Oil & Cold Wax: Creating Abstract Art with Color Palettes Inspired by Interiors

1. Introduction: Do you ever love revisiting supplies that maybe you've put away for awhile? I do. I work with supplies. I'm obsessed with them. I play with them for quite a long time. Then the next shiny object, I'll come around and I'll be obsessed with those supplies for awhile. It'll go for quite a long time, maybe a year or two before I'm like, hey, maybe I should pull this back out and work with it. That's what I've done today. I'm pulling back out my oil and cold wax supplies. I'm recreating and re-imagining super fun art to do in this workshop. I'm Denise Love and I'm an artist and photographer. I can't wait to show you all the different projects that I've got in store for you. I actually started this workshop thinking I'm going to cut all these pieces up. I'm not trying to create a masterpiece right upfront. I'm not going to try to get the perfect composition and try to get the perfect colors and try to get everything just right. So when I peel the tape, it's all perfect and I've made a masterpiece. That puts so much pressure on myself to do that. A lot of times I just end up disappointed and I'll walk away from a supply and I will come back to it for six months. Today I'm taking that pressure off myself and hopefully you. We're going to start with the process of we're going to cut these up. We're going to experiment with some interesting color palettes. I'm pulling some from interior design book that I really love. You can use my same inspiration or you can be inspired by books of interiors or whatever it is that inspires you. We're going to get outside our comfort zone and experiment with new color palettes that we haven't thought to use before. I'm stepping out my side, my comfort zone too, you're not going to see my traditional blue, green, or orange, pink. Well, you may see a little bit of that, but it's not going to be quite the same. We're going to be inspired by these color palettes that are already out there for us to pull from and create art without thinking too hard about it. We're going to mark make, we're going to do some stencil work. We're going to layer paint, doing 2-3 different color palettes and just create. Then we're going to set those aside for the night and let them dry, and then we're going to come back and re-evaluate. Did we end up with something amazing? Because surprise surprise, there's actually pieces that you create this way that end up amazing. This piece right here, my new favorite piece of art. I would not have created it if I had not been doing this workshop and creating these projects and using my leftover trash paint on a piece of paper that was like the very last of the paint. I was just trying not to throw away most favorite piece ever. You're going to end up with surprise, some pieces that are amazing. Then you're going to end up with pieces where you're like, let's cut these up. That's what we're going to do. We're going to create not thinking too hard about it. We're going to end up with some beautiful pieces that we can just finish like they are, we're going to end up with a few pieces that will cut into some stripe samplers. We'll also create a really cool weaving project just to do some paper weaving and try it out. Then we'll also search out compositions within the larger piece. Like is there a small piece that is amazing in the bigger piece that you here about. I've got a lot of fun projects today, and taking the stress off of yourself by just knowing right up front we're creating these with the possibility to cut them up. You're going to have so much fun painting compared to sitting down, trying to really work hard to create the perfect painting your first time. Hope you enjoy this class. I'm excited to have you here. Let's get started. 2. Class Project: Your class project is to come back and share some of the projects that you did in class. I can't wait to see which techniques really spoke to you. Whether it'd be the mark-making, adding in some collage elements, layering the paint, searching out pieces that you could cut out after you'd already finished the painting if you didn't love the piece that you created, doing some stripe collage, doing the paper weaving. We covered a lot of fun different elements in class today. Come back and show me what you create. I can't wait to see those, and I'll see you in class. 3. Color Inspiration: Let's talk about color inspiration, because I know that for a lot of us, color is the hardest part of creating our art. Maybe you have a favorite color palette like I like orange and pink and also light blue and green. Everything that I create tends to come out using some of those colors, all my favorite pieces. But what if you're ready to step outside your comfort zone, or you just don't know where to start, or maybe you need some new inspiration to create your next set of art? I like to be inspired by beautiful coffee table books. I like interiors because I actually went to school for Interior Design years ago when I was a kitchen bath designer for many, many, many years. I didn't stop doing the interior stuff until I started my little creative business 10 years ago. I tend to still love to look at interior magazines. I like to look at art magazines. I love interior books. These Hans Blomquist books are some of my very favorite. His style and the colors and the antiqueness the old settings just really plays right into the type of photography that I like to make. The type of rooms that I love to look at. The type of art that sometimes appeals to me more so than the type of art that I end up creating with the brighter colors. I saw an artist onetime say, the art that you create is not necessarily the same as the art that you're attracted to collect. I took me a minute to understand that because the styles that I'm interested in collecting, I just automatically assumed that that would be the stuff I would create, but it doesn't really work out that way. I end up creating bright, abstract looking things and sometimes that's not what I collect when I buy photography and art from other artist. That was freeing in my mind to me, that I wasn't failing at not creating exactly the aesthetic I tend to like to decorate with and things like that. I thought that was freeing. This Hans Blomquist in the mood for color, perfect palettes for creative interiors. This book is amazing and if you only get one book to be inspired by as we're flipping through this one, you can see why I love it. This one is beautiful. I want to be inspired by color palettes in this book, possibly to create the art that I want to create today. I want to have a direction to go. I feel like it's easier if you're inspired by a color palette that you see and you're like, this is gorgeous, that you'll then have more fun trying to recreate those colors and recreate pieces of art using those colors and that style and that aesthetic. This is all about colors and the interior, but you hang art in interiors and so I think it's appropriate. This book just has the most yummy, delightful photography that goes right in there with all the yummy color like this right here. This sap green with this dark blue base. Look how beautiful that is. That right there I am thinking, maybe we should bookmark that page. I want you to borrow from the library. You can look online. If you get one book, I love this one. Find a book that you find inspiring. Then start just tearing little pieces of paper and marking some of these pages as you're looking through it that you're like, this is amazing. This is really cool too. It's one of my favorite aqua dusty blue colors. It's got like a touch of like a dusty pink in there, with some brown and yellow and white. I mean that right there is a nice fun color palette. Every page I can just pull colors right out of that and say, here's what I'm going to create with today. Look at these, this is beautiful. We've got neutral gray. We've got this yummy, like a burgundy purply pinky color. We've got this yummy yellow. We've got some greens in here. There's lots of stuff that we can play with. Like on this page. That's not my color palette at all. But how gorgeous is that? Maybe it could be my color palette for a series that we're going to create. Look at these, look at these. I just want to live in all of these rooms. This right here, gorgeous, still the same different purply pink and that yummy aqua blue. I love that scene. You can even see some paint colors that he is talking about to experiment with. Look at the texture on this wall that is just so incredible. Like I wish I owned that wall. Just cut it out and bring it to me. Look at this, we've got different shades of yummy blue, love that. We've got some greens that we could be throwing in. I do like things that look like old wallpaper. That right there really appeals to me, especially if you're going to be doing some type of collage elements in any of these. That would be super fun if you get your hands on old wallpaper. I like walls that look like they have been aged by time over 100 years in an abandoned house. These neutrally colors with these different shades of brown and green. Yummy. Yummy with this green color. I'm going to take some inspiration from a favorite book and it's probably going to be this one. You can just see as we're flipping through all the amazing color palette, look at this one. A traditionally a blue and white person, but I'm feeling this little blue and white and this tad of green and bluish-gray that are showing in that photo. How gorgeous is that? Swedish, I'm all about Swedish design that vary that simplicity that you get. Look how beautiful this is with these dried flowers and that pretty ocher tone. I've got some good ideas in here, I'm feeling definitely maybe going to have a few color palettes, possibly out of that book and then because I loved that one so much, I've also got the in detail book and inspired by nature book. There's another one that he just put out that I'm sure I'm going to add to my list of books. I've also used this as inspiration in my photography. Because I just find when I sit outside on the porch under my umbrella with a dog hanging out with me. I let my mind relax and look at the beautiful imagery and the colors that all of a sudden I have inspiration for a new class idea. Now these are a lot more neutral. I may or may not pull from this book, but look at this, a dark ocher yellow, lavender, dark purple, not my color way at all, but little bit of blue with red stripe, or white, some gray, ocher brown. We've got a really beautiful color palette right there that I might take inspiration from totally outside my comfort zone, which is what makes it so exciting. Now I have a color palette to like strive for. I'll sit outside and I'll just start flipping through the books. Look how beautiful that is right there. Now if you want to get one of those and use that and end up with this when you're done, you could do that. But I'll let my mind relax. Then I tell you every time I've done that and I've really been in-between ideas, I have come up with the best workshops, and been inspired by some color, or color palette, or set of images for the still-life. This inspired by nature one is a little more neutral also. I almost think that in the mood for color one is the most exciting for coming up with color palettes. Look at that, now that rust is gorgeous. See that blue and that pretty tan tone. If you get stuck for color palettes, you can look for color palettes online, you can check Pinterest. Look at that. They'll see this is like a deep eggplant with some blue and white and that bluish green color in there. How yummy is that? Now if I actually had one of these houses and they looked that decrepit and I was living in it day in and day out, I'm not sure I could resist not painting it and making it look new and fresh and clean again. But if I had a barn that I could have decorated like these decrepit places, they'll be perfect for photo shoots. That would totally be my studio and I would invite other people over it to be like let's shoot photos, look at my barn. Some good, good ideas. This is my inspiration. I'm going to be inspired by some favorite books of mine. I'm going to open it up and pick a color palette and say, let's see what we can create. Possibly co-create like one or two different whole sheets of it. Because almost now my very favorite inspiration pieces that I did. These were two different nine by 12 sheets that I ended up cutting up and they were a little different, but still in a similar color palettes. I realized as I was cutting these up, that I want some that are more than one sheet and a colorway. You might paint two of each colorway but different patterns on it. Then we would have something to maybe cut up and combine with other possible things that we paint, or weave, or who knows, cut out some interesting part of that painting. But I do like having more than one because after I started cutting this up, this right here, which let me tell you what's the ugliest large painting was my very favorite in the cutout pieces because it had marks and it had all these interesting colors and that was offset by some neutrals and some darks. In the end when I re-imagined it into a new piece of art and ended up being my very favorite. I don't want to limit myself in colors. I want to have as much fun experimenting and maybe end up with 100 pieces of paper that we can then pick and choose from at the end. I want you to buy a couple of pads of paper with the expectation of you're going to free your mind, come up with several color palettes. That's why I said, if you find something online, that's like a little color palette generator, maybe you have some favorite photos that you can pull a color palette out of. Maybe you have some favorite books, or magazines, or interiors that you can look at for color palette inspiration. Because if you're sitting here looking at just a handful of oil paints, you're going to be like, I don't know what to use. Should I mix up some of this and this, I don't know, like what should I do? I have 100 colors to pick from. Whereas now I'm like, I'm trying to create a brown, this cool green, a neutral color up here, a little bit of yellow in it. Now I feel like, I've got something to strive for and a color palette to create. Then I can paint and mark make and draw on and set it to the side and let it dry and move on to the next piece without putting too much pressure on myself. I recommend you find something you find inspiring and use that as some color palette inspiration because on these pieces we're looking to create a bunch of different pieces, a bunch of different color palettes. I want you to not get hung up on making a piece of art out of this first pieces that we're painting. We're painting these first pieces to give us some choices so that we can re-imagine it into something amazing. I'll see you back in class. 4. Supplies: [MUSIC] Let's take a look at the different supplies that we'll be using in class, and this is a mostly what I'll be using. I can certainly possibly spring something up on us in class just because I happen to think of it. Let's start talking about different materials that we're going to be needing. I do recommend when you're doing the oil and cold wax that you're wearing gloves because it's really messy. It's very hard to get off the skin. Some of the oil paints are going to have materials in it that are toxic that you don't really want to get on your hands if you can avoid it. Definitely, some gloves. I forget to wear gloves to a lot of the classes when I'm working, but with the oil and cold wax, trust me, you don't want to forget the gloves. [LAUGHTER] We need some oil paint obviously, and it really does make a difference on the paint. You want a better grade paint if you can. The better the paint, the more pigment, the more refined oil, isn't it? It just ends up giving you a better result. I've got lots of different brands. It just depends on who's got a color that you like or if you've ever worked with any before or if you're just hitting the art store, pick something that's in your price range, but isn't at the bottom of the line is what I would recommend. I've got Gamblin, I've got old Holland, I've got Rembrandt, Charvin is my very favorite. It's at the top of the line price-wise. It's got the neatest colors. But if you're in the mixing colors, that really doesn't matter in that respect, but I do like the Charvin. I've got Winsor Newton, I've got Holbein, and there's plenty of other brands out there. I just went willy-nilly pick in over the years colors that I found interesting but when it comes down to it, you could probably mix most of the colors that you wanted to mix and just start out with a basic set. But I would start out if you could with a basic nicer set. You need some oil paints. These are traditional oil paints. I don't recommend the water-soluble oil paints because they're really weird and waxy, and when you're mixing it in with the wax they're just strange and I don't like them at all. If you pick up water-soluble ones, just know you may get different results. It's not my favorite. [NOISE] Also, have a great big white because I don't know, I always seem to need white. Then we'll also need cold wax. There's a couple of different brands of the cold wax. I am using the Gamblin cold wax medium. There's also the Dolin's cold wax. There may be another brand out there, but this is my favorite. It is a beeswax and solvent mixture, and this size can, this is 16-ounce can, this goes a long way. If you just get one can of this stuff, 16 ounces is a good quantity to start with. We'll also need something to spread that oil and cold wax mixture on. My favorite tool is the silicone bowl scraper. It is a messermeister silicone scraper. It's for making bread and scraping things out of a dough ball thing. Then also have the silicone catalyst wedges. I've got the straight one, I've got the one with the cutouts, and then I've got some of these little harder ones with little cutouts on them. Then I have this random bowl scraper but I'm telling you out of all of those, this is my favorite and this comes in different colors. Even if it's not orange, but it looks like this. [LAUGHTER] It's great. [LAUGHTER] This one's probably my least favorite. It was just a random bowl scraper I found on Amazon. The catalyst wedges, you get those at the art store and they're pretty readily available. I do like the wedges with the different cutouts on them because we can make lots of yummy marks in our oil paint, so I love those. This is not my favorite, but it is another option that you can use instead of the bowl scraper. I don't like this one at all but you have to decide some of those things yourself, whatever you got access to. Those big silicone scrapers are really nice because we can just keep wiping that paint off. They clean up pretty easy. I could scrape the oil paint off of here if I wanted it really clean. I also have some palette knives. We can put paint on the palette knives and this is what I'll be using to mix the paint up and then I also have a few clay tools because this is my favorite tool to make marks. I like this end that looks like a real sharp point. I like the end on the other end of that one that's just like a little scooper looking thing with comes to a point. That's my favorite clay tool but you can use a variety of sharp pointy objects and including another thing I use a lot, especially in my acrylic painting, is a mechanical pencil. I can use that to draw and make marks too in my oil paint. Anything sharp, this is like an ice pick but maybe a little bit smaller diameter. [LAUGHTER] Anything that we can drag and mark-making scrape, those are great. You could also use a wood skewer. I have bags and bags of skewers over here with my art supplies. Those are fantastic. Another spreader over here that I just happened to notice in my little stash of supplies over here. You can use some of these catalysts, wedges that have the handles too, anything like that is fine. One of these things, actually this is a new object for me. I didn't even know existed, but I'm like, "Where have you been all my life." [LAUGHTER] A lot of times after you've had oil paint for a while, it's almost impossible to get the lids back off like this one. It's already on there and I can't even open it, even trying really hard. This thing is a lid opener. Clip it on, squeeze it, and then look at that. You can get these lids off. [LAUGHTER] Greatest invention ever. I actually have a lid over for my jars and the kitchen too and I'm just like, "Where have you been my whole life?" This is a little paint lid opener and I highly recommend it. I also have some blue painter's tape. I will be using that to tape around stuff because I don't want to go to the very edge and have paint get all over my table. I'd rather bring that paint a little