Mixed Media Abstracts - Experiment With Water Soluble Supplies - Crayons, Pencils, Inks and More

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I love experimenting with art supplies and figuring out how they work and how I can push them. That's what this class is all about. I'm Denise Love and I'm an artist and photographer out of Atlanta, Georgia. In this class, I want to pick a supply that maybe you don't play with as often or maybe you just use them as mark-making tools and I want them to become the project. We're going to figure out what they do and how we can push their limits. I'm super excited about this because I've had it on my mind for a while. I use the Neocolor II crayons in probably every art project I ever do but I never add water to them. Even though they say water-soluble, how many people actually play with them in the water soluble way? That's what we're going to do. We're going to push these supplies. We're going to do a whole background in these water soluble items, whether that be the Neo-Teller II crayons or the charcoal, or you could use soft pastels, or you can use watercolor pencils, ink tint Derwent pencils. There's all kinds of things out there that's water soluble. Rather than just using these as mark-making tools, I want to push them to their limits with the water. We're going to create the whole background and then we're going to figure out how we can push that with other marks and supplies on top. We'll start off in our sketchbook doing some color studies and seeing what is this color if I add water to it, and then how does that blend maybe another color that I really like that I want to experiment with? Then we'll do some larger color studies to say, okay, here's how these colors are blending. Then what's the next step I can do on top of that? How can I use these for mark-making? Then what else can I add in there? We do several different color studies. I hope you do 100 of these because it's the only way you're going to figure out how the colors work, what they do with each other, and how they blend, what you like and don't like. I love little color studies and I'm not really a draw a box and paint a color study person. I like to mix things up. Then if you find something that you truly love, mark down the colors that you use, so you can maybe do this for larger projects. That's what we're going to do. We're going to take our favorite color study and then maybe create our larger project. Look how beautiful this is. I can't wait to have this framed. Can't you see this in that frame right there that I'm holding it in front of that blue and green piece is in? Look how beautiful that would be framed in that frame. Like I can't wait to take this one to the framework. [LAUGHTER] Then we're also going to do my very favorite art because you might see me do this in every class I ever do because I truly love creating with abandon, not thinking about color and composition and where I'm putting things and then coming back and cutting out the amazing parts in there to create a pretty little series. I get so excited when I'm painting these, I'm doing just like you are doubting myself. I'm questioning what are these colors doing? Do I even like this? I'm I going to find anything that I like? I don't hide that from you. I'm talking through in the video, [LAUGHTER] so my doubts on the different things like, no, I might not find anything I like. [LAUGHTER] That's true, when I'm doing it, we need to vote for this. Do you like this one? I really love. I need to have a vote button. [LAUGHTER] But I also created some little bitty pieces out of here. When I leave after doing these cut up pieces, I'm on an art high, and I have the best rest of the day. It leaves me feeling so good. I love that. I want you to get up from your art table creating something beautiful that you're like, okay, I love this. Then going away with the high that you can't wait to come back and create again. A lot of times too, I've heard people say, well, I've created stuff. I'm not very happy with it. I'm just going to set it down, but then they come back a week later and they're like, this is so good. I don't know how many times I've done that. I've created something and I thought, this is terrible, I don't like it. I put it in a drawer and I'll go back to it later and I'm rediscovering it and I'm like, that looks amazing and I made it. What was I thinking? [LAUGHTER] If you're one of those people, set things to the side and come back to them later with fresh eyes when you're like, oh, because when you're in the middle of working and doing, it's hard work. Sometimes your brain is tired and then you're like, how to start like this or maybe you're like, I'm just disappointed. or just feel let down. But if you will come back to something later after you let it set and you've let your mind relax, you'll think, oh, if I had two or three marks here and there. Now it's finished and I love it. I want you to figure out what's working best for you. I want you to play with your supplies, try the different projects, and figure out what is the best thing to keep you coming back and practicing in your art practice? I love experimenting with different supplies and pushing how they work. I can't wait to see the projects that you come up with in class, the color combinations, and the different pieces that you create. Definitely come share those with me. I can't wait to get started. I'll see you in class. [MUSIC] 2. Class project: [MUSIC] Your class project is to come back and share with me some of the projects that you created while you were doing this class. I want to see possibly your color ways that you were playing and experimenting with. I'd love to see what colors you were attracted to and how they ended up. I'd like to see your bigger piece if you liked it on the whole page or if you cut it up. I'd love to see if you did the cut-out piece and what those pieces of art looked like. These truly leave me on a little art high. If you're like [LAUGHTER] a runner, and you're doing all the running, and you're getting that runner's high they talk about that I've never personally experienced. [LAUGHTER] I feel like that's probably the feeling I'm getting when I make these pieces of art. You hear me go in the videos because I really am doing that. I get so excited at how just serendipitously these come out so beautiful, and how they're just magical. I love to see how the water-soluble supplies react to each other. How they blend, how they look when they're dry, how it's a little bit different than watercolor and a little bit different than acrylic paint. I love seeing those differences that I really never discovered until I started playing with the crayons, and spilled something, and thought, oh, what is that doing? [LAUGHTER] Then I realized that's what water-soluble meant. It was like, oh, I just never played with some of these products in the way that they were meant to expand into. I love doing that. Picking a project saying, okay, today I'm going to play with these three crayons, this mark-making tool, and let's see what I can create. It gives you some parameters and some limitations to create. It's so much easier to do that than to look at all the supplies and think, crap, I'm stuck. What do I do? I don't know what color I want. Where do I go? Now, I don't know when I'm just not going to make anything today. [LAUGHTER] You don't know how many times I've done that. [LAUGHTER] I want to see what you're creating. Come back and share some of that with me in class. So let's get started. [MUSIC] 3. Supplies: Let's take a look at the supplies for this video. I encourage you to use what you have, but the purpose of this video is to experiment with water-soluble crayons and pencils. I want to do this because it's fun, and it's a different type of medium than say, just a regular acrylic paint or watercolor or what have you. One of my very favorite water-soluble products is the Neocolor II crayon by Aquarelle. This is the full supply of it. I do like having the big master box because I feel I need all the colors, but when it comes to make an art, you don't need all the colors. You need your favorite colors, the ones that you're most likely to use, and you'll notice that some of these have never been used. I don't gravitate towards them. I wouldn't normally buy them. You'll never see me want a bright yellow something probably that I might never ever reach for that. Having all the colors is not necessarily a good thing. Before I had all the colors, I had a few colors. These colors tend to be the ones that I grab a lot. I would recommend if you have an art store near you to go take a look at the open stock of the crayon colors and pick a few that you like because these are good for all stuff, mark-making. They're good for color swatching. They're good for adding an element in there that's different than the other elements that you've used, and they're one of my favorite things to do that with. I will be using the Neocolor II crayons in class, but I won't be using that great big set. I'll be using just a few colors and I recommend you grab a few colors. Another water-soluble product that you might consider is charcoal. This is a set that I got a long time ago. I spend most of my years collecting art supplies, collecting and using our two different hobbies. But these are fun. If you do have charcoal, even if it's just the stick of black charcoal or a black pencil, those are water-soluble, so that's another fun supply to experiment with. Another thing you could consider, are watercolor pencils. This is the Darwin watercolor pencils. I do show you the difference in the watercolor and the ink tints in class on a sample. Just so you can get a look at what look you might be hoping for, but the watercolor pencils are super fun and they're very light and translucent, and you can get a lot of pretty colors and that's a fun water-soluble option. My favorite water-soluble in the pencil variety or the ink tints, and these are very vivid, whereas the watercolor pencils are very light and translucent. These are translucent too, but the vividness is just such so different like it really is a big difference in this pencil versus that pencil. Doing projects like this where you're experimenting with supplies that you've never played with before, you really learn how they work, how intense the colors are, what are your favorite colors in there, and how to maybe incorporate that into your own work. I'm going to be using a few ink tints colors, and a few of the neo crayons. Super fun. I do show you some stuff in my sketchbook, that we do some color swatching, and maybe we start looking at different color palettes that we want to use. I do move outside my sketchbook because being locked into a sketchbook where everything's wet, you're trying to wait for it to dry. We're color swatching, trying to figure out what color we might want to do a bigger piece in. I feel like being in a sec sketchbook slows me down because I can't turn the page until it's dry. In that case, I just work on little pieces of watercolor paper, and so you can just take a great big piece of watercolor paper and cut it up. These are Moleskine books. I like the Moleskine because of the quality of the paper. Everything that I put in it tends to look better than the super cheap sketchbooks. I'll be working in those Moleskines for a little bit. Then, I just moved to loose pieces of paper. Cut some of this up instead. For watercolor paper, when I'm doing a bigger project, the better the paper, the better the finished project. That being said, use what you have if you already have watercolor paper and you want to experiment with water-soluble items making a pretty abstract, use what you've got. But the cheaper papers have more wood pulp in them. The wood pulp just doesn't soak in the color as nicely as the cotton papers. The nicer the paper, the more the cotton content and you get a better look when you're done. I've got some Canson watercolor paper, which I use for a lot of things because I can get a great big pad for not very much money. Then if I'm really feeling like, I've nailed it, I'm looking for some really nice pieces that I might want to frame, then I'll move into like the arches, cold press watercolor paper or the Canson Heritage is a really nice watercolor paper. Now the biggest difference in these two is the Canson has a completely different texture to it than the arches, which you might not care, but the texture on it is slightly different. I just find that interesting when you get into the nicer papers and you get into really honing in your craft. Sometimes those details matter. Use what you've got. I'm going to be using 140 pound cold press watercolor paper. Probably going to be using this arches because I liked the arches, and this is pure cotton, so there's no wood pulp in it. It's going to act a little different than if I were using, say, a student grade