Mastering the Realism of Painting Birds in Watercolor: Wet on Wet and Lifting

1. Introduction: Painting realistic birds with water colors can be quite challenging, especially if you are a beginner. I have personally experienced the difficulties that come with it. Are you struggling with hard edges, feathers that lack softness, overworking certain areas, trying to paint every single father, every single hair, and adding layer after layer, hoping it will start to look more natural. So the good news is that I can teach you how to achieve realistic, soft and smooth feathers while avoiding overworking certain areas. The key to painting birds is to use the wet on wet technique. This technique is very forgiving, allowing you to create a soft layer without having to work on every single feather or hair. I will teach you how to control water and paint on paper from the very beginning, which will enable you to paint birds more realistically. My name is Maria Nachiska and I'm a watercolor artist and teacher who has been teaching watercolors since 2016. In my eight year career, I have taught thousands of people how to paint with watercolors. I have over half 1 million followers on all social media platforms, and I run two online schools. I have even developed my own line of watercolor brushes. I have a lot of experience as a watercolor teacher, especially with the two techniques, wet on, wet, and lifting. And I know how to paint realistic objects in watercolor. And now I'm excited to share everything I know with you in this course. 2. Class Projects: How this Class is Structured: I will guide you through the process of creating five bird paintings using wet on wet and lifting techniques. Each project is designed to build upon the previous one, allowing you to practice. I know that with my guidance, you will gain confidence and be able to paint realistic birds on your own. In project one, we will focus on painting with only one color using the wet on wet technique. The goal is to create a contrast between light and shadows by lifting colors to add highlights and create a soft feather effect. Project two, you will paint a different bird, only half of it, focusing on its eye and beak, and mixing primary colors to create a natural sheet of white and gray feathers. All will be done wet on Wet. Project 34.5 will be full bird paintings with a wet background to create a soft transition for the feathers. You will also paint a branch with a blue undertone. The course includes five different birds to allow for repetitive practice of color blending and painting wet on wet. This is a beginner friendly course that teaches the basics of water colors, color blending, and painting fundamentals. In this course, I will teach you how to create soft feathers and smooth layers. And how to create depth in your paintings. Control the paint and water, add layers. Read the reference image paint with only one color. That's our monochrome class. Create a palette and use a color wheel. How to smooth a layer. Using a M brush technique. Lift colors to create highlights. Create a natural shade of white using primary colors. Create natural shadows using knowledge of the color wheel. Create your own shade of black and how to add vibrancy when necessary. I always simplify things and put myself in the shoes of a beginner, since I was once that person who didn't know the difference between wet on wet or wet on dry. When I first started, I didn't even know how to lift the colors. But now after years of teaching, I have developed techniques that make it less complicated for you. So I would like to invite you to take a class with me and experience a unique way of learning. Get ready to dive into the world of bird painting. 3. Art Materials: This course is about watercolor painting of different birds, but we don't need that many colors or brushes in just one type of a watercolor paper. Let's start with watercolor paper. I recommend using 100% cotton watercolor paper, pressed 140 pounds. A paper that is good for layering student grade watercolor papers won't give you the same results. Watercolors, you don't need to use the same brand of paint I use, which is Holebine. You can use colors you already have. And I suggest for the birds imi, deslone yellow or any other primary yellow, Iso yellow, deep, a richer orange like yellow row tiena or yellow ocher, fine fallow blue, red shade, which is a primary blue. You can also use cobalt blue or ultramarine light quinacrdon red, or some other cooler red. Pero red, which is the primary red. Vandk brown or pia burnt sienna or an orange like brown. And then you have indigo, the darkest blue for the brushes. Whatever you feel comfortable with, you'll find a list of all the brushes I'm using. You can also use cool brushes, just a Y, I. Those are softer brushes. They hold more water and paint. And that's mostly what I will be using in this course. Also to lift the colors. The main brush I use is a rigger brush. It's a rigor size two and it's really good to create longer highlighted lines. For example, other materials, a small bath towel to wipe your brush on, a paper towel for additional lifting. Or maybe you needed to rescue a spot where a water drop landed on the paper. You need small jars with clean water for the easiness of dipping your brush and cleaning your brush. A plastic palette, or if you don't have one, you can use a dinner plate. Then you need good light with daylight bulbs, make sure you have good lighting because you need to see the colors on your paper. So let's get started. 4. Project 1: Monochrome Bird Intro - Color Values: Hi everyone, so welcome to this first project. So we're going to paint this bird, but in a different way. We're going to paint it in monochrome. So we're going to use only one color. So I want you to pick one color that's a little darker. So I'm going to choose indigo for this project, because indigo is darker. And I'll show you in a second the color values of indigo. But also this color lifts very easily. Ideally, you also want to choose a color that lifts easily because we will be practicing lifting colors. Now the reason I'm choosing to paint this with one color is because you'll be able to focus easily on the light and shadows. And that'll help you down the road like with the other bird projects. When we look at the reference image right away, like you can see this part is lighter, this is going to be lighter. And then we have some lighter feathers here and then lighter feathers here. But before I continue talking about how we're going to paint it or where the highlights, let's the color swatch for that one color that you're going to use for this project. This is just a spare sheet of a watercolor paper here. And I'm going to choose this indigo color. I'm going to squeeze it onto my palette. When you dilute it with water, I suggest to still keep it like, nice and creamy. Maybe like a heavy cream like ratio between water and paint. I want you to do this with me. I'm just going to grab the pieces that fell over, but I guess it doesn't matter. I'll just clean my palette later. This is going to be actually perfect for the lightest values of indigo. This is the indigo, just a little chunk fell over here. Then here's my indigo again. I'm going to grab a little more water because this is. But then I also have the paint that's more diluted with water. It's actually pretty easy to create different color values from one color in water colors because all we need is just water. If you were painting like with acrylics or oils, you would be using white and black to create the lightest values of a color. You would or add white to your color. Let's say you're also using indigo to create the lightest values. If this wasn't oil or acrylic paint, then you would add color white to it. Then you just keep adding white to make it really, really light. If you're going to create the darkest values of the indigo, what's already pretty dark, but you would basically add some black to it with water colors. It's super easy because all we need is just some water. Since I already have some of the indigo here very diluted with water, this is going to be the lightest value of indigo. I want you to do the same thing to create values with me of that one color you're going to use for this painting. Now you want to have a little more color. So tiny, thicker, right? It's still a light value, but I added a little more pigment. I'm going to grab a little more. Let's go for like a light to mid tone. This is darker. I'm grabbing more paint. I'm going to grab a little more now. I'm grabbing it from this part, which is a little thicker, and then I'm going to add it right here. And then I'm going to grab again, even thicker amount of paint. Maybe a little more water here. These are like, I'm starting to create like the mid tones. This is a little thicker then even thicker, this is even darker, going for really darker tones. Now this is a little thicker. But this is like the milk like ratio. This is as far as I would go if I was painting wet or dry. Right, with wet on wet is different because I would probably just go with even cream top like ratio if I wanted to create this darker value. We have the lightest values here. These are the mid tones, and then these are the darkest tones. Lightest. This is somewhere in the middle, mid tones. Then we have the darkest values. All of it, you can call it values, basically the lightest values. Mid values. And then you have the darkest values of one color only, this is just indigo. What we're going to do is focus on using these values in our painting to paint this bird. 5. Project 1: Color Placement: For example, we have the lightest parts of the bird here, right? This is in monochrome, so it's very easy to see what are the lightest parts right away. It's the area around the eye of it here, I'm going to use this. Even something lighter than this, I could definitely get something lighter than this. You want something lighter than this? Or even this is fine. And place it right away and you can cover most of the bird. But you don't want to just cover it like this. Grab, let's say flat brush and just covered with that even tone. You never want to do that. You want to grab a brush and just slowly place colors. Whatever you feel like, that lightest area could have a little darker spots. That's where are areas, that's where you're going to add a little bit of that lightest value, then you can move over through the bird because we're going to build it up by adding more color. We have also some light here. This part, these feathers here. Actually, for this, I suggest just to lit the colors later later. Then we have the feathers here. These are actually highlighted feathers right here. The hair, what we're going to do is actually wet the bird, the inside of the bird, including the tail feathers. Then we're going to wet also this part of the background. What will happen is that we will stop applying color somewhere here. Some colors will bleed over here, but you want to stop a little bit earlier to compare to where you see. You have the sketch line, you stop before that, some color will bleed over here. That's fine, but you control it with the amount of water you have in your brush. And that ratio between water and paint right, that you carry after you picked up some paint from the palette. Then this area will dry softly because of that where we're going to wet part of the background here. And we're going to do this in the other bird projects as well. We're going to choose areas that we want to keep softer to show that those soft feathers, of course, you can wet the entire paper and paint the bird wet on wet. Then you have a softer areas basically for the most highlighted areas, we're going to also use a ricker brush. So we're going to lift colors, so we're just going to lift the colors. But let's talk more about these values, the lightest values here. Then you're going to go for like the mid values, somewhere here in the middle. And you're going to start applying it here and here. Basically, you're not thinking about the darkest parts yet, although you're applying these mid tones toward the darker areas, because the darkest parts, you have the darkest value. That's when you're going to use this cream top. And why cream top? Because everything will be wet. You want to have the most control. You use this creamy paint on the brush and you're going to apply it only toward the darkest parts. Then we're going to find the feathers later by lifting colors. The same thing with the beak here. The bottom part especially is darker then the eye. We're going to build it with layers. So we're going to layer it here. The area above the eye, that's like mid tones. We're going to be somewhere here basically. And then we're going to add some of these mid tones here as well. And then here for the shadows, we don't need to think about the legs yet. Legs can be left for later, it's no big deal. Also, you can use a masking fluid for water colors. If you want to make sure that you have some nicely defined hair, I suggest using like an older rigger brush for that. I'm going to place these values on the side. 6. Project 1: Wetting the Paper: I want you to have your color, the one you chose for this project, already slightly diluted with water. This is like creamy, I'd say this is actually more like a half and half, and then I have like heavy cream. And this is like a cream top because there's some water. But I'm keeping this really thick and we're going to start by wetting the bird for that. I'm just going to use my flat. It will cover more right away, so I don't have to spend more time wetting it. Although I still need to spend three to 4 minutes wetting the paper. But it would take longer if I was using like, let's say my round eight brush, right? I don't want to do that. You want to use like a larger brush for this, to paint the bird. I also suggest using a little larger brush. You don't want to paint the bird right away with this little tiny brush because you're going to leave like visible strokes and you want to have like nice flow later. We can use a smaller brush if we want to show like individual strokes. But you want to create the overall look of feathers and will help us to do that is basically lifting colors later because that's how we find the feathers and we separate parts. That's one of the things we're going to be working on. Then it all starts with the placement of your colors in the first place. Now, when you wet the paper, again, I suggest like not doing it for 1 minute only, but maybe like three to 4 minutes or maybe even 5 minutes. I am using a smaller brush because I have tail feathers, I don't want to go on the outside. I'm going to add more water just so it stays wet longer. Then the same thing with these wings. Here I am using way more water right now because I'm still in the process of wetting the paper. Now that I wet it all this, I'm also going to wet the background here because I want these feathers to look soft. I'm just going to wet this part of the background here, then continue wetting the bird through. Go over it many times and I'm going to grab again my long, this is the round eight, medium stiff brush just so I can wet the beak. There you go. I suggest for the color wise, like using a darker color overall. Because with the lighter colors, it's harder with those darkest values and you have to start really, really light. It's much easier to paint something in monochrome when you use like black. Actually, you could use lamp black or some other sheet of black. In this case, yes, black is. Okay. Otherwise, I always suggest creating your own sheet of black. I'm just going to continue wetting almost there like I feel like, Okay, I'm ready to start painting the bird then I'm going to make sure that there's no puddles of water anywhere. I need to either push that water over to the other areas or just wipe my brush on a towel. But you have to be careful if you, let's say, start removing that water with the brush because you might make it too dry. You don't want the paper to feel damp. You actually want the paper to stay wet. You want that nicely wet paper. You see that nice shine there, but no puddles. Then you can always push it toward like the background, right, which is what I'm doing. But I have a little too much water, so I'm just going to scoop it again. We're going to start with the lightest values of that color. I'm going to use my indigo. I like indigo for something like this. Because it lifts easily, it's easier to show that process of lifting, just the effect is nicer versus like using, let's say Rociena. It does lift but not as nicely. And also because Rocienas lighter color rights's hard to see it not as nicely as I can show it with indigo. I'm going to go back again toward the beak and then go through it again. Wipe my brush slightly on a towel. Not hard. Press it really hard on a towel. I just want this to look nice and shiny, like nicely spread water but absorbed already into the paper. That makes sense. No poles. Okay, for this I'm going to use. 7. Project 1: Applying Indigo: My long quail size for brush. You don't want like a damp brush yet. You want to use this lighter value. So I need a little more color but lighter value of the intigo. I actually do need more water. I wipe my brush on towel, but I want to see the flow now. This is just one color. Continue doing this on your palate until it feels right. Like you have enough. I feel like I already lost too much water and I want water because I want this to feel like a water like ratio. First part, we're going with the lightest value right here of the indigo. I'm going to continue now. This lighter part of the bird, all these feathers like we can see a little bit of a color there, right? That's why I'm placing some color there. It's just a light value. My whites are going to have a little bit of a color because it's all shadowed. I need more water because I want to have a flow. I don't want to dry too fast. And the thing is that as I am painting, I continue wetting my paper. That helps, right? To keep it wet longer. I am actually going basically everywhere right now. These are just the lightest values. Again, I am keeping my paper wet longer. This way I'm just looking for some areas. Of course, the lightest areas need to stay as light as possible. But doesn't mean that I can't add any color there to something like this. Then here I'm pressing a little harder here to release more of that paint. Now, you don't want the brush to be soaking in water, basically, you still want to control like how much water. It's just like I was dipping my brush water jar just to get more because it just felt like I would be removing water instead from the paper. And this is the edge basically, right? But I got to start working on these mid tones before I grab my palette. Somewhere here, actually, here and here. I'm going to start with the mid tones. Now, I don't want as much water as before. I still have, this is like a milk maybe like ratio between water and paint and I'll feel it out. If this doesn't feel right, it doesn't feel as thick in the way, then I'm going to go for like maybe two a half ratio, right? Ratio between water and paint. Now, at first you see all paint is spreading and everything. That's okay. You want the paint to spread? Of course, you can decide how much control you want to have because now I can grab a little heavy ratio. If I feel like there's too much water, I can wipe it on a towel and then go back. Now, the brush does feel damp. I have more control. If I don't want that much control, I'm going to grab the more water with this. I'm going for the midtones. And at the same time, like some of these darker areas are getting covered too. But I'm going to show you in a second is this damp brush technique, when you wipe your brush completely, like on a towel, squish it, then you brush through the painting with that damp brush. But here with the tip of my brush, I'm going to add some of this value toward the beak. I have this old course in my old school. This is my old teachable school, right? It's a monochrome class. And I remember that was like the most popular actually course. And I'm very happy to do this again. The reason is because it's just so much easier to understand the values. And like keeping areas much lighter versus keeping it, sometimes we just go too dark here. With the tip of my brush, I'm going to apply these darker tones. The reason I'm also going here is because the paper is drying fast. If I don't supply this with more water and paint, this will dry on me too fast, faster than I want. I'm still not there yet. Like I still want to add more color, right? Because this is not dark enough. Now, use the tip of your brush. Basically, press a little harder for the paint to release that paint. In the second. We're going to grab the screen top basically too. We're going to work on our darkest values, but what's happening to the paint? D' paper is drying like you really want to actually cover most of these areas when you move around, you keep your paper wet longer, right? You want to do that? That's why I'm like, okay, I need to do this first before I go for these darkest tones, just because I need to keep this wet longer. And then I can grab maybe more of this, but this is going to be like a damp brush, like a 2.5 ratio. But I'm going to wipe my brush when I tell it looks damp, right? So we are going to go for this damp brush technique in a second. I just want to first add a little more color here here, before I show this damp brush technique. Now, for the damp brush technique, what doesn't work is if the paper loses that shine, you actually want to do it when the paper is still shiny wet. I got to do this quickly because now that my brush feels damp, I'm actually removing water from the paper. It's like good and bad, right? That's why you want to always think like, okay, what can I do and what works, what doesn't work? I'm just going to release a little more paint. And when I say that means I'm pressing harder on the paper to release more paint. Then this is just with the tip of my brush. And then here we have these feathers. And I'm going to clean this brush. I'm cleaning it and I'm going to show you what I'm going to do. It, it, how do I show this? Maybe here wiping the brush and then I need to grab a piece of a towel so I can show you. I'm going to squish this brush right here. It feels damp like this. Okay, then you're going to brush through your painting. Now, again, this does not work. If you lost that shine already on the paper, the paper needs to be still nicely wet. You're just brushing through. This is the damp brush on. I don't have any paint, although I am picking up the paint right. But it's not like I'm using like fresh paint or anything like that. This is just a clean brush. Then now you see the difference. Like it's brushed through and it looks softer. You can pull on the outside too of these feathers. Here we have soft feathers. We can add a little more color since we have some color on our brushes from applying, pulling the paint. It's not lifting because we're not trying to lift, we're just pulling the paint. If I want to add any more color, I can do it with the same brush. Squish your brush again, so it feels like this. And pick up some of this indigo. This is a damp brush. Still a damp brush technique, but we're picking up paint if you can see it, like I have some paint here and you're going to be careful because if it says squished brush, like you're covering a lot more to right. You can maybe turn the brush a little bit, just so you have the most control. Look at the highlighted parts and where you need to add these darker feathers. Because maybe we don't need to add it everywhere. The reason we're also using this damp brush technique and you want to do it with a softer brush. By the way, this is my quill. It's a long quill size for because if you use a stiffer brush, you're going to just pick up the paint and you're going to lift colors instead, instead of like brushing through right now, what I want to do really, is lift colors, but I can't lift the colors yet. 8. Project 1: Adding Darkest Tones: The reason I can't lift is because I have to still add some darks and this is still nice and wet. That's my only chance I'm going to grab this creamy paint from here. This is like a cream top almost. I'm going to find the darkest parts. Feel it out because maybe you just need heavy cream like ratio between water and paint. You're going to paint the feathers wet and wet. Basically you're going for the darkest parts that you see. You're separating these feathers by lines, but you need either heavy cream, cream top like ratio between water and paint and quickly go back toward the tail feathers because maybe it's too dry or hopefully it's not too dry. If anything, you can always rewet it and at the second layer, and that's when you can make it darker. Ideally, you want to do it all with one layer, because then everything blends in that first layer, nicer than rewetting it and doing it again. But that is an option too. Here, this is the darkest part. Then I got to go back here. I still have paint, but I want to go back for my cream top. Ideally, I'd like to paint the beak, but it's too late. I just tested it. It's too late. The only places I can go is around the eye. Then here, to add a little more darks, some parts like the eye, I'm going to paint it anyway, separately. But here I can still add a little more color. Then maybe I can add more color here and here again, I can go back here, maybe separate some more of these feathers. Now we have to remember about lifting colors because that's another thing I'm teaching and it's important in terms of creating the soft feathers. I'm doing this fast because the papers drying and I really don't have much time left, but I can still add a little color. You want to stop? If things start to look like you're just doing it wet on dry, then I suggest not to do it anymore. Just wait until it dries. But if you are able to lift colors, this is a good timing. You grab a rigger brush or you can grab a round brush, says two. For example, assuming there's no more shine on the paper, on your paper, that's when you want to start lifting. There's no more shine on my paper. I'm just going to start lifting wherever I can. I'm going for the most highlighted areas. But also like if I see like softer feathers, like like here for example, this is where I need to lift. These are good areas to lift then to find my feathers. I'm going in between for the highlighted parts, right? When you look at the reference, you're going to see right away which feathers or what areas to lift, because you're going for the highlighted parts, you're lifting the highlighted parts. And then ideally separate these feathers by lifting as well, you're finding feathers. Maybe here, this is a good spot. I'm trying to be fast because this is almost dry. But this is the thing. If you focus less on my painting while you're painting, of course, then you'll be able to do more on your paper. Of course, when we're not distracted, we can do way more. I suggest for you to watch the class first, then watch what I'm doing. You can listen to my voice, but I really you focus on your paper only you don't follow my strokes because that's when the get confusing. And I know this because I did this project with another artist not too long ago. We challenged each other by creating classes. I created a mushroom class for her. And she created, by the way, these are the little lighter feathers here, I'm just going to lift. She created a escape class for me. My first attempt wasn't as successful because I was following her too closely. And that's not a good thing. Then once I focused on the reference and I already got all the steps, how she was painting something, then everything just made sense. And much like I was enjoying my painting, basically, otherwise, it was just too hard. I'm lifting until I can't lift anymore. But the thing is that you don't want to overly lift because then you also lose that softness. And the softness is there, but it just looks overworked. That's what I meant. I'm going to lift a little more here. The paper is almost dry. No one thing you can also do, if it feels like still damp, can go back with the paint. This is cream top. You can tell it's cream top because my brush is basically damp and it's not even in shape anymore right now unless I grab some water. But I'm going to grab this cream top like ratio of that indigo and I'm going to go toward these areas that need some more color. The darks, I'm looking for a little wet area. This is all wet on wet. You can also create like individual strokes. Just find couple areas maybe that are still a field dam. Then you can create a couple strokes like this. This is just on the tip of my brush. Nothing more than that. Then I'm looking for these areas that feel a little damp. I don't want to go I guess here because this is supposed to be much later. Maybe over here then this part should have some hair, right. But ideally, you would go like over these darkest lines to add some of the cream top like ratio between water and paint. Next step will be to work on the beak. And they actually, I'm glad this is going to be all separate because then we can focus on just different parts of the bird. So that will make it easier for you to follow the other projects. Let's walk away from it and let it dry. 9. Project 1: Painting the Beak: To paint the beak. I want you to zoom in onto the reference image. You can see I've closed the beak, and then we can see the nostrils. Of course, I focus on the