bit in from the edge. I'm not taping these pages down, but I'm taping the edges so I can then put these down on the floor to dry overnight because with the oil paint, they don't dry very fast. You can't just apply heat gun to it and dry and speed it up. You got to actually let that sit out and dry a day or two. What I want to do in class is tape a bunch of pages, paint a bunch of pages, set those all out to dry, and then come back tomorrow or the next day and continue on with our projects. I want to get really creative with the painting part, so I got lots of options to pick from later. Another thing that's pretty fun that I want to use possibly is some stencils. Punchinella is one of my very favorite stencils. This is the leftover material when they make sequins. It's metallic because sequins are metallic and this stuff is amazing. It's easy to push paint through and then let it do its thing. I've also got just some regular stencils and you can just pick some up at the craft store or you can look online for fun stencils. I've just got a little variety to possibly play with. I'm a little bit obsessed with this Moroccan feel here on these stencils. I'd like to possibly work that pattern into something. Then later we'll see how that worked out but basically, we can rub paint through here using a palette knife. For instance, we can do that whole little squeeze the paint through. Then I tried to clean the stencil up as much as possible when I'm doing that, but usually, when I'm using stencils with oil paint, I tend to just figure that's probably going to be the oil paint stencil but oil paint does stay wet pretty long, so we can use some Gamsol or mineral spirits. This is basically odorless mineral spirits, which is why I like it. Gamblin makes it. We can use the Gamsol on our little cloth and we can clean up our stencils that way. I do like having the Gamsol. Even though it says odorless, it does have a slight odor to it, but it's not like a mineral spirits odor. It's just something kind of neutral. [NOISE] I also have some other little raised stencil things that I got as a pack of fun things at Michael's. What's fun these are called premium textures by Craft Smart. I have a couple of different packs of these because I was like, my goodness, these would be amazing in my oil and cold wax paintings because I can paint a thin layer on there, and then I can dab that into that layer of paint. That's what I love oil and cold wax. It's a thickness, it's like a frosting. It gives us the opportunity to use things like this to punch a pattern on top but look at that pattern right there, amazing. We got a wood pattern, we got a little crosshatchy pattern here. Look at this one with the little chevron. See little pebbles. [LAUGHTER] These you could at least have the outside chance to getting your hands on, these are craft smart, premium texture sheets, and they were not expensive and they are perfect for oil and cold wax. The last time I did oil and cold wax, I did not have these. After looking around and it's been awhile since I played my own cold wax after looking around finding these options, see this is way more decorative. Look at that pretty pattern there. The drawback to this is going to be hard to get the oil and cold wax out of that. We'll see. This is a cool pattern here too. Because even on the rubber stencils that I have, the foam ones, the oil and cold wax sits up in there, but these are like silicone. I feel like once they're dry, maybe we could bend them and get a lot of that paint out of there if we needed to. There were perfect for what I wanted to do. If I ruin them, that's okay. They weren't expensive and they had some really cool patterns that I could experiment possibly with. That's fun. I also have some refined linseed oil, which we could use to thin down oil paint if we needed to. This goes a long way so if you have a real thick paint that you've just had for a long time that's maybe dried a little too much, you could reconstitute that a little bit with linseed oil. I also have the Gamblin, this is Gamblin also, the Gamblin Galkyd light. This, you can mix it in with our oil and cold wax mixture, and it speeds the drying time of our paint. A tiny drop or two per color is plenty. The stuff goes a long way. You don't want to overuse it. That's the three liquidy supplies. I've got the gamsol for cleaning up the odorless mineral spirits. Then if you have the galkyd or the linseed, we'd be able to thin the paint and maybe thin the paint and help it dry faster. This is the dry fast medium. Those are fun. I will be working on the projects on paper because it's easier to store paper and when I'm done with these projects, I tend to keep them and frame them, or keep them and store them, or I could cut them down to the size of a cradle board. I can mountain to a cradle board, paint the sides, and then that's a finished piece of art but I find that if I start off on something like a cradle board, I get stuck myself looking at it, thinking, I don't want to ruin this board. I find that if I work on paper instead of the board, I eliminate a little bit of those barriers for myself. Because I genuinely love to cut up art. [LAUGHTER] In the past year to year-and-a-half of making art classes, it truly gives me the joy that I've always wanted to have at my art table. I have some pieces that I created in the junk art collage class. These were oil and cold wax paintings that I thought were just failures. I cut them all up and made these pieces out of it. If you watch junk art collage, that inspired this class because these were so amazing. I want to show you how I created the oil and cold wax sheets of paper that I was cutting up. Because if you're like, oh my gosh, I love that too, I wonder how she did it, now we're going to look at how we did it and make several different cut projects to go with it. Super fun. I'm using the arches oil paper comes 12 sheets per the pad and the kind of paper that you use is fairly important because it's already primed for oil paint. If you're using regular mixed media paper, you'd have to prime that a couple of coats with like a gesso and then use it with a couple of coats of gesso underneath. I'm going to go ahead and use the arches because I tend to stock up on any arches paper I can find when it goes on sale. Then it's in my closet, I don't have to worry about it. I forget if it was expensive or not and I don't feel bad about using it. [LAUGHTER] But if you just got watercolor paper and you're determined to use that, coat that with a couple of coats of gesso and then let that dry and go from there and just see what it does for you. I will be working on the arches oil. I have two different sizes here. I've got the 9 by 12 pad, which is a 23 centimeter by 31 centimeter. I also have the larger 12 by 16 pad, which is 31 centimeter by 41 centimeter, and because my purpose is to cut up art, I may do quite a few on the large pieces because there's more that I can cut up. I could do great big random something on it and I can come through and cut out little pieces of art out of that, I could cut up stripes, I could cut it into all kinds of amazing things. Then this size is actually the size that I used when I cut down the pieces for my original inspiration pieces for this class, they were on the 9 by 12 pages. You can see this size pad cut up into smaller parts, you're going to end up with a piece of art about this size. You're not going to get a piece of art as big as this piece of paper. So bigger paper will equal bigger art basically, unless you collage these together and you keep on going and then of course you can get as big as you want. [LAUGHTER] You also are going to need something to mix that paint on. I'm using disposable palette paper. I've got gray and white. Some people say that the gray matters because it shows you a truer color. I say it doesn't really matter to me and one day I might change my mind on that, but this happens to be what I got. I'm going to be using that. I'm going to mix all my oil paints up on that and have some of these to use. You could also use a mixing palette. If you've got a glass mixing palette, that'd be fine for that. I just find that for oil paint. As much as I leave and come back to different mediums, I don't want to use a glass palette or something like that because by the time I came back to it, they'd be dry. I'd rather use a disposable palette pad. The colors that we mix up will stay good on there. Probably at least a good day, but the oil paint mixed with the cold wax, mixed with a little bit of Galkyd light, they will start to dry. If you're mixing it, try to use what you've mixed up. If I use any collage pieces because I do have in my mind maybe we could collage a little. If the collage is going on the bottom layer, I'm going to be collaging with my Yes paste. You could also collage with matte medium. If the collage material is going on a layer that's already got wax down and it's going on top of that, then we can simply use our cold wax medium on the top and bottom of that and sandwich it in between the cold wax and that will be the glue for that piece. Just thought that'd be fun. If you want to experiment with mark making, definitely anything for mark making that you want to do. I like these water-soluble graphite sticks I could mark make with that. That's something fun and new, so I'm still excited about it. You can also add pigment or powders, any of your mica powders, graphite powder, colored pigment, you could add those in with the cold wax and make a layer with those powders rather than oil paints. That's always fun to experiment with. I'm just trying to give you lots of options on what you could be doing. That's basically most of the supplies that I'll be doing, I'm not trying to create in this class a masterpiece of art on the first paint. What I'm trying to do is just create a bunch of sheets that are going to be the base for possibly other pieces of art when I cut these up to create those pieces. Super fun, it takes the pressure off. I'm not stressed about composition and color, and did I get it right or not? Now I'm playing with interesting marks, what colors do I like, let's get these pagers filled so that we can let them be drying. I can't wait to see what we create in this class. It may spring something else on you in class if I think of it as I'm going, but that's the majority of my plans right there. Let's get started painting. [MUSIC] 5. Overview of Techniques: Now, let's take a look at some different things that we could do with the cold wax. These are some very old cold wax pieces. I'll be honest, sometimes when I'm making art and things aren't working out, I get frustrated and I'll put this down for a long time and not come back to it for a while. But I'm so inspired by these pieces that I made in that junk art collage class that I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Now I'm so excited about these, I want to come back to cold wax. You know what? If I hadn't done those, I might not have picked the cold wax up for another year. Who knows? Because this did not turn out the way I wanted. These are a bunch of old ones. But I wanted to show you how to do the cold wax so that even when you come up with the ones that you're like, oh, it's terrible, now you can do some really cool things with it. What I like about it is it's very thick. It's very textural, it has a different look and feel than acrylic paint. We can do so many things with the wax and then let that dry, the oil and cold wax, that's what I mean, but look how terrible these look. But what I want you to notice is now we can experiment with color, we can dig into it with our sharp tool. What's really cool is even no matter how long these are dry, I can come back and scratch through this and make more marks, and so how cool is that? We could scratch back underneath layers and reveal color. What we could do is we could add a color and we could add another color and we could add another color, and because of the way the wax is, we can basically add those colors on top of each other while they're all still wet. You will get to the point where you're like, okay, I've just got too much going on here and now I'm making mud, so then you'll have to stop, put that piece to the side, maybe let it dry overnight, and then come back tomorrow and continue on with whatever your idea was. But I really like once it's dry, we can come back, scratch, mark-make, so maybe while it's all wet, we're not doing all of our mark-making. Maybe we'll come back and mark-make while they're already dry. These have been dry for two years. That's about as drying as it's going to get. It's because it's wax, we just have that opportunity to come back and continue working on things. We could also come back and continue adding more layers of wax on top of old wax. There's nothing saying I couldn't take this up and continue adding more paint and more paint and more paint. Even though you have a piece that you're like, oh, I don't like that, it's terrible, that does not mean that it's ruined and it doesn't mean that it's done. You could come take that back up, keep adding more layers of paint later. Come back when you know new techniques or you have new ideas. These you can keep working on forever, and so I've got lots of scratches, layers, mark-making, dragging through it with my palette knife and scraping bag. What I really like also to do is when it's dry but not dry to the extent of these, like next day dry, then it's still not fully cured basically, you can come back and scrape paint back off and get fun scraped areas. That's super fun. That's one of my favorite things to do actually, is to come back and do some scraping back and get those colors underneath. If this looked like it was painted on top, it wasn't, it was scraped. This blue was scraped off and this was scraped off the next day, and this was a lot of scraping. See, sometimes the scraping works great and sometimes it works terrible. These little dots here, that's where I took something that had dots on it and just pressed it in. That's where I was talking about these yummy plates with the texture on them. We can compress that in and make a texture. You got do it when it's wet. I did it with something that had dots on it, but that's where these come in handy. We can just tap that right in and get a texture or a pattern. I love doing that. That gives you a really good three-dimensional layer to that, that I don't like this whole painting. When I started scraping, I felt like I ruined it. But definitely, if I start cutting stripes out of here, I can see very exciting little areas. I also could have taken a viewfinder and came back and cut pieces out of this, which when I was creating these, that wasn't on my mind cutting up art. That's really just become a real true love of mine in this past year-and-a-half or so. But I could come back now and look at these and say, is there anything in there I'd like to save even in this one, like maybe something like right in here? I didn't like this whole thing. I think why I like doing that too is because I'm a photographer by nature. I love to frame things up in my little viewfinder on my camera and take that photo, and you can't really do that when you're making art. You're just putting everything down. You're trying your best to get the composition good. Maybe you're doing abstract and you're not really thinking too hard about it and when you're done, you're like, didn't work out. Now I can come back, frame that out to an exciting piece and say, oh, I love that. Then let's re-imagine the rest of this. We may be doing that. If you end up with something amazing, we could definitely end up with something like that. Here I've got just some different marks and scribbles. They're harder to see in this piece, but there's some twirly lines and some scraping, and overall it's a failure as a piece of art, but I can see some different strips that would be super cool, a lot of this. Then here we go. I'm just layering stuff on. I've still got the tape on it. I thought this is not going anywhere, and now I don't even want to look at the wax anymore, so I'm just going to give up. Look how terrible that is. But I did one in those pieces I like so much where it was brown and blue and blue and brown. That came out gorgeous when it was in stripes and little pieces. Now I'm like, okay, maybe I could do something with this. Again, not successful in my mind, not successful. I was actually trying to create really beautiful pieces of abstract. Now I could come back. I do see pieces out of this that could be amazing if I cut that out in a strategic place or I definitely got some colors and marks in here that would make cool pieces of my re-imagined cut up pieces. Lots of marks going on. You can see I've experimented. Here, I did a little half sheets. You can do this too if you don't feel like you want to do whole sheets like I'm going to do. You could do little half sheets and then end up with some fun things that you could separate and cut out. I actually fairly do like these, but I think I could like them even more re-imagined in some pieces. I also used some stenciling. Let's see if I've got any stencils in here. Also use some stencils. I must not have brought one in here with some stencil work. I also used my stencils on a few pieces, so I'm going to definitely do that. Today we're going to do a little stenciling, maybe with some punchinella or with the direct pattern, and we can just do with our little palette knife, and we could scrape paint right through it. I mean, I could even do it on this one just to show you how that's going to go. Then we pick up our stencil, create three-dimensional marks that we can end up with there. Super fun with that also. Then again, I would definitely keep a paper towel handy, and if you've got any on your knife, just keep your knife clean there and then set that to the side. Super fun with stencil work. Now, the stencil work might be an option that you need to come to on the second day. After some of this has dried a little bit, do the stencil work, let that dry for a day and then come back and continue to work on it. Oil and cold wax is a little different than a traditional paint medium because we're having to let these layers dry in-between. Oh, here's the stencil work. That's what I was looking for. That was fun. I had a red, white, blue thing go in there. Not sure why I thought I was going to like that in a piece of art because I really don't. I think I was going for red and teal, that red and teal combo, but it just did not work out the way I wanted. If this were in other colors, I actually think I would love this because I like the way this goes off like that. It's almost like you had one of those firecrackers pop off and went that way. I could see myself liking this in other colors. I don't like the colorway I picked. But I can also see stripes of this actually looking amazing. Or if I came back and cut out a section of this, maybe I'd like it better. I do like the composition, I do like the stenciling and the mark-making in the layers. I don't love the colors that I picked. That's the problem I have with that. But I have lots of little half sheets. I have some that are total failures. I was trying to do opposite colors like red and green and stuff like that, but I just thought that was just awful. But see now, I could have just kept on layering on top of this, so it wouldn't have been a total failure if I had just kept working it. At some point though, I just get tired of working the same thing and then getting frustrated with how it turns out. But you know what? With this workshop, I'm super excited because we're going to paint some fun stuff and I don't care if it turns out good or not because that's not the goal. The goal is to create interesting patterns, interesting marks, interesting colorways, and if I don't love it when I peal the tape, I can then cut it up into more interesting pieces that I will love. That's the goal. Because I have a different goal in this workshop than I had originally when I was doing oil and cold waxes a couple of years ago, I really think I'm going to love this so much more because now I have fun ideas that we can do in this class. I'm thinking of a weaving project, I'm thinking of a striped project, I'm thinking of a collage project. I'm just thinking of so many different things that we could do with this. I'm thinking of paint the whole thing, cut out the parts we love project. I feel like the ideas are just flowing and flowing and flowing, and I'm really excited to hop back into this medium because I love the oil and cold wax, probably the most out of some of the different things because I have a couple of artists that I follow that I'm like, I love their work so much. I've got a few pieces collected here in my house and I've wanted to paint like them, but maybe I didn't quite get there. But this is maybe my way of utilizing that art medium and being more original than copying somebody else anyway. I have taped up a bunch of paper and I tape it up because I can then touch the edges without getting stuff everywhere. It keeps my table clean because I'm now not trying to get paint off all on the table and I can throw it in the floor and let it sit overnight and then pick it up tomorrow and not worry about getting my hands on the paint areas. These are the 9 by 12. This is that bigger, I think 12 by 18. I think is that bigger size. But I went ahead and I thought, let's do just some small ones and then we'd be ready to jump into the big ones. Now that we've looked at all the different ideas, scraping, scraping back, layering using stencils, we're going to actually get into painting a couple of these and just see what can we end up with? How can we start it? What can we do? Then that'll get our feet wet for doing the larger pieces. I'm going to see you in the next video, so let's start some samplers. 