we don't really need it. I am able to do everything I need to do with my brights and my rounds. And I will show you how to do that as well. So we're gonna get rid of the filbert. Alright, so we have now narrowed our brushes down. We know we want long handles, we know we went synthetic brushes. There's still a lot to choose from. Let's get you on the right track here we have different sizes stamped on every brush you're going to see a number. Typically you will see 246810. That number corresponds small to big. So two is going to be small, ten is going to be your biggest one. What you also want to keep in mind is that much like a gene's manufacturer, these numbers across the brands unfortunately aren't completely standardized. So you might find an eight. A certain brand might be a little bit bigger than an eight and another brand, much as you might with your genes. So let's talk about your sizes in your brights. What I have here is a 46810. Don't worry if your numbers don't correspond exactly. Think more like I want small to medium, medium, bigger, biggest. It's going to be a range. And that range will give you a lot of flexibility with both your flats and your rounds. In your rounds, you've got the 246.8. It's going to give you a lot of flexibility. Remember the numbers don't need to correspond exactly. However, with these eight brushes, you're going to have a huge range of ability for your painting. And let's see what these brushes actually do for you. They make different kinds of marks and I'm going to choose a flat brush for certain areas and a round brush for others. So I'm going to take a number six bright brush and show you what kind of marks we can make with that. So we're gonna get some pink going here for you. And let's have some fun. So flats are really good for continuous coverage. And the more coverage you want, the fatter brush you're going to pick. But I can make a nice straight flat stroke with my flat. I can also use the edge of my flat to make a thinner line. So flats can be very versatile that way. But again, remember that you might want to pick up a bigger brush if you want a fat or shape, Let's do that as well. So let's say I needed to cover a wide area. I always like to pick the biggest brush for that area. So I have smoother, more continuous marks. I can also go ahead and use the edge of this brush as well to do a linear treatment. And if I needed to paint in a shape, I could use the corner of the brush and then turn it to make a flat. But it's really important to think about, as I do, pick the biggest brush you can for that area, so you have fewer marks. So those are my flats. Let's see what the round brushes do. So I mentioned that for the round brush, I like to buy a somewhat smaller one. This is the two. And what I like to do with this smaller brush, It's almost like drawing. I can get really expressive with it. And I can stay up on the tip and do hatching marks with it. The other great thing about rounds is if I stay up on the tip, I make a very fine line, right? But if I splay it out, I can make a much fatter mark. So they're very versatile that way. I can also work in much smaller areas. Let's try a larger round brush and see what that does as well. The beauty of this synthetic brushes is that they will keep their tips. Remember I mentioned the brushes not to get like the squirrel hair brush. The worst thing about them is they never keep their points. So keeping a point on a round is really preferable. So even though this is a number eight brush, I can still make a pretty small, delicate line if I stay up on the tip. But then I can start splaying that out and go nice and fat. That's a beautiful line to make with a single brush. So I have a great deal of versatility between my brights and my round brushes. The last brush I'm going to ask you to buy is gonna be a two inch synthetic brush. You will actually need two of these. One, you're going to dedicate for Jess. So this is when your Jessica Canvas, and we'll talk more about that later. The second brush is going to be used for putting a ground or a colored wash on your Canvas. So you don't need expensive brushes for that function, but you do need wider brushes. Let's stick with this synthetic and you could go anywhere from inch and a half to 2 ", both for your Jethro and for your ground. So the brushes that you want, our individual brushes that you've picked out, maybe you've handled them, tested the point. Do they have a nice responsiveness? The brushes I'm going to ask you to stay away from, are the brushes that you might find, for instance, in a multi-pack. They might throw in a DAG or they might throw in a fan. They might have short handles. The quality may not be very good. And you may be ending up with brushes in shapes and sizes that you really don't need. So again, when selecting your brush, why don't you enjoy it? Pick it up, hold it doesn't make a nice point. How's that flexibility? For me? A lot of painting is tactile and responsive. So that's gonna be really important. It's nice to be able to see what you're getting and feel the quality of the brush. You can't really do that also when you buy sets. So you've spent all this time and care and money. You've bought your wonderful brushes, you're in love with them. You need to take care of them. How do we make them last? So let's talk about that. I am not going to leave these brushes face down in the water. Okay? What I am going to do instead is after I've used them, I'm going to wipe them, get most of the paint off. Okay. And then I would use a little bit of soap and water to get the rest of the pain off. There are many options for soaps. You can actually buy a brush cleaner in the art store if you don't want to get all fancy, what I do is keep a piece of Tupperware with all of my soap ends. And I just keep dumping them in and wedding them. And that's how I clean my brushes. So we're going to clean the brush with the soap. And at the very end, it's really important that you form or re-form your brushes, whether it's a flat or around. And then you're going to put them in a receptacle, bottoms down or just lay them flat. And again, reforming the point or reforming the flat, it's going to be really important. A good brush will keep its shape for pretty long time. A bad brush is going to snap and fragment and splay out. Now, all good brushes eventually go bad on you, but let's keep them in good shape for as long as we possible, possibly can, especially if you've made that investment in them. So a little more money for a better brush that's going to last you longer is really good way to think about it. So let's now talk about supports. What are we painting on? 4. What You Need Supports: When you're at the art store, you're going to see a lot of options for supports, anything from wood panels to a pre-stretch Canvas. You'll see Canvas boards, you'll see roles of raw canvas. Where do you start? Overall, you want to be painting on something with a bit of tooth or roughness for the paint to catch on to. So the smooth wood panels that you might be looking at in the art store, or not great for acrylic because the pain is going to tend to slip around and can be a little frustrating. A step up then would be a board like this. The difference is it has a coat of Jessup, so just so provides a barrier between your paint and the board. Most importantly, it also is going to give you a little bit of texture. It doesn't have though, is a responsiveness and the solidity that I'm looking for when I'm painting. So let's look at what comes next. Let's get some canvas happening here. You could find a canvas board in the art store. This is canvas stretched over cardboard. So it does have the tooth that we're looking for. It does have the Jess oh, covering. But what it doesn't have is any good or solidity or responsive next. So it can also even work. So I am not in love with the Canvas wrapped board either. Let me show you what I am in love with. I like something that has a nice solid support, some flexibility that grabs the paint. So I recommend that you paint on something like this. This is a pre stretched canvas. If you look at the back, you'll see that it has the wooden supports, its stapled. It's nice and tight. It's all ready to go. We might put another couple of coats of Jesse, I want it, but for now we have a nice, tight, finished gestured Canvas. This particular canvas is called a spline Canvas. What you'll notice is there are very few staples. It's just like a little rope of plastic that sets this canvas in. I'm not absolutely in love with this because in the event that you might want to unstretched Canvas, you can't really stretch it. It just doesn't give you enough of an overlap or an edge, but it is fabulous to paint on if you think you'll never have to move the canvas again. Another kind of canvas that you're going to find pre-stretch again is a fact stapled Canvas. Here you can see it's kinda like wrapping a present. They have stapled it on the back. You've got your wouldn't support. It is tight as a drum, it is just sewed. You might also find these with a side staple. I don't love the side Staples they might get in the way of framing. Sometimes we don't frame our canvases and you want a nice clean edge. So I would look for either the spline canvases or the back stapled canvases. And we're also going to do something pretty cool in this class. And that is teach you how to stretch your own canvas. So same as with the pre-stretch. I've got my wooden stretcher bars. It's back stapled. It is just sewed on the front and it is typed as a drum. And the benefit to stretching your own Canvas, and we'll get into this more later, is that I can pick the size. So this is a fabulous option for Canvas. The last support that we're going to talk about is paper. We're going to want to use the paper when we're doing exercises, when we're making a painting that you don't think you want to hang on the wall and you need to be able to move through your exercises a little bit quicker without committing to a full on Canvas. So what we're looking at here is called a watercolor block. And the reason I liked this so much is because the paper is stretched already for you. It isn't going to warp and it's nice and solid. However, you'll notice that when I opened it up, it looks a little bit weird. Where is my paper? So let me show you how to use a watercolor block. The first thing that you're going to see when you open your watercolor block is this weird piece of black paper. Where's my paper, right? So we've gotta get rid of it. To do that, what you need to do is identify the notch. It's a little mysterious. It's up here at the top. And that notch is going to allow us to remove the gummed edge of our black paper. So I am going to use my handy palette knife. I don't recommend you use anything sharper because anything like an exact one life is going to actually cut and damage your paper. So if you can find some thin non-lethal blade. You'll be in good shape. So we're going to run this around the edges. We're breaking that gummed barrier. And we can free your paper and get rid of this piece of black. And there is my beautiful pre stretched white watercolor paper. As you do your paintings, you're going to paint. It's all attached, right? Then once again, as you finish your painting, we're going to find that notch again and just keep removing as needed. They work fabulously. And you don't need to do any kind of stretching. You don't even need to just show this because this paper has a wonderful tooth on it. So when you work on a painting exercise, will probably want to keep that on a paper support. But when we're working on a full-on painting project, you're going to want to use a canvas. So there are still a lot of options to talk about here. Let's see what we've got. We have various grades of canvases. And the way you're going to see them divided, again, much like your paint, is your studio versus your professional. And I think the biggest difference that you're going to see is the sturdy thickness of the bars. And they're going to feel a little bit different. So for instance, here in this canvas, we have a nice thick stretcher bar. It's very sturdy. And as that canvas gets bigger, you're going to want that big, fat Canvas bar. This one has a much lighter and thinner stretcher bar, so it's still good. But let's say we start working much bigger. That thin stretcher bar might start warping for you. So if you're going to work bigger than this, let's say 36 by 48, 24 by 18. You're going to want that heavier, sturdy stretcher bar. And you also want to think about a canvas with what's called a back brace. So this is an 18 by 24 inch canvas. It's back stabled, we love that. And it has a brace so that this canvas doesn't torque and warp on. You. Remember that if you're going bigger than 18 by 24, 36 by 48, you're going to look for heavier stretcher bars and or a back brace. Now there is something else that you're going to find that comes with not all but some of your canvases. And that's going to be what's called a canvas key. And we just slot it into the corner, into the notches. And what it does is it tightens up those 90 degree angles for you on a smaller canvas. There's probably very little chance of this warping, but it's just another layer of solidity and security that you can put on your canvas. So when you're shopping for Canvas, I also want you to think that we want cotton, not linen for our canvas. The linen is going to be more expensive and it gives us somewhat tighter weave, therefore, smoother surface. That isn't necessarily what we want with our acrylic paintings. So remember, cotton or linen looking for student grade is fine if you're smaller canvas, as you get bigger, we want to think about heavier stretcher bars and braces. When you buy a pre-stretch Canvas at the store, you'll notice that the Canvas doesn't look like rock Canvas. It's already white. This is because it has a layer of gesso on it already and it's called the Code Canvas. What is gesso? Gesso as translated into Italian means chalk. The base of Jericho was chock. In old-world Italy, they used a little bit of water and a little bit of binder, and we're using an acrylic polymer as our binder, so it's perfect for acrylic paints. What Jess does is it acts as a barrier and a protectant for your support. You're not painting directly onto the canvas. If we were going to do that, it would suck up all of our paint in the college would actually look different. So this barrier is really important. You always want to paint on a canvas. And sometimes when you open your jar, you'll find it very thick. And sometimes not so much. This actually looks pretty good. I'm not going to add any water to it. I'm going to paint straight out of the jar with my two inch. It seems like a house painters brush. We don't have to get top quality brush for this. So what we're gonna do as we start painting. Is put one layer down. Now, this is actually my second coat, as it would be on your store-bought Canvas. If this was your rock Canvas or your own stretched canvas, you'd have to work a lot harder to sort of like grind that Jessup down into the Canvas. Right now. It is pretty much gliding along. Okay? So it's a perfect consistency. And if you're going to think about direction, I wouldn't worry about it too much. So as we put that just so on, I don't want a glob it on. I don't want huge ridges of texture. So I'm kind of going in all different directions and we can smooth it out later. And I'll show you how if you do lose any brush filaments in your Gesso or cat hairs, which happens in my studio. You're going to want to pick those out while the gesso is still wet. And I'm still working pretty hard to drive the gesso down in to the canvas. You'll notice of course, that I'm using white Jess. So because we want to paint on a white surface, you'll also see black just so let's just stick with white for now. So I'm almost done. I love gesturing. It's sort of a precursor to painting, your painting, but you're not really painting, you're just doing the motions. And I love doing it feels great. So you'll notice that I have is in a pint char that I can dip my brush into. That's really important. You will see other kinds of receptacles for your Gesso. You'll see like a squeeze bottle, I do not recommend it. In something new on the market is ace pray on just so I am going to ask you to stay nice and traditional with the DIP Jessup. So as we have worked our JSON, again, I went in a bunch of different directions, but let's now smooth this out. And so to smooth it out, I usually just go in one direction lightly with the brush. And this is getting rid of all of my ridges. There's a little filament. Let's get rid of that. If I made a thumb Mark, don't worry, just smooth it right over. So this is now pretty smooth. If this is a rock Canvas, I would need a second layer. It's important that you let the jets so dry in-between layers depending on the humidity or where you are, could take up to 20 min. I'd like to take my canvas outside and let it kinda bake in the sun and dries really quickly. And also you noticed that I'm working flat. You don't want to work vertically and have gravity pulling it. You're just so you want a nice flat surface. So I've smoothed it out in one direction. I'm now smoothing it out in another direction is pretty much perfectly smooth. I would let this dry now. And then I would go in for a second coat. So remember you also have sites to your Canvas. This could be important if you were interested in not framing your canvas, but doing a nice neutral gray. And that would be a nice way to present an unframed Canvas. So again, you don't want to do your acrylic strain on the rock Canvas. So let's go ahead and just so those sides as well. So our Canvas, once it's dry, is gonna be all ready for painting. Now, you have a lot of great options for buying pre-stretch campus at the store. But if you want a unique size or just want to stretch your own Canvas because it feels so good. I'm going to show you just how to do that next. 5. Method Stretching Canvas: So as a beginner, you may find that you are buying pre-stretch canvases and that's absolutely fine. Maybe they're on sale, maybe you've bought a six pack. But at some point as an artist, learning to stretch your own Canvas is a great thing to know how to do. It'll give you a lot of flexibility in choosing sizes. And sometimes it even can be cheaper than buying the pre-stretch Canvas. But hey, if you're not ready to do this just yet, feel free to skip to the next lesson. Go ahead and paint. Come back and find me when you're ready and we'll learn how to stretch a canvas. So I really love to stretch my own canvases because I find that it immerses you in the entire process from the get-go, it makes you feel more like an artist. It's fun. It's like a real hands-on project. I think about my painting. I use it as an incubation period. And it's a great activity. But most of all, it's going to give you options for customizing the size of your Canvas. I totally suggest that you try it. It's a lot of fun. It's a great experience. So how do we decide on the size of the canvas? We have some decisions to make. And I hope that you will make them because that's part of being an artist is taking control over your creative space. So the first thing you wanna do is think about what am I going to paint? Is it a still life? Am I going to paint a landscape? Is it a portrait? So let's say that we want to paint a tree. We have a lot of options because we're going to think about composition. That's going to translate into what kind of Canvas we stretch. So the two big things that we're going to think about when we think about composition is scale and placement within what could be several different kinds of formats. So a format is a square, a rectangle horizontally, or a rectangle vertically, right? So let's say