beak and the eyes. Everything else, I try to keep it loose, and as you notice, it's mostly just wet and wet. I try not to add the second layer, but a lot of times I do it because of lack of vibrancy and I want to create more contrast dimension, that's when I sometimes add that second layer. But a lot of times it's more satisfying if I can do this contrast with just the first layer doesn't always work because again, it depends from the colors you used with the colors. Some colors just dry more pale and it all depends. The first thing you want to do is you want to dilute your colors or the color color with water. I quickly added water to my India. The next thing you want to grab a smaller brush. I suggest maybe size two or maybe size three, round brush, medium stiff. What we're going to do is wet almost the entire beak except for the top part. When you look at the reference, you will notice that this top line there is lighter. That's a highlight, right? You want to avoid that, you don't need to wet it. And also on the bottom, like there's a nice highlight, we could technically avoid that if you can go ahead and avoid it. Now, another thing is don't worry about the nostril highlight because we will lift the color there. Then another thing, when you wet, you always want to wet more than you need. We're going to wet the inside here as well, because you want to have a soft transition, we're wetting more than we need. I'm going to add more water here. It's much easier, of course, to just do this wet on dry because then you can just add the color. But the pat, the color, the layer will look smoother if you do it wet on wet. Which is why I'm teaching you how to do this wet on wet instead. Now, grab like a heavier ratio, maybe heavy cream like ratio between water and paint off the color that you're using. In that case, this is o, aim for the bottom part. Think of it as if you're drawing maybe with a crayon or pencil colored pencil. You're just using the tip of your brush. You're just applying that color and then pushing it a little bit down there. Now I am going to grab cream top. Because I want to have even more control. I actually need to grab like a chunk. I can add a little more color on the bottom. Yes, the pay tool spread toward the top. But as long as this is like a cream top, then I'll have control over this. And I keep going fruit these parts over and over again. And then there's those lines that I marked for myself, that skin there. Then I need to reload my brush because when you are touching the wet paper, then you're just diluting that paint with water on your brush. You just have to refill. This is you can tell right away this is like a chunk of almost paint. You don't want that chunk straight out of a tube. You do want some tiny bit of water there. But the idea is to have the screen top, let's see, a little bit maybe of it here. We're slowly building it up. These are like the darkest values that we're using for the beak, by the way. Then I'm releasing even more paint because I still had a lot of paint. Now, what about the top? I do want to add more color, but I need to wipe my brush. This is a damp brush. Now what I'm going to do is with that damp brush, wipe it again. And go right above. And just spread it up to that line where where you wet it, the beak. We can also go on the outside a little bit just to connect That's the bottom part I'm sorry, of the beak. And then we have the top right there, that thing. And we have to keep an eye on it. It will be left in colors. So we'll get to it in a second. For now, we can work with the damp brush. Just a damp brush. Okay, that means you're not bringing any water. It's just a damp brush. Now, should we zoom out a little bit? Yes, because zooming out helps us to get a better perspective. Don't worry like if you cover too much, by the way, because we're going to lift the colors and then a little bit here and then I can grab a little more color of that cream top just to make it darker. Right there, you'll notice the paint is spreading less and less and less. It's because the paper is drying. That's why I don't want to walk away from this because this will dry in seconds. Instead, I should clean my brush, wipe it on a towel so it's like a damp brush so I can lift. First of all, I'm going to lift here. This is a little too early, but I might as well lift a little bit. And then this is the area where we're going to wait for. Because I want to have a sharper line when I lift. I just need to wait a little bit. In the meantime, just don't get sidetracked. That's what I have to tell myself. But we can add a little bit of water toward the eye to start the process of wetting it. Let's see, do we want to wet more than we need the wrinkly part? Probably not. Let's just wet the inside of the eyeball. That's because the areas around the eye are pretty light. We can work on that later. Now, let's keep an eye there. I'm going to clean my breasts. Make sure it's clean. Wipe it. This is when I'm going to try to recreate that nostril. Now, this is still too wet. It's actually too wet. I'll continue wetting this and keep an eye there just so we don't miss out on the timing. Hope I don't. We'll see what happens if I miss out on the timing. I'll just repaint this part so you can see it clearly, which I have to do sometimes. All right. Now I'm going to go back here. This is a M brush, it's still literature early. What I'm going to do is lift a little bit the top, just so I have a better contrast. I'm just lifting the top part. And then I do have to create that line that separates this nostril. It's a little too early. I'm going to wait a little longer, but I'm going to lift a little bit here. If you don't see much lifting and you know you're using a good color for that, that lifts, then wait a little bit longer, just going to lift a little here so I can shape that beak. Then I'll just continue adding water here. This will stay longer this way when I'm ready to paint the eye just a little more water. Then we're going to work on the highlights here. By the way, we're going to start with the color of the highlight, which is like very light value and that's what we're going to focus on later. With that next layer, we're going to focus on adding the darks around the eye. And then we're going to work on the pupil. It's also going to be wet on, wet back to the beak. Now, it's better being able to lift because the thing is, if you start too early, you dilute the colors with water more and more. You don't want to do that. Then here, there's that line. You want to use a medium stiff brush for this. I still started too early. I am able to lift here. There you go. Then we can create that first lightest layer there. Or the wash. I'll grab like a milk like ratio. The ratio between one and Pat. I'm just going to think of the highlights, right? The highlight is here, but I want some color in the middle of it. I don't want it to be too white. This is actually my first layer for that, for the eye. I just have to wait for this to dry so I can paint that second layer. And then in the meantime, I can go back here to lift a little more. I can also grab a little more of the cream top of that color, the cream to ratio. Since this is feels a little damp, I just add a little color toward the darkest parts of that nostril. There you go now, It just makes more sense there, but I do have to wait for this to dry. What? Let's move on toward the toes. 10. Project 1: Painting the Feet: With the feet, right? You basically want to wet the toes. And you don't even have to wet the entire toes or the legs. The parts of the legs just skip smaller areas and then you apply colors toward the darkest parts. And a lot of times I start with undertones. If we see a little bit of pink or maybe some yellow, that's what we're going to start with. Then later we're going to add like the screen top like ratio between water and paint of a heavier color. Let's grab like maybe a little larger brush. This is my round three, we're just going to wet. Here is the thing you want to stop with. This one. You want to stop right there because this leg is hidden. It's like behind this belly with this one. When we wet this leg, we're going to go on the inside of the feathers. But for this one, we just want to stop right there. Then I'm not wetting it perfectly. We do have a lot of water and what might as well just wet this one too. We're just dealing with one color, not to connect all the toes right away. You can just not touch with that water everywhere. You're not wetting everything all the way. Then again, you're going in inside the feathers. For the soft transition, when we apply color, we're going to stop right there. Some color will bleed. But we'll have a soft transition. It won't look like that was like glued in there. Just wet it. We have the claws go a little more water and we're going to start slowly with this lighter value. I'm going to remove a little bit of water because I don't want puddles a little more. Water is okay here. In this case, actually my water jar is blue. To have a little bit of blue, I'm going to grab let's say like a milk ratio between water and paint of this, ED. Watch how the paint spreads. I want a little more flow. I'm grabbing way more water with this. I just want to see more flow. You're adding this either on the bottom or the right side here when we're painting the lake here. The same thing here, when this is what I'm grabbing here, it feels like it's like milk like ratio, right? But I'm grabbing quite a bit on my brush again. You want to add this on the bottom. The top is highlighted, right? We don't want to add too much there. Let's see what's going on here. This is in the back, that clock and then more of that milk. Same thing here. I'm still looking at the reference, it's just that I'm focusing mostly on this. I want a little heavier ratio here on my brush. I have a lot of water, but I'm stopping right there. That's as far as I want to go. I'm going to have a soft transition. Once it dries, now it's the good time to grab like a heavier ratio. Really heavy, I'd say like between heavy, cream and cream top. This actually I was saying you apply color toward the bottom. But this is darker, this is shadowed, you're looking for like the darkest parts and that's where you want to apply. This cream top. This is cream top like ration between water and paint. It's still like on the bottom here when you see the claws and toes. Got to hurry up. Actually, this is drying. You might want to do it actually one at a time, 1 ft at a time, but we want to mostly on the bottom. And then there's those wrinkly parts. You can go through them, connect. We have these wrinkly parts. Again, that's how you shape these wrinkly parts. You're adding color, but not everywhere. Then when you have this cream top like ratio between water and paint, that's actually when you really show the dimension. But you have to find the darkest parts, where to place it and then we can also lift colors. That's another thing that helps in painting something like this. I'm going a little on top there just to show that highlights. As you see, I'm still a point colors, but mostly on the bottom. I'm going to wait for this to settle a bit so I can lift the colors. It's not going to be that long because this is a smaller area. But I'm going to wait probably a minute. I waited a minute. Thing is that this one is drying already. There was a toe here somewhere and I goofed up it a little bit. So I'm going to create a claw here and I'm going to push the paint down. It looks like I lost a toe here. Just by lifting. I'm going to add it here. You know what? Nobody will know, you know my little mistake. But that's okay. That's just my sketching. But anyway, you can go through and lift the lightest parts. Let's see on top parts of the clause, the best timing to live colors is once that shine goes away. This is too early. But once that shine goes away, that's when you want to lift colors. I'm going to grab my round two, actually, if you need more help with lifting, I have this other course about apples and water color, and there's a section about lifting, it's just about lifting. I'm going to grab a little bit more color on this brush just because I want to show that there's this foot here. Or not foot by the toe, then back to lifting. This is a smaller brush to lift, you can go through, but this is too early. But I do need like a heavier ratio between water and paint because this part needs to be darker. I'm adding cream top and stopping right there. Well, I can go a little further just because I want to show that buried there right underneath these feathers, you don't really need to do that much. If your placement of colors of color was good, then you created like enough of that contrast. I'm just lifting a little bit. I clean my breast, wipe it on a towel, and I come back to lift again. This should not be highlighted, but these parts here could be lifted. Just lift again. It has to do also with patients like you just have to wait for that timing of time. I'm just going to lift now. But the best time to lift is once that shine goes away from the paper. That's when you lift the colors. Depends what type of lifting, of course, because if you just want really soft lifting and you have a larger area, then you're going to start much earlier. I just want a line here, but I don't want to forget about it. There you go. I don't want to forget about that to this part either. You can go back and like relift the areas. What I'm going to do is leave this alone actually one more, not completely alone. I'm just going to go in a circle here to lift a little more, a little more water. If you add too much water, just that's when the blooms happen. So be careful. We're going to go back toward the eye. 11. Project 1: Eye and Shadows: I want you to zoom in onto the ice so you can see it, so you can see where that highlight is. This time, we're going to avoid wetting the highlight. So I'm just introducing a little bit of water inside the eyeball, but not wetting the high light. I'm going to grab like a milk like ratio between water and paint of the color indigo. Now that I have water, I have a better flow. I just need to remove the hair. I'm going to go around it. I do want the flow. It's easier for me to basically, the paper is not drying on me, right? So I don't want to do this dry. I want this to be wet on wet. This part is wet on dry. But all this on the bottom was wet on wet. But on the top it's easier to go wet on dry. To shape that eye, let's see, goes like this, actually something like this. Then the eye goes, actually gums out a little bit like this. Or not the eye but the lids. Then we have these wrinkly parts. A lot of times I'll create some wrinkles right away and this should be actually larger on the outside, on top, something like that. Now we have that first part. This is the second was technically we need to grab a cream chop to have the control. Where would be the pupil? We're in the middle here, right? You're adding that cream top only there and you grab more of that cream top. And you're going to go right above the highlight where you would have the lid right on the bottom. Basically, you're leaving that area that would be more colorful, which is most likely brown. You're going to leave it alone. You have different values there. You want to create different values in the eye in the painting. For now I'd say that's it. But what I'm going to do is grab some milk or water like ratio. We can paint this part. It's like you're going on the outside wet on dry. But then you're going to clean your brush, wipe it and you're going to touch that and that'll spread this way you're shading it. I'm not crazy about these wrinkles. It's going to wet them gently just to a bit, and that looks much better. We're going to do the same thing from the top here. Add some paint and clean my brush. And just water. And I'm just letting it to spread. Should be much darker, so light actually this side, you just have to wet it, but you got to be careful so it doesn't flow too much toward the eyeball there. Grap a little more of that cream top. We still want to separate the eyeball from the rest of it to make it darker. I'm just applying more of that cream top inside where I have the pupil, and still leaving that part much lighter. Then I can come back to it later too. I can also make a little darker the outside by adding this pain. This is wet on wet because I already wetted it. I can add maybe paint here too to make it slightly darker. I want to show you one more thing now, when you zoom out out of this reference, or not zoom out but make it smaller so you can see the entire bird. On your computer screen, I want you to focus like looking at like, okay, where are you missing? Like those shadows, maybe darkest parts. I usually add a shadow right underneath the wing. And I'm going to show you with my round Et brush, I need clean water. What I'm going to do is wet more than I need to wet underneath the wing right there. You always want to wet more than you need even on the outside where we have the background. And then you're going to grab this cream top, heavy cream tea, cream top. Say that color. And you're going to place it right underneath that wing. The paint will spread right, So we're creating a shadow. And then here as well. Now there's different ways to do it because you can also just do it wet on dry and then spread that paint, just like we did around the eye. Then here, just to have a soft transition there, you can also lift these colors. It's up to you, but you can also do this wet on dry. For example, maybe this area right here. I'm adding the indigo here. Then I'm going to clean my brush. And then use a damp brush just to let it spread and make it softer. You can pick some areas that you feel like need to be darker, maybe here. Then with that damp brush, I'm going to go on the left side of it, the paint spreads there. Let's see over here. A good spot actually. Then the damp brush that spread. Then if there's another area, maybe. Let's see over here. Well, I don't have enough paint. I need to grab more. We can do this here too. We're creating more contrast, right? Another area, maybe over here. I don't often do this. I usually just leave it the way it is. But if you want to create more contrast, you need some dark maybe over here. You see this part should be actually, this part sold. I'm going to clean my brush and then, so this, it, that's all I would really do. I'm going to zoom out more. 12. Project 1: Summary: Congratulations, you just completed this project. You painted a bird wet on wet. And you painted it only with one color, which is amazing. Let's jump on to the next project. Just keep in mind that you always want to focus on light and shadows. The idea is to mix colors on the paper, not on your palette. And I'll explain more about this in each project so you understand like why we're using certain colors to make the other colors pop. Anyway, to use an undertone color, we'll be talking about all this, the dimension, and everything in the following projects. Thank you so much for your time and see you in the next one. 13. Project 2: Introduction: Hey Ron though. We're going to paint just part of the bird to make things easier. This way you have more time to cover this area versus having the entire bird and thinking about the, the entire chest and the bottom part, the tail feathers and so on. We're just going to paint basically up to here. We're going to wet more than we need. We're going to pass the sketch lines this time. We're actually not going to wet the eye. We're going to stay away from the eye, but we can wet the beak too. This is enlarged, so it's going to be much easier to stay away from this area. And the reason I'm staying away is because we are going to apply with the first layer, the darkest feathers. If you have these dark feathers next to the eye and we want to preserve some of the highlights, then the darks would bleed over there. And we'll just end up lifting and lifting and lifting to make it a little easier. We're just going to stay away from the eye. We're going to wet the entire bird on the inside. Then we're going to wet, also the background here, even past these sketch lines. To make it easier, we're going to use a very limited palette. Basically, it's yellow, blue, red, yellow. There are my blues. And then plant brown under red category. Let's say, put it this way, yellow, blue, red. You can add additional yellow blues. It's up to you. The idea is to mix colors on the paper, not your palette. This way you avoid the muddiness of colors. The most important thing is to actually see the separation of colors. When I first started, I didn't know that was really important. I taught myself how to paint with watercolors. And it got to me later on that it really is very important to actually mix these colors on the paper. Because when you look at any object and you paint any object, and water color, even if it's just one color, let's say red apple, you turn that up on. Or just basically by looking at an apple, you'll see that one side is more highlighted and the other side is shadowed. Even it's red, that red will change. That's why we want to mix colors also on the paper and maybe even add other shades of red just to make it prettier. And a lot of times, like talking about red items or subjects, if you paint the red apple, just Y would help to make it pop. That red pop is that you start with a yellow undertone. A lot of times I start with undertones. In this case, here we have a bird with white feathers. There's some yellow feathers too. A lot of shadows. That's why I chose this one because I think it's a great practice in terms of painting something white and watercolors and then recreating your own black. You never want to just use black straight out of way tube. You actually want to create your own shade of black, because again, that black will be differently affected by light and shadows depending where you place that black object. When you look and study those black feathers, you see yeow, there's a little bit of red in there. There's a little bit of blue. I can see some brown. That's the thing. It's like you get excited because you start seeing all these colors and okay, I just need to basically create my blend of colors to create that shade of black. You want to see the separation of colors because when you look at the bird, you see, I'd say this part like all these feathers, they feel like's indigo. The area around the eye has a little bit of red in it. Then say we can add some red and brown maybe. And brown, red, fallow, blue, indigo. Yeah, those are the good colors to create our shade of black. Now, for the white feathers, all you really need is yellow, blue, and red to create a natural shed of that white, or even gray, gray, white. This is how I paint white objects in water color. And it's very important actually because you don't really need to try to match like whatever you see there. Let's say you're trying to paint these lower gray feathers. And you don't need to go for like Dave's gray. That's one of the grays, or paints gray. Let's say you can just use the primary colors and then when you mix these colors, you create that sheet of gray. Then it's just a matter of how much yellow you had or how much blue or how much red to determine if it's a yellow, gray, blue, gray, or red gray. That's just something that always be with you once you accept it. In a way you just see how much more natural everything start to look. When you create that sheet of gray, I want you to squeeze your colors onto the palette. Next, we will start wetting the bird. And you can stop like halfway when you wet the bird. And then maybe the lot colors with water, and then the bird will be wet. So then you can come back to the bird and keep wetting it because more time you're going to have to paint the bird. 14. Project 2: Wetting paper: Let's start by wetting it. I'm going to use a couple of different brushes. This is my long coil size four. I'm using a brush like this, so like a, more like a round brush, right? Because I want to get inside the beak. Like the size is actually perfect for this, if you think about it. Because I'm just going on the inside and I don't have to do much with the brush, like to twist it or anything like that. Then here I'm going to go around the eye, then I can go over the lids, just not the inside. Even if you did, it would be okay. But I'm going to show you like an easier way when you actually do avoid the eye because then you have no color in there. To begin with, you can use more water. I just realized this is actually rough water color paper for me, although I am suggesting for this class to use cold press. Cold press is the easier paper to work with because there's a texture, but there's a way less texture for this part here. You can just basically leave it like this and maybe you can dry brush even through lower parts, but it's not that important to wet or just be focused on like how much to really wet, because that will come more spontaneously. The most important are these parts here. This was, we'll be focusing on applying the lighter colors for the white feathers. Create our own shade of gray. This time, even though we have the soft feathers here, we're still going to stay on the inside of the bird. Because in my other classes I would wet the background too for that soft transition. But to make it simple, to keep it simple for this part here, we're just going to focus on wetting the bird on the inside. Only no background other than here, but that's because we're not painting the entire bird. I'm going to leave it just the way it is with all this water and I'm going to focus on diluting my colors with water quickly. 16. Project 2: Applying the Darks: I suggest grubbing this antic brown. Some of the indigo, maybe some of the red. Just feel it out. I'm moving my palette very quickly so I can add these colors. But this is the area and I want to see the separation of colors. You can see that I'm using some of the indigo there is, and brown. I'm adding it towards the darkest parts that I can see over the bird. It needs to be heavier. This doesn't work for me when I'm just using a 2.5 It has to be like a cream top like ratio between water and paint. To see the separation of colors that I'm using, the shade of red and blue, I need to not blend these colors too much on the palette. I'm coming back here, I know this area is going to drive fast. It's okay if I have to add another layer, but maybe I can start with this initial wash, which will help me greatly with the second one because then I'll have something already there. The thing is that I will be painting the eye anyway later once this dries. Now you want to use the tip of your brush very carefully and go around. But ideally have that cream top like ratio between water and paint. You create that soft transition. Treat this painting like this process here as like an exercise. Just the fact that we're not painting the entire bird. I think it helps because then you have less to focus on. Then again, I'm going to come back here, add some more color. The paint is spreading, which is wonderful. That means that I still have time to apply colors. Then we have the beginning of this wing, so I'm not going to do too much here. I have all this paint still on my brush. Well, you know what, I may as well add it toward the darkest part which is like here, for example. What I have computer screen, I have zoomed in like the bird basically. I have it zoomed in, but I don't see much more now. I have to move it just to see where are those shadows. But again, I don't want to do more than this. This is for my painting, for this part. 17. Project 2: Damp Brush Technique: Next step, you want to use your larger brush that you used. I'm using the long, cool size four. I squish this brush. I wipe it first, or I squish it with a towel. So I remove water, but I squish it like this. This is a damp brush technique. This technique works if the paper is still shiny wet, you're pulling the paint with this damp brush, that's what you want to do. You pull the paint. When you pull, you're actually picking up paint too, for example, from these darker parts, right? You can use that to add, to mimic the hair lines, right? You can do that. Or you can keep cleaning brush to have a clean brush. But I think it works when we just do something like this, although it became a little too dirty a little bit. What I can also do is lift the colors. But I'm going to clean my brush and I do want to lift. But before that I want to add more darks Right here. I'm going to grab the same colors that I used to create, that black, red, red, Van **** brown, and indigo. And this is cream top, and I'm just going to add it toward the darkest parts that I can see. Now, please keep in mind I'm doing this because I can because the paper is still wet. That's why I'm not just doing it to do it. I can't just do it anytime I have to make sure that this is still nice and wet. I feel like we're getting closer to that moment to start lifting colors. What I'm going to do is put this brush away to my round eight. The beak will have another layer, most likely, although it's pretty nice the way it is. But what I'm going to do with that damp brush, I'm just going to reactivate a little bit the color because I want to have a nice shape. There you go. All right, that's much better. Then I have to now paint on my brush because I was reactivating the color. But you know what, this is too dry. It feels like I was dry brushing. 