Paint Three Joyful Abstracts!

1. Intro to Joyful Abstracts: [MUSIC] Hi. I'm Suzanne Allard and I started Suzanne Allard Design about three years ago, started painting about a year before that, finally got through my fear and fear is just something you live within the creative process but I'm really excited to bring you this blooming joy, abstracts class. We are going to have so much fun because abstracts allow you a lot of freedom for self-expression. But they're also pretty intimidating because you don't have a reference, you're not creating, okay so I just basically have to try to copy this flower or copy this landscape or sketch it. There's nothing to start with. You're sitting there with a blank paper and [LAUGHTER] other than shape and color, you're going, what do I do? Then when you see abstract paintings they look fantastic because they're good, and then you sit down and try to make one of them. It is harder than it looks, isn't it? This is a formula, I will share with you how we create this side of abstract. This is my margarita punched painting but we're going to create in this class three beautiful and different paintings. This one is called Caribbean sunshine, you'll see the metallic gold. It's so fun. This is one that we're going to practice a limited color palette with, and these can orient any way. But this one is a limited color palette so we're going to challenge ourselves with not using every color under the sun, only the colors we can make with just a few colors, which as you can see is plenty of color. Then a painting I called never give up because this little guy, [LAUGHTER] has been through so many iterations that I'll show you, and who knows? I think it's done, but I always reserve the right to change a painting. Anyway, we're going to have such fun with this process, it's a great opportunity for self-expression, it's colorful. It's about shape, pattern and I have lots of inspiration. My other paintings in this style that we've done to just encourage you and get you excited and give you plenty of reference. You're not just starting with a blank page and have no idea what to create. If you like other more subdued color palette, you can do that. You can do one of these, in fact, that's on my list to do one of these and just a bunch of different neutrals. You can create whatever style in this that you like and I guarantee you, you'll have fun. If you've never painted before, you're going to learn a lot. I've set it up with a good supply video and then another video on what do supplies do so that beginners can learn about the various media that I use as well. I hope you join me, we're going to have so much fun in this class. I can't wait. 2. All About Supplies: Okay. Let's have a chat about supplies. Here's the thing about supplies. People always say, well, what supplies do I need? It really comes down to what you want and what can you afford and what you already have, so it's a hard question to answer. I'll show you what I use. But just to understand, I have acquired this over years. I didn't start out with all this. I do try to make my classes as accessible as possible. This whole series of abstracts can be done with acrylic. I will be using acrylic and Agra gouache interchangeably and maybe a little bit of matte acrylic, which I've just discovered two different brands up. I like to do some supply reviews along with the class or at least introduce you to things. Just to understand that this is not saying you need to go buy all this. This is just saying here are some options, here's how they work, and then you can pick out what you like. Toward that end, I thought I'd do a video here on the supplies, what they are, and then another video on how to use them just to cover all the basics. Let's talk about paper first. You can use any paper that is a good size pound. Here we have £140 watercolor paper. It is an artist's grave. It's called the better, it's not their best, which is perfectly fine. It's nice and thick, it has good tooth what they call the texture, and works really well. You could also use Bristol vellum surface. That's the one, Bristol comes in a smooth surface and a vellum surface. The smooth is just too sleek for this work, it doesn't have any texture at all. Let's see what pound is this. I don't see it on here, but I think it's £100. That's interesting that it doesn't show it. I think it's a little bit thinner than the watercolor paper. I remember this being about a £100. Then for the heaviest paper, you could use a mixed media, and this is £184. I'll put more like a heavy card stock. I use all of these interchangeably and still this is dellum surface again, has a little bit of texture. It doesn't need to be Strathmore brand. I just grabbed these three. You can sense a good brand and it's often on sale if you're in the US at Michaels. There are other brands you do not need a top-of-the-line paper for these abstracts. Don't go spending a lot on paper. Get a good paper, but you don't need to get say, Arches watercolor paper or anything like that. Now let's look at some of these other supplies for paint. Let's talk about paint. You have acrylics and they can be this quality, the liquid text-based like it's fine. If you wanted to get maybe the next step up, you could get some Nova color paints which are available on their website. They don't sell in stores there in California and it is good paint and it's a good price. I don't have an affiliation with them or really any paint maker. But I find that it's good. You would only need a few colors because we'll look in color mixing. You can make most of your colors. Don't want to buy too many. Let me pull out some other acrylic options. This is probably a little more expensive, the Liquitex soft body. The most expensive would be the Golden and the Liquitex which I don't really use for this process unless at the very top there is a color that is really wonderful and I want to grab some of it. I use these more for florals. Those are the acrylics. There are many others, but my point is you can use a mid-grade acrylic. Then I use from time to time. One of the things I really love about gouache and why it's my favorite medium is that it has this nice thick matte texture and I'll show you that when we paint some of it. That's just my particular preference. I like that chalky matte texture. But gouache can be a little pricey, especially if you're doing bigger pieces. A little tube of gouache, a little goes a long way, especially if you do most of the work in acrylic and then come along on top with gouache and you can get a lot out of these little tubes. But I started looking around to see if there were some matte acrylics. I'd even experimented with having a matte medium to an acrylic to get it to be chalky and matt. The problem with that is it also made it more translucent. I feel like I didn't gain because I like the opacity. But I did find these Jo Sonja map flow acrylics there. The color, the pigment in them is not great. But some of the colors are pretty good. See the dot here, the solid dot that means it's more opaque than one that has a half-circle. That's part of the opacity there for the price. They're pretty good for getting a matte consistency. They're just not the top of the line for a matt acrylic that I've found and these are pricey. But if you wanted to just pick up a couple of colors, I might get the T0 or whatever your favorite colors are. But this is relatively new. The golden so flat matte acrylics. I'll show you what those look like. We've talked about paint. Now let's talk about matt making tools. There are all kinds of pencils that you can choose from. You can get stabilo. These are dry pastels. You can see it on my finger even. Some of my other favorites are these super color too soft, this by a Caran d'Ashe. I'll have these brands on the supply list. This is a water-soluble. I have just a variety of other Prismacolor. I do use the neon Prismacolor quite a bit. I've got two of those. Just a regular Prismacolor. I found all of these at various art supply stores were online. When I go to an art supply store, I'm always saying what I haven't tried. The other thing that I use interchangeably are these woody three and once they're also buying to below. By the way, I have a supply link on my website, but if you have trouble finding some of these, there's links to most of these, but these are three in ones and they're water-soluble also. I like them because they'll go on top of just about everything. Speaking of things that'll go on top of just about everything, these are the oil pastels. I got this probably a year ago among artist's soft oil pastel. I'm finding these are really wonderful and intense pigment. The price was pretty reasonable compared to a Sennelier brand. You can see my favorite colors are getting worn down a little bit, but they look pretty good for how much I've used them. Let's see. When I prepare a piece of paper, this is just a little pasta sauce jar, but I have taken Gesso, I get it in a big tub like this. You do not need to get a big tub. You can get a little container, you can get a mid-grade quality. But I often prepare a paper with Gesso because I like texture and you don't need to. You could do it with just paint. Treat a color of a paint as your first layer. You don't need to put a Gesso before, but as I often do, and I've done it both ways here in the class so you can decide. Let's see, we've talked about paint. I've got to mention a couple of other little fun things. All kinds of pens, of course. Let's see, let's get some of these. Basically, I like to try, if it as an obvious by now, I like to try all different supplies but I end up going to my go-to's. But for pens, you can use anything from a jelly roll, which will make interesting marks. These are my new favorite gold marker. They are fine point and medium point, and this is the pilot gold marker, makes a really nice mark. I'll show you that. These are something I picked up just at a visit to a store. Sennelier Abstract 3D liner. It actually makes a raised 3D liner, I'll show you that. Then of course, Posca pens. Posca pens are paint pens. They come in different thicknesses, different sizes. Let's see if I can get a range here for you. From extra fine to fine point, and then there's a medium and large and I think there's one bigger than this that I don't have any of. But again, in terms of what to buy, if you'd like to use black, you could use a black sharpie that you may have around the house, or just a black pen, or even a dark pencil. As you go through the class, you'll probably see me use some things like, "Ooh, I really like the way that looks, I want one of those." That's how I ended up acquiring these things, just taking online classes and going to art stores and saying, "I wonder what that does?" That's why it's hard to tell you exactly what to buy, because it depends on obviously what you have and what you like. Occasionally I'll use ink. I think I used a little bit on one of these. I love my indigo ink. Indigo is one of my favorite go-to darks. When you need dark in a painting for contrast, so I do like the indigo ink. Occasionally I'll use metallic gold ink. This is almost gone. I hear a little bit. This is Liquitex, Iridescent Bright Gold, but any gold ink will do and it just gives you that really nice metallic filler if you like that. The last thing we need to talk about are brushes. I'll also talk to you about pallet paper. You can use all kinds of things for pallets. You can use a plastic disposable plate. Don't use paper because the paint soaks into it. This is pallet paper that I pick up at Michaels with a 40 percent off coupon, and it comes in a pad like this. There's gray, there's white. There's no random reason to the gray, I just picked it up because I already had white, I thought I'd try it. I just fold them in half and put them right next to where I'm working and they're great because you just toss them out or if they're particularly pretty, you can cut them out and use them as collage. Brushes, again, you can go really minimal brushes and just get a few that you can use in different ways or you can go crazy with brushes. I'm going to do my best here to give you a range. I don't use really nice brushes for this technique. You don't want really cheap brushes, but you're going to be rough on them sometimes if you're scrubbing at all or it's just, you don't need to use a super high-quality brush. These are hardest loft which is the lower end brand at Michaels. There's one of those here. I do have a Princeton Summit but I didn't take good care of it, so it's not looking good. But let me talk about shape. These that are like this are called brights. Not sure why. That's what they're called, little square head. I do think it's nice to have a bright, you should have at least one, and I'll show you how you can make different marks with them. In terms of size, this is a six. That's a good call around size unless you're going to work bigger. I might get a six or an eight. That's an eight, and here's the six. Then you'll need something for details, so a round brush. You could get an acrylic one like this. It has a nice point on it. Acrylic brushes compared to, let me show you, compared to watercolor brushes are much stiffer. This little bristles are thicker and stiffer than the watercolor, which is much more fine. I really try not to use my watercolor brushes with my acrylics. If I do, I just make sure I wash them out really well. That's what I have acrylic brushes that I use more for the acrylic. But when it comes to getting a really fine line, I need to get one, but I don't have a really small Sanacrylic brush, so I do end up using my watercolor one, which is like this. This is a Princeton Velvetouch and I can get a finer line with it, or you can use a rigor, which is a really long bristle brush. This one's by Winsor and Newton, and I do use this and then I just wash it really carefully. I did find, and I've been playing with this almost like a acrylic version of a rigor by Bristol, which is really nice quality brush. It doesn't break the bank, but it is a nice brush, and this is called a Script Liner. I've been getting some interesting things with this but doesn't really give me that thin, thin line so I do end up using maybe a one or a number two watercolor brush for those finer marks, something like this, even. Something small. Let's play with what to do with all the supplies. You don't need a palette knife. Sometimes you'll see me use it to take scoop paint out and put it on the palette knife but you can do that with a brush as well, or even a plastic spoon or actually a plastic