Modern Watercolor Techniques: Beginner's Level

1. Trailer: Hi. My name is Ana Victoria, and we're here in my studio in Mexico City, where I paint with watercolors for a living. Over the past five years, I've developed a unique watercolor technique, which I'm here to share with you today. My work is sold online, but I also have a great opportunity to work with awesome companies such as Papyrus, [inaudible] Studio O, Up With Paper, and Great Big Canvas. I think I've always been really crafty and artistic. I was always the artsy kid. I went to school for graphic design and once I graduated, I noticed that I really wasn't into the conventional logo design or vector design. I really wanted to keep using my hands. I've always wanted to just paint and I just started getting into watercolor more and more and I started developing my own style and my own technique. That's what I'm here to show you today, just how I use paints and I think there's many ways to use watercolors. It can be intimidating, but with a few tips and tricks, you can really, really get the hang of it and make some really interesting paintings, really interesting textures, which is what I really strive for. We will analyze and talk about all the different supplies and types of paints we can use. How to create gradients and transparencies. We will practice pulse and precision, experiment with different mediums and create some really magical paintings. I just really hope you have a great time and you enjoy painting as much as I do. 2. Art Supplies: These are the supplies you're going to need for this class. First of all, we need some watercolor paper, paints, it can be either pan sets, liquid watercolors, or little tubes here. You, of course, will need water, paint brushes, an eraser, a pencil. We always use just a piece of paper. You're also going to need this, which is a ceramic bowl or you can use the palette from the back of your water color pens. This will be to mix around your paints like this or here. Let's talk about paper first. I like to use these blocks or pads. Here's a variety of brands that you can use. Paper will usually vary in size, weight, and texture. Personally, I really like this brand, which is Winsor & Newton Cotman series. It's 12 by 9 inches, which is a really comfortable size for me. It has a spiral up here, which means that you can work on different projects at once. If you get tired of this project or you need to start advancing on a next project, you can just flip it over and finish this one later. It's cold pressed and fine grain, which means that it's just going to be a bit smoother. I like to use this paper because it's just easier for me to work on details. Some people like to use, for example, paint landscapes, like a rougher paper, which would be like this one, which is a rough grain. Basically, it's a lot more textured and it looks a lot more like a watercolor or traditional watercolor painting. I'll just leave this up to you, whatever feels right for you. There's a very large variety of paints that you can use when painting with watercolors. First of all, we have pan sets, which can run from everywhere between crayolas like this, which are very cheap. You can get them at drugstores and just supermarkets. Then you start getting a little bit fancier with brands like, this is my old Winsor & Newton set. You can see how I've used up almost all the colors, but this has been really good for me. Then you can start getting a little bit more professional with brands like, for example, this is Sennelier. This is a really cool French brand. Then this is my most recent pan set, which is Schmincke. This is a German brand and it's really good. The colors are very concentrated and they just give out really vibrant tones. You're going to want to mix everything up in a little pallet or bowl like this or you can use the back of your pan sets like this. See, I've started using this side, but have yet to started using this side. Also, one of my favorite types of paints is Dr. Ph. Martin's, which are going to be these here. These are concentrated watercolors and they come in a liquid form, but I really like to mix these with my pan set and just create my own colors in something like this. I also like to use tubes. If you have a set of only tubes, this is perfectly fine. If you only have pan sets, that's fine too. If you have different paints, you can just mix it all together and you'll get better results. Now I'm going to show you the difference between these different brands. We'll start by trying out the different pans sets. We're going to try out this cherry red for each kind of paints. Crayola is a very basic brand that you get when you're in school or when you're a kid. These are okay to play around with, but you won't get as good a quality as you're going to get with these other professional brands. You're going to start to see how the better the brand, the more pigmented your paint is going to be. This one here is Winsor & Newton, which I really like. Then the center layer is going to be very concentrated. Finally, Schmincke is super, super high-quality pigmented watercolors. As this begins to dry, you can start to tell the difference just the way that each brand looks on your paper. I also use these little tubes here. The way you use watercolor tubes, you just need a little bit of paint on your little ceramic dish or your palette. These are usually more concentrated. You'll get really rich colors especially with this brand of paint. Finally, these are one of my favorites, which are Dr. Ph. Martin's concentrated watercolors. These are the radiant collection. They're just so much fun. They're actually a little too bright so you're usually going to mix them up, let's say with your pan set like I'm going to do here. I get a lot of questions on my Instagram just concerning how do you get your paint to be so vibrant and you just have to find the tones that you like. I really like these Dr. Ph. Martin's. They just give super fun colors and you can mix them with your other pan sets. You can have a lot of different watercolor brushes like this, but the truth is that there's just a couple that I really like and that I use over and over again. These are just round brushes. They are Winsor & Newton again. I usually have three paint brushes right next to me when I'm just doing some illustration where it can, it's always going to be this large 10. This is a number 10. This is faded, but oh yeah, this is a number 2, which is good for filling out smaller areas. Let's say if you're painting a flower, this would be good for smaller petals. Then this is a double zero. This is just a really fine brush for details. This is really good for details. Brushes are really personal. They say that you can't touch other artist's brushes and so on. But I don't know. I think you just find that you just keep on using the same ones no matter how many you have. See, I have just a bunch of brushes and I might use, for example, this brush that's all. It's just old and rough. I might use this for splattering paint. Then I have three of the same brand which I really like too. But basically, you just keep on using what you really like. See I have a number of double zeros which each one has its own little tip that it starts acquiring throughout the years, I guess. I really like these. I recommend this university series of Winsor & Newton. This technique that I've developed usually requires some ink over watercolor. I really like white ink. Here are a few brands that I love, Bombay series from Dr. Ph. Martin's. This is India ink, and then this Japanese brand is definitely my favorite, this opaque white. Then if you don't have ink, this is usually really handy, it's just a white acrylic. The difference between, for example, this ink you can just put some water over it again and it'll get some moisture and you can use it over and over, whereas acrylics, once they dry, that's it. They just turn it into plastic and you can't use them again. That's why I really like using ink. Something does dry and you can't use it again. But this specific Japanese brand is just amazing, I love it. Now that some of these blushes have dried up, I can show you how I would use white ink over watercolor. Basically, your layer needs to be dry. This layer needs to be dry. Then you can just paint over it. I use this a lot for details, especially with my double zero brush. I just can get really fine lines with this white ink. Lastly, I like this black India ink too. In Mexico, it's called [inaudible]. It's a really cool ink for painting basic black backgrounds. This is going to be more opaque. You won't really have that much transparencies or depth. It's just really good for painting solid black backgrounds. It's really smooth. It's a lot smoother than acrylics. I love mixing my watercolors with this ink as well. 3. Lesson 1: Transparencies : The first lesson in watercolor