6. Mixing Colors: Let's start out by mixing up some colors. I already told you that my inspiration for some of these is going to be my in the mood for coloring book. I really loved this blue and gray, and sepia color. There's also a little, tiny bit of a rosy or a peachy tone that could be like the dirt possibly in there, so I could actually pull in some color similar to that if I wanted to. Let's just take a look at the colors. I was trying to keep the book in here while we were mixing colors. Let me just move this over here. Then we can still see our picture while we're doing this. I told you I had a jar opener, a lid opener downstairs in my kitchen. Let me tell you, this is a hand saver because if you ever set your oils down for any length of time and you come back, these lids are basically glued to the container and they will not come off. I have this little one made by Golden to open paint lids. But if you get the bigger one, this lid is too big for that little thing and this thing was definitely glued on there and I couldn't get it, so I went and got my lid opener and that saved my hands because then I could just get that open. If you've got some bigger lids that this will get, get one of those that's got different lid sizes and gives you some hand grip, total hand saver. I might not have cared about that when I was younger, but now that I'm old, it matters. This transparent Earth oxide, that could possibly be that color in there. If I'm looking at those colors, Prussian blue, that's a good choice. I'm trying not to go out and buy more oil paints. I've got plenty of colors over here if I needed to mix stuff. Indigo, that's actually the color I was looking for and couldn't find. See how easy that makes that to open? Indigo, do we want indigo instead? I'm pulling indigo. Let's do indigo. I'm pulling Indigo, Prussian blue, indigo. Maybe a little bit of both. I'm pulling indigo, that's the one I wanted. Now I've already got that lid open, but we'll close it back up. Let's do some Earth oxide for this dark color I can see in here. I'm going to do indigo because I wanted Indigo. I do have a creamy color in here, although this doesn't really have any cream, so maybe we should just leave that creamy color out. This is sepia. I thought the sepia could go in there for these darker tones and could mix in with this dark color too. Then I got white because that's very white. Really we could pull a gray in because there's a lot of gray in there. If I want to make it gray, I could do that with black and white obviously. But I've also got some of these little grays here, so might as well pull a gray out. Why not? This is Gamblin transparent earth oxide. This is Winsor & Newton Indigo. This is Holbein sepia, and this is Old Holland warm gray, and Winsor & Newton titanium white. I would recommend, if you're going to buy colors, get the big white and the little colors because you can do a lot of different things with these. What you want to do, if you're going to mix colors, let's say you want to mix two of these together to make some other color, usually, I will do that before I add the wax, and then I can do all my oil, mix them that way, but you don't have to. You can mix them all up and then you can mix it with the wax if you want. Then you can mix different colors out there. There's a lot of dark in here, so we're going to maybe lighten some of these up with that white, maybe. That gray is so pretty I can already see it. I think it's feeding into my graphite obsession, if you've watched any of those classes. It's like a graphite gray. I've got my paint can opener. I've got my little thing of cold wax that I just opened. See, the wax is a beeswax and solvent mixture, so it's very soft, it is very pliable. You want to mix about 50 percent wax to 50 percent paint, and that's not real exact. The drawback, if you add, say, an absolute ton of wax to very little paint, is the wax could eventually crack. Too much wax and you have that it's-going-to-crack problem. The ratio is usually 50 percent or less of wax. But I'll be honest, I get real liberal with the wax and sometimes I follow that and sometimes I don't follow it as much as maybe I had planned. I've got Galkyd lite here, and that is our mixture that we just add in a drop or so because it is going to make this mixture dry a tiny bit faster. If I just go ahead and maybe get a little bit on my palette knife, I can drop a drop or two in which let me tell you, much easier than pouring it on because I guarantee, you pour half that bottle when you didn't intend to, and you just want a little bit. Everybody is going to have their own formulas for mixing stuff so if you've got a formula that you like, you go for it. There's a lot of forgiveness here with this type of thing. You don't have to be exact to what I'm doing. Once you get all your colors set, you've done any mixing that you want to mix, now we can just add our wax in. I have, over here, a roll of paper towels because I want to wipe this off in-between each color. I want to keep the colors pretty pure, and I'm mixing just a tiny bit to get started here. I want you to mix a little and then paint some and see how far does that go. Then what you could do is if you're painting several paintings in a day like I plan on doing, like I want to paint lots of paintings today, some of them may end up being masterpieces and then that would be fantastic. But that's not really the goal, and I'm not going to be upset if I end up with no masterpieces because my goal is to re-imagine what we paint today into something I love tomorrow or the next day. Go ahead and just mix these up really good. If you're doing more than one painting, lost my train of thought there, pick all of the colors out that you plan on using that day and mix those in the morning. You don't have to be mixing paint all day. You can just go ahead and mix them up. They're not like acrylic paint. They're not going to dry before you get to them, unless you're waiting a month between paintings. But if you're painting a bunch today, just mix all your colors up in the morning. Now because I'm just wanting to show you how to get started, I'm just going to start off with the first set of colors. Go ahead and clean off your palette knife in-between what you're doing. You're going to use a lot of paper towels, so just get a whole roll ready. I just don't even worry about it, I'll go ahead and use what it is I'd like to use. I don't use my good microfiber clothes for this because there's no way to wash that oil paint out of there. I'd just be throwing these away and I prefer to be able to keep on using these, washing them, and using them with the old paint. I'd definitely ruin those, so I don't use that. I definitely use shop towels or paper towels. The shop towels are my favorite. They're little more expensive, but they do soak up things really nice. But if you've got paper towels from the Dollar Store, anything like that, that'll be just fine. Now we are ready to start painting. That was about 50 percent wax to 50 percent paint and a drop or two of the Galkyd lite, which is going to help it dry faster. If you do too much Galkyd lite, it gets really weird and waxy and it's yucky, so be very sparing with this. If you need to get a little dropper, so you can drop them in, or a little knife like I was, you could just add a drop or two. I have found that the easiest way to control this. Then we are ready to use our bowl scraper and get our paper out. I will see you in the next video. 7. Sampler - Layering Colors & Stencils: Let's dive into making some samplers here. If I run out of paint, I still got all my paint colors over here on the table so I can mix up a little more. I'd rather you mix up too little than too much and re-mix a little if you need to. Because if you mix up too much, you got a ton of paint you just wasted, and oil paints are expensive, so it's better just to use what you can that day. Have a junk piece of paper or a junk cradled board where you can just put that extra paint on because those junk boards actually sometimes end up being my favorite. In my case today, my junk board is going to be probably one of these larger pieces of paper that I can just smush paint on because I just want to use up all the paint that I can. So I'm going to save a piece of paper to the side as the junk piece. The junk piece is still going to be used in a cut-out piece of art so it's not going to be a trash piece per se. I'm just calling it junk because the leftover paint at the end of the day that we'll want to do that with. Now a lot of times you're looking at this and you're thinking, "It's a white page, what should I do? How do I get started?" I like to just get started scribbling on my pages, and you know what if you do these and you end up with four masterpieces, feel free to keep them as masterpieces. You don't have to reimagine things. But I find that if I start off this project with the idea that I'm going to cut it up, and I don't care if it's perfect. I'm not going to be upset. If it didn't end up the way I initially thought, then I take the pressure off myself. Now I'm like, "Does it matter if it's perfect?" No, it doesn't matter if it's perfect, so I'm okay with that. Then let's just start making for little abstract so I can start off with any color. My inspiration right now is still our Swedish heritage. Blue and gray, and white book. I've got that sitting over here to the side so I could look at it if I wanted. Not trying to really create that exactly. I was using that more as my inspiration. But I can definitely refer to it if I'm thinking, where do I need to go? What colors do I need? Let's just go with some four little abstracts, and this is how we apply the paint a little bit on my scraper, and we're going to spread it like it was icing. Like we're icing a cake, and with abstract, especially with the cold wax, I don't want them all to look the same, so I'm not starting in the same spot on any of these, so let's just start in different spots and just work that wax around. I don't want it super thick, so I'm working in thin layers, and then if I've got paint on here that I don't want to be on here. I can scrape that off with my scraper and save it. Like don't have to waste all this paint. So that's a lot of paint. I could put that right back on my palette. I'm ready to pick up another color. So maybe, this indigo, let's see what this indigo and I could mix these if I need them whiter, I could have mixed in with the white. I do love this yummy deep blue for some reason it's such a yummy color. Is it going to show up next to these other colors? I don't know. We'll see. I'm just going to work it. I'm just going to keep on going adding some more colors. Let's do some of this white. The white mixed with the blue look at that. I didn't have all the blue off of here. So I got a lighter blue genie color. That's fun. I actually like that, so I'm just going to go with it, and you'll see if I pick up other colors of wax. This is all wet. It's not going to dry like an acrylic paint and you're going to be working wet on wet. You're going to mix up some colors. Maybe you're going to see some of the underneath mark-making. If it bothers you, like for white to be mixed up with say, the brown and the blue and the stuff like that. If you think, that would drive me insane. Start with the white and work your way up to the dark colors. Go back to your painting basics there, and whatever is the lightest color start that first. I knew that I was not trying to get the white to truly be white, and I'm okay with the colors mixing and doing some super fun stuff here on my palette. So white was not my goal. If white is your goal, start with white so that it's still white. Otherwise, you're going to be mixing it with other colors like we're doing right now. I like how that mixed in there, and some of the way that I like this mixing is especially with this wax is I can just drag this right on top of a section, really light, just lightly dragging it, and look at that super yummy texture that just gave us. Let's just drag on here. Look at that oh, my gosh, that's gorgeous. That's the moments that make me excited when I get a piece like that. So yeah, keeping it white, not my concern. But if you do want to keep your colors clean, you can scrape this off between the different colors that you're adding on here. Now see this transparent Earth is definitely a bright pop or something. I don't know if that's good or bad. Let's just reserve judgment there for later. Because weirdly enough, some of the ones I thought I don't like that. When I cut up for that piece that I was showing you, there's some red and some blue and some little tracks of color in there then I'm like, those are actually really pretty little surprises that I did not expect, and when I cut that up and re-imagine those in those pieces, I'm like that turned out amazing and I wish I had worked more of those pieces now, and who knows how I even made those? That was so many years ago. I don't know what I did. I don't know what those colors were, how I did that. You're going to have that too you're going to be like, how did I make that? Let's just scrape some of this paint off of here. That down in there, let's see. Still got plenty of spaces to put some color in like in this blue. I need my table to be a little bigger. I always need twice as much space as whatever I have. Even if I had more space I would need more space. It's never going to be enough. I used to own a great big studio, but now property prices and everything are so insane that I'm like, "Okay, you've just got to make what you got work." I keep reinventing my spaces here, trying to make everything still work that I got because I'm like, "Well, you're going to be here 50 years." See now that's pretty. I'm feeling that. That's a little bit of what's so good about the colors still being wet too. Now, I can very lightly do some dragging, and dragging on top of that just ended up super cool. Look at that. See, I'm feeling so much better about sitting down and playing with wax than I've not felt the first couple of times or many times, the first many times I've done it. Now I'm like excited again and I'm just like ready to revisit this. Sometimes you just got to get past all the years of struggle to get to the years of joy, and I feel like that's what I've done. I've got through all those years of really hard struggle to get to the joy that I now have it at my art table and that I hope comes across to you as a student that this doesn't have to be hard, it don't have to make you mad every time you sit down to do something like I have this desire to create and I'd sit here and I'd be angry when I'm at my table because nothing amazing, it's coming out of it, look at that as my base right right. But yeah, it gets so mad. Not be like, "Why do I even do creative stuff? Why do I even have a creative business?" I hate everything. I hate everybody. But now I'm like if hitting working out, does it matter? Not really. I'm just pushing color around, and when I'm done, I can cut it up and make something that I'm going to love, so let's just not worry so hard about it. Let's put some more of this orange oxide. I feel like I'm getting to the point where I want to do some scraping. I've got enough on here. I'm going to start doing some scrape back. Now I know this looks nothing at all like my inspiration photo. But that was not the goal. My goal here was not to create that photo. My goal here was to be inspired by the color palette. I'm not trying to copy or recreate or do a master study like I've done in the past and other workshops, my sole goal is to create using a color palette I find inspiring, and if you start with a color palette that's already out there that you're like, "Oh, I love that." It's a lot easier than starting from scratch. I never would have come up with these colors. I would not have created this piece of art on my own if I just thought up, what colors do I use? I love being inspired by color palette, even though when I'm creating it's not going to look like what inspired me. I'm going to start mark-making. This thing has a nice little edge. It's not super sharp, but it's a nice edge. If we just slam that down into our paint. We're going to get some really beautiful lines in there. Let's see if it'll focus on that so you can see it. We'll get some really beautiful lines in there. Love it. If once you're doing like a little set like this, or setup too like larger ones if you do like a different element and you're wanting to all go together but still be slightly different. I could have made some darker. I could've used some lighter. I didn't have to have them really all the same color tone here is I finished, but use some of the same elements too. That's how we end up making a series where they look like they go together, but try to put that element in different places on each piece. I love that. Now what I love about the silicone is once I think I'm done getting paint, I can just wipe the paint off and that's how I clean that. I don't worry about paint up here. I could scrape that off if I wanted, but who cares? It's actually pretty up there. I wish that was on a pilot. I can hang on the wall because that's a really pretty look there. I could also take my mark making tool, and now I can come through, make some favorite marks, and if it were thick enough and there were colors underneath it, I would see some bleed through of maybe the colors underneath it. I may just see that there's a scratch there and white paper. I may have to look in the light and see that there were scratches on that. Just some ideas for you. Start scratching in favorite marks and lines and patterns, and let me tell you, you might get so excited at these pieces when they're dry. I'm really feeling one of these is amazing and I might not cut it up, and we'll reveal that when we peel the tape. Once you do some mark-making, we could go ahead and do some stencils lying on top of this. Let me get some pieces here. I got a couple of stencils over here beside me. Let's see if there's anything in here. I got these just in a random piece here. This right here was a lot of little pieces, I believe in this big thing. But it came from the crafters workshops. That's a really good spot to get stencils the crafters workshop. StencilGirl is also a really good place for stencils, and this was a big stencil that I cut into the little pieces because there was a lot going on here. Look at this stencil that's pretty cool. These were more like grunge, and I liked to the grunge, so I thought, grunge might look good. This is really nice. It's like a punchinella but it's uneven and it got some variations, whereas the punchinella is all circles so I like that. I also like this stencil that looks very Moroccan. But I don't know that I want to make this Moroccan, but maybe we could if we wanted. I've got a whole box of stencils. As I'm making different little pages further on, I maybe using some of those stencils for that, whatever it is I come up with. But let's just try one of these. Let's try this one. Why not? Let's try this one. This one just looks like, I don't know if something's smudged, some smudgy paint drips, something, maybe. Maybe I want that right there. Let's just see. You could do it in any color you want because it's already so thin and I don't have so much paint on my Canvas, my paper. I do still have the flexibility at the moment to steal layer this on top without it making a big mess. But I'm pretty much done with what I could do on this one I think after I put this on here, because this is thick and we'll have to dry. It doesn't have to be perfect. I don't have to fill every nook and cranny, but I want to get as much on it as I can, and I've run out of white, so I'm just going to go for it. Let's just see what we get. If we don't like it we can scrape it off and we can paint on top of it. Look at that. That's really cool. I love