Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Sometimes people can
find color intimidating. This is an easy
technique to help you find your own
talent and style. Hi. I'm Ann Shen and I am
an author and illustrator. You can find my book Bad Girls Throughout History, Legendary Ladies, and Nevertheless, She Wore It, all published [inaudible] wherever books are sold. I've also worked with clients like Disney,
Facebook, and Adobe. In today's class, I'm going to be teaching you the basics of gouache techniques
and color theory by painting a color
wheel in our sketch. I chose to cover these tips and tricks in a live
class because they are the little things that can take your artwork to the next level. I love doing this
type of exercise as a meditative practice in my
sketchbook when I can't think of what to paint but
want to just have the relaxation of painting and also discovering
new color palettes. I hope that students
in this class takeaway a fun meditative
exercise that will also help you discover more about
yourself as a creator. Thanks for watching my
Skillshare live class recorded with participation
from the Skillshare community. Something to note, this
class was recorded live and I got to interact
with the audience while I was painting. Let's get started.
2. Getting Started: Hello everybody. My
name is Dylan Morrison. I am a writer and editor
at Cleveland, Ohio, and I am thrilled to be here
today hosting Ann Shen, who is an illustrator, letterer, and
best-selling author. She's going to be
teaching us all about how to mix color palettes
with gouache paints. On that note, Ann, why don't you tell
us a little bit about yourself and what you do? All right. Thank
you so much, Dylan. You're doing amazing. I'm Ann Shen. My pronouns are she/her. I am an author, illustrator, and designer
based here in Los Angeles. I am here today to show
you a fun exercise that we could do in our sketchbooks
that will teach you all about mastering the gouache technique, consistency, and color theory. Let's see. All right, yeah. Everybody ready
to have some fun? I think so. Certainly, I am. I'm very excited to
learn all about this, something I know
very little about. Take it forward into the world when I am not hosting a video, I can do both [LAUGHTER]
at the same time. All right, go ahead
and teach us. All right. So today I'm
going to talk a little bit about color and color theory before we get started
on our actual project, just to give you a little
bit of background on that, and also on gouache. Actually let's
start with gouache. I'd love to know on
the chat if anyone's had experience with gouache
or if it's your first time. As you tell me that,
I'm going to give you a quick background
on gouache for anyone who needs
it, even myself. Gouache is an opaque
watercolor basically. It has the same pigments
that are in watercolor, but the binder and the, shoot, I'm losing
the word in it. But basically there's like
a base in it that makes it matte and opaque, which means you can't see
through, unlike watercolor. However, you can
really thin it down so that you can use it
like a watercolor wash. But the nice thing about gouache is that
you can get really flat, opaque color so you
can use it like an acrylic or an oil where
you can paint over it, say you make a mistake. Or you can use it
the same way like, with watercolor
you are basically painting from the lightest
area to the darkest, but with gouache, you can use it like, again, acrylic or
oil where you're painting. Like you can paint
from the background to the foreground and you can
paint things on top of it. That's the great part of it. It's matte because that way when you're scanning or photographing it,
it's not reflective. It came into popularity with mid-century
illustrators who are doing all these advertising and
animation backgrounds that were being photographed or
scanned and reproduced. It also dries really
fast and it's non-toxic unlike oil paints. It's pretty safe to use unless there's some
pigments that are toxic. But with modern day pigments, they don't really
use those anymore. That's a rundown on gouache. Let me know if you
have any questions about gouache further than that. The trickiest thing that
people find with gouache is the consistency
in getting it right. The first time I
used gouache was for a color theory class. If you use gouache, you know it's pretty expensive. When you're trying
to learn color and how to work with gouache, another tricky
thing with gouache is that it dries darker. Most of them dry darker than
it looks when it's wet. When you're trying to match exact colors like in
a color theory class, that can be infuriating
because it's expensive and difficult and it gets
very clumpy really fast. I'm here to help you, teach you all the
tricks and tips that I've learned in my 10 years of painting with gouache
professionally. Okay, so that's
the gouache part. We're going to do that
as we're going to get into it more as we're
working on the exercise. But just a quick rundown on color theory or
color in general. When we talk about color, we're referring to four