is what transparency is. The cool thing about watercolors is that you can use just one type of paint, one color, and take it in many different places. We're going to try to get five different values from just one color here. Notice how I'm filling up my ceramic bowl with some water, just plain water and then I'm going to add paint gradually. Here on this side is my concentrated paint which comes from here. Now I'm just going to add a little paint in my water just little by little. We're just going to paint blocks using different amounts of concentration in each block. I'm adding a little bit more paint here, so each time my paint is going to get thicker and it's going to get more opaque. This is a real value in watercolors, just being able to use one color and getting so many different tones from just this one color. Now with this cherry red we have a variety of pinks. I would recommend you practice this at least three times until you get it right. It's important to start controlling the amount of water that you use and just getting the real tone that you want. Also, here I used turquoise and then I use this cherry, and now I'm going to use let's say yellow, because also it's important to start to understand what your pigments do for you. For example, yellow will usually be a lot lighter than then a dark blue. Just start understanding your paints. I'm on my third transparency for it at this point, so I'm going to try out yellow now. Again, just get really washy tone at first makes a lot of water into this first block, and this is just a basic exercise that we always do to start out watercolor workshops. Just also to start to get the hang of your colors and what your paints will do for you. If you notice on this turquoise area here where it's starting to dry, you can start to see the texture that develops naturally with watercolors. We're just adding a little bit more paint each time, that was maybe if you feel you have too much paint, you can just add some water to your block to lighten it up. Also a really important lesson in watercolors is that there really is no white paint,our white paint is going to be water. If you want to create more pastel tones you're going to use more water than paint. If you want really bright tones, you're going to want to get a thicker consistency in your paint. Towards the end when your paint is more opaque, it's going to get even harder to move around, see when we play with watercolors, we always have this little puddle that we're just pushing around. Here are my three different tries at this transparency exercise. You can also just, if you have a different, like if you have two paints or if you have paint sets, you can try out different paints in different ones just to see how your paints work. Some tones are really pigmented, some are light and they need more paint so it's also really good to just test out your paints. Do this a couple of times at least, I don't know, maybe three times until you feel you get it right. It's a bit harder than it looks like. You really need to to make sure that like each one is different than the last. Sometimes these two will look exactly like in these three will look exactly like just try to get the most amount of values you can in each color and that will be lesson one. 4. Lesson 2: Gradients: Our second lesson is called Gradients and here we're going to take just plain water to color and color to color. You can keep using the same page that you're using to do all these exercises, this is just basically practice, or if you want more space, just do another page, but I don't like to waste perfectly good paper. What we're actually going to do is this type of exercise, but we're going to eliminate the blocks. We're just going to do a strip taking just plain water to color. We're going to start out by just painting with a really watery paint. You're always going to have a little puddle here that you're going to be just sliding towards the other side, and each time we're just going to grab a little bit more paint and slowly transition from water to color. Notice how I'm always leaving some extra water here. This will make the transition into the next tone smoother. Each time just adding a little bit more concentrated paint into my water puddle. Notice how the real work happens here on my palette rather than on the paper. At this point we going to have a really thick and concentrated wash. Practice this a couple of times with different paints until you get it down, and now we're going to start to do one color to another color. I'm going to take this purple that I was using and mix it with a little bit more water and just start painting here. So we're going to start adding paint as well. I'm going to turn this purple into a cherry red. We're just going to start adding some pink into this purple mix. Just very gradually start adding your next color into the mix. This transition should be very seamless, very smooth and it's just a great way to practice mixing colors. Notice how I clean my brush right after I use this color. When I go into my pink it won't get mixed with my purple mix. See how it started out by pure purple and then it turned into cherry red and we did it really smooth, just a really nice transition. Practice this a couple of times too and if you want to try out mixing let say three colors, we can do that as well. For example, let's take a blue into a yellow. We'll start out just by having just plain blue and we can just start adding some green into the mix. Just very slowly. I want too much contrast here. We want it to look like a piece of the rainbow. I'm just very subtly adding green each time a little bit more, and now we're going to add some more yellow. We're going through a lime green here, and eventually just pure yellow. These exercises are really good. Just to get a grip on your paints. Try out different gradients, tryout mixing different colors. If you have a color wheel, you can see which colors will transition best into the next. You don't want to do red to green, for example, because those are complimentary colors and they will just turn to brown in the middle. But I'll show a chart here where you can see what the color wheel is and find out which combinations work best for this exercise. 5. Lesson 3: Pulse and Precision: Now we're going to start working on some pulse and precision exercises. This is just for you to have better control of what you're doing, like just the way that you move your hand and to create more confidence with your watercolors. We're going to start doing is just painting little bars like this. Try to do the lines as straight as you can. Don't use a ruler, don't use a pencil here, just try to trust your own pulse. Then the next line is going to be just the closest you can make it without touching the next bar. You can start mixing different colors if you want to just experiment with color too. Just keep it as close as you can get without touching the other side. Notice the way I'm holding my brush. Sometimes the inclination matters a lot too. In this case for me, it's just easier to hold it this way sideways. I like to do this activity from time to time just to get a hold on my pulse and precision. It's just really great to practice and also, it's fun to mix up different colors like here I just use turquoise, pink, and some indigo and I got all these different colors out of just three different paints. It's also good to start discovering your own palette. What kind of tones work best for you, how to mix your tones, how to mix different paints and colors. It's just something that I always come back to. It's just good practice in general. I encourage you to do this a couple of times or whenever you don't know what to paint, just start out by doing these little bars and your hand will just start to flow and something will come of it. The second part of this activity gets a little bit tougher. We're just going to try to do the same thing but with circles or just curves. We always do this in every one of my classes and it's just really good to get you in the creative mode. Start to get some confidence with your brush and paints. We're going to paint what ends up looking like a target. Again, you're going to want to paint little bars all around the circle as close as you can get to its neighbor without touching. You're going to just create a little bit of negative space between each loop here. Some people find that curves are a bit harder to paint than straight lines. I like these circular motions a little bit better. This is also so therapeutic. You can just spend hours doing this and go into a trance and forget about everything else. If you've noticed, I changed my color palette here into more oranges and yellows, warmer colors. Notice how the circle gets bigger and I have to keep grabbing more and more paint each time. But I'm still trying to keep the edges moist so that when I start