18. Project 2: Lifting Colors: All right, let's get to the next part which is lifting colors. I'm sorry, this is my rigor size two brush songbird. And I'm going to start lifting, what are the areas that lost that shine? Pretty much all here. What you do to lift colors, you need to first of all determine, okay? Is there an area that, that she, the paper feels down. That's the perfect timing to lift colors. Next, you want to have a clean brush. You want to wipe it on a towel, and then you go for lifting. If you don't wipe your brush on a towel, what you're going to do is create a bloom. And blooms can happen very quickly when we have a damp area right now. Let's go back here. This is the area that will drive faster than anywhere else. It's a smaller part that was separated in a way. I got to come here. I can tell like this is like the last moment to lift. Plus I want to lift here because I want to find a feather. I want to find my feather here by lifting. I can do that because then I can separate parts. For example, right here. Then let's try lifting a little more. Your paper will drive at different speed than my paper. That's why you have to keep an eye on your paper. And I do suggest that you focus on your paper more than mine, my painting. It's really better if you watch this class a couple of times and then make notes on the steps and try to recreate it on your own. Because then you fully focus on your paper. You won't miss out on the timing when to lift the colors. Here, I'm just lifting. Lifting helps to create that softness. Then it brings back like the highlights too. That's another reason why you want to lift. Of course, I don't always lift. And by the way, I'm going to lift this part here for the beak. I don't always lift because I don't always get to lift based on the timing. Sometimes I get sidetracked doing other things. This really happens to me. Yes. Because I'm so busy doing something else. And even though I have a choice, and I tell myself, you know what, this is your last moment to lift. I'm like, okay, you know what? But this is more important to add the color here because yes, I can always add more color for vibrancy with the second layer, right? The problem is sometimes it's better to blend all these colors with the first layer, because then you have this nice softer, organic transition with the second layer. Like we're trying not to reactivate colors, that's one thing. When you add that layer of phonetic color that you wanted to add, it just it doesn't look the same. Yes, it's an option always, but I do that very often, but it's not the same. My goal is always to add the colors I have in mind with that first layer. 19. Project 2: Fine Hair: Now. I don't want to do too much lifting. It's super easy to overdo it and then it doesn't look natural. Instead, I'm going to grab some of this Rustiena with quint red and maybe pull it here or create these individual hair. Now I do need this to be darker here because we have darker feathers. You're using just the tip of your brush. And this is basically like water to milk like ratio. The ratio between water and paint, but using the tip of your brush. And here I'm lifting again, this is the eyeball actually. And I didn't paint the inside here. What I could do is reactivate a little bit of this paint around it and drag it the outside of the eyeball just so it's a little darker. I'm just reactivating color. Just very gently. One more thing I want to show you. You're going to grab this more like a cream top of the Vandy Brown. Indigo and that quin red. But I need more Vandy Brown. Even more and brown. You have this cream top you want to create like individual hair strokes. This needs to be done with this cream top, like ratio between water and paint. That's when you add these individual strokes, right? But ideally, you really want to do this wet on wet. The paper still should be wet. You can add more hair, pull it in, but it has to be that cream top. The paint feels like creamy. Then you can pull it just to create some darker hair. We're going to wait for this to dry so we can paint the eye. 20. Project 2: Details: All right my friends, let's focus on the beak and the eye. First of all, we can leave the beak just the way it is, because we have that lighter part on the inside. But if we want to add maybe some more blue to the top part, since we see a little bit of a blue undertone, why not? Right. First thing I would do is wet the top part of the beak. Now, this will get reactivated. I have to go very gently. The reason they will get reactivated is because I used heavy ratio here between water and paint. And also I used like indigo there. If I want to add some blue, then I'm going to grab now a little bit of that indigo would follow blue. Just let that in there. That was like a milk like ratio ratio between water and paint. And that's it. If I wanted to do that, that would be it for now. But later, once this top part dries, I am going to wet the bottom and add the line on the bottom. Now, this is totally up to you. I guess if I wasn't doing this class, I would just probably leave it just the way it is because it didn't bother me at all. I just wanted to show you how you can add a little bit of blue. Now if you covered it too much, can always lift that bottom part. So there is that highlight right now. Let's move on toward the eye. With the eye you want to focus with that first layer on the lightest colors you see, that would be like the highlight colors of the highlight. Inside that highlight, we see, let's see, there's some blue. I do see like yellow and I see a little bit of red. Actually what I do is I wet the inside of the eyeball. I'm grabbing actually a different brush that was earlier size three. But now I have round two. I'm not going to touch the wrinkly part. You know what, I could. We can actually wet the whole thing. Let's wet the whole thing. When we add second layer, that's when we can go back to these wrinkly parts. Because this first part is about the colors of the high light. All the latest colors we see. First, we're wetting it. Going to apply colors. Wet on wet. You spend maybe a minute just wetting it. We're going to start with some yellow tones, just like we used for the bird. The bird's feathers. Same yellows. You don't want like a pot of water. Make sure there's no pot of water. Then you're going to grab a little bit of that yellow that you used earlier, maybe with some red, and place it around that highlight, because mostly inside is like a shade of blue. I'd say I have some more paint. I'm just going to let that in there. And then I'm going to grab some fallow blue for example. Or maybe follow blue with some indigo. So the blue is not so bright then just inside. I'm not trying to touch like the yellowish parts because that can easily turn into a green color. Yellow plus blue creates a shade of green. I grab a little more, maybe a little bit here actually too, I feel like there is a little bit of that blue. Now, the reason I have a lot of control is first of all, I have paint on the tip of my brush. I'm going to grab a little bit of quid red with that fallow blue, then I don't have much water with that paint. Overall, this feels like it felt actually like a 2.5 ratio and I only had paint on the tip of my brush. That's why I have more control. As you see, like barely leaving any paint there. Right. Just adding to these wrinkly parts. Then we can grab maybe a little bit of some brown. I have actually burned cena. I'm just going to add this burnt cena maybe like on the bottom here. Just say I have a nice undertone and I can go a little lower too. This is the wrinkly part where I place the blue. Then I have some undertones, because the next layer is going to be about adding the darks, darker tones. Now let's go back toward the beak. We do the same thing, them. This is again, optional. When you re wet, just go gently because you will most likely reactivate the colors just because we use such heavier ratios between water and paint. If the top part, let's say it just covered too much of that highlight, you can always lift. I went back to lift, but I can't touch the top with the bottom so the colors don't bleed. I just want to show you what you can do is grab this heavy cream or cream top like ratio between water and paint of the blue with the bontic brown and maybe some yellow too. And then you're just going to add this cream top on the bottom. This is the shading that I could have done actually with this first layer, but I was busy doing other things. That's the thing. Sometimes you just don't have the time to come back. I'm also shaping it a little bit. You're going to be very careful when you shape because it's easy to, again, misshape it, that's one thing. But here I'm going to lift a little bit just to keep that part lighter. I do wish I had this a little lighter. I should have lifted it when I was painting the eye. I still can, but maybe it could be a little lighter. Just have just so you know when to actually go back to lift it. That would be actually before you even paint the eye, just leave the eye alone and focus on the beak. I'm going to now have to wait for the eye. But in the meantime, like how about like adding some hair? Grab my rigor. Some birds size two. That's my rigor. The other rigger, I have two and a set. So this is the one that I use for finest hair. Let's say you want to add some more hair? And let's say I would add that hair actually toward the top part where I have the darks, the darkest feathers and hair. This is just using the tip of my brush and this is vantage brown and indigo. You can add some more fuzzy hair there if you wish. Then you can go over these parts too if you want to, but I think this looks nice like that. We can also go back here, but this is a little wet. If that's the case, then you either wait till it dries or you add this hair with the cream top. I just switch to the cream top like ratio between water and paint because parts are still wet here as you see. Like I can still add some fuzzy hair. It's just that I had to adjust the ratio between water and paint. 21. Project 2: Final Details and Summary: Now this is quite detail now because the reason is because I purposely painted this part much larger, so we can focus on that beak and we can focus on the eye this way. It's much easier to just go about these layers in general. Right, the next step, we're going to avoid the highlighted parts. For that, I'm going to use my round two. I'm going to grab this burn. I guess I wasn't mentioning about using Burna earlier, I decided to use it for the eye. I have this burnt sienna with a little bit of brown, making sure I don't have any water on the feral part. What I'm going to do is for now, this is not really that very diluted paint with water, but there's more water now. This is like a water like ratio. What I'm going to do is find my highlights. I'm going to actually paint around it this way. I have a color and I know I won't go over it. Use that blend of that and brown and burn sienna color everywhere. But where you have that highlight, this way, you're marking for yourself, all these areas for the highlight. It goes like this, but don't go over the wrinkly part because that's supposed to stay lighter. That's my highlight there. I do have a lot of water. I have a flow here. I don't want this to dry on me too fast. But you want to focus here because it's like a nice circle. I feel like it's a little misshaped. But that must have been my sketch, something like that. And then you can go all the way lost the part of it, but it's okay because I have the other highlights. Highlights, that's why it's okay. Then here I'm going to get a little closer to this side. And then with that cream top ratio, first I'm going to use some of this Ind brown and I'm going to go around, this is cream top, the paint will spread. But just a little bit, I'm the tip of my brush. You got to be very careful because you're going along the edge. If you go over, then you're changing the shape again of the eye, right? Then the darkest parts are like right here. In the second what we're going to do is add some indigo. I'm just also shaping this high light, but it's super easy to lose the highlights. I got to be very careful because you see like I'm touching all these parts. I'm like clean my brush. The reason we started with a lighter color, I'm actually lifting a little bit, but we started with this lighter color, is because we want to show that the eye is not just black. Now I'm going to grab this cream top. This is going to be a combination of the and brown, and indigo. And brown, indigo. This is like, almost like a black. Right now you're finding the pupil. That's the pupil right here. It has to be cream top. The paint does not spread much. We're finding the pupil and you don't need to cover it fast, just go slow and it's like you're touching with the tip of your brush. This couple areas here and there that should be a little darker. Once it dries, it will look really nice because then you have different sheets of that brown. That's the most important thing. Then I'm going to wipe my brush on a towel. I'm just going to slightly remove a little bit of the paint from there. Then just grab maybe antic brown only. I just want to create different sheets of that brown. I just added it to some area. Now we have those highlights. I can also lift a little more for the highlights, but overall it's fine. Then another thing is to grab some of the combo of Von Brown and Indigo. What you can do, you would go this wrinkly part, right? You're going in a little bit and out, they need less water with all this. Although you don't want this to dry too fast. Because there's one more thing we need to do that's using a damp brush to soften this. The color bleeds toward the feathers like this. This is a wet brush. You go around with that wet brush, not too much water, just a little bit. Then you let that color to bleed these feathers. We're shading it this way. We can do a little more of this, I'd say like here, but this is too wet. I need to grab like a heavier ratio between water and paint. There's another row basically, of something going on there. Might as well just add it a little further, then actually, this is already spreading because I wet it enough on the outside. Then the last thing is, because we have this wrinkly part, we should basically wait for this to dry, then we should add, let's see, the indigo, maybe with some red, just so you let the colors to mix on the paper. And that basically will cover the eye here. For the eyeball, just make sure that you have enough of these highlights so it's not too dark. I just lift a little more. I'm just waiting for this to dry a little bit again, I can fill that part. All right, so this has dried now, I'm going to grab this. Basically any blue you have with a little bit of red, maybe some and brown and go around but show different colors that you're using. Again, some of that cold blue, just so this area around the eye is not like super white or anything like that. You want some color in there and that's pretty much it. I'm going to zoo out. All right, so we just finished painting and then the bird. Congratulations, let's start another bird bird painting. This time you're going to paint the entire bird. 22. Project 3: Robin Bird Introduction: Everyone, welcome to the third project. You will paint this bird. This time we're painting the full bird. We will wet the entire bird and apply colors, wet on wet. When you take a look at the reference, you see like there's parts that are orange. That's the chest area. This is where we can start working with undertones. Yellow for the undertones, since the chest in parts of the head are orange. And what creates a shade of orange is a combination of yellow and red. That's why you want to start with yellow as an undertone to make that orange, red pop. Now the belly, the lower parts are grayish. There's a little bit of blue. What we can do is create our own shade of white and gray. Basically, this is where you want to work with primary colors, yellow, blue, red. Whenever you blend it three colors together, you create a shade of gray. And then it's just a matter of how much yellow or blue or red you add to it to determine if it's a yellow, gray, blue, gray, or red. Once we apply all the colors wet on wet, we will work on lifting colors. That'll be another thing. And then we'll be adding more dark with a cream top like ratio. With a heavier ratio between water and paint. There's one more thing that we will be doing to create softness. Let's say on the bottom of the feathers. You want to also wet them, part of the background. Let me give you an example. This is my other bird. I wet the bird on the inside, but then I wet it a little bit the background here because I wanted some color to bleed toward the background. Whatever you are okay with and you want the colors to bleed toward the background, you can wet the background as well. Sometimes I wet the entire background. Sometimes I wet just parts of it. Depends. If I'm going to, let's say I want to have soft feathers everywhere. It just depends from the subject because sometimes it's just like it looks like a hard edge everywhere. Then I will just paint background separately and then the bird separately. However, to create those soft feathers, this is when you want to have parts of the background wet it as well so the colors bleed toward the background. How do you control all that spreading? That has to do with how wet the paper is and how much water and paint water paint consistency you have on your brush brush. It just depends from a situation. I can't just say I'm always going to use like cream top like ratio between water and paint because it's not true. It just depends how much control I want to have. We'll get to that through the lesson. But that's the thing. I wet all the body of the bird and then I wet the background. We're going to do the same thing in this lesson. I want to keep these feathers on the bottom here. Softer. I'm going to wet this part of the background too. Everything else, I'm just going to focus on wetting the inside. Let's talk about colors. 23. Project 3: Color Palette: When it comes to like choosing colors, you don't have to have the same colors as I am using. Every painting with every painting is all about finding that balance between light and shadows. That's how you create a contrast. When you look at the belly of the bird, you see there's lighter parts. You actually want to find a highlight. Whatever the areas are highlighted, let's say it would be the left side of the face, the head, and maybe little bit of the back here. But how about making this part a little lighter? And maybe here, this part of the belly with the light is not as obvious like as I was painting this bird because then I kept this part lighter and this part lighter. But it's, the idea is the same because if you just cover the entire bird with that same value, color value of the same color, it's going to be plain. There's not going to be any dimension in your painting. To create a dimension, you always want to create that balance between light and shadows. That's really all you need to think about. Colors are, of course, we pending with water colors. We want to use all these colors. But it's the balance between light and shadows that matters. If you want to create that natural looking object and to create that dimension in your painting here, going to designate like this little area to keep it lighter, maybe over here and then maybe all this here. And then overall, like we need to find the parts that are darker, that's going to be the right side of the head, right here, all this part. And then a little bit of that belly here. Of course, all the parts that are underneath, like the wing or not all that specific line here, that would be much darker because the feathers would create a shadow for the colors. Again, like we want to use a couple yellows then the white feathers, Think of it this way, primary colors, which is yellow, blue, red, you can create a shade of gray just with the three colors, yellow, blue, red. Those are the primary colors. And then once you blend them together, you don't want to overmix these colors because you want to see the separation of colors. That will help you to create a blue gray, red, gray, or yellow gray. This is how I paint white objects or gray objects in water color. That's what I teach. It's to use primary colors instead of using some shade of gray from a tube because it's not going to look as natural as when you create that gray or white yourself. For that, we're just going to use primary yellow. Let's say my red, this is my red. It's not a primary red, but it's my main red color. And then I'm going to use this coupled blue. It's not primary blue either, but this is like a good combo that I always work with. It works, it just works then for the bluish feathers. So we can just use the combo of Queen Red and coupled Blue. However, the left side, the left side of the bird, where we have the wing, we can see a little bit of that Brown, right hint of Brown. That's when we can use a little bit of Band Brown for example. If you don't have and Brown you can use P. You can also add some other brown burn. Siena sin is like a orange shade or orange brown, I want to call it, but not as strong as some brands have like this. I'm trying to remember what the brown is, but some are very like orange. This is like in the middle. Let's say we can use that sheet as well and we can use it also toward the orange feathers of the bird. What we're going to do is have our colors pre diluted with water on the palette. Try to have a consistency that I like to call heavy cream like ratio. That's the ratio between water and paint. It feels like heavy cream. And I'm referring to day you have that consistency. It's okay if some parts are more like milk like ratio. It's just you want to have like a chunk of paint that's a little thicker. I don't have the palette ready, but this is like you want to have like a chunk like this or like this, and everything else is like heavy cream. And it's okay if there's a little bit of paint that's more diluted with what? That's because when you paint wet on wet, you don't want to end up just having this overly diluted paint with water on your palette. Because all you're going to grab is that water like ratio. I call it water because it's so thin down. You want to be able to grab that heavier ratio between water and paint. We're going to wet it. We're going to wet all of this like this and then plus some background. We're going to also wet the tail feathers. 24. Project 3: Wetting Paper: What I normally do is wet the paper first. I wet the bird or whatever I'm painting. Then like halfway through, that's when I start diluting colors with water. I'm waiting for that to squeeze the colors and then I'll dilute them with water, and then I'll come back and I'll wet a little more. The bird this way. I give that a chance to really get inside of that paper and then I come back and I wet it again. Otherwise, you can just wet it. I'd say three to 4 minutes is a good idea. Let's see, I'm going to use my brush for now. This is my flat 20. Don't worry about the eyes generally. Like general ideas just don't directly add color toward the eyes. We can always lift just to make sure we don't have it all covered. The reason we can wet the eyes too is because the eyes are darker. Yes, we do have some highlights in there, but because the bird overall is lighter mid tones, it's not like it's black or dark brown or anything like that. We don't have to worry about the darks going over highlighted parts. Let's begin by wetting the paper first to the bird. And I'm going to grab a little more water. I do have quite a bit of water. There's a reason why I'm using a larger brush. That's because I want to have more coverage right away. Now, I do have to be careful when I go, like next to these edges, right? Because I don't want the water to go, for example, here. Unless I'm okay with that pain bleeding over toward the background. Again, it depends a lot from the effect you want to achieve, what techniques you're using, the effect you want to see, much control you want to have. Those are all the aspects like you have to think about trying not to go over like the areas where you really want to paint on the inside of the bird. Like you don't want to go over the edges here, for example, because then the bird will just become really, really puffy here. I'm just using like the side of a brush in the way to go over this part, which is the feather. Then I have these feathers. At first, I use a lot of water, like a lot of water. I let the water to sit there as I am wetting the paper. Basically, I do it for a few minutes. It depends where I'm painting, how big the object is. But you don't want to just wet the paper one time I go through it and call it done because you're not going to have enough time to apply colors with wet later. The paper which is dry too fast, I feel like I placed a lot of water. I'm going to start working on my palette now, which means I'm going to squeeze the colors and start diluting them with water. Just want to make sure I have enough water all the way here. And I don't want to change the shape of the head. I just have to be very careful. I have enough of that water that's floats there, but not too much. All right, I'm going to place this brush here, and again, I'm going to start squeezing my colors onto the palette. So I'm going to start with the yellows, and then the red, and then the browns, and then the blue. 25. Project 3: Undertones and White Feathers: This is what my palette looks like. Now, I decided to basically dilute ciena as well. And I have some of the yellow. Ok, just because I always use these colors and I have them already on the palette. Red burn band brown. The two yellows, yellow, yellow. Then I have cobalt blue here. Indigo, because I'm going to use that, the red already here from a different painting. So I'm just going to use these colors basically. Now, back to the painting. I walked away from it, I stopped wetting it, and the paper started to buckle. And that's okay. A lot of buckling is not okay, but a little bit is okay because if you have so much buckling, it just depends from the paper. This is honey mile de collection. If you're painting on arches, you're fine too. This Arches was actually my first watercolor paper and I still love it. But this is collection. I'm just rewetting these sections and I'm going to start pushing that water. If I feel like I have too much in some areas I'm just going to keep spreading it. But move it a little down here, wetted the background there. Yet I'm leaving that for the last part technically, but here I'm sinister doing it right away. So I don't confuse you too much. Wetting the background here too now. Because this is where I want the feathers to look softer, the paint to spread. I'm not wetting this part of the background, but only up to, here you go. Going over now as you're wedding, like this is the last time you're really wet's say last minute. Look at the reference. I always want you to look at the reference when you paint with me. Because if you don't look at the reference, then you're going to focus on recreating only my strokes. I want you to think about why you're placing that yellow there and here and so on. You want to have that reference in front of you no matter what, because you need to see like, where you're going to place the colors, like, is this the area much lighter, should I avoid it? And so on. Now that I'm getting closer, I'm going to again, push that water toward the background here, actually toward the bottom, slightly wipe my brush on a tel. But sometimes when you wipe your brush on a tel, you actually remove water from the paper. And that's not a good thing because then you're drawing your paper. This is good. I don't have puddles of water. I'm going to grab my long quiz four. You want to have a softer brush overall, you can grab a quill. Or you can maybe grab like a round brush size 12 or 14, whatever larger brush you have. And then make sure you have a fine point. But you do want to have a softer brush. The first thing I'm going to grab is like the yellows, right? I want to start with undertones. This is orange. The bird is orange, right, overall. But how do you create a shade of orange? Or you can grab red and yellow to create a shade of orange. That's why we're starting in a way with a yellow undertone. You don't want to overly dilute these colors with water. You want to see the separation of colors. I didn't grab enough of the other yellow for now. Just a little bit. But you're trying to find actually those yellow areas of the bird that's like here. What's the ratio? The ratio is like milk like ratio. You just don't want to have too much paint on your brush because then you're just going to release too much paint. I'm going to slightly wipe my brush or not white, but touch the towel just so I don't have too much. Just to make sure very gently you're finding some areas where you can place that yellow. As you see, I'm not placing it everywhere. I'm going to grab a little bit of water here, so it feels more like a milk back to that yellow. Again, I'm going to very gently blend these. I don't want to really blend these, I just want to grab colors because I want to see the separation of colors. I grabbed red because to create a shade of orange, you need yellow and red. When I grab red, I change the shade of my orange, or from yellow becomes orange. Right here, you're finding areas wherever you want to place that color. Not everywhere you need to think about it. Like where you're placing this yellow, you go for the lightest colors over all that you see in the picture, in the reference. Then whatever you see, like the feathers look more orange, more reddish. That's when you can add a little more color and I wipe my brush, my tone because I feel like I have too much of the paint right now. It's not the moment where we need to have a ton of control. That's not it yet. Now, I quickly grab some more red, but more water too. I don't want to have too much control. This is mostly Iso yellow and quad red. At this moment, you're going to place this orange, which feels too orange. I'm going to grab more of the yellows towards like the most orange parts that you can see. Again, you're avoiding some parts. I said this left side is lighter. We just want to add maybe I'll call it orange sheet of orange. Only to some parts. Let that paint do its thing. Like we don't need to control at all. Now, this is the edge of the bird. I'm using the tip of my brush just to make sure I have enough. Okay. Now, this is the beginning. We need to clean the brush because we're not done yet. We have the rest of the bird to cover. We're still in the woods. We're not even close to be done, but I'm going to wet it just a little bit more here with the squall brush, just so this part doesn't dry on me too fast. And now I'm going to start working on the white parts. Grab a little bit of yellow, yellow, red, yellow, red, and blue. This is how you are creating a shade of gray. I'm going to cover more about this in a separate section, but those are the white feathers of the bird. If you want it to be more like a yellow gray, grab more yellow with it, then it's became a little too yellowish. I'm grabbing more of the other two colors. Now I have a little more of that blue. Then we have these feathers that go toward the tail feathers. And then I have to have some of the blue here too. I can't forget that this needs to be bluish. I don't really have to clean my brush. I'm just going to grab more of this cobald blue and more of the quin red. That's like a blue violet, right? I need more blue because that doesn't feel like a bluish completely yet. I'm going to go right here and I have to be careful because if I go too far out here where I have this orange, those colors will blend too much and I'll create, basically will start turning into more like a greenish shade of green. 