Painting a Playful Elephant With Mark Making and Watercolors

1. The Playful Elephant Trailer: Yeah. Hello. My name is Sarah Gardner and I'm a self-taught watercolor artists. I love bright colors and animals and texture and watercolor. More than anything, I really love experiments in my art. So that's why I'm here today. Welcome to my first class on Skillshare. Today we're going to be painting a playful elephant. And don't worry, this is a beginner's level class and I'm going to walk you through every step. We'll start off by looking at photographs, will identify the mid, the light and the dark tones. And then we're going to assign colors to those tones. Next is mark making. In my opinion, mark-making is the best part about this class because you can use any brush that you want, anything that has texture and speaks to you, or you can even use sponges. I love sponges and I will be using sponges throughout the whole class. So we're going to create forums and layers, do some fine details. And at the end, you are going to have a beautiful piece of elephant art to put up on your wall. So let's do it. Let's be brave. Let's be free. And let's remember why we love and why we started watercolor to be in width. 2. Supplies : All righty. Let's get going with our supplies. So first of all, make sure you have some paper towels. Those are perfect for drying your brush, say a dry brush technique as well as blotting for cleaning up messes. That happens, which I wouldn't happen to you, but it might for me. Next, make sure you have some containers for some water. I'm just using some old pasta jars. They worked great for me. Then. Pencil. Make sure when we do our sketching you have a pencil. I like to use mechanical pencil because I get really light lines and also keeps me from getting, making too many lines, which someone is. If I get like an artsy pencil, I like to make lots of lines and just start sketching away. Also puts out a color picture, black and white picture of your elephant. Or if maybe you don't want to print them out, you're going to save paper. Go ahead and just look at your screen when we go through the evaluating phase. As for the actual paper I'm gonna be using today, this is Canson watercolor paper. It's nine by 12 inch, a £140 cold press. Now you don't have to use paper that's this heavy. We won't be using any heavy water at work today because something lighter that should work to paint. Everybody loves paint paint, so that paid. So I'm using Dr. Ph. Martin's hydrous paints today. We've got the deep rose read. This cadmium red, yellow is the gamboge, phthalo green, yellow, blue, and some carbon which will help us darken up our shadows. Now, sides shadows, we have highlights and sometimes they disappear during a painting. We'll use some bleed proof white to put them back in if you have white acrylic that will work as well. So how are we mixing up our paints today? What are we going to put them on? You're going to put them on some pants. I'm using a plastic palette and a metal wash pan. But if you have a ceramic plate, you can always use that as well. For painting and creating texture. In our elephant painting, I'm going to be using some sponges, which I'm gonna be honest, I really loved sponges. This is time on my favorites. It's no packing sponge. And I think if you kinda kitchen sponge, it might be pretty similar. This is a sea sponge in this artist's sponge, which I've never used before, but I want to use it today, so I brought it along. Then brushes so you don't have to have any brushes. I think you can just create textures with whatever you have. But I will say, I enjoy having a Ryan around to brush when it comes to doing some fine details. And really use this flat brush so much. So having a small flat brush is really helpful to do details and create geometric shapes and all kinds of grids. This is a 3 eighth inch, so that's my favorite, It's my go-to. I will use it a lot as you will see for the rest of your brushes. So I don't expect you to have all these brushes. I expect you to go to you in your house or your garage and dig through and find brushes and other things that have texture that you're interested in painting with and using for laying down color. This is an old nylon brush that used to live in my gosh, I think it was for stain or something. I'm not a 100% sure. But I brought it upstairs to come live a good life with me. Create art. This is a fan brush. I use it a lot for grids. I also like to use it to create solutions. What's next? This is a stipple brush. So this is a brush that actually is for creating dots and I use it a lot for water. When I'm doing the water on the elephant spray. What else? Tell me that this is just an old brush that I really do take good care of. And now it's become a texture brush instead of a paintbrush. But it really creates a great look for Warren skin for this elephant. And so that's why I use it and I love it. This brush maybe has lived the hardest life of all the brushes. This is this one belongs to my five-year-old daughter. I rescue and on the weekends. And it comes to create art with me. And again, I use it for a lot of the splash patterns as well. I think that's most of the must-have supplies or probably want to have. What about optional stuff? So this is a light pad and I'm going to show you how to use them on to basically trace the outer edge of the photograph. If you want to, if you don't have time or you're worried that maybe you don't have the skills to draw an alloca free hand. This is great to use. Or if you're a more accomplished artist and you're like, I want to draw it myself and challenge myself. Do that. Absolutely do that. Just do whatever is comfortable for you. In addition, we will be doing each layer, one-by-one, each color, starting with yellow and moving to the darkest colors, black and blue. You can draw each layer as we go or you can naturally let them dry. I tried to naturally let them dry so that I can think about what I wanna do next. But again, it's absolutely up to you. Finally, he met. So if at the end of this you get to it and you're like, I'm not sure my real artists does it look good? I have found nine times out of ten. Throw in mat on something. Suddenly. Love it and it feels great. So you don't have to have it, but I recommend it. So let's get going. 3. Evaluating Tones and Colors: Alright, now we're going to evaluate our photographs and choose our colors. Hopefully you have printed out your black and white color photograph or you're looking at your screen so you can go along with the mean. The first thing we're gonna do is look at the black and white photograph. But basically we're going to find the shadows, the mid tones, and the highlights. So we're looking at a black and white photograph because I think it's easier to see these things because you don't have the colors that are getting in the way and messing with your brain. Now a value is how light or how dark something is. So that makes sense. Shadows easiest to find. Generally speaking, shadows are going to be on the underside of animals, which makes sense, right? They've got something over top of them that is putting them in shadow that is making them darker. Here on our elephant. This inside leg is going to be darker. The bottom here, the belly. Up in this area, down through the front of these legs. You've got this big shadow that's going through here. Ear, the line around it. These little cavernous areas in the face of the elephant, the mouth, the trunk, and the tusk going up around. We've got some darkness where all this water is spurting out, up and around. Those are our shadows. Now the easiest thing to find next is actually the highlights. Now that we've looked at what's really dark, Let's identify what's really light. So what pops out to me immediately is the sun is coming from back in this area, right? So whenever the sun is hitting first or butt's sticking out, It's going to be the highlighted are the lightest areas. Here is, but it is rump the top of his tail, this backside of this right hind leg, this little leg that's pushed out the top of the ear, the top of the shoulders. Right here in this part of the face. This is sort of right above the eye piece where the tusk is sort of sticking out and the top of this trunk, those are highlighted areas. And if you get confused when you're looking at an animal picture, say you're doing something else, just think the parts of the body that are sunken, right? Like if you were looking at your own face, like your eyes are sunken, your mouth, if you were to open your mouth, your cheeks. The more sunk in an area is the darker it's going to be further and shadow is going to be the further it's pushed out. Like your forehead and your nose and in his case like this, this forehead area and his ear, it's pushed out. Those areas are gonna be the brightest lights. The good thing about identifying the shadows and the highlights is that anything you have left is pretty much the mid-tone. So looking at this elephant, all this area here, the middle of the body, parts of the legs, and all throughout the face. We've got some mid tones to and through the water. Those are your lights and your mid tones and your darks. So why do we care about those in this painting? Why do we care? Well, lights and darks together are what gives something 3D shape and form. So what's going to give our elephant form on these edges here is we have mid tones. That's right along here in the back. Where those mid tones are in some of these aren't, some of these will go, we will leave lighter and maybe keep them a little bit of highlight for visual interests into break things up a bit. We don't want to outline our animal like black outline because it's going to flatten him. But where he's moving away as his back is rolling around, that area is darker because it's away from us. We're going to take these values, the light, medium and dark, and we're going to assign them colors. So I will keep this picture with me the whole time. I will be referring to either the black and white or the color photograph. And let's talk colors. So let's jump right back into highlights. The brightest highlights are here on the back and the button, the leg, we said all this area, right? So we want to make sure those satellites, so we're going to use, we're going to leave white and put some yellow and maybe a little bit of light orange in those areas depending on how light they are. The absolute lightest areas, I'm going to try to leave as much white as possible, but if it doesn't work out, bleed proof white will save us. So don't worry about it. Don't stress. And we're actually going to use the yellow in the highlights and the orange and leave white. We're going to put it all through here, right? So we can be pretty laissez faire just throwing it out there because we're going to build our layers after we get the first layer is a yellow down in some oranges. Then we're gonna put our mid tones in, which are gonna be red and green. And with each layer that progresses, we are going to get a little bit more strategic, be a little bit more purposeful in our strokes. Will start to put those colors in here, in the back, here in the middle, and there'll be over top of those yellows and oranges. So we're going to put them all through here, even in the dark areas. We're going to put all the mid tones in here to try to keep it separate. We're going to let each layer dry color by color, by color, so that our colors don't mix and get muddy. Then the final thing we'll do is our shadows. And as you can see, these shadows look pretty purple and blue. And so we're going to mix some purple and we're going to use our indigo and our other dark colors to put them here on our elephant. These colors are going to be these last colors that we've put in, right up in here. Some of this will be a round brush. Some of this will be our flat brush right around in there. Right there, right there. Lot of this'll probably indigo where you see these super dark areas right here and here. I his ears, his mouth where that goes in deep. And then that's how it works. So let's get going. 