again, it'll blend in really easy, just like the gradient exercise we did. You can practice this as many times as you need. You can also start painting different geometric forms like triangles, squares. The important part for me here is that you just leave the smallest amount of space between each shape. That's what we call precision. For the next part of this activity, which is actually the pulse part, we're just going to start painting really thin lines. I'm mixing pretty much water here with some blue paint. We're just going to start painting just horizontal lines like this. Notice how I'm using my hand to get a grip on things. Try to make these lines as straight as you can without stopping. Now if your paint is too thickier, it won't be enough to last to the end of the line. What we're doing now is really going to help us when we start painting detailed objects. You're lightly be a little crook at first but the more you practice, the better you'll get. Until you have enough confidence, so just keep on going. Then the same way we did round motions here, we're going to start doing that with our really thin lines too, and just try to paint really thin lines with your double zero or zero brush. For example, if you're going to paint a tree and you want to add texture to it, this would be good practice. Again, just practice this as many times as you need until you get it right. These activities are great to play around with color too. You get a stable brushstroke. It all depends on how much pressure you place on your brush. For example, I can be doing this line, but if I press too hard, it will get thicker. So the lighter you press, the thinner your line will be. This is also something you learned in lettering, but for now we're just going to do really thin straight lines. 6. Lesson 4: Monochrome Activity: At this point, we're going to start to use what we've learned to paint an actual object. Here, I have a really simple daisy that I painted. I just really like painting flowers, but if you have a specific type of drawing that you like, feel free to do it now. Here, we're going to have to put into play what we learned with transparencies, pulse, and precision, and just detail. Start by choosing just one color. I'm going to choose this really nice forest green. You have to lather up this paint, get as much as you can, like a concentrated mix onto your palate, like that. You're going to want to have a pretty clean little bowl or dish here so you can use the same color with different values. This here is to show you the power of transparencies, just how out of one simple color, you can get so many different dimensions and levels. Right now, I'm going to start by painting the petals with a really washy mix, probably 90 percent water and 10 percent paint here, just to really like green. Remember, I'm just using one color at this point. That's all you need for this exercise. Just choose one that you really love. Notice how I'm painting the petals that are further away from each other. This is just because I don't want them to mix. You can't paint wet next to wet without it mixing together. While I let these four petals dry, I'm going to start painting these little round leaves here which are going to be my super concentrated area. Remember, the very first activity we did where we took our paint to different levels, this would be the last level. This is basically as thick as your paint can get, as concentrated as your paint can get. This is also something I just always practice if I feel like all my illustrations are just getting too one-dimensional, I always go back to this activity. Then I'm going to decide to take these bigger leaves into a midtone which will be not to watery and not too concentrated, just a mix of them both. Notice how I'm playing around with different pressures as well. At this point, I'm probably using 50 percent water and 50 percent paint. By now, I notice how these petals are starting to dry, so I can just go in and start painting the ones that are next to the dry ones. We're just painting these petals with our diluted watery green paintings. Remember, these have to be one by one and you have to let the one that's next to it dry, otherwise the paint will just all mesh in together. We've waited for our petals to dry and I'm just painting the remaining ones right now. See how even with this lighter green, I still have different tones, just because sometime, they have a little bit more water than others. It's really important to always keep a paper towel next to you. In case you have too much water, you can just dry your brush off a bit. Now, I'm going to go back to my 50/50 mix here, which is a midtone, for these bigger petals. Using my number 10 brush here but I'm going to get into some detail, so I'm going with number 2 brush for the smaller area between these petals. Notice how I paint everything by sections, I don't really do a contour first, because if it dries, you'll get to see that edge area which doesn't look too good, so we just always paint by sections. This is when our pulse, and precision, and exercise comes into play, and being really careful to respect the area that is left for the leaf. We have our base on it now, what we're missing is our detail which is what we're going to do with our double zero brush, which is this one. We're going to get some of this concentrated mix. Here's where those really fine lines are going to come into play. See how I'm adding the vines to this leaf with the just really concentrated mix. We're just doing our detail here. Our last exercise really to help us with this. We can also erase whatever is left behind our dry paint. Make sure it's really dry, otherwise, you'll get residue. Now, I'm making sure these pedals are dry so I can start painting over them. Remember, this whole thing has been with just one color, this forest green. The way we're getting definition is just by adding different levels of transparency. Again, I'm just making sure my bottom layer is dry enough so that I can paint detail over it. This is another really important part of water color, it layers. Just having your first layer be a little more transparent let's you add texture and detail over it. It's really easy for me to get carried away and just want to use every single one of the colors in my pan set or my palette but this activity is really good to just keep my transparencies in check, make sure I'm not just over saturating everything. You don't necessarily have to paint the flower, whatever object you like to do, you can try out here. But this daisy is just a really nice example of how you use different tones, different levels. We have a cute little daisy here. You can see that all I needed to do this was just one paint, just this forest green, but I got so many tones out of the same paint. You can see how the petals are the lightest ones, and these leaves, and then these round ones, and the detail are more saturated tone. This is something I really like to practice. I encourage you to practice this as well. It will just prepare us for our next exercises. 7. Lesson 5: Experimental Watercolor Activity: So this is one of my favorite activities. Now that you have a little more experience with your own plain watercolors or your pan set, we're going to start experimenting with different types of paint. There's a really good chance to try out new types of ink or if there's, for example, a lot of people ask me about Dr. Ph. Martin's, if you just want to try out one first, maybe you can buy one of these and try it out in this exercise or whenever I go to arts and crafts supply store, I just pick up different inks to try them out. Today we're also going to use some bleach, which is in here, and some salt. We're going to document what kinds of paints we're mixing here. We're going to just start out by doing a plain circle. This is just water at this point. This is just plain watercolors from my pan set, and just drop some paint in here. You can even write down what you just did. I'm going to write water and pan set watercolor. This way, you're going to really know how your different paints react with each other. Now I'm painting a circle with my pan set. These are actually shminky right now. Then I'm going to use a little drop of this Dr. Ph. Martin's radiant concentrated watercolor in wild Rose and just see what happens. You'll also start to notice how some of the paints dry faster than the others. Now I'm going to grab some of this green that we used for our flower, and I'm just going to sprinkle just a little bit of salt here. So I'm going to write down pan set with Dr. Ph. Martin's, and then here it's going to be pan set with salt. You're just going to want to try to do all the different combinations you can. For example, here I'm using just plain water. I'm going to try this Higgins ink. This is really cool yellow. You can just drop some of this in