different things. Color is basically
the reflection of the light that we're seeing. That's in science as I'm
going to get about it. There are way more science
ways to explain it. But basically colors,
our eye perceiving the wavelength that's
being reflected in light. When we talk about color, we're talking about
four different things. The first thing is hue. Hue refers to the color
family that it's in. For example, rose,
magenta, coral, those are all in
the red hue family. That's just what hue means. The next one is value. Value is how light or dark
a color is basically. Like burgundy and pink are
all different values of red. [NOISE] Let me use my notes
to help me. [OVERLAPPING] No worries at all. I know
that happens too. [LAUGHTER] The third one is saturation. Saturation is how intense the
pigment is in your color. We'll see that more as we're exercising during the exercise. But I think you
pretty much get it if you've edited pictures
on a phone as well. I think we're all very
savvy with these words now. I want to say like one of the things to look out for
when you're starting out with color and painting and making images of
color to begin with, is we tend to use everything
saturated and then that makes everything important and it doesn't feel
as tightly designed. Understanding that is going to take your work to
the next level. Like you want to saturate
the things that you want to draw the eye to or is the most important
thing in your image, not everything is
the same intensity. Look for this when you're
out in the real world. Say you're looking at a store. Usually, the sign of the store
is the most saturated color. Or look at it in
advertising or in TV shows, you'll see characters
and people are dressed more saturated colors in the background for example. Once you start noticing
this and the way that's intentionally
designed for the eye, you'll start seeing
it everywhere. Then the fourth thing
is temperature. When we're talking about
temperature in color, it means how warm or
cool something is. For example, greens in
the green hue family, like olive green has
more yellow in it and that makes it warmer. Warmer tone things
look closer to us, whereas cooler tone things
look further from us. That's a way to
cheat perspective, is when you're painting
something further away or even when you're
looking in real life, like the mountains
always look bluer, even though we all know they're
probably brown or green. Here in California,
they're brown usually, [LAUGHTER] but they're
further away and they're like a
cooler toned color. When you're painting
and setting up pieces that have perspective like things that are further
away and closer, you can take that into
consideration and use color to help you cheat
that perspective. Then the last thing
to know really about color is that it's all relative. Things will look certain
colors next to other colors, and that has to do with the
way our eyes see things. That's also something to think about when you're
painting things, when things are next
to neutral things. That color will pop out if things are next to a
complimentary of its color, it'll start to look green. This is what we're like. If things are next
to a red thing and it's a neutral color, it might start to look green
because your eye wants to compensate for that
complimentary color. This comes up in those debates on the
Internet where you're like, is this dress blue and
black or white and gold? That has to do [LAUGHTER]
with color being relative.
3. Materials: Let's get started. Are we ready to get started
with the color wheel? I think we are, yeah. I do have a couple of folks who, just one quick question, most folks are absolutely at the beginning of
their journey with this kind of paint,
which is awesome. I do have one person wondering if you've ever worked
with jelly gouache. I have. I actually have a couple of paints of
jelly gouache that I'm trying out so that when my students ask me about
it, I know about it. I have worked with jelly
gouache. It's fun. It's a student grade gouache so I wouldn't use
it for anything that say you're doing a gallery piece that
you're selling, I wouldn't use it
for that, but for your sketchbook and for
practice, it's great. The consistency is a little wetter than gouache you
would get out of the tube, so you may not need
to wet it as much. But it doesn't really matter because you're just going to use what consistency you
want things to be, which is for jelly gouache
and for regular gouache, the perfect consistency
to work with for paint is you want it to
be heavy cream. You'll notice in
your jelly gouache, as it gets older, some colors will dry out
faster than other colors, so some may need to re-wet or add glycerin to it,
to reinvigorate more. Do not add glycerin to
your normal gouache paint, it's just specific
to jelly gouache because that's what
they add to keep it in that wet little
jelly cup consistency. I hope that answers
your question. You're very welcome to use
that for this class as well. Fantastic. Let's get started.