4. Using a Light Board to Sketch: Okay, now like I said before, if you want to sketch this elephant out yourself, you are more than welcome to all I'm going to try to provide an outline that works out. However, if you have a light board and you wanna know a quick way of how you trace your own outline. I will show you real fast. So here's our light board. Mine goes up three times, 123, whoo as bright. Now I will say it's a rainy day here, which normally I don't like to paint in a studio on rainy days because the light isn't as good. The light is super great. Using the light pad because the darker the room is, the better, because you can really see it a lot better. The darker does. Of course, you don't want a pitch black room, but I'm going to show you how to do this yourself. So let's start. I'm gonna do this a little bit darker for you guys, but normally I would do this as light as possible, but I felt they could still see it. I'm not going to do with tons of detail, but let me show you here, my daughter screaming with her dog. They're having a good time. So we'll go here around his butt. Down, down, down, down, down, round this little tail. Go up here. I'm kinda going in a little worried these are darker just to remind myself, like hey, those are darkened areas. Lighter here. I'm pushing down on the paper here, whereas foot goes is flipped, kind of meets the shadow. So it's a little tough to tell. Trying to push down here. Like it's like it goes up like this. I'm also going to trace this little bit of shadow just so I know when I'm putting in my darker stuff later maybe like, Hey Sarah, that's where the darkest of your shadows is. So here we're going to go back down and do the rest of this leg. Can I finish his little belly appear? You can kinda see here's where one leg is going behind. Here's the front leg, right? To do, to do. If we need to, we can always fix this sketch up a little bit. Go down and grab the rest of this leg. Here is where these two separate. Again, this doesn't really dark on the bottom or this shadow is so we can kind of blend those together if we want later. I'm gonna go trace around this ear. Pushing down again. This is what it looks like to me. Again. I go down the top of the ear, but we will try and make it a little. I don't want it to be too. I've done this before and I make this too straight here. So I need to make it as random as possible. So you do what you think works. It's hard to exactly to see here. I'm also going to trace this little highlight here. So I remember he, Sarah, keep that, keep that. So you don't have to bleed proof white but white it later. And here's where the dark and the light separate here. I'm gonna go down here, grab this little highlight so I preserve it. Let's see. And this is dark areas where I stopped for open around his head. I'm kinda okay. We'll go there in a minute. Okay. I'm going to follow his head down. Make this little shadow here, keeps the shadow. Can barely see his eye. I know it's like in this area, but I'm just kinda mark it know to go back in their leader and try to put it in. It's kinda hard to see right now. There's a little bit of a highlight there, boop. That's where that shadow stops, come down and then around holding it down really hard. So I can see the outline back down here to the mouth. I'm sure you can trace it out and figure it out. I'm just trying to talk you through it here. Shadow under that tusk and another one sort of under this side of the trunk. Going to try to make this a little wavy or fix. It won't make a ton of difference when we're making it. Circle. Here's our little spit thing. Circled around, circled around, circling around. How this is going to be a little bit different on our outline. I'm going to try to keep it kinda close. I'm making invisible splatter right now. This isn't really in the picture, but I know where I want it to go on the picture, so I'm just dotting it. And I'm gonna look down here. I'm going to try to do this shadow at the bottom. I'm going to put it in the plants later. I'm not going to try to put them in right now. Done this so many times and it's like sometimes, I don't know. Like do I want this to be here? Do I want this to be water? I'm tracing around that you didn't have steel up to you artist's discretion. Let's see. I'm going to do, is you do a little bit of grid patterns because what I really want to remember is skin texture is so important. Here. There's a little bit of a darker tone up there. I want to have a little bit of a darker tone here. Shoulder blades. Hey, this is kinda highlight there. I think that's pretty good. I might make it a little bit of stub. Remind myself, Hey, the tusk is moving this way. Don't. It'll look less real, even though it's not going to be super real. It looks a lot less real. If you get the lines sometimes gone crazy ways opposite where they would go in real life like the trunk lines, I mean, because that's an appendage. That's the muscle. Okay. Thank you. It looks good. I think. Let's check it real fast. I'm going to pull the light board out from underneath. I think he'll work. Hope you're starting out well. 5. Mark Making and Warm Ups: All right. It is time to start with I mark making and our warm-ups. Now, I understand and I sympathize and empathize with people, want to skip the warm-ups and get right to the painting. You know what? You feel super confident and super brave, you can do that. But I will say as a caveat, I think that warm-ups make a real difference in how my painting is turnout because it gives me a chance to get my mind and my body warmed up, my right brain gets going. And it also makes me think through what strokes and maybe what brushes might be right, since how I'll be switching a lot between these things do with that information, what you will you do definitely do not have to do to warm ups, but I think they're important. I'm using some old paper here. So remember this counts as painting. This painting. So don't feel like, Oh, I'm not painting at your painting, we're gonna do it. It's important part of the painting. First I'm going to test out my flat brush and we're going to talk through what we use it for, picked up a little bit of blue. So I like to use my flat brush for shadows and for muscles. So a lot of times I have to go into little areas, right, like this. Little switch there. Oh, dry brush it a little bit. Something like that. It's just see what it can do, can make geometric shapes with it. I like to do a little bit of circles. Looks cool. Also use the flat brush for creating plants. Can our picture duty do see that's that little plant. Maybe this is a taller weedy or plants at trying to keep it random. This is the one thing that's right to remember with all of this, like keep it real bad. Of course plants, we want them to be smaller at the top and then a little bit thicker towards the bottom, but those are fun. We're just really doing impressions of paint lands. We don't want the plants to take over the artwork, right? This is all about Eli the elephant. I've named them you live because I've named all of my paintings and my animals. So we're going to call this guy Eli. What else can we do with the flat brush? Outlines? So a lot of what I do with the flat brush, as I will outline the edge of my animal or certain features of the animal. Like a good thing, this is just a mark-making. There we go. That's really here. Let's see. Let's just say a little bit of time ago. Something like that. Although it'll be a little different when we're actually in it. And you can change the water amount of water. You can also pull it. So let's say we were outlining decimal. I'm going to pull it in, pull that in. Pope Paul. Just a very how thick the line is in different places to make it visually interesting. Also think about the skin, right? Because this is an elephant with thick skin. So I'm going to do a lot of grid patterns on him. I often squeeze the brush like this. I don't recommend always doing it with paint, but I've that's why I have this paper towel. So now it's too late. Bu okay. Just squeeze it and then put the paint on it. But yeah. So, um, what these grids to be? Perfect because these are wrinkles, right? They're not gonna be perfect on his skin. Maybe something like that. Maybe we want to make some thinner lines. There. Those are just some examples of how you might want to try to use that brush. And actually it looks like a weed. Okay. So skin water, Oops, we'll use it for shadows too. So when we get to the bottom of the elephant, well, I tend to like to drag it across like this. Feel like that makes some really good shadows or some really good texture. So that's the other thing I like to use the flat brush for shapes. But we've can use it for like to use a basket weave. I like it a little bit of a dry brush, and I like it with a basket weave too. So something like this where you can see those brushstrokes because it's very visually interesting. I don't want to make it more random. It doesn't look too. Here we go. That's fine. Something like that is gonna be very visually cool on your elephant when you go back through the flat brush, cheryl, do something else different with them. Show you too, but those are just some examples. Really just get creative and think about your brushes and what you have and how you might want to use them. I'm going to look at the sponges next. I'll look at this black little sponge first. I'm going to put him in a little bit of red tide, different color for some, for some visual interests. Dry them out just a tiny bit. So I can show you what happens when we put water on them. So let's do this. See, I use these a lot for shadows and to give texture to the skin. Again, I'm trying to be random and kinda move that around. And I see how that goes. Now what I'm gonna do is add a little bit of water to my sponge. And then kinda go to the edge of this. Maybe a bit too much water. But you can kind of see what it does. We're gonna kinda flows really cool. I like watercolor because it does things that I don't expect. Unexpected. It gives us some cool patterns. Sometimes. I also use this sponge to outline actually, which seems weird. But I found that it gives a very random like I'm going around part of the animal. I wouldn't do the whole thing, but I often use it in that manner as well. Here's our sea sponge. Like to use this little edge and this little edge here. And of course turns still, keep it