paper, which I definitely have plenty of that too. You want some watercolor paper. You want your water-soluble crayon or pencils. Then we're also going to be playing in some acrylic inks. If you don't want to play in inks, then you'd rather play in watercolor, you can, but my goal is to step outside my comfort zone. I do a lot of watercolor classes and play a lot in my watercolors, but you've probably never seen me pull the acrylic inks out so let's play in the inks. Based on my samples and things that I've done, I can narrow down the colors that I want to play in today for my bigger piece when we get to that. I'm just going to go ahead and talk about some of these. This is f and w white acrylic ink. This is Amsterdam warm gray. This one is Aqua fine burnt umber, I'm not apparently. I don't love just one brand apparently, because I also have Liquitex and gold. You can pick whatever it is that you feel comfortable in. I certainly have plenty of the colors that I bought in the F and W because that's what my local art store happen to have in stock, I've got plenty of fun colors to experiment with, but after doing some of my sample pieces, these are the ones that I truly loved today. Doing our samples is how you're going to figure out what colors you love and want to play in. Those are the ones I'll be playing in. I also got a big piece of graphite. You can use any pencil is basically a big pencil. I like a Posca Pen. Got myself cheap paintbrush. Whichever paintbrush you're comfortable with, once we get to a bigger piece and I know we're adding water to our crayons and our intense pencils, but once you get to a bigger piece, I generally for adding the water and stuff, like to move up to a bigger paintbrush, like a big mop brush. I probably will be using something like this Princeton Neptune number 4 to swish water on the bigger piece. I find working with a bigger tool on a bigger piece of paper is easier, and turns out more size appropriate. I used to try to do bigger pieces with the same size materials as the sketchbook, like a little tiny brush, and then I wondered why my piece didn't turn out, how I thought. I think it's because, my tools didn't go up with my size paper. Just try to keep some of that in mind. Then I also have some random mark-making tools. This alike, which is a Jane Davenport number 12, mark-making tool. It looks like a little mermaid fin. If you don't have anything like this, you can certainly use some palette knives that have a texture to them. You could use a fork. You can use anything really that you come across that's got a little pattern in it because I like dragging this through the paint, and it made some very interesting marks and color variations for me when we did our sample pieces. I'm using one of these in class. You can use a fork if you don't have anything that looks like this or you don't have access or it's not available or what have you. Then I just have, of course, some water, a little cup of water over here. That's basic things that we're going to be using in class today. You can substitute any of these for something that you've already got, and colors that you love that are different than the colors I'll be using. The easiest substitute for the ink is watercolor, and then you can use Neocolor crayons or any type of water-soluble pencil product, whether that'd be watercolor pencil or ink tints pencil or whatever you happen to have available or charcoal. Your choice there. This is the time to experiment and figure out how to play in some of our water-soluble supplies. That's our supplies that we'll be going through today. Let's get started. 4. Color Swatching: Let's get started by doing some color swatching and deciding what colors do we want to play with here in our water-soluble pigment things. When I say things, lots of things are water-soluble. Charcoal is water-soluble, graphite can be water-soluble, watercolor pencils can be water-soluble. These are the Inktense pencils by Derwent, they're water-soluble. The difference in these and regular watercolor pencils is they're more vibrant. They're going to give you a lot more color in that pigment than a regular watercolor pencil. Then Neocolor II crayons are water-soluble. What I want to do is experiment with supplies that I don't normally reach for. To be honest for me, the Derwent Inktense pencils, this set is new to me. I've had them in the past years ago. My aunt is a very prolific artist and then she got into colored pencil paintings. I gave her my set because they live in a little town without the access to the art stores that I have and I'm like, "You have to try these amazing Inktense pencils in your pencil art." So I gave her the collection that I had. Man, did she loved those. But I've recently gone back to wanting to play in water-soluble things, and I normally play in the crayons. But I thought I want some of these Inktense again. I'm really glad that I did because they're so amazing. What I want you to do if you have a set of something like this, is I want you to color swatch them. I want you to go through and just start out doing the colors in a row like this. Maybe side-by-side, if you think there's some colors that you're going to like. These are out of order because I was already playing in these thinking, "What am I going to want to play with?" I've started moving the ones to the end that were some of my favorite. I like to start off with any art supply that I have like this. I want to just figure out what does it do? What color are these like? This one right here is what I started with. I was thinking it was a sienna color, but it's really more of a brighter ocher. It's how we're going to discover what colors do we like. If we pick some that we think we want to blend together, what do they look like when we blend them? What I like about the Inktense is they activate with water, and then if you let them sit for a moment, you can go back and then very gently get rid of any draw marks that we had. They activate and become really beautiful swatches of color. This might seem tedious, but let me tell you, over the years has become my go-to for figuring out what is this color and which ones do I actually like? For some reason, I always want to like green-gold and I always want to like it, I think, because it's called green gold. Yet when I use it, a lot of times I'm like, that wasn't quite what I thought. How are you going to know this unless you play and swatch out and maybe blend some colors and see, what are these going to do when I get them wet? How bright are they going to be? Do I want more watercolory? Do I want it more intense? I can add more water to thin them out. What's it going to do when I mix it in a color next to it? These act like watercolors. Once you get them wet, they do have that fun watercolory look. But look how fun this is. Just figuring out what are the colors and what do I like? This is how we're going to figure out what do we want to use. I've also got some Neocolor crayons over here. Because these seem to be three that I grab a lot. This is olive, this is raw sienna, and this is [inaudible] green. For some reason, I tend to grab these out of this box quite a bit. Also, I'm not a purple person, but this rose pink is pretty. I also like this deep one, which is the Payne's gray. Don't we all love Payne's gray? See, now these are going to act completely different than the Inktense, which is why I'm showing you both of these with the color swatching. I still want to get them wet. I'm trying to dip my brush in the water in-between each color. I don't want to put one color directly on the next color while I'm swatching, I actually want to see what color it is without deliberately mixing into another color with that color still on my brush. I'm just dipping it in the water to freshen it up and then just see what do we get. Then I'm letting them touch. I want to see what these do if these colors touch each other and how they'll blend in with each other like watercolor do. Look at all those, those right there. No wonder I grabbed them all the time. Super fun. I really like the difference in the two. These are more vibrant. These are more pastel watercolory. We can come over here and see like if I do a little bit of graphite, how is that different than what I just did? You can see it's water-soluble and at the same time does not give up its line. That's very interesting. I've got some charcoal. Let me grab my charcoal. I've got a big collection of charcoal, the tinted charcoal, because I thought at one point I wanted to really experiment with them. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. But it's very interesting what charcoal does too. I like the colors that these come in. They're very muted, they're very rich dark deeper tones. If I come back and put some water on those, they act really similar to the crayons. You're still going to see where you marked the paper, they don't lift as well as the crayons and the Inktense pencils. So you'll still see an underlay of that what you scribbled, more so than the crayons, more so than the Inktense pencils or even the watercolor pencils. These are the watercolor pencils. These are the Derwent watercolor pencils. These come in a whole lot of really pretty colors. I like this sky blue. This one's cobalt blue versus, yeah, that is sky blue. Just to take a look at the difference in the watercolor versus the Inktense, let's just go ahead and put some of these colors down. Because I want to give you options here. You don't have to have the exact same supplies that I have in class. You can play with any of your water-soluble products, anything that you can color on. You can even do it in watercolor, but I've done several watercolor classes. I like to experiment with my supplies and come up with different projects for myself to create. I like to say, okay, today I'm working with the Neocolor II crayons. I'm going to see what they do. I'm going to mix them together. I want to see what I can create and step outside my box and then I might discover something that I never even knew existed. You can immediately see the difference in the plain watercolor pencil versus the Inktense pencil. You can see it's a much lighter, more transparent color. This is a more intense, a little bit matte in the way that it looks. I love that that's a matte feel, but it's a much more intense color that's like, wow, where this is like very soft and subtle. Depending on what you got, I want you to pick out your water-soluble whatever, watercolor pencil, Inktense, the Neocolor crayons. In this class, I'm going to be working with the Inktense and maybe the Neocolor. I don't like to have too many options out. Because too many things, too many options almost causes more of a supply paralysis. I like to do some color tests and think, here's the little collection of colors I think I'm going to play with. Then I will put everything else away. That's not saying that I won't pull it back out, I certainly could. I just looked over. Let me talk about one more thing that's water-soluble. But I'm going to pick out the few colors that I love and I'm saying, here's what we're going for. For these, I actually am going to go with the five little Neocolor crayons. I can go through and tell you what these colors. I've got Shiraz, iron blue, mustard. It does look like a dirty mustard, doesn't it? Red violet, sienna gold, felt green, baked earth, leaf green. As I was making color swatches thinking, "I like that. " And I would put it to the side. As far as the Neocolors, this one is that [inaudible] green. I've got raw sienna out. This one is the Payne's gray, olive, and pink. Then I'm just going to put everything else away. That doesn't mean I'm not going to pull something else out. But that's the crayons and pencils that are water-soluble that I'm going to play with today. The other water-soluble thing that I just looked over, my very favorite item. This is one of my very favorite items that I own because I just love to look over here at the colors. It's just like the prettiest thing. I love to take pictures of it. I love to use the pastels and that's what these are, soft pastels. These are not the oil pastels, these are the soft chalk pastels. I like them because they are also water-soluble. They're super-duper, heavy pigmented. We can blend and play with these quite easily. These are super messy so they will get on your fingers. One of my favorite things to have in my art room now are these piece of collage, are these microfiber cleaning cloths because I can just do my fingers like that and they're clean, rather than having to go wash my hands when I'm right in the middle of something important. But these, let's just see how that differs, how intense the color is. It's very chalky in the way it looks. Smooth and very elegant, just works so nicely. You're not going to have those draw lines like we had over here with the charcoal. These are going to blend right into some type of color with fairly intense pigment. That's a really nice choice. Also, if you have some of these pastels, they are beautifully water-soluble. Let's say I'm not going to use these because I certainly might pull these back out in the mark-making part of my project. But for the moment, they're going to the side. I'm going to play in this little collection of pencils that I've pulled to the side, played with over here and thought, "Yes, I like these." We'll just start there. 