26. Project 3: Damp Brush Technique: What I need to do is grab more like a heavier ratio between water and paint off that blue and red. I'm grabbing also a different brush. This is a smaller size of that long coil brush. There's my blue violet and I want to have that blue violet like right here, somewhere here. This is the area for those blue feathers. Very quickly, gently and what we cannot forget about the top of its head. This is actually where you can use all three colors, yellow, blue, red. It's like a gray, but keep it on the bluish side. It's not exactly the color that I see there, but I need some color right away before this area dries. I have that top of the head painted as well. What will help is the fact that I'm keeping it wet longer. A lot of times people ask me like, how do you keep your paper wet longer? It's actually because I travel around, I don't focus on one area, only before this is too dry. This part I'm going to quickly grab like a heavier ratio yellows, more like a heavy cream yellows and some red. I need to add it very quickly, needs to be cream top. Actually, because this is almost dry, I could grab some of the burnt sienna as well. Then this is like a heavier ratio between water and paint. It feels creamy. The paint feels creamy. I'm going to grab a little more red because this part, it feels more reddish, this part actually feels more brownish. I can also grab some more of the burnt sienna. When you're grabbing all these colors, you're changing the ratios ratio. You want to change the ratios between these colors. You never grab that same blend, because to make something look natural, you need to change the ratios between those colors. I'm going to grab some more of the red, maybe place it like toward the darkest parts. Then we have these feathers. With that same brush, I still have some yellows and red. I'm going to grab some of this blending brown and quin red. I'm quickly going to go here before this is too dry. And actually I want some yellows as well. I don't have that much paint on my brush and it feels like a damp brush. It's like I grabbed almost like I want to say milk like ratio or half and half. But the key is that I don't have much paint on my brush now. I'm just grabbing this drier paint basically. But I need more of the red, maybe some blue, and pull it more blue and red with that brown. There you go. So it looks like this. We'll have to hurry up because everything just D, which is okay. There's other things we'll be able to do once the paper dries a little bit. Now I had too much of the red. I grab more of the blue. Now it's like a shade of gray that we were already working with. But then I have, with an addition of V Brown, I need to see the tail feathers here. The tail feathers almost dried. This tells me right there. If I want to add, let's say, some blue tones. I'm not cleaning my brush, just FYI, But this is cobalt blue, quin red. Then I'm going to go right here. These are my tail feathers. Then just because you're already added color, it doesn't mean you leave it alone. This is when we get to play a little more with our layers and we can use that same blend, A little more of the blue, I'd say for these feathers right here. These ones feel a little darker. And then we have the shadows. Of course, even though I wetted the background there, not that much. Color really bled over. But this is another area where I need to add a little more dark. I'm, I'm trying to grab more like a cream top, so you can see my brush feels, I'm going to add it right here and towards the right side of the head because this side is shadowed. More shadowed. Again, I'm not worried about the eyes. I can lift them later if it gets too dark. But with this cream top, I'm going to grab again. Quin red, coopled blue and my, and brown, right? It's cream top brush. You can see it's a damp brush. I'm just going to flattened it so I can recreate some of these feathers using this cream top like ratio between water and paint, like having a damp brush. Some parts need to be much darker. That's when I'm using that cream top. Then there's some shadowy feathers here too. Why not to add that as well? We will be lifting colors too. That's fine. We have that balance there. We just need to make this part a little darker, more of that cream top of the blue, red and yellow, blue, red and brown, yellow, but brown. Although I have not cleaned my brush, technically, I would have some yellows there too. Just FYI, Then I'm going back toward the same areas over and over. There's actually another wing here. Didn't add color there before, but right there, something like that. Whatever you see, the darkest parts that you want to go back to, this has almost dried, but I'm going to add a little bit of the color toward the beak, just on the bottom, since I have that nice cream top consistency on my brush. Just to add that mix that I have, which is the and brown and cobalt blue and in red. Right now, I'm going to quickly clean my brush. I'm going to show you a little trick. This trick only works if you still see shine on your paper. It has to be, you have to make it like a damp brush and you squish it. It feels like this. Then you pull it down. But I can't go here because this is too dry. The only thing I can do in this section here is lift colors. And I will do that in a second. But first I want to pull it for that softness, or softness. But pull it the direction like it goes down the feathers. The lines lines the strokes. They'll pull it down a little bit. The paint is not going to spread like this. Instead, I'm going to pull it this way. But I can't do it in a lot of the places because the paper already dried on me. That's the thing. This is too dry? Yes. I'm going to clean my brush. 27. Project 3: Lifting Colors: And let's begin lifting the colors. So my favorite thing, so this is my rigger brush. You want to have like a medium, a stiff brush, medium stiff brush, to lift the colors. Rigger brush is great, but you can, of course, lift colors with the round brush as well. I'm going for the light parts, which is like here. The lightest feathers and parts that I see. Now, what's the best timing to lift colors is once that paper loses that shine. And I actually need to start with the orange feathers because this is almost so dry. I don't even know if I can lift here a little bit. You want to go back towards like these most highlighted parts, hopefully we can still lift. This is the eye area. Now here's the thing. I don't always lift, even though it seems like I always lift, right in all my paintings. I don't always make it with that timing. Sometimes I get sidetracked because I'm doing other things. A lot of times I will basically use masking fluid. Just as my back up this way I have a little bit of some highlighted hair here. I can still lift some of these feathers I'd like to lift here, but this is actually too early. Right there, I'm looking for another area where I can lift, for example, these feathers right here. These are the tail feathers. This is how I find feathers zooming in so you can see, but this is how you find these feathers you lift. In between whatever you see, those highlights, you lift and I press a little harder to. Now the key is when you clean your brush, you wipe it very well in a towel, so it feels like a damp brush. Then we want to maybe divide this part, separate this feather from this feathers so we can create a line. When you don't want to work on details, right? You don't want to create like every single feather. You don't want to paint every single feather. This is how I go about it. I don't want to work on every single feather. I the overall with the wet on wet. Then I maybe create some detail work with lifting. But we can also add color two. I'll show this to you in a second. I just don't want to miss out on this part. The timing to lift these feathers then this is the area where I really want to lift. It seems like it's a little too wet, But I'll start a little bit with a little bit of lifting. Now, you don't want to lift if something is too wet because then you just add water to that area. When you add water to that area, then basically the page just spreads. You don't want to do that diluting paint with water on the paper more and more and things start to flow. You don't want to do that. Lifting here a little bit. The only thing I wish I lifted a little more, this section, but this is too dry. Back to the feathers again. Like if you want to lift more here you're looking for those lighter lines that you see over the feathers. And that's how you can, the left side of the face should be lifted, just so we have these highlights. And then we can also lift the head. I can go back here and you can always go back to those same spots to re, lift. I call it re lift because then you create deeper lines. Deeper lifted lines. That's how we create softness over whether you're painting like these feathers here or the head, or even if you're painting like a different animal. This is exactly how I create that softness in the painting. I can't lift here, but I can lift it here, for example. You don't want to over lift the colors either, because if you over lift the colors, like it would just look overworked. 28. Project 3: Creating Contrast: Another thing, what you can do, and I'll quickly show this. You want to grab that same brush that you were using to lift? This is my blend of the and brown quid, red and blue, right? Coal blue. This is a damp brush and a cream top like ratio because the paper is still wet. This is what I can do. I can create lines, dark lines, using this cream top ratio, some of the darkest parts. This will help me to create a contrast. A lot of times I won't have to add another layer because of that. Let's see, I can't do it everywhere, but maybe the areas should still feel damp. That's what I'm trying to say. Because if it's too dry, then you're just going to be painting wet on dry. You do want to add strokes wet on wet. This is a little too dry. But maybe here I can add a little more that will give me some more contrast. Just because I added these dark, this feels like I'm almost dry brushing, but I think I'm okay. Just to add a little color. Yeah, the tail feathers are a little too dry. Now, I have some color, right? This is the blue, red and yellow. I'm sorry, That blue, red and yellow, blue, red and brown. I can just add some feathers with the tip of my brush now, like I had this damp brush with that cream top like ratio. Right? And I already used up a lot of the paint now. Everything is I have very little amount of paint on my brush. But why not to add some hair detail that dryer paint? It's like you're barely touching the paper. Just a little bit. Worked better here, actually, when I was doing it here. Because you can also go back here, let me grab that dry paint. This is actually too dry, but if it's still dry, you can add some details to like this. You're not painting every single feather, it's just couple areas where you want to add that. Those strokes, it looks like it's detailed but it really is not right. That's the idea. Like something looks detailed but it really is not. You're just giving the impression of that. Yeah, I have one more area I would like to lift right here and then here. Then I'm going to let it dry. This is going to dry. Here's the thing. If you cover too much and you worry about the eyes, you can lift. This is my round three brush. I really don't need to lift because the thing is that this is just yellow over there. And that's what I was saying. Yellow undertones are fine, that the eyeballs are basically black, but we still need to use colors to recreate that black in water color. What I'm going to do is walk away and let it dry again. When we come back, we're going to work on details. 29. Project 3: Details, First Layer: Okay, friends, so we finished that first layer. Maybe that's the only layer for the bird, but we want to start working on details such as eyes. And those are the areas where I focus on really the most. Because with most of my paintings, I will make sure like the eyes and noses are like most detail while everything else is loose. And that's how I go about my paintings, just in general. Now I want you to grab like a smaller breast, so I'm holding round two. You could go with even around zero or one if you feel more comfortable with it just depends how big your bird is. Now, with the eyes you want to zoom in to the reference image. So you can see that eye up close and you see like those highlights. Let's start with the left eye. The left eye has the blue tones there and so on. But it's the darks that we will add that will create a contrast. We don't have to worry about like that flow of the yellow in there too much. What we're going to do is wet it first. You can wet the entire eyeball with the lid on the bottom, I guess because I don't see it on the top. Yeah, let's just focus on wetting the bottom part right here. That's pretty much it. Just a quick moment of wetting, then we're going to grab a little bit of blue and red on the top of our brushes. It's a very small amount of paint. You don't want to overly mix those colors, then you're just going to apply it mainly like toward the right side, but it doesn't look too bluish. I'm going to grab a little more of that blue and add it to right side. Right, just the right side of it, basically. Leave it maybe a little more here. I'm going to leave it. I'll work on it later once this dries because then I will just add the darks, the same thing we are doing with this right eye. The right eye. We're wetting it. We can wet the lido if you feel like things are too dark for you already because of that first layer when we're painting the bird, you can always avoid the area of the eye. Then you just completely like paint it separately, just like now. It's just that you wouldn't have that first layer. Now, here's the thing. Everything becomes easier when you paint on a larger scale. Again, blue and red because when you on a larger scale, let's say the head is the size of my palm. Then you have so much more room to work on details like this. For example, let's focus on adding some blue tones. And more blue than red, because then you don't see as much blue. It's mostly like those highlights. Although I don't have to go directly over those highlights. I just want to have that bluish undertone. That's all I really want. Now let's focus on the beak. This was our technically second layer, but first layer for the eyes. For the beak, I'm going to wet it. There's a highlight on top of the nose. I'm just going to lift it later just to have it lighter. But I'm going to the beak, but then more than a beak towards the right side, because I want to have a nice soft transition. This brush is medium stiff. I don't want to press too hard because I just painted this bird. Even though it's all dry, I don't want to reactivate colors not too long just to wet it a little bit. But more than you need, you always want to wet more than you need go. 30. Project 3: Details - Beak: Now I'm going to grab a little bit of the yellow. With the red as the undertone, but like a heavy cream like ratio between water and paint. If this part is richer after that first layer when we were painting the bird just in general, then maybe you don't need much color here. Just keep that in mind. Now I'm going to grab blue violet, which is let's say cobalt blue and quin red, blue and red together to keep it cleaner here. Well, this is a highlighted area here to make it more bluish, I just have to clean my brush, but I'll keep going with this now. To have even more control. You want to have like a cream top ratio between white and paint, but I'm going to grab tiny bit of that cobalt blue here. I will lift later just to have a better highlight because right now it's covered. Then here for this part I'm going to use this cream top of and brown and indigo v brown, indigo but cream top, which means the paint is like really creamy. And I'm trying to have a lot of control and I want to show that there is Vandk brown and then there's indigo. But they have a little too much paint. And you know what, even a little bit of when red would be good. You're aiming for the areas away from the highlights. Now, this is a little too reddish. I have to keep adjusting. But there's that line in between, the line that divides the bottom, the bottom part and a top part of the beak. I am working with the tip of my brush just so I have the most control. Then there's a little bit of some coloring there too, that we can add for the paint. I'm shaping the beak. I want some more color over all the red, maybe with the yellow, like a cream top as well. To add it on the side and just pull it a little more this way now because we wet this part soft transition. I'm also using a damp brush. Not just to push the paint, I can grab a little more of that of the dark. You can even use blue violet if you want to. Now what you want to do is make sure keep an eye on this part because you want to keep that as light as possible. You can keep working on it if you need to, but generally, like I suggest, just watching, this area needs to stay light. I'm lifting a little bit because the paper in that area felt like damp. I'm going to grab tiny bit more color. This is cream top of the cobalt blue red. Just so I have this nicely shaped this part. And I'll pull this through a little more now. I want to clean my brush, wipe it very well in a towel because this is the highlight that I lost. I don't have as much of that highlight, but it's going to be overall, that left side is going to be lighter. Here you go. Then I can go through this part, but it's soft so it doesn't bother me. Now, let's go back toward the eye, our left eye. There's a lot going on in a way because we have that little part that's lighter and but I wouldn't worry about it at all. We can do this actually wet on dry this time I always say like it's easier to paint wet on wet. However, we have a smaller object to work with, This is my yellow yellow with Van de Brown. Because it's smaller, it's easier to tackle this actually wet on dry. It'll be easier to preserve that little area to keep it light. But in the second I'm going to add a different color to, so there's that. And I'm going to grab some cobalt blue way, bequeen red with some Vande Brown. I'm going to keep shaping it. You want to set your mind. It's basically, it's almost like you're drawing with a pencil. When you use the tip of your brush, that's helpful when you think of it that way. And then this is cobalt blue only then this is a M brush. Now, just to soften this, this is so tiny, right Then I want like a heavier ratio of the Vandek Brown, let's say, and Indigo, just to add it here. Hopefully this is. Yeah, it's still a little, we should be a little more wet. But I'm adding it on the left side. Right side, right here. Now I. So now let's jump toward this eyeball. With this eyeball, okay, this is the thing. It looks black, right? So it's like, do we just use black? No, you don't want to just use black atrovate tube. You want to recreate your own shade of black. And how do I paint the eye like this? First of all, we have highlights, so that's helpful. Another thing is you want to start with an undertone. And when you start with undertone, it changes a ton like so much. Because then you give life to that painting, to that bird, to that eye. It's important to start, I'm sorry, with that highlight. 31. Project 3: Details - Adding More Color: And what color do you use for the highlight? A lot of times I'll just use like a blue violet. And I do see maybe there could be like a blue violet on the bottom. But I also want to add some brown to give it like of some color for that pupil. Or is the iris part, I guess, or the eye wall. What I will do is wet almost the entire eye except for the areas where we have these highlights. I'm going to stay away. And then once I start adding color, I'm going to get closer to it. The reason I'm pre wetting is so I have a nice flow here so the paper doesn't drive fast. I do need to start with let's say even blue violet. That's fine. Start with the blue and red. Let's place it maybe closer toward the highlights. This is when you go around these little highlights, you can mark them for yourself. Okay, these are the highlights. And you just stay away from these areas now because you pre wet it. You have more time right, to play with this a little bit, spread the paint and so on. We're not done with it yet because we still have to add other colors. Let's grab that was by the way, like a very light like I'd say milk like ratio. Okay. Now this is like a heavy cream like ratio. Because I need to start having more control now. Because I'm going to paint wet on wet. It felt more like a cream top, actually, for a second when I first touched the paper, but I'm placing it around these high lights. Again, I don't want to just place in one area. I need to keep moving because the paper is drying now. It's a moment when you can add a little bit of that indigo, I grab a little more water because this is drying super fast. You know, this eyeball, it needs to be really well shaped. You need to go a little on the outside. I need to use the tip of my brush. I touched my paper towel just so I have a fine point on my brush and there's my eyeball. And now here's the thing. If you don't see like that transition, it's just too plain. Well, first of all, I'm adding a little more of the indigo. But what you can do is clean your brush, wipe it very well on a towel and then you're going to lift the bottom. So it's not just like a one tone, right? Another place you can lift, it's right here above the eyeball. You're looking for those highlighted parts, right? I know it's hard sometimes when you see these eyes and they're just like, okay, this is just the black eye. What do I do with it? How do I make sure that I have something in it, not just a black shade? And that's when colors come into play. And I'm going to grab a little more like, you don't need to work that much, but maybe you need to separate the wrinkle, maybe part of from the eyeball. But this is it. That's pretty much it for these eyes. Of course, there's more we can do to it. We can add some more color around. But for now, I'm just going to let it dry. I'm going to let it dry this part, and then I'm looking at the other side. Is there anything else I can do? Technically, I could add a little more color. I'm going to show this to you as more than you need. We more than you need. We're because we need some more shading around this eye. Or maybe you already have shading around this eye. Don't worry about this part, but I'm going to show you what I do. I wet, I re wet more than I need. And I'm going to use the same brush, which is my round two for example. I'm going to grab this. There's a long yellow. Some of the yellow, all the colors, and then red, all the colors I use. I do need shading around it. Maybe you down again, just take a look at your painting because you might have already added colors there. Then I just add color. Cream top ratio. Just so I have some more shading around the eye. I do want to keep it lighter, but it just became a little light and I'm going to grab a little more cream top. I'm trying to find some cream top. It's not always that easy. When the paint is already so diluted, I'm just adding the same colors. Maybe slightly more of the red, and then I have a little more of something they are going on. Maybe a little more. Actually, maybe something like this. That part is a little more highlighted, but I don't want to go too deep in it like too much. It's just this side needed shading. Then the same thing with this side. Like technically, like if I already added some shadows there, well, I should have it on the right side because actually the right side is more shadowed. What I would do is, again, we more than I need, make sure the eye is dry, wet, very gently. Although I am using like a medium stiff brush. But I do have, I'm not touching too hard on the paper like I'm trying not to, so I'm not reactivating colors more than you need. You always want to wet more than you need. You go I'm going to grab my round three. Actually, for this, I am going to grab this yellow, red, yellow, red, Even burn Sena would be fine, but try not to mix the colors on the paper. The palette on the palette paper is good to mix colors. Then you're adding this ner layer, basically to make it the darker. And I'm getting closer just so I can shape it more. I want more of that. And brown. I'm sorry, Burns. And then and brown right here. Just so it gives more to the eye when there's those shadows too. I can always lift the colors too if I go too far. I want a little more of, let's say, red shading, shading. You just can't create dimension without shadows and lights. That's really important. I'm going to grab tiny, tiny bit of the browns with some red but cream top right there, right here and here. I was debating if I need to lift this part, but I really don't. Because from that first layer, initial layer, I have undertones, like all the colors already there. That's it for this part. 32. Project 3: Tree Stump and Feather Shadows: With the toes. Very often I actually paint the branch, whatever the bird is sitting or standing on first. Because if I try to paint the toes first, and I try to avoid like these areas to paint that wooden part, it doesn't look as natural. Instead, I went the whole thing and then I just don't add color where I have those toes and the paint flows too much. Then I lift the color, we're going to do the same thing. I'm grabbing my long quills, which is the softer brush overall. Like you want to zoom in onto the reference or whatever that part is, then I'm going to wet it. If you want to keep it loose, you don't have to go all the way to the bottom of the edge of the paper, Then just set it. You don't have to wet it exactly either. It's perfectly even there. That's not important. And you don't have to go over like these toes either. You can actually avoid them nicely here. But we're going to start with blue undertones. Try to grab like a milk ratio between water and paint, right? The ratio of cobalt blue and quin red. We start with bluish undertones. This is exactly how I normally paint. Like the tree branches and trees in general. You want to start with a nice blue undertone. Grab some red with it, so it's not just blue. This is all like the milk like ratio. We don't need as much control yet. We want the paint to spread here. It was easy because the toes are like on the edge. So I didn't actually wet it there. Now that same brush, you can grab some of the burnt sienna. But I need to clean my brush first. This is the same formula I've used in my apples or some other classes. There's my burned Sienna. I'm going to go in that same to shape the part of this post so it's round. I'm adding the burnt scena toward like the darkest parts. And then I'm pulling the paint just like I see in the reference image, but I want some of this and brown right away. I didn't clean my brush, I just went for that creamy paint, which is more like a heavy cream. Although my brushes, it's a quilt bar, so it holds a lot of paint and water. But here it goes. This is where the toes are very gently going next to those toes. I know