knife would work better. Mark-making tools, oh my gosh, the sky is the limit. Here's something. This came in some packaging, and this is how I think. I can't remember what it came in, and I said, "Ooh, that can make a cool mark." I haven't used it yet, it's cardboard, but I'll be able to dab it in paint. Hopefully, I'll remember to try that and make little circles. A chopstick is great for scraping paint out. Of course, I use the back of my brush usually. Really is your imagination, at that point, what do you want? What do you have? What do you see that can make a mark? In one painting I did do a background with this, but it's not necessary. I thought it was cool and I tried it. It's called the Princeton Catalyst and it's rubber, like a rubber spatula but you could just use your kitchen spatula and wash it really well I guess or get a kitchen spatula at the Dollar Store and it spreads paint for backgrounds, kind of fun. Again, not necessary. I think that covers supplies and if there's anything else, I'll talk about it when we use it. 3. What the Supplies Can Do: Now that we know about the supplies a little bit, let's look at what they can actually do. I'm going to have a short version of this because it's like I could do an entire class on C suppliers and what they can do. But, well, at least explore them, and maybe it'll help you decide which of these that you want to buy. Let's get to it. Let's do pencils first, so I have three types of pencils. I mentioned the Prismacolor, that's just a regular colored pencil. It is not water-soluble, it doesn't do anything with the water. Water solubles, which are nice if you're going to draw a design, and then you just want to use it as an outline, and then you want to paint over it. These are good for that, the Supracolors. I'll just color a little in so that you can see what happens with the water, and then another pencil I have is a Stabilo Carbothello. I love the pigment, but it's really a dry pastel, so you can see that it even flakes off the paper there. If I rub it, I'll get it on my fingers, but I'll use this as an upper layer sometimes for the intense pigment. Let's see what each of these do with water. The regular colored pencil is not going to do anything because it's not water-soluble. You'll see that I just put water over it. This is a watercolor paper sketchbook. This is the Supracolor II Soft, and it is water-soluble, so you can see that it turns into a watercolor, and I've used these for traveling. You take just a few of these if you don't want to take paints, and so if you keep at it, you can get rid of the mark completely. That's what that does. Then the dry pastel, it doesn't really do much of the water. It'll spread a little bit, but not so much. Then the Woody's are called three in ones because they claim a colored pencil like that. They claim they are a wax crayon, more like this, except this is water-soluble. They claim it's a watercolor, and it really is all three, and it also has a really nice pigment. I'll show you some of this, and then I'll show you these are the Neocolor II crayons. Let's see what they do when you have water. Both have nice, intense pigment. They feel similarly, so you really don't need them both. If you wanted to choose one or the other, I probably go with the Neocolors just because there's more of a color range. But I do have to say the turquoise Woody is very creamy and yummy. Let me show you what happens with water. You can turn these Woodys into watercolor. Here's the orange, and here's what the Neocolors do, very similar. Maybe even more pigment, it's hard to say. But I generally use these clears and the crayons on top of paintings, and I don't mix them with water. Then the other thing I use on top of and sometimes below are the oil pastels. They're just really creamy and intense, probably the most intense color. Of course, they're not water-soluble, they're oil pastels. You [NOISE] would use them for texture on top layers. Sometimes I put them below my paint layers. We'll do it all different ways. [NOISE] Then the Posca pens, I just want to show you, you do have to prime shake. [NOISE] If you haven't used it in a while, this one's fresh, but you'll have to prime it like that, you pump it. You can get really nice crisp lines to go over the painting, outline, things like that. With the Poscas, let's show you this. This is that 3D liner, you do have to squeeze it fairly hard. You'll see me use this in some paintings but take some practice, but I'm not trying to be precise with it. Can you see that that's a 3D? It takes a while to dry. If I'm going to use this, I use it toward the end of that layer because I'm going to probably have to walk away when I [NOISE] use that. Then, of course, the gold pens, this is the pilot, this is the medium point, and then the extra fine point. I think I messed up the tip on one of these. By the way, quickly, I will tell you that I've just learned this. Poscas, they're not inexpensive, that if you mess up your tip, let us say you got him too much oil pastel, or it's just gotten a hold, you can pull it out. This was wonderful, and flip it over, and put it back in. I've done that with one of them; isn't that exciting? [NOISE] Very smart of Posca to do that. I had to throw some out before I knew that. Ink will look very intense. I often use it right from the dropper because it helps get some good shapes. I don't want even use a brush sometimes, unless I'm trying to do, say, leaves. Then I'll usually use a watercolor brush. But look how well this dropper is working. Same with the gold, of course, I use it on the dropper a lot because I just want marks. If I want a specific shape, I'll use a brush. This is on its last legs, and I have to order some of that. I've covered the pencils, let's go and play with some paint and [NOISE] brushes. [NOISE] Let me show you what regular acrylic is. Let's get a bright, remember that's that square shape. This Naphthol Crimson is a really pretty color, especially it doesn't look like much, it just looks like red. But when you mix it with white, I'll show you, it gets really pretty. Just a big thing of white from Nova Color. What I like about the bright, this one might beat up bright brush, so it's not going to make the best line, but you can get those nice square shapes. Then, if you lay it on its edge, you can get more of a line. This one, I guess, it is not. This is cutting off because I've been too rough on it, so it doesn't give me the best line, but I just want to show you that. Then a [NOISE] round brush like this, this is Size 4, allows you to do, let's say, some leaves more precisely. Then, if you want to, you can just work a little more. I think it's better with angles is, I guess what I would say, but they just create different marks. This was acrylic and it's drying pretty matte. I just like that the Nova Colors are not real plasticky-looking paint, but let me show you some of these other paints too, just so you can see. Here's the Jo Sonja Matte Flow Acrylic, and it dries pretty matte. I have a dirty brush. That's got a half circle for opacity, so it's not going to be as opaque as this turquoise. You can see the paper through it, and I'll show you that compare to the aqua gouache. We'll see if there's much of a difference. Paper towel, and let's try the aqua, more opaque one. You can see that you cannot see the paper through there. [NOISE] Most likely, the painting people have the most on hand is either acrylic or watercolor. Acrylic works just fine. I just thought I'd show you, so here's the aqua gouache, very creamy, and it will dry matte. You can see that it's more opaque than that. [NOISE] Then all kinds of acrylics, I think, you could do this class also with watercolor, it would just have a much more translucent look to it. It's really up to you to figure out what you like. Let me show you this super flat. They call it SoFlat Golden. I don't expect most of you guys are going to be as weirdly obsessed with opacity and matte paint as I am, but what I will say about this paint, even though it's pricey is, it is so pigmented. I would never use a color straight out like that, but let's say, I wanted a light blue. You'll see, it just takes a tiny bit of the blue that was on my brush, and you get these lovely colors, and just a lot of that intense pigment. I would say, if you'd like to experiment with color mixing, and you really like the intensity, you could get [NOISE] your three basic primary colors in this, and a blue, a yellow, and a red. Then you could do a lot of mixing, if you wanted. [NOISE] You will see me use a variety of these, again, just to show you how they work so that you can see what you like and don't like. We'll put marks like this on top of paint. As far as what goes on top of what, oil pastel goes great on top of everything. Let me get a color that shows up. You can put oil pastel on top of paint, just not wet paint like I just did. [LAUGHTER] You can do the Woodys on top of paint. You see how great that looks. You can do the Neocolors on top of paint. Let me get something that'll show. That's almost dry. You can even take the oil pastel that I've already done and put paint on top of that. If I wanted to change a color, it just adds texture. If I had that oil pastel there, and then I want to paint over it, that's not a problem, it'll add some texture to the background. The key thing is to spray it when you're done because you have all these different yummy things in there, and I will have a video at the end on how I spray my paintings. Let's get creating. 4. How to Approach Creating: [MUSIC] I want to share my creative philosophy with you because I just think it's so important when we're creating to have the right mindset. It is for whatever reason, lots of reasons, it's a scary process. I have had people say literally they felt they sat down to paint and their heart was pounding physically. I know that fear is what kept me from even trying for years. Rather than talk about why it's scaring, which is, I thought we talk about how to deal with that and how to manage it, and how to not keep it most importantly, from letting you create, because my whole passion is I visualize millions of people who are feeling like I was wanting to create, wanting to paint, but terrifying and how much beauty there could be in the world if they follow their creative cravings and begin creating. I think of creativity or a creative spirit is like a scared little kitten hiding under a porch. If you're trying to coax that kit now, you're not going to yell at it. You're not going to make a lot of noise. You're going to be very gentle. You might even just sit there a while, and you're going to coax. You can use that metaphor or whatever metaphor works for you. But the whole idea is that, we have to love ourselves into creating, especially at the very beginning, where the voice wants to say, what are you doing? This is terrible. You don't know what you're doing. You shouldn't even try. All those things that we hear inside. At the beginning that seems more pronounced. As you develop some skills and some intuition and confidence, it does get better. I don't think it goes away though, especially like I'll notice it comes up if I try a new skill, let's say I decided I wanted to learn portraits, faces; well, I would have some of those thoughts. Now, at this point, I know how to deal with them so they don't stop me. But boy, in the beginning they did. Just remember that this is about loving your creative spirit into creation and that jump seller is better. They'll be time later if you want to critique your art, if you want to look at it, if you want to ask people's opinion and you want to get what's wrong with this composition or; but that is way down the road. Right now it's about self-expression, nurturing yourself, seeing what's possible, seeing what you love. Really, it's about discovery, experimenting. What colors do you love? What patterns and lines and shapes make your heart go, put a pattern. What overall composition or what do you like to say in your artwork? That's later on question 2, but I was painting a few years and then then people said, wow, you're working so joyful. Well, I didn't really set out consciously to create joyful paintings, but clearly I do, and I love that. Now I know that what I'm saying with my heart. What I hope I'm saying is that there's joy, that there's hope, and that your self-expression does not need to be contained. If it's really exuberant, in my case, I have a lot of different types of styles because I get bored easily, well, that's me. I just want you to remember as you're learning to try to keep that harsh, judgy voice. You can even talk to it. I think Lisa talks about this. She's an artist and Oregon and this idea that you can even say, well, because people say that fear is trying to protect you from getting hurt. You can see even save your fear, or something like; thank you very much, I'm just going to paint here, I'm fine. As far as I know, painting hasn't killed anyone. Doesn't even really hurt. [LAUGHTER] It's crazy that we're afraid, but there it is we are. Just know fear is at some level in some aspects a constant. It's not about getting rid of the fear, it's more about learning to dance with it. Use it over there. I'm going to create now, combining the idea of how your relationship with the fear, not letting it stop you. It's that book, I think it's from 70s called, 'Feel the fear and do it anyway.' It is why in my email newsletter is called your creative adventure, brave, joyful, and a little scary. Probably shouldn't say a lot scary. Manage the fear on the one hand. Be gentle with your creative spirit, like the little kitten. The third thing I'd say is if you really want to improve, then you just have to put in the time. I can't tell you how many people will say to me, "Oh my gosh, you have so much talent." It always stops me in my tracks because I mean, I should have pulled out to show you what I started painting. They were blobs in four or five years ago and there was nothing you would consider talent, trust me. Whenever I see someone that seems talented, I know they've put in a ton of work, a ton of time, and they haven't given up. I would say that's more of the answer than having talent. Are there painters and composers, and athletes who have talent? Sure, absolutely. But they've still worked at it. There are plenty of people who have talent and haven't worked at it and haven't done much with it. All that to say, it's really about putting in the time. They say if you want to get good at tennis, you're going to hit 10,000 tennis balls, golf, violin, anything you point