Painting With Water-Based Media: Acrylic, Watercolor & Gouache

1. Class Preview: Welcome to painting with water-based media, acrylic, watercolor and gouache. I'm Nina wise. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to work with water-based media, including acrylics or watercolors, gouache and water-based colored pencils will see how these mediums differ from each other, discovered their unique properties, and learn to use them in exciting new ways. I've been painting and drawing since I was 11 and haven't stopped since now. I'm based in Chicago, Illinois and teach out of my studio. But I also teach at colleges and art leaves around the country and traveled to Europe with students each summer. I'm a professional fine artists, like paintings and drawings are in galleries and corporate collections throughout the US. We'll start you out with some basics that you need to know about water-based media in general, I'll show you why gouache is one of my favorite mediums with its versatility and velvety finish, you'll see how to use watercolor to achieve a nuanced and delicate look. Then we use watercolor pencils to create a beautiful landscape. And finally, I'll show you how to work with a limited palette of six colors plus white acrylic paint to make lively and rich works of art. Alright, let's get started. 2. Introduction: I'm so excited that you've chosen to begin painting. And I'm here to make it as easy and fulfilling as possible by giving you information and taking obstacles out of your way. So in this lesson, I'm going to give you a quick introduction to the various media. I'm going to help you set up your workspace to maximize success. We'll go through some basic color theory. A little bit about me. Throughout my career, I've used many different mediums. I began as an oil painter, I transitioned into pastel work. I did colored pencils. I've worked with acrylic and watercolor. And I want to tell you that you don't have to choose just one medium as your specialty. As a student, you should feel free to experiment and learn about all the different media available to you. So the types of media we're going to use in this class, our watercolor, colored pencils, gouache paint, watercolor paint, and acrylic paint. Remember, you don't have to pick just one. So let me talk to you about what's behind the mediums and how they differ from each other. We'll start with the acrylic paint. So in general, when you have a paint medium, you have three elements. You have a binder, pigment, and filler. And what really differentiates water-based media from each other is the binder. So water-based media comes under the umbrella of tempera or in Italian to tamper. You use tempera when you were in grade school, it was that dry pigment, the stuff you added water to pigment. We have pigmented acrylic, but the binder is a polymer, and that makes the acrylic shiny. Then we have the watercolor. The watercolor, again, water-based medium, pigment. Your binder is a little bit of gum arabic. And the pigment is milled a little bit finer because we want transparency. Then with your gouache. Again, pigment, the filler really differentiates the gouache. It's a white chalk which aids to the opacity. So whereas watercolor can be used and is generally used transparently, the gouache is used opaque layer and again, a little bit of gum arabic. And over here, lastly are my watercolor colored pencils, which are marvelous things because it's a drawing tool that also acts like a painting medium because we can hit the colored pencils with water and create washes, or we can use them as line. So if you think about the use of water-based paint in history, the very first paintings that we know of were cave paintings. The pigments were things generally found in a cave. We had the rock, we had carbon from the fire. We had white suit from the fire. And how do we get the paint on the wall? We mix it with water. We can also talk about early frescoes, Persian miniatures, and illuminated manuscripts, rather than showing you all samples. This would be a great time to take a look in the class materials. Well, I'm gonna give you a list for you to research, look at some fabulous examples and you'll be able to see as far back again as the cave paintings and frescoes. We've all been using water-based paints. Okay, so remember I talked about removing obstacles to your painting practice. One of the big ones is your work area. Let's talk about arranging your workspace. So are you left-handed or right-handed? We could use the word ergonomic here. I've had students who are left-handed put their palates on their right side and vice versa. I've had students put their palates all the way back there, so they had to kinda jog over and then jog back. So you want to make things easy for yourself? I'm right-handed here on my palette, my brushes, my water source, my paints, my reference, everything is within easy reach. Sometimes an obstacle can be hair in your eyes. So I'm going to put mine up. Okay. So in talking about arranging your studio space, we need to talk about how you're actually going to paint on your canvas. I keep mine prop up as opposed to completely flat. When your canvas is completely flat, you might run into a foreshortening problem, which is when the image appears to be condensed. This way I can see my work and I don't get any distortion. But if I'm working bigger than eight by ten, I might go over to my easel and work vertically that way I get no distortion. However, if you're working with watercolor, unless you like the dripping effect, you do not want to work vertical because the water will follow gravity and drip all over it. So I've got it prepped up just a little bit. You'll surely have something in your studio that you can tuck underneath the canvas and work with it that way. Alright, let's talk about palettes. I know it's a very romantic to want to stand there with that classical round palette with your thumb through the hole. And you can use that when you're painting outside because it's a long way to the ground, but I don't have to hold my palette in the studio. My needs are a little different. What I want is adequate mixing room. I want wells for my paint. I have additional mixing area in the cover and I use the cover when I'm done with my studio work, I'm going to missed the paint covered up and I'm all ready to go for the next day. And that is a big bonus if you can find a space in your home to set up your studio and not have to take it down at the end of each night, then you have no excuse when you wake up the next morning, you're ready to go. Let's talk about brushes. You'll notice that I have a variety of brushes and a number of brushes. And we have some basic differences that I would love to explain to you. You'll notice I have short handled brushes. I have long handled brushes. I have what's known as a flat brush. It's a variety of a bright is a shorter one. A flat is a longer one. I like to use the brights more control. The round comes to a point which is very, very useful. I like to use short handled brushes for control. I like to use longer handled brushes for more gesture. These are synthetic brushes. You do not have to use bristle brushes. These are softer. They don't leave streaks. They're easily cleavable and a little more economical. So we don't mind that I have a number of brushes because I don't want to pick a brush and have to continually clean it. Typically, I will end up with about five or six brushes in one hand and I will paint with the other like this. You don't need this many brushes. We've got a good variety going. Another thing that I would like to talk about is the fact that I'm standing. Why am I not sitting? So I mentioned using long handled brush for gesture. When you sit, you tend to grab your brush and what I like to call the death grip. And you use a very small gesture when you stand, you tend to move your hand from your shoulder and you get the gesture of your entire arm. You can also stand back from your work and see things. So it just gives me more variety and more gesture. And you could sit down if you get tired. But for work, I always stand for talking about painting. We need to talk about basic color theory. You'll notice I only have seven tubes of paint here. You may be wondering why. Let me explain. There are three primary colors in paint pigment, red, yellow, blue. However, I have a warm and a cool of blue, of yellow. I've read with these six colors plus white, I can mix absolutely everything. However, if I tried to make a violet using my warm red and my cool blue, I would probably get mud as many of you may have experienced. Let me explain about warm and cool colors. If you look at a color wheel, you'll notice there's a portion in the color wheel that appears to be moving into light. And we call those the warm colors. Those ranged from about read through yellow. Then we have a range of colors on the color wheel that we call cool colors. They appear to be moving into shadow. Those are somewhat smaller range. They move from about blue-violet through maybe blue-green. We have some swing colors, what I call relative or swing