I might overhead, I'm going to show you
all my materials, I have a watercolor sketchbook, the one I have here
is from Arteza, I believe it's pronounced, and you can see I just do it. This was a jelly
gouache experiment actually to see how
the consistency is, and you can see it's
perfectly flat, but it's a little thinner than the Winsor and Newton
gouaches I'm using, and so I have to layer
a couple of more, like one more extra layer to get as opaque and as
flat as I'd like. I like these sketchbooks because they do lay flat nicely. Then I have a little
ceramic plate that I use for a
pallet actually, but I'm also using it today
to trace my color wheel, which you could see lightly
I've already penciled in, but we'll get there. I've picked three colors in
the primary hue families, but I wanted to show you
how different they can look and how you can get different types of
color wheels based on the saturation and the hue that you've chosen
from that family. That's how we can build our entire palette because
to unify your painting, you actually want to use
as few colors as possible. That's something I
learned in art school. In the beginning I thought, oh, I'm really great at color. That's what I'm good at. I'm not good at
drawing or [inaudible] but I could do color, and then I was in a
class in art school, and one of my critiques,
my teacher was like, oh, this is good, but can you maybe try not using every color
of the rainbow. I was like, what? Then I realized my thinking
I was going to color it was because I was just
using every color on every piece all the time. You can use every
color as you're seeing if you want in your
pieces to express something. But I wasn't doing
it intentionally. You want to make sure that when you're working on your pieces, you're doing things
intentionally and all the colors in the
family really melt together. When I say that it
means when you're using just three primary colors, and then you're white and
you're black or whatever you're using as a darker black color, you can still get a
full range of color, but your painting looks
so much more unified. An example I have on this is our master painter,
John Singer Sargent. Most of his paintings, you could do with three colors, with burnt umber as
your black or white, and ultramarine blue, a yellow ocher,
and burnt sienna, which is also what I have here. I have burnt umber
instead of burnt sienna, but you can get this whole
unified painting with just those colors and then different saturations
of everything. That's amazing, I think, because you can make
your painting look like that next level of
finish when you are purposeful with
your color choices. That's what we're here
to help you figure out. This yellow-green is not the
same as this yellow-green. If you use this yellow-green
in this palette, it may not look unified unless
you're trying to make it look like a certain
glowing neon green color. That is what I'm
talking about when I'm talking about
purposeful color use.
4. Setting Up Your Wheel: Today I've chosen
to use primary red, cobalt blue light,
and yellow ocher as my primary color hues. Then I have a big tube
of permanent white. Then you have your palette, your cup of water, your misting bottle, and
your Number 6 brush. You can see my paper
towels and my pencil, you'll see in one second here. I like a mechanical pencil just because it's always sharp. Then I always like to use pink because pink is
my favorite color, but feel free to use whatever
color makes you happy. The first thing you're going to do is you're going to trace your round object in the center-ish of your
page, if you can. Mine is not perfectly fine, but it's just a
sketchbook exercise. I like to do the
sketchbook exercise because I'm not
thinking too much about what I'm painting and
trying to get a likeness, I'm just thinking
about paint and color. It can be a really fun
meditative practice. What we're going to do is divide this circle up into nine parts. You could also do 12
but for sake of time, we're going to do nine today. You measure the exact center and put a little dot there. Sure. Pretty close. The center of my circle. I keep breaking my
pencil today though. One, two. Let's see how many lines
I'm going to need actually, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. We need five lines, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. They're all about equally
distanced apart pie slices, but don't worry about it
too much if it's not. Again, this is a
sketchbook exercise, so keep it fun and
light for yourself. Then what I'm going to do
is actually just freehand draw a second smaller circle. It's not perfect, but again, we're going to be painting
over all of this. This is just guidelines
for ourselves. Are any of us perfect really? No. That's what makes
this beautiful, [OVERLAPPING] the imperfections. Beautiful and interesting. Then you're drawing a smaller
circle on the inside. If you have three
perfect little saucers that you can trace, great. I'm a big fan of using
what you have on hand and sometimes even if you
don't have it on hand, just doing the best you can. Any questions so
far? Are there 10? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Yes, 10 total. You're right, Dylan. I was pretty sure but
I was like, oh, no. Did I make too many?