we're going to draw that tree. And so this might be like your preliminary sketch. So that tree in a square might look really different. Then that tree in a rectangle, the space around it is really different. And that's going to look really different again in a vertical. So that's your first decision. What do I need? A square, a vertical rectangle, or a horizontal rectangle. Okay? How is my subject matter going to look best? Then we think about scale and placement. In other words, composition is really about where do I put my stuff? How big is my stuff, and where am I going to put it right? So let's say I make a really high horizon line and a really small tree back here that says something very different. It says this tree is very far away. There's a big foreground. And it just feels very different than a really low horizon with a really, really big tree. Maybe it's even crapped a little bit. This is much closer to you. This is much further away. So how big is my stuff and where did I put it? Another thought about, where do I put my things? You'll notice that artists don't always put subject matter right in the middle of the composition. So there's a wonderful law about composition. It's called the rule of thirds. And what that says is, let's take our composition, our focal point, and take it away from the center. And let's move it over. So maybe the tree is now over here and the horizon line isn't in the middle, but we drop it. So the rule of thirds is both for horizontal and vertical. Okay? So now we've had a lot of decision-making. We've really thought about composition. We're going to say, I think I would like to compose in a square, right? Or I think I want a rectangle, but I'm going to turn it vertically. Okay? You've made your sketch. How big is your painting going to be? Okay? So I like to say, how big does it need to be? For instance, if I'm just painting a lemon, I don't need to make it enormous. Sorry, I'm going to maybe do my sketch first. And then the way that I do it, very simple math is just multiply by five or six. And then I have each side in the correct ratio. Because sometimes you find that, that painting needed to be a little bit bigger and it needed to be horizontal. And maybe you only had pre-stretch squares in your studio. It's kinda hard to stuff the composition onto a size that doesn't really fit. But the most important thing is make the decision. How big does it want to be? What's the format? Okay, so now we've made our decisions. It's time to stretch a canvas. Very exciting. Okay? So you're in the art store and you're going to buy some stretcher bars. You're going to see these strips of wood in varying sizes. You already know what size canvas that you're looking for. So for instance, I've decided I need to stretch 16 by 20. Keep in mind you need two of each size to 16.2, 20s k. You will find them in both odd and even increments. So you can get really creative with your sizes. You only need to get two of each. When you pick out your stretcher bar, you will notice you can get the heavier ones or the thinner ones. So for a smaller canvas, you're okay with the thinner ones. And as you go bigger, maybe go for the fatter ones. As these stretcher bars get bigger, they can warp. Or even a small one in production could have been made a little wonky. So what I like to do is just draw a bead down it and make sure that it's perfectly straight. Okay. So did you pick for really good stretcher bars? Excellent. Your eyeball test will tell you so. And you are not going to start with a warped stretcher bar. Okay? So we've got two of each size. And what we're gonna do is assemble the bars by building two l's. So what you're gonna notice about your stretcher bars is that you have a notch and kind of like a dub dovetail apparatus here. So what you're going to do is fit both into each other and slide them together until you can approximate a 90 degree angle. But don't worry because we will check that right now. We're just kinda putting them together. What's also important to notice is that there is a lip on one side of the stretcher bar and that needs to be facing up. That's what we're stretching the canvas over. Okay? So we're gonna do one l that we're gonna do our second L. Right now, remember, this is all by hand and both sides lip up. You don't want one facing the wrong way. So dovetail. And sometimes you need to use a little muscle. Okay. So they're not perfectly angled, but that doesn't matter just yet. So here are your two L's. And now we're going to join the two L's together. Same thing with the dovetail in this corner. It's okay if it's not perfect again. And then we're going to join the last corner together. And it's a little stiff, but don't worry, that's what hammers are before. Okay. So before we permanently commit to the adjoining here, we need to use a hammer and a right angle to make sure that this is going to be perfectly square. So I'm going to use a hammer to ensure that these have a nice tight fit. I'm gonna do that on each corner and adjust as needed. If necessary. You might want to raise this up and get yourself a better angle. That worked better. But am I square? So I have a right angle in my studio. I also use the floor and the wall. You might want to do that as well. Check and see if everything is lining up. Pretty easy to do. We look pretty good here. Not so much here. I do not have a right angle, so I need to adjust. And I find this easier to do a little bit vertically because you need something to press against. Alright, let's check it again. I think maybe we've got it. So let's nugget up against the right angle and it looks great. We did it. Perfect. So now I can get rid of my right angle. And I'm going to flip the entire frame over because remember this is our front. So we don't want a staple on the front. Flip it over. And to make sure that that perfect right angle that we worked so hard to create is not going to move. We're going to put two staples in each corner. And that's going to fix this. So I have my staple gun. It's loaded with staples and we're going to hit each corner with two staples. So a good way to do this is to rotate. Remember you want to staples in each corner. You can, if you need to, gently tap those in, they don't always go in on the first try, so I've got to rotate one more time. Give each one a little tap. And we're good. Let's talk about Canvas. You know, generally what size you need because you know what size stretcher bars you bought. The canvas usually comes in a yard. It's gonna be the raw canvas. It looks like this. If you can buy smaller quantities than a yard, if you need that, that's great as well. What you need to remember is that you need to leave yourself a generous 3 " all around your stretcher bars to grab onto and wrap around the bars. Remember, or lip is what we stretched the canvas around so that goes down. And you can either measure your 3 ". What I like to do, I don't always trust math. Is do I have enough do I physically have enough to pull over? Is that about 3? "? Check yourself. Indeed it is. Okay. So I'm gonna give it a little more so you need that 3 " all the way around. Okay? And the beauty of Canvas is that you don't have to cut the whole thing. You can actually rip a straighter line than you can cut. So the only thing I'm going to use the scissors for is to just cut a little notch, right? So remember, the canvas is unprimed rock. You may have bought it off a roll right? Now we need to cut it down. So I've left my three inch margin all around and I'm going to give it just a little notch. And then I'm going to rip. Which is a lot of fun. Here we go. Okay? I've got one dimension, now I need the other dimension. So before I cut and rip, measure twice, rip once, right? Here we go. Do I have my 3 " over here as well? And then I can put my notch in and we'll rip again. Alright, so I have my second notch and I'm going to let her rip. Here we go. That's it. I've got my canvas. It's cut to the right size. You can save your scraps for something else. But we're in good shape. Okay, so we've now rip the canvas to the correct size. And we are going to stretch the canvas. And to get it nice and tight. There's a very specific way to do it. It involves one staple first on all four sides. So we're going to keep rotating it. And we're going to use this wonderful tool. It's a stretcher supplier. You don't have to have it. It's very useful. And the way that it works is I'm going to grab the canvas. And it has this little fulcrum here. We don't really need it for the very first one, and we'll pull and stretch. But for the first one, I think I can do this by hand. So we have one stipple going in here, and we're going to rotate to the other side. Now I can use my pliers as soon as I've got that one staple in. Okay. I want to give it a tug. This just gives me more strength. I have to say that the pliers are much stronger than my hand. And there's my one staple. Don't worry if they don't go all the way in as mine or not because we're going to use our hammer to give it a little whack later. So let's rotate. And so really the important thing is that you're not just doing one side and then the other, but that we keep rotating. So here we go again. So I'm going to grab the lip again, use that fulcrum. The fulcrum kinda pulls against the the wood stretcher bar. Just gives you more strength. So keep rotating too. You've got one on all four sides. And here's my fourth side. I'm going to grab the players once again fulcrum side down and give it a yank. So every time I give it a yank, it's getting tighter and tighter and staple. So we have all four sides now, the pattern is a little bit different. I'm going to go opposite on these two sides. So I'm gonna go this way and then this way. So I'm going to start at the edge closest to me because that's where I have the most strength. And I'm going to pull, this is a cotton duck canvas. That's what you want to look for. The weight is a 10.5. That's a nice sturdy weight. So one side and then rotate. This side's going this way. This side is going to go the opposite way. Here we go. Pull. And you can just feel it getting tighter and rotate again. So you can see we're pulling on the diagonal. I really liked the pliers. I just can't seem to get it quite as tight by my hands. And we're rotating. So you don't want to staple all the way up to the corners because we're going to need a little room to fold. So let's leave that one. And I think we're good on this one. So now let's go the other way. I'll start down here. Going to the left. On a bigger Canvas, you will need obviously more staples. On a bigger Canvas, I stretch on the floor and that works as well. It's a lot of deep knee bends. Smaller Canvases. You can stretch on a tabletop as I'm doing here. And we def keep rotating until we finish these sides. Remember you don't want to staple all the way up to the corner? And every tug makes it taught her. We're looking good. Okay. I've got one more on this side. So now I'm going to start on the short ends of the canvas. Same thing. We're going to rotate. So you may find that not all of your staples hit home perfectly. They may be sticking up and maybe a little wonky. So go ahead. Take your hammer. Give them a whack. So we've done all four sides. We've hammered our errant staples in and we just have to do the corners. He's kinda like wrapping a present. We're gonna do what we call the pinch method. So I'm going to take this corner and sort of pinch it and then pull it real tight towards the interior and then flatten it out. And then each side will get a staple. That's pretty good. So what I was trying for there is to pull the fabric as tight as I can to make it a real thin corner. And I need to do that on each corner. So remember, we are sort of pinching and pulling over flat and it naturally wants to just relax and fold over. And then we get a staple in each side. So pinch, pull real hard, flap it over, staple. So remember pinching, always pulling nice and taut. All the staples go on the back and watch your fingers. So right there I had a little too much fabric going on. And I think we're good. Let's flip it over. Let's see what we got. Tight as a drum. And the beauty is as tight as this is. It will get even tighter when we just saw it because there'll be moisture and as suggest so drives the fibers will contract again. And we're going to have a perfectly smooth, tight, stretched canvas that you did all by yourself. Okay, So we're almost ready to start painting. Let's set up our painting space first and get going. 6. Method Workspace: There can be a lot of things that get in your way of painting. You might have to man in kids a hectic life, even need the pets. So we want to make your painting space as easy, inviting, and comfortable as possible. We want this to be a place for you to escape. It should be comfortable so that you want to be there and you want to spend as much time as possible painting, believe me, it really does make a difference. So I'm going to show you how to set up your workspace or your work table, how to arrange your lighting and your supplies so that you're really comfortable while you paint. So I really recommend that you stand while you paint if you can. If you're comfortable that way, if you're standing, you're likely to want to use an easel, not a tabletop easel. The easel itself could be a metal one. It could be wood, it could be a super fancy one. Anything that will work for you as long as it's sturdy and you can raise and lower the part that holds the canvas. The height of your canvas is going to be important. You always want to keep it around I level. You don't want to be painting up or painting all the way down there. And what's really important here is that your support is vertical k. So some other considerations while you're standing, of course, that's going to be the location of your work table in relationship to the easel. We want to keep things ergonomic, easy for you to reach me. I don't want you to have to do a little dance every time you reach for the palate. So if you're right-handed, you're going to want all of your supplies on your right-hand side within easy reach. And of course, if you're left-handed, we're going to put them within easy reach of your left hand. We want to be able to get to the water source, the brushes, the palette, without having to travel. Another great thing about this vertical setup at the easel is that it's really easy for me to step back from my work and I do recommend that you do that, leave yourself a little bit of room to get that view. We might also have a reference material that we're working from or possibly even a still-life. Let's think about how we set that up again, so everything is easy and ergonomic. Another really important factor in setting up your workspace is obviously going to be your light. You need to have the brightest, most consistent light that you possibly can. So some suggestions for lighting would be to set up your easel or your workspace with a natural light, and that is going to be your window. We want the window and the light source at your back, if possible. That way you'll have a nice even consistent light on your canvas. If you don't have the option of using the natural light of a window, maybe you're in a basement or you just don't have a window, it is really effective to light your workspace using something called a daylight balanced bulb. And this is going to allow you to see a full spectrum of color. You can either clip that light to the easel. You can use a desk or a floor lamp. So although daylight is best, we don't always have that option. We can use the daylight balanced bulbs. So you may not have the space to set up an easel. You may be more comfortable sitting. So let me talk you through how to set up a table as an alternative workspace. So if you're working on a small canvas about this size, no problem leaving it flat. But look what happens when we move to one of our larger canvases. If I work flat on this canvas, two things are gonna happen. The imagery as it moves up the canvas may become foreshortened. And I've got to stretch my arm across my painting to work at the top. So this way you can reach up to the top of your Canvas. You don't have to deal with the foreshortening and you're not dragging your arm through your image. And again, good light is really important. I still want to make sure that the light is too my back. But now, because the canvas is a bit more flat, you may also want to augment your light by putting maybe a desk lamp to give yourself just a little bit more illumination. And we do want to be comfortable. So what are you wearing? Are you comfortable with getting pain on your clothing? If not, why don't you give yourself a designated painting uniform that you are comfortable getting paint on? It could be a smack, it could be an entire outfit that you put on. And that becomes almost like your work clothing. You are now in creativity mode. You can get paint all over it and you're very comfortable. If we're thinking about comfort, what else is going to bug you are sort of take you out of your painting mood. Is it too hot or too cold? Do you like to listen to music? I like to sing along. So I want to control what kind of music I've got going on. Shut the door if you can keep out the distractions. Try and create. If only for that hour, the ideal space so that you're comfortable painting and that you can lose yourself in it because that's what we really want to do. Turn your space into your happy place so that you want to escape and paint. So we've got all of our supplies. We've set up our space now, we're comfortable and we are ready to paint. 