there's shadows we can add to those later. You don't have to worry about it now since we are avoiding the toes. Otherwise, it'll be easier to add the shadows. But the shadows would require using a much darker tones. And I don't want to do that right now just because I wetted the toes too. Now I can grab that same brush to tip of my brush. Some of the indigo. Indigo. Now again, this is where the shadows would be, but I don't want to play too much with it. Then I have post, which shouldn't be the way I painted. It should be like this straight down. You can pull the paint a little bit, so on. There's just not that much to do to it and we're keeping things loose anyway, I'm going to clean the brush, just to add a little more towards the bottom, although I'm not finishing it then. Where you have the toes, just lift the paint a little bit so not too much paint goes over those toes. That's pretty much what we can do until this dries, of course we can come back lift just like we see. Like that part is, I'll highlight it. Just can do it now. Pull the paint a little bit. I grab paint, so I'm like using the paint that I grabbed to pull it down here. I'm going to clean my brush. Here's a thought, since we're waiting for that supposed to dry, why not set a little shadow here? I'm going to wet more than I need. I'm using my round eight brush for this purpose. I just want a shadow. Let's say here, right? What do you do when you want a shadow? You wet more than you need. Again, you always want to wet more than you need. I'm going to wet the legs to some of the leg, two legs. Because I'm not going to get to the legs until the post is 100% dry. Then I'm going to grab the same combo which is like the And brown quin red. You can grab the same colors you use. So with the yellow two cream top like ratio between one and paint. Then I'm going to add it right here. It's like a specific area, but I need more yellow. This is supposed to be the same sheet of that gray. It's just to make it a little darker, just like we see in the reference. Now I have a little bit more contrast. It can make it a little darker. This area right here. So I grabbed a little bit of indigo for this. Now we have a little more contrast there. Yes, you can go through the feathers. You can do the same thing. It's just a question, if you want to do all those details, right, All the detailed work. That's one spot where I needed a little more contrast. And I'll show you like an example, I guess just so you know how you can add color to shadows. You go underneath a feather that you want to, so there's a feather. See these parts here. Then you clean your brush quickly. It's a damp brush and then you wet right underneath you. Let the color to bleed toward the rest of the part of the bird. Right, I'm just going to turn here with this. There you go. That's how you can create like shadows under feathers. But if you want to keep it simple, then you don't do anything at all. This is the post that we've been working on. The last thing we could do is let's say lift. This is my ricker brush. Fuels damp. I just wiped it on a towel. You can lift the colors here too, although it's a little too early in this part because the perfect timing lift the colors is when that shine is almost gone. A lot of times, yes, I start early because let's say I have so much to lift. This is the nice part here. I'm just going to lift a little more. And I'm using like the full body of the brush and pressing it with the full body of the, a little harder to lift more. If you want to create like some pattern or you need to lift the legs or the toes, then that's the way to go. You just want to go through it. Once that paper feels like it's almost dry, that shine should be gone or almost gone. Then you can go back to re, lift. Think actually it's a cool thing. You can do the same thing we did actually with the bird. You grab the colors. So let's equal blue, ndeg brown. I'm trying to grab the cream top. Maybe some indigo to make it even darker. Then you add like this cream top into some areas to the lines that we see over the tree parts. And this is cream top, right? You can go right underneath. To create the bigger, larger contrast, you drag it. The brush brush, this is a damp brush that I grabbed, like the paint with. It was cream top like ratio between what and paint. And then you can still lift if you want to because this is actually perfect timing not to lift. Let's say I want to lift a little more. I can go back here. I can keep playing with it, but I want to leave it, and then we can focus on the legs. 33. Project 3: Painting Legs Wet on Wet: When we first see like the legs toes. I remember when I first started painting with watercolors, it was like, it looks so complex. Looks so complicated. I was thinking like, how do I paint these toes? There's so many wrinkles and everything. But here's the thing. Once I felt so comfortable painting wet on wet, there was nothing that I thought I couldn't paint. It's once you feel comfortable with that technique which is wet, and this is the main technique in watercolor, you realize that everything can be painted wet and wet. You don't, just like with feathers, we didn't have to work on every single feather or paint every single hair. We can do the same thing with those toes, those legs. What we're going to do is basically wet one leg at a time. And we're going to apply colors with the wet, when you wet the leg. First of all, you want to go inside the bird's feathers. But when you apply colors, you're only going to apply here up to here. Right this way. We're going to create a sub transition when you wet the toes with them, but skip maybe tiny, teeny areas to keep them paper dry. Now I have this one here, we have this toe here, and then I have this one here. Everything else is the other legs. A little more water, just so it doesn't dry on me too fast. Again, I'm not perfectly wetting it. Just enough water, it doesn't dry too fast. Then again, you want to go over here to wet the bird's feathers. So you have a soft transition, the first colors and we're going to use cream top ratio mostly, or I should say heavy cream. Use the yellow ocher. Or if you have rosa more like a heavy cream, then apply it more towards the left side. Going to start with this color, then this is more yellow is how about grabbing some of the yellow that we've used already, which is like a. I'm going to clean my brush because I have a little too much of the other paints. I'm grab some of the quin red with it. Then quickly here, before this is dry, I'm adding some of the yellow tones. As you see, I'm not doing it perfectly. I'm applying these colors perfectly covering these spots. I just want some color there. Looks like parts are like highlighted. So maybe a little more color here. And it's just the tip of my brush. I'm like clean my brush. I want to have a blend of the Qured and bald blue. The blend should be more like you want to have control, but you don't mind if the paint spreads a little bit. This is, I'd say like a 2.5 like ratio. Once I'm touching the paper, it becomes like the paint just spreads even more. And then I'm going to go over some of the areas, like over here with the tip of my breast. This is not a bad moment to grab like a smaller brush. Actually, you might want to grab a smaller breast for more control. Then whatever you see those purple is over the toes. That's where you want to apply this color. And you can go over the close, but I'd say like the bottom or the middle section. It should be like the middle section. There are toes, then let's grab cream top. I don't know if you still have that blend, but I had a blend of the coal blue, red, and bund brown. I just have it on the tip of my brush. And I'm going to start right here before this is too dry. There's like a line there. When you have cream top, the paint won't spread much anymore. Of course, it depends how wet the paper is, but assuming it's drying, then it's not going to spread as much. And you want to add it, the sticker pat to cream top mostly toward the bottom. It's okay if something feels there like your pat wet on dry because it's okay to have a stroke here and there that feels like wet on dry. Then I should have a little bit of that here, although has dried. But the transition is there. I still see a little bit of that red when I apply it there. I'm thinking, what else could I add the paint? That step would be to lift the colors, if we need to lift colors. But that's pretty much it for this part. I want to lift, I'm just going to wait a little bit because I get sidetracked too fast. I start doing something else and next thing I don't lift the colors, I'm actually going to grab my round two to lift the colors. This is my round two brush and it's a medium stiff brush. One area to lift would be like right here. But remember, the paper needs to feel damp, like you lose that shine. That's why I'm able to lift here easily. That's because the paper feels damp. Now, some parts may be already too dry because different areas will dry at different speed. That's because it just depends how we wet it, how much paint we add it, try to lift. Whatever you see in the reference, there's lighter parts. Try to lift. Of course, I can't lift everywhere. And I'm reactivating color here just to add a little more to the top part here. But you can't just probably lift everywhere because we run out of that time. I can't either. And that's okay. It's okay. If you didn't lift at all too, it would be okay. I'm just going to lift a little bit here and I'm going to go through this part. There you go. Without working too much on the leg we show like we have some detail there. Right? The same thing we're going to do with this leg. So we're going to go inside the bird, the feathers and then wet the leg. You don't have to wet everything. Just have enough water there so it doesn't dry too fast. Looks like I have this part here. And of course, this is my hand sketching, so it's not perfect, but with water colors being such a forgiving medium. And if we paint something loose and wet on wet, that's even better, then we really don't have to work on too much. And then here we have this top, our claw. 34. Project 3: Painting Left Leg: I'm going to start with the same colors. It was like the yellow cad, yellow ochre. Whichever color you prefer, I'm going to grab some more of the quin red actually, and then maybe some more of the yellows, just because this part becomes more yellowish. But I want to see the separation of colors, which is why I quickly grab all these colors without like mixing them on the paper or anything like I'm sorry, on the palette a little bit here. And again, I getting too close to this part. Some paint will bleed and it's okay. And if it's too much then I'll just go back there and control it with the lifting. Now I'm grabbing this is like the coupled blue quin red. But I have a little bit of brown, which is the and brown. Actually, I do want that brown and brown. This looks a little different because the highlights are different. Maybe here, this should be more purple. Ish, I'm actually going to start here first, just like I see it. I'm not going to apply colors everywhere, either skipping and touching it very gently. The tip of my brush. And then this is the claw I'm going to go underneath. Just so I have a nice shadow there. Just to separate this one from that one. Maybe I want to add something more here. Again, not too much. It's just, we're giving the impression, right, that there's that detailed leg without working on too much on it. I could add a little more of, let's say yellow and some reds. Maybe here I just grab more of the yellows, the yellow tones. But I want more red with it because this part reddish. When I look at the reference, just a couple of eras, they want to drop the paint. That's pretty much it. If the paint bleed too much here, then you're going to grab a brush and just going to lift it. Or not lift, push the paint. Now, just like we lifted this leg, we can do the same thing, although it's a little too early for me. Actually, I don't want the paint to stop only there because the way I painted it, it would look like this leg would be skinnier than the other one. I'm just using a brush to spread the paint a little more, but it is too early to lift. And while I'm waiting, I actually want to add a little more of that cobalt blue and quid red toward these parts. This is cream top. I have a little more control now. Lastly, we're going to add some shadows. Shadows are, of course, optional, but shadows do add a lot to your painting. It's a good idea to create some shadows underneath those costs. I'm going to, actually, I don't have to wait because parts drive faster here. This is my round two, by the way. This is lifting colors. Just the top part. Maybe here again, like I was going to wait. But different parts will drive faster. No, I don't have to walk away. Just keep an eye on all this. As you see, like nothing is perfect. But when you paint it like loosely and you do a lot of it wet on wet, you realize like how forgiving this technique is. It's all about lighting shadows. It really is. I'm just lifting colors. I'd like to lift here, this part here, just with the tip of my brush. Normally I lift with the record brush, but this is fine too. All right. 35. Project 3: Cast Shadows: Just the shadows, right? For the shadows, I'm going to grab the same brush, my round two. What's the color? Right? Well, first of all, whenever you determine what is the local color of your object, which like if we just look at the legs, is it like orange? Technically, once you locate on the color, we wears orange, That's orange. Blue is the complimentary color. We should add some blue to the colors we use for the legs. Right? You want to have that combination of those colors with water? I suggest using that same blue you use. Plus that is yellow. Let's say It's like working with primary colors almost, But we're going to use like a milk like ratio. So make sure there's some red in it, in blue and red. Then with the tip of your brush, just like we see in the reference, we have this shadow. The best way to paint shadows is if you just continue with the stroke without going back to it. This shadow, it goes like this, it stops, and then we don't really have many shadows that side. And then we have some shadows here underneath. I need a little more color here underneath it to create a contrast. Then we have this shadow in between to separate, maybe this claw from this leg. I can add a shadow here too. That's pretty much it. If we want to, we can add another layer towards the claws to one side. Maybe that needs to be a little darker. I'm just going to add like a line here, then this would be nice to add right here. This is wet on dry. Okay. The ratio is, I say milk but it feels like water to sometimes now it feels like water like ratio. This is like the second layer. Technically, for these claws, that's pretty much it. Yeah, there's of course, more to the shadow because when we look at the bird, like these shadows are part of the bigger shadows. Technically, we should expand it. Maybe this is just a damp brush, but this should be much darker. We can do it wet on dry or wet on wet. Our shall is to wet on dry. You grab the same colors. I have my round eight golden one. It's a medium stiff brush. Again, the same consistency of color and water, or paint and water. Then I'm just going to add this very gentle shadow just so we see it. Okay? This is from the bird. There you go. Just that. I'm going to keep it that simple because I'm not doing like a full background. 36. Project 3: Summary: All right, so I guess that's it for this bird. Again, if you want to add another layer over the bird's face to create a larger contrast, because you need a shadow here, right? Which we could. But I'm going to keep it simple, but I want you to know you can do that. You can re wet all this. So you wet more than you need. And then you apply the same colors toward the same areas. Maybe slightly darker, maybe more red with it toward the right side. And the same thing with the feathers. Just like we added a shadow here. We added it wet on dry. And then we use the dam brush to soften this, to let the paint spread. We did the same thing here. You can do that through these feathers, but here's my advice to don't overdo it. Because then it, that softness that the painting loses that softness. It can very quickly lose that softness and it stops looking like so organic, like that looser style like wet on wet. You want to keep it as soft, smooth as possible, so do very little of wet on dry. Please let me know if you have any questions. 37. Project 4: Cardinal Introduction: Hi everyone and welcome to this class. We're going to paint a red cardinal. I want to show you my two other attempts. I was trying to come up with a strategy steps that make it the easiest for you. I was thinking, how am I going to explain exactly like about the color placement? As usual, I pretty much always actually refer to a color wheel and I will cover a little bit more about it during the class. I want you to feel comfortable with it. It's just that I want you to know why am I using certain colors? Because I think that's important. Especially like when you start or you choose your own reference image and you're trying to come up with that color palette, right? You want to know why I am choosing these colors and why it's actually important to refer to a color wheel. This was my first attempt. I actually recorded the class. I did the class, but then I was thinking I didn't explain enough about these undertones overall, like I did explain about the yellows, but I didn't explain like why I was adding blue. This is my other attempt where I want to show you and make sure you understand why I wet this part of the background as well as I am painting the bird. I wet it, the entire bird, including this part of the background and this part of the background. This is optional 100% like. You can decide if you want colors to bleed toward the background or you want to keep things clean and have a hard edge all along this bird. That's an option, right? The reason I do wet the background is because I want parts, the feather here, for example, to look softer. I do that a lot when I paint animals. This is actually for my book, watercolor book. The book is still in the making, so it's not published or anything like that. But this is Olivia. I painted her 99% This is all wet on wet. So I wet 9% of the paper. That's what I mean. I wet 99% of the paper except for this nose bridge. Why is that? It's because there's a nice highlight right here. And the same thing with the reference image. I knew if I we all of the paper, then the colors from the background would lead over toward her nose. The nose wouldn't be as bright white and I wanted to really keep it light everywhere else. The paper was just wet. The way I had so much control was, Number one, when you wet the paper, you don't want the paper to be overly wet. You don't want puddles of water. You do want to wet it for like 5 minutes. The longer you wet, the longer your paper will stay wet for you. That's what I did, and then I applied the colors. But I was thinking about the ratio the whole time. Every time I grabbed that paint with water, it was important to determine how wet the paper was and what is the correct ratio that I need to use the certain areas. I'll give you example. I first started actually with Olivia's face. Then for the background here, once I was done with her face just a little bit, I started painting the background right to create a contrast and to form her body basically here. When I got closer to her fur, I would use a heavy cream to cream top like ratio between water and paint. I would also stay away from the, from the outlines of her body. My sketch lines are right here, but I would stop applying color up to here. Right here. Some color would bleed here. But then I would control it more. I wipe the brush on a towel and I'd have a damp brush. And I'll go over that stroke that would help to control the spreading. Other thing I did was lifting the colors, but back to our bird. Basically, this is how we're going to paint it. Again, you don't have to wet the background if you want to have even more control. But we're going to start with yellow undertones. And I want to explain to you why yellow undertones by using this color wheel here. When you look at the cardinal, when you look at the feathers, where are those colors? We have red, we have orange. When you look at the feathers and you see this is red, orange, and this is orange. We don't really see much of the yellow. Maybe a couple spots, there's like yellow feathers. But it's mostly right here. Now, to create, let's say, shade of orange. This is orange. This is orange. What colors do you need? You need red and yellow to create shade of orange right here. This is very important because of that, whatever we have that those red feathers or even orange feathers. That's exactly why I would use a yellow undertone. First of all, that's how you create, create a shade of orange. Number two, it's because yellow placed first. And after that you place the red, that yellow will make the red pop even more and it will make that red brighter. This is teaching from my mom. Actually, she painted like the entire life with oils. She's an oil artist and she has taught many people how to paint with oils. But the same idea basically applies to watercolors. Like you can use a lot of that knowledge. So a lot of things I've learned from my mom, I can apply to my own paintings. She was really hard on me with this color wheel. And when I first started painting, it was very important, and now I can see why. Because I can easily choose the colors and the shades are natural. I'll give you another example why you don't want to just pick shade of orange. I could easily use some brilliant orange. Or I could easily use this vermilion hue, right? Those are orange, orange, and maybe an addition of red. But if we can create our own shade of orange, and if we use that yellow as the undertone, again, the red will pop more. Here's the example, right? This looks nice and pretty. 38. Project 4: The Process: But I'm going to give you an example of a fruit, for example. I'm holding a pair, right? All that light is coming this way. Now the pair is green. However, that green has different shades. It depends from what side that light is affecting it. That shade of green will slightly change, because then we have shadows too. That's why to create that natural shade of that green, you don't want to just use one color. Let's say leaf green. You want to use actually colors that create that green, which would be blue and yellow. When you mix blue and yellow together, we have blue and yellow. When you mix those two together, you create different shades of green. That would be like your base color. You can start painting the pair with a yellow, or you can start painting the pair with a blue. But at the end, you create a shade of green. It's the same thing with the cardinal. Like the cardinal overall is red. If you were not an artist, you would just say, well wait, there's a red cardinal. You wouldn't really think about much of the colors. Maybe. But then because we're artists, we have to think about it. And that's why we're thinking about these undertones and different shades of that red. We're going to start again with the yellow undertones, and then we're going to start mixing in a little bit of red to change the shade of that yellow. And then we're going to create our own orange. But we're not going to over mix colors on the palette. We want to mix colors on the paper, and that's very important. Number one, you're creating different shades of yellow or orange or red. Number two, you're avoiding muddiness of colors because if you over mix colors on the palette, which you really don't want to do, then it can quickly become like a muddy color and you don't want to do that. It's a quick blend and then you apply colors here. Now let's talk about these shadows. First of all, the cardinal has black feathers, right? So you want to create your own shade of black. Whether you're using ultramarine blue or you're using quinone red with some burns in it, that's fine. It's totally up to you. I'm going to use Fallow blue probably and Banda brown and code red, maybe some indigo. But you don't want to use a black straight out of a tube. You want to create your own shade of black because again, the light is affecting feathers. In the light, those feathers will have different color. Like you'll see different shades. You might see some brown popping there. You might see some blue, some purple. That's the thing. That's why you want to use different colors to recreate that black feather. Now, for these shadows, here's the thing we're talking about. What is a complimentary color to red? It's green, but here we also have orange feathers. Let's say we go with this orange, which is the latest orange. Blue is a complimentary color to orange. I'll cover more about this later, but I want you to know why am I going to add some of the blue to my red when I are orange, when I apply the darks, for the shadows to create a natural looking shadow of that object. First, you want to determine what is the local color of your object. Let's just say it's orange. Let's just say it's orange, right? Then what is the complementary color of orange? It's blue. What? Green, Blue. Here's the thing. Red, that's complementary color. Green, right? Red is the complementary color of green and green is a complementary color of red. Yes, you could use green to add to the red to create these natural looking feathers, the shadows for the feathers. However, how is green created, blue plus yellow? These two colors mixed together will give you a shade of green. You might as well just add some blue. You don't have to go for the green. You can also go for the blue when you paint shadows. I hope this makes sense. I'm trying to make it as simple as possible. Here's the thing. The more classes you take from me, the more you get used to this idea. And I constantly repeat these things about the color wheel. Like what is a complimentary hair color? Why am I using this color as the undertone you get used to? And I taught thousands of students over the years, and I know it works, is just the idea of getting used to that lot and having actually that color wheel in front of you. Have it somewhere like hanging above your desk, because that's how I started. Now let's talk about the reds. It's a little tricky with the reds. In the past, I had a hard time actually painting Cardinals, the red ones. Because reds, first of all, a lot of reds are opaque. If you're painting with hole winding, you'll be familiar with this color chart. If not, that's okay. Because you can use your own colors. Different brand is fine. What I wouldn't use for the cardinal, our opaque colors. Which would be like codmiumd purple or comm red deep. And I want you to use to choose a transparent red. That's why I'm going to go with which is like semi transparent, which is Po red. And then I'm going to use my favorite red, which is actually a cooler red. It's quinacral red because it's transparent. So I'm going to use Po red and then quar red. And then for the yellows I want to use a primary yellow. Actually tells you right here, this is opacity rating and that's why I want this one semitransparent. I want to use my Im yellow. Another reason is because it's a primary yellow according to Bins color chart. Because of that, if I use more primary colors together, so the three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, then I will have a less chance of getting into muddiness. Let's say overly mix the colors. The colors will look better together if you use like the primary colors when you mix them. It's just a general idea of it. You don't really have to, but I do suggest the most important is to use actually transparent yellow. You could go with Rolin or you could go that's transparent, 100% transparent. And then we also have like Cm transparent which is Imes alone lemon, permanent yellow lemon. But it's all up to you right then I'm going to use a primary blue which is semi transparent to fallow blue, red shade. That's a primary color, all wine primary color for watercolors. And then if I want to add, let's say another shade to those feathers, I can always go with brown. And I would use maybe Band Brown, which I will be using for this mix. For the black feathers. Brown like you want to think about it like it's, it goes toward red in a way. I'm going to use that I'm that places on the site actually. Before I do that, I want you to know that I also lifted the colors. Practice some lifting when we wet the bird. If you take a look here, and I purposely didn't finish this up, you could see the idea, right? This is all one layer. I finished it, which is one layer and I left it. But when I was wetting the bird and parts of the background, I did not wet the beak. Why is that? It's because I have black feathers around the beak. And if I wet the beak to the colors, black feathers will bleed over toward my beak. And I do have some nice highlights there, and I want to keep this beak really, really clean, just like here. If I had any colors from the black feathers bleeding over here, then I would lose like that cleanliness. I'd say the layer wouldn't look as clean. I wanted to do that and I want to show this to you. The first thing we're going to do is wet the bird plus the background. If you want to, then we're going to stop for a second. We're going to dilute our colors with water. And then we're going to go back to wet the bird more. Then when we're ready, we'll start applying colors again. My color palette is this first part. Then we have this, and maybe I'll use some Phansic brown. These are the colors I'm going to start wetting. 