Hold on, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Oh, my God. What is happening? I'm not teaching math or
geometry today. Hold on. I was just going to say really, how many creatives
does it take to figure out how many
lines are in a circle? I did that totally wrong. One. Basically, what we're doing is we're painting
one triangle slice with each hue and then doing two colors between each
primary. [LAUGHTER]. Got it. Oh, my gosh. Then we really
needed just four lines, 1, 2, 3, 4. Correct me if I'm wrong
because obviously, I am very [LAUGHTER] bad
at math and geometry. Maybe we have an extra
practice slice. Let's see. We have [LAUGHTER] 1, 2, 3, 4. Oh, my God. Math will
be the end of me here. I think it is supposed to be 12. Is it 12? Maybe nine. I could be wrong. I reduced it. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
It should be nine. I reduced it just for
the sake of time, which obviously we
could have just done [LAUGHTER] if I had
just done this correctly. Honestly, I am one of those people
who if you want words, I'm good all day, if you
want numbers, forget it. You have to call anyone else, so no judgment here
for sure. [LAUGHTER]. Thank you. Same thing. Here's
what we're going to do. We're going to do one. I did this so many times too
and [LAUGHTER] was like, I think I got it finally. No. Obviously, I don't. This is just a real lesson for students that even
the professionals sometimes need an extra moment and it's totally
fine. [LAUGHTER]. If anyone's a professional
color wheel painter out here, let me know. [LAUGHTER] I'm so sorry that I'm embarrassing you so deeply. Well, we're hearing from
students that this is exactly how it goes when they work on
their own sketchbooks, so you're in good company. Got it. [LAUGHTER]. Oh my gosh, you guys, I worked on this so
hard to be like, this is the right number. Numbers are tricky. Then I messed up in
real-time in front of you guys. Oh, my God. What are we doing here? I'm just going to erase all of mine to start over and make sure
the slices are even. This is just real-time
what's happening today. [LAUGHTER]. This is the beauty
of a live class. It really is. As you can see, numbers are hard for me. Colors, I know. That's what you're here for really, right? Exactly. I'm going to do one slice here. What I need is three slices. Is this a radioactive sign? A little, but in the
best possible way. A beautiful radioactive sign. Yes. You could see these 1, 2, 3. This is why we love sketchbooks. It's where we can
explore things, learn we're bad at geometry,
and then work on it. I definitely am one
of those people who even in a sketchbook I struggle and I want
it to be perfect, so it's actually very comforting to see you doing this as well. I know. I always want to, like one of those people who has
a beautiful sketchbook, but I am not. You should see my scribbles of how my illustrations start out. [LAUGHTER] What I did was I did three slices that are
opposite each other, every third, and then
I divided the triangle that was between them into
two so that we have nine. Wait, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Just wanted to confirm before I threw you guys off because ultimately what we want to do is the three primary colors, they're different values, and then the two colors in
between. Is that clear?
5. Painting the First Segment: What I'm going to do is
start with the first color. I'm going to start with
my yellow hue family. We're going to start
with yellow ocher. I'm going to squeeze out some yellow ocher there. With gouache, you always want a little more than a little less because it's pretty hard to match that same color again
that you're mixing, so I always like to mix up a batch that's a little bigger
than I think I'll need. Then I'm going to actually
squeeze my permanent white on the side just
so it's ready to go. If you're wondering why
we use permanent white instead of zinc
white, it's because permanent white is
totally opaque, it's actually just
fully composed of the base that the pigment
of whatever paint is added to whereas zinc white or China white is
more transparent. Just in case you're
wondering and I think jelly gouache that's come
with both in there and they might mean
something different but you will find one is more of your mixing white and one is a more transparent
or I think they call it zinc white or mixing
white because it is more transparent and then the permanent white is the one that you can paint on top
of other things. That is so good to know. We're going to take
our six brush, I ditch it in water a little bit because I'm trying to
get, as you can see, that straight out of the tube. It's a little bit thicker
than heavy cream. What I'm trying to get is
the consistency too is heavy cream and I will
do that by adding just water from my brush in the beginning and
you just mix it and you get the feel for it like when it's coming out like that, it's heavy cream and
it's blending out easily versus when it's chunky and it's thick like that.