random. I'm going to stick this guy in the orange. I mixed a little bit of red and yellow make orange. It's kinda like hopefully this shows up for you. If not, I'll just stick it back in the red. Okay? Yeah, here we go. You can kinda see how that one works. Alright, onto the other brushes. This omens quickly. So here is our fan brush up. First. I really love to do like sweeping grid textures with it. I think that works out nicely. So something like try to keep it random. Gnarly the brush-up first. Something like that. You can also stick a little bit of another color on the edge. Let me see if I can pick up the balloon. That works. So if you wanted to do a little bit of blue, and sometimes I'll take the number two and you see these little boxes now fill them in with different colors. Again, just for some visual interest. I also like to do some, sometimes some grasses or some swoops with this thin it out a little bit. It's cool little bit of texture. So that's what I enjoy. The fan brush for. Toothbrush. Let's look at the tooth brush I've got here toothbrush. I will say be careful with the toothbrush. If it can sometimes do stuff that's not super random, right? So it's, these bristles are set where they are and they're exactly the same amount of park kind of. So I like to use it for the water in the splatter. I have to move the brush in a little bit more water in certain areas so that it looks like every droplets gonna be different, right? So that's kind of how it works with the splatter. Little bit, maybe not as random as I'd like. But that's alright because we're going to do lots of layers and that's an important thing to remember through this whole thing. Lots of layers. So if one thing doesn't turn out perfectly like, oh wow, that's fine. I'm also going to splatter it a little bit, so I'll put a little bit of paint here. Wham, boom, boom. You see that? That's fun, splattering. It's fun. My five-year-old is a huge fan of splatter in some way. Next, my daughter, we're gonna go ahead and use her. Her brush the kids breast will look at the kids breast milk at the stipple brush. So I will use these a lot from making little tiny circles for doing dots, water splatter in the shadows for some of the darker areas. So grabbed the stipple brush first. Here we go. See if you can write. We'll do it here. Again. Great for the water splatter. Be careful. Keep turning the brush. Do they do they do they do they do it for the shadows? Pretty simple. I don't really use it to make other marks with that I can think of, maybe I do and I don't even realize it. But be creative, maybe you find a new way to use it and it does a cool texture. I haven't figured out yet. Here's my kids brush comes to work for me on the weekends, get away from my daughter. This is also a good one to use for water. A lot of different little textures. I like to swirl it, make little circles. I think that if I were to do like a leopard or a cheetah or something, it might be something was spot. So if you're doing something with spots, here is something different. I mean, it could be cool. I'm going to put that in the brain bank. Not doing obviously not doing a Ledbetter to you today, but I can also eyes. I could probably use that for eyes. Now it'd be neat. Okay. What else do we have? We've got our what our nylon brush or a number two brush and this other brush. And remember if you have other brushes, you need to be playing with those and figuring out how they might tie into the skin of the animal. Or maybe an eyeball or just keep playing with it and see maybe you have, I'm sure you'll have a completely different and cool idea that I have not come up with. So now we're looking at the nylon brush, one of my favorites. I use it for flowers, she wouldn't think. But I also my elephant. I like to use them, use them a ton because he's kinda big. And you just think about size in the small parts of the elephant, like on the trunk. You're probably not going to you're going to want to be careful. I'm not going to, you're not going to use these brushes, but I wanna see you want to be careful because if you go outside the line a little bit, it looks cool, but if you get too far outside the line, it looks like his appendages are wrong. So let's try this. It's perfect. I love that. I use this. I would like to use this on the belly. Sweep it up. Also, you can use the edge of a brush like this. Yeast it like for fire before. But now that I'm looking at it, I think maybe it would make a good fire breast nylon, but water, I also use it for water. If that was blue, it would make a good splash of water. Sometimes I spin it around and throw it into the splash that's coming out of the trunk. Can also use it for part of the shadows if you let down near the bottom. You know how we talked about this? The flat brush here I can go in and darken maybe some of the water like that with some thicker paint on my brush already. So let's see this brush, old gnarly brush. Let's see what it can do. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Good for splatter, good for a little texture. I like that one. See where it does when you might be able to even do a few little interesting grids on there. It's very Warren looking very good for elephants. And then here is our number two brush. Now, I might use it a little bit to make some tiny lines here and there. Maybe to fix up some plants. They feel like they need a little more of a delicate hand. Sometimes I do like little dots with it. Although it's hard to make it random enough, even though the agency that's like I switch it up, but I think a lot of the other ones work better. You can create some good patterns with it if you wanted to, if you wanted to get specific or just do some really tiny areas, which I sometimes do. But I think that that's all my mark-making step that I've got. So I hope this gives you some great ideas. I hope your brain and your hand is really warmed up. 6. Yellow Layer: All ready, Let's get started with our yellow. I've got a watery yellow. These patients can be very concentrated. So for our first layer of yellow, I want something kind of light. And then a little bit of the darker concentrated gamboge, and then added a tiny bit of the cadmium red, so it has more of that orange tint to it. So we're going to be working with those three. Hopefully they'll drive pretty fast. So it will be alright. Now I've got my picture of my elephant that I'm looking at closely. And it looks like, as we talked about before, the majority of the highlights on this back portion here and this back leg. So I'm going to start by inputting a little bit of yellow back with my flat brush. And I probably want to fill it in, but I like the idea, a little bit of a line here, maybe some dots going down the tail. As far as some of these little pieces are. Great there. Maybe some yellow swoosh right here. It's fun to start it off. They got in the middle. Maybe I'll leave the middle there so that area we're going to keep really light. So I'm going to think a little bit more before I just start putting a bunch of stuff in. There. May be some sort of like basket weave here, some better this loop. Then little lighten up this side a little bit. Lift. Here we go. A little bit of grid stuff here. I just want to get a bunch of this texture, yellow texture. So it looks like there's some lines down here. Still using the lightest yellow. See there's a little bit of highlights that running here. Seen. A fan brush. But this lightest yellow. Gnarly it up a little bit. Maybe come down. That's kinda fun. I sit a little bit and go up like this. Bump on the camera. Try to be a little bit more careful. Oh, cred their grid. Grid. Grid. Okay. Again, I just wanted to lay down some paint doesn't have to be perfect. I just want to give it some texture when you use this brush next. Run up. In this area. Maybe a little darker. This maybe a little bit of that down here or even this appear appear a little to see if I can lift that up a little bit. It's kinda hard sometimes to lift it with watercolors. I'll figure something else that might look cool there. I'm not too worried about it. Next I'm going to take some yellow kind of mimic what I see there on the picture. Kind of some bright yellow showing through. I've had the more concentrated yellow kind of going over some of the areas that I already had. The yellow because they are the same color. I don't really have to worry about them getting muddy might blend together a little bit. I'm not mad if they do that. Okay. Here's some Here we go. Again. Donning some yellow. Maybe this up here. Like a little yeah, Good. Take a little bit more of the gamboge. He ran through parts of this that I made here, here, here. That's just fun. Let's see what else. I see some yellow moving through here. Maybe just sort of brushing it like this. Diagonally ish lines. I just really want some cool textures that are going to show back up through here. So maybe because whoosh here. Swish. Nice. Alright. Keep an eye on with the yellow. Like I said, we're keeping this area wipe to I'm gonna go back in there with a sponge, kinda put some lighter stuff in there. Oh ma'am. Dropped. Brush. Believe that see what that can become later. Run a little bit of yellow here because there is a highlight, a little bit running down that side of the leg. But dude, do make. Now we said this was a highlight. Here's our swoosh highlight. The back of this leg with a light is hitting it. There's some Here we go. I'm going to put some here. We will darken this leg a lot. I went a little bit of yellow to show through on some parts of it. If we can catch, everything gets written, if we can remember. Again, I really want some sort of a grid or something. Oh, this is fun. Something different here. Not to pattern like, that's what I gotta be careful of. Some lines of yellow running here. Yellow writing down, that's gonna be really dark there. I'm going to need to be careful, but I want some other colors to shine through. Again. Here up in the shoulder. We've got a lot of highlight. So I'm going to run some yellow around that. Maybe take a little yellow off the top of this. I see a little bit. It's like a highlight running up until this shoulder. So we can have different line, different thickness. It gets dark a little bit on that side, so I'm just going to nap on the yellow that way. We've got the yellow. Well, this is the highlight up here. So let's kind of goes like that, kind of turns. So I'm gonna do that with it. Then. This area, some lines here. We wouldn't really important too. That seems like a lot. Staff that down a little bit. Now looking into his ear, create some shapes here. But in a lighter yellow. So I'm just going to water down a little bit of it. And C, AB, swirl it in. Bring this in. And I will definitely be darkening up a lot of that area. But until then I'm just kinda make some fun. Colors that can poke through on it. Yes. Alrighty. Like that. Moving onto his face and his trunk. Now, even though it can be pretty free on this yellow because we can fix it up a little bit. I still want there to be quite a bit of texture. So this is a, this is a lighter part here. I'm just gonna make some little dashes through here. This is gonna be maybe, maybe take some, mess it up a little bit. I'm going to run