39. Project 4: Wetting Paper: I'm going to use a wider brush, and I'll tell you why. First of all, when we wet the paper, it really does help to have a wider brush because you cover the area much faster. Okay. That's number one reason. But when I apply colors first washes, I also want to stick to this wider brush. Because I don't want to create visible individual strokes first. I want to make sure this is all just nicely spread, spread paint. Just start with those yellow undertones. I want all that to spread. Then when I want more control, first of all, I'm going to change the ratio between white and paint from milk like ratio will go to like heavy cream. But then when I want to really work on these feathers, for example, that's when I will switch to a quill brush. This is my long quil size four. Then I'll be able to create more visible individual strokes. It's always easier to actually cover more areas like right away with a larger brush, you have more coverage right away, you don't have like these individual strokes. And what I don't want you to do is use like a tiny brush. This is like round three, for example, to paint every single feather. This is not what I teach, this is something I recommend personally. It would drive me crazy if I had to paint every single feather. Instead, what we're doing is we're playing with light and shadows to create that natural look of feathers. This is actually the most way to paint feathers. You work with light and shadows. You work with those colors. Then once the paper dries, you can, you can use a smaller brush to maybe recreate these small feathers. But you're still painting wet on wet. This is still first layer. You're just going to use like a heavy cream to cream top like ratio and then we're going to lift colors. All that together will give you this look. It looks like there's so many feathers. But it's just an illusion because we're working with light and shadows. And then we're just lifting and adding some dark. We have to create a contrast to, this is the flat 20 push. I do recommend using larger flat brush. Now, this is Leonardo watercolor paper. Please don't stress about using the same paper. I went a little too far out there, but please don't worry about that because it's not important to use exactly the same paper as long as I suggest to use 100% cotton watercolor paper. Another thing is like normally I paint on the collection watercolor paper by Hanna Mile. But I love this Leonardo paper and unfortunately, it has been discontinued in America. In the US, I hear that it's still available, like in India and some other countries. You might as well just take advantage if you can get hold of this paper. It's very similar to the collection. The collection watercolor paper by honey mill is very similar to arches and arches was my first watercolor paper and I still love it. I think it's great. And I'll always recommend it if you're not bothered by the gelatin sizing, because it is a animal product, you have to be super careful so the paper doesn't get spoiled for now. I'm staying on the inside of the bird. I'm actually using a lot of water at first. I always use a ton of water. When I get closer toward that moment when I'm going to start applying colors, that's when I will start pushing that water down or away. And then again, I'm wetting the background. You don't have to do that, but it's just this area here because I want to create like soft feathers here. And then this area right here, Those are the couple areas where I want to create like that softness, that soft transition. I'll have to think more about the ratios between water and paint. I'm going to add a little more water and then I'm going to begin diluting colors with water. When you start diluting colors with water, I want you to think of having like the heavy cream to cream top like ratio between water and paint, whether you squeeze the colors or you use the pants. I do suggest overall using tubes like these ones. This one because it's much easier to get to that consistency of heavy cream cream top and so on. Now I'm going to work on my Pal and I'll show this to you in a just a second. 40. Project 4: Applying First Wash: Here's my palette. So Pero red, quin red, Mis, a long yellow. I do have Vanek brown, but then there's fallow blue and then some indigo that I had mentioned earlier. That's, or maybe I did, but that's for the black feathers. Back to wetting. Because I took a pause with wetting and I started diluting my colors with water. This allowed time for the water to sink inside of that paper. Now I'm coming back to wet a little longer. This is just one way to wet the paper basically. It's just that this way, like the water was sitting a little longer on the paper and I had a lot more of that water now. I'm pushing it away. Pushing it down over the edges, Let's say the paper then again, I'm wetting the background here. There's so many different ways to make the paper dry slower. One way would be to wet the backside of the paper. And you just basically have everything wet. That's fine. Because you can or you can paint the cardinal like that to entirely wet on wet. You also have the background wet. I have done that before. And you just have this nice puffy bird basically. But you can paint the background and you can frame it more to this way. You have like highlights around the feathers. And I can show you the example. If I remember, I can remember that. Because then I can just add a photo into the workbook. You can see it how I did it. But I'm pretty ready here. You don't want to have puddles of water. I'm just going to push it down a little bit. And you don't want to wipe your brush too much on a towel. Because then when you come back to wet the bird, you actually end up removing the water from the paper. Now I want to make sure I have a good focus here. What we're going to do is grab some of the undertone colors. This is my imlyellow, this is more like a milk like ratio, and I'm going to right away grab some of this pearl red, Maybe that's a little too much, but don't overly mix those colors on the palette. Do all the mixing here on the paper. More of that along yellow, you're aiming for the most yellowish parts. But you can also add these colors, like the shade of that yellow to where we're going to put like the blue feathers or blue I'm the red feather. The red color with a little bit of blue for the shadows. More of that, If you want to have more control, you can adjust the ratio between water and paint to maybe have like a 2.5 like ratio. Again, I have it here. You don't want to just cover the entire bird with that same tone. First of all, every time you grab the color from the palette, two colors, right now it's Ems along yellow and pearl red. But every time you grab these colors from your palette, you always want to change the ratio between the colors. Now I'm grabbing some red there too. Again, back here. Then I want to keep my paper wet longer. I can't just focus on one part, That's why I'm going right away here. This is the bottom or the tail feathers. Right away. I'm applying color here too. Now let's start playing with the colors. Right, I'm going to go back to the cardinal on my screen. Not just the tail feathers, more of that P red. And try to grab like a heavier ratio between water and paint. This is again the P red. Some of the is a long yellow. I actually want more of that Emil yellow. There you go. And then here we can go back here. And back here toward the tail feathers. Let's go here. And this is where the paint will spread because we wet at the background too. But again, this is optional. Right now I'm going to wipe my brush on the towel, I have a little too much water. Wipe my brush on the towel again, so you can go back. And now it feels like a damp brush and then you can pull it up there and then back to these areas. I'm going to grab some of this heavy cream of the pearl red and red. Maybe a little more water. Now I'm playing with these tones. This is also Quinacridone red. Now my cooler red as well that I just added. It's like I'm going from here to here to here. I'm going to go closer toward this edge here. Just so I have a nice sheet of red here. A little too cool, I need to grab more of that. Pero red with Imed is a long yellow. This is like the reddish part. Then use the tip of your brush. But here's the thing. If you're not used to painting with a flat brush, you may as well just grab maybe like a round eighth for example, just to have a little more control. To pull it up. Now, just because you add a color there, doesn't mean you have to leave it alone. You actually want to go back and continue adding more. I'm grabbing this heavy cream to cream top of this red quad and Imi does a long yellow. Now these feathers, the tail feathers are a little more reddish or orange. I'm sorry, orange. It's like using the side of your brush mostly. Just have different tones. I want to have different tones. I'm grabbing more of that. Quin Red pops more here. I want this to pop more in this area where we have the wings or the wing one wing basically. It's okay to keep like parts a little more yellowish but I'm going to go through just a little bit and I can add some red right here around the beak. Just using the side of my brush, I have the control again, you can go back, but every time now you're going to grab paint. It has to be more like a heavy cream to cream top like ratio between water and paint. So you have the most control. If you grab paint that's more diluted with water, the paint will just spread too fast. Too much. It's like if you have an area that's drawing already, let's say on the paper, it's easy to create a bloom. I'm just using like the flat side part of the brush in a way to add some more. Oops, red. I went over the beak, but it's okay. It's going to be red anyway or orange. I'm just going to go really close here, Go back. I'm going to wipe the brush, so it looks like this. Then I'm going to go with that flat brush. But I wiped it right. It feels more damp. It's more damp. And I'm going to grab more of that qu, red cream top. Then maybe here and here. This is the time where I should start grabbing a little bit of blue. With my reds, I just grab some of this fallow blue, I could grab some of the. And brown like I was mentioning, these are the darker feathers. I'm going to switch to my cool brush in a second. But as you see, I'm not creating like tiny strokes. I don't want to create like tiny little strokes. I want this to look like it's nicely covered. But you see that the difference is because of the tonal values and changing the colors maybe here, release some of that paint here. And I'm going to clean this brush. Quickly, clean it, the clean water, so I don't forget, I'm going to grab my long quail. This is my long quil size four. It's a larger quil brush. What I need to do is go back and grab this cream top, even yellow, it's fine, red, blue and red, blue and yellow basically. Now let's try to recreate some of these individual feathers. This is also Van de Brown. Yes, we have to be a little bit in a hurry here because the paper is drying and we want to apply these colors pretty quickly. So it's still wet on wet. But let's the beak, because that's where we're supposed to apply the dark. The black feathers are going to be here as well. Add the blend first. This is again the quin, the bow quin red, fallow blue. Let me grab this N brown too. I'm trying to see like my sketch lines. Here's more of the blue. It's right here. I have this one feather here. I got to go quickly. The bottom is drying. That's not good, but it's okay. I can still quickly apply the dark. Be more on this right side, just lines with the tip of my brush right here. There you go. Dark. Now let's go back to the wing, Basically use the tip of your brush. This feels more like a damp brush. That's why you don't want to have any more water because that means the paint will just spread too fast and it's easy to make it all a puddle basically. You don't want to do that. But what I need to do, once I play some of these dark, I need to go back here and add some more reds. Maybe a little bit of that blue tone here. I'm moving around the reference, they can see exactly like the tail feathers this is feels like, let's say cream top like ratio. And I'm just going around the beak. It's not like the color yet that I want for the feathers around the beak. It's just that I have this shade and I want to keep the paper wet longer. I have that chance to apply the colors later, the dark. Otherwise, they would dry too fast. 41. Project 4: Damp Brush Tech: That thing, which you can do. I'm going to show you a little trick. This only works if there's shine on the paper. You can use a damp brush. This is like a damp brush technique. And you can pull the paint to make it actually look softer. But the paper has to be shiny. This has to still be shiny. I'm going to clean the brush, and I'm going to make it like a damp brush, because I actually want to grab more of the reds, some of the blue. Now you can see more of these brush strokes. But you know what we will resemble. What we see over the cardinal, like these feathers. This is like a damp brush but like a cream top like ro, between we and paint. And you know what, I need to add more dogs here. This is a good moment to add more. Here we have all these feathers on top. It's like I'm pulling away. At the same time, this is pretty, it's tiny, tiny, shiny where I can still add some color and I want some more of the blue actually with the red, just to add it here. It's just a flat brush, right? It's just a flat brush. And I'm using that brush to add some more paint. This is actually a good moment to lift the colors to then maybe like shape it more here and then add some more color here. Then we have these tail feathers. I'm going to clean this brush. I'm going to grab my round eight golden one and I'm going to grab this T brown, the blue red. Where is my red? I got to go for the feathers right here. This is cream top like creation between water and paint. These are going to be my black feathers. And I do have to lift the area around the eye before it gets too dark. It dries like that, so I don't want it too dry like that. But this is like my last chance to add these darker tones to create the illusion of these black feathers. Then what? Since I'm already painting with this brush, I might as well go here through these feathers. My tail feathers. Here's the thing. I suggest watching the class first and then 100% focusing on your bird. If I was not talking, I would basically be able to do a little more of like with the bird overall. But because I'm talking, that takes a little bit of time and the paper dries faster on me in the way. I do suggest that you watch this first and then play with your bird. Here's another thing I'd like to share, how I do. I'm going to lift with this rigger brush. What we're going to do is lift some of the areas you don't want to overly lift because it doesn't look as natural. You want to find like the most highlighted part, basically maybe like lift here. What is the perfect timing to lift colors? I'm going to grab my round three. I'm going to lift the eye just because I do want to have some apply lighter tone here, overall toward the wrinkles. But what is that? Perfect timing is right before the paper is too dry. But you always want to start pretty much lifting earlier. You want to start earlier because you have so many areas to lift. For example, right? Maybe over here for example, I'm pressing a little hard in the areas that are a little too dry. But let's say I want to lift here, it's a little bit not ideal, but I can still lift a little bit. This is the area where I should be lifting. This is where still can I'm going to lift a little bit here. You always want to wipe your brush on a towel before you lift. It's a damp brush, right? It's a damp brush you lift with the damp brush. And then let's separate some of these feathers. Whatever you see the lighter parts lines, that's basically where you want to lift. And this is a good area here, but it's a little dry. Let's see if I can lift, I'm going to try to lift with my round brush. Three, it's a medium stiff brush. If you use a stiff brush, it work to basically like I have this one brush that I leave for like the very end, Sometimes I will lift with it. It's a chisel blender brush. Stiff brush, like a flat brush. That helps too if you want to lift. But let's say it's really hard to lift. And I will use like a really stiff brush. But what mostly works is a stiff brush. Just the areas that they need, some highlights and separation basically, I'm not worried about the background, like where the paint bled. That's like not my concern at all. What else should I lift? Maybe here you can go back lift. That's another thing. You can go back and relift the areas I'm going to lift, right here you go. After doing all these test pieces, I decided that this was probably the best way because I also did a test piece where I divided the painting and took two parts. But the thing is that when you do that, you miss out on that timing. Like you can't really lift as good. That's the thing I decided, you know what? We just have to paint it all at once. If this is a challenge for you, then I just really suggest to wet the backside, and it's okay if the paint spreads. I'll show you the example because it's not that big of a deal. If you're using correct ratios between water and paint, it will still look beautiful and soft. What is one more thing that I sometimes do? I will grab my rigger brush. Okay, let's say I still want to lift so I can go back and maybe re, lift, maybe add some more highlights because that's how you can actually add the highlights. But one thing you can do is add a little more brush strokes. So those will be individual brush strokes. So these are the reds. With some of the blue, it's a little darker, right? But you can add individual hair, for example, like here, let's say pull it away from these feathers. These are the black feathers. Then let's say you want to add some more, right? Spread them a little bit. This is a rigger burst size two. I'm just adding like some more. Then I got to go back toward the eye just so it's nice and light when I come back to paint it. There you go. That's pretty much it. I know it's intense. It feels intense because we have how long I've been painting, Probably for 20 minutes. But it's just that first part of applying the colors and then you can just easily focus on like, oh, okay, I will do some lifting and this and that. Because basically like based on how much time like I have left because the paper is still wet, I decide like, okay, now I'm going to add some more darks and that, or I'm going to continue lifting, for example, now I have this cream tub like gratia between water and paint. The paper still feels a little damp, right? That's why I'm adding a little more of those darks For the shadows then let's say we have some hair actually here. I'm going to show you what a different brush the bird has, like hair coming up from here. I'm going to grab this water like gratia, basically the same darks, brown, blue, red. Then with the tip of my brush, I can add more. But you know what, this is a little too thick, it needs to feel like really just with the tip of my brush, I'm going to zoom in so you can see it with the tip of my brush. I'm just going to add some strokes here. A couple of strokes here. I can go back here, but this is actually still wet. It may be here. I want to add, I guess hair detail. The next step will be to work on the details. We just have to wait for this first layer to dry. Let's walk away from it and let it dry. 42. Project 4: Beak and Eye Painting: All right, so to paint the beak, I want you to zoom in onto the reference so you can see exactly all these colors. I'm going to start wetting the beak with my round eight brush. This is a medium stiff brush. I'm using like a smaller brush in general, but it's medium sized basically. But it has a fine point. I want you to have a fine 0.2 because then it's like it serves almost as a smaller brush. If you have that nice fine point, I suggest not to use Kolinsky brushes or natural hair brushes because those brushes, the hair is just out of control from my experience. Okay. It's just so hard to have a fine point. When you have the Kolinski or some other Siberian or whatever the natural hair brushes are, you wet it and you want to actually wet it a little longer. Now, we do have a nice highlight there. You can use a wax stick for that. Right here and here, you could do that or you can just lift later. I'm going to lift the colors also when I apply colors in those areas, or I'm not going to apply colors towards those highlights. Except if I want to start, maybe give it like an undertone, let's see, blue. I'm going to show this to you how you can do it too. This way you mark for yourself like, okay, this is where the highlight, so grab some of the quo red with a fallow blue. And this is where the highlight is, and this is where the highlight is. Highlights look really pretty when they have those tones in there, right? I'll often start like this and that will remind me like, okay, this is where the highlights are. And also we have like a little area here, you might as well add a little bit of that blue and red. Now we should grab a little bit of red. And actually let's start with the yellow Ems. A long yellow with teeny tiny bit of red or Pero red. I'm going to grab, I have Pero red. Then you're not directly adding color toward these highlights. You staying away, adding color next to it. I want a little more water with my paint. More like a 22 creation between water and paint, because I do want the paint to spread. I don't need that much control. Let's see, I'm going to start grabbing more of this per red and quacddquacdm yellow. Now we're creating like a sheet of orange. But we're mixing colors on the paper. We don't want to mix them on the palette. We're just quickly grabbing the colors. It's okay to blend them quickly is just, you're not trying to recreate a brand new color, right? That's the idea. Then again, narrowing down the spot in here where I have these highlights, you can still see those spots. You go back toward the same areas over and over, and then we're going to grab like a cream top, almost migration between water and paint of the yellows, but mostly the yellow, but mostly it's like there's more of the red in it. In this blend, you're using the tip of your brush. That's why I'm thinking maybe now you want to switch to like a smaller brush, like a size three, I'd say to have more control. It's trying to imagine as if you are using a crayon, let's say our colored pencil. Because you're using the tip of your brush to shape the beak and release more and more paint. Normally, like I'll do everything or looser like wet on wet, I want to say, I want to focus on some details really. But when it comes to beaks, yes, I do spend more time because I like that type of detail. I'm going to clean my brush and I'll wipe it very well on a towel so it feels like a damp brush and I'll almost flutten it. And I'm going to go through these areas with that damp brush, but I still have too much water. There you go. You move the paint around, you're smoothing it. This is the damp brush technique that I've mentioned before. You're spreading it with a damp brush. But the key here, if you want to do this damp brush technique, the paper needs to be still shiny wet. There's no other way it has to be shiny wet. Now I'm going to grab my round brush. Says three smaller brush and I'm going to grab a little bit the cream top of the reds with tiny bit of blue for example the bottom. This is dry fast, hopefully. Well, I want to add a wet on wet. Well, this is still wet. It's like shading it with the tip of your brush. You're adding some shadows. And this is the area that I actually didn't see with my first version. This is actually part of this beak. This is how it goes. You're adding some colors. Right there. The little shadows, right? And you can go over the beak a little bit. So the paint from your brush or from this side where you're applying color, it bleeds toward the beak. It's a softer transition where we have all these black feathers right then let's see where we see the darks. I'd say like we have to hurry up because this is drying, maybe like here. And then we can add the feathers. Our feathers. Like the hair going over. I'd say. We don't have to butter about them now, I did it with my under version. I prefer to do it like later, some more dark maybe. And then we can lift the colors too. Let's say a little more of these. I have not like grabbed any more paint. This is all the same. Then I'm going to clean my brush. And I'm going to wait a second so I can lift the colors here. For lifting, you want to use a damp brush? You wipe your part very well in a towel and you can see how easily I can lift. Right. That's because the paper lost that she there's no more shine on the paper. That's why it's okay if you don't use like masking or wax stick for this part because you can just lift the colors. I think that's easy. Once you really focus on the paper and you watch how that shine is going away, you see, okay, this is it. That's the timing. And then I can lift a little bit here again. You have to wipe your brush on a towel very well. So it's like a dry brush. You don't want it to be just dry brush. It has to be wet it first and then you use that tip of your brush to lift parts of it. I think that's pretty good. Let's do the eye now. For the eye, we have that first layer, but not really. What we're going to do is wet the eyeball, including the outside, which is like the wrinkles, the wrinkly parts, the wrinkly parts. Say the lids wet it when I paint the first layer, let's pretend like I didn't paint that first layer wet on wet. Let's just pretend this is our first layer. You focus on the colors that you see in the highlight. This, like the lightest tones you can see later on, that's how you're going to focus on the mid tones and the iris. More on the iris. And then the last thing is actually painting the pupil so you don't have to worry about it at all. Okay, the first color I want you to grab, the combination is blue with red. It's blue violet. We're going to place it there. It goes towards the lids. And then we have the highlight there too. Just spread it a little bit. Now we could grab some of the. And brown, let's say Imed long yellow. That would work for that lightest tone. And maybe just place it here but away from that highlight because that highlight needs to stay light. If you lose the highlights in this process, we don't worry about it because you can lift the colors. I'm actually using that Iml yellow to go around the eye to. But let's see here. Maybe some color here. There you go. You know what? That's pretty good for the first layer. We don't need to do more to it. But what you could do is actually I need more red with it. You can go back here. This is almost dry, so it still feels damp. So I'm just going to create like a sharper line. This has to be cream top like ratio, cream top like ratio between water and paint. If you want to add any more detail, we'll come back to it. Any let's add some hair and stuff like that. What I could show you is how to paint the leg now. 43. Project 4: Eye and Foot: So I want you to zoom it onto the leg, and then we're going to wet it. We're going to look at it as a whole. So we're not going to try to separate pieces, like the toes, we're going to actually wet it. And you don't need to like wet it exactly everywhere. It's going to jump around a little bit, so you have some parts, maybe paper dry. If I was painting, this looks like the toes are, the claws are around the branch. Basically, most of the foot was over the branch or something like that. I would probably paint the branch first, but here we have it separated anyway, like this top part of the branch and the bottom right, I'm just going to show this, see this way. And then you always want to go over the feathers too, because you're going to stop applying color here. But you want to have a self transition, a little more water with the tip of my brush. Actually, you can use a smaller brush, maybe size three, if you feel more comfortable. Now let's start with, let's see, we use already that yellow. Let's not jump to a different yellow. Let's use that same yellow and some of the red, pearl red, let's say. Then we're going to apply it towards the bottom. The highlighted parts are mostly on the top. We're going to use color or apply the color mostly like toward the bottom here. Then maybe a little more. I'm pressing my brush a little harder. But you know what, I touched the paper after I tried to lift it a little bit. Okay. I'm just going to press the paper or the tissue or the paper towel toward the paper. There you go. Then quickly before this is too dry because now I got sidetracked. I'm grabbing some of the blue with the red and I'm going to apply it first here. Now I need way more red with it. And then apply it there. And then it's like you're looking for the most like the darkest parts. Grabbing a little more of it. This is let's say, let's add a little bit of bond. Brown too. Blue, red and brown toward the bottom mostly because that's where we would have the shadows. Something like