colors that can be made to look either warm or cool. But for our purposes, what I want you to see, if I take the cap off of my paint tubes and you can look at them together. You'll notice one appears to have a little blue in it. You might even say it's darker. This is your cool red. It's the quinacridone. The crimson or the ultramarine, excuse me, the Alizarin crimson. And your warm is going to be your cad, red. So we have a recipe to mix your secondaries from your primaries, which warm and which cool. And I will have those all listed out for you so that you can accurately mix your secondaries. So if you look at the color wheel, what you're going to notice is that in-between the red and the yellow, we have guess what? Orange. And in-between the yellow. And the blue, we have the green. And in-between. The blue and the red is your violet. Those are your secondaries. It's that simple. Then in-between your primaries and secondaries, We have your tertiaries. Red, orange, yellow, orange, blue green, yellow green, blue, violet, red, violet. And there's your color wheel. I can mix absolutely every color here. I can mix my browns. A brown is actually neutralized complements. What are complements? Again, let's look at the color wheel. When you look at a read, if you go directly through the color wheel, you'll see its opposite is a green. If you've ever stared at something red for too long, say thirty-seconds, look away, you see green. What's happened is the cones in your eye have gotten fatigue. To relieve that fatigue. You see the complement they complete each other. They neutralize each other. So when we mix from red to green through the center of the color wheel, if you could picture a big N for neutral, those are your browns. We don't always want to mix a brown. Sometimes we just want to double a red. We mix a little green. So in this way, I've mixed Brown's, neutrals, secondaries, tertiaries, and I change the value. So I have white. So the pure colors are called Spectrum value colors. There they are. We can also say these colors are intense or saturated to D saturate a color. I want to change the value, I'm going to add white. You'll also notice I don't have black here. Because we're painting with color. We don't use black. Black is the absence of color. How do I make a dark In pigment? Color is reductive and you've probably experienced this when you were in elementary school. What happened? When you mix too much paint together? You got mud. So the more color you put in, the less ability the light has to come out. So those darks, those blackish colors are just layered primaries. So if you can see it in your still-life, in your landscape, it isn't black, It's a color including your shadows. So with my seven tubes of paint, I can mix absolutely any color I want. The exception, however, will be when we get to our colored pencils, because we don't physically mix the colored pencils together. We layer them. We actually need a bigger set with different colors that reduce the chromatic intensity. Again, that means colors that already have white mixed into them. Alright, so we're ready. Let's put together your studio. Remember, it's really beneficial to try and find a place where you don't have to clean up every single time. Okay, so let's gather up your paint and get ready to go. In our next lesson, we are going to begin painting in something called 3. Gouache: This lesson is about wash. You're probably thinking gouache. That's a funny word to say. So GRU a CHA. It is the water-based medium that is most like tempera. It's got a binder that's a little bit of gum arabic, and it will feel most familiar to what you might have used in elementary school. It feels most like the tempera medium. I love using gouache. It dries, velvety, you get a very subtle, deep color. It's one of my favorite mediums because of that velvety texture, it doesn't reflect light, it absorbs it, which lends to that velvety texture. So in this lesson, we're going to work with preparing a board to paint with gouache. We're going to talk about how to achieve an even and flat surface for a more graphic look with the gouache. And we're also going to create a variety of textures using thinner line work and a technique called scumbling. So again, gouache is like a more sophisticated temperature. It will give you deeper colors. You can layer with it because it is used opaque layer. The white chalk filler is what allows the gouache to be used opaque layer. And again, there is a binder in it that is not in your school grade, tempera paint, That's the gum arabic. It is water-soluble and typically used for opaque coverage in earlier stages, it can be thinned down with water to be used as a wash. But you have to be careful with the gouache because if you put down a layer and you kinda what I call scrub back and forth with your brush. The work surface will not seal and you'll bring up those other layers resulting in mud. So remember that gouache is always water permeable. That means as you're working with it, you have to watch your brushstrokes. And when you want to frame your beautiful finished project, you have to protect it. You'd want to put it under glass or under plexi to avoid on a no throwing a cup of coffee on it. You can paint with gouache on paper. I am using bored because if your paper isn't thick enough, it will ripple soon as you start hitting that board, excuse me, that paper with water, it will ripple. We're going to talk about how to prepare this board for using gouache on it with Jess. So the first thing that we really need to talk about is getting the board this size. So you may purchase a board that is typically, say 18 by 24. You're going to need to cut it. I've chosen a thicker board to avoid that ripple and has a wonderful surface. It's very satisfying to paint on, but it's a little tough to cut. So we're going to talk about that. What's a really, really important is that you are using a nice heavy utility blade, not a thin exacto knife. Blade will wobble and you won't get a straight cut. So the secret is patients, you must cut using a metal ruler and very slowly repeat your line. I like to get down on the floor because I can get all of my weight into both the board, the ruler, and repeat that cut several times. Don't get impatient and rip, you'll get a jagged edge. So if you want to get a nice clean edge, ruler, weight, fresh blade, nice heavy utility blade. And now we're going to hit the board with some Jess. So let me explain what Jericho is to you. So this is my naked board. If I just paint on this directly with the gouache, the board is going to soak in the water in my paint will feel really stiff. So the gesso is used to create a barrier that helps the paint adhere and not to the board but to the Jess. Oh, so it's a barrier between your paint and the board. So I have a small jar of Jeff. So here, you do not need to mix this with water. The consistency is absolutely perfect the way it is. I have a dedicated, larger, flat Gesso brush. This does not have to be a very expensive brush, but it's important that it's bigger and flatter and that the bristles aren't really stiff because we don't want to be leaving really big marks on the board. And the way to avoid leaving those big marks is two in one layer because I'm going to do too in one layer to go in one direction. Just keep loading up your brush. You can see when I run out it gets a little scumbling. There's that word again, we also have a trick to keep this board from warping as soon as you wet one side, it wants to start curling up. So when I'm done with this, I'm going to make a sloppy wet x on the backside of my board. Okay? So I'm going to smooth this out and going in all one direction. That's fabulous. And I am going to make a wet x on the back of the board. So here's my water bucket. X marks the spot and this will keep IT or sort of counteract its natural inclination to warp and then I have to let it dry. Okay, So I've switched boards on U to show you a perfectly dry, smooth board on which I've done a second layer. Now I have some students who like to use a perfectly smooth board. So they might do a layer and then sand and then do a second layer. But really the trick to getting it reasonably smooth as just going in one direction as I did second layer, other direction. Here's my board, perfectly flat. I'm ready to go. We're going to start painting some swatches k. The trick to laying out flat, beautiful, consistent color is, as I say, you want your gouache to flow off your brush like mayonnaise on a hot summer day. Okay. So that means I'm always fussing with the water. I'm not going to paint directly out of the tube. As you see, I'm going to start mixing to swatch colors that are going to end up looking a little bit like this. Okay, so we have warm swatch with cool brushstroke over it. We need contrast, Otherwise you can't see what we're doing. So we have warm, cool, cool, warm, dark, light, and light, dark. And then we have some complimentary line work. The line work has to be opaque and you want your swatch opaque as well. So let's start mixing. So as I said, we always want to use a little