Do you see that? Absolutely. Part of this exercise
is practicing, and getting this
consistency right. You just take that pure color
straight out of the tube and we're painting
our first slice. When I get a little dry,
I just dip my brush in the water and I'm
using a round brush because round
brushes can get into precise corners
like that and also fan out to give you a
nice flat layer of color. What you don't want to do is go over and over it
because it'll get really gunk stuck and thick. Then you want to get
this consistency so you can get that nice flat
layer the first time. When you do that first stroke, it completely covers the paper. Makes a lot of total sense. Any questions so far? We are having fun? Straight out [inaudible]
[OVERLAPPING] I think people are
just enjoying it. Somebody is wondering which
side the round brush is it? If I'm correct,
it's a six, right? Yes. I'm using a six. You can't really see it on
here but, yeah, it's a six. Absolutely. Yeah. We're just going to do one color all the way
in because it'll be easier to just mix
your white into that, then to mix all the colors, and then come back to this because it'll be dried by that. What we're trying to
get here is maybe these are all approximations
in math because as I've revealed I'm very bad
at math. [LAUGHTER] This is maybe about 50/50 of the white and
the yellow ocher color. What you do is paint
the second slice. This is a really good
exercise also for just practicing
with control with your brush and getting that perfect flat
consistency with gouache. You want it to look
totally seamless. You can have it look
whatever you want it to look like because
it's your style. But a good exercise and learning to control
and play with gouache so that you get it the
way you want it to look is to do this where you can see. This is the
consistency I want to get it to the flatness and pure layer of color before
you start playing with textures and dry brushing and sipling and
things like that. Now the other 50 percent, now I'm going to do more of a, let's see, this looks
more like maybe a 20/80. I'll add a little
more white into it. I didn't even go back to
the pure yellow ocher, I took that second color
and added white to it. Most of the time when
you're mixing colors, you want to add
the color to white because as you can
see, you need to add a lot of white into a
color to get the color to come down in value.
Whereas if you add just some pigment into white,
it tense it really fast. That's just to save
you some paint and some heartache because gouache is pretty
expensive, [LAUGHTER] so just working smarter. Then the last slice
I'm painting in and it's so satisfying when you know the consistency is
right when you lay it down and the paint just flattens out into the shape
that you painted. If you're painting,
you can understand that it's a hard
thing to explain. It's something that
you see and feel as you're painting
because it happens so quickly as you start.
6. Painting the Other Primary Colors: I'm going to actually
paint in all of the primary colors
and then we're going to do the secondary. We're not doing tertiary today. Secondary colors [inaudible]. Secondary means when the primary colors
are mixed together, tertiary is when the
secondary colors are mixed with each
other even more. Honestly, I never think of these terms though
when I'm painting. I don't think, oh, I'm going
to use a secondary color. I just think, okay,
I'm going to use maybe a red violet in this family. I think that makes sense. It's one of those things
that you need the words to describe it when you're
talking about the concept, but when you're
actually doing it, you're like, well,
I'm just doing stuff. Exactly. You'll notice
I'm using primary red for this and I'm noticing
with this that it's a little more transparent
than the yellow ocher was. That has to do with the
pigment that they're using. This one I painted over a
couple of times to get it flat and you may not need
to add as much water. I'm going to go back
in, add white into it to get that 50, 50ish vibe. Any questions? How's
everyone doing? So far it looks like people are just really enjoying
watching this. I've got somebody who just wants to let you know
how therapeutic it is to watch this
because color mixing is so satisfying which I
definitely agree with. Yes, totally. At least for now, it looks like we're
good on questions. I will definitely keep you
posted as they pop up. Awesome. One way that you
can use this to figure out your own palette and style
is pick your favorite color. Go to the art store, pick three of your
favorite colors and those primary hue families. Again, they don't have to be just primary red,
yellow, and blue. It could be like
this yellow ocher, a turquoise and then just pick your favorite primary colors and then you'll start to make
a color wheel with it. Then you can feel like, oh, you found your palette
for your brand, your paintings, your style. It will always have a
touch of this color in it. I find that really fun
and fun way to explore your personal style as an artist when
you're starting out. Because I think you can
get really lost in, oh, I like this, but
I don't know why. Studying colors you like is a great way to
start discovering your own personality and voice and it can even not just be
for your artistic pursuits, it could be for your
personal life too and the way you decorate your house, the way you dress, decorate your body, things
you pick to make you happy. Color has such an
impact on that. I'm using this cobalt turquoise
light, what a long name, as my blue hued primarily. [NOISE] I love that color. Isn't a gorgeous? I love it so much. I added it to my kit. That's one of the colors
that I use a lot. I always add it into a
little bit of my blues. It's a signature color
in my paintings. I just love it so much. Yeah, it's just gorgeous. I'm adding the
color to the white, so it doesn't get
totally swallowed up. See that, kind of 50, 50. This is a really fun
sketchbook exercise. Again, you could do it with whatever paints or
mediums you'd like to use just to get better
at painting too. But no pressure because
you're not trying to make it look like something else and color wheels are always super
satisfying to look at. Definitely true. To
your point earlier, I know that there are people
out there into theory who have beautiful
sketchbooks with no mistakes, but I've never met one
in my life. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, me neither and I
know a lot of others. Me too. It's got messy parts
that are beautiful too. Like seeing someone's
thought process, seeing how they perceive the world is what's
really beautiful. Absolutely. I don't
think that there's much creativity that
doesn't involve some mess at some
stage of the process. I know my early drafts
[inaudible] and stuff are just ridiculous. Right just get to a point where
you see how it started as a seedling and it evolves into this beautiful final
piece. I love that.