5. Color Experiments: [MUSIC] The next thing that I want to determine is after I get some colors that I've played with and I like having a piece of graphite handy that can be a pencil. It can be this great big piece of graphite that I have, something like that. I only have it because it came in an art box. [LAUGHTER] The sketch box subscription that I get stuff from and I'm like, I like this fun little piece of graphite, so I do like to use that. I do have some pencils over here. I've got mechanical pencil because I like to use graphite and a lot of stuff. I've got a Posca pen and I've got some acrylic inks. My goal is to create a piece with water-soluble something crayon or ink tints and use some of these fun acrylic inks to give me a little bit of a difference in texture and the way the color works, because these will be a little more opaque than my water-soluble items are and they'll give me some nice contrast I think and then I also thought metallic. I'm always thinking metallic. One of my favorite metallic acrylic paints is this pasty stuff [LAUGHTER] that I use a lot in some several classes but I'm going to use this acrylic Liquitex ink. I'm going to be playing with the inks and pencils or crayons. We're just going to show you what my intention here is as I move to a bigger project. Let's take a look at this. I'm just going to pick out say, these three and color on and just play. This is my moment to decide for a bigger piece. Was this what I had in mind? Is this what I want to try out? I'm going to color these three on here. This is the way you can work out before you get into larger pieces and better-quality papers. I like doing this stuff in my sketchbook. I'm going to just dip my brush and activate each color without having extra color in the brush. I don't want to activate the blue with my brush full of the green. I'm going to go through and activate these and then I want some of it to blend. I want there to be enough water on here to let them mesh together and then I'm going to drop some acrylic ink on it and then see because, in my mind, that's the project I want to play with and create. Let's just see how that works out for us. That's what I want you to do. I want you to pull a big little collection of your supplies and think. Today I'm going to work with these crayons, these colors and what, let's see what we can create and that's the goal. I'm adding a little more water on some of this. It gives it more of a translucent color. It's also helping some of this color blend. One thing I did not mention as we were colors watching you can use these wet or dry if I dipped this pencil into water or into a water spot here, I can now get marks that are super intense while this is wet, which is pretty cool. Still playing in color here. Thinking and the reason why I'm color swatching a little bit larger ones, I think, I like these. Because now I want to do some inks and here and let them do their thing. They spread out. Maybe they'll blend, maybe I'll come back and add a drop of water because I really want these to balloon out nicely with that watercolor and just see what it's going to do. Look at that. Let's come back. This was warm gray by Amsterdam. This one is antelope brown by FW. This is a good way too to see, do you even like the colors that you're planning on doing a larger piece in? This is burnt umber. Or did you like one color but maybe you didn't like another color you tried, which one's going to really work out best? It's come back with some warm gray. It's a good way to experiment with how much ink and got some white could come back with some water. These will activate, move around while they're wet and then once they're dry, they're pretty set. They're not going to continue to re-wet like the crayons and stuff will. That, I want to actually let dry. I could also consider at this point dragging something through and making the colors blend. This is just a brush I got at the art store that has [LAUGHTER] a little final end on it. I do like looking for different art-making tools at the art store. It's a good time to experiment here while these things are wet, just to see what is this going to do if I drag something through it, look how pretty that is. Then we want to let that dry and think, did I like everything that did? Do I need to do another one or something bigger? I can also go ahead and add in some gold or silver just to let them spread out and see what they do. Look at that. Then once I'm done with this larger color swatch of things I've experimented with, now's the time to let it dry and then look at it and think, did I like the antelope brown in there or was that the wrong choice? Then if that was the wrong choice and the burnt umber then pull that out like the white, the warm gray, the burnt umber and the gold. I feel like I'm liking all that. The antelope is questionable. For the next piece that I do a larger piece or maybe as I continue this experimenting series, maybe smaller pieces like this. I like to do several different colorways that are smaller. As I'm doing that then maybe I'm going to just narrow it down to the colors that I actually loved and maybe do some mark-making and finishing up and turning that color swatch into a finished piece of something. But I feel like this little mark-making, these three neon colors, the warm gray, the white, the burnt umber and the gold is a winner. I'm going to pull those aside to be a collection for a larger piece. I'm going to go back and play with some of these other ones that I have and the ink tints. We'll do some smaller pieces to narrow down what we want to do for our larger piece. Experiment a little bit more with these smaller pieces. But I'm going to work outside of sketchbook because I want to do several at a time. This one's almost dry. I know that I really loved the colors in here. Do I love this pretty blue that is sparkling here on the edge that's peeking through? I also love this random heart that has ended up right in the middle of this and I'm like, the way that it comes from I love it. [LAUGHTER] What we going to do is work on some other just little pieces of paper. These are some random watercolor postcards that I have that came in my little sketch box subscription. These are the [inaudible] 105-pound paper. This is a tiny bit lighter-weight cold press. Then the sketchbook paper. The sketchbook is cold press 110 pound. When we get to our larger pieces, we'll be using 140-pound weight watercolor paper. But I want to be able to work on several of these and so what you could do if you don't just happen to have random postcards [LAUGHTER]. I'm using what I have. I'm trying to encourage you to use what you have. Some of what I have is going to be randomly strange because I get that art box subscription. I'm trying to use the different things that they send and experiment. This came several months ago. If you don't have random postcards, just cut up a piece of watercolor paper. Cold press, hundred 110 pounds, 140 pounds, doesn't matter and just have them so that you can then do several of these and be able to set one to the side and let it dry while you're working on some of the others. If you think that this is going to be a piece that you're going to dearly love when you're done then you might, on the side, because I actually do dearly love this. I'm going to go ahead and do a little color swatch thing here on the side and just let myself know. Look, here's the stuff we used in this and once it's dry, I can come back with a pencil under each one of these and write what it was. I probably should have put this in that last color swatching video, but that's okay. Better late than never. Each item that I've put in there, I've gone ahead and just done a little color swatch. We'll let that dry and then I can just come right in here with a pencil and just write underneath that what that was. I just stuck my finger in that, so be careful not to do that because it's still slightly wet right there. That's why I want to work on these. Some of this gets thick when we add in the acrylic paints. I want to be able to just set that to the side and let it dry. That's what I'm going to do if I really truly love it on the back when it's dry or on the end, we can write down what that was, which is really convenient in a sketch book. If you have several sketchbooks, work in several at the same time so you can set them off to the side and dry. But I want to set these out of my way as I'm doing them. Let's just pick a few of these. I know one project might be those neo color crayons, but I want one of the projects to be some of these ink tint pencils. Let's go ahead and play with some of these colors. The way that you draw this on here it's going to determine how well these blend. If you're doing it on the side like cryon and making some scribbles and keeping your touch fairly light, your lines will blend really good. If you're coming down really hard, making really deep lines on the paper, you're probably going to end up not being able to scrub those out with any water. I'm just starting out here, ink tents, shiraz, and mustard because I think I'm going to like these colors based on the little color swatches that I did here on that page before, that's still it's dry but the one under it's wet. But these first color swatches that I did, that very top one here, I like those colors. Let's see what we can get if we go a little larger. I also like in our sample piece here, the blue that shines outside of the browns and yellows that we ended up with. I might play with those colors too. But let's start with this one and then just see what we get as we blend them. Again, I'm putting my brush in the water and I'm just going to activate each color separately and then add some extra water to really blend it in and let them mix. I've got two things, a water over here. Let me just pull the clean on out because that one's dirty. See after I've let that sit for a second, now they really start to get exciting. I really want to see these blend because that transition between this yummy mustard color and that pretty maroonish color is what I'm hoping to really get out of that. Now while this is still good and wet, I'm going to go ahead and dip some inks in. I want the inks to have as much wet as they can because then they drop out like dropping in some watercolor. If you don't want to use acrylic ink and you'd rather use, say, watercolor, you could drop in some watercolor here too. Then I'm just going to spread this a little bit with some extra water. This is warm gray. I like warm gray. I've got my paint on my fingers, so I'm just going to wipe that off. What else might we want to mix in there just to experiment? I really like the gold, so we might put the gold. I also have tons of colors over here. Look at this. This is a pretty purple lake. Does this look great? I don't know. That's why I like doing these a little bit larger color studies because I don't know what this is going to end up like. Let's go ahead and just play. I'm not thinking too hard about composition. I'm trying to just drop these in. These are going to be wet. They're going to move around. I might even let these swish on my paper and then set them to the side and let them do their thing. I do like this gold, so I might just swish some of this gold in there. I liked how it made a heart on this piece over here. There's no way that I could have duplicated that again, but it was amazing how it just naturally did that. I'm just taking a little bit of water on my brush and letting that separate out. I'm just going to have to set that to the side and let it dry and do its thing. I might just occasionally come and wash these colors and let him just see what they're going to do. Let's see, let's try these. I don't know if I'm not, we'll see. Leaf green, iron blue, and some sienna gold. If say for instance, I really loved that blue that's peeking out on our piece. It's over here. It's sitting in the corner drying. There's nothing saying that I can't mix these. If I'm loving, for instance, that touch of blue, so much that we got out of here this fellow silane green, then I can come back and mix these. There's nothing saying you got to stick to one type of crayon or pencil in your work. Let me set these right here, so I know what I used. We'll set these over here and let them do their thing. Let's just see, let's just activate these and see what we got. I'm just dipping into clean the brush