here. So remember, use whatever you have, whatever you have handy is going to be good. Water, ink. Again, I'm using just plain water. I might use two different just regular pan set watercolors here. Just two pan set watercolors. See, notice how the salt is starting to take action here. You can see a really cool texture is being formed. So you're going to begin to notice how different kinds of paint react or interact differently with each other. Right now, I'm just using plain water again. Then when we use India ink or in Spanish Tinta china, all we need is a little drop to create these really magical effects. If you're into painting space stuff like I am, this is really cool for little planets. See, so we've experimented with salt just a little bit at this point but I want to go into it more. The way salt reacts really depends on how much paint you have and what kind of paint you're using too. Right now, I'm going to try out this Dr. Ph. Martin's concentrated mix. Then I'm just going to have some of my pan set, mix two. Again, I'm just using some salt. You don't want to do too much, just a little sprinkle like that. Otherwise, it'll just be too saturated and it will never dry. This takes a while to react, as you can see up here, it's started to create a really cool texture. I really like using these textures for nature stuff like a lot of space stuff or under the sea effects are really cool. Now, I'll do a base of a really light watercolor like this lime green. This is just my regular pan set. For example, these Winsor and Newton inks are pretty fun. A lot of people use these for calligraphy, but I like just mixing them up with paint a little. See, everything depends on how much water you use too. This little circle here is pretty dry so the paint won't be expanding as much, and also we're using ink. This is a fun way to learn how to create textures, and sometimes just by experimenting you can find out or discover new things. This activity always reminds me of looking under a microscope and what everything would look like real close or we also call it the planet activity sometimes because it looks like little planets and it's just really fun. Now, I'm going to paint, oh wait, let's keep track of these. This is Dr. Ph. Martin's with salt, and then this is watercolor with Winsor and Newton ink. This Winsor and Newton gold ink is so awesome, it's just really good. It's not too expensive and it's really thick and you can get really great textures with this. I'm just going to try this out with some water color and see how it blends, although, I usually use it for details over a previous painting. So just adding some gold details here. Now we're going to try out some bleach, which can look really cool in our ultimate activity, which is going to be a galaxy or universe, we'll do later on. But right now I'm going to try out, I believe this is a mix of Winsor and Newton and my Sennelier pan set. It's just something that I had, those are already dry, in my palette. When using bleach, you want to use a Q-tip like this or an old brush that you don't want anymore because it will ruin it. So I'm just grabbing a little bit of bleach here, and just placing it over my paint. It's so cool to see how it starts losing its pigment and again, this creates really great textures. Now, let's see what happens if we add bleach to an ink surface. Let's try out different inks together. Let's try out some of this yellow ink, we can mix it with some pink ink I have here. We want to observe here is the different ways your bleach will react to your different types of paint. Here, I'm just placing some more bleach. Also, it's interesting to see for example how bleach will react to dry paint rather than wet paint. For example, this we painted a while ago is dry by now which was just a pan set with Dr. Ph. Martin's. Let's just see what happens if we add bleach to this dry area here. It almost works as an eraser. That looks pretty cool too. Now, I was amazed by what I discover whenever I do this, it's just every paint reacts in different ways and it was just great for creating textures. Going back to here where we used ink with bleach. You can notice how the bleach really didn't have much effect on my yellow ink. What we know now is that bleach will work a lot better if we're using just watercolors. Now, I'm going to try another just plain circle with, maybe we'll use some just green watercolor here. I'm starting to get more creative with colors at this point just to experiment blending. We're going to try some more, this is just a different brand of India ink, this is Bombay. Just to see what happens here. That looks so cool. It looks like a supernova, or an eye, or an explosion. It's just the things you can do with ink and watercolor together are amazing. Right now, I'm not too fond of what's going on with this Dr. Ph. Martin in salt. The color is probably too saturated to even notice any texture. I'm going to try out just using maybe green watercolors. These are just different tones from my pan sets. I'm just grabbing some salt here. I'm not going overboard with it just tiny sprinkles, and then we just wait for that to do its own magic. I also have this. I think this is acrylic. It's a pearl texture acrylic liquid paint. This can be cool too when you're creating really fun out of space textures. I'm going to try having some watercolor. Again, this is from my pan set. Now, I'm feeling like mixing up some colors a bit. Here's the purple from my pan set, and I just want to see how this reacts. This will probably give a really cool texture when it dries. Then, if I were to really mix everything up, I should try some salt with bleach as well. This is just plain pan set watercolor, and I just want to see what happens when we do a little bit of salt. Then, see the side of my cue tip is already pink, because we bleached out this past ones. I'm going to use the other side. I'm just going to drop a little bit of bleach in here. Just wait for that to dry. Lastly, we're just going to see how white ink is going to react. Right now, this is one of my favorite tones of these radiant watercolors, and I'm just going to use a little bit of that as a base, mix a little pink with that. We already know how this will react with dry paint, but what if we place just a little drop of this into our wet paint? See the consistency is a lot thicker too. Now, let's review what we just did. All the experiments we did using different supplies all based around watercolor of course. This first one is just what happened when we did just a plain water circle and let some of our pan set watercolor fall into here. Look at these awesome textures it makes just with simple to just watercolor and water. Well it depends on the way you place it. For example, this here was our pan set with Dr. Ph. Martin's and then we added some bleach once it was dry. You can notice how the bleach ate up all the pan set part, all of the irregular, I think just was Winsor & Newton watercolor, and it didn't do too much to our concentrated Ph. Martin's. This is just regular watercolor with salt. Beautiful textures is just amazing the way it looks when it dries. This was water and ink. We just did a circle with plain water and just dropped some of this yellow ink here. I believe it was this ink. Then, this is what happened when we mixed two pan sets. Again, it's just regular watercolor and it creates this really pretty textures. This is what happens when we did little drops of India ink on water, which looks like the moon almost, it's amazing, it looks like a little planet. These are really fun. Then, here we did Dr. Ph. Martin's with salt, you can see that it didn't really do that much. There's no really effect to it. If you're going to use salt I would recommend just using regular pan sets instead of a concentrated mix. Then, this one's really pretty too, it created a great texture, is just a background with a light wash of watercolor with a pan set and some of this Winsor & Newton ink. It was a little drier so it didn't expand as much and that looks cool too. Then, here is some watercolor with gold ink. You may not be able to see how it shimmers on this side, but if you move around, you can see how it shines with really cool texture too. Here we started experimenting with bleach. You know how this turns out because it looks sort of like tie-dye or batik. It's a really bohemian kind of look as well. It just really pretty textures again. Then here, we tried out ink with bleach and you can tell how this yellow ink really didn't care, for the bleach, nothing really happened here. But in our pink part, we did get some bleach action here. This bleach is going to look really cool when we paint our galaxy in our final activity. Then this, we had bluish watercolor circle in the back and then we just placed one drop of India ink in the middle, and you can see how the India ink really consumes the watercolor, it takes over. It's just really cool and spacey. Then this is beautiful how the salt reacted to this watercolor. You can see it looks like little stars or just really nice texture. You can use your imagination and just place it on anything you want. Then, here is watercolor with our iridescent paint. I don't know if you can see it too well through this angle but if you move your head around, you can see how it shines. Then, this looks really cool. This was watercolor, salt, and bleach. I don't know exactly what happened here, but I feel the bleach ate up the salt because I don't see it on here anymore, but it created a really cool texture on the edges here. This looks amazing to me. It looks really cool. Then lastly, this is just Dr. Ph. Martin's and white India ink. It didn't expand at all, it just stayed in its place. So this is actually what we used to paint stars later on. So this lesson just experiment with whatever you have. If you're feeling you want to buy just maybe one new paint or experiment with whatever you have at home, feel free to do this in this activity. Just mix it up with watercolors and you can get some really great results. 