7. Painting the Secondary Colors: We're going to start mixing
the secondary colors. What I'm doing is pretty
much 75 percent of this turquoise and 25 percent of the red, the primary red. I'm going to squeeze out
more primary red for that, so I get it pure pigment. For the first one,
we're still just using pure pigment
straight out of the tube. That a little bit
more translates into it because that red
was very strong. When I say 75 percent, 25
percent, it's a feeling, it's obviously not a exact
science measurement, but it's more heavy on the
turquoise than it is on the red painted here. I do not expect the two of them to make this
slate-blue color. No, I was just
thinking like that. Is not what I would
have guessed. Would come out about to color. Isn't it so fun to explore that? Absolutely. I think it's [LAUGHTER] on, I'm a color nerd, but isn't that magical? It really is as somebody
who watches a lot of Instagram videos of
people just mixing paints together. I'm
right there with you. Now you can use this in a
painting that you're using these two colors and it'll totally feel
very unified still, because now you know, it's part of the
same color family. My little color wheel families. That is wild. I haven't done this
color wheel before, like each one as a surprise
to me so I'm being as genuinely
surprised as you guys are if you see [LAUGHTER]
this come together. The red was primary red, I just saw a question
pop up books, Kelly. I was going to say you beat
me to asking him that. [LAUGHTER] I'm picking
up some of those turquoise but now I'm
going heavy on the red. I'm getting this
more reddish purple. Now I do have somebody
wondering why you went with the yellow ocher instead of like a
primary yellow. I just wanted to show you that all different hues in the same hue family can
give you different results. Because we all know a
classic primary yellow, blue, and red looks like so I wanted to give
you something more fun. Excellent. All were different. I mean, we've all seen there,
I shouldn't assume, but we mostly have all seen
a normal primary blue, red, yellow color wheel. I think we have and I do think that if
you Google color wheel, it is like always what comes up. That's what get, I wanted to show
you how to create your own color palettes by
using the color wheel as a tool to see what color families are created
using different hues. A primary colors, I
hope that makes sense, it's like too many words to describe something
that's easier to see. I'm definitely following so I think that you are good there. Hope in the chat, are really loving the color
mixing work here, which is very cool to see. Isn't it fun? It's really
fun to add honestly, when you're not
talking and showing how bad you are at
math on a live. It's very [LAUGHTER]. I mean, at least we
were both bad at math, at least we could
do it together. I love that it really
took a bunch of artists together to figure out how
many slices we needed. [LAUGHTER] Now I'm going
to do the red and yellow. I tend to try to paint so
I'm right-handed so I try to paint from left to right so that my hand
isn't in wet paint. That's just a logistical thing. Zoning that makes it or
when you're working. It doesn't ask me how I learned that the
hard way of course. [LAUGHTER] I just wanted to
give you that little tip in case you guys are, when you're planning
your paintings, you don't have to
make my mistakes. I'm going to do the
same thing here, where it's more 75
percent yellow ocher. You could always, of course, turn your palette I mean, to turn the thing
you're painting on. This is 75 percent yellow
over 25 percent primary red. You're getting this
beautiful burnt orange. What's fun as I thought
that this would actually, every color in-between
would be supersaturated. We're actually getting
these really beautiful, more muted fall tones
in-between these hot colors. I'm calling them hot because
they're like really, warm tone of that hue,
like the magenta. The primary red looks
very hot pink and the turquoise blue is a very warm blue because it looks
like it has yellow in it. Then it gives us a really cool
blue when it's mixed with a primary red color. It's really wild to see just how autumnal-like these colors in-between are coming out from those very bright initial
color, fascinating. I wouldn't ever pick, a burnt
orange and a slate blue. We'll go with turquoise but
it actually really works. Yeah, it's beautiful. Engineering is probably is
like [NOISE] how I figured out pilots sometimes when I want to break out
and do something. New or fine, I like that
lead a painting sometimes versus the subject itself because it'll give
me the feeling. Colors really give
you a feeling. Also, on the note of like
colors looking correct, are all relative, it's like you can paint anyone skin
tone. [NOISE] Any color. You can meet someone