8. Exercise Value Painting of Eggs: So hopefully you're feeling comfortable mixing with black and white because we're gonna be doing another value painting. But this time it will be a representational painting of an egg. We're going to continue to practice skills from our previous project, but this time we'll focus on how to make the egg look round. And I'll show you how to blend values to create smooth transitions. So because we are no longer creating a flat composition and we're trying to make something look round. We have some different concerns. Our brains track the movement of light over a round object as we see the light transitioning from dark to light. And that's how we know that that is a round object. Without those value changes, the object will look flat. So we're going to use value to understand that the object is round. Turning a two-dimensional object into something that looks three-dimensional is called creating form. And again, I'm on the watercolor paper, so it's nice and flat for this exercise. And we're going to tackle and egg. We're going to compose a painting with a single egg. We're looking for a loose painting. Don't be afraid to let your paint strokes show as you apply the paint. We're not trying to make this look like a perfect photograph that is completely smooth because it's a painting. This is gonna be really great practice for using your values to create the look of the egg becoming round. There are some new vocabulary words I'd like to draw your attention to. In this particular composition. We have already spoken about foreground and background. But in this case, the foreground is the tabletop on which the egg is sitting as it comes towards you. And then the background is the wall behind the egg. So another thing I'd like to draw to your attention is what's going to be a line not quite through the middle, but that goes across your composition and you'll see that in the reference photo. So I already have a medium gray grounds Square painted on my page. And I have done that with my nice big flat brush. Remember, big space, biggest brush, There's your number ten. And the reason we're painting on the gray ground is because it gives you something to react off of instead of just painting on white. So white is too much of a high contrast to everything, and gray gives us a middle ground. This way we start from a middle ground and we go both darker and lighter as we create our composition. So in a painting, with the exception of watercolor where you preserve your lights, we're going to work from dark to light so that the lights sit on top. If you start with white, there's no place to go. Again. There's our middle gray and we're going to build the egg up with an underpainting. But the first thing we're gonna do is draw out the composition. And to do that, I'm going to grab a thinner brush that almost serves like a drawing utensil. And I need a nice thin paint that will flow. But I also need a value that I can see over the middle gray. So I'm going to go darker and mix up my gag, my water, get that flow going. And I'm going to draw out my composition. I would draw it as big as you can within your space because you really need to see what you're doing. You don't want to make it too small, then you have no room. So the first thing I'm gonna do is draw the egg. Now just a word about the drawing. Basically the egg is an ellipse. Look at this gesture I'm making. This is from the shoulder and the natural inclination is to make something nice and round so you don't want to be here. You don't want to be sketching out the ED. Let's get that arm going and see if we can make a nice round, big eclipsed egg. Don't worry about any lines that are mistakes because they will go away. Remember, we're working in layers. So you can make mistakes, that's okay. Those mistakes will get corrected in your layers. The horizon that we spoke about. Remember the rule of thirds? I don't want to put it right in the middle. I'm going to move it up a little bit because I need room for my shadow that's cast by the egg. And let's indicate where that shadow is. Without the shadow, you have a floating egg, right? The shadow anchors the egg to our space. So it's a very simple drawing. I have a little bit of extra lines. I am not worried about it at all. I used my arm to make a nice gestural motion. And we're ready to do our underpainting now. Okay. So always put your brush in water. Swish, swish, swish. I'm not going to leave it in the water. The less time those brushes spend down, the better this pressure is going to be. So I'm going to leave that out here. And to do my underpinning, I'm picking a round brush. The biggest one, it's an eight. And it's nice. And the word I have to use here is split sheath, okay? And I'm going to ask you to look for this time, not graze, but sort of like extreme values of either dark or light. So everything that you look at will either be darker light, just have to make a lot of decisions. So the first thing I'm gonna do is put in my darks wherever I see them. And I can make this underpinning watery. And when you look at your egg, you'll notice that there's no geometric harsh line where the darks and the lights begin. So it's okay if the blacks and whites kinda squished into each other. Okay? So remember, I want to create something round here somewhere. I want to move my paint with the egg. And everything is either dark or light right now. Don't worry about in-betweens. So just making a bunch of decisions. And I'm going to throw in some darks and lights. I'm continually adding water into the mix so that the paint flows. And make sure you have enough paint on your brush also so that you get that flow. And then let's make some more decisions here. And I'm going to switch to my white. So swish, swish, swish in the water. And remember, I'm never working with the paint straight out of the tube. I'm always pulling it out, putting it on my palette and mixing it with a little bit of GAAC and a little bit of water. Now remember if I had just left the page white, you wouldn't be able to see the highlights at all. But because I have a medium gray, we can really work with this. The values. What helps is to squint at your subject matter. And that will help you lose detail and see the kind of fuzziness as the values move into each other. So I'm gonna throw in those darks, Excuse me. Now we're on our lights. And this light underneath is something that's called reflected light. As the egg turns, it's catching a little bit of light reflecting up from the table top. So you want to throw that in as well. You'll notice that I didn't make the background solid black because we do something called contrast here, the dark end of the egg will look darker if I have a lighter background back here. Conversely, where the egg is lighter, I'm going to have a black background that will make that look lighter as well. I don't want to leave an outline around the egg. If I do my job, I'm going to have contrast edges, so I don't need to have an outline. In fact, if I have an outline, it will flatten my egg. Okay, so I'm putting a lighter value here in the background. Remember, a light against dark is going to help that edge to pop. And then I'm going to put light down in the foreground as well. Need more paint. So working with a water-based paint is a constant dance of fussing with flow and water and GAAC. Because the minute you squeeze it out and wants to start drawing. But we need a flow, a consistent flow. So that's where your water and your gap come in. And I'm going to bring that up here. So I'm putting white down here in the foreground because again, I'm looking for contrasting edges. Now remember this is an extreme contrast of black and white. This is not going to stay white, but for now, because the shadow is so dark, I need a light edge here. Same thing as I continue up through the tabletop around my egg in the foreground, then is going to be my underpainting. Remember, I really have no grace. I've made a decision about every area as being either dark or light. This is our underpinning and you're going to want to let that dry before we go on to our next layer. It's not looking that much like an egg just yet, but that's okay. Don't worry about it. We're going to continue to build up areas of dark and light and we'll look for areas of transition. Alright, so I've got my blacks and whites and now I need to think about transitional areas of gray. So I'm going to start grabbing brushes, rounds, and flats. I probably will use mostly flats. And I'm going to start mixing up some grays and looking at those really important transitional areas. So you're going to do a lot of mixing here. And a lot of looking and a lot of squinting. Really important. Okay, So my darkest darks through here, but they're certainly not black. So that's where I'm gonna start with some grays. And remember that my strokes want to form the egg. And those strokes are called contour or cross contour, going across the contour of the egg. And remember we made extreme lights, but the lightest light is on the edge in through here. And if it's not white, that means it's a gray. So you have to keep mixing. The darkest darks and lightest lights are the easiest to see. What's harder to see are those transitional areas. That's where you're squinting comes in. Remember you're working in layers so you can make corrections as you go. It's okay if you don't get it right the first time. And you don't have to go in any one direction. As long as we make this egg look round. I'm going both this way and this way to create the illusion of my rounded eg. I'm doing a little blending as I get wet edge, too wet edge. And that's going to help merge those areas of transition. I'm thinking about my value scale, trying to get all of those different values in here. The more values you get, the smooth ER, those transitions will be. So it's not real jumpy. And remember that area of reflected light down in through here. So remember we talked about value being relative. So it's gonna be really important as I work on my egg to also work on the background. I don't want to leave this stark white. I don't want to leave this black. So I'm going to switch to a larger flat brush because this is a pretty big area here. So I just grabbed my number eight bright brush and I'm going to start getting some grays in the background. Remember we want contrast. So this darker end of the egg can get a gray that maybe we'll transition into some darker values against the light of the egg. You don't have to make that background a flat value. Then as I move over towards the light end of the egg, I want some darker values, not black. So black and white is the highest contrast you could possibly do. And I don't think I want any straight up black or white in the background. My widest white would be probably the edge of the egg right here. Let's work on the foreground here. And let's also talk about the shadow. Take a note where the darkest dark is. It's usually where your object, in this case an egg, actually sits on the tabletop. There's my black black. The rest of the shadow isn't really that dark, so let's get a gray going on there. And I think I will switch back to more of a medium brush. And I can alter my pre-existing blobs of paint. I don t have to keep creating new ones. If your pain starts drying out on the palette, you can grab your Mr. and just keep all of those blobs going. The shadow is laying on the table top. So it's good to go in the direction of the tabletop, which is horizontal rather than making it round. And as I work on that, I'm also going to work on the background. Excuse me, not the background, but right in back of the shadow there. It's still our foreground, but it's slightly more in back. So I want to get kinda like a gray happening there. Okay, So I'm working here on the midground. And I have a dark edge of the egg, so I need a contrast. I don't want it to go too dark here. Bring that down. And I don't want to leave the tabletop white. So that is also going to get a gray treatment. Back to the big brush. See how I'm always switching brushes. So again, I'd like to use the biggest brush I can for the area and still have control. What do we think of that? Great, that is too dark, no worries. Let's mix up a lighter gray little gag, little water. Mixing the paint is one of my favorite things to do. And what do we got? I think that's okay. Let's do that. So the table top is a horizontal. The egg is round. So again, think about not just putting paint on the paper, but how are you putting paint on the paper? Because that's really going to help the illusion of what we're painting. As we go back into that middle ground here, I could actually go a little bit darker because that edge of the egg gets light. It's not like yet, but it's going to be. So I'm going to grab a little darker value. And as I bring the edge of the egg up, you'll see that beautiful contrast there. So I'm going to define the edge of the egg. And as I'm doing that, I noticed I must have dropped my brush down into these grays. Absolutely no worries. I can adjust that. I probably would do that anyway, because as I adjusted value here, I adjusted value here. Remember it's all relative. So let's get that white edge going and then see what that midground wants to be. That's why it's also really good to work on all parts of the painting because it is relative. Adjusting one area means you adjust the next area. You just have to keep looking. So I've got my lightest value happening now. And I want a nice flow. I've got that round brush going and I'm in here. So the question in my mind is, where is my lightest light? And I want to finesse the transition, some sort of smoothing that edge out. Now I have this white edge down here and I need to change a value on the tip of the edge right there. So you may find is perfectly normal. I put one value down. Oops, I need to change the next one. Just keep looking at that relativity. And let's fix that area right there, which can actually go a little lighter. Now that I've grayed that tip of the egg out, I'm going to push that value a little bit lighter and get rid of some of my loop sees. And they just, they disappear. That's the beauty of the acrylic. You can make the changes instantaneously. So you never have to panic about making a mistake. This is looking pretty good. I think that the value in the shadow is too dark. So I'm going to lighten that up. That's just like a boring, kinda like manhole cover right now. So let's make that a little more exciting. So I'm going to make that value a little more interesting there. And I see some areas where I can push my areas of contrast Could be lighter in here, dark here. I want a little bit of lightness right here. So I will grab another brush and do that. It's a smaller brush. Sometimes you can have better control with a smaller brush. Our eye focuses on edges. So it's really important that areas where you have edges are a little bit crisper and that contrast is a little bit clearer. Because we will notice it. The i just goes right there. So I'm kinda tightening up that edge. And then sort of blending that in. I'm not thrilled with this transition here in the background, so we're going to work on that too. And let's get a little more solidity here in the foreground. Switching back to the number ten brush again. And we're going to get a little more paint here. It's a little bit washy and a little too dark. So you're always making decisions. So I'm changing the value in the foreground a little bit. And you've noticed I haven't had to sit and wait for anything to dry because I'm working on the entire painting by the time I get back to the background, it's dry. So let's address my background issues. And the issue was I don't love this transition, so I'm going to finesse that. You could do like a veil of color. In this case, value that will smooth that transition over by sort of almost like feathering it in. I need to go a little bit darker, remember as I go to my left, so let's go back to that dark value. But again, as soon as you see something, you can make that correction. And it is certainly okay to jump around the composition. In fact, it's, it's, it's a good thing to do. So I'm actually doing wet into wet, which makes it a little bit blended, which makes a really smooth transition. And one thing I'm also noticing, maybe you are too, is that these two values are very similar. And I want some contrast there. So I asked myself, which is darker background or foreground? I've got a lighter foreground. So I'm gonna hit this edge one more time with a light. So remember you adjust one thing and it affects what's next to it. Let's hit that. Then I do it. And I'm feathering the paint down. So it has a nice transition. It's really important to sort of get a little bit back from your work and look at it. This is actually looking pretty good. I'm going to ask myself, do I have my darkest darks? Do I have my lightest lights in? I think I can hit my lightest lights one more time. Remember that was my round brush. And I'm just going to push the lightest light one more time because my darkest darks will only look as dark as my lightest light. So let and also have a bit of an outline here, and I don't like that, I'm gonna get rid of that. I would rather have edge to edge than outlines. So we're just going to clean up the lightest edge. In now I have to make that transition a little smoother. So I'm just going to feather that in so that you don't see any abrupt changes there. And Here we go. We've got an egg. I think that looks nice and round. The strokes are going with the contour. We've got contrast, foreground, middle ground, background. In the next lesson, we're going to do something so fun. We're going to take one color and add it into our black and white. And that's going to be called a monochromatic work. We're going to stick with the eggs, but we're going to start working with color. 9. Exercise Monochromatic Painting of Eggs: So you're probably feeling pretty comfortable now using black and white for values. But let's just throw a little bit of color into the mix. Will use a similar subject, but this time we're going to paint it using black, white, and a color blue. This is also known as a monochromatic painting. So remember when we did our monochromatic scales, you had your black plus white. But now look at these beautiful scales, starting with white and a little bit of blue. And I've used your cool blue, which is your ultramarine, gradually adding blue. And then we kinda curve over this way until we end up with a saturated blue. So this was a tint blue plus white is a tent. In this line here we have the ultramarine blue plus gray. And remember that's a tone. And you'll notice that this scale is much shorter. Things tend to get darker quicker than they get lighter. And this last shorter range here is the blue plus black, which is the shade. And it got dark very quickly and we really couldn't see any more transitions because once it gets dark, it just gets dark. Okay? So if you have the time, I would recommend doing these as well. They're fun to do and it's just like when you did your monochromatic gray one. Alright, so let's look at our new composition. We have three eggs and what that is gonna do for us, It's going to give us more practice. Arranging the objects in space. Three eggs means we have more edges to pay attention to, more places where we can create contrast. You've got a good photo of the three eggs and your class materials. You're going to work from that and I'm going to work from that as well. So I've prepared another ground on the watercolor pad this time using a blue midtone ground. Remember that the tone is the color blue plus gray. And it is about mid-range on your value scale if you want to refer to that. And the process is going to be very similar to what we did with the single monochromatic egg. The very first thing we're going to do is draw out our composition with, again around. So I am back to my number two or even a number four round. I think I'm gonna go thin. Let's do number two. And we need a thinner paint for this because it needs to flow. Let's do it in a dark value so that you can see it. So I'm grabbing some black and I'm just going to throw a little bit of blue in there as well. Not too much. Again, let's work as big as you can in the space while still getting all three eggs into the composition. And I'm going to encourage you to work big because you need room to see what you're doing. So remember, we want to get some of that gesture going because the eggs are round. And it's okay if you get some overlaps happening in here because it's easier to draw out a full egg than half an egg because your hand just wants to complete that circle. And I have an overlap here. Needs to be a little more watery. So we're looking for the unique gesture of each egg, believe it or not, each one is a little bit different. One of them is a little bit turned, its kinda foreshortened, so it's a little bit shorter. It's smaller. Then there's one that's kinda placed behind and a little bit above as well. Remember, mistakes are okay. All those lines are gonna go away. As we work into our layers. We do need the horizon line. It kind of locks your composition into place. So let's put that in. Coming through here little bit there. And the cast shadows should be part of your drawing because I really want you to think about them. So where are those cast shadows? There kind of in through here, aren't they? And remember, I'm trying to hold the brush fairly loosely, get my hand going to create those rounded forms. This shadow is going to go right off the composition and that's absolutely fine. That is our drawing. Feel free to make corrections. Remember it doesn't matter. There's, those are gonna go away. So there's our drawing. After the drawing, we want to think about our underpainting. Remember what the underpinning is. We are establishing the lights and the darks throughout the entire painting, using a bigger brush around your brush and keeping the paint fairly loose. So let's go back to one of our big round brushes, going to take a