off a little, and get some fresh water before I dip back on another color. Blue and green and pink and orange tend to be some of my favorite colors that I go to. I'm trying a little bit to step outside my own comfort zone. But as I'm looking at these and they're mixing, it looks like blue-green. [LAUGHTER] Let's just dip some other colors in here. This is all of the green. I don't know if we'll like it or not, but look at that. That just spread out. Look what that just did. [LAUGHTER] That just went crazy. [LAUGHTER] Maybe some warm gray on there just to separate those out, maybe some silver. Then we'll set this to the side and let it dry. I really like on these wet mediums, letting them do what they're going to do, and just seeing when you're done what you got. That's pretty fun. I'm going to move this silver a little bit, I don't want it to sit as a dot quite yet. I just move that around a little, liking that. Maybe I'll move this. I don't want just to be a gigantic dot right here, I don't think. Let's just look at that with a little bit, look how pretty that is. We're going to set this one to the side. [MUSIC] 6. A Few More Color Experiments: [MUSIC] You see why this is super important, which I'm not doing because I'm filming to stop and say here's the colors I used in these. Because when we get to the bigger ones, we're going to think, I wonder what we used in that. [LAUGHTER] It was something we really loved. I think that I want to try pink and orange, which I have not pulled out. So I haven't tried those yet, but I'm going to pull out some other color here from our little color palette and just see, I really think I'm going to like this color. Let's just say we get mixing pink and red and orange and whatever. Because that is one of my go-to color palettes and I feel fine, I feel comfortable in that color range. A lot of times I'm surprised sometimes with what I end up with, and I'm like, oh, look at this. [LAUGHTER] All right, so let's see what we got here. See how fun these are, just scribbling on here and then doing their thing. I like doing these because when it's dry, we can come back and add mark-making and really make things, "Oh, look at that color." Really make it look like a piece of art. We've got our mark-making in our little additional things that we add at the end, that's my favorite part and if you get some of this on your brush, we can add some splatters. Look at that. Okay, so let this do its thing, I want to move this one a little bit more. Let's come back in here. I like the gray. I'm going to use the warm gray just is what it is. Let's see what we can get that to do. I like it because it blends in. It's not going to stand out a whole lot, but it just looks different. All right, let's see what else we got over here. I want pink and orange, or red or something like that. Let's see, what is this? This one is crimson, look at crimson. This is a FW color. Oh, that one had a dropper that dropped right on our piece. This is why we do samples. Because if that were on a great big piece of art that I just did, I would've been very, very upset. I'm getting a lot of that off. Glad that did that because we can talk about it. [LAUGHTER] Let's just go ahead and blend that in some easy-to-fix, but you want to know what your supplies are going to do? Woah, way too much. You want to know what your supplies are going to do before you get to this day, but the stage of your big art. Okay, so FW is have a dropper in them, and these Liquitex ones don't. We just went insane with the gray on this dropper, but if we move this around and we let this dry and we come back and we do some mark-making, I think we'll be okay. Let's just let that do its thing. [LAUGHTER] That might be an oopsies who knows, but this is the time to discover those oopsies. Let's try this again and see because it looked different now that hopefully, we don't have a great big thing like that. You might spread these out a little. Again, I'm coming in from the side, I don't want to be super sharp, I don't want it to be very heavy. I want to be able to activate it and it do its thing without digging into the paper really. All right, let's come back in a little swash some of this color. Let these do some blending now and just see what are we going to get here. All right, let's try this again. Can I add a little water in that? Let it do its thing. Let's try this color without a big blob. Because I like that it's a little darker than the other colors I have on here so it gives it a kind of a chance to be the contrast maybe. I also like the silver. I guess it does have a stopper. It does work with the little dropper. I just mind must just have been frozen up. Let's put some silver on here and let the silver do its thing. You'll notice I'm being random. I'm not worried about composition at the moment. These are my play pieces. This is where I'm figuring out what's going to work, what's not going to work, what's going to do something so weird that I'm like, oh, I didn't expect that. This is where we're discovering that. This is my little mermaid-looking thing I got at the art store. This is by Jane Davenport by the way, and it's a little setup and I think I got several. This is my favorite one but if you don't have something like this to do mark-making, you can use a fork. I want to drag some of this color while it's still wet because that was really pretty on my sample piece over here. I might even come back on some of these that are drying out some and drag the wet color out into the piece. Because how cool is that like this one? Dragging that out into the yellow, really changed some stuff here. Let's do that. Let's do that over here too. Let's do this green one. I had too much water. Let's go ahead. I like what that's doing in there. This one, we're going to have to let this one dry but look what dragging through does. I like this part right here. [LAUGHTER] You can see that, but right there, look what that just did. That's really cool. If we did too much, that might be and once this is dry, there's nothing saying that we can't come back in and add some color on top of here. Now that we've got that doing its little spread out thing there, maybe now, after we've let that dry a little, this is why we use these to experiment so that we can say stuff like this, like what can it do if I add a little more color in here or if I do this or I do that, let that do its thing. I don't have a blue piece here. I mean, I've got green over here, but I don't know. Do I want to play with maybe the Payne's gray, you got Payne's gray Neil color crayon. Maybe play with this Payne's gray and then maybe pick a blue, like I like this cobalt. Let's see what these are. I've got peacock blue and bright blue. Let's try this peacock. I mean, if we're thinking peacock, I'm thinking blue and green again, but I'm trying to resist [LAUGHTER] doing everything in blue and green. But look at this fun color. This is a little bit of a teal. Let me pull this out here. We've got, oh, it is teal green. There we go, so teal that says peacock. Let's see what we get if we throw in a little of that and then will activate these. Again, I'm trying to activate each color individually, but I did mix these in with each other. We'll just see what we get. Here, it looks like a peacock, doesn't it? [LAUGHTER] The Payne's gray is a bluish color. It's a bluish-gray. That's fun. I think I'm going to go ahead through in some of the gray. I want to use the warm gray in my pieces, that's why I'm playing with it more. This has some air bubbles that I want the air bubbles in there. We might throw in antelope brown. Let's just throw in something crazy just to see, [LAUGHTER] what do we got. light green, which is a crazy color. Which was also thick, so let's just spread that around. I need to go through and dip all these out just to make sure I'm not going to be surprised on a big piece but again, these samples are the reason why we're doing this. So that we figure out what are the supplies do and before we get to something that's really important. This is really pretty and I'm thinking silver might be pretty in there, so let's do a couple of drops of silver, we'll just spread those out a little bit. I like things that shimmer when the light hits it. Like just a little unexpected, delightful thing that happens. [MUSIC] 7. Adding Interest With Mark Making: These are pretty dry. I did go back on the really super thick things as paint, take just a paper towel and dap on there to speed stuff up for myself on color swatches. But if this were a big piece that I were doing that I wanted to keep and really let its colors do what they were going to do, I wouldn't do that. I'd go ahead and just walk away, eat dinner, and see what it is that I want to end up with. I really like the colors in here. I like these colors. This one is not my favorite. It's the one with the big splotch of gray on it. I know that if I overdo the gray, I'm not going to like it. That's a very interesting experiment with that one. This one, I don't know. It's just not talking to me with the colors. It is the real pretty blue and green and we can certainly make something out of it, but for today's feeling for myself, I'm not feeling it, so don't feel like that's going to be my big piece. I really like these three, and my original sampler over here from our color swatching section. That's our choices today. Then I want to experiment with some mark-making just to look at it and talk about it. I like Posca pens for mark-making. I like pieces of graphite. I have a mechanical pencil that I love to mark-make with. You could also use any kind of colored pencil. You could use your Inktense pencils, which is the perfect time to come back in now and really see if you want to use any of these to stand out. You could come back and add more of a metallic if you think your metallic got lost, now's the time to add some metallic in there. We could come back in here with some black. I like using India ink for black. It's not water-soluble, but it is a nice way to at the end to give some extra oomph to a piece. Let's just start with this first one. I love how the colors came out. I want to come back in and just start adding some of my favorite marks and see, what can we end up with? I particularly like dots. I might just come back in here with some dot details. Then I like lines, so I'll come back in here, maybe with the Inktense pencil or graphite and put some lines in here maybe. Some of this maybe you're not going to see until you get close up and then you're like, look at that interesting whatever that is that's going on in there, because this right here, super-duper interesting. As you get closer, look at those colors that are in there, that little tinge of almost that blue look that ended up coming through with the way the color is mixed? Super beautiful. I can also just come back in here with one of the colors that are in here, it don't have to be the exact one that we use, but it could be something similar and just do some additional marks or lines that aren't like white. It's not so contrasty that you're thinking, but it is a nice little addition in there that's like, what's that interesting thing going on in there? Then you come closer for a look. That's not super, it's very subtle, It's not in your face, but as you get closer, you're like, look at that. I like that. I can also come back in here with a blue if I wanted to. This is the peacock blue. If I wanted to just put some blue in here, I could come back in here and do a little blue. Keep in mind, these are water-soluble. If you put the blue in and you think too much, we can come back in and soften it with water and really get that to do some blending. That's what I like about these water-soluble things. We can come back in and make these do something a little bit different, you don't have to stay that line, and really blend that in. If I just wanted a little taste of that color, which I did, I just wanted to taste of it, now I got a little taste without it being super crazy. We can come back in here with some little dots in this color, dots don't have to be white and black. They can be the color of that we were using or something similar. We come back in here, just add some other little details on top of what we've got. It's really with the success of little abstracts like this is all about the layers. Now, here, I put into a little bit of a wet. You can see the difference when I was wet versus one I was dry. A little bit of difference there in your mark-making. If I were to wet this pencil, just dip it in your water and wet it, I'd get a different look than I get when I get dry. I want you to experiment with your water-soluble items. Experiment with it being wet, experiment with it being dry. I'm telling you, one of my very favorite still, I think it's going to be this one. That might be my big piece, which not every piece of art I do is successful. Well, most