8. Lesson 6: Jellyfish Activity : This is the jellyfish class. It's so much fun it's just a great activity and we're going to apply what we've learned in our past lessons, which is, we're going to use what we learned here with our different types of experiments and then we're going to use a little bit of pulse and precision, which are these lines that we've practiced a while ago. To paint jellyfish you can look up for a few references online, or you can just have fun and play around with different shapes. I'm just going to draw these jellyfish caps here. Just lightly, very loosely. You can again look up for references online. So here I have these three. I'm going to start out just by painting. Again, whatever you liked in our past activity you can apply here. So let's say that I really like the way this yellow ink looks and I'm going to apply it with this regular green watercolor. I really like using electric tones but if you enjoy pastels, you can do that too. I'm just going to draw, here I'm using some of this Ph Martin. Just filling up this area. You can use, I'm just using my number 10 brush right now, but you can use a one or a two as well whenever you feel comfortable with here. I really like how this looks, but I feel it's missing a little bit of texture. At this point I'm going to add a little bit of salt here. Maybe a little bit of, I'm using my double zero brush right now, and maybe just a little bit of color here. You can just add drops. Mixing your paint. Now we are going to practice this whole pulse and precision thing, which is getting my small brush filled up with paint. We can use the wet paint that is here at the bottom of your jellyfish cap and just start to take it downward like that. See, this is such a simple activity and now we know how to do it. It's all about the cool textures and having just a little bit of control of what you're doing. Here, I grabbed a little bit of pink, which I'm going to use here in combination with whatever wet paint I have here. Be mindful if you have another jellyfish on top. If you want this guy to be in the bottom layer just avoid painting over this. Again, notice how I'm not applying too much pressure to my double zero paintbrush because I want really thin strokes here. I've had enough practice with these that I know the way the jellyfish moves, but it really helps if you look for a couple of references online. Again, this is great practice for pulse and precision. Just being really careful that your stroke is thin enough. We just have a lot of natural movement here as well. You can continue this until you feel that it's ready, that you've saturated it enough. Now let's move on to these other two, which are flipped over and I'm going to use a little bit darker color inside here. Just mixing colors again. We're going to try and make this look as interesting as possible. Not just one layer of color, but just mixing in with my pen set. That's it. Then while I wait for this to dry because I want to paint this next, we're going to go with this other guy, which I'm going to do pink and purple tones. Again, I'm mixing different paint. If you only have pen sets it's okay. You can just use pen sets too. So now we're just going to wait for this to dry a little bit before we can paint these two areas. By now these two areas have dried so we can paint the areas next to it, which will be the capstore jellyfish. I'm going to do this a little lighter than this one because this is inside, so it should be darker. Again, we can do whatever mix of colors you like. I'm keeping this one in bluer tones because this is oranges. I want to make this one pink and purple and this one's going to be blues. Notice how I'm using a smaller brush this time, just because these areas here, they're just a little more delicate. Just put into practice what you learned in pulse and precision, which is just staying within the line, getting very close. Don't overlap. I want to create a little bit of texture here. I'm just going to use a little bit of salt. You don't need much, just a couple of grains, like that, and here we go with pinky purple. Now, I'm going to use maybe a little bit of this ink here. Maybe mix it a little bit, bleach here. If you feel like you have just too much paint or just a big puddle of water, you can always just grab the tip of paper towel, and just let it absorb. Here, I've used watercolor and bleach, and I'm just going to add a little bit of layers to this, just adding a little more watercolor over, and maybe we can finish this off with just a sprinkle of salt. So it's just really playing around with whatever you have. Salt goes a really long way just makes everything look really textured. Now we're going to start to do the detailed part. Since this one is open, your little strands are going to start from both the bottom area here and this upper area. I'm just going to keep on painting. See I'm doing these, these are going open like this, I set the tone for that already, but I'm going to do this one closed up like that. So when the jellyfish is closed, it means it's going up and when it's open, it means it's going down. This just to show a range of movement. Now, be mindful of your pinky that might smudge a little, you want to stay away from wet paint whenever you're doing a lot of detail like this. So we finished up painting our basic jellyfish forms. By now this salt is dried, so you just want to push it out of the way. You can do a number of things here. I really like to do paint splatter. So you grab one of these brushes I told you about, you might not use as much, or you can also use a toothbrush, just splatter some paint around here, it's just makes it look really interesting. Plot tubing like that. But I always like to paint, let's say, I did some pink spider around this guy, and then I'm just going to do some blue around this one here, and then I like this electric orange for this one. So that alone just gives it a lot of depth, it just makes it fun to look at, and it's also fun to do. It's really fun to just splatter all this paint around. I always like to add just a little bit of white detail with the ink we spoke about, this is the brand that I really like, this is sold at Blake, or you can use just any old white acrylic. This is a good brand too. There's a variety of white inks or white paints that you can use for this. Let's see. So I'm just going to grab this here, it's going to be a number 2 brush. I have a little bit of white ink here that's already been dried, but I can just put some water on it, and create a little bit of shine, reflective areas like this. See this is just watery right now it's not super opaque, and then with our number 0 brush, we're going to grab just some fresh ink, some thicker ink, just mix it up a little here. This would be like a shiny area, so just feel free to play around with this white ink to create some detail. I'm obsessed with painting little dots on everything, just makes everything look like shimmery and magical. Hinges here too. This is autistic to create texture. Again, I'm using the activity we did with pulse just to get really straight and fine lines here. That's it, you have some really cool jellyfish that you've created just through experimenting with different paints, and just having a steady pulse, being able to pay these fine lines, and that was really awesome. 