softer one. Now, this is a six round. And the way I'm going to work my darks and lights is I'm going to mix a little bit of blue into the black for the dark, so I don't want straight up black. So from now on, every value that you use will have blue mixed into it. And that is the monochromatic one color plus black and white. So again, black, a little bit of your ultramarine blue is gonna be your darkest dark. And it's a little more complicated now because we have the three eggs. So it's gonna be so important to focus on where those edges are. And I'm going to clarify that just a little bit so you can clearly see where I am. Right here. We have an overlap and I want you to see that right there. Perfect. This goes behind this. This is here. Okay. Where am I darks throughout the egg. Going to keep it a little bit loose, a little bit watery, and move throughout the composition, making your decisions. And I think what you're gonna notice is like a pattern of dark, light, dark light, so dark edges against light edges and that's how we build our contrast. Moving my brush with the eggs, so contour. And then decisions about cast shadows as well. So what's really cool about around, as you can remember, go up on the tip. But if you need to cover more ground, you can apply pressure with your hand and kinda splurge it out and cover a wider area. Remember we talked about contrast in the background as well. So let's put in darks against where we know our light edges are going to be. Remember that your background doesn't need to be consistently one value or flat. In fact, it's really rather more interesting if it isn't. So this dark, I'm going to take up all along the top where the lights of the eggs are. Then as we come over to the right-hand side where the dark egg is, we're going to switch when we switch to the lights. And I think we're about ready to do that now. So swish, swish, and let's move on to our life values. So just like we put a little blue and the black, Let's put some blue in our white for our lightest value. Just so we don't have any pure black or pure white going on. So I am creating a tint of blue and make sure you mix enough paint so you can keep that consistent. So water GAAC blue, and we're good. So where are my lights? See? Follow your form. Remember it's extreme, we have no grace now. We will alter them later. And we talked about the background. We're going to get a light value here against the dark. And maybe lighter at the top as well. And we can bring that down into the darks. In the foreground. I'm going to use the lights as well. And just like with our monochromatic egg, will get some other darks in there later on. So around the shadows and down into your foreground. And this is also a good way to make corrections. You can sort of almost redraw the exit Anytime if you see something that isn't quite right. So I am never shy about making corrections. So your underpainting again, extreme lights, extreme darks. Having the strokes move with your eggs, and making decisions about all areas of your painting. Even if you know there'll be gray later for now, it's either dark or light. And we are done with our underpinning, which we're going to let dry before we move on to the next layer. We need to talk about the fact that I know that eggs aren't blue. So what is it I'm asking you to do here? Eggs are white and that's called a local color that I'm asking you to ignore the local color white and just look at values. So in a way, we're assigning these eggs to have a blue color and blue monochromatic values. So we just have to suspend our thoughts about the real color of eggs and look at the value. Let's do that. So we're heading now into our grays, right? Only this time we've got three eggs to think about and their relative value. And it may be that overall, one egg is indeed lighter than all the other ones. It looks to me like our back egg is overall just a little bit lighter. But right now I'm going to start with a medium gray. So remember, no straight up black or white, everything should have a little bit of blue mixed into it. And that is going to give you your monochromatic color. The grayed-out areas, those are your tones. And straight up blue is gonna be really saturated and that will be almost like a mid tone for you. Alright, let's get to work here. That's probably a little too light. So to darken it, both blue and black. Good mixing is important. It takes a little bit longer, but then you don't get any surprises. Get those surprises on your palette and not on your painting, right? Okay, that works. So wherever you see that value, you can go ahead and plug that in. It will probably alter and change eventually, but for now, let's go ahead and use it. Okay, So remember if you're seeing a value, it's not bright white. So I've got to treat it with some kind of a gray. So I'm also remembering to look at transitional values that don't want to do a big jump from dark to light. That's going to kinda throw us off the illusion of the roundness of these eggs, right? So transitional areas always really important unless I'm seeing straight up white. And remember even our straight-up white is going to have just a little bit of blue hanging out in it. Okay? So really important to look at your contrasting edges. This egg is in front of this egg. So I've got to make sure I've got a light and then a dark and get some more grays in through here. And light down in through here. The dark does not come all the way through here, does it? Okay, So again, notice that my brush strokes are creating the form of the egg. I think it's really useful to have a couple of brushes going at once. For instance, I might have a brush for the darks and a brush for the lights. So I'm not constantly having to clean or wipe my brushes. Sometimes even have more than one of my favorite brush that I really like to use a lot and usually a bright. So I'm re-establishing some darks and clarifying some edges. My darkest dark is kinda in through here. This has got to be a little bit darker. And there's that beautiful dark right behind the light of this egg as it overlaps and then it kind of goes up this way. So don't forget to squint. And in your head, you're asking yourself, where are those darkest darks and where are those lightest lights? So the dark is Stark, is in this middle egg through the center. And I want to re-establish that. Hey, let's get some more grays in here. So I'm constantly mixing and readjusting. And actually that's why we don't premix our colors because it's much more expedient to alter as we go then to premix the values and feel locked into using them. Because if you picture a ten step value scale, there could be another five shades in between each one of those ten steps that you're going to need. In this way, I can mix as I need them. Get some darks back in here. So you'll notice too that I'm jumping around from egg to egg. As I alter one thing, I have to alter another. And right now, some of the difficulty we're having seeing the exits because of background interference. So let's take care of that as well. I do want to clarify this top edge of the egg. Remember no straight out white's always get a little bit of blue happening in them. So as I work with my darks, I also need to work with my lights. And it's here on those back edges where we're catching the light. And let's look at our background. Right now. It's too dark. I'm going to go into a tone and make it a little bit dark, but not as dark as what we have here in. Always get that blue in there. It's really fun to be working with color, even if it's just one. What do we think about that? Nice, Okay, go with that. And remember, the background doesn't have to be completely flat. We can alter it as we move to get contrasting values. See how the egg changes as we put that background in there, it's pretty cool. You get a little bit of the back edge of the table is showing through there. So I'm going to leave that little notch. And then as we come to the right-hand side, we want more of a light against dark. So I am going to work with that value to make it a little bit lighter and do kind of a transition here. Right now it's much too light. And in doing this, I'm also redrawing the egg because I have to get to the edge of it. I've got some really annoying black. That's what happens when you don't mix your paint really well. Did you see those black streaks? Let's get rid of them. So again, with the acrylic, we can easily get rid of mistakes. That's kinda nice. Little smudgy right there. Alright, let's come down into for ground and the shadows. The shadows right now, our overall just too dark and we want them to be a little bit grayer. Darkest right underneath the egg. The grayer parts or as the shadows move away from the egg. So let's establish that. Then we'll go back in and give our darkest dark right under the egg where it sits on the table. And I'll switch brushes to do that to a smaller brush. Not pure black. Remember we went a little bit of blue. Always happen in there. Where my darkest darks, let's see. Right under here. Yeah. And that's going to set that egg down on the table top. In each egg has its own special shadow. Let's go back in there with a medium gray. And I'm always redefining edges. And looking at contrast and making corrections, I want to redefine the edge of our egg here. Let's do that. That's better. Let's deal with the tabletop, bigger brush. We've got a big expense to go. I'm thinking we're going to brighten this up. Let's go four. More of a saturated blue. Saturated colors tend to advance. So instead of grain this blue out, I'm going to let it be a little bit more saturated. I don't think I'm going to add much black to this at all. And I'm going to mix enough of it so we don't run out. As I do my work. So let's get a little more paint in there. Sometimes the urge to thin, to extend the paint can get you in trouble because then you just end up with transparent, watery paint. So just use more, even more than you think you need. And then you won't have to worry about extending that particular color. And a little bit of white. Let's see. What we've got is kinda pretty. So that looks a lot bluer, but it's still within our rules. It's still monochromatic. That was our blue with some white and very little, if any black in that really makes the foreground come forward just like we want it to. And I'm pretty good with the paint. So notice that I'm taking these strokes horizontal to set up the direction of the table. And hopefully we've got some good contrast to our eggs. Yes, we do. But we're not done. And a lot more to go. Okay, So let's come back up to this egg here and I'm thinking I'm going to extend the white kind of lost that back edge a little bit. Let's go back into that. That was one of our lighter values. Remember, a little bit of white, a little bit of blue. And were there. Alright, so I'm fixing this top edge. And as I do that, I see that I have forgotten this top right corner of the tabletop. That was our sort of more saturated blue. So let's pop that in there and establish the back edge. Okay. I like my flat brush for feathering the paint down. So we had this lighter edge here. Let's make it move down into the egg. There we go. Okay, so I'm going to keep moving through all three eggs and the kind of things I'm thinking about. Our where's my darkest dark? Where's my lightest light? How are my transitional areas? How does this edge look against this edge? And I'm constantly going back and just kinda shifting everything a tiny bit. I haven't spent too much time over here, so let's go back. Top edge is lightest, but I don't have any transitional areas yet, so let's do that. Ideally as you work, you move through the whole painting. So you don't want to just finish one egg and then move to the next one because you know now that it's all relative. So if I did that, I moved on to the next egg. That first egg that I thought was finished, it's going to look different. It's really good to get in the habit of thinking about the whole painting and all if it's moving parts, we're looking pretty good. There is some kind of rough areas where their transitions aren't real smooth. I'm gonna go back into those and look for my reflected light underneath this area of reflected light here. Let's go back in and get that. And what's kinda cool. There was some brights here, some brights here. And it's looking pretty good. I think I want to make this corner again just a little bit lighter. So we have contrast from light to dark. So I'm going to go back to my flat in sort of clarify. That's better. Lighter corner here. And I can sort of feather that value in. So kinda disappears. I think I'm gonna get some grays back in through here. We want it darker so we can go light, dark, light dark. But as we come up through here, it could actually be a little lighter. Perfect. And I'm going to feather that down. So I keep talking about directional mark making it can really help your painting feel more realistic by establishing different planes. This goes this way. These are round, this is horizontal. I see one area that I'm not very happy with and it doesn't have a good transition. It's from the dark to the light right here. So I'm gonna go back in and hit that with a gray sort of smooth out that bumpy transition there. And edge right there. It's looking a little ragged array. So I'm going to clarify that. We are looking pretty good. I'm just seeing one more area. I do not love. So let's fix that. It is the dark right under the egg here. Needs to be a little bit more of a shadow. Okay, That is much better. So I think we're done here. This was a little more complicated adding in the blue. But remember, really what we're looking for is the same as with a black and white painting. Now we've just added in a single color to create a monochromatic painting, we are still looking for the values. Now, it's time to say goodbye to our black. In the next lesson, we'll start exploring color, beginning with a color wheel. 10. Exercise The Color Wheel: So now we are ready to start incorporating the rest of our colors on our palate and figuring out just how those colors work together. This is a little bit of a jump because you've just used blue, black, and white up to this point, but stick with me. We'll start by creating a color wheel together. I'll teach you some basic color theory from triadic to temperature mixtures. And I'll show you how to mix colors just using the paints on our limited palette. Let's begin with the color wheel. What is a color wheel? And why is it useful? So you'll see here that I have three color wheels. They are different in age. They were printed at different times. The inks are different. They've been in the sun or not. And what you probably notice is that the three colors that are supposed to be blue-green are each very different. So how would you know which the correct blue-green is? That's why we're going to make our own. So the color wheel represents what we call the visual spectrum. It's organized in order of Roy G Biv or red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Which is really fun to say. It's in this visual orientation to show both the order and also the relationships of the colors within the color wheels, such as, for instance, complimentary colors. We do have a handout and a worksheet on how to construct the color wheel. But we'll work together to do it as well. We're going to do this on our watercolor paper. And here we go. To begin, you're going to grab a compass and open it as wide as you can. You want to work fairly large to get a pretty decent size, diameter. And you're just going to spin yourself a circle like I have here. Okay? What happens next is pretty cool. So I'm going to keep that open to the same radius. And I'm going to show you a very simple way to get 12 even spaces because there are 12 colors on the color wheel. So here we go. We haven't moved the compass. You can start anywhere on your circle. You're going to place the point on the perimeter and make a very small x. Next, take the same measurement, don't change it. The point goes on that X. There's your second mark. We're walking the compass around until we get what amounts to six different divisions. All the way around. Just think about as you're taking a walk around the perimeter. Fabulous. We only have six. How do we get our 12th? Here's what you do. Now we're going to split one of those in half. I'm just going to eyeball it. And starting midway, I take that same walk outside my compass, excuse me, inside the wheel. And I get hash mark, just a little x's. And each one of those six spaces is now cut in half. Pretty cool. And we have a perfect division of, well, okay, so we're gonna put that down and we're going to pick up a pencil and a ruler. The pencil I'm using is a Tooby. And the reason I'm using a to-be pencil is it's kind of a harder graphite. You don't want to leave a lot of graphite on your color wheel pie shapes, because certain colors like yellow will show the carbon underneath. Alright, so here's what we do. I have a center dot. It's pretty light if you can't see it, just go ahead and make yourself a little carbon dot right there. And I'm gonna take my ruler and draw from that dot to the center of each X. Again, keep that line pretty light. So again, from the center to my x, you may be tempted to draw that line all the way through, but you'll find it doesn't meet up. So make sure you're going from the center dot to the center of each x. And you can just sort of pivot your ruler. And you're going to go all the way around. So you just want to clean up with an eraser. If you've made, any group sees no big. This is a kneaded eraser which just tends to pick up the graphite. And I like it because it doesn't leave those little kinda eraser shavings that you sometimes get. So I didn't press real hard on the graphite because they didn't want to deposit a ton of black stuff on my color wheel, but we are ready to go. So you should have 12 even divisions. And the first thing we're gonna do is place our three primary colors, which is also known as your primary triad. I like to start with red at the top. And to paint this, I'm going to use, as I have suggested before, the biggest brush possible to mix with fewer brushstrokes, actually a little bit more control. So your primary red is the red on the color wheel, and that looks a lot like this. So remember, we never paint straight out of the tube. It's always a little bit of water. A little bit of GAAC, mixed, mixed mix. Gotta get that flow going. And I'm going to paint using sort of like the long end of my brush to make the straighter lines and then fill in. So I'm going to choose to be right here. And then move that straight down as I come into the pie, I can switch my brush. Remember we talked about the beauty of flat brushes. You can use that straight edge and get some thinner lines as well. So that is my primary red. So we're moving on to our second color and we want to clean our brush off really well because we don't want any of the red mixed into the yellow. Let's talk about placement of the second leg of our primary triad. What you wanna do is count over four clockwise. So we go 1234 and there's our placement for our yellow. If it's helpful, you can make notations on the outside of your color wheel so you don't get lost. So now we know where our primary yellow goes. In the primary yellow is often called primary yellow makes it easy for us. And here we go. A little bit of GAAC, a bit of water, little bit of yellow. Let's go ahead and paint that in. So here's my straight edge. So you see the flat brushes, super versatile. I can even get into that tiniest little edge there. The color wheel does not have to be perfect. Don't worry if, if things are overlapping, I'd rather you just think about getting the colors right, okay, So this was our primary yellow. Sometimes it's called lemon