to, it is going to take a lot of practice.This is no different. I don't know why we would expect to sit down with some paints and some paper and produce something that we love the first time. It's a paradox though, because if you want to get better, so gentle with the creative spirit, managing the fear. Then you've got to be disciplined with the time. It's like, don't be disciplined with the creative spirit. Don't judge in your terrible and all that stuff. But do we discipline with the time if you want to improve? Now if you were doing this for your relaxation, which is a wonderful reason to do it, I don't mean to sound like you've got to take it to the next level. We got too much of them in their lives. You know what, up your game [inaudible]. No you can, if you enjoy doing what you're doing at the level where you are, you'll probably just to keep doing it every day and get better anyway because you love it. But the discipline piece comes into play when you're putting it into practice every day. Maybe you can't paint every day, but maybe you can for 15 minutes. Poking my sketchbook out. I can always usually even if it's at night in front of the TV with my husband watching, I'll get a few paints out and I'll do an exercise. You can only use three colors plus white. I'm going to do some shapes. I enjoy it. I'm learning something. It's almost like just logging. There's part of this is just literally logging the time, putting in the time. I hope that helps. Those are the messages that I give myself throughout this journey. I hope they help you because I know or I believe if you have a strong craving to create, then you have the capacity to create. You may not have the skill yet, but you have that capacity, the capability. Because I don't believe you'd have that strong craving if you didn't. Pay attention to the craving and put in the time, be gentle with your spirit and don't let the fear stop you. 5. Caribbean Sunshine 1 - Painting the Background: [MUSIC] I'm starting with a piece of the Bristol paper vellum surface and I'm going to apply just some darks. This one I thought it'd be fun to try with a dark start. I've got some umber acrylic here and then I picked up some black Gesso just because I want to see what it does and it is extremely black, so I'm not going to use much of it. You could use anything dark you have, you could use a dark blue. If you wanted to try to follow this particular idea of starting with a dark, it can add depth. We're going to end up covering up most of it but I know some artists start every painting with umber as the bottom layer. I don't do that. Sometimes I start with bright colors. You'll see what I thought for this one we'd see what we thought about it, because that's the whole idea, is to experiment and see what you like. Any old brush will do and not being fuzzy about how you get the paint on the paper. If you don't have a big brush, you don't need to buy one for something like this, you can use an old house paintbrush or one of those sponge brushes, cheapies and I'm just scrubbing it in hoping to create texture. I don't worry about evenly any even brushstrokes because it's what I want. See I'm [LAUGHTER] struggling, I don't want the brown paint all over my plastic, so I keep adjusting here and try not to paint my hands completely. Just scrubbing it into the paper. We could've gessoed the paper first or not. I've done it both ways and it's not necessary, but it can add some more texture. I'm just rubbing all of this humbrol and then getting a touch of the black Gesso. [MUSIC] I've got just some lighter acrylic colors. I'm just putting them across here and see what we think of that. You can use a brush, I got this little catalyst spreader. You can also use a kitchen rubber spatula, one that you don't use for food. Let's see how that works. I'm also going to add a little bit of half white. You could also throw in some Gesso for texture and now see what this does. [NOISE] Moving outwardly, maybe I'll do one center there. I'm going to have the darker spots, something like that. It should have a mark and then go out from those [NOISE] just trying really fast. Looking more geometric than I want so I'm going to now get my brush, and mix it up a little bit. I will leave some of that geometric stuff, it's cool. This adds a lot of texture too. Also has brush hairs [LAUGHTER] which I have to remove. I like the juxtaposition of the geometric with the brushes. A lot of paint on this. It's a good second layer. 6. Caribbean Sunshine 2 - Beginning Marks: This might look a little different because I recorded my next step, the whole thing, and it didn't record. I don't know what happened so I've painted another paper black, and umber, and on the same coverage, and so we're just going to move forward. Everything else is recorded fine, so I don't know what happened. What I'm doing here is like that the three focal points, and I'm just starting to take whatever you have, so I've got oil pastels, I got the neo colors, I could use some of these. If you have colored pencils, you could use that. You could use even regular crayons. The whole idea is just to start laying down some interests. I am going to think about these three areas and go out from them with my marks. I also am going to do my best to stay with the color palette. The other tip is I'm going to put the darker colors in the centers of the flower mostly so let's start with that. The dark here is really a plum, which is not the easiest color to come up with. But I obviously I don't have to stick to that, I can take a navy and plum and just mix, and easy. I just use my left hand because when we're trying not to be too fussy, was mark making it can help to use your non dominant hand. Then I will take a couple of the darks, maybe out, again, radiating out of these three areas. Then from there, I'm taking these colors and different materials and just either shapes, marks, lines are fine. Even they can look like a leaf like that, scribbles. Sometimes I do these little half circles, sometimes I just color in a section, let's grab some of this orange yellow. It's pretty. We've got pinks in here, so maybe I'll switch to a new color. I'm trying to make smaller marks and larger ones, and a lot of this will probably end up getting covered up. But it's a little show and it just helps you get into the flow of what you're doing here. It's almost like maybe it's some form of a sketch, a corollary color here, so pretty, and then we add some darker red. Just being loose. If you're being too fussy, you could use your non dominant hand. Then we have this pretty blue, it's a teal but also it's a [inaudible] what's this called light-blue that's never very helpful. This looks like a cerulean blue. Maybe a bit more turquoise, you can even use, here, there's sharpie, why not? Then we can do this, this is not a must have, but it's fun, the 3D liner. I'm going to squeeze some of that on here and make some squiggles. It'll probably get covered up probably mostly too, but it's got a 3D, so it adds texture, just fun. Let's see. I think it's a good place. You can obviously take it as far as you want, put the stage, but you'll see we start to add some paint in the next stage. Maybe I'll just add a little bit of this form or green and I just love the intensity of oil pastels. That's good to move on to the next stage. Let's see where we want to go with this. The 3D fluorescent pink has dried. I just made some ridges, I got the oil pastel here. At this point, you can use acrylic paint, you can use aqua gouache. You can even use regular gouache. It's just you're going to have to make sure you don't disturb the next layers too much. I frankly wouldn't waste too much gouache on these lower layers because you're going to be putting stuff on top and gouache is more expensive than say, acrylic. This is the Nova Color acrylic. You can buy on their website, but any acrylic will do, and you don't need a really great paint for this level, even though this is a good paint. It's reasonably priced. It's not available in stores, it's only on their website, nova color.com, I guess. I've got a few colors here just to build the mix. I got a dark, some blues, some yellows, and I should grab some reds. I really try to challenge myself to making my colors, like for example, I'll show you a green that I bought from them. I really don't greens anymore, because greens, you can make so beautifully. But I think I'm going to do a class sometime on just how to make colors from just a few paints. That allows you to spend your money on better paints and just buy fewer colors. What I'm thinking about now is just taking some shapes and strokes that are going out from these three, and just keeping it loose and really concentrating on color because I love color. I'm using white adjust. So this is Liquitex. It comes in a big tub, but I just put it in here. You can use white paint too, of course. Let's see, I've got my water here, I'm still thinking of this as the color palette. Since then I've painted something here that I'm going to go over. But this is the color palette we're thinking of. Let's see where we go. I think I'm going to start with this holiday green. I was saying I bought this green, and I don't even really like it. I shouldn't have bought it because you can mix greens so much better than I have hardly used any of this. Sometimes I add it to the green I've made. I might do that, but it's such a flat, boring green. Anyway. I'm going to make a green. I'm afraid that I left this up with the top on for too long and there's not much left in it. It is not feeling well. I'm going to get some. This is their turquoise, but I don't find it very turquoisy, so I usually add a bright yellow to it. Look, I've mock-up all of these because I don't do what I should probably, which is to get a palette knife and put my paint down on the palette. I want to knock this green back a little bit, meaning that it's too bright, and the best way to knock back the green is to have tiny bit of red. I don't use the color wheel a lot, but for this, it really is helpful because if you want to tone a color down, you use the color on the opposite of the color wheel. Green here would be red and that will take it down in the intensity. I will, like I said, do you see how that just brings it down? You have to be careful not to overdo it or you'll get brown. But it starts to take it down to the green I was looking for, more like this green there. Actually, this green is like that too, so we might add some of that. We'll see. I'm thinking of shapes that are like leaves maybe, but this is abstract, so they're really just outwardly expressions of color. Maybe that's what we should call them. In varying sizes, and where I want to like if I have some contrasting things underneath, I can scrape through the back of my brush. Make large marks, small marks. This will be a series of layers. I don't need to be too fussy at this stage. I could add white along the way or yellow and continue to change the color. I love mixing my colors as I go, which is probably why my jars are marked up. A little bit of yellow and warm it up. Just going around, thinking about what's reaching out, and obviously, these are going to run into each other. That's perfectly okay. I like to do a few stripy things too. We might come back to that green, but that's enough for now. What next? By the way, this is a really beat up brush. I don't use my good brushes for this painting. Look at it. My hairs are all coming up and that's perfectly fine for this. I'm going to go in that more turquoisy direction. Like I said, that turquoise isn't very turquoisy. What I usually add and by the way, I mix acrylic and aqua gouache over time. It doesn't matter, so that color will help make it a little more. This is a lemon yellow. Will help take it in a more turquoise direction. Lemon yellow, this is phthalo turquoise. That's pretty little too green. Now, here we go. Yeah like that. I don't know at this point what will end up being covered up, or what we'll be able to see. I'm just thinking about shape and color and direction with these outward strokes and marks. I'm also thinking about varying the shapes and marks. I can go around some other shapes like this. Just grabbing. They dry so fast I can hit it with a second coat. 7. Caribbean Sunshine 3 - Adding Paint Layers: I am going to change out my palette paper because I had flipped this over. But it's this palette pad and the other side basically it's absorbing the paint. Let me just get a new sheet. I really like this. This is gray. Gray or white is fine. I love these when I travel too. I just fold the sheets in half and put them in my sketchbook and I've got palette ready to go. Actually it works better for me with my setup here to fold them in half. Then sometimes the pallet paper is really pretty and I'll use it for a collage. Sometimes. [NOISE] Let's see this through. Let's make a pink. I like this naphthol crimson with some white mix. It's really pretty. It's sort because you wouldn't think looking at it. That's the naphthol crimson and this is cadmium red medium. I mean, to the eye they look almost identical, but you can tell I like the naphthol more because it's more of used up. [NOISE] I'm going to really wash my brush thorough because it's got green paint on it, and green and red make mud. [NOISE] It's helpful to have two water jars going. So I'll take some of this. I have several different pinks in the color palette here. I think what I'm going to go for right now is this lighter pink. A little more white and maybe even a little bit of my fluorescent pink. I'm going to have to get some more of those. Yeah, that's pretty. Maybe a little more white. I can do a little bit of suggestion of flower, but mostly I'm going to end up with some darks in there. [MUSIC] So I added some red to the pink and some warm yellow. We have a dark coral here and then we'll maybe lighten it up too. It's looking red, so I'm going to lighten it up and add a little more yellow. Oops, not that much yellow. Well, [LAUGHTER] you could either call it a happy accident or an unhappy accident, but I do get some interesting colors that way because I have marked this up, there was some green in there. It's not a precise way, that's for sure, but I end up getting some interesting colors. These are actually pretty close to that base color. There you go. If I wanted to be really precise, I would've put a little bit of the color on the palette. Now I want to really warm that up with some yellow, [NOISE] and some white. That's yummy. A darksome of that color. We are almost done with this layer. We'll let it dry. [MUSIC] Okay. I