it. I love that. What you might do while your stencil still has the wet paint on it. Go ahead and wipe that stencil off. Let's go ahead and clean it off now. You don't want to wait and let that dry. You're basically going to ruin that stencil, but it doesn't matter if the stencil is dirty. I just don't want any thick paint left on it and there we go. That's how I'm going to clean the stencil. I don't care about the extra color on it. I just want the stencil itself to be free of heavy paint. How cool is that? Super easy to clean your stencil? That was fun. We could try some of the other stencils on here if we wanted. Just to see what we get, maybe we'll do this punchinella. Even though I said if you're using an element on it, see if you can use the same element on all of them. You don't have to. Maybe the element here is stencil. But I actually am a little obsessed with how good that just looked that Punchinella did. Just go ahead. Look at that. Oh, my gosh. See, punchinella, everybody needs punchinella. That punchinella is amazing, and it's a really good way to use up the rest of our paint here. 8. Sampler - Finishing Up: Because I can just scrape that right through. I can scrape it along my stencil. My stencil is pretty clean. Look at that. Just get a little of this here. How about that? Look at that. Again, you just wipe off that paint while it's still wet and just save your stencils. Then any leftover will just dry. Look, they just wipe off. Look how easy that was to clean that, but you can only do it when it's wet. We have done stenciling. We have scraped through. We have pounded a shape on there. So be creative. What are some other shapes that you've got? We can use all stuff to make a shape. Maybe different palette knife. Maybe any other sharp objects. Maybe any other sharp objects. Maybe the bottom of a jar. Just be creative. Maybe the top of a jar. Look at this. I've got one of these. I've got a little circle. Look, we could go down. While it's wet, we still have enough paint on there to create a shape or many shapes. This is stuck in my art room, so I'm not really careful about being precious with it. Just wipe the lid back off if you use a lid or something. You don't want to use your good kitchen glasses or anything like that. But maybe the lid of a jar, the lids of something, make some circles. Because we can press into wax. Now, this will have to dry at the minimum 24 hours, maybe even more than that. I'm going to take my gloves off for a second because I'm going to peel the tape just to see what did we get? My hands are clean, so I'm trying not to get oil paint all over my hand as I'm peeling these because there is paint on that tape. Have a spot to throw the tape because I don't want to get the paper wet dirty after I do this. Just because I'm painting junk pieces in my mind, what if it's the perfect, most magnificent masterpiece, the best things I've ever created? I don't want to ruin it by getting that paper dirty until I decide, not a masterpiece. Look at these. Oh, my goodness. Look at these. Maybe I do have masterpieces here. Oh, my goodness. Look at that. Look how gorgeous these are. What I love about these is they don't have to stay the way you painted them. Because look at that, if I go this way. Look at those. I love this one. Oh, my goodness. I love this line. Maybe out of this, if I have two that I'm like, whoa, maybe I keep those two. Maybe the two that I'm like not so whoa about, maybe those are ones I re-imagine into something else. But I love the colors. I got to tell you, I actually a tiny bit doubted myself going so dark and not really matching my inspiration as closely as I was actually maybe intending, but not really. But look at that. The inspiration that we went from to the art that we created. Because I was not so invested in making a masterpiece. I think that's what allowed me to actually create a couple of pieces that I just found completely amazing. I'll be honest, these two I find completely amazing. Definitely, I'm going to keep those. These two I'm like, oh, that's pretty good. But I'd be okay to cut that up. So if you want to try this particular colorway, grab those colors that we started with and some punchella. That's amazing. Indigo paint with the punchella, look how great that is. You may end up with something don't even want to cut up. We're going to have to throw this in the floor and let this dry for a day or two. Then if I want say, keep two of these and not keep the rest of these, I can varnish these with game bar or I could put another layer of just the clear cold wax on top to protect it. If you have pieces that you love, after doing some of this, feel free to not cut those up. Those are going to be two pieces of art right there that I'm like, whoa. Let me tell you too, some of my loving these may just be constant art practice up here in my art room so that you end up just working more and more and more, and you get techniques that you love, and you're just getting better at freely creating without thinking too hard about it. It just gets easier, really, the more you're your at art table. I can definitely see myself creating a ton of art out of this workshop now that my very first samplers were so amazing. The reason I wanted to do these upfront was to get all the different techniques to try that I'll be using on pages going forward. Definitely I like scraping things. Definitely, I loved a lid to stamp into. I really loved both scraper lines that I stamped into those. Those three elements right there just made these amazing. So go ahead and slice up a piece of paper into fours with some tape and pick out a color palette, or two, or three or five. Start creating some little pieces just to get used to mixing the wax, working with a color palette, the different techniques that we're going for. If you're wanting to scrape back, then you need to let that dry until tomorrow and then you could come back and maybe add a little clear wax to it, which will soften it up and then you can do some scraping. So lots of different techniques that we utilized today that create these but super easy. None of the stuff that I just did was hard. I really like how easy it was. Also what I like was I did not try to cover every 100 percent part of the paper. There's one or two spots here that look a little bit like white paint, but it's maybe the paper showing through underneath. You don't have to cover the paper 100 percent either. So another little texture popping through is a little tiny bit of that paper, and I love that too. So paint some samplers. I want you to paint several of these, different colorways. Start testing stuff out and then we'll get to something big. I'll see you back in class. 9. Cleaning your stencil: Cleaning your stencils. I do talk about this a little bit each time I use a stencil, but I just wanted to show you how I'm going to clean my punchinella, so that it stays fairly good for the next time I want to use it. The oil and cold wax, it's really easy to clean off. I'm not looking to necessarily get all the color or whatever. I just want it to be a clean enough stencil to use it. Going forward, you want to do this right after you use it because the oil and cold wax is still wet for quite a while. It's not like acrylic paint where it's drying almost immediately. I just take a paper towel and another paper towel, and just clean that paint right off of there. Now, it's ready to use over and over. I do this with all my stencils, even the ones that I use like this. If I'm using them with the oil and coal wax, I'm Just real careful and just clean any paint off. That is a good way to keep your stencils clean enough to keep using them going forward. Do clean your stencils off at the end of a painting session. Don't leave that a couple of days, all that paint will dry on there. Then same thing with the tools. I just take a paper towel and clean those off. I don't care if there's leftover paint residue from the last painting session, but I do want them to be clean enough and maybe just pick out the edges of your silicone things so that you have enough tooth there to drag the next time you pull this out to use it. Because these are silicone tools, they just wipe off. Then above that, any paint that you have leftover, you could scrape that off if you wanted, but I don't even care that it's there, so I don't even bother. Be careful with anything sharp that you're using on your tool because you'll scrape it. But I could scrape these off with say this other side of my clay tool, and you can see that paint just comes right off, but I don't even care that it's there, so I don't bother. I just want the edges clean. Just a little note there on cleaning your tools as you're going, do it every day. Don't leave them overnight for a couple of days sitting with stuff all over them. See you back in class. 10. Sampler - Pigment & Collage: For this next little set of four, I'm going to do another set of four because I want to introduce you to two other little techniques that we didn't talk about in the mixing of the paint or in the first sampler set. I want to do one more sampler set to introduce you to two more techniques and then we'll start painting larger ones. l'm actually wanting to be inspired by this poppy photo and I'm assuming it's a poppy, it might be something else. It looks like it's got a really deep gray. It's not quite indigo, so I'm actually going to use a warm gray, this is by Old Holland. I like this yummy, lighter pink, so I'm going to go with this blush tint by Sennelier. There's a green in here, so I'm going to use Terre Verte, Winsor and Newton. There is white in here, so I'm going to pull the big thing of white back out, which is already over here. I got some sanguine powder in my sketch box, so I don't know what to do with sanguine powder, but I thought, you know what, I did not show you how to mix pigment in with wax. Let's mix this powder in with wax because it's a yummy color. Then we'll have a pigment mixed and that's my inspiration color palette. Let me tell you, part of these not working out for me in the past, have been me not knowing where to start with the colors and pulling random things and going, oh, I made bad choices. This picking a color palette from a book or a photo or something you find inspiring, really made that last set go so much faster and easier that I couldn't wait to paint the next set instead of being angry here at my art table. It really does make the whole process move smoother. I've also just pulled a couple of old book pages and a piece of old lined paper because I thought, what if we do a tiny bit of collage work in this set? Because we did not talk about collaging in the other one. Got a little stencil here. This one is more of the harlequin pattern, those little diamonds, so l really like that. Maybe that'll be what I stencil with the sub-sanguine powder. I'm going to go ahead and get these colors mixed. I am keeping it simple for myself and not like mixing a bunch of colors up separately than they're coming out of the container. But again, if I were going to mix a different color, like if I wanted to make a gray and I didn't have any gray, I would take white and black and mix those together first and make my gray. Then I would add wax to it to make it the cold wax mixture. Let's go ahead, got my wax over here. This stuff lasts a long time. If you ever get wax that looks super grainy, like this is super smooth, you can see there's no little grainy dots in it, if you ever get some of the wax and it's really grainy, that's bad wax. You need to just close that back up and return it or contact Gamblin and let them know that you have a batch of bad wax just so you don't continue using it if it's a real grainy and it's not smooth because it's not supposed to be grainy. Now, I'm going to go ahead and put a little dab of wax out here by itself. We're going to mix that with powder. I'm going to wipe this off really good. This is my Galkyd light. Again, this is going to aid us in drying a little faster. It's already drying pretty fast. But I really want to start cutting stuff up tomorrow, so I'm hoping that I can make a whole bunch of these today and then tomorrow I'll have a whole bunch of stuff I can cut up and go with. I just added two drops and like I said, don't be tempted to pour the bottle because two drops ain't going to be what you end up with. I learned that the hard way, you end up with half the bottle out there. Let's just start with this sanguine powder. Again, if you're using a powder, l just got it on the table, but that's okay. It can be underneath. I can actually just spread that out on the paper to be underneath everything. If you're working with a powder, you don't want to be breathing any of these powders in, wear a mask. I'm just going to dip out some powder and I'm not really measuring how much that powder is. I can always add some more if I need to. I don't want powder everywhere, so I'm just going to wipe up some of this powder. Then I'm just going to very gently mix the powder in and then we're ready. It's a little bit different than mixing it with the oil paint. I probably could have added in some linseed oil to really make that like an oil paint that I was mixing in with the wax. But for this, it's really not necessary. I could just go ahead mix the pigment in, still going to take overnight to dry so just mix whatever color pigment you want right in with that wax. Some of these come out waxier than others like that green. I don't think I like it, but I'm going to use it on this particular painting. You can tell when it's maybe a student grade paint versus a professional paint that was really waxy and I was looking to see if it was a water-based oil paint, but it's not. Feels like a water-based oil paint though. It's got that super waxy feel. It's strange. It's hard to describe until you see it yourself, so I don't know that I love that green, but we're going to use it in this and just use it up. No sense in wasting it. It was just an interesting observation as I was mixing here. One other thing too that we could have done that I did not do in that last one is drag through with one of our tools. Let's say three new techniques in this. I don't care if there's powder on there, it doesn't matter. I still could start this off with some scribble. Anything on this bottom layer just really doesn't matter so much, so I'm going to go ahead. l'll also need some wax by itself out here. Let's just grab a little bit of that because that's what I'm going to use to put a piece of collage down with so clear wax for the collage. Let's just get started. I'm going to do this one very similar really to the first sampler set. I'm going to start by laying down some color and I'm trying to put it in different places on each piece. I've started with a dark color here on this one too, but that's okay. Then l just spread it out a little bit, making it a thin layer rather than a real super thick layer. I don't want it to be super thick. Let's come back with some of this yummy salmon color. If I've got pigment on the page that might mix in a little with any oil color that I'm painting out here also but that's okay because I don't mind that a bit. My tape is sticking to the table. There we go. I like being able to move the papers around as I'm moving around and I don't know if you're this way or not. Laugh with me if you are. The longer I paint, the worst things get which is why I don't want to paint a bunch of these today, so by the end of the day, l'm totally disgusted so that tomorrow I'm like, look at all this paint and papers that I have ready to cut up. Not really feeling green here, but let's just see what we can get with green. Because I might be pleasantly surprised even though I'm thinking. I like picking a color palette to help me step outside my comfort zone because I'm really comfortable with other things and not that right there. I do like having other things. At this point before I even do anything else, I could go ahead and do some mark-making. Not using the drag tool because really how much paint is there for me to drag through it at the moment, not a lot, but there is plenty to mark on. You could try doing all this with a palette knife too, but let me tell you it's just so much easier using the scraper. 11. Sampler - Adding Collage & Finishing: You got to be real careful where you throw this down too or you'll end up with a paint line right there, like you can tell where that paint started and stopped. What if I did a little scraping now? I had some white here to school. Look at that. Now, we have some fun stuff to scrape. I'm cleaning it off a little in between each time. Now, I love scraping through. That was nice. If we had done that with this bigger one, I would've gotten some bigger scrapie lines. Look at that. Look it there. Oh, yeah, look at that scrapie line. See now I don't have to be upset that I'm not making a masterpiece because I am excited with the marks. Let's just throw in a little bit of paper. Just tearing a little strip of music because I just want you to get a feel for waxing something. Usually, with something like this, I'm going to put a little bit of wax on it. It's all wet, so it's not like it's not already waxed on the page, but let's put a little bit of wax on top. Let's just pick a spot. A little bit of clear wax on top of that. I am being very light-handed, I'm not trying to scrape into the paint. But because my paint is still pretty thin, I run a less into less of an issue. But look how easy that was to just slip in a piece of collage. Let's do one more here. We don't have to collage all of them, but I do want you to get a feel for doing some collage. We're just going to put some wax on the back to let it glue itself to the wax that's on the page. Then just use your palette knife to pick it up if you throw it down like I just did. I want it straight, so before you really bring it down, you've got a second where you can adjust. I do want it to be inside the painting, I don't want any of it to be where the tape is, and then just come back very gently and smooth that down. Then we can continue painting. That's how easy adding in a piece of collage is. We could also, at this point, I could continue painting or I could go ahead and add some stenciling in. I can paint on top of my collage work so that we're really pushing it back into the work. I also, maybe want to do some circles in here. Let's get this thing again. I like the circles. We can have too many patterns, but I don't know. Because I'm really just going to cut this up, I do feel like this is definitely going to be the pair I'm cutting stuff out of because I'm not seeing any of my super favorites. Another thing when this is dry, you can actually draw on top of this with oil pastels. If you want it to continue mark making on top you could use oil pastels right on top of these pieces. Now it's too quick to use it on top of them while they are wet. But if you needed some additional mark making and stuff, this would definitely be a go-to item for me. They're creamy, they're oily, so they work really well. The thing I don't like about these, is they don't really seem to dry. So that's definitely a last mark making thing on top. Now, we've got some collage. We have mixed some paint with our pigment powder that I haven't figured out exactly what it is, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that. For regular art pieces, but it was some powder on my desk because that's something that came not too long ago. Look at that. Ops, I just smeared. When we smear something, if you're like, "Oh, I messed it up," you can just scoop it back off just like that. Not a big deal, it's very forgiving. That's one of the things I like about the oil and coal wax, is it's very forgiving. I am scraping the paint over the stencils, so it is mostly cleaning my stencil off as I'm going. Because that was still wet it did pick up my piece of collage so let's spread the collage down. I'm working on wet on wet on wet that will dry and not come back up later. But while I'm working on wet on wet, it will still come back up. You just got to be careful and very gently tap it back down into the wax. That is that. I really want punchella. Where did I lay the punchella at? Here we go. Let's do some punchella instead because I love it. I love a punchella. You only get one stencil this is why I recommend the circles I like circles. I love the way that it can give you solid circles and broken circles, so it's not perfect. You can make it perfect if you want, but I like the imperfection that we get doing it that way. Now, anywhere that you have stencils that's going to take extra time to dry because I'm laying thick paint on it is really thick. That little bit. Oh, yeah look at that. I'm not feeling as good about these as I was that first set, and glad because that first said I'm like well shoot, I don't want to cut these up. I love it. I love the colors. I love the pattern. I love that we tried big scrape-through marks with our different tools. We tried pigment, powder in wax, and we tried collage. Three more techniques that we didn't talk about earlier that I want you to give a try, along with a color palette that's outside your norm. I do want to put all of this paint on something else, but for the moment, I'm going to move it out of my way so we can look at what I ended up with and then we can all agree that it'd be fun to cut it up. Oh, my goodness. Again, I'm trying not to get paint all over just in case I have a masterpiece. I got tape stick into my hand. Once I peel the tape, I start to change my mind. Even if I'm doubting myself while the tape is on there, I started looking at it thinking, "Oh, wait, this is pretty good", but I'm not thinking that about this. Now, I'm feeling pretty good about how this turned out. I don't see any masterpieces that I want to keep. I do like the collage in here, and I definitely can see pieces of this that I love so I think using this into something we cut up would be fun. That was super fun and we went with our inspiration color palette with the peonies and the gray. I do feel like I was successful in creating the color palette. But now that I've done the piece, I can say, "Okay, not my favorite color palette." That's why I like using color palettes for inspiration because you're going to discover things that you love, that you never even thought of, like on that first set of love that, or you're going to discover stuff that you're like, "Oh, okay that does not work out the way I thought. I don't love it the way I did it or whatever." Then you'll know that maybe that's not your favorite color palette, but I like doing it because the experience of learning what colors you do love together and don't love together is a valuable learning experience helps you getting used to working with color and discovering things that you love. That's how you nail things down into your own personal style when you make these decisions for yourself. We're going to let this little set dry and I'm going to get to painting some bigger pieces. I'd really encourage you to do tons of these samplers trying different color palettes. Then you can use those color palettes as inspiration for your larger pieces. So I'll see you back in class. 