bit of water. I've squeezed out my palette so that I can pull the paint and not contaminate the major part of the blob. And I'm using a warm cad yellow and some red. Another trick is a Mr. I have two Misters here. This is my tried and true. Traveled everywhere with me, Mr. And it is just a used clean, emptied hairspray bottle. You can also buy a nice, perfectly clean Mr. in the art store that looks a lot like this. Okay. And that's just a really good way of getting some water happening on your palette without having to continually dip your brush. Another trick is you've got to use enough paint. If you don't use enough paint, your coverage will be not opaque and not consistent. So it's not just getting the paint on the board, it's how you get the paint on the board. Mixing is really important. I want the mixing to happen on my palette, not on my board. You've got to watch out for surprises, what I call surprises on your brush. So kinda try and clean up those edges a little bit. And I'm going to hit the board. The fewer strokes the better. But while it's still wet, I can work into it. Just going to start laying that paint down, see how it flows so nicely. Now, you'll notice I'm doing long strokes and I can also try and hit my edges with a nice long stroke this way that cleans up that edge. Another thing that helps with opacity is mixing a tiny bit of white into your paint. Even if I don't want a lighter value, the white is just more of that chalk filler that aids in the opacity so I could hit it with a little bit of that. So here is my warmish red, orange swatch, and I'm going to rinse my brush off. The great thing about water-based media is cleanup is really easy. And it also means that I can keep my brush pretty clean pretty easily than a nice big bucket of water going on here. And now I'm going to mix a cool color for my cool swatch. So let's start with primary blue or excuse me, ultramarine blue, a little bit of water. And let's make this a bit of a blue violet. So now I'm going for my cool red, that's the Alizarin. And you know what, in this one, I will show you the white because violet tends to be super dark, so little bit of white. And we bring that value up. And I don't have enough pain happening here. I'm going to take a little more mixed, mixed mix, a little more blue, little more white. I think we're good. There's that beautiful velvet equality. We're talking about little more water. So because it's a water-based media, the minute you start squeezing it out, it wants to start drying. And that is the, again, always fussing with the water. So here we go with some nice even strokes. And again, make sure you have enough paint. And we get a nice even coverage there. And what's really important about keeping your colors clean is waiting for the paint to dry before you go over it. So you want to work wet into dry. Otherwise, you will get your mud. That's it. I'm going to give this a moment to dry. It's water-based ink, will dry super quickly. And then I can work on the line, work over it. I can do hatching. You'll see me do some curvilinear work and some scumbling which is using a dryer brush less water. It's almost like the brushes stuttering over the surface and lending you see-through to that other color. But wait for your work to try. Okay, we're going to start doing some line work. I made a humorous want is remember that there are several different ways to create contrast. We're gonna do a warm with a cool work over it, a cool with a warm work. I'm being tricky on these two and then I'm going to do light, dark, and I'm also gonna do complimentary contrasts. So let's start mixing for some line work. We'll do some cool work over this one. Please remember that you want to use enough paint so that the line is opaque. And sometimes I have to fight with my watercolors because watercolor wants to be transparent. When you move to gouache. If you're working with gouache, most of the time you want to be opaque. So I'm always telling them to use more paint. So use more paint. And I'm going to go cool, but also a little bit lighter. Remember that the white really helps aid in opacity. It's also reducing the value a little bit. So we have a light over dark. Now, a lot of students think that if they hold on really tight and really carefully, then we'll make the perfect line. But the truth is, if I'm standing and I can use gesture, if I move my hand faster from here, I'll get a better, more flowing even line. This is a round brush, small, thin with a point. If I press hard, I will splay out. So I want to keep my touch light and moving and I will get a thinner line. This is also a good synthetic brush. You don't want to use. The bristle brushes are the squirrel hair brushes because they do not keep a point. You'll be very frustrated. Alright, so I'm going to make my line keep that hand moving. I can do crosshatching. I can do loose curvilinear work like that. Then I'm going to rinse my brush off. We're going to do a warm light over the violet. Is, the violet is kinda cool. So let's do a warm cad red over this. And we're going to always phosphate the water. It's too sticky right out of the tube. Remember that mayonnaise on a hot summer day, maybe August. And again, thoroughly mixed on the palette. You don't want any surprises on your brush. It's also a good idea not to spread your blob out too big. It is hard to gather your paint up. It makes you look like you actually have less paint to work with then you do. I think I'm gonna go a little bit lighter here. Mixed, mixed mix. You have to enjoy the mixing process. No streaks and we're ready to go again. So I'm gonna do some crosshatching and that can be a little lighter. Let's kill them are white happening in their little lighter value will also again help, aid in the past today. And let's do some curvilinear work over that. Maybe some fancy dots. The gouache will dry a little bit darker. So you may think you have a really light value and as it dries, it gets a bit darker. So you may want to push your colors a little lighter than you originally think. Do a little more with a pink because it's fun. And then we'll move on. Okay, so we've got a light green here, the complement of green. Oh, look, it is pink, but we have light. So let's do a read over the green. Again. I'm pulling my color from the corner. And people often wonder how it is to work with these little tubes. I've done huge paintings with just the little tubes because you do so much mixing and you add white. So they do last a very long time. Also because you're always mixing a little bit of water into them in a little bit of white. Alright, so let's do some work over the light green swatch right here. And I get that cross hatch. You can really see that. See, the faster I move my hand, the smaller I can make those strokes. If you look at early frescoes, it's all of this line work and this hatching. And let's do some fun curvilinear stuff. Fun stuff, I don't know, maybe some dots. So you can see we've got a nice contrast of dark red over the green, cool over the warm light, over the dark. Here I've got a cool blue. The complement of blue is orange, so it's a secondary color. We have to mix a secondary. So we're gonna start with the warm yellow because it's heading towards warm, That's your cad yellow and your warm red. Now, when you're mixing your secondaries, you always want to start with the lighter color and drop the darker color in. It could take a whole tube of yellow to change the red. It only takes a drop of the red to change the yellow. I think we're going to add a little bit of white to this as well, so we don't have dark saturated over dark saturated. Again, I always like to add a little bit of white because it helps with the opacity. A little bit of water. Here we go. So we're, we're doing some hatching. Ooh, nice. This is a little bit more of a yellow, orange. And let's make that a little more orangey. And some fun stuff. No more hatching. Um, you can, once this is dry, continue to layer. I could take this orange and go back in here. Nice. So I love layering and doing the interaction of the color. You can just keep going. Crashes pretty wonderful for that. The one thing we're going to do last is show you what scumbling is. It's a fun word, right? Okay. So scumbling is a dryer brush that sort of stutters its way across your surface so that you can see through to the other colors. Let's do a little bit of scumbling on the green with kind of like a light blue. Where would you use this? Well, you could use this may be in your sky. Maybe one, you want to get an optical mixture of two colors. You'll notice when I'm not doing is mixing colors on the surface, I'm not blending here. All the mixing happens here. You really don't want to be working wet into wet. I also have no blended edges. For the swatches. We're keeping everything kinda flat and graphic. We've got a blue happening here. And I need, as I said, to keep my brush dry so I'm actually going to work with a towel in one hand. It's a bigger brush. I switched back to a bigger brush. And I'm going to start to sort of, you know, it's not dry enough. We're gonna dry that off, put the paint on, and it should start stuttering. There goes. That's it. So you have a texture that lets you see through to the paint underneath creating kind of an optical mixture and that is scumbling. Alright, so now that you have an understanding of the basics, in the next lesson, we'll use what we know to paint a lemon with our gouache. 