a little bit of yellow through here to here. Cookbook. I don't think that's going to hurt because that's going to become pretty dark. I want some of this yellow to run down here around the eye. The eye is going to be dark. I want some lighter colors around his mouth. I want this to pop, pop, pop, pop, pop up. Be careful here. I want some yellow on this task. Pull some yellow up, random, random, random. Then I really want the top of this to be white and yellow. All white, but not all yellow. That's definitely be lighter. Then I want some dashes here going this way because that's the way that those wrinkles are running on the trunk. Looks good. Now I'm going to take my sponge in and I'm going to do a little bit. The darker gamboge. I will try all the sponges and play around and see a really want this area to have more sponge stuff because I'm trying to keep the white. So the sponge is going to let the white stay through for us. To try this artist sponge I found. All right. I'm going to take this kind of in and around this area. Dark. You can really see it that well. That's better. Then this is kind of a darker part of the highlight. Then down through here, we'll take some yellow in and around here, kinda see that. And there's gonna be a lot of darkness in here. I think I'm also going to make a graphic shape in there. Thinking that through, again through, so you get it through. You take that yellow up there, run some yellow through here. Around this leg a little bit. Then hind leg there. Boop, boop, boop texture, texture, texture. Okay, That's good. A little bit. And maybe at the bottom little bit in here. Let's look at this. We're running a little bit of this darker color up here. Some through here. Then a little bit through bottom over what we already have. Layering sort of the brighter gamba was over the lighter one. Then. Let's try this. I'll put this on the top of the head. And then a little bit around these areas here where those circles are. Some of this around the mouth. Then some of this here in the middle trunk. A couple of it appear. It's kinda fun. Is there anywhere else? I think I need it. Maybe a little bit here. Then I'm going to again select darker. Maybe another, but I do like it a bit. Okay. Now I'm going to take some of this yellow on the sponge. I'm going to try it, sort of spreading out a little bit more water on it now. Probably should have taken some of these dots out. That's alright though. I think it will be alright. I will fix it. Fix it. We've also, we're going to lay her lots of colors, so I think we'll be all right in the end. That's some good texture. I'm going to run a little bit of it down here to like texture moving throughout the picture has some good yellow, I will say I'm a little worried that's a bit too patterning. Just take a little bit now, the orangey red in these areas. Some of this up here. Don't be afraid just to try it. I think we can probably fix it if we need to. And then a yellow, orange down here, a little bit in there. Here, here, here. This line right here, kind of a little bit going up, just hit the highlights for the ends. Could do want to take some of this around at ear, then put a few spots of it on the ear. Time and the time. Appear a little bit good at my picture. Then. Here. This is a little darker. Going up there. I'm like I said, we'll go over a lot of this part. So let's just put a tiny bit in here. Tiny bit here. These are bigger, heavier. There's more water on this part of the sponge. So that's why you're getting those sort of looks. Spinning it around here. This needs to be, it's going to have some more medium color. ****. Alrighty. I like where this is going, left a lot of highlights. I'm a little worried about I'm not worried about we'll make it work. I'm going to put some orange in this spray on just yellow. I mean, before we do our actual orange layer next, I'm just moving this around. I like that seems to be going well. And then I think I'm going to take we want to take this brush and use it as mine a little bit there on the side. Let's see. Let's do this. And I will put a heavier I put a heavier grid there in red I think, but little bit except for it. Take this brush and use the side of it, maybe running along here. Now this is where we're going to have our shadow at. I'm going to let some highlights in there as well. Put the darker towards the front. I think that'll be that'll be alright for now. Alright. Let's let this dry. We'll take a pause and come back and use the cadmium red. 7. Cadmium Red Reverse Style Layer: Okay. So had a little malfunction with my camera and I already did my orange layer, but it turned out really good. So I thought maybe on this one, I can sort of do it backwards and explain to you what I did with each brush. And maybe then you can reconstruct it on your end. So the brushes I use for this color were the fan brush, the flat brush in my I use my sponge so we didn't use a ton of stuff. I'm going to show you what I use with each thing. I started off to show his belly. I did swipes with a fan, brush this way, and then the opposite way. And then I went through and darken them a little bit with some paint. Then I took a little bit of swishes appear through the back little bit in here on the trunk. So that's all I really use the fan brush for on this color. Then I took my flat brush, which of course, you know, I love. Starting in the back. I blotted this tail. I kinda did a little bit of an outline down the leg, did a little bit in this middle shadow area, came up and around data, a little bit of grids here and a little bit of outlining in the back. Nothing really here in the middle with the flat brush. But then I took it up sort of a dry brush banded up around the back of the shoulder and the back of the ear. Then I talked extensively about how I'm extremely emotionally committed to this ear turning out, because I've done this ear. Oh my gosh, I've done this painting so many times, maybe five times. There's something about it. I always feel like it could be better, which is fine. There's always a part of your painting where you're like, man, I wish it had turned out a different way, but you love other parts of it. This time I feel like the ear, it's moment. So I did an uneven line, kind of imagined where these creases would be going up because it's, you can see them in the picture, but it's a little tough. Then I darken these little areas around the face, came down around the top, this brush to this a little bit under the jaw, down here to the face, just a tiny bit to that little bit of grid pattern here. Tiny bits of grid up through the trunk, a little bit up here. And then I ran the brush down here around the bottom. So just a little basket weave here to just a tiny bit on this leg. And then I decided I wanted to do a little bit of orange because I've not done the ground a different color before as in the plants. So decided to make a little bit of orange on the plants and then to see how that plays out when I get that green in there, might've been a big mistake. But I'm really interested in how it turns out. Next. I took my sponge and I started off pretty dry with it. And all of these marks around the edges, I went around the edges a little bit through the middle. I was still trying to preserve this middle here, but I wanted to put some around the edges. I think this could be a little bit too light. I might end up adding some darker bits here at the top, but I'm just going to leave it. I can always get rid of shadows and get rid of highlights a lot easier than I can get rid of too much shadow. I ran a bunch of sponge through the middle here, a little bit on this ear. Again, really, really working on that texture. Then I did some sponge work here and as you can see, it got outside his face. But I really liked that. I feel like that almost makes me feel like he's won with the splatter. Didn't make me mad. But I said if you want and make it smaller, you can always curl up your sponge like this and try to use that in a smaller area. But I really liked that it was going outside. Then I added some water to this sponge so it wasn't as concentrated. And that's how I got these big wet blobs that you see, and I really loved that and you know what I love to, I'm glad that there are some they're still wet so I can show you. I like lifting them. I think sometimes that leaves a really cool imprint. This one didn't turn out that way, but sometimes edges will be darker than the middle will be lighter. But yeah, I like this. I even threw some splashes down here around his legs, which will lend itself to if we decide to make this water, which I'm still a little undecided. I'm undecided. I'm going to let the painting speak to me and let me know how it should go. So I didn't get to paint that one in front of you. But maybe it's better if I just explain it to you what I did first and then you can decide if that's how you want to take your painting. So let's move on to red. Let's do it. Maybe I've had too much coffee. Let's be honest. 8. Red Rose Layer: Okay, Now we're going to move on to the deep red. Honestly, I think it worked out pretty well. On the last take of this. We are showing you what brushes and I was going to use first. So I'm going to try that. And I'm going to try to make myself work with whatever I have. So I'm going to try this disheveled brush, nylon brush, flat brush. Here, my stipple brush. And for sponges, let me give this a shot. Now, I figure, since this class is about experimentation, I should experiment with all the stuff that I've got. So you guys can see. And also to show like this is not super planned out class. I've tried so many things and done so many things with this picture. I still like to be creative. I still like to try and do stuff with it. So I think at my red here, water down a little bit because these are very concentrated. My stipple brush. First, I'm going to try to stipple brush. I'm going to start this time. The other times I've been sort of starting with the elephant. I'm going to start with the supplier this time. I'm going to try to make it nice and random. Need to be random or right there, you'll need more randomness. Do it. Obviously, we're overlapping at this point, right? Because we've got lots of different colors. And that's what we want. We want to see some overlap. Now I'm going to take some of this red. I'm going to take this, this red is the medium, the mid tone. And how a lot of different places where we have these mid tones. I'm going to start by moving it through the leg with the stipple brush and see what I think of it. All right, let's do that. So I'm going to take these in here under this. That's gonna be pretty dark later. But I liked the idea of keeping some red in there. This is going to be dark the back of this leg, but again, let's get some red color in there to make that pop. Next, next, next, I really want some over here. It'd be the darkest will be up in the inside, but I'll need some darker colors anyway. Texture, texture, texture, texture. Looking at the picture as I go, maybe try a little bit of like, oh, those are going to go a little bit aligns with the stipple brush. Maybe that was too thick of a line. They don't want to quite thick. I'm going to do didn't not want that. I think I tried to