12. Larger Art - Gray Yellow Red: Let's get into painting something bigger. This time I'm going to take my inspiration from a prior piece of art, I'm going to take it from this inspiration piece. I want to paint some more with this brown and this pretty light blue and just create maybe another set in this color tones because I love it so much, why not, just see if we can recreate it and then you know how I did it. This has a blue so I've got indigo. I'm sure my colors are slightly different, which will be nice. It's a change but at the same time similar. I've got the indigo, I've got some yellow, so I've pulled ocher. I've got some pretty red in here and I've got several different reddish choices that I could pull from. I could pull from a pink but I'm not feeling it's pink. I could pull from, well, I feel like it could be more like this. I pulled out the golden barrack red from Old Holland, but maybe it's really the Naphthol red from M. Graham & Company, that looks closer so let's go with that. There's also a fleshy color in here so I'm thinking that's this flesh shocker by Sennelier. It might not be, but it might be. We can also play on top of here with some of our oil pastels if we wanted to. But remember the oil pastels if we use those, have to go on the very top. I do have the oil pastel box over here on my table just in case I get inspired as I'm going. I'm just going to create. I'm not trying to actually copy this, I'm using it as an inspiration color palette for us to go by. I really love those so much, I want to scan them in and maybe even print them larger, we'll see. That pretty blue, I believe, is this Richeson Oil ice blue, which is a color that's almost drying up and I couldn't get the lid off at one point, which if I'd had my handy-dandy lid openers, I probably could have, but I don't guess I did so I actually cut the bottom of this tube trying to use it. Let's see if I can even get that open with my handle here. I just could not get it to budge no matter what I did. This thing is amazing. I could not get that lid off to save my life and it actually cut the bottom. Telling you people, lifesaver. This is real thick too, but look how pretty that color is. I think that's the exact color, but you know what I thought what if, now I got it open, we don't have to do it. What if we try to mix a color like this and just see how if we could get close and so I thought before I mix the other colors on my palette, what if we played with some color mixing and just tried, I've got some Prussian blue. Let's just put a little of that over here. I want that color anyway. Then, I'm almost feeling, because in my watercolors, I've mixed green, gold, and a blue and got that gorgeous aqua color that's my favorite. I'm wondering if I go with a green gold color. This is the Shiva Yellow Citron by Richeson Oils, but it's that green gold that I have a little love-hate relationship with and a whole lot of white. Let's just see. Let's mix the color and see if I mix a blue and a little of that green, can I get close? There's a blue. Let's just try dab of the green. With color mixing, you want to do a little at a time. If we mix it and we're, not quite there, a little bit more. Then if we're, it's almost there but it's too light or it's too dark, we can then add more color, or we can add more white. See that's almost green. I could have picked a different blue. Maybe I started off with the wrong blue hue. Look at that right there, I think I'm getting there. This is what color mixing charts are really handy because they're not exact, but you'll get close. I'm feeling pretty good about that color there. Might be even a little greener. Look how pretty that is. Then maybe more white. If I just put some more white out here, that's a pretty color. I almost feel like there's a little more of a gray to it so I might could add like a tinge of black to gray it down some, or I could find that pretty gray. Here's a cool gray, and just see if I add a little gray in there, what do we think? This is just cool gray by Sennelier. I just want to grab a little and just test it out. That's a pretty color right there. This is a tiny bit more gray, but I'm okay with the color I ended up with, look how pretty it is. See this one is almost gray so I might actually should have started with gray, maybe this gray here and white and added a tad of blue to it. We're going to use that one. But let's mix up one more because I don't want you to get discouraged. That's a gorgeous color, I'm going to use that for something. But what if I did white, a little bit of the gray, and a tiny bit of the blue? It might have even been a different blue than that blue, but I'm going to go with that blue. Here let's just go with the gray. There we go, let's just take it. That might be even more gray than that was in that, that's all right. See, that's closer right there. There we go, that is a gorgeous color. I could even take a tiny bit of that yellowy, greeny color in there. Yes, see I love that too. I'm definitely going to use those two colors. Let me just get a clean palette. We're going to mix these with the oil and coal wax. I've got that, not worried about that little bit of white still showing because it'll mix right in. I've got this yummy, lighter color. I'm going to start fresh for us for a moment. Now I'm going to mix all of these colors in with my cold wax and add my other colors that I was thinking. I was thinking there was a flesh color. That's got some extra oil that came out, but that's all right. That will still mix right in. I've got a dark brown. I'm thinking that's not dark enough. This is the burnt sienna. Is there any burnt sienna in there? Let's just do the sepia, I love sepia, so that'll be my dark brown today, would be super dark brown. I'm not trying to match it exactly, but if I can just get close. Here's the original. See, look at that. The blue-gray that I really loved, this Richeson ice blue, is one shade lighter than the one I mixed so that's mostly neutral gray and white with a tad of blue. But I could have added more white and got even right on the money with that. That was fun to discover. Here we got yellow ocher. This thing I'm telling you, try to cut off the bottom of that blue and I'm just sad, I didn't know this little thing existed. My yellow ocher is super thick. You'll tell which ones are my favorite because they're actually beat up pretty good. There is some random red. See that's bright, bright red. We'll just test it out. I've got the blue, the flesh, the ocher, that's the sepia. I want the indigo. Indigo and sepia look real close, don't they? I feel like that's all my colors there so let's go ahead. I'm going to get a tad of my gal kid on each color and then I'm going to mix a little bit of our oil, coal, wax. Once you got your colors ready, you are ready to start painting. I want you to use all of our different things that we talked about on these bigger pieces; mark-making, layering your colors, some stenciling, maybe work in some collage pieces, drag through with some different tools that you can drag through. I want you too, if you've got any powder, maybe mix up a color with some powder and try out that. Now that would have been a good color for that red if I had mixed in that powder with that. Then I want you to just start painting. I work on a pair. I might work on two of these at the same time and just go back and forth with these and I'll probably move the other papers I have underneath here just out of the way. When you're doing both of these, you might have a different goal for each page, but I like them to be coordinating a little bit so that when we cut them up, we've got some good stuff going. If you run out of a color and you think, oh, I need more of that color then just makes them more. I'm doing thinner layers here in the beginning. I've got plenty of little towels over here ready to mix. You know what? I didn't mix white. I do like white. There's no white in those others really, so we'll see. At this stage, I'm not looking to have a perfect composition. I'm looking to lay my first layer down. I'm not thinking about where things are going. I'm thinking how can I cover all of this page more than anything and work in a few of these colors that I loved and I just got oil paint on the edge of the paper. So let's just clean that off before we make a big, big mess which I am prone to do. Usually when I'm up here, I'm wearing a t-shirt, not wearing anything super important that I don't want to get paint on. I have an apron that I wear a lot of times. If you're messy painter, you don't want to get stuff ruined, definitely put an apron on. I'm still working in real thin layers right now because remember with the wax we can layer for a bit. But once it gets to where we're basically creating mud, you got to set that to the side and let that dry for the next day, but I want to make as many of these as I can today. Because let's go with some blue. Because I want to really start making more with these tomorrow. I don't want to have three or four days of painting on this particular collection. But you can be painting on these for months. You could just keep on adding layers until you're okay, I think I'm ready to do something with this, or that's what that I needed. That was the last of that. Definitely going to make a mess going back and forth here, but that's okay. That's because some of the fun with art marking making a mess. You can paint with other things too don't just get stuck with your bowl scraper if you feel, I want to work with a different tool. Get creative with your tools that you're working with also. Then before you get too far, come back in here with some mark-making. Let's go ahead. Maybe draw through this a little bit, and we could start putting in some of our texture. We can come back in here with a color that we didn't have in here already. If you think you're really loving the piece and you want to add final marks and start thinking about composition, then definitely do that. I feel that puts so much pressure on me. When I get to this stage that I almost don't want to put that extra pressure on me if I don't have to. So I'm okay with creating like this. But if it's a piece that you love, like I love that first set of many pieces that we just created. If it's a set like that and you think I love it so much, not even going to cut it up, feel free to finish it off and say I love it. I am digging these colors. What if we come in here with the punchella? What did I do with my punchella? Where is it? What if we come in with some punchella because I didn't do that on my original inspiring piece. What if on this piece I come back with some punchella? Look at that. Oh my goodness. That's what I want. Let's go with that because I can see some parts out of here that I love, I can see some there might. I'm going to go ahead and call that one a keeper for what we're doing 13. Larger Art Finishing Up: We're going to finish this one with some other. We could do it with red looking here. Let's get crazy. Red and teal. Oh, my goodness. That right there might have been the ticket. We're definitely going to call these keepers. Because I don't want to waste the paint, I'm going to go ahead and do another one with the paint that I already have mixed up. Let me throw these on the floor and make some more with the paint that we already have here because I don't want to waste the paint. Here we go. Let's just do another set completely different. Let's start off with this other color that I mixed because look how beautiful that color is. I might want white. I might need to make some white up. Look at that color. Holy cow, new favorite color. Look at that. That's actually like that is my favorite color. I like aqua light color, polish aqua color. Look at that color. Oh, my goodness. I just liked that color so much more. Putting it down on the paper then I did even mixing it that I am going gaga over this. I don't know what that is, but we will get rid of that. Greatest color ever. I don't even mind coating most of the background in that color because greatest color ever. I got something real thick in this paint. Must have been something who knows what that is. That was super fun. That is the best color ever. Definitely try mixing up that color. Now I love this color so much. Let's go ahead with the indigo. Somehow I got red in there accidentally, but look at that. That was a fun surprise. It's going to get red. Look, there's more red. Red it is accidentally, but that's okay. Sometimes you discover things accidentally that you're like just blew my mind there. Again, don't worry about messing something up, even if it's the most favorite color and you just totally got excited and then you're like, "Oh, I ruined it." Don't get too upset. At this stage, we are not finished with these. We're simply covering our page with paint, basically. I'm using up the paint already mixed up. There's some crazy colors left. Maybe I'll throw a little bit of a red in this one so that it matches. But I don't necessarily want it all to be red. Can't say that I want it to be that yellow or that flesh color either, but that's what I have over here. I do have this other gray. Let's just see. Because really with the cold wax, we're looking for layers. We're looking for things that are going to shine through underneath. This is how I ended up with so many pieces that are just like tall duds as I would have leftover paint and think, "Let's just try to use those," and then I'm like, "Yeah, that didn't work." But you know what really they did work because now I've come back and created new stuff with and I'm like totally, opened up my eyes and changed my mind on what I thought worked and didn't work. We're going to use this up anyway. Let's just go for it. Not even worried about it because can be a piece in a bigger piece. Drag some across and get some of that drag texture. Look at that I like the drag texture because it's so that'll make a really cool element. Let's just get this red in here, that'll make a really cool element when we cut, when we have these textural pieces at some of my favorite tiny little stripes on some of the stuff I've created. You'd be amazed. That one's a little crazy. This one's super crazy, but I like this one better actually because I can see that texture. Let's come back through here with some texture. I've got a little paint on here. That right there. Very gently, I'm not even pressing down at all. I'm just letting the little scraper do its thing, but I'm not really pressing down at all. I'm just dragging. Because we get some cool colors. We get some cool mixes. Now, we could do some mark-making and you're really going to see it because there's layers there underneath it. We could do some little hash marks. If we like hash marks, you could do some long squiggly lines, scribble. Could be a lot more careful than I am. I'm just doing some real fast mark-making. Let's get some scribble here too. Now you really see the scribble here. It's the layers, it's the marks, it's the combination of all these things. Now we could take one of our scrapers. We could add some good mark-making scrape marks. That was nice. Let's go ahead back to this one. I'm loving this one now. Look at that curved at the end, but that's okay. I like that. I also like some punchinella we only have yellow and red. Feeling like red punchinella little bit of red. Look at that. Just a little bit. Look at that. That just got way cooler, didn't it? See you doubted with me I know early on we were all doubting it, but crazy colors, just using up the rest of our paint palette. Look at this delightful, surprising crazy combo. Look at that. I'm feeling good about this one. I need to wipe the punchinella off so I'll do that in a moment. Just wipe your paint off as you're going because it's still wet, so it's very easy to do. Now, I still have a little bit of yellow so looking at our two pieces, do we need to do anything else to this? Feeling like I could have a little more yellow in this piece here because there's not hardly any there. I could do this with a palette knife if I wanted. Look at that. If you're like, let's try a different tool, let's just put this on with the palette knife. We'll get a different texture than we got originally. Always fun. I think I'm going to call these good because I'm liking them. I don't think they're a masterpiece in themselves, but I do think there's enough going on that we will be able to work with that tomorrow. We'll call this our extra paint scrap paper sets. When you mix up a bunch of color, if you've got a bunch of color left on your color palette, make another set, use all that paint. There's still a little bit of paint left on my palette, so I might just scrape that on a piece of junk paper for some extra marks and stuff. We'll just keep adding to that piece of junk paper the more pieces that we create. But those are pretty fun completely different than I expected. I want some dark brown stuff now that I can mix in maybe with this later. We'll see, we're going to put these to the side to dry and continue on. 14. Larger Art - Orange & Pink: I'm going to paint one more set of these with you and then I'm going to paint some more not on camera just to give a whole set of these that I could play with for making other art. I just wanted to say, if you've mixed all your colors and you thought, oh gosh, I wish I had a lighter orange or I wish I had a lighter pink, you can mix up your colors after the fact if you get them all mixed, you can take some of the color that you mixed up because this time I'm going to use orange and pink and ocher, which is my own personal favorite color palette. I thought that'd be fun to play in for a bit, and then I'll go back to my book as inspiration. But you can take a couple of colors and once they've got the wax already in it, you can still mix up another color even with the wax already in it. It's almost easier with the wax in it if you wanted to mix after the fact. But look how pretty that is as an additional color. Definitely, if you're playing and you're getting everything going, don't be afraid to get some additional colors in there. These are pyrrole orange by Holbein, my yellow ocher by Winsor Newton, and this yummy pink is light magenta by Holbein, and then I've got my Winsor Newton titanium white. That is like a neon orange. I'm glad I'm using it first. This is a color. A lot of traditional painters use like an orange or a red as their base coat, and that's a really cool color that shines through underneath all the other colors. That's why I have this orange because I have used it