of them are not successful in my mind. I don't have to be. The reason why you do something like this is so that you discover new supplies, you figure out what they do. You just decide, do I like this? Is it working out for me? Do I like the way things blend? This is how you figure out what your favorite supplies and your favorite marks. It's how you you get into what is your style, because you've taken the time to do things like this and create a lot of bad art to the point where you're like, this is the colors I like, this is the marks that I like, let me narrow this down to the tools that I love and see what I can create. There's a reason why I know that I like this big piece of graphite, because I've used it enough to be like, I like that thing. There's a reason why I like little Posca pens because I played with them so much that I'm like, I love a Posca pen just for some extra marks at the end. Until you play with these things, you're not going to know how they work, how they blend in with other things, whether you're going to love it or hate it, or think, what was I thinking. I don't know, that's pretty cool right there. Look at that one. I'm liking the green. Even though really be perfect if that didn't appear on there, and the piece of paint that I put accidentally, but this right here, I love that. We also have the pink. Again, I'm just experimenting with different supplies. I might dip the pink in the water and see how does that change up my mark when I mark on there. It's more intense. It's a lot heavier in the application. As the water wears off, I see how the dry pencil is a lot less heavy handed as the wet pencil. That's very interesting. Look at that. I do like playing with these wet. It's pretty cool. It's like watercolor in a stick. Look how fine. See if that a lot of focus on it for us. Look how fine that turned out? I might just come back with this and make some marks. What does that mark look like if the pencil is wet? See, they're completely different look. Look how that changed from here to here, wet versus dry. Big difference there on how that pencil operated for us. I love that. There we go. I could come back in here add some of my little signature things, maybe some dots. Super fun. I think in the end, now that I have all my stuff figured out here, this one, I did not add marks and stuff too because as I was playing, it was still wet, but let's go back to our original piece and maybe just come in here with a few lines and dots and see, how does this piece, this might be my very favorite piece out of the whole class. My little sample is not dry, that's okay. Let me get where I was going to write my colors. I didn't realize I still had that was wet. This over here is just beautiful. I love this right here. Look at that. I almost wish, I'll probably do, never mind. I'm just thinking a gold pencil, but I don't want to put any extra gold in there. I like what it's doing. I'm just going to add a few little marks in here, my graphite. Look how pretty this is? Maybe some lines would be fine. Really subtle, I don't want it to be in there so much that you're like, what the heck? Look how pretty that is? Really pretty. Now that we have tried several different colorways, I do love this one. I love this pink and orange. I love this yellow and burgundy, blue and green. Then this one that's more neutral, this is the one where I use these blue and green and gold and some inks. I really think that for today my large project is going to be this colorway. This is very interesting because I did a lot of different colorways here, and I figured out that this one is not my favorite. If I get too much of that gray in there, it just ends up blah, like a little piece of poopie there. Then in this one, the colors are a little brighter, a little more neon green. On another day that might be my favorite, but on today, I'm thinking more of this muted color palette is the right way to go. I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't done all of these yummy little samples. I'm going to do the larger piece, I believe, in these colors with the gray, the burnt umber, I got some white here if I need it. I could even dab a purple in there if I wanted, but I really do like what it's doing. I might stick with those. Then I might use my Posca pen, my graphite, and maybe an Inktense or two pencil if I want to just come back with some other details and to add colors in. Then I've got some mark-making tools and we're ready and set to move on to our next larger project. I hope you enjoyed a little look at just experimenting and playing in colors and seeing which one do we like the best and which one might we now want to do a larger project in after we have played and experimented and figured out what our colors do and what's our favorite ones. All right. Let's go on to the big project. 8. Creating A Larger Piece: [MUSIC] In this project, we're going to do a larger piece based on our little color samples. I've got the little samples that I did yesterday, my color experiments, and then do these look so good. Now that they're actually dry and you can take in the details. My favorite one is still that first one that I did in my sketchbook. I'm going to play with these colors. I believe they were these neo color two crayons and then I had the burnt umber, the white, and the warm gray in these inks. Then I also had this gold and so we're going to use those. I've got a little bit bigger paintbrush that I'm going to be using to do water with and my same mark-making tools that I've used in these samples. I've got them all sitting over here to the side. Let's just move this. I'm working on a nine-inch by 12-inch piece of the watercolor cold press paper. This is the arches paper that I have and I'm just using it because I like it. I like that it's 100 percent cotton. The materials do work a little different on the better-quality papers. But practice and play until you get to the point where you're willing to spend on the better paper. Start off with student grade papers and your sketchbook and whatever it is that you happen to have, that's just perfectly fine. I've taped my piece of paper down to just a piece of cardboard because part of what makes this so beautiful is that we let this dry naturally. I wasn't applying a heat gun to it. I was letting all that water move around and blend and do its thing without forcing it and when you use a heat gun, I don't know if things are just aren't as pretty, it goes too fast, you get impatient and you don't let those colors seep around and do what they're going to do. I'm going to try my best to not do that. I think the other color that I had on that one that I decided wasn't my favorite was the antelope in that ink. But now I'm looking at it, thinking maybe I did like that antelope. I might dig the antelope out in my inks from over here and also have some black India ink just in case I decide that I want some black touches. Now we've got our colors. On this piece I am thinking of composition and color and where do I want the colors to be. I actually want there to be a nice white border around the finished piece. That's why I taped it down. So I'm looking at my original piece and I'm thinking, what did I love the most about this? I really love these blue tinges. Those were a particular favorite. I like the shiny bits that I got from the metallic, that was a real favorite. I love this area right here and how that whatever that toning is, it's just so beautiful. I like how your eye moves around. We did have like a little darker focus area in there. I'm just looking, what way do I want to lay the colors down? How do I want it to be when I'm done? What did you not like about the piece that you're starting from? To be honest, I love everything about this piece. That's why it's my favorite. I like the blue being in this lower area and I'm going to work with bigger splashes of color and a bigger paintbrush in my water and that way, I have enlarged the piece that I'm working from. Just scale-wise to bump that up and then the green. You can blend these if one of these colors is not exactly right, and you've got a couple of crayon colors, you can color one color right on top of the other color and blend it. I'm putting colors beside each other because I do like how that turned out yesterday. But you can put colors on top of each other just like paint and blend them. I have this throughout the center and just see what we get. A piece of crayon flaked off, let's move that. Let's just start here. We can add more crayon if we want. I've got a great big paintbrush. I've got my acrylic inks up here because I like adding the ink on when it was partially still wet. Just going to go through here and activate each color separately. I am dipping it in my water, as I'm going to give me a fresh clean brush. One thing too, about this different paper than my sketchbook, this paper has more texture. It's cold-pressed steel, but it's a heavier-weight paper. It has more texture. It will work a little different than my sketchbook. We'll just know that right up front, but I'm still going to just go back, activate the colors, let them blend the edges and just see what can we get. I love this big moppy paintbrush. These Neptune brushes by Princeton are super nice. This one is a number 4 that I'm using on this larger piece of paper. [MUSIC] It is quite a bit of water I've got going on here. It's going to go through and dip some of my gray while I've got all that water to do its thing and just see. Then I'll go through and move that around some with my brush. I might add a little white on here because I remember using a little white here and there. I should look that up. That's the thing with these acrylic inks, they separate and you need to shake them when you're starting. What I really love about the way they start to blend, is they get different patterns and textures and the paint breaks up in different ways, in the middle of your piece, that's very interesting. It adds really just a dynamic that I don't get with a lot of other different paints. If we look in this piece here, we just get some blending and texture that pretty darn cool. I actually posted my little sample on Instagram. Just a little video saying, look what I'm working on today and somebody was like, that's so beautiful. Was that some of your own handmade watercolor paints that you used? I was like, looks does people think it looks like beautiful handmade watercolors? I thought that was pretty darn cool. I could say, no, it's not. I'm using neo-color crayons and acrylic ink. It was fun to be able to say it was something a little different. That is definitely not what I wanted. That was a whole lot of brown there. I'm just going to see what we can do to spread that out some. That's part of the fun at some of these two, it's very serendipitous what are you going to end up with? [MUSIC] If you get some drips outside, that's okay. You could actually pick up some of this and do a few drips on purpose just to see, in the end, did you like that. Maybe you do and maybe you don't. Part of what I really loved was running my little textured comb through part of these. Let's just do that. It moved to the color. It really changed stuff around when I did that on my original little piece. Then I also liked bits of gold in here and then after it's dry, we can come back in with marks and stuff like that. One of my favorite bits about the gold in our original inspiration piece was one of these little bits of gold made of heart. I was like, it's a little surprise in there. I loved that. It's like my favorite part of that whole piece was that yummy little surprise. Just trying to tap in this a little bit with the brush to make these little bits of gold do something else. I don't want it to sit there as a dot. I wanted to be some movement in there. That's pretty darn cool. Is it going to be our favorite? I don't know. It's at this point that I always doubt everything. Am I going to love it? I'm not going to hate it. Is it going to do what I wanted? There's no telling. But that's the magic bubble in here. That's the magic of watercolor pieces. Something else we get a too is take the end of our brush and we could draw through some of our pieces and make a design, look at that. That's some of the magic of water , water paints, water-soluble, whatever's is what you're going to end up when it's dry, it looks nothing at all like it does when it's wet. I can't wait to see what this little bunch of paint looks like because as it's wet, those colors are really beautiful. At this point, I'm going to stop because I could keep adding stuff to it completely in my mind, ruin it and I'm just going to let this sit to the side and do its thing. You have to resist overwork in the piece. Add your colors, set it to the side, pick up another project and do something else. That way, you can let this stuff do its thing and see what you get later. We're going to set