lift a little bit off here. See if they can scrub it off a little bit here. Maybe I'm here being lifted. Florida. Maybe again. Maybe I can come up. Again. Lifting these liquid watercolors can be really tough sometimes because there's just so concentrated and paper just sucks it up. So that's again, why we need to be very strategic with what we're doing. The darker that we get. So it's gonna be a lot of darker pieces up here. Again. Appear. These legs need to get darkened for sure. And there needs to be more it needs to be more stripes on them because we need to show some more of those wrinkles. So I'm gonna go with me to fly for us to in a minute and do that. And I do a couple here. And these are these mid tones. I'm going to, I'm trying to darken these areas so that you can see that shape in that form. It's going, I'm also I got a little exciting thing plan. This is me like an exciting stuff with everyone's like, Okay, you say Zara floats your boat, going to take some of this red, pop it into the ear. I think I want it over in this area and then move it through here. And I want to do it needs to be an arc. If you look on the painting, there's like an arc that goes here. So I'm trying to create that line a little bit. Maybe tiny. And then I'm down here. Down here. Alrighty. Let's tube light here. I think. I'm just going to fill some of this in with pink. Again, this needs to be darker back here. I'm worried this is a little too patterning. So I think I'm going to switch this brush out. I'm not a lot of those will get covered over, but I want to be careful with this. Now I'm gonna take this brush. Nylon brush. Tried to create a little bit of this bottom shape here. See what happens to whole lot. There wasn't very dirt. So like I don't wanna be too is pretty concentrated, but I want this color to be concentrated to maybe I can try to take it up here. Yeah, I'll try and take that up there. It's appear a little bit. Take this around here. Stippled. It ish This is like right where that rounds. Let's kinda nice there. I'm gonna go save some bumps. Okay. Now I'm gonna go to my flat brush. And I just cannot stop thinking. I'm trying to make it dry. So what I'm doing right now is in red to it. Then dabbing it on my paper to make it dryer. Now, it could be crazy, but I kinda feel like I can see heart rate here. Do you see this in the mid area? I'm crazy. I kinda wanna make a heart. So C that goes here. I feel like it goes like this. It's like that. Then most like here. And down here. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe that's not a heart. I see a heart. I swear I do. So if you see one drawing, if you want to put something else there, put something else there. I wanted to look not perfect though. I want to make this down. Alright, I like that. I might try to lift it as a tiny bit, see what happens. Don't really lift too much. I'll probably take a little bit of a darker color in there. I like it. I wanted it to look. It says, I am an elephant and I might not. But I'm a painting as well. So I'm going to be very careful. Use this brush. Go up that using the side of this brush. Don't want to fill all these colors in because I liked them. And I also I'm going to have to put some dark in. But I feel like this, I like that. Do that up here to this red. We're going to now just back of this leg here. I'm going to pull that in and I want to go in. And like I said before, so you've got these lines. I need to see these lines a little bit better. But I don't want them to be perfect and I don't want to just draw a straight line across it. Okay. I'm just trying to keep in mind I need to be really strategic here. Because I've still got green to go and I've still got blue and probably purple. Can I'm trying to think if I want a mix of purple. Undecided, decided. Okay, I'm going to take back of this leg and read. And again, I kinda see this is not the super, super dark. So I see a lot of mid tones in here and I'm not sure I want I'm going to have so much darkness in their darkness. Okay. Also feel like no, I'm just going to hold off on that first. I'm just going to hold off and no one knows. I'm talking about it like I'm holding off on things that nobody knows. I'm talking about. Alright, little bit of red up here. Going to think there's a darker area here. How do you use both sides of this brush here? Again, I'm sure you can tell by what's going on as I move the paper. I am definitely I'm looking at my picture the whole time because I want to. These texture is going in the right direction. I'm not putting them everywhere. I also want to make these mid tones, like in the right areas. So this is a darker area here. It's almost like a triangle here. I see. Just making a little pattern there. I don't think it's a little bit. That might be a little bit to like repeating. So I'm going to try to break it up a little bit. Now. Take my red again. And I'm going to go around this ear sort of in the same places, but not just darken some of these areas. I really liked what was going on. Trying to not make it too flat, want it to look like it's moving and bending a little bit and not the right word, but I wanted to look like it has more shape than that, I guess is. Okay. I like that. Darken that up a bit over top of this. Now. This is going to be pretty dark. I use wearing a head band right now. Head band down to the top of this and make this red. I don't want it to be too perfect of a line. Sort of why I'm using this like that, even though that looks varied on random, There's something about it I really enjoy. Again, these lines are going to need to do this here. He's a node, really an old elephant, but he's a playful wise elephant. All elephants, I feel like our anyone else out there just wanted elephant. Maybe I should talk about the painting. I love elephants there. I think their texture for their skin. This works so well. I'm cross, I'm going back across like went down and then came back across the bat around, around, around. And I'm going to take the red and sort of go around his mouth. Part of his mouth. Feel like he's smiling. He is smiling. Smiling. This is kinda his eyebrow. I want to make it like an eyebrow. I want the eyebrows to look like an eyebrow. Okay. Darkening this area up a little bit. To, to, to, to, to to, to to do using the side of it. Needs to be a little thinner. Darkening that. It's tough in this part because you really don't want to go overboard, want to have enough, because you need to get that contrast in order to give it form one on along the bottom of the tusk. Now with this, again, I think I got them on the top of the tusk to all the way across because we're going to do some blue and some green somewhere in here. Just so you know, green makes me nervous on some of these animals because I feel like sometimes you just have to be really careful if you overdo it on the green, it loses something in mammals, I think maybe it's just something I think, or maybe I just haven't done it away that I really have found that I really enjoy yet. But boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That might be a little darker. Maybe a little dark there. Right? I'm going to take the corner of this brush. Well, we'll do this first. First I'm going to go down and get this, outline, this a little bit more. And again, I'm probably going to do something a bit different with that. At some point. I really want to color in some of these little squares in red. Not want them to be random. The grids not dark enough for you to see what this is. I wonder if I can want to take a little bit of red and side of this brush to darken this grid a little bit so you can see what it does. Be careful though. Because you don't want to lose. You don't want it to be random. I need it to be random. To be darker. This is a very mid-tone area in a shadowed area. And I feel like this needs to be darker. I really want these to kinda show up. You can kind of hear that, but whatever. Kind of like that too. Okay. Okay. A little bit more red on this leg and then we'll bring it into the spray. Do a little bit. This is bell-shaped to it, trying to make that make sure you can tell their legs or their feet are sort of like a bell, the bottom. Okay. Okay. Use the right colors, I guess. We'll find out. Okay. Suppose I'm sadly, we're going to use the sea sponge this time around in the water. Wow, that's heavy. Heavy. Mid tone wise. It is alternately fun and scary. Yeah, I want some there there there, there there there there. Down to the bottom here to this leg. And this leg is shadow and highlight. How to control on the edge. We'll have to figure out what we're going to do that. We want to keep that in this area. I'm going to go up behind the shoulder with the sponge. Might have to. The other side of this budget a little bit towards its bottom. This is shadow, like I said. That's more shadow. Okay. There's a little bit of a shadow here starting into that shadow. Alright, I think I'm gonna do now is you see splatter? This a little bit, but yeah. Feel like he would thousand right. Call he needed a little bit more. Back to the back to the flat brush one more time to run some red into this bottom. Keep it close to the orange. Thinking through everything ends up going in my brain. I'm loving how this is going. Hope you were loving how yours is going. We can do, alright. We're gonna call that the red layer. And that's a little long, I guess we made up for that short orange layer. Alright, necessarily be brave and try green. 9. Light Green Layer: All right, Now we're gonna move on to green, and I just have to make two greens. So we've got this green, which is a mix of our gamboge, yellow, blue. And then we've got the straight yellow, green, which as you can see, it's darker and very bluer. I think what I'm going to try and we'll see how this works out, is to use the light green as our medium. And then that darker green integrated as part of the shadows with some blue. And then we will see if we need the Carbon Black or not. Then I don't think unless I really think it needs it, I'm going to make any purple because I really liked the idea of putting those two different greens then. Okay. So starting off looking at our photo again, we're looking at the medium areas here in the middle of the body. A little bit, we'll put in the face and a little bit around the edges. That's my plan. I've got the paper in front of me. Let's get started. Flat brush first, loving the fibers, you hear me? Okay. I'm going to start off by doing a little bit of basket weaving this here. Trying to make it non pattern as we always talk about, as we always talk about as we've been talking about for the biggest part of this. Okay? I'm going to green back here. I'm going to run some green on the top underside of this. Then I'm going to dark green part of the back. Like wherever I see. I wanted to be completely across but I tried to put it where there's not a completely all the red is on the top of this trunk. On the underside of this part of the trunk. Work my way back through a little bit of green here. Green and here. Of course I let this dry completely because I don't want it to be muddy. I liked the idea of a green mossy trunk. A little or a tusk, you know, like oh is he eating? Is eating some grass and got it on. They're going to make a few little things here. Now as we know, this is mid tones and shadows. I'm just going to fill in some of these areas. They're kind of already there. Some green live in preserving some of the highlights. I go around the eye with a little bit of green, but leaving white, leaving a white rim around it. Then I'm gonna go down here onto his mouth. Kinda put a diagonally line here. Lead into that. You can see preserving this year, but I'm going to add some little dots in there, a little texture lines. Now I'm gonna go up here. I kinda looks like there's some lines that go like this across that part of the eye. So I'm gonna do that. Then. This is kinda like a little triangle here. When a triangle that up, make that into a triangle, I like that idea, a perfect triangle. But the triangle, and I'm gonna go up here to the top of the head. That part green. I like the idea of that being greener. Again, being more strategic and sort of think through everything as I go. Now. Top of this green. Pull that up. Now. I like the idea of having some lines that go across like this. Some dashes. Then just some dabs of color. They're down to this part, dabs of color here. Falling down here. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. I make it random? Command ear. This is our time targeting this fold here and this fold here. And then pulling that around. Finally, I'm going to go, this is supposed to be darker, right? Because that's going to push that air out in this area is darker. We know that it's darker from our photograph. And I'm going to a little bit of green here. And then run some lines of green here. Grid them to create things like can I say lines here, grid I'm going to, there's a shadow that runs right here. Some dabs of green there. Here. Make some grids appear. Do, do, do, do, do, do. And then run some green down here. Because it's like I said, it's gonna be in shadow as well. I want to preserve some colors, but I also want it to be darker, so we'll get some green in there. It gets. Darker. Now I'm going to take green around here. That front of the leg has got quite a bit of shadow there. This back, back part of the leg and maybe swirling green there. Like make just going to drag the brush a little. And here I'm going to skip the brush like this. And here swoop like a little bit of that green. Getting outside. What I'll actually do, flatten the brush a little bit and I'll probably will go through with dark green. At the end. I'm going to take some light green here right now, because like it inside a little bit of green in here. Let's see. I like the idea of the screen here. Because we've got, again, this is mid tones here and a little bit of shadow colors, some of these in green. Kilohertz, remember our grid boxes like it. Okay. Moving on. Let's get our light green back on the back. Legs, back part of the legs to the side of the slide first. And then in here, just some dabs of it here and there again, I'm trying to be random. Sometimes it's hard. Here. I'm going to run some green down here. And then here, trying to fill in some of this white. So we'll fill that in with green and then pull that across. And I'm going to run a little bit down towards this leg again. But portion really needs to be darker. This is going to have a lot of really dark color at some point, perhaps some point, probably soon since wow, yes, run the screen here. Just want that to be. Then here. Little bit there. This also, you know what, I'm going to take splatter in there. I think I don't want to put another design in there yet. So now I'm going to pick up my sponge and pick up this spend and black sponge. Go to, go to green. Go to the green spoon right here. See you practice that. See, it's got a pretty good amount of water. Let's see. I will outline a few areas here, kinda like where we already have some green. I'm just going to dot some of this in. Make it okay. I'm going to cut some of this in here. Like that. Started up top. That in there. Maybe transition S and this one green. I like that RED, they're too heavy. That backup. Maybe I'll go in there with dark green. Now, I'm going to take my sponge, induce bladder and green boop, boop. Like those ones, they look very like, star-like and sparkly. Good, good, good, good. That worked out really well. I hope it's coming alive for you. I feel like he's coming to life for me. I really enjoy him. I'm going to run some of this green through here. Because that's mid tones, right in that area. It transmit, transmit probably will be a little bit darker at some point too. Okay, well, he's busy but that's how we'd like a busy, busy, busy jumping back in with the flat brush. Now, I'm going to do some of these plants and we're going to layer them late grade and then we'll go back in with some dark greens. So just be creative here. These are impressions of plants. I'm using this side. I'm going to try to make them random as possible. Random, random, random, random, random. I need to do. Then I'm going to run some green through here. Again. This is a lighter green. So I'm going to try to get next to the yellow a little bit. And yeah, there's gonna be a lot of blue that's going to run over with, as I said before, this is going to be water. I forgot. I obviously water. You have to be water. It's gonna be land, I guess. Now I'm going to take some plants up through here and go over these orange pieces a little bit. I love these flowers, flowers, plants, whatever. Just going to have fun with them. Do what you will. Put them where you think looks right for your picture. Might be going overboard, but I really enjoyed them. So this is just a very fertile area. Fertile area. That's fine. It's fine. I'm going to maybe do this slightly. I'm probably going to have to go back in here, figure out the final details, what I want and my backyard. Okay. Dark green being do we need to let the light green dry? I think it will let it dry and then we'll go back in. Once everything is dry, even though it is green, don't want to lose the light green and mix the two. Straighten it out for you. It's looking good though, right? I think it's looking good now. Almost looks like a butterfly coming out. Alright. I'll see you in a minute. 10. Pthalo Green Layer: Okay, now let's go back to our greens. This dark green right? Now there's a little green. And being strategic, careful withheld dark, we go and layer. So I've got my flat brush here. It's, you know me. That's why I love to start with. I'm going to start with some of these darkest shadows under here and try to make interesting marks. Make some in here. I'm gonna go in here with a sponge to and not yet though. So trying to create texture, texture, texture. Knowing that this is again our darkest area and we're looking at this shadow closely like this. This way. First in this brush, flat brush around to make some interesting things. Following it down. Then again, this is a very dark area here. Moving down this back left leg. That interesting shape here. There's almost like a triangle with a curve on the bottom for that part. You'll definitely have more dark parts coming in there. But I do want to run a few of these in this lines to show those. You can see on his leg, right. Those lines that go across. I want to make some of those we put impressions of them with the red. I want to put some more impressions along with the green and keep them a little different. Now this there's a dark area here. Moving forward. Again. Kinda like a bell-shape. Aching back of that leg. Look good. Dark. This is dark in shadow. This back piece here. I'm going to try to curl that up a little bit. Again, this is dark. Underneath the butt is really dark. So let's make sure that this is, we're going to definitely go up there with some, some really dark blue. Now. Play around with the green. Go down the tail where it get on either side of these colors, so we're not losing them completely. And then pull the bottom of the tail. We're still going to be going over that with some blue. So you have to remember that then. I think this is a light green here, but I think it would be nice to have like a little bit of this going on. Like a fan shooting out like that. Then I just crossed over it. I like that. Now let's look up here. I'm going to like the idea of a very small green shadow coming up there around his back. What? They add some here as well. Just pulling, pulling, pulling, pulling, pulling. It's giving him forum. I hope, I hope yours is taking form. Some dashes along. I liked that splatter that's there. I don't want to completely lose it. But I also want to take some of this green in here a little bit in these areas. So I'm going to have a lot of time just enough to pass and be like, oh yeah. Look at your own pictures, see where it needs it. Going to put some green and some areas in these little boxes strike created. Like this box is going to be honest. I think I've said that a few times. Pull some a little bit through here. This is definitely be darker. Now, I'm looking at the shadows. We've got a pretty dark shadow back here, right? But I am texturing it. I'm not. We still have these highlights that are running through it. I will put some bigger chunks. Just being very careful, Careful, careful, careful. I'm going to create it without losing. Alright, I'm going to put grids here, some grids here. Again. I really want to pull some of these down, pull some lines here. And here. This needs to be a lot darker. This needs to be quite a bit darker. This front of this leg. I'm going to run this like this almost align. Don't want it to be a perfect line though. I needed to curve a little bit diagonal lines to there's this darker. And this is gonna go up here. This is darker as well. Some more darkness, darkness, darkness. And again, that's, you know, this from saying is like. We're just looking at our picture, evaluating it and trying to figure out, I really want that year to pop. Sorry, need to have some really dark areas behind it. There's like a dark area here on the top. Then I know we put red here and the stripe, I kinda felt like it was too much. So I'm going to try to go over it with green if we doesn't make it quite so striking already. Okay? Alright, alright, alright. And then here, let's go down here and here, and here and here. Drop that. And I want to make this a little bit into, okay, I think he needs there's some has that highlight, right? So I need to make this darker is highlight. So I wanted to preserve that. Now let's take a look at the ears. He's in. So a little bit of a weird place, so don't be mad at him, just give him some time and some space. There's amazing this flat edge here to make these lines go down. You do to do, to do. I'm going to draw his mouth that I'm afraid of women lose this line. Two. Then. This is a shadow right here, right? We've talked about this quite a few times. This is a shadow. So I want to keep some of these other colors in here. So I'm just sort of grading it, crossing it completely. Going up or along this I still preserving a little bit of a white circle around everything. Okay? Okay. Okay. And then under Let's go under here and then around here and up this part of his trunk. Do you want to bring some of these lines dark dark green? Not all of them. Some of them tried