under tons of cold wax paintings, and I love it. I'm glad I picked that one to start with. I'm just getting a real nice thin coats. I'm pressing down a little bit on this to really get that color smashed into my paper. Yeah, I see. I like it. I'm just going to start in both that way. I have two sitting here. Working on pairs because I make a mess. Getting paint over there. Really is it art if you didn't get messy while you're doing it? If you didn't get it on everything including yourself. If I run out of orange before I get this whole piece coated, I'm not going to worry about it. Now I'm just going to do a little abstract painting, pour color in, in different areas and just see what can I end up with? Well, I have white on there accidentally. That's all right. If you do all this and you're like, I don't like any of that but I just did, you can scrape it all off with this little scraper too. This little scraper thing, it's amazing. I would not call these completely finished paintings, but they are definitely at a point where I could do a lot with them when I maybe re-imagine these. I'm actually going to stop on these. I love the pink, the orange, the ocher. I'm actually loving the colorways that came out here, and it's completely different than the colorway that came out here. Super fun. I have leftover paint, so I have an extra piece of paper here that I'm definitely going to be putting that paint on. I'm going to make one more of these with my extra paint, and then I'm going to set all these to the side to dry overnight. Maybe even two days if I come back and they're still too wet tomorrow, but because it's got the wax mixed in and then hopefully you've mixed the Galerkin light into your colors, just a tad of it, we should be dry to the touch tomorrow to be able to do something else with these possibly. Paint as many of these as you can, as you have pieces of paper, paint as many as you can. I want you to go ahead and just use all the paint. Do the different colorways. Get inspired by different inspiration sources like the books, perhaps some of your favorite colors. Try out a color combo that maybe you've never tried before, and just see, what can you end up with as some pieces that we can then cut up. I want you to not get bogged down in the composition. I don't want you to get bogged down thinking things are ugly. I don't want you to get stuck before we get to the next part. That is the point of these. They don't have to be pretty. We are up here spreading color around for the simple reason that we need these to get to the next stage. Look how fast this is. Just using this up. Don't forget to try out our different techniques. Dragging through with tools, dragging through with something sharp, using stencils, mixing your paint colors into some different colors. I am trying to keep in mind light and dark a little bit so that we've got some nice contrast, which is why I like having a little pop of a lighter tone or some white. Use some drag through here with our tool just by not even pressing down very hard, just let the tools wait, do its thing as you drag it across. I love the way that looks. Then as we drag that across, we can make more marks, we can do stenciling, I could've gotten some punch yellow going. Look at that. I'm telling you, I freaking love the punch yellow. Every single time, it's amazing. I'm still just using up the very last of my paint here. Look at that. Now, see that might be my favorite piece and it was the very last jump part. Then we can clean off our tool. We could come back on the top and do a few lines and marks. Yeah. See now this last piece with trash paint and it might be my favorite. I do love it when that happens. You wouldn't even got this piece if you just didn't have that leftover paint. Sometimes just do that one last piece and see what you get. I love dragging that through those little stencils, circles. Look at that. That's a cool texture. Yes. We can do some little marks if we want. We could come back and do extra little drag through. If we covered up our drag and we liked the drag, we could drag through something. We don't want to drag through anything. Maybe we'll drag right here. Super cool. I love what's showing up from underneath on that. Maybe we'll just drag a little right here. Yeah, look at that. Definitely like my little drag tool, so we're just going to clean that out. Sometimes you'll have some paint in the center, gets stuck in there. It doesn't matter, it's a silicone tool. We can just come back even after they're dry and get that paint off. There we go. Now we got our third trash piece. I want you to paint as many of these as pieces of paper you have. If you need to just source some paper, you can just source some paper. I want you to have at least two different colorways to play with for the projects going forward, more if you get excited and you're having fun painting because I'm getting excited having fun painting. I love this last piece. That might be my favorite. Then we'll see what we can do with these going forward. We're going to have to let these dry to the touch. That might be tomorrow, it might be the next day, but we should be good to go pretty quickly. It does dry faster than regular oil paint. I'll see you back in class. 15. Larger Art - Purple: I decided to come up and paint some more. I wasn't going to film it, but I've picked a color inspired out of my book here. I thought, why not film it since the two bigger ones I've filmed were done with color palettes that weren't from my inspiration book. But I think I want to try to do something like this. It's like a titan. There's a greenish gray in here. There's a deep, dark, yummy purple. I like the colors that are going on in here. I'll probably pull out another color because I can see some other color like a grayish green in there. I pulled some colors out and I've already started mixing them to go with my inspiration color palette. In that greenish gray, I might just go with this cool gray to get a gray in there. It's a little bit lighter than that though, so I could mix that in with some white and just see what I can get. While I was mixing. I have a trash page here and I thought I should just use the trash page to get started on one of these. I can just rub this paint off onto my page to get started. That's another way you can start if you don't want to scribble or if you're just getting confused and going, how can I get started? That's a good way. Use your trash piece to get started because I'm using my trash piece as a last use all the paints up piece anyway. Why don't we just start it with the paints? Then that's a good way to see, do we like these colors? Are they going to do what we want? Are they dark enough like that? That purple was almost an eggplant color and that's not eggplant. Now I'm wondering if I should say, mix a little bit of indigo in there and really get the right color. I'm going to mix a little bit of gray here. Like that. I'm going to go ahead and put some wax in this gray, maybe I'll like it. Then I feel like that purple really is very bright and I should probably get some indigo out to go with it. You look at that. Now that's more of an eggplant. This is a fantastic way to test colors and clean your palette knife as you're mixing colors. Just say, is this even going to be something that I like? I forgot to put my gloves back on. Even though I've called that my trash palette to get started, I could actually use it now as my starter piece and just start layering on top of that. I took my gloves off to tape off all these papers. But oil paints are pain to get off your skin. I do actually make it a habit of keeping gloves on. I can actually just go ahead and get started. Just filling in. Now I don't have to worry about it. I do like this eggplant. I'm glad I had made that deeper. It was really very vivid in a way that I don't think I would've loved it. Look at this. I've got some transparent earth oxide because I felt like I had a tiny bit of that color may be shining through. I'm not going to use a lot of it, but some of it is fine. I've got this pretty gray. We could come in with some gray. I could start layering in a little bit of this, some mark-making. Let me finish covering this up though. You get with those yummy marks and stuff like this. It's easier when it's not raw paper. It's easier when it's coded and the paper is not showing through. I got some yellow. Let's just start layering some colors now. Look at that. I don't know that my goal is necessarily on this first piece to be all light, but I could do a light piece and some darker pieces. Then we have some stuff to contrast because I noticed on that one that I did earlier, all the pieces were similar in contrast and color. I came back up and I painted one. It was basically mostly brown because I want to be able to have a contrast piece that I can cut up. I like a lot of those marks right in there and it's thick enough where I could go ahead, start doing some marks in here. Marks just add some interest, especially later when we pick out pieces of this that we really love. Marks just really add more interest in texture and layer in there. I love to see the marks and stuff. I like the circular shapes. Sometimes that's the bottom of my paint can. We can also go ahead, do a drag or two. Which I forgot to do on some of the earlier pieces, we could try our stamps. Look at that. It was denser, definitely. My favorite. Little do lolly there. Oh, my goodness, super funny. You see how it gets in the grooves. All you can really do is wipe it off as you're going and that'll clean it off pretty well. This is also a fun mark. That was super fine. I could come back in if I wanted. Do a little dragging, make it nice and contrast either. See that's fine. Again, I'm cleaning these tools as I'm going. Let's do that. I could do stinting on top of it. But let's go ahead and let that be that. I'm going to set that to the side so I can think about it. I always like to do more than one at a time. That's what I'm getting started here. Let's just do another one. I'm going to go backwards, or the opposite of what I just did. I just started off real dark. Maybe on this one and I've got paint on my spatula that I am letting get on the paper. Let's start off with light and go dark on this one so that we've got some contrast pieces. While I'm not thinking of coloring composition super hard at the front beyond my inspiration palette, obviously, I'm thinking contrast, are they all the same shade, will I really get anything out of that contrast that I can use? I'm thinking along those lines because I do need there to be contrast and some differences. That's really cool now. I think I want to go ahead and mark-make. I like that. This has got enough difference in contrast between the two and there's so much paint there that we're going to go ahead and paint another one. But check out that pair, completely different than what we've already painted. I like the eggplant purple shades. I like this, it started off light and had these yummy Earth oxide, this tera transparent earth orange. I love that. I'm going to go ahead and give myself another one of those. Maybe mostly in the light, we'll see and just use up my paint here. This one is completely different than I just was playing and moving around paint and trying to use up what I had, which I still have a little bit more left. But I really like a scraped a whole bunch of it off and then dragged that back in there and really made those colors mesh in super cool together. It's really, really dark. I might want one that's really light to be a contrast, but that's super-duper cool, so I'm loving that one. I'm going to continue just painting and using up my paint and then I'll see you back in class. 16. Paintings Recap: Let's do a little recap of our paintings before we move on to some other projects. I actually intended to start this whole process with the intention of cutting all the pieces up. Because in my mind, that's what I liked the best from my inspiration pieces was all the yummy little bits that fit together after I cut it up and re-imagined it into a new piece of art. But I think because I thought I'm going to cut everything up that I freed myself from the pressure that you get when you're trying to create something amazing and it doesn't work out. Doing that allowed me to get a few pieces that I'm like, holy cow, that's so amazing. I have to keep it. I can't cut that up. Then several pieces that I'm like, let's cut this up. I was thrilled actually to have some pieces that I loved, loved. This is that first set that we did. It was inspired by a color palette in the mood for color book. Let's just revisit that color palette for a moment. I've got three color palettes out of here. This was the color palette that I picked off of this Swedish heritage tones. Even though it's not exactly like really light with lots of blue, there's other colors all in here, this is what I was inspired by for this color palette. I've got some of this dirt color in the edges that's orange. Got a lot of gray in here so even though it looks white, it's not truly white. We've got a lot of this blue in here. I pulled together that color palette and we ended up with the most gorgeous set of four. Out of this set of four, I really loved the two here. The two here I love, but I don't love love and so I thought, oh, I could cut this up and see what I can get. But these have to stay just like they are. They're amazing. That's what I really love about this process. If you stop trying so hard to create something amazing and maybe we're just going to create with the intention of possibly cutting it up, you'd really take a lot of that stress and pressure off yourself so that you can just create, have fun test colors, and try new color palettes. Then when you're done, you're like, whoa, don't even know where that came from. Totally didn't expect that, out of the blue, I was experimenting. But look how amazing that is when we finished. I really like this part right here with the circle and the lines that we created and the darkness of the little punchinella pieces on the side. Just magically it came together and I was just letting the art flow out of me without the pressure that we usually have going on there. This one is a 50, 50 keep and we're going to cut up. I want you to evaluate the art once you create it and keep the pieces that you're like, that's crazy amazing. This is another piece that I created from a color palette. These color palettes are way outside my normal comfort zone of what I would be picking. I like that. We're stepping outside the box and we're going for stuff that we wouldn't just normally gravitate towards. This color palette was inspired by this poppy set. It's not a poppy. I'm not sure what it is. It looks like a poppy. I just pulled green, pretty gray, and blush color and stuff out of that and that's the color palette I was working with. That's another part that took a lot of pressure off working with a color palette that's already established, and that you are like, oh, I really love that. It's not something that you're just going to go to your paint box and pull those colors out. Now, you're like, okay, I know I like this color palette, what can I create with those colors myself? This is what I created from that color palette. I know now that not every color palette is going to work for you and this is not my personal favorite color palette, but somebody else may think, oh, amazing. Because this is not my personal favorite color palette, none of these are jumping out at me is amazing like they did on that first piece. They're just not grabbing me in the same way. This is a set that I have no problem cutting up and saying what else can we create with that. I love that freeing feeling that I get by trying out a color palette that's already out there that I can just pull from creating with the intention of not making a masterpiece, but I'm going to cut this up and make a different masterpiece. I had so much fun painting that I painted all of these in one day. Then I left them overnight to give them a try out today. On the bigger pieces, the color palettes, I had three different color palettes that I painted with you, one of them was inspired by my inspiration pieces that I did a long time ago. Then created this fun collage abstract with, and I was really inspired by the colors that were in this section down here so I thought, you know what, I love those colors, let's just see what we can create. I think in that when I was actually thinking that teal and red is such a cool color combination that I'm always trying to make something I like. I don't know that I've ever been successful up to this point in creating anything I like beyond that cut up piece because the painting was not my favorite. But check this out. I've got some really good options to work with. I actually really liked this, but I'm still willing to cut it up. I think I love this one. I like the drag through marks. I like the randomness of the red. I like that there's a big bit of red here on this side. I do actually really love this one so it's on the fence if I would cut it up or not. What I would recommend, especially if you look at some of these and you're on the fence, photograph all of them so that you have a photo that you could get a print from later if you cut it up and think, oh, I wish I hadn't done that, you could still get a print. I've already photographed all of these. I just took my nice camera with some good lighting, just like this light that's on the table. I just photographed each and every one of these so that I can look back later and think what the heck, that was the best thing I ever created. Why did I cut that up? I can print it again. If I create today and if you're on the fence about one like I'm on the fence about this one a little bit. I might save that one for a later project and I might cut up all of the other three that I'm like, yes, I can cut that up. Yes, I can cut that up. Yes, I can cut this up. I'm on the fence with those. But this one I'm thinking is a keeper. Now the second palette that we did was going back to my traditional orange and pink. Out of those two, the third one I painted with my trash paint, the leftover paint at the end is actually my very favorite. I love this. That's a keeper. But I do feel like there are two that I could cut up to create with. The last color palette that I tried, I pulled back out in the mood for color book. Let me just open this one up. It was this color palette right here, which is a very soft yellow and eggplant purple color palette, which is not a color palette you've ever seen me use. It's definitely outside of what I normally would gravitate towards. But holy cow, look at these. Look at that. Now, this one, there are a couple that are definite keepers and then there are several that I'm like, let's cut that up. For me and I painted just a junk brown one to mix in to my collage ones slash definitely junk. This one, how amazing did that turn out? This was actually my last trash piece. It was the one where I was using up the paint that I had leftover. I love that it's lighter than the other ones that I was doing because I had very little purple left and so I just tucked the purple in on the edges a tiny bit. I'm insanely in love with this one. This is a keeper and I'm not going to cut it up, but it's just so gorgeous. I can even turn this to the side and just think, how stunning is this? It's so beautiful. Anyway that I take it, it's beautiful. I loved it so much that I made it the little cover of these videos. Is it not just the most beautiful piece? Don't waste the leftover paint. This was the leftover paint that I just would have thrown in the trash and it made my very favorite piece of all of them. Now on this, this is definitely a cut up piece. This is definitely one that I can cut up. But these two, check that out. The two that we painted and we used the yummy punchinella to do our patterns and stuff. I also want to talk about with that punchinella. On most of that, I was actually pushing paint through those dots. But on this one I had very little paint leftover so I was just smashing that punchinella down into the paint and making a pattern in the paint itself and you can do that. You can just scrunch your stencil down in there, take your palette knife and just smooth the stencil down and then pick the stencil up and look what that does. It creates a pattern down in the paint. Now I wish I had done that more so even in layers on top of the paint because it gave the coolest effect. Super fun. You can see some of that here. We've got it down in the paint and then we've got some stencil areas that are raised. I liked that little combination. I just wanted to take a little recap here of what we painted in class. Talk about if you end up with amazing pieces, great. Then if you paint with the intention of cutting up and not having that pressure on yourself, that when you get these amazing pieces, it's even better. Because for the most part I was creating stuff like this to say, let's have some stuff that I can cut up and re-imagine. I had a lot of fun. These took one day to dry and they are dried. They're tiny bit almost like tacky like a crayon feels like, but they're not wet so we are ready to jump into doing some projects with these fun paintings for the ones that I want to cut up. Then, yay, for the couple that I created that I thought, holy cow, that's amazing. That made it even more exciting. These are some of the best things I've painted since I've ever started with the oil and coal wax, and I've been doing the oil and coal wax for five or six years now and I'd say this enjoyable paint session that I've had, and I ended up with the most incredible pieces. Release yourself from the mindset of I got to paint something amazing. I got to worry about the composition. I got to get these colors right. I want you to pick a color palette that you're not comfortable with and I want you to just create with the knowledge that this is going to turn out blah and we're going to cut it up to make it something amazing. Then when you end up with something amazing before you even get to cut it up, don't cut those up. Keep those. These are exciting and we will start cutting these into some other projects for the ones that we want to cut up. I'll see you back in class. 