4. A Lemon in Gouache: Now we're ready to work with our gouache to paint a still-life of a lemon. In this lesson, we'll be creating depth by layering colors. We are going to create a realistic shape by thinking about directional mark-making. We're going to emphasize value over local color. I'm beginning here with a board that has been just so twice and it's got a wash over it. So I've been asking you to work with gouache opaque layer. However, the ground this is called the ground has been used a little bit more washy. I didn't want it to be super thick because I don't want the paint to come back up. So we did a nice thin wash. You'll notice that it is a violet color because I want it to contrast and highlight as we come up to the yellowy lemon. So this is my reference photo. You've got one in your class material. We've got two photos of lemons. We've got one with three and I, today we'll be painting for you the lemon, a section cut in half. So we're gonna get going. The first thing I'm going to do is basically draw with my paint. I have a thin round brush that's got a point on it. And you'll notice that I am not taking a pencil and drawing out my lemon. I tell my students that all the marks that they make become part of the painting, including the marks that you use to draw this out. So I'm not gonna be shy and use a color that I can hide or make mistakes with. I'm going to use a color. I can see if you make a mistake, you can just wash it out with a bigger brush. So there really are no mistakes because we're working in layers. Anything that you want to cover up you can. So I'm going to establish a format. You'll notice that I'm not filling up the space of this board. The board is cut to a random size. But for my composition, I think I want to work in a square. So again, I've mixed up a color that I can actually see. And I don't really care if my lines are straight. I haven't used a ruler and they're not too bad. So it's a very simple composition, but it can be a little deceptive. So I'm going to hold my reference material. Also notice that the photograph is mounted. You can mount the photo on a board piece of cardboard, cut open a carton that keeps it from flopping around. It keeps my fingers actually off the photo. And I am going to begin by just drawing out my lemon. There's my drawing. Again, making corrections is easily done. If I did make a mistake, I would take a fatter brush some water and just kinda scrub it out. It would be gone. What we're going to do to actually paint this lemon is work from thin to thick to thin will be more like a wash. The thick will come over towards the top. And you'll notice that I am not going to use yellow in my underpainting. It is a lemon. Yellow is the local color. It actually takes very little yellow for you to understand that this is a lemon. What's a little bit more important is that I interpret this object as it sits in the light, as it moves from dark to light. And we're going to interpret the darks, the shadows as cools. Remember we talked about warms and cools and the lights. As warm, my lighter value will sit on top. So that whole underpinning will be a little bit more saturated. I'm not trying to make a carbon copy of the photo. I want you to understand it's a lemon sitting in space with light falling across it. But the warm and cool, the dark and light will be more important than hitting this with a whole lot of yellow. In fact, if I did hit this with a ton of yellow, it would be flat. So let's get going. So I'm going to mix up cool violet for my darkest shadows, which are under the lemon. And I'm just gonna kinda lay those in. I don't want to scrub back and forth because that will bring up the previous paint. And you know, as I look at this, I see that I have created a really good educational learning point. I want to correct something. So I don't love the positioning of my lemon. I can see too much negative space. So I'm going to make a correction in a slightly darker color so I can see my new lines. And remember that with the gouache, because we're layering and it's opaque. Corrections that you make will just get eaten up by your painting and no one will ever know. You. And I know that I am making this lemon a little bit bigger, so it sort of overlaps a little bit more. And you can see the new red lines of my new piece. No problem. And there we go. So now I have a bigger lemon wedge. Okay. So I've mixed violet for my shadow areas, my darkest ones that sit underneath. Okay, remember these are kinda washy. And then I am going actually into the lemon. Remember I'm using a bigger, I like to use the word splotchy brush. It's a little blue chair. And I think I'll use just a straight-up blue for some of the darker areas of shadow. Remember, we're going to just kinda like flood those on. Now, when you look at shadows, you'll notice that they don't end geometrically. They sort of move into each other. So I don't have a harsh edge. I am looking for areas of dark and light and contrast. So the darker shadows sit behind the lemon kinda in there. And now I'm going to move to maybe like a warm blue for my next area of shadow. See how different that is. There's the cool, there's the warm. And that's kinda like my interim area of value. Kinda flood that on there. And if I see a similar value elsewhere, I can kinda flood that on as well, sort of in here as well. So I'm not using a small brush. I'm not being real detailed, not being real exact. What I'm doing is building form with color. And you'll notice I haven't used any yellow yet. So those are my shadowy colors. I want to move to some interim values. I'm gonna go back to that red. Cleaning your brush was as simple as swish, swish, swish. I'm always using a paper towel to wipe. And here's my interim value. Kind of get a little bit and they're still haven't used yellow, I think from my lightest value, I'll mix a secondary orange. Remember I want to start with the yellow, the lighter one, drop a little bit of that red into their member, keeping it pretty watery and we're gonna kinda flood that in. So I'm always looking at my reference. And where else should that go? How about here? Little bit there. Alright, now, I haven't used any local color yet. Remember that local color is the overall color. Let's have some fun with the background and the foreground. That is a place to have fun. What do you think? How about a green? Let's flood some green. And so again, I'm starting with my lighter color, which is yellow. And let's use a little bit of that warm blue, make a nice green. I'm going to mix a little bit of white in here as well. If your palate seems to get too crowded, you can clean it off. I can do that yet, It's really important that you use enough paint to come right up to the edge of your object. Don't leave like a halo around it because you're afraid to smack into it. So I would almost rather kinda overlap than Mrs. spot. So here's my background. And then I'm going to choose a color for the foreground. I think I'm gonna go with the warm red with a little bit of white in it. So we want the foreground to advance, warm colors advance, and we want the background to recede. And we'll do that by making it a very light value. If your palate starts to dry up and you want to reuse a color you can. That's when I'm going to use my Mr missed it down. Also, your paints might start getting a little hard and crunchy. To avoid that, you just hit them with a little bit of mist. It's important to find a Mr. that really miss not like globs that way you can control what's coming out of there. So let's do the pinky red for the foreground. I'm going to flood that on. So you'll notice that I haven't really been using any opaque colors so far. The lemons are built with washes of darks and lights, keeping it light. And what you see is a lemon niche painting. The form is there. They're not the right color. We're gonna get to that, but we need to let this dry because it's water-based, it's going to dry pretty quickly. If you have access to the outside, you can pop it into the sun. You could certainly also use a hairdryer, or you could just go have a cup of coffee and come back, come on back. So that's it. I'm going to let this dry for a minute. Okay, now that my first washy layer has dried, I'm going to continue painting some things to keep in mind. I'm going to use thicker paint. I'm going to use my strokes directionally so I can catch the movement of this lemon, make it look round. I am going to keep some of the cool shadows, but I need to warm it up a little bit. I'm going to start mixing a little bit of white into my colors and let that underpainting show through. So I am going to switch brushes. You'll notice that I put down my big round splotchy round one and I've picked up some smaller flats. So I'm going