it to the side. I'm going to resist heat drying it and everything and let it do its natural thing and then we'll see what we got. [MUSIC] 9. Adding Interest And Marks: [MUSIC] This is 98 percent dry I'll call it [LAUGHTER] I went to took a little break and let it dry and do its thing. Then I will admit that they were just a little puddle of paint that just live there and because I was filming, I didn't want to wait till tomorrow to come back and film the next part of what I want to do on this so I took a tissue and very gently took the little edges and just sopped up some of the extra paint. Because when you put that much water, it's going to buckle the paper a little bit and then the paint is going to pull on one spot. If you have that happen, just take a tissue and take the edges and just gently sop up the paint. My goal wasn't to dab the tissue on the piece, it was just to tap it down a little bit so that the tissue sop that paint without leaving lots of marks or crinkles or whatever it is texture on that tissue. Now I did that and then I'll let it dry a little further. If you end up with buckled watercolor paper, it's not a big deal. I just pile. I put a piece of wax paper on top of my art. When it's dry let it sit under some big heavy books for a couple of days and it flattens back out. Just a little tip on that. Look how pretty this is. This section right here is so beautiful. I love it. When I'm looking at it, I'm almost thinking, does it look better one direction versus the other? I'm almost feeling this right here. I also in my mind, I don't love the drips so I do leave myself and open on something like this. I could cut this as a square, maybe even decal the edges so if I get to the end and I think, yes, let's cut this [LAUGHTER] then we'll do that. Then we can use it as a floating piece of art in a frame, which I know I've showed you this before, but I love art that floats in a frame and that's what that looks like. I always leave the option open to cut apart. Even though in our next project we'll be cutting up a big piece of art into little pieces also reserve the fact that I might cut up something like this. Now we just need to decide what other marks do we want. I'm thinking that maybe I love it this way, I might go ahead and work on it this direction. Some of the mark just might be a little graphite, just some scribbles. Anything that happens to be your favorite mark-making techniques, maybe I want some dots or some lines or some extra texture in here. Maybe I want some pastels. This is a chance to come in with some other art supplies that you may have. Even though I did not mention these in the supply video, this would be an instance where you're thinking, what do I have that I can now put on top of this, or do you love it like it is because sometimes when you're done, you're going to love what you got without adding anything else to it. Don't be afraid to stop. I see so many people think, I'm afraid to go forward because I'm afraid to mess something up. Well, on the reverse they're afraid to [LAUGHTER] go too far. Afraid they're going to mess it up. Just look at it and think, is this finished? Does it need more stuff? I like stuff so let's just go ahead and keep going. I'm not going to be afraid of it. I'm not going to stop and think, it just never looks finished and be unhappy with it. I'm going to go ahead and we'll just add some stuff in here. Because on our little sample pieces, there's pretty things in as you get closer that makes it look interesting. Don't be afraid to move forward because you think you're going to mess it up and don't be afraid to cut stuff up and make it better. It's just art. You can come back and do it again. If you just can't get past that paralysis, set the piece to the side, look at it and you'll get to the point one day where you're thinking, okay, I'm ready to now do the next step on this piece of art. Not all art is finished in one session. I tend to like to finish things in one session because I don't come back to stuff. But truly things that you work on and you love, look how pretty that is, and you might want to take some time, think about things, let it soak in. You don't have to be in a hurry with this stuff. The goal was not to sit at your table and work as fast as you can and then get mad when something don't workout, which I'm speaking from my own experience here, I've sat at my art table so many times and gotten so frustrated and got ****** [LAUGHTER] I'm mad for the rest of the day. Now, I try to do methods that don't do that to me. In looking at something like this, I'm already thinking in my mind, I feel like I'm going to cut this up and I don't worry about that. Let's add some crayon in here and maybe this color, I like these little white dots though. I'm just adding in details which maybe you won't see till you get up close like that right there, those lines, you may not see those until you write up looking at it and you're taking in the details and you're like, look at that little extra whatever right in there that we just added. It's not something that's super hop out at you and slap you in the face but it's very interesting. If you get up and you see that, if you get real close, these are little surprises that are rewards [LAUGHTER] Like, look at this fun little thing they left in here for me to find. That's why I like these neon color crayons and the pencils. They are amazing wet. That looks like we played with custom watercolors almost. Then they're amazing dry. They're like the most versatile tools that you work with [MUSIC] Now if you're working with stuff that smears like chalk pastels then be real careful putting your hand on your piece of art and then smearing that pastel. Men, I do that too much [LAUGHTER] because I like pastels and then I forget that they're on there or I don't notice where my hand is sitting. But so far everything on here is not picking up on my hands, so I'm not worried about it [MUSIC] I need a vote. What else does this need? Does this need a pop of black? Maybe this needs a pop of black like some lines or something to give it some super extra contrast. Look at that. Now see, this is a moment where you might be thinking, that's scary. It is scary. But at the same time it wasn't too bad. It gave us a little bit of something in there. We might ask, don't drop it [LAUGHTER] Oh my goodness. This is turning out to be my favorite piece and I'm dropping stuff on it. I do like the little bit of some splatter that I got. There we go. Yes, I like the splatter. It's hard work though, one of the container here but look at that. See, if I've been afraid of the black, I wouldn't have got this pretty splatter. Look how pretty that splatter is on there, gives us a little tiny bit of some contrast. It gives our eyes something to think about and move around. Look how pretty that is. Play, play, play. Here's your chance to add color. Here's your chance to sneak in something that maybe didn't get in as much as you wanted. Maybe if I didn't get this blue in enough, I could come back in and add some in. I do like that, blue peeking out at the edges. I love that. This is our chance to really decorate and add but I'm really feeling this right here with that bit of mark-making so I'm going to let the black ink dry. I don't want to ruin that. Then maybe take the tape off and I may get a piece of mark board and just mark this visually and see, do I like it better cropped in? We might, we'll see. Let's let this thing dry and I'll be back. I've taken my tape off. It is the black is dry. I have a piece of mat here just in a five by seven size that I got at the craft store to look and see. I might go and like that framed up, saying that size is that doing everything that I'd like it to do. Do I want to cut this piece up so that it's got the decal tone edges on it. That would be extremely pretty. This just lets me take away the white if I don't like the speckles, I'm not sure that I like it as a circular blob formation. But if I pull that in to this formation, all of a sudden, it's really, really beautiful. Now I can see that maybe I want something right here in the center part and I have this acrylic gold paste and you can use any gold paint. But I think what I'm going to do is put some of this gold paste right up here [LAUGHTER] Another moment when you're like, did I just ruin it [LAUGHTER] I'm going to get a palette knife. I am going to just do a little spread here of that gold. I add in with the other gold that we've already got going on. Look how pretty that is. Men, I just love this stuff. It's basically just a gold acrylic paste I got in my art subscription box. But look at that. Now, we've got something right there in the middle that draws the eye that's at the one-third and then as the light hits it, it gives us a sparkle. You could do that with cheap acrylic paint. I've certainly got several of those because I like metallics. This is a cheap craft paint and it would do the exact same thing. I'm just using that because I have it and it's my favorite [LAUGHTER] But look how beautiful that is. I think I am going to let this dry and then tackle these edges and see what that finished piece looks like because I think as a square that would be really pretty framed like the piece I showed you. We're going to let that dry and I'll be back [MUSIC] 10. Adding A Deckled Edge: [MUSIC] This is dry and I'm just eyeballing like where I really want this. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to deckle the edges. I've got a metal ruler here and I want to flip it on the back to tear because I want it to look like a natural tear rather than the page looking torn because, let me grab a piece of paper here just to show you the difference. If you have a piece that you're tearing up, like this way, you end up with this line and the paper torn on the back side of that. Whereas if we had flipped it over and did that tear, you don't have the line and the paper now has a more natural edge to it than it did on this side. I want to tear it from the back so that the front side looks like this. That's basically how I do it. I put the metal ruler down, I hold really tight, and I pull the half that I'm throwing away. I pull that half. Then when I flip that over, look how beautiful that edge is. That's what I want. It will have color on it, but that's okay because we can frame it in that float framey thing. I say color because I'm not tearing it out here, I'm tearing it into a rectangle like this right here. I'm just going to eyeball it. It's not a huge deal if it's exact, but I do want it close to what I'm thinking. If I measure this, here we go. I'm just going to flip it and measure it. That's about two and a quarter from that side. Then I'll put this back on and measure it again. Let's say two and a quarter. I'm just going to eyeball it. I want it to be about right here. Really even one line over because that's like a little, let's just move that one line over. Because of the word, that ruler ends there. I even have a bigger ruler which I might use for this piece of paper because it's longer than 12 inches. Now I can align the whole thing up. Then I've also had people say measure from the front, put a little hole through the paper. Then you can use that hole as your guide as you're on the backside. I've done that before too, and that works out fine. Look at that. See we get that pretty edge on there. I like that a lot. Let's just go ahead and use this as our guide again. We are just a hair less than two and a quarter, so let's just go ahead and go for that. I'll just mark these again. If it's exact, it's not a big deal. I do want it to be straight, but it doesn't really matter. I'm not trying to end up with a specific size piece of art. If I'm a little off, it's not a gigantic deal because when I get it framed at the framer, she'll center wherever I want it. There we go. Yeah. Look how pretty that is turning out. Let's see. I like it right about there. I don't mind if there's a little white at the bottom because there's a little white at the top, that'll pull that in. That is just over 3.5, is that 3.5 or how long is it? Sorry, just over two and three-quarters. See, measure twice, cut once. Even with your art [LAUGHTER]. My goodness. I know you think I'm crazy. [LAUGHTER] It's okay. Now let's tear this. If we end up with a piece like that, not a big deal. But I would go to the front side and tear down so that it matches what you are trying to do and doesn't look odd. If you tear it up instead of down, or you tear it from the backside, you'll end up with a weird spot. Now we've got that in there. Let's see how big this is. We'll cut this fourth side. So right at three inches. Really anywhere right in here would be pretty, but I'm going to keep it to a 5 by 7 inch. Here we go. Press down hard so your ruler doesn't move. Then look how pretty that turned out. That's exactly what I wanted. Now we have a beautiful piece of art. We've got a little bit of some gold that I've put on there that's our focal point off to the side, so nothing's centered. I've given it a focal point in my composition. Just to give you an example, if we float that on something like that, look how beautiful that is. Now I want to have a frame just like that. My goodness. I love it when things turn out beautiful. I hope you enjoy doing one of these projects. It's fun if you end up with a piece that you love without cutting it. Then you can frame it in a mat. But if you end up with a piece where maybe you didn't like the edges or you didn't like the splatter, like I did not like the splatter, then don't be afraid to cut the part you love right out of the center of that. Maybe do the deckled edges and know that this is going to be a piece that you float frame. You could sign it right down here in pencil or on the back and look how beautiful that is. Then these leftover pieces, I would save for a piece of collage art and I wouldn't throw them away. They're still useful for other art projects. So super fun. I hope you enjoy this project. I can't wait to see the piece that you create as a big, single, more purposeful piece. Then whether you cut it out with the deckled edges or not, I'm definitely wanting to see what you come up with, with water-soluble crayons and pencils. Let's go on to our next project [MUSIC]. 