that. You can go through this part because it's all wrinkly part. Now we're stopping here right now. We're going to have a soft transition. This is going to be our soft transition. I don't want too much color on top here, because that's supposed to be shadowed. I should focus on the plying colors toward the bottom. That makes sense. A little more of these colors in here. Of course, my sketch is different, right? It doesn't look exactly like what we see in the reference, but it's up to you. You can use my sketch, or you can try to sketch on your own. But the thing is about that painting, the feet, the toes, you really don't need to make it perfect. I'd say the one thing not to do is painting it on dry because then you're forced to do like details here. By the way, I just grabbed a little bit of indigo. Or no, this wasn t indigo, this was follow Bloom. You want to paint it wet, Wet. Because wet on wet is a very forgiving technique. The last thing what we could do is just lift the colors. I'm going to get ready with my round brushes three, and I'm wiping it on a towel and wiping it. And wiping it and wiping it just in case I lost some highlights. Those will be like the top parts here. Then did I lose some highlights here? Maybe a little bit. I can also lift here a little bit then. Yes, we have these lines. We can spend more time lifting those if we want to in between. But that's pretty much it for the like. What we're going to do is come back toward the eye. I can show you how we can paint the second layer. And you want to zoom in onto that eye. You can see everything perfectly. I'm going to grab a smaller brush, this time around two. Here's the thing. What I want you to do is stay away now from that highlight. The little dot there, that's our highlight, Everything but that. Or you don't even have to wet the entire eyeball. The reason we're wetting it is so we have a flow so the paper doesn't dry too fast. There you go. Now with that and Brown, you can even grab burn CNI if you want to, but with that and Brown, I'm going to grab like a 2.5 ratio because it's not like overly wetted. But this is when I'm going to mark for myself where the highlight is. It's right there, right? I'm keeping that highlight paper dry. I'm not going to touch it, then I'm going to place the brown. Because there's also like a highlight that goes through. So I don't want to lose it, but the tones, it's not like perfect tone of that. And brown, that's why we need to grab other colors. I'm going to grab, let's say Red. With A and brown, maybe some of the burn. Sena then I see like there's more of that here. Let's see it here. Some more of that, of it there. But stay away from that highlight so you don't lose it. We don't want to lose that highlight. You're applying colors like toward these mid tones. Grab a little more color, Maybe that red with and brown. And I'd see go around that highlight again, just so we have a darker edge there. The other thing is we have these dark, a darker line on the inside, grab a little bit of blue. It maybe quin red, yellow, blue, and then this and brown. Now we got to hurry up before it dries, but you want to add it toward like these edges right along this line. Then once you add or you work on that pupil, then you see how everything just pops. You can also lift colors in case you maybe lost too much light in the eye, right? They do have those darks and they probably shouldn't work on that pupil yet or show you to do that. But I just wanted to add a little more color there, the darks. Now we're going to leave that. However, if you need to lift, to wipe your brush on a towel, let's say you have to lift here or there. You can lift with that brush. Right. Other thing we're going to do is grab the same three colors, the Vanc, Brown, red and blue. You can grab fellow blue or you can grab indigo. Then we're going to go the eye here, maybe more of the Vang Brown. You can even grab burns in if you want to. It's optional. You're going to go around it just like this feels weird, right then you clean your brush and you spread the outside. You let that paint to spread on the outside, we're shading it. That looks very pretty. That's another thing which you can do. This is another thing I do often. I'll grab the three colors. Let's say from here I'll create like these lines, the wrinkly parts. A lot of birds have these wrinkly lids, or the parts around the eyes. You can do that too. This is just a paint on the tip of my brush and you got to be very careful. Yeah, basically it's just the paint on the tip of my brush. It's more like a half and half ratio. And I'm going to use now my rigger brush to Songbird. I'm going to grab the same colors I used to create. The black, blue, some red, and let's say and brown. Then with the tip of your brush, you want to create like really fine strokes that's going in, but that's not fine yet. There you go. I had to wipe my brush on a towel because I had too much paint. This is between water to milk ratio. Water to milk like ratio. The ratio between water and paint. Just the paint, just you want to have a nice flow, right? And then we can go out here, maybe add some more. We did that already, but I feel like this is a nicer color shade. You can go here, you can add some more here. Not too much I say because it's super easy to overdo something like this and then it's just too much. All right. 44. Project 4: Painting Branch and Claws: All right, the last part of painting the eye would be to that pupil. Now what I want to do is grab like a diluted, maybe like a water ratio of brown with dark blue. I'm going to grab bond brown and indigo in. What you're going to do is basically quickly create that circle but more water diluted, it's not so thick. What you're going to do, shape it. Keep in mind of that, you don't lose that highlight. It's like right next to it basically. Then you're going to grab indigo with the tip of your brush and only like a creamy paint. Maybe tiny bit of bond brown tube. You're just going to apply it to one side. One side is a little darker. We do have a little highlight going through, but we can do that, get that back with lifting. Another thing is I want you to grab that water, to milktio of the same colors, bond brown, indigo. And then just to create shade. Yes, but same lines around the iris. And I feel like it's a little too light the eye, but I think I'll be okay with it once I maybe lift the pupil. I need to wait to lift it. It's a little too early. I'm going to do is grab a little bit of fly brown, like a pale wash, and go over that wrinkly part. If I have to add another layer, I will add layer if this doesn't feel right. But what I really want to do is lift. And I need to wait probably like a minute. I can lift that part quickly. I'm just waiting now. I'm wiping my brush to make sure I have no water there and I'm going to lift it still a little too early to lift. Now I have a little highlight going through my pupil. So I want to do the same thing, but wait till there's no more shine over that area. Now let's focus on painting the branch. To paint the branch, that can be really simple actually. Usually I start with a blue undertone and usually it's cobald blue. But you could use a different sheet of blue. I'm going to quickly dilute my cobalt blue. You could use follow blue. And I'm just going to make a note that to make this palette simple, at the beginning of the course, you see it's just a follow blue and cobalt blue is optional. Okay, what do you want to do is basically wet the branch and you don't have to wet it perfectly. Then you're going to start with that blue undertone. The highlight is actually tell because there's a branch in front of the branch, but I'm guessing the edges would be a little darker. Then we can grab some of this burnt. I grab like a milk like ratio with the tip of my brush because this branch actually is really light in colors added mostly toward the sides. Let's say if you want to do more, you can grab like a cream top like ratio of like Vanda Brown for example. Then add it toward like one side, for example, here. And you let that to bleed. It's pretty when you add these acids, we're going to do the same thing here. Fortunately we have it all divided, which is easier right then we don't have to worry about painting all at once, wetting up to the foot. Then you want to go over the bird a little bit. You're going to stop applying colors. Like right here you have the transition, soft transition again we're doing the blue undertones. This is cobalt blue or you can use follow blue. Then some of this burn CNA but more like a milk clay creation. Actually grab and then careful so you don't lose the toes. Now we have a soft transition and then if you want to grab this cream top, I'm going to make a close up in just a second so you can see it better. But this is cream top of the Van **** Brown. All right. I'm going to make a close up on the bottom here. We're wetting the branch again. Doesn't have to be perfectly wet. I'd say perfectly wet, maybe next to the toes, but everything else doesn't matter. And then we grab this diluted like a milk of follow. I'd blue, blue all the way toward the to clean the brush and then grab this burntNa. I am adding more here underneath the toes because that's where naturally I'd have the shadow right. And then releasing more paint by pressing a little harder, Then grab the cream top of this Vanda Brown. This really is like a cream top, and I'm going to add more here. I would grab a little bit of also like I'm going to grab, I'm adding indigo just so this part is darker. Because I would have a shadow exactly like right underneath the clause. Then continue with that color if you want to, like maybe create some pieces sticking out or something. There you go. That's it. Yeah, that's pretty much it for the branch. That's all I would do because this is a lighter branch. We do have claws here too. I'm going to finish these claws, just like we painted the claws below. We're going to do the same thing. Grab this time. I'm not sure if we grab the round three, but try to grab something like 23. Brush. This time you don't want to wet the feathers because these claws are behind the body of the bird. Behind, but behind this part, you don't want that to go over. And then we're going to start with that yellow and red, same thing. Maybe a little more yellow. And then we're going to end up with the blue, red, and brown. All right, let's grab some blue, brown. Follow blue, red, and, and brown. But I need this cream. I need this to be cream top that was too diluted with water. Then where you're placing this color on the bottom of each toe, basically just to separate it, now we can tell there's the to this part, this little line that's just from what I was painting. I think I was trying to create like a of a hair or something like that, so don't worry about that part. Here you go. There's are my claws, although I need to make this one a little better. There you go. 45. Project 4: Cardinal Summary: Okay my friends, so we just finished the Cardinal. Here's this version that I was actually the first layer that I was showing in this class. It's pretty similar overall. It's just that I don't have the eye finished yet and everything else, but the idea is all the same. If you want to practice more, I'd say just paint this bird like three times or four times. Practice as much as you can. And you're going to practice with other birds too, which is great. If you don't like the colors you use, you can always switch the colors. Try them on a separate sheet of a paper so you can create some swatches and so on. But thank you so much for your time and please let me know if you have any questions. 46. Project 5: Introduction: Hi everyone. Welcome to this class. We're going to paint this blue T. There's so many different ways. Of course, we can paint the bird, but the way we're going to play with the feathers is wet on wet. Wet is my usual technique and lifting at the same time. Those are the two main techniques I teach in watercolor. We're not just going to the bird, we're also going to the background in some areas. Here's the thing, you decide what parts of the feathers you want to keep softer. That's where the paint will bleed toward the background. This is what I mean, I'm going to show this to with the brush, You wet the entire bird on the inside. And then you decide, okay, maybe I want to have a little more softness on this side. You can wet the background here too. Colors from here will bleed a little bit toward the background. Now you can just the inside of the bird if you want to, the technique will be the same. We'll just paint the bird wet on wet. However, again, if you want to have a little more softness here on this side or maybe here on this side, you can wet parts of the background too. It's up to you. There's many paintings I did this way, especially if you want to add, let's say background, how much of the bird you going to wet? It's up to you too because you can wet all the way here and you don't have to worry about the claws cuss are darker anyway. We just don't need to apply colors directly there. We'll add this foot later as well. This tail part here. This is out of focus. This is what I would like to do. I'm going to wet the entire bird, all of it. Even here. This is a little background here. I'm going to wet that too. All the way here. This way, this can be out focus. Then when we're ready, we start applying colors. Wet on wet. What I'm going to do, before I squeeze colors onto my palette, I'm going to actually start wetting the bird. I'll place a lot of water in there, and then I'll jump onto my palette, dilute colors with water. And then I'll come back here and wet it again. That will give me more time for the paper to absorb that water. And then I can keep adding more water. Because the longer you wet the paper, the more time you're going to have to apply the colors wet on wet. As far as the colors go, think of it this way. We're using red, blue and yellow. Three colors, primary colors, yellow, red and blue. Everything else is an addition. Also like let's say you want to use more than one yellow, then you can add these two. This is a yellow and this is raw Sienna Burn, Sienna would go more toward the red. Then we have Diga, which would go under this bluish category. Then we have Banta brown, which would also go under this red category. Yellow, blue, red. Now you can paint this bird with only three colors, which is yellow, red, and blue. Or you can keep adding some other sets of yellow. One thing I always teach is to not overly blend the colors on your palette. Instead, blend the colors on the paper, which is why you can easily just add an additional shade of yellow or additional shade of red if you want to. It's nice to do that because we're painting with watercolors and again, we're mixing colors on the paper. And you want to see the separation of colors. That's the idea. If you blend the colors too much on your palette, you get into that muddy color, into the muddiness of colors, and then the colors stop looking pretty. You can blend, I should say, blend colors on your palette for very quickly. It's just a quick swirl. You can do it even with ten colors. If you do it very quickly and you grab that blend and place it on the paper, you'll see that you're not going to see muddiness. Instead, you're going to see that shade of, there's ten colors. It's probably going to be like a grayish or blackish color, but at least you will see the separation of colors. Okay? The idea is to quickly blend the colors on your palette. And then you actually mix the colors on the paper. And that separation of colors, and that's what gives it a natural look of that object, whichever object you choose. In nature, let's just say we see this yellow bird with the belly here and chest outside on the branch. Technically, those feathers are yellow. But it depends how that light and shadows affect the bird. Because even though the feathers are yellow, yellow, well, it depends because from the light that yellow might be brighter. And from the shadows that yellow might feel more reddish or you start seeing some blue undertones. It just depends how object is affected by light and shadows. That's why you don't want to just grab a perfect shade of the color that you see in the reference. You actually want to create these shades when we look at the bird, let's just say the lower part where we have the belly, there are parts that are more orange. This is when you can add a little bit of red to your yellow, because that's how you create a shade of orange. Yellow plus red creates a shade of orange. The same thing, like let's say something green. To create a shade of green, all you need is yellow and blue. Together, you create additional shades. Now let's talk about the white parts of the feathers. We see white around its face. To create a shade of white or gray. I will always though it's red, just in general, yellow and blue. Because when you blended three colors together, you create a shade, you can create a shade of gray. And then it's just a matter of how much blue, red, or yellow. You add it to the blend to determine if it's a yellow, gray, blue, gray, or red gray. This is also how I create white objects. I paint white objects in water color because of course we have shadows. It's important to remember there's no true white in nature. There's no true white in nature. Of course, this is perfectly white. That's paper. Somebody made this paper. But if you look at the flower, let's say Arcade, or I have plumeria outside here. I study those petals. Yes, the center is yellow. But the petals are white. They are white, yes. But if you are going to paint these petals, you would need to use colors to show that there's shadows and light is affecting it too. That's why you need to use colors. Create something white on the white paper. But there's no true white in nature, even snow. It will be affected by like how the light is hitting it, how the shadows are hitting it are affecting it. That's the thing. What I'm going to do is place these colors on the side and then I'm going to wet the bird. And wet it for a couple of minutes and plus some background parts of the background. And then I'll start working on the palette. And then I'll come back to the bird and start wetting the bird even more for a little longer. 47. Project 5: Wetting: I'm using a flat 20 brush and I'm going to start wetting the paper. I'm using a generous amount of water. Actually, going to place the jar right here because I do want that water to get absorbed deep inside of the paper, whatever. I don't want the colors to bleed toward the background. I need to really make sure that I'm wetting only the inside inside parts of the bird. There's so much water right now because this is just the beginning of wedding. I still have a few more minutes. A couple more minutes for sure. You want to spend time wetting the paper. The longer you wet the paper, the more time you're going to have to apply colors, wet on wet. It depends from the paper you're using. Some papers, like the cheaper paper, student grade will start buckling a lot. You have to be careful with that. I always suggest using 100% cotton watercolor paper no matter what. Although if you decide to paint something quick, let's say you're painting a bridge or you're painting a lantern, then even the cellulose papers can be really fun. Now, a little too much over. I'm going to use my paper towel. I only want to stay on the inside of the beak. I'm using my round eight, I'm just waiting the inside of the beak. I'm waiting the two, because the overall is darker, I really don't worry about it. Like if the paint goes over, I will not directly apply colors there. But even if some color flows in there, which will the blues for example, it's okay because it's just a highlight that's lighter and we can lift the colors there. If you worry about nuts being able to lift, maybe you can always use masking fluid for water colors. Okay, Now the areas that I want the feathers to look softer, for example, I'm going to wet background here as well. This way colors from the bird will slightly bleed toward the background. But it just depends how much paint I'll have on my brush with that water. The ratio between water and paint will matter a lot and how wet the paper is. But I'm not going to wet the background where I have the head because I don't want the colors from the head to bleed toward the background or any other areas like here. I'm just going to stay on the inside, although there's a little part of the background inside there. Now, I'm going to take a quick break to dilute my colors with water. 48. Project 5: First Wash: I just diluted my colors with water. This is Rosana, red and brown, yellow. As long, yellow. I do have cobalt blue. But it's not a necessity like it's just because I already have it there. Fallow, blue, indigo. I will continue wetting my bird a little longer because I really want this paper to stay wet longer. Another thing when I paint a bird, and I know that I'm just going to wet the entire sheet, basically. I'm not going to just the bird on the inside. Then I will wet the backside of the paper too. And that won't give me more time to apply colors. Wet on let that's another option. It's just the same as that I wet it before. I'm using a wider brush because I have more coverage right away. It's not a bad idea to start your first wash when you pay the bird with a wider bush too. Because then you don't have the visible smaller strokes. When we use like a round brush or brush, I'm pretty ready. I want to make sure I don't have like puddles of water. I'm just going to spread this water and push it over this background here, this part of the background. Then make sure this is all nice and you don't want puddles of water. That means the paint will spread too much, too fast. I'm going to start with those whitish parts. I'm going to grab my long quill size for, for that I need yellow red. Trying to grab thicker paint, a little bit more than just the milk, more like a 2.5 And there's my blue, If it feels to greenish, you need to add more red. But essentially this is my gray mix. If it feels like falls into more like a greenish, then add more red and blue. Then the yellow, one of those grayish part spots are red here and I want actually more blue. I want to show there is some blue with this gray mix or blend. May as well add some here as well. It's like your mapping areas for yourself. Then we have all this part. These are the white gray feathers. We want some color there. We don't want to just leave it white unless we're adding darker background. Maybe that would make more sense, then the top will be more bluish. Now I'm going around these whiter parts, I don't have that much water really on my brush, grabbing more of that blend plus more blue. These are going to be the black feathers or very dark blue feathers. Maybe some of that mix here. The reason also I jump around so much from one area to the other, is so the paper doesn't dry on me too fast. When you move around, I'm grabbing the cobalt blue and in red with some of the yellow when you move around a lot. You keep your paper wet longer. Why am I adding these grays here? Because this side is shadowed like it's darker. It's just darker. A little more of that over here. I'll add some more dark there too. This is going to be like my light area. All right. I'm going to clean my brush. I'm going to go for the yellows. There's my emison yellow rosa, some of this o yellow, but mostly it's just Rosina Ems along yellow. This part here, this is going to be more intense colors. A little more plus quin red in this part, I'm going to keep it lighter right away. You're mapping for yourself the areas that are going to be lighter and then some darker. More of that, this is more like between milk and half and half ratio that I'm grabbing on my brush. If you want to have more control, you start grabbing like a heavy cream like ratio between water and paint. You get all the colors and you're not spending time really mixing them on the palette. It's all mixing on the paper. This part right underneath these darker feathers, that could be darker too, I grab more of the yellows. More intense. Here you go, more of the eyes of yellow and in red go. These are the more intense areas like mid tones. Then we can add a little bit of yellow here too, because this is like a greenish area. And to create a shade of green, all you need is blue and yellow. Now I just grab more of the eyes of yellow and I'm grabbing more of the quin red. I want this part, these feathers, to be richer, more orange. There's other parts, like right here next to these darker feathers that feel like that too. Now we do want to keep this overall lighter. Doesn't mean like I can't add any more color. Have to be careful of how much. I just grab more of the yellow, yellow, that was my yellow. Then this part needs to be also more yellowish then all these feathers. Now, I would like to add or grab a little bit of fallow blue here. This is too much and this was actually indigo. I didn't clean my brush, instead I grabbed some of this. Indigo. Indigo. Then clean my brush, and I'm going back towards the shadowed parts. Then how about here? Let's grab the yellow leftovers. We have the yellows plus some of this blue. That will give us a shade of green, like what we see in the reference, even more of the blue. Because when you mix blue and yellow together, you create a shade of green. A little more of that, we technically should add some more color there. I'm going to grab a super brush for more control. 49. Project 5: Applying the Darks: Then my round eight and I'm going to grab this Fallow blue, some indigo. Play right there where the areas need to be darker. Now to make it more blackish, I'm going to add red and brown to it, then go all the way here. This is still wet again. The longer you wet your paper, the more time you're going to have to apply colors, wet the top. I'm not going to clean my brush. I didn't clean my brush. Instead, I grabbed fallow blue. And I'm pulling it, but I need more of that cleaner Fallow blue. And I'm actually going to clean my brush and then grab that fallow blue and apply it like I say, grab cream top to see how the most control. Then you can also pull away to add some hair to create some hair. Now this is fallow blue indigo. We're going for our feathers, Wing feathers, before it's too dry. You're just creating long strokes. Later when we get to the lifting part, we can separate them more. Let's see, the same thing here before. It's too dry. Jumping around a lot. And it's important to jump around, actually from one area to another. You have that chance to apply colors like in most of the parts. This is the indigo and brown. That's because paper dries fast. Yes, you can keep rewetting paper like once, let the layer dry and then reapply colors. But I think it's overall, it's easier if we can tackle all of it in this first layer. Now I'm going for the darker parts in between, this is going to be lifted for the whiter feathers. And I'm going for the contrast I'm creating, adding the darks, whatever I feel like the bird needs shadows now. This is still wet, this and brown. There's some indigo. And I'm going to be lifting very soon. I can see how the paper is drying now, I forgot one area. This is the area that I should have added those lines. Fortunately, this is still wet. This is the indigo brown quin red. I'm going for the darks, then I can add some more color here. A lot of frustration comes from actually when the paper dries on us too fast and we're not able to add like some colors and so on. That's why it's important to really focus on wetting the paper and not do it for a minute or two. But even like 10 minutes, sometimes you just wet the paper right before you are ready to start painting. What I want to do, this is like the mix up of all these colors. I need to clean my brush. 