to work with those. I'm going to start using some more opaque paint and working on the layers, not scrubbing, not bringing up the previous layer. And eventually we'll get to some fun line work that goes on top. Okay, so as you can see, I have begun to use thicker paint. I'm moving my paint in the direction of the lemon. And I can continue to make changes because remember you can go over the gouache. Again. You don't want to scrub back and forth. What I want to change right now is the contrast of the lemon to the foreground. I need to do a little bit lighter and maybe we can actually get some scumbling going on here. So I'm going to change the value and see how simple it is to do a layer and change in this case the value. Then you can see the lemon much better. Now because we can keep layering up with the gouache. How far you want to take this towards. Realism is entirely up to you. You can continue working with the color till you start approaching local color. What I'm gonna do now is push values. Values are pretty important to make this thing look lively and round. But I've also switched to a thinner brush. So I'm going to do a little bit of line work now, which is really fun. Remember we talked about that thinner brush keeping up on the point and keeping the keeping the paint opaque. And I'm going to just sort of maybe clarify some edges. I don't want to completely outline that will flatten my object. I can even kinda hatch in some marks. Those are my darkest marks where the shadows are. And that helps to set the lemon down on the table there. Again, clarifying an edge that works. And I'm going to mix up some lighter paint. One fun thing about the lemon is texture. Texture can be done with darks and lights or with your mark making. So in this case we have a stippling that happens in the lemon. So I'm going to mix up a lighter yellow for the lighter areas of the lemon. And try and go for that lemony texture. And you see how beautifully the white and the lighter values wanna sit on top. Okay, So I'm going to put in a couple of more marks. You can go as far as you want with the detail. Remember that is really up to you. One thing you do want to keep in mind though, is that wash doesn't really lend itself to blending on the support. That's why I have sort of like a broken brushstroke that allows you to begin. Mixing visually. Knowing when to stop is also really important. I'm going to do that and we're going to talk about clean up. Clean up with water is really easy, but you do want to take care of your investment, which is your brushes. So what I like to do is get most of the paint off in the water. Maybe wipe my brushes down and then just go to the sink and use some regular old soap and water. But what's really important is that you do not leave them face down in your water source overnight. Or really for any length of time, you're going to lose those beautiful points and your flats, your brights, we'll start splaying out. So once you've cleaned them, I like to re-form the point. And then we're going to store the brush just like that, so it's ready and fresh for us to go next time. And that is my lemon in gouache water-based paint. 5. Watercolor: Alright, now let's talk about watercolor. This is probably the medium you most identify with water-based media. Many people have the perception that watercolor can be really easy, but actually a good watercolor can have its challenges. And the reason it's challenging is because watercolor is transparent. So when we work in opaque mediums so we can cover up things, we can make corrections. However, when you want to work with watercolor, mistakes become really obvious. What you put down is what you get, but we're going to learn to work with it so it isn't frustrating. Alright? So some of the things we're going to talk about today are selecting the best brush for the job. We are going to work on a custom surface by stretching paper on a drawing board using tape, will also work with a watercolor block. We'll explore a variety of brushstrokes to understand the different behaviors of the medium wet into wet, wet into dry. We'll play with those a little bit. So in general, watercolor differs from all of our other mediums because the pigment in watercolor is mil to be suspended finer, and use transparent light. Also, the watercolor doesn't seal. So if you want to squish back and forth, you're going to bring up previous layers. So the kind of brush stroke is very important. The layers will show through again because it's transparent. The watercolor, you can again, as I was saying, you could do it on a stretched paper, you could do it on a water block. We'll talk about when to use each. And again, remember that watercolor differs from other mediums because of its transparency, we have to preserve the lights. In other mediums. We might work from saturated to light or dark to light. But in the watercolor, we can put lights in on top. We have to preserve the lights. So my advice to you with watercolors, as with many of the other mediums. By the best watercolors you can. I know that it's really tempting to use something that's really pretty and colorful. You might find this in your local five and dime or drugstore. I would ask you not to buy your art supplies in the drugstore. And the reason is that they're inexpensive because they lack pigment. So we're not going to use the watercolors in the pan. There are some better quality ones. My preference is to use tubes of good quality watercolor paint. But the good news is, you don't need that many tubes. We've got a warm and a cool of each primary once again, so six or seven tubes and your gut. Okay, Now let's start talking about your supports. So if you are working bigger than your watercolor block, let's say you want to work on a board, it's going to be really important to keep that paper from rippling. And the way that we do that is we're going to tape it down. However, first, I'm going to teach you a really easy effective way of cutting or making your paper smaller without using a razor or scissors, it's really hard to make a perfectly straight line sometimes with a scissor. So this is a full foolproof way that will also give you a decode edge. So what I'm gonna do is carefully fold my paper in half. And it's all about scoring and breaking down the fibers of your paper. So I've pressed down one way. I'm going to turn it. And now I'm actually going to grab a tool. It's just my painting spatula. And I'm really going to be aggressive in breaking down the edge, breaking down the fibers in the paper. Turn it over one more time. Do it again. This is 140 pound weight, which is a really, really good weight of paper. If you go any heavier, it's gonna be hard to score and rip. It will basically crack on you. So 140 pound weight is really your sweet spot. That's where I am. Okay, Let's give it one more aggressive nudge and we're going to rip. Now when you rip, you want to keep the back end up in the bottom here. And like a nice quick tag and we have almost a perfect RIP. So the quicker you do that rip the straight or it will be the more aggressive you are with scoring, the better it will be. We've got a couple of little things here. It's not going to matter because when I use my tape will create a border. So those little things will be on the border. So the next thing I wanna do before I start messing with my water is cut my gummed paper. So this is brown craft paper then has a gum adhesive on one side. And the reason I want to start messing with it before. Before I start with the water is because it will stick to everything. So let's do this while the surface is still dry and it doesn't have to be exact, it just has to be big enough to cover each side. You can buy the brown paper in craft store or any place that sells watercolors supplies. Again, I'm not being exact. Just making sure it's big enough to cover and it's okay to have overlaps as you go. The other thing I've got here on the table are sponges, watercolors, sponges. One of them I will dedicate to the gummy tape and the other one I will use to smooth paper and I really don't want to mix the two. So I'm going to move these out of the way. And there's a couple of different ways you can wet your paper. If you have a receptacle large enough, you can soak through this paper. You want to use hot water, but not too hot. What can happen is on paper is sized with a chemical. If you soak it for too long into hot water, you break down the sizing. Instead of soaking it. We're going to take a Mr. again, here's my favorite MR. And we're just going to spray both sides of the paper. And we're going to wet it down this way. I'm going to turn it also. There will be a right-sided on the wrong side to your watercolor paper. The right side has a little bit more texture. Again, that's your cold press. You can see that the minute I wet one side it wants to curl the other way, but if I went both sides, it isn't. So in wedding it I'm breaking the fibers down just enough so that when it dries, it'll kinda curl back up and be tight as a drum. And when you paint on it, it will not ripple. Now, to wet my strips little different