think we will let this dry. 8. Caribbean Sunshine 4 - More Paint Layers: [MUSIC] We're starting to get some good background stuff going. I think what I'm going to do next is some larger shapes with paint. Then we'll let that dry and do some marks with pens and pencil and stuff. Basically, I'm working on covering up most of the background and probably even most of what we see here. We shall see. I'm going to get some of this turquoise out. I was looking at the color palette and I want to get, so make this blue with this turquoise and then this marigold or sunflower yellow. Bring those two in. Probably bring in some more of this really vibrant rows. So fun to get paints out and play. People ask me a lot, do you mix gouache and acrylic, and gouache and acryl gouache? [LAUGHTER] The answer is yes. Because like right now, I'm mixing this as some of this golden. These are matte acrylics, but if it's the color, they have super intense pigment. I've been having fun with those. A tiny bit goes a long way. They're not inexpensive, but they might be once you factor in how much you get out of them. I'm just making a soft cerulean blue to take and to maybe make some larger types of shapes. [MUSIC] It's just a process of layers of color and shape and just continuing until it's feels done. I'm also thinking varying mark size, so do some small ones in this and maybe with a smaller brush. That is a bright shape I was using there. Bright just means basically a square shape, and then this is round. So taking the round because I can get a better point with this to do some smaller things with it. Let's make some marigold yellow. For that, I'm going to use a warm yellow and a little bit of red. I'll do the same thing start out with the bright to make the larger shapes. Just get a clean one with some yellow and the tiniest bit of red because of one way. See, that was even too much red. One of the things about acrylic that I don't like and you can fix it with multiple layers, but you can see it right here as the translucency of it and you just do another layer. But I really like opaque. If you look at the SoFlat that I was talking about, the Golden SoFlat, this stuff, which is a matte acrylic, which is basically like an acryl gouache, same as this. You get that matte, so you can see that blue's already dried, pretty opaque. I do have the SoFlat and this and if I use it, I'll get that opaque pop. But since I've already got this out, and most of you are going to have acrylic, we'll just go with this. You can get the same thing by a couple of things increase the opacity of acrylic. One is to add white with a gesso or a white. Then the other is just more coats. I have tried on matte medium, like this fluid matte medium. The problem is that you're adding a medium so it thins it and makes it matte, so I don't find that it really does what I'm looking for. You end up just doing multiple coats if you want that matte look but you may not care. Again, I'm thinking about some larger shapes to vary things because I have too much of the same thing going on. With a bright, you can get a thinner line by just using the edge of it like this, the corner of it really. These centers, I keep mostly dark, but I'll put a little bit of light in them sometimes. I think that's enough of the yellow. We're going to let it dry a little bit while we do some pink things and then maybe hit it with that second coat I was talking about. Hopefully, the paint will not dry in a couple minutes. Let's look at some things we can do here, the neil colors, oil pastels. Some of this is like a negative painting. Painting into the background with a oil pastel. This is a super light pigment that probably really mostly comes across as white. Some of those pretty greens. There's one green in particular that I really love. This one, light olive. They give me that nice opacity that I like into stripes. These crayons can go on top of paint if it's dry, of course. So I'm staying away from the yellow. Time to go back into the center with some of my navy. I just ordered, I've been looking for it since I love indigo or navy. I'm always on the hunt for navy or indigo pens. They're harder to come by than you would think. I saw that posca, I don't know if it's new because I've never seen it before, but they have now a navy blue in one of the sizes so I just ordered it. We'll see if it's truly navy or just sometimes they say that and it's just really a dark blue that's not very navy. I'm just going to keep messing around here and see where this goes. [MUSIC] I departed from our color palette. [LAUGHTER] There's no navy or indigo on this but I wanted more contrast, so we're allowed to do that. We'll see where it goes. 9. Caribbean Sunshine 5 - Mark Making Layer: [MUSIC] The good thing about acrylics as they do dry fast, so does gouache and Flashe as well. I've got my fluorescent pink Posca marker and the coral one. Both of those colors are in the color palette, so I thought I would bring those in and see where this goes. [MUSIC] That was the gold markers, this is my new favorite, a palette gold marker, I get it on Amazon. It comes [NOISE] in this size, which medium point and then extra fine point, and so far they've been pretty good at not drying up and clogging, which an issue with oil paint markers, and I've got a link to these on the suppliers tab on my website. Now I'm just going to do some finer lines with the fine tip one. [NOISE] You have to pump these, shake them, pump them. They can be fuzzy paint markers, but they're well-worth it. [NOISE] These are a little details that you may not even be able to see, but the details make it come alive. [NOISE] [MUSIC] I'm at that point where I feel like it needs some unification and a background color to come forward. This is a process. Sometimes I do this multiple times before I like it. Now, basically I'm going to make an ivory type color and go through some aspects of the background and see if it unifies it and brings it together in a way that I wanted to. [MUSIC] What I did is I made an ivory. You can buy an off white, but to get the ivory read I like it's usually a mixture of a tinny bit of blue, tinny bit of yellow, tinny bit of red, so all the primary colors and then white. I'm doing negative space painting. I'm going around keeping what I like, and going over what I don't like. There may be, like I said, multiple passes at this, but this will be my first one and we'll see where it goes. [MUSIC] Let's talk about a couple of things. We're going to let this dry, but you saw me come through and do the white space. Now why ivory? That's just personal preference. I've done one in fact, one of our inspiration ones, Margarita Punch, I did white. It was just different look. Now, you see me go through and now coming back and doing a second coat to get that opacity I like. Then when this dries, we'll come back in and maybe add more color, maybe add more details, step away from it and see what we think of it, after giving it some space, giving ourselves a break from it. Sometimes at this stage and I still feel like painting, I'll just grab another one and work it forward and do multiple paintings at once, especially in this style. I can grab [NOISE] several of these going at different stages. I can grab one, and see what it needs until I'm tired. This one in my sketchbook it's gotten really vibrant, and I think I'll be toning it down just a little bit. For now though, once I've finished playing with this off-white, I will let this dry. [MUSIC] 10. Caribbean Sunshine 6 - Layering with Paint: [MUSIC] I'd let this sit for a few days. What I do, is then I come back and look at it, and I can look at some others for inspiration, and I'll include these two paintings. I'm sitting here looking at these two drawings. These two are finished. They feel finished. I worked until I felt I finished. This doesn't feel finished. Now that's personal preference. You might look at this and say, yeah it's done. I like it, and then you stop. But for me, when I'm looking at these compared to this, it just doesn't feel finished. I say, "Well, what am I missing?" I did something a little different in this one, and I went through and did the white as a background, which I like it. But now, I want to come through and bring the colors back up and push that background back in places, so I think that's one issue, and I'll do that with paint, just taking the colors and going over some of the areas with the same colors. I'll do that. The other thing then, we'll see what we think of it. But you can see that there are more little details on these: some dots, and the pencil marks, and oil pastel, and just some general juiciness that we haven't done that layer. Then same here, you got little pencil marks and scribbles and just a little bit more going on. I will start with the color first. I'm going to really work hard to stay in this color palette because I do like the color palette. Then you'll see me come through a color, and then I'll pause, and then we can look at mark making. [MUSIC] Let me pause there again to talk about a couple of things. One is that from me, color, and color discovery, and color play is so important to me that sometimes it's just discovering a color that makes me go, "Oh yes." I had mixed the Turner Acryl Gouache coral red with some of the orange and lights went off inside me because I loved what I was doing, so I wanted to share that point, but also what I've learned is sometimes when a painting is just like [NOISE] it's just not coming together or it's just lacking something, it ends up being that I needed to find a color to bring it to life. Just one color and bring it to life and bring it together. Now, I'm not saying that I'm done with this yet. But I think for me, it dramatically improved. I still see somethings that I want to do, but I'm starting to get excited about it when I wasn't particularly excited before. I took the mixture there, an orangey coral, and I used thinner brushes, thicker brushes, and I did cover up some edges of the white parts. Now I think I'm going to do the same thing with some of these greens, sort of this olivey-green and come through and do the same thing. Let's make it green. I think I've talked about this, but green is a great color to make yourself make, [LAUGHTER] rather than buying greens, you save money and you get much more interesting colors. I do have some greens of course, but [NOISE] I always try to make something. There are not many colors I use straight from the tube. I think this coral red and maybe the Winsor Newton turquoise gouache is one of the few. It's just that, I want the color to be mine, and I want the colors to be yours. Even if you just take a tiny dab of something, then you've just made that color yours. I grabbed too much of that orange. If a green is too bright when you mix your yellow and blue, you can take a dab of anything in the red orange family and tone it down. I may do that here. I will just keep adding a little blue. Yeah, that's a little too bright and it's also too light for what I want. I want an olivey-green. It's getting closer, yeah the touch of the coral. I don't waste much paint because even what's left here on the paper, well, there isn't much. But if there were more, I would open up a sketch book page and throw it on a blank background and start building texture for my next spread there. You can see I went a little too far, and its a pretty color, but it's a little more drab that I wanted. I grabbed a little too much coral probably because I was talking. [LAUGHTER] Can't chew gum and talk at the same time. I know I got to bring it back with more yellow or more blue or maybe even some white. If I want to brighten it back up, so I've got a warm yellow here, but I could get a lemon or a brighter yellow. I'm just going deep here in the green color land, but that would bring up the brightness. Let's try that. Now I'm just going to go through like I did with the coral and see where I feel like this color should go over this range of colors. I'll probably change the yellows throughout or the green throughout. [MUSIC] 11. Caribbean Sunshine 7 - Finishing Touches: [MUSIC] Definitely liking this more, is just so wow. [LAUGHTER] But I see a few little things I want to do. I think I want to go back in with the ivory, but I'm going to use the Poscas and just do little bit of details, I'm not sure, but maybe go around some things. I definitely achieve my objective of bringing the color forward, but make maybe a little too much. There's definitely no rest for the eye in this. I do have paintings where I feel there's not much rest. [NOISE] I don't know, I'm going to do that. I love these little pops of the hot pink, so I think I'm going to go back into those. Maybe hit the blue and turquoise a little bit and maybe even some more gold. Let's see what we can do. Start with the ivory, [NOISE] the Posca pens which always have to be shaken, and then primed like this until they're moving. I just feel I want some of these ivory bits to be a little cleaner. Again, it's personal preference. [MUSIC] We're getting on that homestretch where I'm liking it more and more. Let's do a few more things. Just want to come through with the hot pink and accent those areas that I had done that have gotten lost. Because there's just not enough going on in this, [LAUGHTER] just kidding. It's got plenty going on. Then for the first time, I just opened this and primed it. I'm obsessed with navy for my dark. I don't know if it's new, but that was new to me, this navy Posca marker. Probably just looks like black to you [LAUGHTER] through the camera, but I don't know, we all have our little things we like, and I just like the way navy looks. I think it's called the color navy, sometimes people call it indigo. I'm just going to play with this a little bit. Right about now you might be saying stop, Suzanne, it's done. The fun thing about painting is you can always undo what you've done in a painting like this and just decide that [NOISE] you want to even like something you tried and paint over it. Right now I'm thinking about the height of these little line things going on here, here, and a little bit there. But they're not as noticeable with the gold, so I'm going to do this. Really have three of those. I have an indigo pencil, but you can use regular pencil and just decide that you want some leafy marks. That's not showing up very well. You can use a darker pencil. It just allows to varying the lines and it'll scrape through, which is interesting. I just like these to have a lot of interest so that you feel like you're in a candy store and you have to look around at all