50. Project 5: Damp Brush and Lifting: Another way you can do it, you squish your brush like this. On a towel, you remove all that water, the squish, squish it. Just to look like this, it's a damp brush. This is called a damp brush technique. If your paper is still shiny wet and this is a little shiny wet, you can start pulling the paint down if you want to create more softness. You can also that damp brush that looks funny, right? But you grab these yellows with some red. This is a, to dry I'm, I needed to wet my brush a little bit. There's the reds. Then you can add more color. This is really like a damp brush and you can see the brush strokes. Now you can add strokes with the damp brush. Doesn't mean you have to have this brush, you just want to have a softer brush for this. Then you can add more of the red with the yellows, for example, like here. Another thing I'll show you in a second is we can use a rigger brush for this too to add the thicker paint toward our bird. When I clean this brush, it's time to lift the colors. This is my rigger too. When I left, I need to look for areas that are feel like the paper, like there's no more shine, Different parts on the paper will dry at different speed here. This is still actually nice and wet. You're pulling away towards the darks simple one then you can lift over these darker fathers. This can become darker. If you add the second layer, you can always, always add second layer. Now this is the important part to lift for me, I'm going to go right away here. This is a damp brush ricker two, I'm lifting colors. This area sees it needs to be a little lighter so I can lift the second I'm going to lift over the feathers, or the wing feathers. But for now, let's focus here where we want to show like these highlighted details like the hair, the same thing here. We added all these. Again, the paper needs to feel damp, like you just lost that shine or about to lose that shine. You go. We can lift, lift. You don't want to overlift either because it doesn't look as natural. If you do too much lifting, go. Now another thing I want to show you we can do, although I want to lift a little more here. Because we can see the lighter feathers here. Just go through the dark feathers in the way. 51. Project 5: Fine Hair and Lifting: But I want to grab heavy cream like ratio. Or cream top. I'd say cream top, creamy paint like this. I don't really have the melon yell, I just have this other yellow. But I'm going to grab this orange. Then you're adding some more orange strokes here. And you can also add some blue for the shadowed ones, and that would be okay. This is a little drier, but you can continue working on detail. For example, I have some of this orange here, right, which is yellow and red. And then I'm going for the blue, yellow, red and blue. So it's basically a gray. Then we can add these grayish feathers on the bottom, especially, let's not forget about the wing feathers. That's very, actually important to go there. I got to hurry up. I just wanted to add this cream top with using this brush a little more of the individual strokes. To do that, you can use actually ricker brush. I put it away, but I'm going to show you with the rigger brush and I'm going to show you with a round brush. This is a ricker you can lift and you go over the lighter parts. The lighter in between the feathers. We have the light. You want to lift that now? This is too late for me. I'm going to grab my round three. I'm going to try to lift this. Although it's a little too late, I'm still going to try to lift a little bit. It's okay if it's too late, but you might as well try. This should be a little later too. There's another here. That should be L, which is right here. Just keep an eye on it, because this should be later like this. Then we can continue lifting. Click here, here and here. Lifting this way you're separating the feathers. And you're creating feathers without actually working on details. Then we can grab more darks, let's say you're grabbing and brown red. This is camp. The paint is really, you can still go back towards the darker parts and add more contrast as long as the paper is still wet. That's very important. I'm going to add some more here. Because this is still wet then this is not wet. But I can add a little more shadow here because this is still wet. Some parts are still wet, some parts are just way too dry. But contrast is important. If you have to re wet, then I would say, go for it this way. You still have like those darker parts. Now, last thing I want to do, if let's say you have too much pain that blood over the toes, you can lift those two. You wipe your brush on a towel and then you lift. It's not really that important because these toes and just feet are darker anyway. And the yellow will just serve as an undertone. It's no big deal. It's just if you want to have a fresher at the start. For now, we're just going to let this dry. And then when we come back, we'll focus on other parts. 52. Project 5: Details Eyes and Beak: Hi everyone. So everything is dry, 100% dry, and I'm ready for the next step. I decided that I'm going to start working on details to paint the eye and the beak. Once you have the eye and the beak, you can see like right away, like things just change quickly and suddenly you have almost completed painting. Because once you have the eyes, you put life into your painting. The bird becomes more lifelike, basically, before I do anything, because this is me coming back after a few hours. I need to clean my palette a little bit. And it's no big deal if I was painting a background. But here I need cleaner colors. My imlon yellow is pretty much gone. And then I have a mix up of the three colors. Primaries here, I want to clean it and what I normally do, I grab a paper towel, I dip it in water, and I just go through the this. I try not to pick up the colors from the islands of color. I don't waste the paint, it's very quickly. Just so I have my palette with clean colors. Again, this was all like a mix up of the ml yellow, there and red. And I just want here some along yellow. This is what it looks like. Again, the same colors. I'm going to zoom onto the eye and the beak. First thing you want to do is zoom onto your reference so you can see the eye app close. You want to use a smaller brush. I'm using my round two smaller brush with a finer point and we're going to wet the entire eyeball plus the wrinkly parts of the wrinkles. Or not wrinkles but the lids. We're going to wet all that. Try to wet it for a little longer because you don't want this to dry too fast. Part of those lids, I covered it too much with the pain, but that's okay. I didn't lift enough at the end. But again, it's okay. The first layer is all about the highlights. You want to focus on the lightest colors you see first. That's when I'm going to use all my blues. I'm going to grab quickly the blues. I have more like a heavy cream like ratio between water and paint. This is like cobalt blue. I have here, I have some indigo and I have fallow blue. But you don't want to just cover with the same tone. Basically, you want to find the darks, which is like here. This is the darkest part. Then we have these wrinkly parts right there. Just market for myself. Let's see, this is going to be darker. This part, we're not really painting the whole thing yet. It's just it's easier to see. I have like colors now bleed toward this lightest part. The highlight. This is going to be the lid. We're going to work on that later. This is our first layer. Then let's focus on the beak. You want to wet it too, but you want to wet more than you need for that. I'm going to use my round eight. I just want to cover more. Right away it's covering more. It's just that if you only wetted the beak after here and you add all these colors, you'd have a hard edge. You want to have a self transition, so you want to show that there are feathers. Using the tip of my brush, either you use a larger brush, make sure you have a nice fine point, or maybe you're using a smaller round brush, just make sure you have a nice fine point. We're going to start with the yellow undertones, grab like Iso yellow and some burnt sienna. This is the bottom part that's more yellowish. Try to use between heavy cream to cream top like ratio between water and paint. You can add even here to basically could leave like some of that yellow in there too. I'm going to grab more like a cream top, very creamy paint. Add a little more. The pink doesn't spread too much, which is why I'm using the cream top now. I'm going to use my damp brush just to push it down a bit even more. Then with the smaller brush, I'm going to grab my round two. I'm going to grab this cream top of the mostly and brown I guess, but there's a little bit of indigo. It's from the bottom here that you're adding now. Am I going to make it for this top part? I have to hurry up here. If not, I'm going to have to rewet it. Go and I'm going to quickly grab the blues that already used for the eye, the same blues. I'm still making it time wise because this is still not 100% dry. This is the indigo and fellow blue. And then I have copal blue to basically all the blues I've been using. There'll be a moment where I can start lifting too if I went over too much. But I'm going to push the paint a little bit. This is with the damp brush, damp brush technique. You're manipulating how the paint is spreading and how everything is going to dry cleaning my brush, again, wiping it, it's just a damp brush and then a little more of that blend I guess the band ground and indiga, just to place it there. Nothing has to be perfect. Nothing has to look exactly like we've seen in the reference. Maybe I covered too much, I can always lift. What I would like to add is that line between the top and the bottom part of the beak. It has to be done with a creamy paint. Though I'm trying to find like an area where I have creamy top like ratio between water and paint so I can create a cream tub. This is literally with the tip of my brush painting, this line, it's like a really dry paint. There's a little tiny bit of water, but it's really dry. It's just so I can separate the top from the bottom. Then. The dry paint sometimes is nice dry brushing, but not really because I don't really do much dry brushing. But if it comes to like hair, you can pull a little bit. Especially if let's say area is wet, then it's nice to pull it from there. We can go back now toward the eye. With the eye, you want to focus now on the darkest parts. We're going to grab this time more like a water like ratio between the paint and water. Let's indeed with some vand brown. A lot of times it seems like the eyeball is black, but we always want to start with some color. That's why I'm adding here Van de Brown. It's like I'm sketching almost with my brush. It's actually better to even use more diluted paint with water. But I'm going to go around here so I can frame this eyeball and it goes much higher. Make sure you have a comfortable brush. Good brush with a fine point. You can do this part easily. Just focus, right? Just focus on it. I'm going to do is clean my brush, grab a little bit of blue. I can reactivate the bottom part, but add blue some blue. At the same time, clean my brush, wipe it on a towel, and this is just a damp brush to move that paint higher. Now, this is not dry anymore. It's wet on wet. Because this is wet, I'm adding more paint. Indigo v brown with the cream top like ratio between water and paint. That's This is not dry anymore? Yes, it's wet cleaning my brush, wiping it just with the damp brush. Manipulating again how the paint will dry. We can also work on the outside. This time you're going to go for water or milk like ratio because we're going to paint wet on dry. This is wet on dry. You're grabbing the paint that's loaded with water. We're going to go over these parts. You can go into, just like the wrinkly parts are, you know what, it should be a little wider. Then I can go like this. I'm going to go over it again and then clean my brush. Slightly white but you want to water because you want to paint to spread around that eye lids so you're reactivating. But from the outside the paint, it's a soft transition and you're creating more depth this way. I want a little more of the ground there. I'm adding a little more paint now. You can see it spreading, right? Because I wetted it. I wedded the outside. Yeah, it does look better if you add the Van Brown. Look more of the Van Tic Brown. 53. Project 5: Details and 2nd Layer: I think that's pretty good. We can let it breast a bit and we do have to work a little bit on those parts maybe. And we can do it now. Actually, since we're here just a cream top. Well, it's a little too early. I'm going to leave it. Let's add one more quick layer toward the bottom part of the beak. I'm rewetting the beak, the eyes. Those are the only details that I really work on. Like, I wouldn't spend time on painting like feathers for example. But once you have the ice, it's like the outcome changes so quickly. It looks pretty and somewhat realistic. Baad yellow. Then I need the dark on the bottom. Van Brown in Digo, just on the bottom or not even bottom. It's like this section right here. I'm actually staying away from the bottom bottom then since I have all this paint. May as well some parts a little darker to maybe this is not that pretty. I'm going to lift it a little bit, something like that. If you need to lift you wipe your brush on a towel just so we can also manipulate how the paint will dry there. You can add a little, let's say Indigo to make it a little darker. I'm just adding indigo could like a cream top lay creation between water and paint and just using up the paint to add more hair. For now, this part is fine. What we could do is just add a very gentle layer toward the body of the bird. Whether you want to add more color to the head or this part of the body, it's totally up to you. But general idea, like I placed the colors in the same places like before, the same spots and you can wet the entire vert, like I said only. Or you can also wet part of the background to maintain that softness. It's optional, it's up to you if you want to do that. You still have softness from that first layer over, even if you just wet the inside. And you can soft that line too later with the damp press. You want to wet the bird first. You want to use a softer brush. You don't reactivate the colors too much. At least some colors will still get reactivated because it's just a matter of what colors you used and some colors just do get reactivated. I'm not going to work on this wing. I really like the way it is. I'm just going to wet a little bit here just for the soft transitions, but I'm not going to apply colors there then. Do I need color here? No, but I still need to wet a little more than I need. I don't have a hard edge. I'm gently going over here because I just painted that part. Have your colors ready to go, pre diluted with water. Let's see, do I want any more water? I'm reactivating colors have to be very gentle quick to when I'm adding that second layer, it's just too easy to pick up the colors. And I'm going to grab my long quill. Two, I'm sorry, four. I'm going to start with the Mason yellow. And some of the yellow same areas, rarely added colors. It's just to create more depth and more vibrancy. This is like a 2.5 like ratio between water and pain. Now, when you re wet and paint and add another layer, right? You are going to lose some of these lifted lines. Right? You got to be aware of that but you can still re lift a little bit so it's not like completely gone. What I need to do is add some blue tones. This is my long cal, two, basically the gray tone that we used before which is yellow, blue, red. And just add it more like here in the more shadowed parts of the bird. Little more. Then back to these yellows, I actually want to start adding some of the red. This is, is yellow, yellow. And in red it is a little more orange. But I'm just going to place it toward this richest part here. Maybe this, say a little bit, this is the richer part. The bottom right. I also want a little bit right underneath these darker feathers. Just a little bit. This is not really the brush that I would go like with the smaller strokes, but I might as well just place tiny, tiny bit. Then here and here over. I don't want to do too much. Maybe a little more red with it. Don't want it to be too red, but this is more like a heavier ratio now. Like a heavy cream for sure. I think that's pretty so I'm going to leave it. I don't overdo it. Now I'm going to use this round three brush, medium stiff. I'm going to grab Van Tak Brown and some of the quin red, maybe burn tiny bit of maybe blue, blue. And I'm going to place it right here so the paint spreads a little bit. Just right there. For more shadows. To create more shadows like this. There you go. Now I want this blend to have more like indigo shade of indigo. Maybe I didn't clean my brush, I just grabbed indigo cream top like ratio between water and paint. Brush feels damp so it's flattened. And then I'm going to make this part darker. Because that's a contrast there, right? That's my contrast. I need to work on it too, or I don't have to, but I want to add a little more darks. Same thing with these feathers. This is my rigger two. And I'm going to apply this cream top with the rigger brush. It's just some detail. A little more cream top you can pull toward the outside. You can add some individual hair, something like this. Pull it outside to add create more depth. You want to have cream top like ratio between water and paint and go back here, for example, not to overdo it. That's pretty much it. I'm going to wait to lift the colors here. I don't want to have a hard edge. Feels like the water was not clean, so I'm just going to use that damp brush to go a little higher. Now. I'm going to wait to lift the colors. 54. Project 5: Painting a Branch: When you wait, you want to take a step back so you don't keep working on it too much. But the general idea is to an eye on everything, how it's drying, and you want to lift the colors. You need to remember that it's not easy to lift with the second layer. A lot of times I just find the lines that are already lifted before, like here for example, and I'll go over them again. Right? Sometimes the work sometimes doesn't. But the thing is that with the second layer, you don't place colors everywhere exactly like where you're already placed. The idea is, yes, that's where you want to place the colors the same colors, but there's a lot of areas that we kept lighter. For example, here it's a little easier to lift, re, lift. I say here we just have to wait a little bit longer. Basically, you want to wait till that shine is gone from the paper and that's when you want to lift or re, lift. Like this area here wasn't as rich as before. It was much lighter. I should be able to lift colors because I added way more of that is a lone yellow and before it was more like whiter, it is easier to lift. That's actually perfect because I kept it light before and now I added more of that yellow. And then I'm creating those softer feathers there. You don't need the softer feathers everywhere. It's just a general idea to have some lifted lines, right? It's a good place here to lift too. If you can, that's great. If you can't, don't worry about it. But then basically re lifting, it's a little too wet. You got to remember that too. Like if nothing is happening, it doesn't necessarily mean because you already have that second layer and it's harder to lift with the second layer. But sometimes the paper is just so wet, like it feels like okay, There's no more shine, but it still can't lift. That's because it's just too wet and hard to see that moment I lift enough and I'm not going to lift anymore. I'm happy with the eye, with the beak, so I'm not going to add anymore to it. The only thing left is really to work on the toes and the branch. Technically, we can start actually working on the branch because the way I paint the branch, like I wet the whole branch and then I paint the claws later. If anything, I just lift a little bit. Do you paint the branch? You want to make sure you have like the two main colors. Which is the cobalt blue or any blue you want to use actually and burn CNL, which is like the orange brown. Ready to go. I'm quickly diluting these colors with water. It's all like a creamy consistency. You can add to it red if you want to. And actually that is a good idea because the branch in the reference is red, ish, I will quickly dilute some more of that quin red. A lot of times this is my way of not wasting the paint. Like when I clean the pallet later, I use all the colors I have whenever I paint the branch. But the main thing is to wet the branch. So we're going to wet it. When you wet, you really don't have to like wet every single part of it. You can skip area, so you have like paper, dry, tiny spots. And that's nice too. Almost like dry brushing, but not really just that we're skipping some parts. The reason you are wetting it so you have a nice flow. The first color is the undertone color, and I always go with the blue that gives you the base and then you add that reddish brown and then the colors just pop. This is my bald blue and what, You can also grab some quinacridal red with it. That's not a bad idea since parts, let's say you can see those highlights. The highlights are usually blue violet. They look like blue violet. Why not to have that? I'm going to go a little higher here if the paint is too thick. So you want to use actually more like a milk like ratio. Because the milk ratio will cause the paint to spread more and you don't want to have actually that much control. Sometimes I go with the heavier. It really depends like how rich the part is and what I'm trying to do. But the more you try to paint on your own, from your own references, even if you feel like, okay, I don't like it and stuff like it's okay. It's okay because at the beginning, like you're still learning. Just remember that I haven't stopped learning. I'm still learning to. I come up with different ways to paint things all the time. That's part of learning like okay, you know what, I prefer to paint it this way or the other way. I'm going on the outside a little bit. Just the layer is not so even then I'm going to grab burn Ciena. I'm trying to grab like a heavier ratio. Actually, burn Siena and Quin Red. This is a good one. It's a good combo. Normally, I'd go for just burned ciena. But this is reddish as well. I scooping all the paint I have, this is it should be more like a heavy cream to the paint is litter to diluted with water. But you know what, It feels nice. I keep going with it and then I'll grab something heavier in just a moment. But you can see like the separation now, like the blue violet we have. And then the reds, or the brown and red. I'm going to grab some more of the quin red. This is just a quin red now, but the brush is dirty. Technically, I still have burned Sienna there. I'm just adding some more of quad. But again, it's not a clean qu, red. Because I have some burned Sienna. And I'm going to lift this area so it's cleaner for the toes. Now the next color I want to add is something darker I'm going to go for. And brown. I'm going to clean my brush. Actually use a smaller brush. Round eight, round eight. So make sure you leave some parts with that blue violet. This is going to be my Vanda Brown. You can also start grabbing like the indigo too at the same time, although sometimes I do. And brown first and then indigo. Now the idea here is to grab like a really creamy and brown. So more like a cream top like ratio between water and paint going toward the bottom of the tree because that would be the shadowed part. But you can also go in more like middle sections. Now I'm going to grab and brown plus indigo. And brown indigo. But this is way too diluted with water, so you have to grab like a thicker paint. Again, you can create a couple lines and dots going through the tree as well. But the idea is the bottom part of the tree is shadowed, that's why it needs to be darker. You can even go all the way to the top with this the darks because maybe there's like some little branch that's trying to grow, something like that. And then we can add shadows underneath the claws later. This is just the bottom. 55. Project 5: Lifting: All right. You can also lift, that's fine too. You can add some water like this to make the paint go down a bit. If let's say you add it too many colors, it's just too dark. You can push that down a bit. Maybe these are the areas actually to do it a little bit. Water here, push it down a bit. I'm still wiping my brush a little bit on a towel, making this a little. This is just a clean brush. Water and pushing it down a bit. If you lost like too much light, you can do that. Then I'm going to wait to lift. We can lift now. It's just so I don't have too much paint over claws, although it's really no big deal because the toes are darker like we're going to be adding like indigo and so on. Some undertones will actually do good, we don't mind those. It's just a general idea to have some highlights. We're going to let it dry. I'm just going to go through it. With that, it's almost like a lifting a little bit just to create some texture. Bring back some of the highlights, but be careful if you add too much water and things which just flow too much. But it's fun to work on trees, they do encourage you to play a little bit. All right, then leave this. Then when we come back, we're going to work on the clos and the toes. 56. Project 5: Final Details: For the toes. You want to zoom in under the reference image, you can see them up close. Just take note on all these highlights. We're still going to start with those undertones, which is actually about the highlights. But we're going to wet the toes very gently. We don't have to every single part of it. Just so we have some water or paint flowing later. We have the flow going because otherwise we'll have too many hard edges which is okay too for the toes. Depends how you want to paint it, but I just generally just wet a little bit. Start with the blue violet as my undertone. I add it on the bottom, but it is a little too dark. We do, I don't know if you see it, but I see a lot of indigo color in those toes. It makes it like right away, like, okay, I'm just going to use that indigo as the final color. You could actually use yellow and red for example, so the shade of orange. But we already have undertones from that layer that was flowing over here. A little more of that blue violet mostly toward the bottom that to bleed over there. And then I'm going to grab some cream top of the and brown, and indigo. More of the indigo that felt more like a brown. Then you're adding it toward the bottom. Because the top is highlighted, I feel like I didn't wet it enough. Just keep that in mind. You want to make sure you wet it enough. That's pretty much enough for those toes. I'm going to focus on these to same thing, same situation. We're wetting same thing here. But here we have the leg you always want to wet more than you need. You have a soft transition. You just stop applying colors. Like right here, for example. Right here. All right. I'm going to start with that blue violet. Again, this is creptpk. You have the most control. But I need more paint. I feel like I'm grabbing but I'm not grabbing enough. Then the leg, it's fine. It's blue, blue violet, for example. More of that paint. You see, I'm stopping like here. I went a little further but it's okay. And then right there. Then we have that to now. Let's grab this cream top of the indigo. And brown brown. Why am I adding always like fine brown when I do something with the indigo, it's gives me like that really dark shade of the color. I want to see more than just the indigo. I'm letting these colors separate on the paper. I see like different shades of it, this way, like there. And this should be a little darker. There should not be a highlight, which is why I'm adding more color. Because I would not have a highlight under the claws or toes. If anything, I'd have shadows. Cast shadows. The little things we have to think about. Right, This is fine. The only thing if we want to do is add a shadow underneath. So we'll go back to this one. Almost dry, grab a little bit of blue. With that, I guess blue, red is fine. We can add some burn to make it more like milk to water ratio or water to milk like ratio to confuse you. Do we see any shadows from this one, really? Because this is supposed to be behind, you know, there's a toe here that would not make sense to have a open area. This is the blend that I just talked about, but now I added it here because I had to fill it. Otherwise, there's no toe shadows. We do have some shadow here. This is a little wet, but I'm thinking about this one. Maybe a slight shadow like this, something like that. So we have a shadow and then here, the same thing. Sometimes there's no shadows. Like really in the reference. I'll still add a shadow just to make it there's more sense in it. I added like some shadows from the claws. What there should be here to another one that maybe. Okay, that makes more sense, right? I'll pretend like the bird is really behind this branch and it's just the toe. I don't have to work on the shadow, for the, for the body of the bird. But let's focus on this part. This is just like the tail feathers, but the end of it, this is the fastest way to paint it. You wet this area completely. Small area. We're going to start with the yellow undertones, some red yellow. This is heavy cream like ratio between one and paint. And then we grab this indigo and basically at the same colors before cream top for the most control. That's why I really believe that is such a forgiving technique. It's just so much easier to paint something. I'm going to zoom out. That's pretty much it. We finished another bird. Actually scratch that. I have a toe. I forgot about this toe. Okay, wetting it first. Now, this toe will not have any highlights. It's underneath. Let's grab this blue violet anyway, as our undertone, but no highlights here. And then indigo, band brown. Now, you could actually have a little bit of yellow as an undertone or too, because I can see it now. But be fine with just that, maybe make it slightly darker on the bottom. Here you go, and can lift maybe tiny bit here. I'm looking at the reference, I'm thinking like, okay, needs to be a little lighter there. Okay, that's it. Thank you so much for your time. Please let me know if you have any questions. 57. Conclusion: You have just completed this course and you learned so many new techniques and tricks to paint smooth feathers. Let's summarize this. You not only learn how to properly wet the paper, but also how to paint with undertones and why undertones are important. You have learned what is the best timing to lift the colors, but also how to create an even smoother layer using a damp brush technique to the already painted area on the paper. So congratulations, Please don't forget to share your beautiful paintings in our community and please keep an eye on my upcoming new classes. You can also find me on social media and I have two other online schools. Thank you so much.