process. Little bit of water on your sponge. Not too much. And I'm just going to take that down the strip of paper. You don't want it soaking wet. You just want to kind of tacky. And I'm just going to lay that down. It's kind of a fun process. And if I felt like my paper was buckling a little bit, you can take your other sponge or Clean sponge and kind of pass it over the paper. And now all we have to let it dry and it will tighten right up. Your other option for your support is watercolor block. And these are a little bit easier to use and that obviously you don't have to stretch the paper. They're portable, but they tend to be limited in size. Again, if I thought I wanted to work bigger, I have the option of making a custom size paid or stretching. Alright, now here's the trick to these. First of all, you want to remove the black piece and what you want to look for is a notch. So if you can see I have a little interruption in the gummed edge. That is where I want to take a sharp but not too sharp object. This is a palette knife. You could use a butter knife, don't use a razor blade. You might end up actually cutting your pages. And I'm just going to gently run that along the edge. Again, you must start at your notch. If you don't know the notch secret, you're going to have trouble doing this. But once you know, it's pretty easy and we're just passing that all the way through and we're going to reveal. And actually now I can just rip. There is my first beautifully stretched ready to go first piece of paper. This is 140 pounds and it's cold press. So what I like to say about remembering Cold Press versus hot press is that cold press has bumps and when you're cold, you get goosebumps. So this paper has goose bumps and you want the bumps because it holds the water, it holds the paint. You can get paper that's even more cold press. But I think then you end up with hills and valleys and you might have trouble getting the paint down into the hills. So I think this is a nice surface to work on, so we are ready to paint. I don't have anything else to this paper. It is perfectly flat. It's not going to rip. Let's not going anywhere. I am ready to go. Okay, Let's talk about techniques for watercolor. And we're going to be dealing with all the different variables. But there's one really important trick that you have to know right away and you're probably already thinking about it. And that is that how do I preserve my whites? Well, sometimes it's easy, you can just paint around things if you want, like a softer edge. But sometimes there are many small areas. There are reflections or highlights that you need to preserve, and it's just too hard to paint around them. So we use something that's called brisket, fun word. And the brisket, it's sort of like your rubber cement that you used to use when you were little. We would paint it on using a very small brush. And then as it dries, we can paint right over it. We don't have to worry about it again. When the painting is finished, you can either use your finger or some special eraser is just to pick that right up. There's also something called a brisket pen, which will give you even finer lines if you want to. And it is really a lifesaver for preserving your whites. We're going to use this when we get to our landscape demo. So think about the brisket. Alright, let's start looking at some of the variables. And the variables are very much about wet paper, dry paper, and the kinds of brushes that you use. What's really important is going to be thinking about a gradient in watercolor because we don't add in white. We can use the gradient to let the white of the paper show through. So let's say we had a sky that we wanted to move from dark to light. That's a good place to use a gradient. So watercolor is all about water. The amount of water on your brush, how much, how much water your brush holds? And also, do you put water on your ground or not? So let's start with a dry gradient. And I'm going to pick a nice cool blue. This is your ultramarine blue. The palate is, again, are warm and cool of each, but look how little paint I have to use. And I get this explosion of color. We don't have to load the brush with pigment the way we did with the gouache. Here, it's really all about the water. So I'm just going to make one stroke from top to bottom and you're going to see this gradient. Nice, huh? Okay, So that was wet into dry. Now I'm going to wet the paper first and you're going to see the somewhat softened effect of the gradient on the wet paper. So I'm going to just wet the paper first. If it was a bigger area, I can actually take my bottle and spray this down. Here is the difference. You'll also notice I'm working flat. If I raise this, this drip here is really going to be a drip and it will flow with the gravity. So you want to work flat for this. And here is my wet into wet gradient. And it's just a much softer, more delicate, misty or kind of a field. We have a lot of options. These are separate strokes. Let's talk about edges. We can do a wet paper with wet into wet That's going to mix and get real splotchy. Splotchy is not a word, but I think it works very well here. So let's wet the paper and we're going to work wet into wet with wet edges. So this is when you want that gradual mixing. You don't need a hard edge. We'll stick with the blue again. Very little pigment goes a long way. Now you can leave the watercolors in your palette. You don't even have to miss them. You can just close them up and then re-wet them the next day and you're good to go. So here is a nice splotchy color, very spooky. Let's move now to a read and see what happens to that edge as we start mixing. And we get surprises too, because what you're going to notice is that the pigment follows the water. So if I had like sort of blobs of water and they start bleeding into each other. Another way I can work this is a wet edge bleed I'm going to do to dry ones, but almost purposefully mix the two. So I get that very gradual merging. Look what's happening here, still happening. So as the water flows, the pigment flows with it. And you could take advantage of that in your paintings. So I've got red on my brush. Let's continue with the read. The papers dry. Look how different that acts. Kinda stays where I put it. But I can do an overlap and get that wet edge going. And we're getting that little bit of overlap happening. And it merges very nicely, but it's very different than the wet into wet. The next thing I'm going to show you is, let's say you want to be precise. You want a hard edge. How do I do that? You've got to work. Wet, wet, hard edge, don't mix. So you want to have a little control over your brush. I'm going to stick with the blue. Let's get a little more pigment on there. And we're going to do that hard edge. Okay, here we go. So I was saying it's all about loading up your brush. You need to load up your brush didn't have enough paint there. So I'm gonna get a little more paint here, a little more water. Better. And now we're gonna go for hard edge five to be a little more careful about my stroke. And we're just going to butt right up to that but not mingle. Hopefully. There we go. We got a little mingling happening. Let's talk about a few other ways we can use the watercolor. I have some swatches here. And when you buy your watercolor paints, you need to pay attention to not just the color, but other properties that can get a little complicated. We're not going to deal with them too much, but there are two major things that you need to watch for. I am showing you a paint here that has a staining quality. And so what that means is, in general, when you work with watercolor, you can lift. And lifting means I've put too much pigment down. I can take either a sponge or a paper towel and I can actually remove that color, but this color which is labeled on the tube, staining will not lift and it is a little more saturated and we can get beautiful effects with it. You have to decide if you want that or not. The other option would be a granulating color. Got a color here that is a shadow, violet. And you're going to want to read the tube or do some research about which colors are granulating or not. This is not the effect you want. You will be disappointed, but it gives you a little bit of a texture, a little bit of a bumpiness, and it's a nice effect if that's what you want. So we have staining which doesn't lift. We have granulating which gives a texture. These swatches show the layering and the transparency with something we've already talked about and that is neutralizing complements. So a swatch of violet with a large stroke of yellow in this area of transparency, you can see it's dulled, the violet. Same thing with red and green. If you look at this area here, we've got a dull red and orange and primary blue. Complimentary neutralization. Same thing, but the effects of the transparencies can be absolutely beautiful. You have to learn to control them. And one thing that will help you do that is always having a swatch sheet by you. So you can say, oh yeah, that's what that color looks like. Here's what the color looks like on top of that, watercolors can create beautiful effects. You'll get a better result if you do some experimentation before you hit the main event, our main event is going to be coming up quite soon as we work on a full landscape in watercolor, you can see a finished one behind me. We'll also learn how to use the first-cut to preserve the whites of the colon. 