17. Reimagined Art - Wonky Stripes: I thought we would just start off cutting up some of our pieces of art and just jump into our first project. This set is my least favorite so let's turn it into something that we're like, oh, look at that. It's only my least favorite because I think in the end I don't love the colors. I'm just hoping as we re-imagine pieces, that I will love the colors in because I have a whole lot of existing bad art that I have created in the past that we looked at as we were just figuring what it is that we're trying to create. I'm looking down at the pile thinking, maybe this re-imagined with this piece here might look pretty cool actually. I'm opening up all my old art as options to blend in and I want you to do that too. If you've got other old art that's maybe not cold wax or something that you think, oh, that would be cool if I did this with it or that with are used as part of that collage. Because even though I am taking this first project and cutting it up and saying, okay, I'm going to put some of this stuff in there. In addition to that, we can also get out our tub of scrapbook papers or wallpapers, old art, anything at all that you think, oh, that's cool and I can work that into the strike collage. Feel free to get that stuff out too and see maybe a stripe or two would look good and some of this other stuff. I'm going to keep those down here beside me as an option and I've got plenty of old scrapbook papers that we might pull something in. I'm just keeping my options open and because I used old boot pages here as a collage element, we could also use some collage elements of old book pages. It might go in my closet and pull some of that out. I'm actually going to just jump in and cut the edges off of this and your early art might be something that you're willing to sacrifice. This one I did years ago and at the time I thought it looks like a garden. I did so good, now I'm like, what the heck is that? At this point, I'm ready to say, "Okay, I don't have to keep this. I can give some of this up." I think we're going to cut it into different sized stripes. I'm going to pick some big stripes and then I'll cut some little stripes and we could make a pair if we have enough pieces. You can be more strategic, if you see a section that you really truly love, cut that out first and then cut out a bunch of strikes around it and then on these just cut yourself some different sized stripe, so we've got some thin, we've got some thick. Then we've got the really thick. All right, so here's our first choices. Those down, let's cut some of these up. I might decide as I'm cutting, to go ahead and make this the same width as these so that I'm not trying to cut it with scissors. Because if you were watching that Junk Art Collage class, I was trying to cut them all down with scissors if they were different size and if we go ahead and make these the same size, I can decide which part of this I like and I can cut one of the edges off, so let's cut this off. Then let's decide, I like this part here more so than just this pink edge, so let's just go ahead. It's wax so I can just take my thumbnail and put a dividend there. Hopefully I cut these the same size. Let's just now the newer wax pieces versus the older wax pieces. It feels like I'm working with wet crayons. I can tell it's not completely cured, these take a couple of weeks to cure, but they are dry but I am getting some white on my fingers and so getting paint on your fingers, but you're still wanting to keep going. Get a microfiber cleaning cloth and that will clean those right off your fingers. Faster and easier than trying to wash your hands with soap and water. On here I actually like this section, so maybe I'll try a real fat stripe and look how easy that cuts with that piece of collage on there and look how cool that looks. That will make a beautiful bookmark so another little option that you can try there and so let's just cut. Maybe I'll keep some big pieces off of that but I do like that one too and cut some little pieces off of one of these others. Let's just cut this one up. I liked doing the little sand borders because it's really good for getting your feet wet. You get four little paintings, you get test out colors. Then it's not going to go to waste if you decide later, almost cut that up. Like all this going on here. I like all that going on there. Well, I guess we'll strip off the side here. Oh, yeah. I can feel the white paint is a tiny bit still wet I can feel bad. But that's okay, it's not like working with wet paint it's a little bit different but it is tacky it's like tacky paint. It's a weird feeling working with the tacky paint. All right, so let's cut a few thin stripes. Maybe I'll keep a thicker stripe in here. Then we can cut some stripes down to again later. We don't have to cut it and say one and done now we have to use it. We can keep cutting these down later and because I'm using enough stripy pieces here, I'm sure I'm going to have more than one piece worth of cut up stuff. Consider making a pair when you're creating like this. Some are finished cutting these up and I'll be right back. All right, we got all our slices over here, I've finished cutting these up. I'm going to be using YES! paste to glue these pieces onto a piece of nice watercolor paper. I'm not going to use my nice oil paper because it's expensive and I want to just create a piece now on a nice piece of white paper, so I'm gonna be using my Canson 9 by 12, 140 pound watercolor paper as my base. I just want to be able to glue these pieces down to a nice clean piece of paper and let that be my finished piece of art. Now I'm going to make a stripe collage out of this. You can definitely experiment and play. I also cut up a couple of pieces of a book page to just see will that fit in? Do I like it? Do I want to try it? You could do different collage papers in there and just see what do we end up with if we work some of this stuff in? I don't even know where that old paper came from, I think it was just from the thrift store. Just start playing with the pattern, the design, the thickness of your layers. I tried to have mostly a nice even edge around my piece of paper and because we have enough scraps before I glue anything down, I might go ahead and see. Can I make two? If I'm using a big stripe off this one piece of art at the bottom, maybe on this other one I can do that at the top and, and be a pair without being exactly matchy-matchy. Perhaps I could even decide that maybe I want one of these over here and I need to do something else over here, so I could switch and change out stripes as I'm looking at this and figuring out what needs to go where. I just like the differences that those create. They don't have to be even, and they don't have to match, and they don't have to be perfectly straight. You could certainly have some stuff going back and forth, being mismatched, being uneven, and creating that collage stripe in a way that you find appealing. Let's just throw some of these out of whack a bit and just see what that would look like. See, now I'm seen that. What if we did something like that? What do we think of that? Do we like it doing its own thing, or do we like it nice and straight? Now I need a come here and vote button. I do know that I like the straight. This, because the top is such a big piece there, I do like the uneven though, I do like the unevenness. I'm thinking just to have something a little different than anything else I've done. Let's just make these a little wonky. We can have some white space in-between. We can have our stripes off back-and-forth. We can start the top off, not in the center, and then glue each of these down, a tiny bit wonky, and just see what we get because that's pretty cool right there. Your choice on this. You could go wonky, you could go perfectly straight. I do know that I love the perfectly straight, just to look back at the pieces that are inspiring this project. They're really beautiful, straight. They make a finished piece of art. They're going to photograph really beautifully, so I could print these on a larger print if I wanted, which is something I especially think I want to do with this one here on my right because I could see this being a great big piece and a nice quality print. A good photograph of it with a nice quality print, I think I love that because I'm just obsessed with that piece of art. That being said, if you want to be able to photograph it and maybe make prints out of it, probably better to do it straight. If this is just a one-off piece that you're like, let's just try it and see what we get, then try it wonky. I've got my glue out using my YES! paste. You can glue these with heavy gel matte medium if you want. I'm just using a palette knife on this. You can use heavy bodied matte medium. You could possibly use a glue stick. You want it to be archival, you want it to be a nicer quality glue stick that's going to stand up to the test of time. But what you probably couldn't do with this really thick stuff is use the thin matte medium because this paper is really thick and we have now put really thick coats of waxy paint on top. You can't really use a real thin glue. Well, you probably could. I'm lying, you probably could. Just use a real thin layer on the back and glue it down, but let it sit there for a bit. But usually my rule of thumb on glues is the thicker the paper, the thicker the glue. It just works out nicer. What I really like about the YES! paste is that I still have a moment or two. Even after I glue all these pieces, I still have some time to move it and shift it. In something like this where maybe I'm going to be doing a wonky stripe like I'm doing, I want a moment to be able to adjust these before that glue sets in and dries completely. That's what I'm going to be counting on, that I can glue these down and still slightly adjust them. If I'm doing it straight, I still want to be able to adjust them a little bit. But this is my favorite glue for everything. It's like a glue stick in a jar. It's just like working with frosting. It's amazing. I'm laying them down gently. I'm not smooshing them down at this point because I want the option to still shift a little bit. I got them stuck down. Look how super fun that is. Now once you get these on here, I want you to take just a piece of scrap paper and instead of smearing these down with your hands, I want you to do it with the paper so that you can really get everything nice and adhered down for both pieces. The glue that we've used, it dries clear. But if I see any glue sticking out, I will just go ahead and take my fingernail and get it off because even though it dries clear, I don't like big, heavy glue dollops anywhere. Look at that. That looks super fun. I really love that they're not even. That was a fun thing to test out. I also love that there's some random collage, like a piece of book page in there. Keep that in mind when you're collaging. Tear up all book pages or collage paper are all pieces of art and throw that in there, especially if you collage on any of your cold wax paintings because then that pulls that element into our larger collage piece. Mix the colors up, mix the lights and the darks. I tried to have the main piece of art that we started with and then I ended up wanting a contrasting piece of art. Paint lots of different paintings and lots of different colorways and stack up all the different pieces and then pull two pieces together. They may not be exactly matchy-matchy because I would not say that my faux flower garden and my pink and gray were the same. They were definitely had a contrast and a different coloring to them, a different color palette, but because there was this little bit of green in our original piece, I thought maybe we can pull that together and it would work. Like opposites is an interesting way to think of that, pull a color out of that in something that's completely, or maybe it's a complementing color. We can think of it that way. But I do love how interesting it is after you get the two different pieces of arts combined into one piece. Feel free on this to do something like this where it's all hodgepodge and it's on purpose, or you could do everything straight and butted up to each other so they just flow as one big piece of art that you painted in different stripes. Either way, you're going to get something super fun and amazing and you're going to turn some art that you're like, "I really didn't like those colors," to something like, "Look how fun that is," That actually is super fun. Then as far as composition, I do like how the bigger pieces are opposite. But we could check out what would this look like if I turn this over, though I do like that actually. Don't be afraid to look at them from different directions. Maybe they'd be cool as a set in this direction because that is actually pretty cool right there. I might even like that better because now it's a long and they're [inaudible] . That's actually super cool. I'm glad I did that. Have some fun with this project. I want you to pull together a couple of color ways that contrast or opposites or pull one color out of the piece that you started with and just see what can you make, glue in these together. I hope you have fun with this project and I'll see you in the next project. 18. Reimagined Art - Cut Our Favorites: For this project, I want to talk about cutting the pieces out of the larger piece that we might love. If you end up with a large composition and you're like, something's just off about it, we can search out little treasures in that piece of art that we're like, now that works. Now we have the control to edit out parts that just aren't working for us to include parts that are to focus on composition and the movement of the piece. For this I particularly like the way the punchella red circles come through here. I like the way the yellow is merging in from the sides and that could be a composition. To look around different pieces of the art, I like this here with the stripes and that red coming in. I'm using some little pieces of mat board that I got at the craft store because they're cheap and they're really nice to look at how a piece might look as a framed piece of art. Because sometimes you just need to frame it a little differently to be like, wow, look at that. I also cut these out myself. This is just a piece of watercolor paper that I've cut a square in. Then I could come around here and say, are there any little micro collages that we could pull out of here? That's cool with that mark-making. I really love being able to re-examine a piece with these and pulling little pieces of art out. Because I identified this piece here, I could go ahead and just take A because it's a double mat, I could make it a little tiny bit bigger and cut the bigger square out, and then I could double-mat it like that. But I could just take like a pencil and decide, that's the one I love and cut this out with a pair of scissors. It should be really easy to see with the wax because I just dug down into the wax. Then for something like this, I'm probably just going to take my scissors, cut along that line we just created, and just cut that piece out. If you are concerned about ruining a piece of art and you're like, oh, no, what if I cut the wrong piece? You could photograph these and then cut up your print until you're like, this is the one I want. Then you didn't cut up the original piece of art. You can get lots of different pieces of art out of things that way. Then you can come back and use that as your main guide. If you decide you loved it and you're ready to cut the piece of art out, you can do that and I don't care if these get stuff on them. I'm just using these because I did just get paint on that. Don't pretend that these are going to be used later for anything other than your guide because you're going to get paint stuff on them. But now check that out. I love that and I might even love it enough to want to pair out of it, and so now I can re-imagine larger pieces of art into smaller pieces that I find amazing. Because I actually did like this right here with the stripes and the red coming in from the side, so let's just cut that out. I know it's not going to be perfect, but it's up underneath that smaller size. Let's just go ahead and commit this piece right here and the longer you let these cure, the less residual paint you'll have that might come off onto say, your fingers. Just know if I'm ending up with a little bit of paint on my fingers today it's because I'm working on these pretty close to when they were painted. The longer you leave it, the less residual paint you'll have come out on your fingers. Now check this out. I actually like it that way now that I've turned it, I flipped it. But check that out. I love it. Oh, my goodness. Look at those two. Those are pretty cool. Now I have two cool pieces of art that I have cut out of the bigger piece of art. If I want, I could trim the white edge off of this. It doesn't matter if I'm a hair different because these would be matted right up to the edge. But if I want to photograph these before, then I could just cut that white edge off but check that out. That wouldn't have been my color choices, but that's some super fun pieces that we've cut out of this larger piece. Because I have still some art left over, this could be collage elements for some other pieces. This right here, look at that right there. That's a beautiful piece in itself. Could be a little micro collage, but check this corner out. Could be an element in a larger collage piece and this could be the standout piece. Oh, my goodness, I'm loving this little corner. I like the little bit of yellow and the little bit of red and teal. That one's pretty cool. We could just cut this whole thing up. It could be gift tags, it can be small pieces of art that we send to other people. I'm really liking this piece here and this piece, but let's leave this for an option later. If I wanted to see if I had any other pieces that I could connect up with this series, I could come back into my other pieces before I cut them up and just see is there anything else that I want to cut out of here? These have a lot more going on, but I like this one here because I like the darkness movement. I like the yellow coming in from the side. That's pretty cool right there. Don't be afraid if you're looking at it to start flipping it around. Don't just look at it from one direction because you might see something different coming in from a different viewpoint. Like if we did that same corner but this way, now we've got these cool stripes up here from where we banged our bowl scraper into our paint. Then we've got some good movement with this set of brown dots and the little yellow down there. That's even better composition. If I cut that out too soon, I would not have gotten that composition out of there. Look around all the pieces and cut out the ones that you think are amazing that you would definitely want to keep as a piece of art and cut those out before you go to any other cutting out. Because you may have something amazing sitting in there that you didn't want to give up. I could look at this with a little bit bigger viewfinder. I think the smaller one worked better for that, but I did like that little corner there. I could definitely pull this out of here. I'm feeling that. Let's just claim this corner. Got little pencil here. It will be completely different really than the two that I've got over there because even though I was using the same color palette, I was combining them in a little bit different way and I ended up with a completely different look by doing that. Look at that. This is like peeling tape and having a reveal. Let's put our little mat board around it and just see. Look at that. That's a pretty cool piece of art right there. I love that. We did good on that one too. But you'll see here too there's a little bit different than the other ones I cut because I went to more teal and this is more grayish in that blue rather than that teal. Completely different. But check out how amazing that one is. Now I just want to look, is there another one in here that I can have as a pair? Because if they're framed up as a little payer, how cool would that be? That would be pretty cool. I'm liking this mushy paint here. Do we think that would make a cool? That might be pretty cool. If we're putting that right next to this, it might be a cool pair, but completely different because I do like what that paint is doing. Should we look at it from another direction? I'm not liking it from that direction, maybe from this direction. Let's see what we have come in. Now see if I go right there, pairing that right there. I'm liking that. Let's just get that in there. I just love, love to cut up stuff. I should have been like an elementary school teacher. We should have been playing in art and scissors because kids like to cut stuff up too. Oh, we would have had so much fun. You can use a paper cutter on these if you want to be more exact. I'm just doing these for me and you, but look at that. Oh, my goodness. This one is gorgeous and it's really pretty next to the little pair. That one's pretty stinking cool, that one's cool. Now I want a clean piece of mat board to photograph these with now that I've got this piece of mat all gummed up with paint. But check that out. That is amazing. We've got those two out of there. Search out the art before you decide on another project that you're going to do with it and see if there's any pieces that are insanely amazing that you may have to use. Look at that stripe, wouldn't that be gorgeous in one of the stripe ones? Oh, my goodness. Got to say that. These two pieces are cool. Got a little baby stripe there. The little stripe pieces that you end up with, you could actually just take all these little pieces and make a big stripe piece and see just what you end up with from random paintings that have a leftover piece. How cool would that be? Today's goal for this particular section is to cut yourself out some miniature little masterpieces out of your big art and just see, what can you create? Searching out fun compositions in the bigger piece that maybe the bigger piece isn't working out at all, but maybe the little pieces are like, perfect. I can't wait to see what you cut up. I'll see you back in class. 