to look at your painting and see what it needs. Then I'm going to take the screen to the top of the trunk, running on either side of some of these lines. Then I'm going to hear underside pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull. This needs to be dark on this underside. As you can see, there's a shadow or these wrinkles are. Alright, I'm gonna make a little bit of green on the tip of this ear. And down there. This is a darker area. So I need to figure out how to make this round preserve some of the stuff. I want to put some lines here, Einstein's lines, lines I sides, and then some lines here like this. And then lines here, my deadlines. Okay. Few in this ear. I think that there needs to be some there. Here. Maybe some hair. Look like dots rather than like lines. Then here. Put some up here, or here, or here. So those are just babies. Then maybe some more here. I'm just going to twist and pull. Okay, Interesting. That's an interesting colors. I'm going to, again darken a little bit of this. But a little bit, I think it just needed a little bit more. Little bit more. So now let's go to the ground. So I'm going to bring some green in here. What would you do? The shadow will be in here as well. Don't forget. That'll be the blue and maybe some other black to haven't figured out. Still trying to figure out what he needs for that portion. Now going to take in and do some of these plants. And I like to make them very Daddy. Daddy. Is that the right term? I don't know. I like to use the marks that we're using for the mark-making around down here. I'm just gonna make the front of this leg. Is that as light or those some plants could be either at this point. Random, random is the key to this part. The main focus of this is the elephant anyway. So if it turns out there's something you're not like a 100% in love with on the ground, you're okay. I mean, come on. You. People are going to be very busy staring at this elephant. They are not gonna be like, oh, look at the ground. It shouldn't be like this. Only you're going to think that and I bet you, you're going to notice when you look at it again, there were some little tiny piece of it and you're like, oh, I like that and you're like, wait, I think about it. Another week or two, you'll look at it. You'd be like, I'm not, It's amazing. Amazing. Sometimes you need to, again, just dotting these grasses. If you, sometimes you just need to step away from your painting, which is also why we're doing it in layers. So if you don't like it for some reason at 1, let it sit a day, come back, we'll talk about it and look at it again. Maybe you'll be like, Oh, I love it. Or if you're like, oh, I know why I don't like it, then you'll know how you should fix it. Because I think that's part of it, right. Like sometimes you don't know why you're not like loving something and you just need to sit with it awhile and think about it. Now, I'm going to take this black sponge again. I'm gonna put a little bit of this thaler green on it. I'm going to go into some of the areas here on the back. It doesn't seem to be going well. Alright, and then I want to put some of these dots, like literally I don't know who I'm seeing these dots. So concentrated sometimes when I water it down, it's not water it down too much. Put some more water. It's like I want to fit but watery. Know why that seems to be a problem. Okay. Alright. I think we've got a better handle on it now. Really thick, right? Watery side. It's really watery. It's almost like half that's sitting heavy on the paper. I tried to dry it off a little bit. Sometimes I really liked that look though. So I like once you give it a minute, it's like, oh, it's okay. It just needed to figure itself out. So I'm going to run some of it underneath this trunk. Heavy, watering, heavy. I'm going to lift some of it. So little bit of it and see. Actually came up pretty well. Just don't want it to like, I'm afraid it will bleed into the other colors of it's too wet and then ovulate sitting on top of it. It'll be we'll get muddy and mix itself. Not what we want. Is that with you elephant, some reason I'm flipping the sponge. I don't know why. I will say it's good to mess with your paints before, I haven't used the fallow green a ton. I normally mixed male veins. Haven't done a ton of fan. Yeah. I don't know if it's just thinking, thinking, thinking. Okay. I'm trying the other sponsors to see if maybe the other sponge will work better. The wonder of it. Thinking, thinking. Thank you. Thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. Play around with it. I do like how that green in the back is coming up. Let's put a little bit of green here. Green here. You got to work through this, right where you're like, what is the thing about that that I don't like. Put a little bit of green supposed from there. Okay. Okay. Secretly do next is pickup this kid's brush and put the green on this. I'm going to try to use that in the, in the splatter a little bit. Keep it tiny. Like in that good splatter. Thanks for thanks for doing what I need. Splatter. Appreciate it. I mean. All right. Oh, oh, maybe I should use this brush to do the shadows. I think I will like it better. My word I'm looking for good. Good, good, good. Let me go back through some of us. Do not talking, just spinning the brush around, trying to take up space and these areas that should be shadows. Don't want to run it through the background here. I'm just going back and forth inside. Why I like it. So I'm just doing that. I'm going to put it each of these areas a little bit before we bring in the dark blue and the other things. He's coming together. He is coming together. I hope yours is coming together to write a pause and go for our blue and possibly make some backward that if we need to. 11. Pthalo Blue Layer: Alright, now we're going to do a few more shadows. Starting off with my fan brush and ran it through this Thaler blue. Where I'm going to try to do is just go a little bit up here and cross it back through here a little bit again. Put it up here in this shadow here and the shadow a little bit here. Here. I do a tiny bit of blue up here. Tiny bit here. Once top of it here. I'm only using this side of it. Exhibit back in. I'm going to try to use this a little bit here and then cross it through here. And these shadows darken them around this eye. Down here. Trying to be careful with this blue preserve some of the shadows. Will probably have to mix this blue with some black at some point. Running corner of this brush up out of the center of it. Trying to get these edges. Maybe a little bit here. That's fine. But up here. Now, again, strategic, strategic here. Well, I think a little bit more about the body. I'm going to grab this brush, my good old nylon brush, and I'm going to do this shadow. I'm looking at the picture. So I'm going to try to recreate, Wow, just soaked up all that sailor blue. I'm going to need some more squeezing it down on there. Okay. So now I'm going to brush, I'm going to start at the start at this foot, right? I'm going to try to brush it out straight. Then dabble a bit more. Grab this foot, and then like go like this. Then these fields click on together here. And I'm going to darken that. We go, That's more what I want. Then here, here, here. And I'm gonna go up this little thing here. And up, I'm not going to take this all the way because I like these colors and I want to preserve them. I'm going to try to go between it a little bit like that. It turns out cool. Then bring this back down and connect this. I, pulling some of that color back through. I like that. I'm going to put a little bit in the back here too. Okay. So it's giving me a little bit of time to think through some other things in my head. I'm going to grab the splatter next. I've always just going to keep going. So I'm going to take this blue and dance it through this. This is going to quite a bit of it. I want it to because the water is blue. But I think it's good contrast. Now I am putting it in the white area, but also going over the colors. Girl, I didn't want to appear. I will probably sponge a tiny bit in there too. Now, let's take this blue. Get a little bit more heavy handed with it. Spinning this brush. Spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning. Back here. It'll spin. To go inside of this leg, darken this up quite a bit because this, there's a lot of shadow back here. And then a little bit of that here. Just a little bit on the back there. This is our shadow folks. This is the button that there. I'm going to take the flat brush and go under the tail. This is too wide for the tail. Then here. This is going to go here. He is definitely taken shape. You can definitely tell his forum now. I'm going to go out this way. And then now here, there is a line and I'm also just dotting this up. Trying so hard to preserve those colors. Dancing through here with the blue. It's like man, you want those other colors to come through, but you also need it to be darker. And I'm going to take some blue here. So pretty I like them. Okay. He's gonna make it everyone. He's kinda make it already. Some blue in there. And I'm gonna dance. Dance is a technical term. I'm going to put some of this through here, like this needs to be rounder. Just wanted to take that out a little bit. Maybe not quite that round. Okay. Then this needs to be darker in here. Definitely because that's where bursitis and I'm going to go around here a little bit and give him I was worried about that green a little bit, but I feel like the blue is really kind of balancing that out for us. Who does. This is really soaking up the blue, this brush. I like it. So now I'm gonna go pick him here and here and here. And it gets some glue around these eyes. Lift a little bit up there. Not too much. I need the flat brush here in a minute, but right now I'm just really liking that. A little bit of like This is leaving so much of that nice color for us and I like it. I like it a lot. When we were on such a long layer, like you're not really seeing the fact, I mean, it's just such a late layer. You're not seeing as much. You're not seeing that it's maybe a little bit more patterning because we've got so much other color here. I'm going to M twisting it. But Matt up. Some of this darker. I think this really needs to be darker, even though I like these colors here. Then here, here, here, here, here, here he is. He's turning that Okey-dokey. All righty. There. Alright, now I'm going to pull a flat brush out. Select the rush. No, I'm just kidding. 