6. A Watercolor Landscape: Now you're ready to get started with a watercolor painting. We're going to start you out with landscape. So in this lesson, you will learn how to create atmosphere with washes. We will successfully mask out these clouds with frisk gets so they stay nice and white and fluffy will work on getting the edge that you want as we move into some of these harder shapes out here in the foliage. So the first thing that we want to think about is our reference photo. I've mounted a portion of the photo that I've cropped off onto a board. And what I'm going to do is very lightly sketch this out. I've used a hard pencil, it's a five h. And the reason I use such a hard lead is because I wanted to deposit as little graphite as possible. Heavy graphite will show through. Sometimes you can erase it, sometimes you can't, you don't want the graphite to bleed into your painting. Okay, so I've got this already sketched out and we are ready to go. I am going to work with the frisk at first. So this is also water-soluble, so I don't really need to switch my brushes as long as I get it into the water right away, I'm good. So I'm going to mask out my clouds that I've drawn out here. I'm starting with the top because I'm going to start painting on the bottom so they will not interfere. You'll notice it is a different color, which is great. So I know where I've been and I don't have to load it up too much. It's going to dry just fine. Remember that we will peel it off later using an eraser. It just rubs write-off. That's it. I've worked with my brisket. We're going to start working on the water down here. And as we talked about in our color swatches, I'm going to wet the paper first because I want the water to bleed from dark to light and be a little bit atmospheric. So I'm going to wet my paper down with some my bigger brush. And I'm going to then load the brush up with some paint. If you look closely in the water, you'll see that it is both warm and cool, darker towards the bottom and a little bit pinkish as we get up towards the top. So I'm going to start with a blue. And I don't want to do just a straight up primary blue. I'm going to put a little bit of the Alizarin crimson, which is your cool red. And remember that with the watercolors, It's not so much about loading the brush up with paint, controlling the amount of water on your brush. So it's much darker towards the bottom. And that's where I'm going to start now with watercolor. Remember that you can always make it darker. It's a little bit harder to make it lighter. So it's going to be easier to darken the area than to lighten it then to go too dark, too quickly can't make it lighter. So I've done a wash from bottom to top and I'm going to continue to darken the bottom. And I'm going to move into some pinks as well. And I'm going to switch my brush. I'm going to move away from that really large one. I've switched to a just like a medium flat brush. And I'm going to introduce some of this alizarin know in any other medium to make my pink, I'd be mixing widened. But remember, the white is our paper. So if I want a pinky wash, I'm just going very lightly with it. And that's working out really nicely down here on the bottom. And as I work, my brisket is drying. I also want to get the streaky movement of the water. So I'm going to add in some blue towards the bottom. I'm working with my cool blue. That's my warm once I'm doing some work with the cool blue. And again, you can see how building up the darks is really effective. A lot of landscapes you'll notice are weighted on the bottom. So this dark water is going to work wonderfully for us now I am working wet into wet still, which is nice because it's really flowing. And I'm turning my brush and using flats and sides. And I would want to wait for this to dry before I continue with it. So now I can move into other areas and you really have to plan what areas you're working into because I don't want my water bleeding into my land masses. A good thing to hang your hat on in terms of where you are is to establish darks and larger areas. So I am going to continue working and mixing some other colors. So as I continue working on the painting, remember that I can make my darks darker, but once I put them down, I can't make them lighter. So you need to approach your darks very cautiously. You can do some lifting, but once it's dry, it is there. So I've got two different fluids. Remember I have my cool blue, my ultramarine, and my warm blue, which is the cyan or civilian. So as I was in the water as working with the cool blue and then as I switch into the grass which is really warm, I switched to my warm blue. So remember that this whole painting doesn't get accomplished with one brush. You need to switch brushes. So for a larger flatter area, larger flatter brush, smaller areas, I might switch to a round brush. So think about not just putting the paint on, but how you're putting it on and also your tools. Sometimes with watercolor painting, you have to be patient and let things dry. You can walk away, you can grab a hairdryer. But if you're interested in having an edge to edge hard line, you really have to wait for the colors to drive. So remember if you can't make an area lighter, what you can do to combat it is make another area darker. So by contrast, the darker area will make your lights look lighter. Okay, let's take a look at what I've got so far. We've done the water graded from dark to that sort of lighter pink. I've worked in some details of the landscape, being very careful to build up the dark slowly and our brisket is dry. So we get to have some fun now by putting in some layers for the sky. So I'm not going to go straight up blue in the sky. To me, it looks rather pinkie. So I'm gonna do a very, very, very light layer of blue. So when I say light, I mean, I'm not going to use a lot of paint at all. I'm just keeping it very, very watery. But the fun stuff is I can just ignore those clouds and go right over them and get that very light wash. And I don't have to worry about preserving the whites of my clouds. That work will be done for me. So very light if I feel like I've gotten too much pigment while it's still wet. I can take my wet rag, my wet paper towel, and I can lift. And you can also get some nice effects that way. So the sky is nice and light. And now I want to do a light alizarin crimson wash over that. Remember the alizarin crimson is your cool red. Again, very little pigment on the brush. And we're going to get you a pink sky. So here we go. In a nice pink sky. Now, I can always go back in and fix other areas if I feel like some things are too dark, I'm kinda sunk. But if I feel like things are too light, I can certainly dark in them. Once that color is dry, it's pretty much dry. I can introduce maybe a little bit of line work if I feel like I need to define an edge. So it's really up to you if you want to make it very misty and blobby and running into each other. Or if you want to define edges and do some line work, It's really up to you the degree of realism or detail that you want to go for. I'm waiting for the sky to dry and then we'll have some fun picking up the brisket and revealing our white clouds. Alright, so we put in the sky, we put in some line work. Everything is dry for skits, dry sky is dry. Now comes the fun part, the big reveal. Here we go. We are, yeah, look, it's coming up. So it will kind of give you these little knobby things. You can just brush them away if you don't want to use your hand. Take a clean dry brush, not a wet brush. And you can just whisk those away. Here we go on our next one. And again, it's really just a lot like that rubber cement that you used when you were little. But it's leaving us exactly what we painted on for our clouds. Remember that you can get more detailed with a first-cut pen. But for now, we've got leftover white clouds. So there is my completed watercolor landscape. An important part of your process is going to be stepping back to see what you've done. And I can't wait to see what you've done, but don't forget to take a moment and really look at it. 7. Water Based Colored Pencils: So I always like to say that a good painting is based on a good drawing. The water-based colored pencils marry the two disciplines because we're drawing and redrawing in color. So in this lesson, we're going to teach you to create unity in your work using washes with the colored pencils. We're going to learn how to mix colors without necessarily having to use local color. But instead, we're going to create optical mixtures. We're going to gain control and creativity with our color usage. And another thing I like to say, remember, It's never a one color solution. So we're going to help you to get comfortable