11. Creating Large With Abandon: In this project, it's a little extra project, but I really love doing cut-up art where you make just a big piece. You have fine, you just be messy and do everything that you've just imagined that you might like. We can start off with the pencils, which is what I want to play with is the pencils. We can do the neo-color crayons. You can do any of your water-soluble stuff that you want to do. We can lay the color down, let it dry, do some mark-making and some extra fun little bits of whatever. Then we go through and cut out our favorite part. We can then decide on composition, color, what stands out at us, what's our favorite thing. I've done lots of little workshops with this technique. It's definitely not a new technique, but it is working with different supplies. I like revisiting techniques that I feel comfortable with different supplies because I'm going to get different looks for things. I'm going to learn how to really work the supplies a whole lot better than maybe I had intended. I've played a little bit with these ink tents pencils, and I've noticed a few go a little bit lighter on the paper, you get a lot lighter look to the watercolor. It's still intense color, but it's not so vivid. You're less likely to have leftover marks and lines from the pencil. So I am going a little bit light coming in from the side. I don't want to gouge the paper. I'm just going to play and see what do I end up with, if anything at all, I may not like it at all, and that's okay. The cutout pieces are perfect for collage. So if you are wanting to do collage or wondering what can you do with the leftover pieces? Go take a look at the creative collage workshop, or I then show you what I do with all the extra leftover bits. I make very pretty collage art. I'm just being real light. I'm not trying to fill the whole page with one color. I'm not thinking about composition. I want to have some room to move this stuff around and just see what we can get. I did like in my very favorite piece and the sketchbook, the little bit of blue that we saw peeking through. I'm just going to add some of this neo-color crayon in that pretty color and just see, does it peak through? Do we get any surprising spots by having this in here? We're mixing up our water-soluble stuff. That's fun. I'm using my larger paintbrush because this is a larger piece. I'm just going to activate the color separately, add some acrylic ink, and then let it dry, like we're letting our other pieces dry and then we can add marks and then see what do we get. What pretty stuff did we end up with? I am mostly trying to activate each color separate just so that we don't have a big wash of mud basically. Then we'll come back and work on them again. My water is a little bit dirty. If that bothers you, you, go get clean water or have a couple of sitting over here that you can switch out. So this is an even more watercolory. Look how pretty that is. Now I'm just going to go back through and really work the color in a little more. Make sure I don't have any mostly no crown lines. I don't want the crayon lines. I want it to look like swashes of paint and color. Maybe a few marks in there but not so many that it's like, what was that? I want the colors to touch and blend. I'm not trying to keep them all separate. I just wanted to activate them separately. Now some of these, you can see there is some mark in here of the crayon and that's okay, we'll incorporate that as part of our mark-making. I'm not taping it down because I want white edges. I'm just taping it down so it's secure and I can move it around us. We let it dry later. So now, I'm just going to come back in here on this wet stuff and maybe add some more color, perhaps some marks. Because it's fun working wet on wet. It's also fun working on dry. It's interesting to see how these do a little differently if you're working on wet or you're working on dry. If you're wanting to put an extra touch a color in here, you could come back and then switch that around. If you wanted, you could work that in a little bit. I really like this color and then we can add some ink on top of this and just see what do we get. I really love this warm gray. It's a mix of a little bit of gray and some burnt umber mixed together. So if you can't find the warm gray, which is the Amsterdam brand you can't easily find that you can always mix your own. That's what I did before I found that color I just mixed up some of my own. There we'll go in with a little burnt umber. Just see, go in with some white. Then once these are Caesar dry, you can always go back in and add more color, more marks, more whatever, until you've got all the layers that you want. Because at some point it's fun to let some of the layers dry and start working in multiple layers while things are doing their thing as they're drying. Now I'm just pull in some of this color through because it does really cool things when you pull this through. So that's actually looking really cool. Almost wondering if I wouldn't want a tad of this purple. Now I'm just making it up as I go along. There's nothing at all planned about where I want to end up. I just want to play and maybe add colors that I really just are going to be a delightful surprise when we're done. That's looking really pretty over here. We could also come in here with some graphite. The graphite is going to look different on this that we're moving paint around than it will when it's dry. That's fun. What marks can we get versus dry marks when we've let this sit for a while and do its thing? Really like and whatever this right here is doing. I'm going to run some gold around here, and just see what can we get that gold to do. I have accidentally spilled a whole thing of paint on my paintings before. So I'm rolling the brush through the gold to scatter it without it actually being like a brush mark. That was pretty. So you might consider different ways to move the paint, not just dabbing it like you're painting. Anyway, I've spilled whole things on my painting, accidentally picking it up, thinking the lid was back on, and then at one. So maybe just keep that in mind as you're working with these inks, especially way too easy to do that. I got a whole area over here where I really didn't work. That water is good. Let's run that water out over here. So I think for the moment, I'm going to let this dry and just see what it is that we're going to end up with. Then we can make marks and add other things on top of it, and then see what we want to cut up. So I'm going to set this down to the side, and I will let it dry naturally. Please resist adding lots of heat or trying to draw this with your heat gun. Just let it do its thing, and see what you end up with. It's so much more fun. The colors blend and change in ways you didn't expect. I'm not sure I'm going to like this area, but I'm not going to take it out because what if it's pretty as part of a composition? So we'll see. I'm definitely going to add some more on top of this piece. It's looking a little crazy. I'm already thinking, am I going to like anything on this? But if I take a little piece of mat board, and this is just an example, I'm probably going to cut these into squares because that is my favorite. Here's another piece that I framed. It was one of the cutout pieces from another class. But look how beautiful things like this are framed up. I love it. Once we cut a piece out, we can then continue to embellish a piece if we needed to, if we found like the perfect little section and it needed one extra thing. Maybe you didn't know that till we cut it out. But as I'm looking at this, this right here, I'm actually rather loving. So I do think there's going to be some that I love out of here after we put some more stuff on top. So let's go ahead and start adding and just see what we can end up with. Let me move that picture out of the way. So now's the time to play in the inks or we could play in our metallics, or we could play in mark-making and pencils, and we could add another layer, water-soluble stuff on top of this. Keep in mind, if you do that, you're reactivating the stuff. If I just added this on here and I wanted to have that blend around, you're reactivating the multi-layers. You're not just activating what you just drew on there. Also consider dipping that in water and then seeing how these work wet versus dry, you get a different mark, which is cool. It's way different than it is when it's dry. I'm thinking, not thinking of anything other than, let's just draw on here. Do I pick the right color? Am I worried about the composition? I'm not thinking of any of that at this point. So I'm just thinking, let's draw and make interesting stuff and see what we can get. If anything is wet, we could drag through it, really add some texture to. That gold is still wet. So this was mostly dry, but I guess not completely dry. That was an interesting thing. I'm particularly loving this one section right here. We get this. This right here, look how beautiful that is. I want to preserve that. Even if I cover everything else up, that I want to preserve. Now, what we could do, I've got my palette knife out from other piece. We could take some ink way too much. But now, we can add some layers of acrylic paint if we want. Since I'm already working with the inks and stuff, might just play in the inks that I've got out. Maybe some mark-making. You could use stencils. If you've got stencils and you want to play in the stencils, you could do that. All kinds of stuff that you could be adding on top of your pieces. I love working with pastels. We could add pastels, come back in here with our India ink and maybe do some mark-making with some black. I like having really dark areas, really light areas, nice little contrast going in there like that. If you use something like pastels on top of your pieces, definitely consider finishing spray. I use like the Sennelier spray or this workable fixative before we start cutting up. This was from the craft store, but I also have the Sennelier from the art store. Because if you don't settle these down, you'll keep smudging them. They are fun to work into your pieces. I'm just looking at this thinking maybe I want to go ahead and add some of the [inaudible]. This is water-soluble too, which I particularly like. You can smear it with your fingers. That's another thing I like with the pastel chalk. So now I've got this in here, I can come back and do this water on top of it. These things are particularly beautiful. They're really chalky when they're done. The eye can actually like some of this mustard in here. Hang on. They're really chalky when they're done, they're a matte finish. It's almost like a nice little top-off to the other things that we were doing with water and the crayons and the pencils. Because at this point, I'm less likely to reactivate what's under it because these are so pigmented and soft that they do their own little thing without too much effort, which I love. Look how pretty these are. So that's a fun way to get some extra color smudge in here without resorting to say, full-on paints. I love that gold paste. I use it on that next project, which is basically, it's like the inks and stuff. I liked those touches of gold and silver. I've got some silver craft and gold craft paint. I like some of these a lot because they just add another dimension and interests and layer that we're not going to get without them. Really particularly like that Blick Matte Acrylic. It's just an acrylic paint that's matte-colored, so use whatever you've got, whatever your favorites tend to be. I like white my fingers. I love my little microfiber cloth as an art cloth because when you're working with stuff like pastels, it gets all over your fingers. We can get enough off so that we can look around at stuff like what I'm really loving that right there. Actually, I like some of these in here with this black. Like that black really sets off some of these. So now, I'm wondering, in this right here, do I need more? We can always go back and add it later. But it is interesting to look at that and then think okay, this is working and whatever, this is not. Look at that. That's pretty right there, actually. So let's just take a look. Let's just let this dry. I might come in here with some more. I really love this right here. But colors are blending together in such a way that it's like purple fire almost. Let's let this dry, and then we can cut up the pieces that we like, and then add our finishing touches. So at this point, I'm going to let this dry for a moment. 