9. Galaxy Project (part 1): We're about to begin our final class project. What we're going to do here is paint a universe or a galaxy. This is a texture I really like to use for backgrounds or you can also use it as a under the sea concept. Right now I'm just applying a little bit of water just in one area. We're going to mix what we've learned throughout this course at this final stage. Right now, I'm just placing color onto the paper. I'm mixing my watercolors and just using my regular pen set right now. You can see I'm not really painting a circle or a square, it's just basically a blob of paint. I'm just going to leave this here for a bit, let this area dry. In the meantime, we can start over here on this corner. You can do a multi-colored galaxy or you can do, like right now, I'm starting out with blues, but I might add some pink as I go along. We're just little by little going to be filling up this space. Remember what we did with those circles, the little planet activity. You can do that here too. Remember you can use your salt to start adding texture. We don't need too much, just a little tiny bit. Right now, I'm using a little bit of ink this [inaudible]. You may not have a large variety of supplies at home. It doesn't really matter, you don't need it, it's just an extra. See how I'm leaving these regular forms. I'm just going to be really patient and let everything dry on its own. We have a lot of space to work here. We can always just let something dry while we go to another area. Right now you may not see my paints but I'll bring them here for you to see that. I was going to lather up one of these color as my pen set, and then mix it up in my palette to create my own colors, my own combinations. I'm going to add a little bit of salt here. I'm just mixing my own colors here. I had a little bit of green in this little dish and I'm just adding some Ph. Martin blue. I'm just beginning to place.Now we do want the final first layer which will be our watercolor layer, to be a little bit dark, in order for the stars to appear when we place them once we're done with this section. We are going to be adding a little bit of black ink if possible. See you notice how our salt is starting to appear here, it's starting to dry, we can start to see a texture, it's forming. This point, all I have is just weird random blobs of paint. But each blob of paint has a really cool texture. When we start layering these, they will turn into an amazing galaxy universe backdrop. I'm free handing it right now, but you can also look up pictures like of the Hubble station or NASA's website has great images and you can get inspiration on that too. You can paint supernovas and stars and planets. There's just so much material for this kind of subject matter. Having used bleach yet, so I'm going to start just using a little bit of that in here. [inaudible] really cool texture. I'm just going to leave this over here. Right now, I'm just using a little bit of black watercolor. I'm going to let the paint act on it's own. Right now I'm using my number 10 brush. If you use a smaller brush, it will take you forever. It'll just take longer to fill in these spaces. I like larger, round brush for this kind of backdrop, or this texture. Then we're going to start using our smaller brushes for details. Right now this area had dried and I'm starting to overlap our blobs of paint. We can actually use this really good texture that we get on the edges of our watercolor blobs. For example, right here, this bleach was a bit much, so I'm just going to add some paint there and see what happens. Just creating the most interesting textures we can. Right now I feel like this painting needs a little bit of pink. So I'm just going to start adding just slightly, then mixing my Ph. Martin's with my pen sets. Try to look back on your planet exercise to remember what combinations you really loved or if there's something you want to try here on a larger scale. For example, I thought it was really interesting how the bleach and salt mixed up together. So I think I might try that in this area here. We'll do a little bit of salt first like that. You can see how the water immediately repels the salt, expands like this and then as it dries it will leave certain areas like here. You can see how it starts to work. I'm just going to add a little bit of bleach to this area where I added salt and see what happens. There is really no mistake you can make care because by the time you're done, you'll have so many layers that if there is something that you weren't too fond of, you can just cover up with another one. You can make some layers a little bit lighter than others. This is a really fun activity. Whenever we do this in workshops, I'm amazed with how everyone can come up with different uses for this background. I'll actually show those slideshow at the end of this class just so you can see how I've used this background or this backdrop in different designs, or you can even integrate lettering or use negative space to make the texture just be a filler into a specific space. Notice how I'm leaving little windows here, like this. This looks really cool when we start layering. It really gives the painting some depth. So you really want a lot of texture. Let's say when you paint with acrylics, you want to try to fill up an area real nice and here what we want is just to use the watercolor the best way we can, which is just a lot of transparencies, a lot of different tones. See like here I'm just going very light, I'm just actually using whatever I had leftover from this little area here that hasn't dried well yet. We're just going to continue filling up our paper until we're satisfied with the result. Also, another little tip is to try to leave a little area around the edges blank. It'll just look like a nice little frame for your paper and you should be able to do this with no problem because we learned that in our pulse and precision activity. Just stay really close to the edge but don't go out of the edge. Another thing is your paper might start to bloat up or you might start to get these puddles of water. If you notice that there's just too much water in certain areas, you can just grab a paper towel just on the edges, clean it up like that. That's no problem. I like to use these pads, but some people do actually use sheets of paper and take them around the edges to get a really flat experience. For me it's not necessary. I have not had to do that. You can get cards that the edges are stuck to each other, so that it'll be really flat and then you won't have problem with all this water. But once it dries anyway, it'll flat out on its own. So don't worry too much about it right now. I'm just going to keep on painting. I'm just going to keep layering these areas. It's very important to have contrast too, so that's why I'm applying this really dark India ink to some areas. We've been filling in these different areas of our spacey background. You may think it looks weird right now. You may be like, ''It's not looking the way I want it to'', but don't get discouraged. Once we start placing all the details over this, it'll really start to come together. Also notice how I purposely left this area a little bit brighter and more colorful and then some areas are darker and I used more black, for example, just to give it more definition. Or if you're copying a supernova or a galaxy, it'll show you where it needs to be darker. I left my little border around here. It's going to be my frame. So just some finishing touches, some extra salt around these wet areas. You can see how the salt is already dried here in these areas and it just really gives us a great texture. I might do a little bit of bleach around here. I need just some in here, some over here. I'm just feeling like I need to add a little more paint here in this area. You're just dropping your paint very delicately over the paper. We're just going to let this dry for a bit. When painting details over watercolor, you really need it to be completely dry, otherwise your top layer will just expand back into the background. So we're just going to wait for this to dry, probably about 15 minutes. When your paper is shiny, that means it's still wet. Once this is all dry, we're going to begin with our details that will make it look like what it is, like a galaxy or universe. If you're doing an under the sea matter, this can be all blue. I'll show some examples later so you can see what I'm talking about. But just let this dry for now and we'll continue in a bit. 10. Galaxy Project (part 2: details): By now we've waited for our paint to dry. You can see how all the salt has dried too. We can just start to fresh it off like this. You can just use your fingers or I have this cool eraser and a brush on this side. I can also use the dry brush like this or any dry brush you have. Just get the salt grains out of the way. They've already worked here. You can see, especially on this side, I think I did a little more here and there's just a really cool texture. That will just add to the depth of our spacey painting. Right now, it just looks like this big blob. But once we start doing details, it will really come together and we'll give it an intention. The stars are giving it an intention to