12. Final Details and Celebrate: Okay. We're on to our details. So the first thing I did this morning was make sure all that my professors, when they sink. And I'm going to try to go by color. I made a list of all the things I need to do to make my elephant the best he could possibly be. They're not super difficult things, but they're all little things. And I think I can do them all in this layer without mixing anything. First, I'm going to take it, you have to evaluate your own picture, right, and see what it needs. One of the things I really felt like, I felt like these grasses under here are missing a little bit of something. So I'm going to try to put some yellow, some gamboge and see how that makes things look. Just see somebody use the number two. I'm just going to try to make dots around these. I think it would add a little bit of visual interests. I feel like they're a little flat. I could use a sponge in here, but I kinda want them to be a little more. I want them to look a little different than that. So I like the idea of using this yellow through here because you can't really see it super well, but it's alright, I have the front layers, but I've got a good idea for what we can do there. Okay. I've drawn a little few lines below through visual interest. I'm going very light. Like I said, trying to be random to yeah, there wasn't very much. Now, I'm going to take a tiny bit of red. The same thing. If I really liked that, a yellow, I think that the red add to it too. Again, this I'm probably going to use even less of the red. I'm not going to draw any lines with the red. I don't think that's personal choice. Not gonna do that. Very, just going to add a few tiny red ones here and there. Don't just want tiny little pops. This is final details, right? I just want a couple of little things here at the end. I don't want too much. I think those look pretty good. I'm going to try not to. That's kinda weird right there and that's alright, That's on my list to take care of that. So that's my yellow dots, red dots. Next color I'm going to look at is orange. So I think that my oranges pretty good. Cadmium red orange. Why I did that in the thing I heard it was like throwing it. It looks orangey. Okay. My defense It's cadmium red though. But anyway, so what I really wanted to, I feel like there's a pretty decent amount of orange in here. I wanted to we've got that hurt there. This I wanted to make sort of a darker heart here. You'd have to kinda look for that. I don't know if you can see that, but there's a little heart right there zooming in. It's right over here. I started just put a little heart right in here. Zoom back out. Again. What's the orange? Although now I feel like I want to take a few dots of it in here. If you didn't hit anything. I don't think you can really tell much about the orange here, but man, this love colors. I love my mike. Just going to do red and orange, yellow. That's cool. Okay. Yeah. I'm just putting that one little hurt in there. Kinda like as a little surprise. Although let me tell you there is a part of me that wants to go through and heart that whole splatter. And if that's what you wanna do to, I'd love to see it all splatter, all hearts beautiful. Okay, next, I need to do a little bit of phthalo green. I want to do two things with it. So first, I'm going to take a little bit of it and to try to put it in here with this blue, probably going to have to put some yellow in there too. Now that I think about it anyway, I wanted to put that here. I wanted to put a little bit darker, just like darken up some of the thaler green that's in the shadow and on the ground. Have a ton of it. Not make it all the darkest, but feel like it needed to pop a little bit more. Then I'm going to take my fun and one of them and I'm going to dip one the sponges in it. Or yeah, you could take the sponge if you needed a color in here or you could use a brush. I think I'm going to take want to take something. I'm going to take that professional button, which again, I'm going to take and put some darker green, not a ton of it, but just some darker green in the spray. I just feel like it's too late. I'd like something a little bit darker. I'm trying to go over those green ones. They already have. Very dark. Beautiful Sarah. Because now is the place where we get crazy, right? And you needed this is fine details, so don't get too crazy, Sara. That's the corner that okay. I kinda like the big square inches but kind of some tinier ones too. That's better. That's better. Let me see. Yeah. I just wanted a little bit of contrast and that's okay. That green one, that green one says to me, contrast that one. Okay, elsewhere they're too close together. Let's see if I can let that guy, Sarah, That's alright. Nice bluish. See if I can pull part of that. That might drive kinda cool. So I'm not too worried. You get worried about things like, you know, I have a feeling. I'm the only one that's going to notice that. That's probably true for that. Okay. I'm not gonna do any more that the next thing I want to do is take a little bit of this fellow green. I feel like maybe this area needs a little bit extra something, but again, I want to preserve this. It's got a little money. So I'm going to do, I think this sponge by blacks buttons, again, assess your own piece. See what it's calling for. I just think that there's too much highlight back here that needs just a little bit less, like something a little bit more behind that shoulder. Smith thought, I'm gonna go with green. I could do blue if I don t think grains enough, I'm gonna go blue. So be prepared for that because that could happen. I think it's enough. I don't want to get crazy and I don't want to like start pulling into the other part of the highlights. Like I'm okay. Next. Like reading my stuff. Read I want a darker red and the spray and you can do that too, by the way. Look at your painting and I took actual notes because I was like, What do we think it needs? Then some of the stuff ended up looking at and going this morning after I'd taken some notes and I was like, you know, I think that's okay. It's wanna do some more red splatter, a little bit of darker red. I just want to more of a brighter pop of color, kinda going where the red is already yet, because I don't want to make them a deck that I did with the green, which is where maybe I took a little bit too much. I think there needs to be some here knowing when to stop. Right. Okay. So I'm just going to do that red and blue, the face in the middle back. So I think with that, I mean, morning Sarah for talking for night, Sarah. Sarah, what are you doing? I'm gonna take this the five-year-old brush again. And what I'm talking about is like these little circles right here. You see this over that go in and the ridge of the eye. And I want to make those a little bit more pronounced. I think they kind of got lost here, but I need to be very careful. So let's see. Going to do that. I'm not doing the whole thing like straight like a I'm just dotting it through because I want it to be a little bit darker. And then right here a little bit tiny bit appearing on his face. I think there was any other shadows that were lost on here. I don't have anything looking looking, looking maybe a little bit of blue here and a little bit of blue here. I think this could use a little bit more. I think I can darken this up a little bit. This shadow Meta. And I might, I'm trying this now, but what I might end up doing is pulling some black into this. I still haven't completely decided yet if this blue is dark enough. I think I think it's dark enough. I'm gonna I'm gonna say that I think it starts next. I have white on here. That makes sense. So now we're going to pull out our bleed proof white. And this is where you really don't want to get crazy. I have done on many paintings, but you also, I mean, like I said, Look at your own work. I sometimes get really wild with bleed proof white. Next thing you know, like, I hope painting is bleed proof white, which I would never, I mean, I like it. I like it. I'm going to put some of this bleed proof white on my flat brush and on my round two. And what I have down here is make the plants, okay. So I like to do this where I go over this shadow part and make some plants like this. Maybe pull it a little bit. Here we go. A little bit of pulling. And then right here, what I'm doing, I'll put a little back here even though I don't really think you didn't see that. I just think that's like, oh, these things in the shadow there now sticking out, we couldn't really see them before, right. Okay. That's weird. And too much and too much lifting that lifting that lifting that sometimes this can be really hard to get off, so just be careful. Sometimes doesn't come off very well. I'm going to try to pull it up and lift it and then take the flat brush because I made a mistake right. Now I'm losing some of that shadow and it's a little opaque maybe. I don't know, it's not as bright. It's not as bright. So I'm taking this back in. All right, I'm happy with that. Eli or elephant. I think that slider as good as faces, good, everything's good. I'm going to sign them wherever you want. I liked back at the back of animals then their back legs. I don't know why. It's just where I generally like to do it. You figure it out. I'm going to use dark blue. So maybe it's just a shadow. I'm going to put my signature. It's like I don't want to like take that away. I liked that plant like that too. I'm going to stick it in. Now. You gotta do what you want to do. But I am going to say in here, almost make it look like a plant. Can make yours more obvious if you like. But I am not going to on this one sometimes I do. So I put mine is sort of like a secret in the corner. And date your painting if you want. I many times I date my paintings so that I know when I completed them and I can be like, hey, that was a year ago like this without growth as an artist. And you know what? I'm going to show you something. So I did this painting for the first time and they came up with these ideas about a year ago. First crack at it. Then look at that. Yeah, I mean, it takes a while to refine things and to figure out how you want things that he got to paint things. A lot of times I painted this at least this week alone, at least six times they figure out how I wanted it to go. And each time it was a little bit different and each time I learned a lot. So don't, don't get overwhelmed or don't think, Hey, like, I'm not good at this isn't whatever. It takes practice, it takes time and you can get there. You just have to be passionate and keep working hard. Now. So my side and let's see, what did I say at the beginning? Doubt that it looks good or you're worried about if it looks like a professional painting. Put a mat on it. Beautiful. I'm sure yours turned out great. Please share yours. And I would love to see all the cool things that you did differently and all the colors that you used. 13. Final Thoughts: We did it. We made it. Congratulations. The end of a painting. What I always like to do is try to focus on the positive. Because as people and as artists, it is really easy to continually tear ourselves apart and look at all the things we did wrong. So you take a look at your painting and figure out three things you really love about your painting. One thing that if you were to do it again, you could approve upon. So I'll go first. I really like all of the highlights and colors I was able to preserve in my shadows. I really like those hearts that are in the spray. I think that I'm out of all the elephant ears I've done this week. This is the best one, so I'm really happy about that. And that's it. The only thing left is for you to give me some feedback and that's what I really need, please. Because there's no way that I am going to become a better artist or a better teacher if I don't know what I'm doing wrong or what it could do better because we're all a work in progress, right? Thanks so much.