12. Cutting Up And Adding Marks: Our piece is dry and I hold out some just watercolor paper that I have taped together as a nice way to look around and see is there anything that we're going to like in this piece. I have some cradled board that I use to cut around sometimes. I'll have a cutting board and I'll just set that there and use my Exacto knife to cut around and you can see I do that a lot because I like these and it makes it convenient. This is a five by five. Is this just five by five? Yeah, five by five. I got a five-by-five board. This a five by seven, six by six. I got six-by-six board. This I think is a four-by-four board. So I like to sometimes cheat when I'm cutting stuff, but I like to cut stuff out. That one I showed you that I framed of a different cut-out piece, they look good, cut straight, but again, I want the edges to be fairly straight. Or if you left enough room, you could deck all the edges like we did on our last project. I'm really loving that one. Those colors turned out amazing. But I'm just wanting to decide now what do I love out of this, and I may not love at all and the scraps that are leftover will be pieces that I use in collage art. Definitely check out the creative collage class because that's what you can do with these little scraps that you have leftover, which is why I really love doing stuff like that. If you end up with a piece and you're thinking that's amazing and you don't want to cut it up, don't cut it up. But if you end up with a piece and you're thinking, okay, let's see what I love in here, you're looking around, don't feel like you have to leave the piece of paper in the direction that you did it, feel free to like, see here now these things run down the page. That was like one of my favorite areas, but do I like it better this way with those running down? I already see that I'm going to love this one. Here's the five-by-five square. Let's just take a look at that. What part of that do we really love, and where do we want that composition to fall? Do I love it better this way, and do I need to move these further over? Or once I get it framed out, do I like it at all? Do I like this better over here? Do I like it or do I like it? Here's where I need the vote button. We all need to vote. This is really fun right here. Do we like it better this way? That's really fun. I'm really loving this piece here. Not loving that. Let's see. I'm actually digging this and I'm just looking at it, thinking, do I like this dark coming in here, offsetting this dark here? Do I want it without the dark but then this is more centered? I don't have enough room to really go any further. Also, don't get tied into a square or a rectangle. If there's a section that you particularly love, and maybe it's this part, maybe consider odd-shaped art, or bookmarks, or gift tags. Because I do actually particularly like this section of that. Now that I have said that, I like that more than the whole thing. I'm really loving that right there. If I find something that I really, really love, then I would go ahead and draw with a pencil. I will just go ahead and draw that out and we'll use that as one of our pieces that we cut out because I love that. I also want to come back to this. I'm determined I'm going to love this one way or another. I'm actually thinking framed in tighter is the one that I like. We're going to cut this a tiny bit bigger, and then I'm giving me something to frame in. I almost didn't expect that. I'm going to go ahead and cut the pieces out that I know I really love, and then we'll see what pieces are leftover. Then you can decide, I love this, does it need more mark-making? Look how pretty that is. Let me tell you, I'm the worst about doubting myself from the art thinking. Am I going to like this? Is this not going to turn out? Look at this, it's so beautiful when you get it cut out and look at the way these colors move around and mesh. This is so beautiful. I get so excited every time. Every class you take, every time we cut something out, and then I can visually get rid of all the clutter around it and see how amazing something just turned out when the whole time I was painting it, I was like, "This is kind of ugly. I don't think I'm going to like this." Every time, I'm telling you, look at that. Oh, that is so pretty. Total joy just happened with those two pieces and I'm telling you, I almost thought, is this the one that I'm not going to get something I love out of? Because I did this and I might want to have a little set of two, so another one in that size that I love. Let's just see. But yeah, I mean, it's at that moment when I finally see, look at that. I think I like that. When I finally see the pieces cut out and separated that I can truly think, wow, even better than I hoped. But the whole rest of the time I'm doing it, I'm thinking I don't know if I'm going to like this. I don't know if it's going to turn out. This one maybe the ugly one. This may be the time when I leave my table mad. I just love how beautiful these colors are smashed together with the water like that. They're different. They're different than a watercolor. They're different than an acrylic ink, just solid painting. They're different than regular acrylic paint. I can't explain it until you're sitting here actually looking at a piece close-up how these colors are just different and beautiful when they're coming out of these water-soluble crayons or pencils. Look how pretty that is. Now I have a pretty little pair. Look at that. I like that they're different, but they're kind of in the same colorway. Oh, prettier that way. Look at that. Then you just want to see, is there anything left? This one was particularly beautiful. Any pieces left that are crazy pretty? This one's pretty here. It was even pretty as a skinnier piece. See, I don't think I love that one at all. Just my personal preference. You might be going, "That's my favorite." At this point, too, we could also just cut these out as tags. You could cut them out in squares, cut the little corners so it's a really pretty tag. Now that's pretty there. Then this would be pretty with some kind of gold sprinkled up through it. I'm feeling that. Let's go ahead and draw this one. I'm drawing it a little bigger so that there's room to matte it if I want to matte it. See, I'm feeling that right there. What do you think right there? Then if we do a little smattering of gold up there, that would be pretty. This piece right here is particularly beautiful. Now I'm going to regret not going over to the edge, aren't I? That would be so pretty in a piece of collage, or as a tag, or as a micro piece of art. I do like making little micro pieces of art. Look at that, super pretty. That was cool. I love this one. I love this little edge. I love this piece right here. Let's just go ahead. See, I've cut it right there. Let's go ahead and cut it. Look how pretty that is. Look how pretty that is. That's so pretty, oh my goodness. Let's cut the edge off this and have a couple of micro pieces. Look how pretty both these are. These would be really pretty as a little decoration on the front of a card that you send somebody, and then they've got their own little piece of micro art that they can. This piece here that I've cut off the edge that I said, that's actually really pretty, although they're little micro piece. Then that'll be a pretty tag. I'm not digging this side. So let's just go ahead and set this to the side. Don't throw away your scraps, use them for collage pieces. Look at all these little pretty collage pieces. That one right there, it's going to be beautiful on something that I collage. Keep all those. Look how pretty these are cut out. Oh my goodness, so pretty. Look at all that. Let's just move these out of the way. Now we can look at this and think, what else does this need to give me that extra little? This one I'm actually liking, just like it is, almost. I don't want to add anything else to it, I don t think. I like the marks coming in. I like the little pops. I like the gold in here. I like this one section that more than anything I wanted to save. I love that. I'm feeling like this one's really pretty just like it is, but I might change my mind. This one is so dark. I don't want to do this pop of gold, and let's just see. Like we did on that first piece, just a little bit of acrylic paint and my palette knife and just see, can I give this an interesting focal point? A little bit of shine. Look at that. I love that. Now I want a little of that on this one here. But I don't necessarily want to copy exactly what I did, but look at that little tiny bit. I'm doing that off center, so I'm still keeping in mind composition. That ties in with this one. I could put a little more right here in this Z because it is a different shine than that ink was. Just to tie all three pieces together, look at that. Those are beautiful and I will say, purple and purple, what that ended up, those purply tones, not my normal color palette. Now, little pieces we could come back on these. We could add a little bit of mark-making if we wanted to. We could add some dots. I actually like those, but maybe a tiny bit of gold on this one would finish this one off for me. Let's just see. That's pretty. Look at that, that's real pretty. I like that. But I'm feeling like that could use something else. So maybe white Posca pen, maybe some dots or something as an extra visual, something different. I like that up there across the top. There we go. That gave me some tiny finishing bits that I think really finished off that pretty piece of art. This one, I'm loving like it is, but could we use some dots? Maybe some dots. Just because it's one extra visual element that's interesting, then it really pulled that one together for me nicely. Look at that, is these little touches? Look how pretty that is with that extra little touch there. Then this one, I am going to leave it like I had it because I do like all of that that I've got going on. These I'm in love with, like insanely in love. Look how beautiful that is. I love all of those. Last project is make one big piece of paper with a mess and then cut little pieces out of it and see what you end up with. Even though, just like me, you're going to doubt the whole time whether you're going to get anything at all that you love, cut the pieces out that you like the most and add some finishing touches and see what you can turn out. Because look how amazing these are, even these micro pieces. I mean, I love this. I can't wait to see what you create. Definitely come back and share this with me, and I'll see you back in class. 13. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Well, what did you think of these different supplies? Have you ever played with the water soluble crayons and pencils and added water and thought to make projects like we've done today? If you have, that's awesome. If you haven't, did you have any yummy, fantastic aha moments? I know I had several when I was playing and experimenting especially in this piece right here. The way these colors blended, some of the ones that ended up as the outlying little pops of color were very exciting. I want to know what those ahas were for you. Did you have fun playing in the supplies and adding water and coming up with some different things that maybe you never even thought to do? I want to see your color ways. I want to see your projects. I want to see the piece if you made any and you cut up some beautiful little pieces. I want to know if you've ever tried playing in the water soluble products in the way that we were playing in class. What did you think of it? I would love to know. Come back and share your projects. I want to see what you're working on and the colors you picked and the marks you made and what fun you were having. I get true joy out of that. I can't wait to see you in the next class. I'll see you later. [MUSIC]