be out of space. If you do an all blue background and you paint white jellyfish over it, that'll be an under the sea concept. We're going to start by splattering tiny stars. I have a fresh ceramic bowl here, it's clean. I'm going to use my white ink or again, this is perfectly fine, just white acrylics or any other white ink you might have. Just going to grab a little bit of this. It is thick, just like acrylic. I'm going to leave this thick opaque paint on this side and then start a little diluted ink spot right here because we're going to be using both. You might remember when you went to school and you might have even done this with a toothbrush or in some sort of art class, and we're going to do it today. All you need to do is just start splattering like that. The closer you get, you're going to get little tiny clusters of stars. If you go far up, they are going to be more far away and they might be bigger too. So you want to alternate that as well. Here I can see that I dropped some paint there, but don't worry, we'll make it work. We'll make this white too, just use your diluted paint to do these stars until we've covered it up. Try to make sure that your brush is facing down. If you do it sideways like this, you'll get diagonal lines instead of dots. The reason I love teaching this specific activity is because it's not really that difficult and you can start to get a real sense of how your paints work and you get to mix up different kinds of paint and use white detail over color. It's just a really fun activity you can use as background for so many illustrations. I'm going to dilute even more ink to make it watery, really transparent. I'm going to paint little circles around my painting. The reason we want this to be a little more transparent is because we're going to make these shining stars. If you look at pictures of the universe or a galaxy, you can always see different sizes in the stars. That's what we're going to do here too. Just a bunch of different sizes and some are going to shine more than others. Then we're going to go to our thicker paint here, which thicker means it will be more opaque, not as translucent, and we're just going to manually start painting a couple of larger stars. Then you can get really creative and just start thinking of what you would see in a starry night landscape, and you can even do a shooting star. You can do this by getting just some watery white paint, and just pressing down and then laying it goes like that. Then we can grab a little bit of our thicker paint and start it off like that. These little details like this are going to really enhance your painting. Another thing you can do that's really cool is constellations, [inaudible]. To do constellations we're going to really practice what we did in our pulse and precision class or lesson. We want to do really fine and straight lines, try to just do one stroke. You can look up, let's say I'm a Gemini, I'm going to paint my Gemini constellation or you can just make up cool figures. Here we have a couple of constellations. These are concentrated paint to paint the stars that will keep the constellations together. We might want to do a couple more constellations around this area here. Try to make those lines as fine as possible. I know you can do it. You already practiced, and if you haven't gotten this down yet, just practice a little bit more. Just keep doing those fine lines that we did in the pulse and precision class. Once you're confident enough, it'll be really easy to get these. Also, I'm noticing that these translucent circles I painted are starting to dry. Now I can get some of my thick paint, it'll be more opaque, to paint these, another dot inside this circle to make our shining stars. Just all these little details really help the painting look more alive. Feel free to experiment at this point. What you're going to share in your class project is your final galaxy or watercolor painting. If you can think up of any other elements that might be a part of your galaxy, please feel free to share. Tell me what you did different, tell me if you had any new paints you wanted to try out? I have this little metallic paint from a while ago. We can try that out and maybe paint some shining stars in here. That was a little too big so I'm going to absorb a little bit of this. Just have a lot of fun with this. You can use this painting as the background, or maybe eventually you can integrate some lettering into it and have a really cool quote. Or just as a backdrop for a starry night landscape. So I have my shiny paint there, and I have some gold we might be able to use as well. It's weird with paintings like this, you never really know when you're done. It just has to feel right. For me, I think these last few details are going to make it just right. I'm just adding a few extra little stars to my painting. It's basically done. This is just really hypnotizing and it feels like you're going to go on forever. But the class has come to an end. Your assignment is to upload your version of this galaxy, universe, starry night, or texture to the class project area. It's really cool to see everyone's work. What everyone thought up of, if everyone had any specific idea or modification. This exercise is just really great because we can finally apply everything that we've learned into one single painting. We're applying gradients, we're applying transparencies, we're applying detail, pulse, precision, experimenting with different paints. You'll find that this is just really fun to do. It's really fun to loosen up and just know how to use your paints. Even if you're not a beginner, this is a really fun activity. If you are a beginner, I hope that this course was useful for you. It just has some really basic tips on how to use your paints and how to experiment with different kinds of paints using your watercolors. This was modern watercolor techniques for beginners. I am Anna Victoria, and it was really fun to spend these moments with you. 11. FAQ- scanning, supplies, living as an artist, income, licensing: Hi class. Well, we're about one month and a half into my first Skillshare class and I just wanted to say that I'm really proud of you. I've seen all of your projects and they're really cool, and I'm just making this video to address a few questions that I've got throughout from different students throughout this time. I'm just going to start really quickly with scanning. So a few of you have asked about scanning and I have battled with this throughout my whole painting career, especially being such a color freak like I am. So with scanning, there are two different things that I do, one is I just have a regular Epson scanner at home. Let's say I painted something simple like this, which is just some lettering that I needed to place into a project I did and I would just use my home scanner, my Epson scanner. But for example, let's say a larger illustration like this, which I just painted. This wouldn't even fit into my regular scanner. I could do it there, I could Photoshop it together, but I really like to use professionals scanners for this. I would just go to OfficeMax or Office Depot and just have them scan it for me there to like really high resolution, and then I will have a really nice image to work with. So that's really it about scanning. You may need to Photoshop a bit adjusting colors. But basically, I'd use Epson and a professional scanner. Just to get the supplies questions out of the way. I've also had people with concerns on having the right supplies or let's say, not willing to start the class because they feel like they didn't have professional watercolors or seeing how I use a bunch of different inks and mix all my different pen sets together. I just want to say that I worked with one set of my ones are even in pen set for about three years and that's all I had. That's all I really had to work with and it was more than enough, so don't let this stop, you don't let it be an obstacle. Talking about supplies is really fun. Some of us had a great discussion in class about different brands, for example, there's a Winsor & Newton tone of ogre that I really like, and I like that over Winsor over Dr. Ph. Martin's, or you just start finding what your favorite colors are for each brand. This is not necessary, it's just like a fun part, once you're really into it. Maybe you've saved up enough money to buy more pricey pen set but I just wanted to say that don't let supplies be an obstacle. Just keep on going and as time goes by, you'll either find a necessity to get new supplies or start discovering different. For example, you can start buying little tube sets individually and then start accumulating stuff like that. Other questions are about new classes. Are you planning to teach new classes on Skillshare for advanced or intermediate levels? The answer is yes. I have two classes planned out already. What