with green skin. It just depends on
what colors you paint next to it that makes
it look correct. Because if someone
has green skin, maybe they're in a dark room that has green lighting,
things like that. That makes total sense. I'm just really
loving the way that your palate looks at this point, that is in another
terry pretty now. Yeah, it totally is. This one is 25% yellow, 75% red. I'm laying down and
may not be enough red. It is a really simple exercise, but I just wanted to show
you different ways to find your own artistic
signature palette based on your own
favorite colors. It's just a simple meditative
exercise I hope you can use when you're just feeling stuck or you just want something
fun and meditative to do by the end of the day. But you also get
something really beautiful out of it that doesn't require any really
heavy mental load. Well, and for
something so simple, it really does end up showing you a lot. I
would never have guessed. you'd get a brick red from a primary red and a
yellow ocher like that. But there it is. Then with gouache, you don't have to buy
every single color, and each tube can be $20 to $40. It's really fun to
get to know that you can embed so many of the
colors in between that all. Now we're doing yellow
ocher and turquoise. What are your favorite
primary colors, John? Well, I feel [OVERLAPPING] I'm a big fan of turquoise and
generally any cool color. My entire apartment is various greens and then anything that's going to give me
forest vibes so brow, green. I love that, yeah. Green is a very soothing color. I notice right now that my older turquoise paint has become a little bit of dry blob. You can see I'm poking
it and it's moving instead of my paint
just going into it. This is where the spray
bottle comes in really handy. Gouache does dry
really fast so I just need to give a spritz
to refresh the palette. You can do this when your
palate is totally dry too, you could just re-wet
it with a spray bottle. Okay. Alright. This was mostly yellow ocher
with some turquoise in it. Again, I'm checking, I'm
adding more water to it because I felt like it wasn't
as flowy as heavy cream. Somebody can cook
for that. I'm really loving that heavy
cream guideline, I can identify that extra
anywhere [LAUGHTER]. Yes, I'm a big baker so I also love that as the guideline. What is your favorite
thing to cook? Tonight, when we're
done with this video, I am making Rick
Martinez/s Chili Colorado, which I'm really excited about. What is that. Basically, you take an
entire pork shoulder and you cut it into cubes and you cook it
real low and slow for a couple of hours with
dry chili pepper paste, and it is phenomenal. Oh my God, you are a chef. I enjoy any long involved
cooking projects like that. It's actually in
some ways my version of doing this, it's
very meditative. How you relax. Yeah, baking for me is mine because this is my
full-time, I mean, not painting color wheels, but painting is
my full-time job. Which I love as a hobby, but now that it's my job, baking is my long involved
relaxing project. What is your favorite
thing to bake? This core, I got really into learning how to
make French pastries. My favorite thing
was actually macrons because they were so hard
for me for the longest time. I took this baking class with Molly Wilkinson who is
this baker from Texas, who lives in Versailles. She's a professional
French pastry chef, and she just made it
really approachable. I really liked doing them
because they're really fun , they're really beautiful. I mean I loved eating macrons, and they're what, $3 a cookie. it's nice to be able
to make them at home. Those were my favorite
things to make, I made so many last year
during core [LAUGHTER]. We couldn't see anyone
so our freezer was just stocked with macrons [LAUGHTER]. Well, I am very jealous
and very impressed. I tried, I am not
much of a baker. But one time I was, I'm
going to try to do this and I ended up with some very crunchy little flat
palm and pieces and I was, okay, that's not for me. I feel you, my first batch they were all amoeba-shaped craft. [LAUGHTER]. But it's extra satisfying now to have
gone on that journey. Yes, they are just such beautiful and such
delicious little cookies. They're so beautiful. Oh, yeah. I'd never was a huge fan of puff pastry before
or cream puffs. But making fresh ones, wow, they are totally a whole
different ball game. I make that, but again, not being able to share
them with people is a real hardship right now. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Because you
have to eat them all. I really understand my husband and I are
going to have to go through three pounds of pork shoulder before I
can [OVERLAPPING] say. Now, how are we
going to do that? You can't just make
a little bit of slow rows that you're
putting so much into.