of the fun parts and get lost in it. Let's see. I'm going gently here because it is scraping through, which is fine, but I want that navy mark. Then also, this is probably, we'll just see what a little bit does. This is a fluorescent Prismacolor. This was the indigo blue Prismacolor pencil. This is orange neon, it's probably not going to do much. It scrapes through. That's fun. Let's see. I don't want to do anything with this. I don't think I want to do much. It's got so much going on that I don't want to add too much of this. Another tool I use sometimes is the jelly roll. I guess color is not written on it, but it's some fluorescent pinky-orange. You have to coax these jelly rolls sometimes to go on top of the paint, but they will. They're like those little touches. [NOISE] If I can only get one jelly roll, it would be this color. Let's see if I want to do just a little tabs of some turquoise where the turquoise already is. Say, this is going to get too crazy if I start introducing a completely new places. Where else? Sometimes I'll take it and hold it away from me, and take a color like this turquoise and have my eye follow around. Turquoise here, here, and a little bit there, and maybe do something like that. But I think we both know that this is pretty much done, although I always reserve the right to look at it tomorrow. At this point, I'm just adding texture by going over the same color with the oil pastel. But it just adds some dimension that I like and I don't do it in all the places. I think at this point I need to sign it. It's always tricky with these, what to sign with and where to sign, especially because my gold pen which I would like to sign with was misbehaving. I'm going to have to open a new one, I have a whole bunch of these. Let's see if it's acting any better today. I have a feeling this one's headed for the list basket. Let's see here. I can always sign it in pencil, and I like to assign either just my initials. On this one, I might do that with a thicker gold one or my whole name and I'll sign it along one of these so that it's incorporated into it. But I think on this one, it's the thicker one since it'll just be a gold mark anyway, and do my initial of course. The thing is this painting could be oriented any which way, but it feels to me like it's this way. What I like is this ended up in an abstract way looking like almost a vase here and how they're just moving out. I think I'll just sign over here. I think we're done. Like I said, I reserve the right to look at it again tomorrow, maybe do a couple of other little things, but I don't think I'll be doing much if I do anything at all. Maybe coming through with a thinner gold pen when I get it working. Anyway, I hope you loved this and I hope you make lots and lots of them and fill your house with color. 12. Limited Palette Abstract 1 - Beginning: For this one, let's try the mixed media paper. This is £184. Watercolor paper, as I've said, mixed media paper, Bristol paper. You just want a good heavy paper that can take water and whatever we throw at it. This is heavier than £140 watercolor paper. But watercolor paper has more of that texture. Totally personal preference. With this one, I thought we would do a limited color palette, meaning that I'm just going to choose four colors and white and then whatever colors we can make from these. This is a great exercise because it forces you to discover new colors. In fact, see, I've got some paintings that I just finished with this exact thing. I loved the colors I created and it brought out colors that I never think of. These are the two paintings and what I like is some of these rust colors that came about. You can get so many colors just from mixing these four plus white. You don't have to use these four, obviously. I'm using a yellow green, an aqua, and an orange and then a Payne's gray. You do need though, something that's dark, so a dark of any kind. You can use a Payne's gray, you could use a little black. I tend to not use much black. I just would rather use a navy or a plum or a dark purple or even a dark blue will work. Then I just grabbed these and liked the results, so you can pick any four colors you want as long as one of them is dark, and then of course you have some white. Now, let me just say something about this paint. I like to show you guys different supplies when I do classes. I'm not saying you need to go get this paint. I'm actually been experimenting with it myself because it is a matte acrylic, so you got paint all over my hands. You know it's a good day when you've got paint on your hands. Matte acrylic, meaning that it's not pure acrylic like this. When it dries, it's got that shiny plasticy look. I don't like that look, which is why I usually use aqua gouache. But you can use acrylic. You could use this, you could use aqua gouache. You could try regular gouache. The only thing is that since it is water-soluble, even after it's dry, you'll have to be careful not to disturb the under layers. For this, it's probably easier to use something with some acrylic in it. Regular acrylic paint or an aqua gouache. What I'm going to do is the same thing I did in the paintings I just showed you is start the background with just the turquoise. I'm going to throw in some white so that there's some parts that are lighter and darker and that's it for the background. That's all we're going to do for this first stage. I'll mix it right on the paper. You'll see how easy this is. Just going to mix in some of the turquoise and all I'm going for is that I've got lighter and darker areas on the page. I Intentionally what texture so I'm not going to try to be smooth in my painting. Once again, if you don't have a big brush you could use a house painting brush, if you have one around, or you could use a paper towel, palette knife. Sponge, getting this covered. Some people wear gloves when they paint and I probably should, but I don't like how it feels. I've got some dark areas, some light areas pretty well covered and we're going to let that dry. Easy-peasy. While that dries, I wanted to talk to you and show you a little bit about color mixing because it is really fascinating. We talked about these three colors. You're probably going to choose, well, I guess four colors, but you're going to choose your four colors plus white. We'll do this on the painting, but I want to show you how amazing it is to just what a great exercise in your sketch book or on a piece of paper to do this, to say, okay, I'm artistic, three or four colors. Make sure there's a dark in there. You'll find colors that you like better than others. Sometimes you can look at the color wheel and pick things that are opposite on the color wheel if you want. I don't pay too much attention to the color wheel, I refer to it sometimes. It's helpful for making sure that colors pop if you're trying to think about that, if you're trying to think about things being on the opposite side. Like for example, well here we have orange and turquoise or almost across. You could say these are and then the lime green is on the same side. Then you could, if you wanted to do a dark, a dark plum is really pretty too and it'll get you some interesting colors. If you aren't sure what colors to pick, start with three or four you like, or grab a couple that are opposite, and then a third one, and then your dark, so maybe that helps you. Like I said, I know it's there, and I understand the concepts, some of it of the car wheel, but I don't use it a lot. Let me get my white out. Of course, we already know that you add white to all these and you're going to get different colors. Let me be good and get a palette knife and get my white out and not dip my brush into the white, which I love to do. Then my white is not so white anymore. Of course, if we add white to any color, we're going to get a whole range of colors. It also increases its opacity, which is fun. We can change the color that way with all of these, so we have, I've already had a tiny bit of orange in that turquoise, that already orange. I will tell you this about complimentary colors. If you want to reduce the intensity of a color, put a little bit of its opposite on the wheel color. We're dealing with the turquoise. Let's say we want to tone it down. Let's say we just think it's too bright. We're going to add tiny bit of orange to it, which already did with my brush. You'll see that it toned it down, it knocks it back and the opposite is true. I'll show you what the turquoise is with a clean brush. It's going to be brighter, see. That had a little bit of white and a little bit of the orange in my brush. Now that I've got some turquoise in my brush, I'm not going to take too much. I don't have that much or it'll really put a tiny bit of turquoise. If we thought the orange was too bright, we'll not get back. See how that made it a darker orange. Then is up here, of course, then you can add weight to that and you've got a different color. Just by adding a tiny bit of turquoise. It's really endless so let's take the lime green. Now, I've got already on my brush a little bit of orange, tiny bit of turquoise, and we get this mustardy color. I can add a little more turquoise and look at that green. I can add white, get a lovely color sage green, isn't that pretty? I'm not just by not cleaning my brush too much. Now, let's say I wanted to take that back into a brighter green and I grab some of my lime. These three greens are beautiful. See I just love color. A lot of what I do in my work is just creating colors in the painting. Then I added a little bit turquoise and got that. I think that would look pretty with some white in it, get a mint green. If you want to make notes about how you achieved the colors with your three or four, I haven't even started with a dark yet, then you could do this exercise and make little notes next to it. If this was the lime plus the little bit of turquoise and some tiny bit of orange. Let's grab some orange now and see what happens because we add that mint on our brush and we add grape orange and we get this really pretty neutral. Neutrals are important part of any painting because the bright colors can't all be the star of the show. Let's start with some of the dark now. Again, I've not cleaned my brush. That's a really pretty neutral as well. But if we wanted to take the lime and some of the Payne's gray, you get a quite a dark green. What if we wanted a dark turquoise? Take some turquoise, a little Payne's. It's really pretty. Of course, we can make a dark orange. Let's see. You could really go on forever. I think we should make at least one more page of them. Let's see. I want to keep this out though. Tear it off. Oh, it didn't tear pretty. That's okay. We'll forgive the paper. I can put this in the class downloads too, but I want to set that there as we can see we've got, it's a fun exercise to see how many colors can we make. I'll start with a clean brush just to start over. It always helps to dry your brush out with a paper towel or a rag so that you don't diluting the paint too much and getting it too watery. Maybe this time we'll start with the dark. Of course, we have the Payne's gray. We can just add some white with that. That's pretty, little bit of orange. I bet I can make brown by adding all three colors. No, it didn't. That's pretty. Getting into the pretty greens again, that's a lot like that one. You can start to say, do I want this to be more vibrant? Then I'm going to add my lime green. Do I want it to be more dull? Then I'm going to bring it back down with the orange. Can go in either direction. Turquoise, add some dark in that. That's a pretty color. I add some of the lime in my brush. Let's see how you end up making colors that are accidental in the painting. That's why I don't really spend any time before a painting picking out. I may pick out like I did here the three main colors. But as far as what they end up being, I don't really know. They're going to come out in the painting. I just wanted to show you the amazing range of colors you could get in just a few. When we add white to this, we almost get a pink to this orange. I don't really like to use the colors straight out of the tube. I usually don't because there's something else already on my brush. The only ones that I'll use sometimes like that are, I want like a bright bit of turquoise like this, so then I'll use a clean brush. I'll mark it up too much. Well, I think that's a good sampling of the colors that we can get from this. There's more. I know there's more because I discovered more in the painting. Hopefully, this helps you with the idea of color play. I think it's a great exercise to do. You may or may not use some of these colors in your painting, but you could make notes, you could circle the ones that you like, or you could just do this and then go into the painting and see what colors show up. Let's get on to the next stage. 