yellow, it's a cool yellow. And it is not so great at covering the graphite, but no big deal. So that was the second color. And also, as I painted, I was thinking about keeping a nice thick or opaque consistency. And you're going to want that for all of your colors. Because it's not just about getting the right color, it's also the quality of the color as you apply it. So let's clean off the brush again to move on to the third leg of our primary triad, which is your bleu. And often people want to use ultramarine blue, which is your cool blue right here. For primary blue, it's actually cyan blue, which is your warm blow count over 41 more time from the yellow. And that's gonna get us to the blue. So here we go, 1234. And that's where the third leg of our primary triad ends up. Cyan blue. Well water, little GAAC. And we're in business. As you notice, the relationship of the primary triad is pretty extreme. None of these colors have anything to do with each other. They are the basis from which we mix everything. Let's get that blue on here. So if I mix too much water into this, you'll see it'll immediately start going transparent. So I want to get enough paint on the brush to keep that opacity. So you cannot create a red or yellow or a blue. They just kind of are. So there you have it. We've got our primary triad. We're going to move on to secondary colors. Secondary colors are pretty cool. We've got a great visual here. They're actually the colors that are created by mixing halfway between our two primaries. So the first one that we're going to do is right here between red and yellow, orange. So let's go for that. Clean off your brush really well. And we're going to stick with the warm red and the warm yellow. So right here on my palette, I have everything I need to make an orange. Here we go. So here's my warm red and here's my warm yellow thing about orange. You want to actually start with the yellow and drop the red into it. Because it takes an awful lot of yellow to change the red, but a very little bit of red to change the yellow. So remember, always try and mix your darker color into your lighter color. When you think about secondary orange, think about an orange or even a carrot. Students frequently wanna make that orange just a little bit too red. So that's a pretty good orange. Okay. Moving on. In-between, yellow and blue are mixture is green and that is our secondary green. And we have everything on the palate. We need to mix that as well. So we're going to start with that yellow and drop a little bit of that primary blue into it. And boy, that immediately goes green on you. However, we want a secondary green. Right now this looks a little bit more like a yellow greens. So let's get some more blue in there. And we can even grab for this some of the ultramarine blue, which is your cool blue and then helps calm this green down. Works like a term. There we go. So we have a really good secondary green going on here. And we're going to paint that in. Just getting all the surprises off my brush here. Okay, so between blue and yellow, we've got secondary green. Let's go for it. Okay, Good. Our last secondary color, or as we say, the secondary triad is our violet. So in-between blue and red, we have a violet, but the colors that I have out here are not going to make a violet, they will make mud. So I want to instead switch over to my cool red and my cool blue. You're cool red is your Alizarin crimson. And you're cool. Blue is your ultramarine. So in this case, I'm going to start with the ultramarine and drop some Alizarin into it. Or it may be quinacridone on your tube depending on which brand you have. And I've got a really good violet straight away. Here we go. Again, going on there. And here's our violet. Violet tends to be really dark. It's not your fault. If it's super dark, that's just the nature of it. You'll notice that there's no white on the palette for this lesson because these colors are all what's called Spectrum value colors, these are all equally intense, or we could use the word saturated. And the way I like to think about the word saturated is you cannot make these colors any louder. You cannot turn up the volume. These are as saturated as you're going to get. Alright, so we have our primary triad and our secondary triad. And now we're going to go into our tertiary colors. Tertiary colors are the colors in-between each primary and secondary. And by the way, if you make a mistake with placement, you don't have to start over. There's a really easy fix. So let's say maybe I put the green in the wrong place. I would just go ahead and just so that over, let it dry and then put the correct color in there. So no need to start over. So I'm just going to walk you through here and then we'll make the colors because this is kinda fun. So in-between red and orange, red, orange in between orange and yellow, yellow, orange, yellow, green, yellow green, blue, excuse me, green and blue, blue-green, blue and violet. Blue-violet. And last between violet and red is a red violet. Those are your tertiary colors. And they're kind of fun. And they actually make two tertiary triads. Okay, so to make the red orange, I could actually go back to my orange and alter it by just throwing a little more red in there. So we're nearly there. So it's not super red and it's not super orange. It's just right in between the two. Get a little more red going on there. Okay? So remember it's a lot of mixing, lot of fussing with the flow. And let's get that right orange in there. And it's pretty good. The reason I want you to make your own color wheel is because first of all, it's super fun. And it's going to teach you a lot about mixing the colors and why they are where they are. It really helps you understand the relationships of these colors. Okay, so I've got my I've got my red orange. I don't have to go crazy cleaning my brush because yellow orange has all the same colors in it. It's just a wee bit yellower. I could actually jump over now to my warm yellow and use that. It is pretty close to a yellow, orange, and yellow more red. If I go too far and back to orange. But I think I've got us a pretty decent yellow orange here. So let's throw that down. Okay, yellow, orange here become know little more yellow. Okay. Sometimes you don't know until you get that relativity, again, on the palette looked okay, next to orange, it looked kind of orange. So remember the gag is putting body back into your acrylics in them down too much. That is much better. Okay, Nice. Now we're gonna move on to our next tertiary color in-between the yellow and the green is a yellow green. I do want to clean my brush this time because I don't want any red getting into my yellow green. Okay. So remember that you want to drop your darker color into your lighter color. So I'm gonna start with a yellow. And I might have to do some squeeze in here. And I could steal a little green from here and a little bit of gas and we're good to go. Okay. So our next tertiary color between the green and the blue is a blue-green. Remember, that's the color we had so much trouble with looking at the store-bought color wheels. When you look at a blue-green, it's really just slightly bluer than green. That's the best way to think about it. So let's start with coming back to a green and then let's just turn it slightly bluer. So cool, yellow, not the warm this time. And its relatives. So when you look at yellow, green, green, blue green, this looks warmer. This looks cooler. Let's get just a little more blue happening in there. I grabbed the ultramarine because that is just a little bit deeper because there's actually some yellow already in your warm blue. And I want it to cool this off. That is good. Okay, let's keep that on there. So it's just, it's just slightly deeper, slightly cooler. Okay, so now we get into the violets and those are super fun. All we have left is a blue violet and a red violet. Red violet is sometimes called magenta. And the blue violet is sometimes also called indigo. So let's mix up a blue violet. We've got a lot of violet happening here. And what we can do is just grab some of it and make it bluer. And I'm going to do that with my ultramarine color, light, ultramarine blue. So it's not straight up blue. You still need a little alizarin in it. Again, just like with the greens. It is bluer when you look at it next to a real violet. So it's very helpful to have that other color right next to it. And we're good. Let's throw that on there. And we've got one last color, the red violet or the magenta. So to mix the red violet, I could grab my violet and try and make it a little bit redder. I'm gonna do that with my cool red and that is the Alizarin crimson. And that is such a yummy color. Wow, look at that. Just need a little more paint. So let me go back to the Alizarin. And I think we've got a good red violet. Let's throw that down. And it's our last piece of pie. Here we go. Okay, so we've now created our own color wheel. And you have a really good understanding of how we mix the secondaries, where their placement is, and where the tertiaries are. Each of these colors remember, is known as spectrum value. They are all equally saturated, okay? And we can talk a little bit about why the colors are in the order that they're in. These colors are what's known as the electromagnetic spectrum. They are basically lightwaves. So if we start at red, what we're looking at is the slowest moving light wave. And then we become progressively faster as we move through the Roy G Biv until we reach violet, which is your fastest moving light wave, when you see a rainbow, or the next time you see a rainbow, notice the order of the colors. They will never vary from this, it's super cool. Another thing to think about is that if I asked you to pick the lightest color, you might say it was yellow. And then if I asked you to pick the darkest color, you might say it was violet. However, we know that these are all equally saturated and all equally intense. These are the spectrum value colors. There's no white mixed in any of these colors. Okay? So when we speak about vocabulary words, we wouldn't necessarily use yellow as a light color or Violet's as a dark color. They are equally saturated. Yellow is not a light color. It's a weaker color. Yeah, absolutely. Violet is a much stronger color, but they are equally saturated. So saturating a color means it's as bright as it can go. Changing the value is adding white. And we did that with our value scales. Remember when we did, those were talking about bright versus light. Okay? So the next thing that we're going to talk about are some really interesting relationships in the color wheel that divide the color wheel into something we call color temperatures. Okay? So if you look at this side of the color wheel, it feels like we're moving into light k. And these are called the warm colors. We have red, red, orange, orange, yellow, orangey yellow. They feel warm like you're in the sun. And warm colors also tend to feel closer to us. We also react to warm colors slightly differently than we tend to react to some of the other colors on the color wheel. Okay, so here is our warm range. Then we look at some of the other colors on the color wheel, ranging from about red, violet through blue. And these colors feel cooler, like we're moving into shadow. These colors tend to also feel further away. So in a composition, we might use warmer colors towards the front and cooler colors towards the back. So we have kind of like an advance retreat. Okay, another super cool thing about light waves and color. The example of four purple mountains, Majesty. So for instance, you're driving and you see a mountain, it's way in the distance. Now I've never actually walked on a purple mountain, but I've seen a lot of them. So remember we talked about the strength of lightwaves. So for mountain is really far away, the light wave has to hit the mountain, bounce back and hit your eyes. So the weaker or slower colors, like red, red, orange, orange, yellow, all the way through the greens, they drop out there. Lightwaves, what is left are the strongest, most risky lightwaves. The Violet's bright. So things in the distance tend to look cooler or bluer, and all those other colors have dropped out. So our experience of the world and how we see color really informs how we understand color when we translate it into art. Okay, so there's a couple of colors I did not mention. We call those the swing colors or the relative colors. Those colors have both warm and cool in them, and they can be made to look either warm or cool. So I can make this green look really, really hot. By putting something really, really cool next to it. I can make it look really, really cool by putting something really, really warm next to it. So just like with our values we talked about relativity, color is also always relative. What is it relative to? Its relative to what's next to them or their contexts. That's really important. Okay, So another interesting color relationship to look at is the analogous color range. So analogous colors are colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. And they move sequentially. And in moving sequentially, they can sometimes suggest movement, right? But if we were working on a composition, we need to build in contrast. So if I concentrate on two colors next to each other, very little contrast, right? But if I move from red to yellow, orange, I might get a lot of contrast. So keep in mind that an analogous color scheme is a primary, a secondary and two tertiaries. Okay? So they're kind of like a very chill group of colors. There's not a lot going on with that, but the most exciting grouping of colors are what's known as the complimentary colors. The complimentary colors are located opposite each other on the color wheel. So we have a red, green, and orange, blue and the yellow, violet. And complimentary colors do some really amazing things. If we take, for instance, yellow and violet, I'm going to show you something pretty crazy. We're going to experience what's known as eye fatigue. So what happens when we put the yellow and the violet next to each other, these two complimentary colors at the edge, you're going to start to see almost like a vibration and it can hurt your eyes. If you tend to get sea sick, you might start feeling a little bit. See sick, there starts to be like a vibration. So what is happening? Okay. We're going to show you. So I want you to stare at this red square for about as long as you can stand, which I hope is about 30 s. That's all you need. When the red square disappears, something crazy is going to happen. You're going to probably see green. What happened? You're not actually seeing green. So the cones in your eyes that are responsible for seeing colors have experienced what we call a fatigue. And to relieve the fatigue, your eye actually sees the opposite color, which is green. So it's like your eyes are trying to neutralize the red with the green and just kinda give you a break. Okay? The same thing would happen if you stare at any of the other secondary colors. But if I don't give you a chance to relieve the fatigue, like when you looked at the edge of the yellow and the violet, that's when you get your seasickness happening. Now in your art work, you probably don't want people to get nauseous, right? So how do we use the yellow and the violet to brighten your painting? For instance, let's say you're trying to paint a very yellow sunflower. I like to say you can press on that yellow crayon as hard as you possibly can. It isn't going to get any more yellow. How can I make this sunflower look brighter? Okay, So if you look at the two-halves here, I've got yellow, just changing the value and it looks a little bit dull. But look what happens when I introduce violet and some values of violet in amongst the yellow? That yellow now looks so much brighter. We're not experiencing fatigue. It's just enough to make that yellow really, really pop. So in order to make colors brighter, we're going to include the proximity of their complimentary color. So another really cool thing that complimentary colors do is when we mix them together across the color wheel from say, violet through to yellow, they do what we call neutralize each other. So you can see on this string of colors that we are moving from yellow with a little bit of white, progressively dropping in violet until we move through a neutralize zone. They're kinda like brown in, through the violet. You can do that neutralization with any of the three pairs of complimentary colors. We can do that with the red and green, the blue and orange. And as you see here, the lovely results with the yellow and violet. And we're going to explore all of these neutralization in the next lesson. 11. Exercise Neutralization Scales: In this lesson, we'll dive into my favorite or the world of complementary colors. I love working with compliments because for me, this is the best and easiest way to shift colors for subtle variations. So I use compliments a lot. In this lesson, we'll work with all three sets of compliments and create colored scales with each. So you can see just how magical they are. Remember that first lesson where I had the set of paints here and I through the paints over my shoulder. Those were the browns. We're going to create our own browns which are really neutralized complements. So while we still have that color wheel fresh in our mind and the workshop, let's take another look back at those complimentary colors. Remember, you've got yellow, violet, blue, orange, and red green. Let's see what those three pairs can do. To start with, we're going to work with yellow, violet. And what's gonna be important here is that we mix the correct violet, that we mix a lot of it. So let's just jump right in and do that. Remember that we're going to use a cool blue that's your ultramarine. And you're cool red, which is your Alizarin, to mix a violet. And I need a fair amount of paint because I've got to make it all the way to the end of my complimentary scale. So let's make sure we get enough mixed on the palette. And then I'm not flirting with blue-violet or violet. And right now I'm to blue-violet. So let's correct that with a little bit more alizarin storing and look good because Violet is so dark. Again, sometimes it's a bit hard to see. So when I like to do sometimes is do like a little swatch test where I dislike, dig in and pick up some violet and take a look at what I've got there and it's just a little blue stoke. So I'm going to hit it with a tiny bit more Alizarin, good Lamar gap there. And I think that's looking better. We can swatch test that again. Yeah, that's looking good. I'm thinking that's perfect. Okay. So we've mixed up pretty sizable blob of violet. And what we're gonna do is drop the violet into the yellow. Remember, we are going to change the lighter color with the darker color. So I'm going to scoop out some yellow and I need a pretty big blob of that as well. So I've picked up a clean brush so I don't start neutralizing right away. And let's kinda work that in with a little GAAC in some water. And as before, I'm not going to make separate neutralized blobs. I'm going to work off of one blonde. So it is a nice cohesive progression. In there. You have it. I think I'll put down my purple mixing brush and let's do this exercise with the smaller brush. So you can start with a pure yellow and that way you know where you're coming from. And again, I haven't ruled out my scale if that feels uncomfortable for you, go ahead and grab your ruler. And we're usually like about 1 " squares. So starting with straight up yellow. Again, it's a pacing issue where you don't want your first jumped to be huge. So I'm going to grab some violet. And you'll see that immediately the yellow has gotten a bit dull. And that's where we want to go. So make