8. Finishing Up: I do have one person
who just want a quick refresher on how you are coloring these last ones. I think just like the
ratios on this last wedge. Sure. I'll do it again.
Let me get my [NOISE]. [OVERLAPPING]. Talking about food.
[LAUGHTER] Okay. What we're going to
do, these last two. These two secondary
colors between are, this is a, I'm going
to write it down. This is 75 percent, can you see it because it's
in pink, yellow, ocher? I have a darker pencil around, and 25 percent of the turquoise. Then this one will be 75
percent of the turquoise, and 25 percent of
the yellow ocher. I actually like to make notes
like this in my sketch book as I'm mixing these
colors just so I remember later what my
little formula was. I'm going to mix
the colors with you again, just to show you. Then you'll see what I
mean about how hard it is to match exactly that color again and why you'll
want to match or mix a lot of what you're using. To mix this yellow
ocher and turquoise, I'm taking more yellow ocher. Yellow ocher is thick
straight out of the tube, so I'm adding more water to get that heavy cream consistency. Then I'm picking up a little
bit of the turquoise, so that it's about 25 percent of the formula to
get this color. Then you'll see, I'll paint it over here on this side since we're sketch booking. You'll see it's
darker right now and that's probably him dry,
a little bit lighter. Now I'm thinking about it. You might try about
this color actually, you can tell because
it dries really fast, that's how I know not
because I'm psychic. Then I'm going to add
my permanent white, I'm going to add some white
to it so it becomes darker, although that might
be too late already, this is where you're, let see. It should be 50, 50, and then you're adding more white to get to even paler version of that. To get that final interior. Inject a little bit
on my sketch book, but again, it's a
beautiful mistakes, right? Exactly. That's what it's for. Then to do this color, which turned out to
be a Kelly green, which I did not
expect that you could make with turquoise,
and yellow ocher. It's more turquoise, so it's about 75 percent turquoise and 25 percent that yellow ocher , and also watch it here. We do this because we can
identify color families, so there are different groupings of colors that you could do. In a painting, there's
obviously complimentary colors, which would be colors on the opposite side
of the color wheel. Blue orange is a
really popular one. Blue orange always feels really good,
eye-catching, satisfying. Red, green is another one. Red green is used a lot in more whimsical either
Christmasy or more whimsical. If you watch a film like Emily, or Pushing Daisies, you'll notice their
palates are red and green a lot in the set
and the costumes. Then purple, yellow
is another one. Then when you're doing, we could do analogous
color groupings, which are the three colors
that are next to each other in a color wheel
to create a painting, and usually one will
be the main color and the two other ones will
be the supporting colors, and then what you might do is, your backgrounds are all red, orange, yellow, and then
maybe your main person, maybe it's a
portrait of someone, maybe that person is wearing a turquoise top and that
really makes them pop out. That's a very simplified way. Very simplified way
of saying that, but it's like thinking of
how you can use color as design. Any further questions? I just have one more quick one coming up and then I do think we are
running short on time, so maybe we want to have
folks show us their work, but before we get to that, this question is just what
type of paint brushes? It's soft like a water brush or more sturdy like an acrylic? It is a watercolor brush. To use watercolor
brushes for this, I try to use all synthetic because there's
really no difference, no reason you need to use a sable or real
animal for a brush. But yeah, any watercolor
brush will do. I honestly will just get them back when Aaron
brothers existed. I would just buy a bunch
during their sales, Michael's still has those sales and I'll just grab a bunch. You don't really need to
invest a lot in brushes, which is nice because you
invest a lot in the paint.
9. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Oh my gosh, thank you so much for
joining [LAUGHTER] me for this class, and bearing with
me with my geometry problems. It's been so fun to share
this exercise with you. I can't wait to see what
you guys do with it. Please explore, go
to the art store, pick out your favorite cues of those primary colors,
and experiment with colors. I can't wait to see what
you guys come up with. Thank you so much for joining.
Ann Shen, Illustrator & Author