13. Limited Palette Abstract 2 - First Layer of Marks: [MUSIC] There are a couple of composition rules; I don't really like the word rule, guidelines maybe, that I wanted to talk about that I do consider when I'm composing a painting or at least in the back of my head. One is the rule of threes. You can google it too, there's a lot of great examples. I'm going to write on our painting because this is all going to get covered up. You divide the paper in three sections horizontally and vertically, and so you end up with these focal points. The idea is to put the focal point along here, here, here, or here, so basically not in the center and maybe not over here. I end up doing something like this or this somewhere in here but I have seen floral paintings where the bouquet is right in the center and it looks fine, so I can take this with a grain of salt. But for this particular painting, I thought we would have our focal point be here. That means that this is going to be the center of the flower, and I'll just take some pencil because I picked up some supplies that are the color palette that we're using. Let's think about this and then it can radiate out from there. This just helps. I'm just using a pencil to give you a structure to start with. There we go, radiating like that. Now as we select marks, we could like before just start with our pencils and pens and I'm wearing gloves this time [LAUGHTER].It's getting really hard to clean off this stuff and I'm pretty messy, but we could start with oil pastels, and woodies, and crayons, and whatever; all the mark making tools we want to use and do those, but I also want to say you can also start with paint at this point. You can do the paint part and then come back in with the marks. It's really personal preference. I'm going to do a few marks with these and then we'll go with paint and see where it goes. Now the other thing is, since we have these lovely colors from when we did the color swatches now I can look at them and say, "If I'm staying in this color palette, I don't need to just pick these four colors which [inaudible] colors of paint," turquoise, lime, I'm using a pencil for the Payne's gray and then orange, but I realize of course we've got all these colors that we know we can make with these four plus white. That allows me to then look at my crayons and pick out things that I see is throughout here like this green, or this gray, and broaden that a little bit. Here's a Goldie color and here's another pale gray. That's all I really have of these. I have more color range with my oil pastels. I can see here that there's a peachy color, almost peachy tan. It does force you; look at this [inaudible] purple right there, to use colors that you don't normally gravitate to. Here is our gray blue, that might be like that. Let's see here. One of the advantages to working like this with just a limited number of colors and whatever you can mix from those colors is that it'll help your composition work because the colors will blend. It'll hang together in a way that can be sometimes a challenge if you use colors all over the mat. I'm just grabbing. There's a tan there, there's a mustard here I'd love to find. This is one of my favorite colors, this green gold. I guess this is a mustard. That's a good start. I can take all of these colors, and I'm still staying within that limited color palette. It's going to be really hard not to put in some hot fluorescent pink in here, isn't it? [LAUGHTER] Well, maybe not for you but for me it will be. Again, I could pick these up and work or I could start with paint, but since I've got these out I'm going to go ahead and just start making our marks and thinking about flowing out from that center. On this painting, I think I'll just work on larger shapes. Remember some of the other paintings they're the three focal areas and they get pushed into each other. We have a lot more room in this one, so we can go big. Go big or go home, they say. This is almost like sketching. I will probably paint over most of this. Maybe I'll even paint it in the colors that I'm using if I like them or maybe a different color will go over it. We shall see how this sunflowery color is yummy. I do talk about paint like it's food. I don't know what that's about. Just paintings and textures seem like they're delicious to me or yummy. Let's see, it doesn't make sense to put much turquoise at this point because our background is turquoise. Did I pull here? Is this a lighter gray? It's darker, so the dark we'll put in here. Remember I usually put some dark in the center, but other places too. This is pretty cream and it's such a pretty color. I didn't look at the Woodies. Let's see, there's limited colors here but we can put in some orange. [NOISE] We'll keep out the orange, and the turquoise, and the lime green. With Woodies you can mix too. I don't know if you see that. I mean really with all these, I could take this Woodie on top of the oil pastel. [NOISE] Now, we will leave this out but transition to paint, and we'll go back and forth with both. 14. Limited Palette Abstract 3 - First Layer with Paint - : I realized the other thing we're doing differently in this one is this is vertical. We're painting it vertically, although you'll see when it's done, it'll probably be able to be any which way. Let's get some paint out. My table gets so crowded with all the yumminess, but I did clean it up once in awhile. Now, brush wise, you can use something like this. This is not a technique where you want to use good brushes. I might use it later for a liner Princeton, something like that but I'm not going to scrub with a good brush. I'll use either the Artist's Loft, just a brand that is not a better brand. You don't really need that. In fact, here's one. Look how fray that is, just fine for this. I see this before I started doing, if this was a decent brush, but everyone did. Now I don't use my decent brushes like this is a nice brush. Silver, and you can see I've taken good care of it. I did get some brush cleaner which helps. Let's play with our colors. Get some out of each one and some white. Since we already practiced the color mixing, we know what colors we're going to get. The mystery of those are what I love about a process like this. You don't really know. You get it on the paper because we have a turquoise background, which is going to change the colors compared to the white background on our color swatches. Probably didn't need that much of a gray put some white. This is ANOVA color white. Just a nice quality acrylic. Nice price point. These are those paints that are available only on their website. They don't sell them in stores. But they're pretty good. For this kind of painting, you don't need high-quality paints either. You don't want cheap paints because the pigment won't be there. You do want some good, I would say at least a middle-grade paint. All right, let's just dig in here. It feel like starting with something already. I don't think I made this color look at that already I have made a color that we didn't make in this watch and they're funny. Endless possibilities that's what I love about it. We start making shapes, marks that are moving away. With a bright, which is what this shape is called. You can hold it square. Then you can also hold it on its edge and get a line like so. This is the one that's albedo doesn't give you a real thin line. But if you had one that was in better shape, you could definitely see if I can be more careful, here, I can get a little bit of a line there. That's a pretty pink. I just grabbed a little bit of the orange. I like that color. Sometimes it's just fun to make these squarish marks like this with a bright-shaped brush. Let's see grab some of this line. Maybe we can go, please get some dark so I just added some paint gray to what was on my brush. I have not washed my brush yet. It's getting some neutrals that I wouldn't normally pick up. From this one I'm not going to cover up the background so much because I like the turquoise. Just adding some turquoise to what's on my brush. Maybe now I'll change shapes of brushes. I might go back and forth, but I'm going to take around. This was a bright number 6, this is around number 2. I can get more of a line and I can do things like this. Lighten this up a little contrast. Keep adding more white. You get just a nice pathway. The only trouble with these rounds sometimes is they don't necessarily turn corners real well, which can be a look on its own. I like this color. This is a pale minty color. I'm trying to, like I said, make larger shapes in this one. If I want some finer lines or smaller marks, I can get a smaller brush, which I probably will here shortly just to get some variety, you can also do that with pen, of course. These centers, I just play in the center, and maybe, they loosely resemble a flower center, but I try not to get too hung up on that. I'm noticing that I've got a lot of pastels going here, and that's because I have not darkened much. I'm going to try and make that brighter, darker orange. I will clean my brush to get that white out. Actually, I'm going to use some of the orange and darken it up a little bit. This particular brush, I'm liking for a straight line. I'm not liking it when I'm trying to turn the corner, I think it's too rough. Came out as almost a dark red, didn't it? Trying to make a really thin line, I think I'm going to have to use another brush for that, just doesn't want to cooperate. This is where I can bring in, this is a liner brush. This one's by Winsor & Newton, but you can get, there's different ones. This is also called a rigger for some reason. But I've got a liner one by Princeton & Newton, it's just that it's a short handle and so it always hides in my brush jar. This is good for thinner lines as long as you wet the paint quite a bit. Because the bristles are so long, they hold quite a bit of paint so you can make a longer mark with them. You can do the same thing though with just a small round brush like this, and a light touch. I like those marks, I'm going to put some of them somewhere else. I can have a square front tomb, because of the way I'm holding the brush. A great activity is to just take a piece of paper and play with brush strokes and things; holding the brush differently, holding it in your other hand. A lot of artists, instead of holding it like a pencil, which makes you more precise, will hold it like this, if you want to just not be too fussy. Just by changing how you hold the brush, you will get some slight variations and maybe a bit more freedom. What happens when we mix turquoise and pink? We just get a pretty color, probably won't show up much here. It's a pretty blue isn't it? I'm going to add a little Payne's gray to it. You do need more water when you use this brush. I like these, let's see, shapes that go around other shapes. Let's see if we can do it here. I like to take the stroke around, almost like lattice, and it ends up looking pretty cool sometimes. Stripes are good too. This may look cool here. I think it's time to let some things dry. 15. Limited Palette Abstract 4 - Next Layer of Paint: [MUSIC] Let's go to the next step on our limited color palette painting. This is where we are. I let it sit for a while and then I looked at it and I'm going to keep adding things. But I definitely don't want to cover up all of the turquoise, I want some of that popping through. I've got some different materials here. I've got the things that we set aside, we're passed those, the crayons, and then I have these three tubes that we started with with the Payne's gray, but I thought, let me get out some of those same colors and the aqua gouache and just see if I get a little bit different shades of the same color and then I also have these which are the same colors. Just to have them out, I might not use them, but just playing with the idea and then I've got the poster markers and the colors. It's close that we've chosen. Let's see. I'm just going to start by this part of the process is intuitive somewhat, I guess to a good extent, but I'm thinking about a variety of shapes, sizes. Here is a larger shape, here's a larger one, here's a larger one. Then some smaller marks that I'm going to put throughout. Just going back and forth with colors and seeing how I respond to the colors. I like that one that I just made, so I'm going to do more of it and so that's a process. Then I thought at some point we can do some metallic gold because, why not. I think I want to get maybe a bit smaller, bright shape brush. This is a four. You can see I have paint over it. This is the aqua gouache I already got it out. Let's use those three colors. I have a feeling its pigment is going to be more intense. We shall see. You can still use the acrylic. You can mix acrylic and aqua gouache of course. I haven't found anything like a mix that doesn't work. It just might change the properties of how it works. The other thing that I want to get out is some white and I really like this minty color, so I'll probably make something similar to that. Get some white out. You can also use white gesso as your white. I've done that many, many a time getting paper towel, but I've been really enjoying the creaminess of this novel color of white lately. So I'm playing with that. All right, let's see here. We also need more contrast, so we're going to have to come in with some darks at some point. Where do I want to start? Maybe with some orange and I'm going to knock it back just a little bit. I don't really like using colors straight out of the tube, so I just add a little something to it. It makes my color nice and bright. I needed some contrasts so this is a bright that is fitting that bill. I'm just adding some white and green to it, that just gives maybe a little bit different that's a really pretty peach salmon. See, this is why I love this process, because you never know what color you're going to come up with till you get in here and start playing. I can use the bright because this one is not. I have taken care of those ones so I can use it to get a nice edge. That amazing all the colors you can get just from this view. I really like that light pink salmon that came out here and here. This is pretty close to it, but this is more yellow. You can see I'm being a little more deliberate now than I was in the beginning. Little more thoughtful about I'm looking for with the color I had as my eye flow so if I'm from following this peak, this color here that I just made, then I see it here and comes across here and maybe put some here. It doesn't mean that every color needs to be in every spot of a painting. That's just something I do to help me keep the painting flowing. I've got a coming that same color I can do another coat of it here. You get purple a little more. Let me go in with some darks. Let's grab some of this and see if we can make it darker if we like maybe this with some turquoise. Probably I should clean some of the peach out of my brush. Dark turquoise is pretty, like that. I need to get some lighter turquoise and use the one that we started with. We have to watch for hairs in the studio, especially if you have a cat, I don't think this is a cat hair, I think it's a bristle. You can always remove them with a palette knife or a toothpick as they get in your painting, that's so pretty. Not so many here, but I don't want to cover up all that turquoise. I'm being thoughtful there. This is a strong color, I do want to look at it in terms of composition flow. I see it here, here maybe bring it down here a little bit, some in here. Actually, I like the idea that it almost looks like a stone to these peach things so I'll go with that idea. I've got it there, centered in the middle, maybe a little more in there, and I could make some smaller marks of it out here. Just a little bit different texture and maybe out here. There are a lot of ways you can use these bright brushes. We're going to pause and let that dry. 16. Limited Palette Abstract 5 - Adding More Interest: Hello, back to creating. It's so great to be able to create. Speaking of creating, I just want to say a couple of things about your mindset when you sit down to create. I think of the creative spirit as this either scared child, timid child, or maybe like a kitten hiding under a porch or maybe like my rescue dog when I first got her scared