sure that you grab all of your paints and make sure that blob doesn't start traveling across your palette. You'll have trouble crawling all of your paint. And it's nice to kinda keep it in one spot. So our first neutralization jump right next to it, you can immediately see it's getting somewhat dollar. Okay? Okay, so we're going to continue with our neutralization by dropping the violet into the yellow. Grab a little more of this time. And you can see it begin to change. The color, starts to go slightly greenish, are almost what we would call like an umbrella or a color. So do some real good mixing there. And let's see where we are. So remember, it's also an issue of pacing. They don't want to jump too fast. And we're off. So just keep dropping that violet in and looking for those changes. So the yellow violet begins to develop a range of colors that I've often used instead of using greens. Especially when I'm working on a landscape where I might want the trees to be receding in the distance. So it is just a really lovely range of colors. We haven't yet reached full neutralization. That's going to take a little while. So let's keep going. It is not necessary to push all the way through violet. And remember, again, it's a matter of pacing. If you do bigger jumps, you'll get there quicker. If you do slower jumps, I think you can really explore the range of the neutralization and you'll just get there a lot slower. But if you don't think about going all the way to violet, then you won't rush. Because really what we're interested in exploring as the neutralization like these super yummy colors that are happening here. So the cool thing also about working with complimentary colors is you can do as we will later and entire composition with just two colors with an enormous range. And it doesn't feel like you're only using the two colors. Look how wonderful this is going. So it looks very much almost like my sweater. It's a neutralized, kinda like softer green. Let's keep going. So here we go with our next step. So this range of color also kinda reminds you have maybe like mustard the colors and avocado colors. They're just really, really rich without getting super dull just yet. We're not there yet. But we're gonna keep going a little bit longer. And you'll see it as it starts shifting more towards the violet and away from the yellow. We're getting darker and darker. But it's still pretty yummy. See where we are. Nice. So what I'm hoping for is that each jump, the intervals are about the same. I haven't made any huge leap, so look how dark that's getting. Let's just push it a little, a little further. So there's nothing on the page that you would call purple or violet. We just haven't gotten there yet. We're just kinda still flirting with that. Ambari, almost just like soft green territory. Nice. I think I gotta kinda up my violet intake here. Let's give it a nice shot. I think we're good for about two more. Yeah. Here we are. It should be a nice jump. Wow, cut dark. That is, this color is actually something we would almost call a raw umber. These colors here almost like a yellow ocher moving into umber, moving into a raw umber. And now it's really neutralizes almost like it's not quite a brown, but it's kind of brownish. So I'm gonna give you just one more poke. And then we're going to call it a day where most out of our violet too. Here's our last jump. Again, you don't have to go all the way through to violet. Can if you want to. We're not gonna do that here. No more gas. And we are good. So this is the darkest in them yet because it has the most violet in it. Wow, really dark, really yummy. Okay, so let's talk about when you might use this range of colors, right? There's a picture of me, I'm standing in a sunflower field. If I want the sunflowers in front of you to be nice and bright, I would use a lot of saturated yellow. And we also talked about using some straight up violet around the sunflowers to make them bright. But we want the back of the field to recede in the distance. How are we going to do that? We're going to take that yellow, neutralize it with a little bit of violet. And that's going to make the sunflowers feel further away. In a little bit, duller and duller colors recede and saturated bright colors advance. So we are done with our yellow violet neutralization. Let's move on to blue, orange. So for our blue orange complimentary pair, we want to make sure we use the correct colors, and that would be cyan and an orange. So once again, let's be sure we mix a secondary orange. Because we're heading towards orange, we can use the warm yellow and we're going to drop read into it. Remember you can affect change much quicker when you drop the dark color into the light color. So we started with the warm yellow and we're going to just slowly hit it with some red. Doesn't take a whole lot of red to change the yellow into an orange so we don't go too far with it will move slowly. And we're not there yet right now we have about a yellow, orange. Let's keep hitting that with some red. Remember it's your warm red. Not sure. Cool red. Primary red. Get into orange territory. Get all the surprises off your brush to some really good mixing. This is looking pretty orange. So eventually, you'll always think of orange this way. Secondary orange will be firmly there and you'll never think of it any other way. There's a brilliant secondary orange with the blue. We don't actually have to mix it. We just have to move it out into the palette. So let's do that. I'll just grab another smaller brush. And we're going to take that blob and kind of hit it with some GAAC smooth sheet out. You start getting that complimentary contrasts, right? When they're pure and unmixed. How bright they look. Really beautiful. And now we're going to change all of that. Here we go. Okay, so let's start with a straight up orange square. So we know where we're going. And what color do you think this is going to turn as we start neutralizing, Let's find out. So that first jump is starting to give you a clue, right? It looks a little greenish. Alright, let's get that first square on there. It's a really nice kinda mustard, Oh, Curry color, big difference. And little more. Blue. Just a little blue really changes this blob. So it's moving a little faster than with a yellow violet. So with this much paint, it tends to creep up your brush. So do some just kinda smash it down in there, get it off the feral. Actually that feral is the middle part of your brush. And what do we have here? Very nice. Okay, let's keep going. So it's not like we have a totally new color. It's just that the orange is getting dollar. Eventually it'll look like a completely new color, but we're not there yet. If you're like me, you will end up with a favorite complimentary neutralization between the yellow violet, which we've done, the blue, orange which we're doing. And eventually we'll also get to the red green. So that the complimentary neutralization is starting to shift a little bit greener and greener. Let's see what happens with this next jump. And when I say jump, I mean maybe more like hop because you don't want a huge jump going on. You're going to miss the fun. Alright, let's see what we have here. That's nice. Okay. I like that. That is a beautiful olive green. Now you know how you get that. Neutralize blue and orange. That color looks so different than that color. That's fun. Alright, here we go. Take her next little hop. Greener and greener, but not like a straight up, bright secondary Green's got a very subtle neutralized flavor. I like that. Okay, here we go. Next step. I need to pull some more paint in there. And remember always fussing with the consistency, how it flows off your brush and your coverage on the page. Wow, that's what we call a sap, green. That is lovely. So the more blue we get in here, the green or it gets, again, we don't have to mix all the way through. Let's give it a couple more steps and see where we end up. I really liked this range of colors. So that's nice. Okay, I'm gonna give it two more, and then we're done. I got a little blob of blue there I don't want. So it's getting cooler and cooler. That's another wonderful thing about it. Look at the shift from warm on this side, too cool on this side, the more blue that we throw in here. So this is now just like a nice kinda darkish green. Let's give it one more nudge. That's kinda like a nice blue-green there. Okay, Here's our last square. We're not going all the way through to the blue, but hopefully, Hope you're having as much fun as I am. I really enjoy this. And just love mixing colors. Alright, that is where we are ending up. That's quite a journey from this beautiful warm orange to this rich, neutralized green. So where would you use these kinds of colors? Well, I always go to creating a neutralized green instead of squeezing out that tube of secondary green that we threw away because the interests is in the variation and the subtleties that you can create. So maybe it's in a landscape, maybe it's when you're painting a still life, but this range will make your visual so much more interesting. So let's move on to our last complimentary pair of red and green. So to begin our red, green complimentary neutralization, I have to mix up a whole bunch of green. So remember when we mix our green, we want our cool yellow. So let's pull that out and get some GAAC going on in there. Remember that we always want to mix the darker into the lighter. This time we're going to grab some warm blue. And that immediately goes greenish, yellow, green. So I think we've done this before. When we were mixing green, we took a little bit of the cool blue as well, and that just kinda calms the whole thing down. So let's grab some of your cool blue. So both blues in this, this is your ultramarine and it just gets a little more mellow. Kinda. Right now, what I've got is our raucous yellow, green, not what I want. Let's get a little more blue in here. So we want to get as close as we can to the secondary. Otherwise we're not really going to get complimentary neutralization. It is still quite yellow. And one more push, I guess I'm going slowly because it's kinda easy to creep up on it. And that's better than just going immediately way overboard. So I'm okay with getting there slowly. I think we're good. That's a nice secondary green. Okay, so as before, we're going to start with a first square of secondary green right about here. And I'm going to warn you that the red green neutralization goes a little bit faster. You'll see what I mean. Dropping a little bit of red. And I'm really begins to turn quickly. If my pink gets too thick. Remember, little bit of GAAC, little bit of water. Here's our first jump. And it's pretty subtle. Maybe too subtle. Let's take a bigger jump this time, a little more red. Each complimentary, neutralized pair has a real different flavor. And the beauty to actually doing these scales is then you know what they do. And you know, when you want to grab that particular color. In as this scale develops, you can start thinking about where you might use this particular range. Where I use this particular range quite a bit is in my landscapes. I paint a lot of landscapes. And one thing that you think about is creating spatial depth. So let's say you had a line of trees along the back edge of a field and I wanted them to go back and recede. I would DO the green just like I'm doing here with some red. And it's really going to help that back line of trees recede in the distance. There's a big old blob of something. Let's get that out of there. Okay. So you see it's darling. Oh, okay. That was a whole mess of red. Let's get rid of that. It's a very rich green. It's really lovely. Okay, let's keep going. Trapping in the primary red. And again, it's a range of greens, but real different than the ones we've seen before. Okay, that red is pretty persistent. You really have to work it in. Let's see what we've got. Nice, like it. We see we're turning into the red pretty quickly now it's going to, it's going to speed up for you. And again, we would call these colors kind of Ambari. So if you have mixed an awful lot of pain, It's also going to take an awful lot of paint to start changing it. But as we tip over into the red, it's kind of going into like I'm just like a rust color. And soon we're going to probably hit something more like a brick color and we haven't done that yet. So it's getting red, red, red. Let's keep going. Well, that may be too much. Okay. So you see how quickly it tips over into red? Wow, I kinda like that. Just like I'm like a MOV. Brick red. I'm thinking, let's give it one more push. See where we end up. Again, not going all the way through to the red. But we have definitely gone warm. This went much quicker, didn't it? Okay. Let's give this just one more hit. Nice. That is a beautiful brick red color. Okay, so that's our last neutralization scale. They get doll maybe a little bit duller than some of the other neutralization, but don't be afraid to use these colors. So with these scales in mind, we're going to approach our eggs, but a little bit differently this time we're going to use a complimentary neutralization color scheme to create the eggs with just the addition of white. 12. Exercise Complementary Color Painting of Eggs: We've spent a lot of time painting eggs already, but this time we're going to use our new understanding of color theory and color mixing to create the painting while using the complimentary colors of violet and yellow. And we'll also be able to add in white. But for this exercise we will not be using black. We're going to throw that out. Instead, I will show you how to create a dark just using our violet and yellow. I'll also show you how to make these colors pop by using compliments to our advantage. So here's the Saturation scale that we used in our last lesson. Now, you would think that this would also work for our value scale. But you remember that we said that yellow is not a light value. It just appears to be light, a whole lot lighter in value than the violet. But to really change the value of the yellow, what we have to do is add white. So these values to our left will be our lights. Then we move into our mid tones, and then we move into our darks, which will be more like the violet. So another thing that you probably will notice is happening here is that our lights on the left are warm with our yellows. And then we move through to our cools, which are the violet. So remember when we did that monochromatic painting of the eggs in blue, we were looking at values and trying to make the egg round and using lights and darks. We're going to do a very similar thing, this time with yellow and violet and complementary neutralization. And it's going to look a little bit more like this. So let's get painting. The very first thing I'm going to do is mix up a whole lot of violet. You remember how to do that as well? I'm not going to use my biggest brush to mix paint. Remember that? When we do that, the brush tends to suck up all the paint to mix our violet, we're using the two cools. We have your Alizarin crimson. That's your cool red. And you're cool. Blue. Let's make sure we get enough paint because we don't want to get halfway through the painting and have to alter or re-mix our violet. So right now I'm looking a little red violet and I want to hit violet right on the nose. Otherwise my neutralization will be off. So that looks like a pretty good violet. Remember if you want to, you can kinda swatch that out, see how it looks on the white paper. I'm going to go with this and to neutralize it, I'm going to drop in a little bit of yellow, the cool yellow. And I'm going to do that over here so I don't compromise my entire blob of violet. And I'm going to add a little bit of white and that's gonna be my ground. So remember when we painted our blue eggs, we had kinda like a mid gray ground. That's what I'm approximating and I'm doing it by neutralizing the violet with yellow and then adding a little bit of white to that as well. We're about there. And then I'm gonna go ahead and paint out my ground. Make sure you have enough paint so that you can cover the whole ground. And that is what I'm doing right now. Just giving it a little more and we're good. So this is not my biggest brush. I'm gonna grab that real quick. Number ten and draw out a square and fill in my ground. Actually, format wise, I think this wants to be a rectangle, not a square. So that is a nice grayed out violet. I am not using a ruler. You certainly can. It doesn't have to be perfectly straight, whatever you are comfortable with. And then I'm going to paint that in. It doesn't have to be super thick, but I do want to cover all the, all the white. Remember, we want to get rid of the white. It's really great to have color to react to immediately, especially like a medium value in white is certainly not that. So I'm putting the paint down, kinda spreading it out a little bit. It's not quite as thick as we've been doing and that's okay. It will also dry a little bit faster. I think we're good. We got enough. Remember we always want to let the previous color dry. Right now. Okay, my ground is dry. I'm going to grab that smaller number two brush because it feels almost like a pencil for drawing. And I'm going to go ahead and draw out the composition of my eggs. And you are familiar with this composition because you did it before with our blue monochromatic eggs. I'm choosing straight up violet so you can see it. So always important to be able to see your drawing. Remember, keep your hand flowing in a little bit gestural. And you can think about composition, having enough room for all three eggs, but still pretty big because we need to see what we're doing. So let's start with that center egg. And don't worry if it is not perfect straight away, we can certainly make corrections. Look at the relationship of the three eggs together. One is behind, one is a little bit in front, we have some overlaps. So think about their placement. And then we have one that's kinda tucked in behind. So a little bit like that. Then we have the horizon line and the placement is above halfway. Remember that's our rule of thirds. And our cast shadows really important as well. That attaches your eggs to the tabletop. So I'm just indicating where those are. And it's a simple line drawing, but it sets everything where it's supposed to be. And you're going to wait for that to dry, which shouldn't take long at all. Let's talk about what happens with our underpainting. So this time I'm going to assign the shadows or the darks as cool. Violet is your cool color. In the complimentary pair, the lights are warmer, so they're going to be the yellow, the cool yellow of your complimentary pair. Then also think about mid tones or the grayed areas. Those are going to be neutralized violets. So we've got a bunch of violet mixed already. Hopefully that's going to see us through to the end. Remember when we did, our monochromatic eggs were overstepping the darks and the lights. So I'm going to take that big round brush again and look at where the darks are and they're flowing into the lights. So my dark is a violet. I'm going to make that watery little bit of GAAC and move throughout the composition, identifying my darks. I'm moving my brush gesturally with the shape of the eggs, looking at the contours, and identifying where I see my darkest darks. Those will include the cast shadows. So let's throw those in as well. So underpinnings don't have to be real tight. The paint is a little bit more washy. I'm really moving through it pretty quickly. And I'm observing the eggs, maybe even squinting, looking at those extreme darks and lights. So our darks, we're cool, Violet, my lights are going to be my yellow. So you can either clean this brush really well or Swift switch brushes to hit your yellow