is it going to be for lettering with watercolor, which is an actual real workshop we do here in Mexico City. The other one is exploring more mixed media, more techniques to combine with your watercolors. We might do some more classes because there's another class I would like to teach that's about textures. How to create textures and watercolor and start overlapping different layers and stuff like that, so there's more to come. So that will be really cool. These questions are really interesting. They're not about technique as much as living as an artist, like what it's like to be a full-time artist. For example, this first question is, Laura mentioned she finds it hard to find time to dedicate to painting and then asks, "How did you manage your time when you started? Did you juggle a regular job when you started or did you jump right in and go for the artist right away?" Then Myra has a similar question where she says, "When was the moment you said this is what I want to be doing? Did I have any doubts? How about balancing earning an income through art and staying true to yourself at the same time?" Which is a really big question. I might just tell you a quick story about how I got into this. I did go to school for Graphic Design and Fine Arts at the same time, it was like a minor program we had at school in my university, which was in Puebla. So I went to school for graphic design just because I thought it could teach me more skills for real life profession, which it I actually did, it was good to study graphic design. I learned a lot about composition and Photoshop and how to use these different technology, I guess. I did take art classes, but no one taught me how to use watercolor per se, or how to use acrylics. So the class project has to be a collection of seven pieces about something personal or whatever and then we would just develop whatever we thought was best, whatever we could, just keeping in mind the class project. So I graduated and went straight into graphic design, which wasn't too bad. But after a few years, I found myself being miserable because I found it really hard to compromise with clients. I don't know if that would be a word, but some people have a real ability to be like, "Oh, I want to convince the client that this looks better." Or maybe people find it easier to work on subjects or concepts that aren't really appealing to them. For example, if I had like a travel agency as a client or just something that was not of my interest, I find it hard to be interested. I'm not saying anything is wrong with that, it's just that I wasn't too good at it. I had this graphic design business with two friends. It was doing pretty good, we had some nice clients, but I would go home every night and just start painting nonstop. It would be 4:00 AM and I would be like, "I have to go to bed, I need to go to work tomorrow." I just became more and more obsessed with painting. I wasn't too happy with my life either I was living in Cancun where I grew up, which is a small town. I know for most of you it's like, that place where you go on vacation. But for me it's like the small town where I grew up. I just started getting really frustrated and there was nothing really for me there. So painting was a real escape for me. This was around 2010, which is about five years ago. Etsy was just starting to become popular and I started to notice how some people were applying their art to objects. This seemed interesting to me because I always knew that the type of art that I wanted to create was more to, let's say, apply or decorate instead of hanging in a gallery wall, if that makes any sense. So a tip here would be see where your artwork belongs. Don't necessarily think that it has to be in big shows, or maybe selling prints is better for you, or maybe selling your textures on different websites like Creative Market or something like that. So just try out different things and see where your art strides also. So for me, I just opened an online shop. I would also say don't get frustrated because it took me about a year to really get my shop going. I probably sold like one thing a month during that whole year, but that was enough to keep me interested at least. So by this time, I still had my graphic design business and I had to make a big decision and what I did was I just moved to a big city, which I knew was what I had to do if I wanted to have a career in art. In this case, it was Mexico City where there was a lot of like booming craft shows and there was a real platform for me to start selling my work and start discovering who's going to buy these little flowers or whatever it was that I was painting. So that's what I did. I just moved here. I kept a few of my graphic design clients to have some income which goes back to Laura's question. I didn't just drop everything and do art. I had to find a balance where these two clients give me so and so money, so I'll just keep them just to pay rent and I was living on really little low income at that time. But it was a sacrifice for, I'd say, three years before artwork really had significant income. So I moved to Mexico City, I started selling in a lot of craft fairs. I just kept on going with my online shop. I started to get contacted by different brands that wanted to collaborate with me. They were not willing to pay me any money. But when you're starting out, you're like, I just want exposure. Then once you you've been established, this changes a lot, but there is a point where you're just starting out, and you don't even know that you're good enough yet. Anything works, any type of exposure, any type of project is a yes. So that's what I did. Then, I started to just start to figure out ways to make a bit more money out of this, but still really enjoying the painting part, and I got approached by someone through my Etsy site actually, I will not mention the client's name, but they said that, if I was interested in licensing a print they saw my Etsy shop for green cards, and I would receive certain percentage for each sale. This sounded amazing to me because I was like, okay, I already created this. This artwork is something I did because I wanted to and now someone wants to use it to sell on a product and I'm just going to get more money out of it. That seemed like something that really interested me. So I licensed my first piece of artwork to this company, I got paid my checks like they said they would, and I thought, wow, this is great. I can keep painting the stuff that I like, and then someone might want to use it or license it, which is essentially borrowing my image to use on something and then, I would get paid royalties for it. So I started investigating. I looked what was the best way to get more clients out of this type of this dynamic. So I looked for trade shows online and I found a few. The one that really interested me, it's called Sartex. It's in New York every May and I've been attending Sartex for the past three years and that's where most of my big clients have come out of. Sartex is pretty pricey, it's a huge investment. But if you're really serious about it, and if this is your path, I would highly recommend it. So that's it. Now basically what I do is, I still have my online shops, I have two. I do some workshops, here in Mexico City is online teaching, a few commissioned projects. So you have to not just rely on one thing, but find different sources of income that will help you have a steady income, not just relying on one single thing. You have to have a few revenues. So that's about it. I don't know really what else to say about balancing income through art and staying true to yourself. I would just say, work really hard. It's not easy to do what you have. You have to be a little obsessed with it. I think since I started painting, I've painted almost every single day, even if it's just a little tiny bit of watercolor. Try to keep yourself interested in different projects and also sometimes pick up different, I would take ceramic classes, or pottery classes, you can focus on one technique, but it's nice to have different ways of doing art. This also keeps you relevant and you can learn something from other techniques. This is about it for now. I thought having a little video about doing what you love, and these other questions would be a little better than in written form. But you can keep asking me questions through the board and the community board you can just post whatever comments or questions you have there and I will do my best to answer it. I'm looking forward to getting new classes out to you. I love seeing all of your projects. It's really cool, it's amazing what you guys have created. Please keep them coming, I'm excited. Every time I see a new project, I'm like, let's check it out. So you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for taking my class and let me know if you have any other questions.