19. Reimagined Art - Paper Weaving: On this project, I'd like to try something a little different, and I'm trying to use up all the different paintings that we painted in class to do these projects with so that I didn't paint something and then you're like, wait a minute, what did you do with that? But we'll see how it works out. Here's what I've got left over that we haven't already used or decided, looks amazing, or cut up into other pieces of art. Here's what I've got left over. I like orange and purple so I'm okay with maybe combining some of the orange into this so it's a pinky purple look to it on that one. I'm okay trying this out. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but I thought I would try. I've got the two purples, the two orange and pink and the brown that I had is a contrast possibility, which I did not end up using in my stripe that I created, but I could use it in another stripe if I decide to make some more of those striped pieces. But I want to do something completely different. I'm going to be working on a larger piece of Canson watercolor paper. This is 11 by 15. You can go as big as you want. You can try much smaller if you'd like, you could have that piece of paper and cut it in half for like this size. But I thought, go big or go home. I want to try a weaving project. It's decide or determine how big we can go really by how many pieces we can weave together. But I thought maybe we could at least start off just giving it a try. I'm going to cut all of my papers into some stripes and you don't have to cut all of them up because I think maybe even three pieces might be plenty. But I'm thinking this brown. Let's just cut those up into, I would say stripes all the same color to be honest, because thinking with this weaving, it might be easier. But then again, it might be nice to have different sized weaved pieces in there. Let's do different sizes. Let's just do different sizes. Never mind, you know what? Let's just go for it. You can decide as you're creating your weaved piece, what you think it needs to be. As we're weaving, I might be more inclined to say, oh, this works better or that works better. I don't know. So let's just cut these into big stripes. These are fairly big pieces because I'm using that 9 by 12 paper and it's most of the page. If I want it to be even bigger, like we might cut this other one the other way, these I'm cutting from this direction, so they're only this tall, but what if I had cut them for this direction, they would have been even bigger. So experiment with that and see what are you thinking you want your weaved piece to look like? Because this is different. This is something that you can do that you're not going to see a lot out there. Let's cut this the long way. I particularly love doing things that are unexpected, out of the ordinary. You're not going to see every artist out there making one of these unless you took my class. But here's the point. I want you to start thinking outside the box. What else can I do with these pieces? You can paint it and say, I don't know how that worked out. Now that I said I cut that the short way, look at that, I actually cut that the long way, so I lied. These are the long ones. Do I want these to be short? Now I'm just like, let's just cut them all along and we can cut some shorter ones out of there if we need to. But I want you to think outside the box. I want you to get art that nobody else is getting. I want you to get excited about creating and I want you to create things out of stuff that maybe you thought, that didn't work out. Look at it and say, okay, that didn't work out right, but what else can I do with it? What else can I make with this? Can I just make a collage piece with it? Cut them all up, build them in your collage box. Can I make a weave piece out of it like we're about to create? Can I make a cut up stripe one? Because let me tell you that right there, you're going to see that again from me. This is now the second time I've brought that up in a little bit different way. I wanted the project to be a tiny bit different than my original piece, so every time I do it, I change things a tiny bit. Look at that stripe. Cool. Every time I do that, I want things to be slightly different than what I did before and I want to keep things exciting, give you some fun, new ideas too. But I want you to start thinking about your own art, like okay, now this didn't turn out. What can I do with it? Can I just cut a lot of little pieces out of it and make those little mini collage pieces or many art pieces that I can do something else with. I can sell, I can send it in little cards. Just all fun you can think to do with art even if your original piece didn't end up like you wanted, don't get disappointed. Think how can I cut that up into something else? I wish I had been cutting up art way longer than I had because it really is the thing that gives me the most joy up here when I re-imagine it into something else and I'm like, wow, totally didn't expect that. Now that I'm cutting these oranges out, probably going to like these in here. I don't know. Don't be afraid to abandon your idea if you're thinking not quite what I was expecting, don't be afraid to change directions and make some other choices. You don't have to. Nothing is locked in. There are no decisions that you can't back out of. Some of it could just be the mood you're in that day. Let's take this, I got paint residual all over my fingers. Let's just go ahead and clean my fingers off with my microfiber cloth. I'm telling you these are the most amazing invention ever. They're cleaning cloths, they're over there in the home cleaning section, most stores. Let's work right here so I don't even have to touch everything too much. What I really love about them is I use them for everything, wipe my brushes off on them. They're perfect for anything that you could want to do in your art studio. They're amazing. With paper weaving, we're taking pieces of paper and we're weaving other pieces through it. It's going to take a little bit of deciding and moving stuff around and which way do you really want to weave some stuff and do I need some little pieces, and if I get something on this piece of paper in the wrong spot, do I need to start over on a clean piece of paper? Maybe. Because I just got brown paint where I didn't want it. But can I take my eraser and erase that paint over there? Maybe. Hope I've got more paint on it. We're going to lay this out, decide what we want and then I'll start on a clean piece of paper. I want it to be clean when I'm done. I want it to actually be a beautiful piece of art and the weave in part, we might end up with some dirty fingers and I might attach it later. Really this is the shape we're getting. I'm thinking we could start with this. We could weave things in so you're going to go under over, under over, so you can see how this is going to be a challenge getting under over, under over the pieces. But just take your time and just see, what can we get? This is if I weave the purple through and then some of these, once we attach these to our paper, we can trim all these edges. What else do we have in here? Now you're going to have to go opposite. So if I went under here, the next layer has to be over. Let's say, do we like the purple or do we like the crazy pink? Or do we like the pink and the brown and leave the purple out? Let's see, maybe we like the pink and brown and leave the purple out. What we could do is when they're all straight, we can weave them and then we can push some of the weaved pieces in some uneven directions too. Maybe we like the brown and the pink, what do you think of that? I'm just going opposite over under, over under and then I'll pull these down. It's like we're weaving our own piece of fabric, but we're doing it with cool paper art. Do we like the brown and the pink? I want it purple. Now I can see with the bigger piece of purple. I may need to cut the other purple up. But now that I just did that, I can see that I did the purple. Let's just start weaving this. Now that we've made that decision, that's going to take you a minute. I'm just going to come in from this end so I can weave these in the opposite way. If I went under on the first one, I'm going to go over and then pull those in. They're not going to pull super tight. We're working with real thick paper here, but we will get them pulled in pretty far. If you need to, you could work with clips and clip these papers down. Like with bowl clips, you could try something like that. Let's just go opposite what we did and see if we come from the end. We're getting it's a little easier to go over under in the opposite way than we just did. See, it's pulling together nicely when you do that. This two will determine for us, oh, we're going to need this big piece of paper or do I need to go smaller? Let's just get it started. Then we can make some final decisions because as we're weaving, those pieces of paper are going to hold themselves together. I don't have to glue them all immediately. I can start pulling and pushing and just seeing what we end up with. Look how cool that is. I like this part of this with this [inaudible] pattern on it. Just going back and forth over, under, in the opposite way of whatever we just did. Look at that. That's pretty awesome. That's pretty beautiful, actually. Oh, my goodness. Now I'm not worried about the pieces sticking up because I can glue these down onto my final piece of paper once I get for sure what I'm wanting to do. I can definitely tell on the purples. We can pull those in and out. I do like how they're doing that fun, not quite even look. That's fun. I could match that on the bottom side by just cutting these with scissors. I like that right there. What do you think of that? That's pretty amazing. I could match that with the brown. We don't have to have them all stopping at the same place. I do like the unevenness of the brown and the purple. You just decide if that bothers you or you love it. I do have some paint here that as I was pulling I pulled some paint. What do we think of that? I'm liking this. One other thing that we might consider, we don't have to attach this to paper. We can attach this to cradled board. This could be a finished board piece. Paint the board. It's a colored out here that you love. Then this piece can be glued on top of that. Get a board as big as this piece. I might consider that. I'm not sold completely on this having to be on paper. Let's just look. Do we want to pull these in tighter or like the different links? I actually love this circle pattern even more than what I got up top. What if we can cut the top off of that one? Look how cool that is. My goodness. The top ones are still a little shorter. Don't want to even that up. Let me look at that. It's almost like I need one more brown. Do we have one more brown? Let's see. I do have another piece of brown. Of course, now I've already cut some of that. That's okay. Let's just see. This is why I don't glue it down immediately because I may need to look at the composition. I may need to make some decisions and start moving and changing stuff. Yes, I think that last piece of brown made that look a lot better. Now I wish I had not cut this piece, but I did. That's okay. Do I have a piece left over that's longer? I do. We could replace that with the longer piece and think about it. I'm loving that like there. Before I decide what I'm actually going to attach that to, I'm going to go look at my cradle boards and see if I've got one of those. I'd have to have a bigger piece of paper which we could paint if we wanted to have it a color, or I could have it melted nice and clean, but I'd want all of the paint residue off my fingers, and I'd want to be very careful about gluing it down. Let me go and see if I've got a cradle board. I'll be right back. 20. Mounting To Cradled Board: [MUSIC] I do have a cradleboard, this is 11 by 14, which works really nicely with the size collage that we've created, the size weaving. It does go off the edges just a tad on the ones that I've pulled to the extreme, but we can simply trim that at the very edge of our piece. What we want to do is take the wrapper off, paint this whole board and the sides in a color that's in this preferably. Could be the brown, could be the purple, could be this lighter orange color. You can see it on the board [NOISE]. Let me just take this. This is unprimed board. But even the raw wood will give us an idea [NOISE] of what this would look like on a lighter color. Check it out. That would look super cool right there in the middle of our board. If we painted this a lighter whatever this orangey color is, we can just use a craft paint for that, paint that that lighter color or a color coming out of your piece, that would be super cool, and then we can glue this down. I'm going to paint this board and I'll be right back. I have picked a yellow ocher. If you're wondering what paint should you paint with? Should it be a craft paint or a nicer paint? What is your end purpose? If your end purpose is just to do something fun and crafty for yourself, then a craft paint is fine. If your end piece is to be a beautiful piece of art, that maybe you want to hang in your house or give away or sell or use in some way that's more fine artesque, then use a nicer acrylic paint as your base coat. I have picked yellow ocher because yellow ocher was in our piece. It's a very vivid yellow, which I don't mind. The color is, it's probably 80 percent dry. I painted it, I went to eat lunch downstairs. I put two very thick coats of paint on here. It's not maybe 100 percent dry. If you're sticking this down when it's not completely dry [NOISE], you'll have some paint come back up. But I'm not really worried about that, I can touch up if I need to, I want to tell you how I'm going to finish it off. I'm going to use my Yes! paste, and I'm going to strategically put the paste on the back of here, and then stick it down exactly where I'd like to have it. Then I will trim these pieces that are coming off the edge, I'm going to trim those slightly, but I'm going to wait till I stick it down to make sure that I don't trim it in the wrong spot. Then all the pieces will be attached exactly where I want it. If I put a little bit of a Yes! paste on the edges here and stick those down, then all of my piece of art will be completely stuck down really nicely. When the paint is dry and I stick those down, I could then smooth it out really nicely with a piece of paper to make sure that everything is smoothed on. I'm going to go ahead and glue this down and call this project good because I'm actually super thrilled with the way that this weave piece looks on top of the piece that's behind it. It's got the sides painted. I just put two coats on the sides. I could have done a deep purple on the side, that would have been really cool. You can get creative with how you finish these and paint the sides. But how super cool is that? I want to see you do a weave project just because it's unusual. You can pick two contrasting pieces of art to cut up. You can do different size stripes. It's very interesting to weave and see the way that they combine and visually look from further back when you see the different patterns. I did like it [NOISE] that one had quite a bit of pattern on it, that purple one, and the other one was a little more neutral, but there's still a lot of movement going on in it, so you might paint like a junk piece that's all similar one-color mark-making it with something sharp and then just have that as a fun contrasting piece. That might be fun. I want you to give this a try out. Doing the collage weaving project is super fun. This is a really beautiful finished piece of art on a cradleboard ready to hang. I can't wait to see what you do with this. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 21. Final Thoughts: What do you think? Did you have some fun aha moments in this class? Have you sat down and started painting a few yourself and thinking, okay, I'm not going to put too much pressure on myself? Let's just create, and I know that tomorrow I'm going to come back and cut some of these up, and that's going to be super fun because we're going to re-imagine it into a piece of art that we really love. Did you end up like me with several pieces that you were like pleasantly surprised and like, oh, this actually turned out amazing, I'm going to keep it just like it is and not cut it up. [LAUGHTER] I hope you did because I feel like creating with the intention of cutting things up relieves all the pressure that we put on ourselves when we create art. If we know just right up front, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just eases the mind and lets us put on some music and just start creating, and then when we're all done, it's a joy to see what we ended up with rather than an angry fest of I didn't get nothing I loved. [LAUGHTER] I hope you have fun doing some of these projects. I hope you take some of this philosophy of create with abandon and don't worry about the outcome because we can always re-imagine it into something else. I hope you take that mindset going forward. I want you to really start to enjoy hanging out your art table and experimenting not worrying about different colors and things because you can pull from a source to have colors and just say, okay, what can I create today with this color palette? I'm going to cut these up later so I'm not too worried about it. What can I make? I hope you have fun with that mindset because you're going to end up with some amazing pieces of art because you let yourself relax. You didn't think too hard about it. You went with the flow and loosened up. That's the best way because then you surprise yourself with some of the things that you end up with and you're like this is so cool. I hope you experience some of those moments. Take that mindset with you going forward. I can't wait to see what you create in class, so come back and share some of those in the projects and I'll see you next time.