of everything. With the creative spirit, you have to be gentle, I think. Because I have met people who've gone to art school, which I didn't do, they put so much pressure and felt so much pressure that they haven't painted since. Which I think is so sad so I just want to encourage you to approach everything, the creating is play and to recognize that when it comes to that creative spirit that you're nurturing in yourself, you just have to be really gentle and loving with it. Now on the other side, if you want to get better, you have to have discipline. You have to be firm with your discipline side. I will paint today, I will spend just like if somebody wants to be a writer and they write 30 minutes every day. This is painting. It's a commitment. Now if you're just doing it for fun and which is nothing wrong with that. I don't mean to discourage that, that's a great reason to paint. Maybe you want some more art in your house, who knows, but I'm just the distinction between being gentle with the spirit, gentle with yourself is in your creative process. I think is really important so that you keep going. I just felt like saying that this morning we are going to continue on our limited color palette painting and I thought I would pull out this one that's done and we can look at it for inspiration. Doesn't really matter I guess I had it oriented this way. Anyway you can see it has all the details in it, so we're going to look at both of these and see where we want to go next on this one. This one though we covered up, I covered most of the background and then came through and painted. This one I definitely want to keep some turquoise in the background but maybe not as much as there is there. I also notice that I have some larger shapes going on out here in the outer areas. Even inner in here, more circles and ovals and just a variety of shapes. Got some metallic golden there, which will definitely add. There's ink and oil pastel here. They all the same things that had been using here. I have not used ink yet on this but we will. In course this was not really a limited color palette, it was every color I felt like putting in it. This is a different challenge, but this is good inspiration for us. I will include that in class resources and you can print it out and have it next to you or just have it on one of your devices in front of you if you like. Now to get into the zone on this, get your coffee or your tea or whatever it is you like and thinking about, given my color, limited color palette, where am I going to go next with this. I'm thinking I want darker olive green, which we can make with mixing yellow green, probably a bit of orange will darken it, deep in it. Then we'll see if we want a little bit of turquoise on it. I'm going to get my few colors out or we can put some of the payne's gray in it. We shall see here. We had a bunch of rain here yesterday in Florida, which is not that common and it was really nice. It always makes me happy for the plants. I call rainy days, plant hydration days. But we don't know that much rain here, so I can't get tired of it. I've lived in places where I did get tired of it. I'm going to get a medium-size brush. This is a Size 6. I could also grab a four, maybe a four will be better and I'm going to work on making this olive green. Too much orange. I'm going to get some white on my palette paper. You can see how little paint it actually takes when you're creating small like this on paper. It does not go through the paint much. Let's see if I can add a little turquoise to this. I'm getting a nice green there. I think I want it to be a tad darker. When you are mixing it's so easy to this is where you do go through the paint. Like I just grabbed too much of that payne's gray and so then it's too dark and then I got to add more stuff and pretty soon you end up with a big old pile of a color but what's great for that is you can take it and use what you like and then take the rest and put it as a background in your sketchbook or background on another piece of paper, I have stacks of backgrounds that I have built. What's really nice about that is I can grab them anytime to do a painting. Now I'm going to think about putting in some more bold and larger shapes and maybe something where I want to large something. Remember, not to be too precious with this because you can always paint over. I'm going to then find a place to do some smaller bits of this color. Bring out more of that lime green. This is drying already, so I'm going to go through and do a second coat on some of it. I don't have to cover it completely because it just now looks better if you have, I don't know, not super precise at least for this style. I'm going to go back to my oranges and pinks. There is another brush. Let's see what happens if I add a tiny bit of turquoise to that. It knocks it back and makes a really pretty pink. You can make pink with orange and a bit of turquoise and white. This is why I love color. I really like that pink. With peach, which is pretty too, but until I added a touch of this turquoise to just cool it down. I just got an idea. It's not dry yet, but this pink would look fabulous on that green that we just did in little dots, so it'll have to dry. I want some little bits of that, so I'm going to get a little brush. This little tiny baby bright, it's a Size 1. If I do the dots there, I'm just thinking ahead, where else do I want small little pink shapes? Maybe over here. I'll try to make these things random, like they are in nature. I just saw my pencil here. I could do the dots with this as the same shade of pink, I can do some other details with it, or I could put them there. What I can do is grab a piece of scrap paper because I want a really small, see if this brush is going to do it. Yeah, that'll work. Using my brush I added a bit of water, I'm just going to make some little. Even though it's not quite dry, it's working. Pink and green, so pretty. I don't feel like I'm done with this pink yet. Usually, I'll use the pencil for that. Lines are interesting. Maybe some lines over here. I'm going a little lightly because I don't want it to scrape through. Sometimes I do want that. That's getting more interesting. I think it could benefit from some half white. Take a little brush, maybe just put in some top white details here and there. Let's try this. This is number 4 round. Make my athlete with a little bit of pink, a little bit of green, lots of white, just tiniest bit. I just got a pretty color. It's almost like a really soft stone. I think we're going to let that dry. 17. Limited Palette Abstract 6 - Finishing Touches: [MUSIC] We're on the home stretch with this one. I get to a point where I feel like I'm mostly down with paint, and I'm going to head now to the posca markers and some oil pastels and some pencils, and add those details. But I always reserve the right to go back to the paint. Let's get to this one. It's bothering me this mark I made here, so I'll fix that with oil pastels. But going again by this inspiration, these little splashes I made with a wetting a brush with paint and then hitting it against my hand. We can do that probably toward the end because once you do that, you don't want to mess with those dots, so you want to do that towards the end. Then you can see here that we have a little line marks that texture that comes from oil pastels. A little oil pastel, thanks there. Some more pencil here and here and posca marker here. Then we've got to sign it. This is the navy ink. But I feel like this dark teal that we did, is dark enough. I do love how this oil pastel textures peeking through to here and here. It's okay that this doesn't have a super dark, it does have a dark, there is contrast. Now I'm going to start playing with these other tools and see where they take us. [MUSIC] Let's pause and talk a little bit. Definitely getting there, I would say for me it's 90 percent, maybe 95 percent there. I went around with colored pencil, with a jelly roll, with some pastels and posca markers. One of the things I like to do is put the same color on top of the same color of a different medium. What I mean by that is this was pink paint, and then I took a pinkish pastel and did that on top of it, and just adds to meet depth and dimension. The same thing with the posca, I have peach color here. There's a little different peach colors, so same on same, I don't do that everywhere, you can see why I put colors that are different, but there's some peach on peach in this subtle, but I like it. I'm just going to continue with this thing until it feels like it's done to me. [MUSIC] I am there grabbing more paint because I didn't like that one, and then I've been playing with the gold markers. As I said before, they are finicky. This one, especially this 5.1, I ran it through too much oil pastel [LAUGHTER] so they'll tip out a little bit smashed. The thicker one does go better on just less fuzzy. If you want to go over oil pastel and that sort of thing, you want to use the thicker one. This is pretty much done. You're going to laugh at me because I want to do just a little bit more with some white something, some darks or something, I'm not sure yet, we'll get the posca's out and we will see. I just like how I did the white real pastel here and here, and so I want to paint just a little bit of white throughout it, because remember, I'm thinking about my eye moving around. I don't want my eye to get stuck anywhere, so I want right now my eyes just getting stuck on these. It's probably mental illness. [LAUGHTER] My mother, my daughter does this great imitation because she visited, she was in London and I don't know where she heard this, but she's like, "It's mental illness in it." I always just crack up whenever we're doing this weird stuff, we are like, that's what we say. Here I go. Finally I got a white, and my white pens and markers were all misbehaving. The jelly roll, my pentel, I think this is a pentel. Now my only valid signal which is normally, I think it's just I haven't used in awhile and they needed some major work. But I finally get this one going, just going to put in just a couple touches of white. At this point, I would put it aside, wait at least a day, and then the way I decide is something's done and of course that's personal. You might have thought this was done a long time ago. [LAUGHTER] But what I do is I put it aside, and then I come back to it with fresh eyes and feel like I am scanning for two things. First, what's bothering me? If I take my eye around this, is anything bothering me? Is there anything I don't like? Even that, there might be a couple of small things here that I feel that way about it. I'm not sure I like this here, but I'm probably sitting too close to it, because I'm here at the table with you, so I would stand back and then I'd fix anything that was bothering me, but then I'd also look for any spots that seem just unfinished or flat or just something that I don't like. It's definitely a good place to rest. I really like, it's funny. The littlest things, just those little white dots that I put there, I really like what that did, so that's making me say, do I want to put just a few white dots anywhere else? I think I do. Then we will stop and proclaim it done. But like I said, prior to process is resting, walking away, coming back, and seeing if you want to do anything else. Oh, I do need to sign it. I sign in paint or paint pen in one of the colors that I've used. This is a painting that could be oriented so many, really, any of the four ways. The signature I'll just incorporate into it, and that way, whoever wants, however the person who buys this wants to hang it, it'll work. I just put it within the design. Sometimes I spell my whole name out. For something like this it's already pretty busy, I'm just going to do that mark, the essay. I hope you enjoy the limited color palette , it's pretty amazing. The colors you can create with just a few colors. Thanks for joining me. 18. Never Give Up, Part 1: [MUSIC] You're going to learn a little bit later why I call this painting Never Give Up. [LAUGHTER] But I had already painted this background, and so we're going to start here. What this was was a painting I didn't like, I think. I'd save a lot of beginnings, I call them, and they're just like this, stuff, marks, looks like a little bit of gesso and I just grab it when I want to paint an abstract painting and I have my background done. I encourage you to do the same thing. This one, being very loose here and I've got my oil pastels and I'm going to be doing one focal point on this one in the center. I threw in some black to start with and then I'm going from paint to oil pastels, I've got acrylics. I don't have a particular plan color wise on this one, I just going to see what happens and working really intuitively here which by the way, if you're just starting out, that skill, that intuitive field develops with practice. I have literally stacks of practice sheets like this that I've played with. There you see me using that 3D liner again, radiating the marks in general out from the center. I'm not really following the rule of thirds here, I'm more just playing intuitively and shapes got some paint coming in here, I am using a combination of [inaudible] gouache and acrylic. The only difference really with them is that the [inaudible] gouache is matte and has more coverage. It's more opaque and with the acrylics, which I encourage you to use because they're cheaper on the background and under layers, the acrylics are more translucent in general. So you don't want that effect or you just might have to paint over them again. But when I want high opacity and sometimes I mix the two, there's nothing wrong with that too. Now, I'm just taking a lighter color for some contrast and putting it in and it looks like a scribbled mess, doesn't it? [LAUGHTER] That's what it is right now. But all that texture from underneath and those marks, they do add to interest and depth as the painting progresses. That's the reason for doing them, plus it may get rid of that blank page staring at you. At least now, I have something to work with more than a blank page. I've heard an artist, I wish I could remember who it was, say that making art is about creating problems and solving them, and I so relate to that because I've created the beginnings. Basically, you can look at this as a bunch of problems at this point because it's a mess and then you go through thinking about what you want to solve. Here, you can see me negative space painting, meaning, painting the background around those oil pastel marks for now. I often, when