paint. Remember, cool yellow, no white. We want our underpinning to be saturated. By saturated, we mean these colors are as loud as they're gonna get. We have turned up the volume. Okay. So where am I lights the tops of the eggs? In through here. It's okay if you get a little bit of mixture going on, don't worry about it. Remember, because we work in layers with the acrylic, we can always make our corrections. And let's get some yellow in the tabletop foreground. And when I need to switch back to put some darks in the background, I will clean my brush one more time. I find that a wiping your brushes really useful in addition to doing the swish, it gets a lot of the excess paint off and gets you going where you need to go a little bit faster. Okay, so here's our tabletop. And we see that this part of the background can go a little bit lighter because the backend of the egg is darker. And then I'm going to transition into my darks on the left-hand side. So here I'm going to switch back to my violet. We're going to throw some violet into that background and that will be our underpainting. Alright, so we've got our underpainting done here. Remember it's extreme darks and lights. We don't have any transitional areas. I'm going to wait for that to dry. Then we'll go back in and start pushing the grayish transitional areas, the darks, and the lights. Okay, So our underpinning is dry and we're going to start layering. Remember that the lights are going to be your warmer yellows and the darks are going to tend towards the violet. The mid tones are going to be more neutralized. So let's start painting. I am going to grab some different brushes. I'm going to think about maybe having one brush that might be more warms and one brush that might be more cools. So I don't have to keep switching. Another wonderful thing about working with neutralized colors in a composition is that the entire painting is cohesive. Think about it. You only have yellow and violet. All of the values, all of the colors are mixed from just yellow and violet. So we're gonna have a lot of variation. And yet everything will be visually, as I said, really cohesive. So I'm making a beautiful, kinda grayed out mid tone that I'm going to start applying and adjusting and going to dedicate this brush to my cools. I just love these tones really is what we're mixing here. So let's start looking at the eggs for mid tones. And remember, I'll have to go back in for my darks and lights as well. And remember that as we paint, we move around the whole painting. So if I see a similar mid tone in the other eggs, so I'm going to pop that in as well. I'm actually adding in one more brush. This brush will be darks and the darks or violet. So I don't have to keep cleaning my brushes. I do have a lot of brushes and I have duplicates are the ones that I like. So that's not a bad idea. When you find the ones that you love. Let's put those darks back in wherever we see them. So there's a couple of ways to think about creating these eggs. We've talked about blended edges. And I'm also doing something which is called a broken brushstroke, which kind of dovetails the two strokes together. As I make my broken brushstrokes, I'm also thinking about contour. And these, again are called cross contour lines. So that's kind of a stylistic decision. The blended edges will give you a smoother egg. The dovetailed are broken brushstroke also will give you a rounded egg, but a more active surface. So it's really kind of a choice. It's a stylistic choice. So as I have my dark brush, I'm also popping back in the darkest darks that sit under the egg and attach the egg to the surface. You just keep looking. The more you look, the more you see. Don't forget to squint. That's not a bad thing to do either. Then I'm always adjusting the values. So just keep mixing. Remember the more values we have, the smoother the transitions are in the round or your eggs will be. Now, we talked a lot about reflective light that happens right here as the egg turns. So I've gotta get some warm growing in there. Haven't done that yet. So I'm going to head a little bit more towards yellow. Let's see what that looks like. Now grab a little violet. And there's that great neutralization. And I also have to add in some white. So remember, we are essentially still doing a value painting. Only this time. We're just using yellow and violet. And we have the added bonus of these beautiful neutralized colors. So where do I see those? That's nice. Remember, if it isn't right the first time, don't worry about it. You're going to let that paint dry and just go back in and make your corrections. So as I head up into the light, I'm also going to use that value because it has a lot more yellow in it. And remember to pay a lot of attention to those edges. So I am still looking at the reflected light that happens right under here. And I'm always cleaning up my edges. So you want to alter the direction. You don't want the entire egg to be painted with the same directional stroke. Sometimes if you do that, it kinda breaks the egg because all we see are the strokes. So it's okay to switch directions. And I think what's going to really help us when we get up here into our light lights where we're heading towards yellow. So let's go there. Remember I had one brush that it was a little bit more dedicated to the warm or the yellow. So I'm gonna switch back to that one. And try not to use straight up white. Let's keep it a little bit warmed up with a cool yellow. So where do we see those lighter lights up here at the top of the egg, right? And kind of feather down this way. Then in, through here in, we'll work on those transitions. For now, I want to just kinda suck some of these lights and so you can see the edges. That is very helpful. Look how this dark edge of the egg butts up against this lighter egg over here. And that's a really good place to focus. So make sure that you are making decisions about dark and light edges. Because that's where we're going to register it the most. So it looks like right now what I've got going as a light brush, a dark brush, and a neutralized brush. And that way I don't have to keep mixing and cleaning them. I just love this range of color. It is just so versatile and yummy. I know I keep using that word, but I don't have a better one. They are yummy. Okay. So think about what kind of strokes make you happy? Do you like using those a little bit more sort of like vigorous strokes and letting them show what works for you. There's no right or wrong as long as these eggs look round, however you get there is absolutely fine. And I need to define the bottom of this egg a little bit better. Let's do that. And let's go head towards the warm, neutralized, warm. Wow, look at this range of colors, so beautiful. Here we go. Here's that Barnum. And going to finesse this transition, Let's go a little bit lighter here. In lighter still. Hopefully what you're getting excited about as I am is the range of color from just yellow and violet. It really is limitless. Here we go. So transitions. Now remember that what I do in the foreground and the background has a lot of bearing on the eggs themselves. So I don't want to wait too long before I attack those. Let's do a little more work here and then let's talk about foreground and background. Okay, We're going to have to come back to this egg. He's a little help. So always a little bit of water, a little bit of GAAC that, Oh, that's better. Let the paint flow. Let's get that light value backup in there. Nice. Okay, so in general, you want the foreground to advance and you want the background to recede. So we know that violet is essentially a cooler color. If we add white to it and we grayed out, it will recede. If we warm up the foreground and make it a little more saturated, it will advance. So let's do that. I'm going to switch to a bigger brush and start mixing a color for the background. Again, we said cooler. Yeah. So cooler and a little bit duller. Okay. So that means I have to neutralize and a little bit lighter. So we've done two things to it. So I'm planning for our background to do another technique that's pretty cool after I do this one. So we're going to put in this sort of neutralized grayish, coolish color. And that's kind of nice because then you get the violet against the yellow as it moves back. And after that dries, I'm going to show you a new technique. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Let's just throw this in here. And the foreground, we're going to head more towards yellow. So I'm going to wipe that brush off. That's my big brush. And let's head warmer in the foreground. So we have a sort of a neutralized but warmer and darker ground. And we're going to put that in the front. Let's warm that up even more. So instead of heading towards violet, I'm going to head towards yellow. That's nice. We still have to work on the shadows. We're not done with that. And remember I'm using the biggest brush I can for the area. I'm in. That way I have actually more control. I'm not fussing with a small brush. So that foreground is looking really nice. And I was talking about doing something cool here in the background. So let's do that. So the technique I'm going to do now is called scumbling. How great is that word? And what scumbling refers to is almost like a stuttering over the surface of your brush. And what that allows you to do is see the previous color without completely covering it. And to achieve that stator, you have to work dryer. So I'm gonna put my brushes down. You need to wipe your brush and get a lot of the moisture off. Because we've been talking about flow. Now I want you to stutter or stumble, and we don't want flow. So first I'm going to mix, I think I want a little bit of a lighter value, a lighter cool. That's still a little dark. I still want it neutralized. And I want to make sure this is almost like stiff would be a good word for it as well. And actually the biggest brush possible. So let's go back to our ten. I'll put this baby down. Wipe your brush and yet most of the moisture off of it, we want to dry. And I have to keep resisting tipping this because I'm so used to doing it. It's pretty dry so that when I let's make this lighter so you can see it. When I pass my brush through, it is stuttering. Might work. Let's try that. Yeah, there it is. So it's an incomplete coverage. And it's it's almost like it's speckled. And it gives just a really nice subtle texture to the area that you're working on. Okay? I think I'm going to play with the foreground a little bit more. To me, it looks a little bit dark, so let's keep it warm, but a little bit lighter value. So I'm going to go back to a bigger brush. We'll put this one down and attack the foreground again. I'd like to go a little bit lighter there. Alright, so I'm going to make the back edge a little bit lighter and sort of funnel that down as we've done before. So that we have a nice contrast between the foreground and the background. And it is pretty typical to actually wait the bottom of your painting. So if the bottom is darker than the top, that will work to your advantage. The very last thing I want to do is push the lights at the top of the eggs. And then we're going to talk about how you know when you're painting is finished, right? Because you could just keep working. Let's just give it that one last push and crisp up these lighter edges. And we'll see if we're finished. Just want to clean these up a little bit. So there's still some yellow mixed into the white. So hopefully it's not like blinding white all of a sudden. And I'm looking at where my lightest lights are. And a little bit more transitional work to finesse that light into the egg, which I think we just did. Okay. So how do you know when you are done? Okay. Let's talk about that. So what I like to do is step back from my work and almost like pretend I haven't done it and I'm just looking at it and I'm evaluating it in terms of what? In terms of contrast, for instance, can I see my eggs against the background? Does the background recede? Does the foreground advance? Do I have contrast between my eggs? Can I see one from the other? Is my egg sitting on the table. Have I incurred it with a shadow? Does my egg have the darkest darks and lightest lights? In other words, contrast is push, pull. Your lights will only look as light as your darkest dark. Okay. And how about my areas of transition? Do they flow into each other? Do I have a rounded egg? Another thing that can sometimes happen, and it started to happen when I put in my last lights. If you don't build up to them and transition into them, they can float on top of your egg and be detached. So are my lights resting on the egg? Are they staying where they're supposed to be or did I jumped to them too fast. So remember, when you step back and look at your work, it's like you get both a physical and an emotional distance. Pretend you didn't do it and say, hey, what's up with that painting? How did I do? Does something bug you? Is something kind of catching your eye that isn't right. If it's not right, see if you can fix it. For our last lesson, we're going to take everything we've learned and put it into practice, will bring in all of the colors on our palate to paint a still-life of a lemon. 13. Make It Lemon Painting: So you've built your limited palette awhile ago and we've been dabbling in mixing colors, adjusting values, and working with complements. Now we're ready to bring in our full palette and do a painting of a lemon still-life using everything we've learned. You know, how to use complements to neutralize how to work from dark to light and thin to thick. You know how to look for the full range of values. And you've used your pain application to make an egg look round, but this time it'll be a lemon. So with all of these color possibilities in the mix, it can be a little overwhelming at first, but just lean on what you've learned up to now. And we're going to have fun. First, let's talk about the canvas. So we're going to use a canvas for this painting and you can either take one that you've already built and stretch yourself or you can work on a pre-stretch store-bought Canvas if that's easier for you. If you are working on a pre stretched canvas, you're going to want to put on a second coat of Jesse to smooth out that texture of the wheat. Let's talk about a yellow lemon. When you look at a lemon, you're going to see what's called a local color. You're going to see a whole lot of yellow. How is it that we can pull in the entire spectrum to make a yellow lemon? So if we just use yellow to create our lemon, we're going to end up with something that might look like a symbol of a lemon using the local color of yellow. But it isn't going to look round. It's not going to have darks and lights and warms and cools. It's going to look rather flat. But if we incorporate a full spectrum of colors, we're going to end up with a lemon that has a three-dimensional quality to it. We're going to get interesting shadows. We're going to get neutralization. And a much more realistic lemon than if we only used yellow to create the lemon. So the first thing that we're going to do is create a ground on which to paint, as we did in all of our other paintings. Only this time on the canvas. We're going to treat it a little bit differently, that it'll be just a little bit more watery and this ground is going to be a cool color. So when you think about a lemon being yellow, you think about it being very warm. So we want that to contrast on a cool ground. For instance, when I paint landscapes that are very green, I often use a red ground to contrast up to that green. We're just thinking color, temperature, warm and cool contrast. Let's get a ground on this canvas. And the ground is going to be, as I said, a little bit thinner. So what we're going to do is water down some ultramarine blue. And as we water that blue down, we also want to put some gaskin. Remember what we're doing is putting that body back into it. And I need probably a little bit more blue happening here. I'm using my big brush and I am going to get rather a thin layer of paint. Let's just squeeze out some more blue here. I'll just do it directly on here. Okay. So we would call this kind of more of a wash. So it's important that we put our ground on a flat surface so gravity doesn't fight us and give us a drippy ground. We want it to be pretty even and pretty flat. So take your canvas and lay it flat. And again, I've got that number ten brush going. That's your biggest brush. And I'm just gonna do a nice even stroke through here. Doesn't have to be perfectly even. What I'm doing is I'm sort of working the paint into the canvas. There's still a little bit of we've left and that's okay. And I'm spreading the paint out because it does not need to be particularly thick. We just want to cover that white canvas. We have our ground and it's dry. I did not do it, but you can also take that ground along the sides of your canvas and paint that as well. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna do is draw out our composition, which in this case is one single object. So again, I'm going to go for my thin round brush. That's my number two. And I'm going to choose a color that I can see against the blue, warm and cool always contrast because I have a cool ground. I'm going to do a warm drawing and I'm going to go for the alizarin crimson. Remember that you want this drawing line to run and be nice and fluid. So I've got to get the water and the gas back in it. As I mentioned before, the benefit to standing is getting that gesture going. So now I can really move my arm because I am standing and I can get that nice round lemon shape going. Also holding my brush a little further back because I just have a lot more distance from the Canvas. So it's really kind of easier to get that lemon shape going. Your hand just kinda wants to make that ellipse. And I need my cast shadow to set the lemon on the table. It's just going to run off the canvas there. I made the lemon pretty big. I want room to move. And that's great. Just cut that down a tiny bit here. And then your horizon line, remember not halfway rule of thirds, right? So I'm going to pick that up in through here. And it's a very simple drawing because it's just the one object. But boy, are we going to have fun with this one object, right? So let's talk about the underpinning. That's what comes next. In the underpinning, we're going to look for areas of warm and cool, cool in the shadows and warm where the light is hitting it. We aren't going to use yellow. This is not about local color. This is about laying down saturated color as a structure for your lemon at, to hang the lighter colors on. So we're going to use fully saturated colors. What does that mean? No white mixed in and I'm not neutralizing the different colors are almost standing in for the different areas of value in your lemon. The underpinning may look a little crazy. Again, it's not about local color. The lemon will look round. It just won't be the right color. Okay, So we're done with a rather simple drawing of our still-life, but we are going to have so much fun with the colors. Let's begin our underpainting. I'm gonna grab my larger brushes for this underpinning. I've got some rounds going to use some flats as well. And what we're doing is choosing colors for warms and cools. As we move through the lemon, it will be more than two colors because there's a lot of different values. And the lemon, and it's kind of like these colors are stand-ins for the different areas of value. So I'm going to start by mixing violet. And I'm going to use that in my shadow area, on my darkest shadow area, you're going to pull out your reference lemon that's in your handouts. Take a look at that. Same one I'm working from. And look at where your warms and cools our k. And I want a different color for different areas of value, so it's not all the same. So the underpinning should still look round even though it isn't the correct colors. So you'll notice that all of these colors are completely saturated. Remember there's no white mixed into them. I'm even going to use a green as one of my values. So we're not actually changing the values in terms of adding white to them. We're just switching colors. And the green that I'm mixing is for one of my mid tones in the lemon. It's kind of like down in through here. So the strokes are still working with the contours of the lemon. And as I move up into the area where the light hits, I'm going to switch to some warmer colors and just grab a different brush for that. So by warmer colors, because we're staying away from yellow, right? We're gonna do reds, red, oranges, oranges. Yellow is actually kind of a weak color to use for your underpinning. It's the color that is most like white. So it doesn't work so great for an underpainting. And remember, we're keeping in this watery. And then for my lightest area, I think I will mix up a little bit of orange. And I can just change the red blob of already got out here. So I like to work with the paint already on my palette and just kinda alter what I've got. And this is why we like a big mixing area. So you always have a fresh place to do your mixing. So notice how I'm merging the different areas into each other so there's no harsh demarcation of where the lights and darks fall. Let's take a look at our shadow. I think I'm going to use some of that. Alizarin crimson in the shadow. Alizarin crimson is your cool red and it's really versatile because it has blue in it, making it a little bit cool. So that will be nice as a base for our shadow. And we're going to throw that in, right? And through here. We can have fun with our background and our foreground. Let's put in an underpinning there. And let's do a warm foreground. Now go back to the red. Get it a little bit watery. This is the warm red. Your primary red. And throw this in. The confusing thing sometimes about that underpinning is all the values are the same. You're used to looking at value contrast. It's not here yet. It will be because we're working from saturated to lights. We have no lights yet. So we're working in layers and the process will lead us to our lights. We're just not there yet. I think for fun in the background, I'll do a blue green. And I'm going for blue-green because that's a little bit cooler. Yellow green is too hot. So remember this is kind of thin. And as we build our layers will go thicker. It is good to wipe your brush before you try and clean it, you'll get a whole lot of that excess paint out right here. So blue-green, we're just going to alter the green we already have and just kinda push it more towards that blue-green. Keeping it loose and a bit watery. And let's throw that back here. So that's our underpinning. We need to let it dry before we go on. This looks pretty crazy, right? We haven't used any yellow. This is not about the local color. The lemon looks round. It's just not the right color yet. Let's see where we're going with this. I promise you will have a lemon. Okay, so our underpinning is dry and now we're going to begin working on the Layers. And remember that your challenge is to use all 12 colors from the color wheel to paint a yellow lemon. Alright, we haven't used white yet. Now we can start using it, but remember we don't want to jump too quickly to the lightest values, so we'll approach them a little more slowly. We're also going to start incorporating some of those neutralized Violet's that you learned how to do to get some of those mid tones. I've picked up some smaller brushes. I'm going to use a thicker paint as well now. So a little more pink going on. And I'm going to continue to look for my darks and lights. Very important. You will find that I don't need to use a whole lot of yellow for you to understand that this is a lemon. Here we go. So these are my shadowy areas here is still and they weren't deep enough, so I'm kinda making them a little bit darker. And as I transition into some lighter values. I can go back to that neutralized color that add a little more yellow to it. And they think, Oh, even warm it up with a little bit of red. So a great thing about keeping your paint wet on your palette is that you can go back to it and grab from your different areas of mixture. That's going to have to go little more yellow there. Okay. I'm going to switch brushes and think about using some warmer colors now. Alright, so I can start using a little bit of white to make some lighter values where I need them. Remember, we're working in layers, so it's okay to approach it slowly and build up those colors. You don't want to just get there in one layer. Let's bust down another brush here. Let's too light. So I don't want to jump too quickly to my lights. That's a little bit too light. So I'm going to dial that back a bit and look for my areas of transition. For instance, right in here. And I want to go back to my areas of neutralization there too dark. So let's go back in there. Actually want to grab a little green for that as well. I'm grabbing green here because of the violet was too dark. That is more of a mid-tone shadow or dark, dark, dark shadow is actually right under the lemon and as the lemon sits on the table, so I don't want that kind of dark up here. And the lemon, we are working around the lemon. Let's go back up here to our lights. And I think I want one of my bigger brushes back again. So grab and white. And let's take some of those warmer colors, not quite as light, and go back up into the lemon in the top. A slightly more saturated color. That means it's bright, it's intense. The volume has been turned up, right? So we're kinda like in here, a little bit in here, button here. The acrylic dries so quickly I can just move through those layers. Lot of fun. So if you've put a color down, you don't love it, you want to adjust it. It, it can happen pretty quickly. I'm putting a little more green up through here. I didn't like that transition in this is too dark as well. So enlightening this up. Let's establish the shadow. Remember everything is relative. So if I just hung out here working on the lemon and didn't work on the background and the foreground, I may get in trouble later. So remember, try and work on the entire painting all at once. We are getting a nice dark under the lemon, set it there on the tabletop, grabbing another brush about that one. Okay, so we said that that was our darkest dark, right? So we're gonna go back and mix another violet. Now the GAAC. And we're going to set that lemon right down. It's right here. Nice, beautiful dark. But the whole shadow isn't that dark, right? So in fact, there's some, what we call reflected light. Just a little bit of that shadow that is yellow we almost. So I'm going to get some warmth as well into my shadow. Not much. Just a little hint of it. It's kinda like right here. Then I'm going to pull that shadow out towards the end of the canvas. And working on that shadow, it's mostly cool to little lighter. I haven't used the warm blue yet. Can do that. It's going to work really well for our shadow. I'm actually going to get a little white into that shadow as well. And directionally we're going to sort of pull it out this way. Starting to look nice. We are going to be able to see the lemon better if I give you a different color here for the foreground. So let's do that. We want the foreground to advance, so a warm color would definitely work. It has to be a strong enough color to hold up the lemon. So it's good that we have the red underneath. We can certainly go lighter. We don't want it to be saturated because we don't want saturated and unsaturated. They're going to fight each other. So I have to get some white into this. So why don't we mix up almost like a warm red, violet, red because it will advance and that's the warm color and violet because it's tempered by a little bit of blue. So remember our tertiaries, red violet was one of your tertiaries and I'm just going to alter a violet I already had down here on the palette. Little bit of the cool blue. Are still there, re-read. So another great thing about the red violet foreground. Remember we have a yellow lemon. So this is really going to help make that lemon pop. But again, not too saturated. They will fight. And I want the focus on the lemon, ooh, nice color k. Let's see if this is light enough. You know what, I think maybe not to give it one more hit a white. Yummy. Is that okay? Let's paint that in. Yeah, too dark. If it's too dark, change the value, I'm tinting it, remember? So I'm going to add some white to that. And let's see if we've got it. And as I do the background, I can also kind of redefine the edges or the contours of the lemon as well because I'm kinda cutting it with my brush. Hopefully as I paint this lemon is really going to come into focus. You can start seeing it a little bit better. I love the feeling of this acrylic. It is like butter. Also, mayonnaise on a hot summer day. That just the texture on the quality and the glide of it is so much fun. You see how that lemon is really starting to pop now, we can see it so much clearer. Let's alter the background as well so you can really see it. We want the background to recede. So we know that that involves some cooler colors. But we can also make it lighter in value and we can make it dollar. We can do all three things to a color. So why don't we start with a blue and you have two blues, right? So what should we get? U2 is not the warm blue because that might advance, but the cool blue that's your ultramarine and it is saturated. Any saturated color will advance, so we don't want that. So now I've added white to it. Better. What happens if I double it? Just a tiny bit? So I'm gonna grab some orange from a previous blob. And what I'm going to get now is kinda like a grayed out, lightest blue. And that's going to really fall back behind the lemon. Cool color. We'll contrast up to the warm lemon. It's always about highlighting figure ground. What do I want to stand out? Not my background, but my foreground. So let's see how that works. I think I like it. I'm going to push it one more time. Lighter, lighter value, more white. Were tinting the blue. Let's try that again. Much better. And you see how easy it is to cover that background in there. When you start painting, you start reacting to the color. And you think about color theory, but you also have your own sort of intuitive jumps. And you'll start learning what looks good and what works. And if you don't get there right away, just use your color theory. So as I bring that cool background in against the warm lemon, you can see how it is beginning to pop. Let's grab a little more clean up that background. Okay, so we have work to do on the lemon still, what do I need? I want to warm this up a little bit. Yellow is a primary color. I have to use some yellow for you to understand. Lemon. So I'm going to use some yellow and a little bit of white happening in that. It's neutralized a tiny bit. I'm grabbing some yellow here and a little bit of white. And just a tad of neutralization, not too much. Here's where I want to, I want to get that yellow working for us. And the great thing about working in layers is I let some of those layers show through by using that broken brushstrokes that we talked about, right? As they come over this way, it's actually more saturated, meaning it's a brighter yellow. So I'm going to grab that brighter yellow. I don't think I'll ever use the straight up saturated yellow right out of the tube. It's always neutralized just a little bit. Actually just grab some of our red violet that we use there. That will also work to do a little dulling for us. To get that right there. That is too light. Go a little darker there. So now I'm really looking at my values and how they move across the lemon. Still too light over there. Let's go back. Let's really neutralize a little bit more. As I add in that red violet, I am getting darker, just where I need to write here. Not dark enough. Alright, let's go back, probably because that was a red violet. Let's go back here and do some more neutralization. Some of our darker colors. That'll work better. Yep. Was to light. Again. We can feather in colors, we can blend wet edges. We can use broken brushstroke, getting a little bit more violet happening in here. It was a little too green as we came down in through here, Let's get a little more violet happening. I think that's working better for our dark. It's nice to have that green under there. Anything we need to push the violet parts of it. So I've been working on some of the shadows and remember, it's good to work on the whole painting as I'm working, I'm seeing that this little lemon nodule thing here is too big. So I'm going to cut in with the background and make that shape a little more lemony. Yeah, that's better. Sort of cut that down. Okay. I need some lights and I think this is probably too straight up, yellow down here. So I'm going to neutralize that a little bit and sort of calm that bit down. That might work better. So I'm always thinking about directional mark making and how the form of the lemon is nice and round. And it gets some Violet's happening in the shadows. I think I just need to mix some more violet. Cool off this darkest dark here, which is now just a little bit green. Let's get a nice violet, nice violet shadow under there. That works. And I want to push my lighter values on top of the lemon so that you can really focus on the lights. Also want to tighten up where the shadow meets the lemon. So I'm going to ask myself, which is darker, the lemon or the cast shadow and it's actually the lemon. So I'm going to lighten up the shadow, right, as it sneaks underneath the lemon there, it's actually that kinda like reflected light because we need a light against dark. Other words, we're going to lose the edge of our lemon. We don't want to do that. I'm going to pull that out. Who's kinda nice. Let's mix some whites in and get our lightest lights going on. Up at the top of that lemon, I'm grabbing white. I'm going to change the value. I don't wanna go too light. In usually in a rounded object, There's what we call a hotspot. That's where the light is really glinting. That's there. Well, that's the hotspot betting. Going to save that for a little bit still. I see it. I see where it is. But let's do that last. It's definitely lighter up here. And I'm going to kind of feather that down into the rest of the lemon. So it's not just like a solid blob. So you always want to look at those transitional areas. And I am a little bit of that right there. Maybe to like sternum look round. I need a little more saturated yellow on this end, the lemon. So I'm going to grab some more yellow. See, I'm using yellow and a little bit of orange to warm it up. And we're here at the back end of the lemon. Like that was a little light mimicking a little more saturated. Okay. And here is to light as well. I'm going to make that a little more saturated. I'm going to step back and take another look. Let's get some yellow into this little bit that sticks out here. Because it's darker on top and a little bit lighter on the bottom. And let's go back into that. A little bit of neutralize violet. I think it's just too dark, can't really see it. That's better. And actually there's a little bit right there as well. Starting to look really good. I want to clarify some of my edges. I actually think that the foreground, as it comes up to the lemon can be lighter. I really want that limit to pop. So I'm gonna go back to that red violet, but I'm going to mix a little more white into it. You'll see the contrast from light to dark. I'm not going to take it all the way down to the bottom. I'm just going to keep it up here on the top. Nice. And again, I can use that to redraw as I need. So it's never too late to make corrections as needed. I think that works better. This might be a good place if you wanted to do a little scumbling to remember, that's when we get the pink, get a little drier as we pull it down, it's really effective. I'm just kinda scumbling that down and making it disappear. So much better having that lighter value be there. I am not in love with my shadow. It's not juicy enough yet. Let's make that shadow a little juicy or it isn't that dark. The darkest place, remember, is right underneath. So I think we need some more paint happening here. I'm gonna go back to that red violet, but I'm going to cool it off. I'm going to hit it more towards blue-violet. There are your tertiaries again. And let's establish that shadow a little bit better. Okay. It's coming through this way. I think also making corrections, I'm going to cut up into that shadow just a little bit more. I made it a little wide. I'm not that happy with it, so we're going to cut up into it. So you see how I can integrate my strokes, make corrections, as I said, never too late. And watch your edges. Let's tighten that up. Much better. I promised you a highlight. Let's do that highlight. I'm going to take a smaller brush and grab some of my lighter values. Already have a light yellow here on the, on the palette. So where is that highlight here? Nice. And that helps a lot. I'm not 100% thrilled with the shadow as the lemons sits. So let's go back in and punch up the dark. That's very often the thing I do the most at the end is punched the lights and the darks. Just one more time. We're gonna do that. And we're closing in on the finish. Here's that shadow we're looking for. Right underneath. I think that works better. So we're stepping back to look. I think things are actually looking pretty good. I am going to lighten up as we bring the shadow across the lemon right in through here, seeing a lot richer warms and I've got some gonna go back to some of my warmer colors. Get some yellow in there. In brighten up. This kind of back-end here. Okay, So just some last adjustments from stepping back and looking at it. And we are almost there. I think I'm going to lighten up the shadow back here as well just a little bit. So I'm back to some of my violet here. Lightening up this shadow chess where it needs to be. So remember we talked about how do you know when you're finished right? Punched my lights and darks. Is there anything bugging me to I need to make any further corrections. I just redefine that edge there so I can get a step back and look. And I think everything is looking good. I want to do just one more thing and that is lightened the background just one more time. I feel like maybe it's just still fighting me a bit. So lightening means adding white. I'm going to do that, get a little bit of water happening in there. That was our cooler blue, remember? And I've just pushed that value one more time so that I can really see the lemon. And there we go. The lighter value. I don't want any saturation fighting my lemon to y. Okay? I think that looks real good. And I don't have to make the whole background like a solid blue. It's okay to let some of your other colors show through which I think I've just done. I think we are finished. Now. We just let it dry. Look at all the colors we've used to make our yellow lemon. If you look at the palette, you see that I've used all of our six warm and cool colors. I did use yellow, but we didn't need that much of it to give the illusion of this lemon. We've got warms and cools and shadows and neutralized. We have gone over so much in this class. You've just learned some wonderful building blocks that will help you tremendously on your painting journey. Try and paint every day. Be patient with yourself. The more you work, the better you'll get, and the more confident you will be. I'm Nina Weiss, and this has been startup library painting with acrylic.