I make a color, because like I said I didn't have a color plan, you can tell by my palette, I do not have these colors pre-made, I make them as I go. Here's a pale yellow. Then I take it all around the painting and see where it feels like it should go and that inspires me in itself, the color. Right now, I'm loving this oil pastel in that magenta so it caused me to grab a neo-color crayon and a ruddy and it take some of those same colors. Now, coming back through with some paint doing a second code, I love this blue when I make it as a cerulean blue, but it's really just a touch of lavender and some white in your blues. Just keep playing with the color until you get what you like and then keep going back to this minty green. You do see that some more structure is emerging. Now I'm taking some yellow, I've got a small brush here, adding a few more, beginning to add some smaller marks, and going back and forth trying to remember to doing the large marks. The key to these pieces is, that there is a variety that you have. The little stuff, different shapes, just a lot of interest, and then you can always just keep adding, you'll see I do on this one. [LAUGHTER] That's a hint as to why it's called Never Give Up. I've made this green, I'm using some liquitex of acrylic there, basically, I just grab what I've got. For this kind of painting, you don't need a great quality of paints. Well, I should say this, the higher your quality of paint, the more intense the pigment is. I would not get cheap paint except for on the background. The background is fine because it doesn't matter how much coverage you have and so forth. If you have some old craft paints or anything like that, you could use those on the background. But when you're at this stage, if your paint is too cheap, you just won't get the pigment, it'll just look watery and it just does not give you that excitement that comes with colors. Here, I'm making one of my favorite darks, which is a plum. You can see my color mixing habits are very organic. It's on this painting very much, let's add some of this to that, and then now I'm in love with this color. I'm, this mauve color is lovely, let's see where we can put that. You can see I repeat that over and over. I do look at the painting and say, What is this need potentially? In terms of contrast, do we have enough light and dark? Do I have a balance of this size of the marks, the shape of the marks? Are there parts like right there where I'm just covering up something I don't like and putting something else there? I'm just going around paying attention to those questions, mixing colors, seeing how beautiful that lavender is. The great thing about this process is you just paint over if you don't like, and you'll see me do that plenty of times. Then I'm looking at this point, there'll be areas that are just getting too crowded, too congested, I guess is a better way of putting in and I can't tell in that particular area where I want it to go. What I'll do then is do this, mix a neutral, which is a pretty neutral, and then go in and just cover and clarify right in there, some areas. You can see I'm doing much smaller circles in the center just to create that focal point, and then all these shapes and marks are directing your eye to the middle. But then there's so much interest outside that your eye goes outs from there as well. Here I decided that I want to unify it a little bit and see how that works on taking another color back to the light mint and going around spots throughout to see if this brings it more together. Because it's a happy, disjointed mess at this point. Well, I guess it's not a mess, but it's disjointed and I bring things together often with color in terms of unifying it. I can go around and you'll see I do this several more time with this painting, changing the colors. I think it's a really great example of never giving up and just how you just keep playing with something and how it doesn't hurt anything, nobody gets hurt in this process. Here, I'm doing against some negative space painting with that new color. I'm taking it all the way around and now going back to that, and filling in some of those background areas but loosely, not super, not trying to cover everything. Just seeing if this brings it together a little bit more. It's really just a very creative process. It will teach you to let go, it really will. Highly recommend it for that. Time to let this dry. 19. Never Give Up, Part 2: [MUSIC] Let's continue this. You can see that I am coming back to it another time and thinking about I really fell in love with this blue and wanted to do a little bit more detail. Then same with a minty turquoise is what I call that. Looking for places to put it as a unifying color, just going back and forth. Here I've picked up a liner brush, so it really helps to make those thinner lines so when I'm doing these paintings I'm always thinking about varying the marks and this is called either a script liner or a rigger brush. This particular one is made by Princeton velvet touch. They have really long bristles so they hold the paint and then allow you to take a line quite a ways whereas you can get a small line from say, a Number 1 or two or zero brush. But if you want that long line, these longer bristles will hold more pain and allow you to do that. But you don't need those you can do it with just, you can even do it with the Number 4 round and just be very light on your pressure. Here I'm taking one of my favorite [LAUGHTER] little nibs left of a very pale turquoise oil pastel and then grabbing my Prismacolor colored pencil because I decided to put in some fluorescent and then also my fluorescent Posca marker. I discovered started using fluorescence about a year ago, and I just love what they do for a painting. Here is some pencil. This is STABILO/super color to by crown dash or Swiss made. But it's a water-soluble pencil. It doesn't need to be the water-soluble because you'll see here I'm not adding water to it and so any colored pencil will do for that how I just used it and then I used some more oil pastel and here's the pencil again just going back and forth thinking about covering areas I don't like. You'll see sometimes like that didn't really work that well that pencil there so I tried different things and here I am trying a third thing to see if I can get it to show up but I don't mind that because it adds to the interest. I just keep going trying something else until I get what I'm trying to do. This is back to the pencil, and when you try to put pencil or some of these materials on top of oil pastel or you'll see some things don't work and then find out what does work. Oil pastel on top of oil pastel works really well. Acrylic paint or gouache will go over oil pastel if you use enough of it and that's what I just did there. I'm getting more to get that. What I really want, that opacity and then just layers of Marx and interests. This is a little tiny brush that has the what's called the bright shape. It's basically square headed and then using the back of my brush to scrape through Marx. But you can use a variety of brushes or you can just get creative with the brush that you have in creating the textures that you want and the effects that you want. The colors in here I'm going over this again to make it pop more. Then I let that dry and came in with a micron pen, which it works okay on acrylic. You can see I've got my paper to keep it going but I've switched to the Sharpie then because the micron is just too fine for going on top of all the stuff that's on his painting [LAUGHTER]. I'm taking this navy Sharpie, which wholesale gotten mocked up at some point. Here's my navy or indigo ink, which really looks black here, but I can see the difference and I'm taking the script liner now or smaller, just a small round brush and doing some marks with the navy indigo just for some contrast and interest. This is personal preference. You could argue very easily that there's enough interest in this and stop. It's funny because when I look at where this painting ended up, I like it where it is right now more than where it ended up. I probably will, I don't know. We'll see what you think but I'm not sure I'm done with it. Even after calling it never give up, you'll see how many times I change it but I think right there is where I should have left it. Or somewhere in here you'll see I start. I get this idea of, and a lot of this is learning so here's where I got the idea. I said I'm just going to go in and do the indigo ink halls through the background and replace that other lighter color. Because I haven't done that, I haven't used a dark like that and one of these so I wanted to see what I thought of it. I go through the whole painting which completely changes it. Again, personal preference could come awake gland goo. That's really cool. I'm learning as I'm painting, and I know I can always go back over it so I don't really worry about it. For this painting, I don't think you can quote ruin it because even whatever I paint over it will just had to the texture. The fact that I have a picture of it before I did this, which by the way I recommend you don't have to do a time-lapse video like this [NOISE]. But you could do just pictures, add a layer take a picture. Because for a couple reasons, one is it shows the painting as it progresses and you may decide to take it [LAUGHTER] Here then I decided another day to go over all the indigo in a neutral Tanish ivory that I made. That's where I ended up, but anyway, back to the value of taking pictures. One is you have a record of where it was land so you can take it back to a certain stage if you like that. The other reason is that it really helps to take a picture of it and look at it on your phone from a distance, and you can also stand up and look away but there is something that helps me evaluate a painting by looking at it in the picture from a distance and evaluating it as a whole, so I often do that to see what I'm thinking of a painting. Yeah this was where this ended up and it's so funny because now that I look at it again I think, I don't know, maybe you're not quite done yet because I'm just not in love with that tan background. I may need to go over it with another coat or I just bring back the lighter minty color more. We'll see, but the point is to never give up. Just keep working a painting and you'll learn so much from that process. 20. Varnishing and Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] I hope you had as much fun taking this class as I had creating it. I want to show you a couple of things on protecting your paintings and if there's any buckling in the paper. Let's talk about the buckling first. None of mine buckled. But what I do is as soon as a painting is dry, I put it upside down on a flat, clean surface, and then I put books or other pads of paper on it and leave it overnight. That just keeps it from buckling if it wants to. If I have some buckling and sometimes it just depends on the media you use, the paper. Sometimes you will. In that case, what I do is I do the same thing, place it upside down on a clean surface. Then I take paper towel and you want to take as much paper towel as you would need to cover the entire surface. So I would probably use three on this one just to make sure. What you do is you wet the paper towel, but then you squeeze all the water out of it so it's just damp. Then you open it back up. Remember you got your painting upside down. You lay this damp paper towel on the opposite side of the painting, not the front, and you press on it. Then you put, I've got a cutting board that's really big, so I like to use that. But you put something that is at least as large as your painting and then you add weight to that. I typically will take my cutting board and then some books and you leave that overnight. You will see that it is flat in the morning. Now, you could varnish it before that or after that. I've done both. When it comes to varnish, there are a couple of things I like to use. Let's say, especially in my sketch books, but I'll use workable fixative, but I do use it anyway, especially when we have this oil pastel and different media on these paintings, I'll use the workable fixative by Krylon, which means that it protects it, it keeps that pastel stuff in place, but it allows you to continue to work it. If you're not sure you're done or even if you know, like I'm in here and they're stacked on each other, I could spray this and they're going to be fine. When I'm sure I'm done, usually when I've sold a painting and I'm shipping it, that's when I do the final coat varnish. Now, I do love this Liquitex matte varnish. By the way, all of these you spray outside. I don't spray them inside and I don't like to spray them in full sun. It depends. If it's not a really hot day, it's fine. But I'm in Florida and it's usually a hot day. The problem with the Liquitex that I find is the nozzle, it gets clogged a lot. They tell you, after you use it to spray upside down, kind of empty the nozzle. But I've even tried that. You can see right now there is no nozzle on here because what I've done is I borrow a nozzle from another can to use it up. I decided to start testing some new ones and I did find this on Amazon, Rust-oleum, matte finish. As long as you're using a product, I like a matte finish. I don't like a gloss or semi-gloss, but that's personal preference. But as long as you're looking at something that says it's for art, and then test it on something. Because the only things that I had go wrong with products like this is either it'll make a cloudy finish on your painting and that only happened when I think I sprayed on a day that was a little cooler than I should have because I'll tell you the temperature. I think it's 50 degrees Fahrenheit and above. There's a range in there. That happened. Then the other thing that I've heard, and I haven't had this happen, but it can have a like a yellowing look. You'd want to test it on something that's not important. But this, I've had good luck with, this Rust-oleum matte finish. Krylon also makes matte finish as well. You can try those. That's how to flatten and protect the paintings. I'm going to be doing more classes like this, because, in fact I've got one coming up, because these paintings are so much fun. Look out for my next abstract painting class and then also check out my other classes. I have abstract garden classes and I have floral classes, all with the same encouraging, nurturing style. Thank you for joining me and keep creating. Do not stop. That is 90 percent of it. Just don't stop. You will get better, I promise.