with these materials. And the great thing about the colored pencils is that they're easy to use on the fly, on location, on your travels. Okay, So let's just talk about colored pencils. The medium itself is a little bit different from the paint mediums we've been talking about. We've got a gum binder, binding the pigment. There is a clay filler. But what so fabulous about the pencils, the watercolor pencils can be used in two ways. We can hit them with water, creating transparent washes. And we can use them like a regular pencil to create linear drawings and optical mixtures in layers. Remember though, like all of our watercolor medium, with the exception of acrylic, your surface will not seal. It always remains water-soluble. So you're going to want to put your finished drawings under glass or plexiglass. We're going to draw on paper. This is a thicker paper and we'll talk a little bit more about different kinds of paper you can use. It is like watercolor in that we have to preserve our whites. We can't use a white pencil on top to bring up our lights. We have to save them. And because we can't physically mix the colors, we can't mix white end like we would with pain. It's really beneficial if you can, to spring for the biggest set possible. And what that will do for you is it gives you a range of colors with reduced saturations. In other words, colors with white already mixed into them. And what you might want to do when you get your set is take a look at the primaries and secondaries and match those up to your color wheel so that you know, if you layer a primary red and a primary yellow, you're going to create your secondary. Then also take a look at some pencils with a reductive value, meaning it's got white mixed into it as opposed to a saturated color. So here we've got a violet that saturated and a violet with white mixed into them. So the biggest set possible is always advised, I'm gonna just jump right in and start showing you to the major differences in the ways that we can use our colored pencils. I'm going to use the word tonal and linear. So in a tonal usage of the pencil, I'm not showing you any line. It's just a continuous veil of color in a way that's a tonal usage as opposed to and watch I even hold the pencil differently. A linear usage, which we're going to do quite a bit of because I love working linearly as line. Now, here's the magic. Watch. What happens when I hit both the tonal and the linear with water. Just a word about my water source. This is the world's smallest Tupperware container. It's really good for travel. It's seals perfectly and it never leaks. So it's been all over the world with me. Watch when I hit this with water. Wow. So it becomes sort of bright and saturated and the lines completely disappear. But when I hit the linear with water, I don't completely use the lines. And you may often want that kind of effect again, so tonal and linear, hitting it with a wash. The next thing we're going to do is talk about creating secondaries and also neutralizing. So let's talk about orange. You know that orange is a mixture of yellow and red. So we're going to put down a block of yellow here and here. But we're going to treat them. Let's do three swatches and I'll show you three different ways. We're going to treat them differently. So the first swatch, I'm going to hit with water and I'm gonna get that beautiful tonal wash cup, right? That gets, okay. I'm going to hit the second one as well, and I'm going to leave the third one alone. So we're waiting for the first two to dry. I'm going to lightly hatch over the red. And hopefully what begins to happen is you get an optical mixture of the red and yellow creating an orange. Now, on these two swatches, I'm going to do two different things. I'm going to take the red. And again, if it's wet it makes a nice, There's that word again, splotchy line, love that word. And I'm going to hit these two with water. So that's going to effectively mix to an orange. But on this swatch, I'm going to just again hatch the read end and not hit it with water. So three different ways and lots of ways to create a line. This guy is still wet. Look what happens. Hey, you know what? I'm going to dip my pencil in here, it makes it even fatter. Look at that gorgeous fat line. I can make lots of different ways to use the watercolor pencils. They're really versatile. Alright, let's talk about neutralizing. So, you know that compliments are opposite each other on the color wheel, right? And they are used in two different ways. They make each other look brighter. If you put them right next to each other, There's your red and green. So as they cross over, they look brighter. But the way that we're going to use them mostly is neutralizing. Let's put down a swatch of green. I'm going to make two swatches of green. We're going to neutralize them. One, I will hit with water in one. I won't. Actually, again, Let's go for three. I'll show you three different ways. Okay, so we are hitting the first one with water. See how brilliant it gets when you hit it with water, nice and bright. And I will also hit the second one with water, but not the third one. The brush I'm using is a little bit smaller and short handle than the one that I would use for painting. And I like this brush because I travel with it and you don't need a huge brush. You want it to be again, a synthetic, softer bristle. Okay, so now I'm going to neutralize the green with red here. By physically mixing. Now a word about mixing. We talked about color, being reductive in pigment, meaning the more colors you put in, the less light comes out. So although I can hit the two colors with water, I wouldn't do my drawing and then hit the whole thing with water because I guarantee you will end up with mud. So now I've doubled the green and the red and mix them to a neutralized brown in this one, which we hit with water. So we have a tonal field. I'm just going to hatch my red end. And you can see that dullness beginning to happen. So it's not like I've made a new color, I'm neutralizing the green. This could be used when you have the Green Tree way off in the distance. I don't want it to be bright green because it will come forward. I might do avail of red or even pink over it. In this last one, I'm not hitting it with water at all. And you can really see the neutralization. So remember that your neutralized complimentary pairs, there are three, red, green, orange, blue, violet, yellow. And you could play and do those exercises with all of them and just have some fun experiment with dipping your pen, pencil. And another thing to think about is your gesture and your line when I'm on the phone, I doodle and get that risk going. So you can experiment with your mark making as well. We are going to really get into it next and create a landscape. Going to use all of these different techniques, the washes, the line and the mixing to create a colored pencil, watercolor pencil landscape. 8. Water Based Colored Pencil Landscape: Let's get started on our landscape. So in this lesson, we're going to learn how to merge the tunnel work that we did in our swatches. The tonal washes with the linear work. We're going to learn how to build optical color mixtures by layering up lines, again as we did in our swatches. And we're also going to talk about building form with that line by implementing directional mark-making. Before we get started with our drawing, Let's talk a little bit about paper considerations. So I work in a sketchbook that you see behind me. And it's got a little bit of a tooth that's the cold press. I've got to finish drawings here. If you look at the one on my left, you'll see it has somewhat of a speckled appearance. And the one on the right looks a little bit smoother. So if the paper is very cold press it will have those hills and valleys. And the colored pencil doesn't really go down into the valleys and that's what gives it that speckled book. So I actually prefer working with the colors more on the right-hand side, paper. It's a little bit smoother. Let's talk about our drawing. So the first stage is what I've started for you. You'll notice that I'm drawing with red again, it's not a color I want to hide because the drawing becomes part of your entire drawing. Again, if you think you've made a mistake, those marks will just get eaten up by your drawing. So I have gesturally drawn out my composition. Here is my subject matter. It's a beautiful landscape from New Zealand that I've cropped out and I'm ready to go with. What we're gonna do is we're going to start with washes. Remember, we're not treating this like a coloring book that I now have to color in. But we're going to approach it as we build up colors. And a good way to do that is to start with cool colors in the shadows. Before we start, I also want to talk a little bit about my pencils. I think you're going to notice some blank spaces here. I've pulled out a couple of pencils. I've pulled out blacks and grays and browns. So we're going to talk in a little bit about building up darks and why I've pulled out the blacks and grays. So remember that our first layer is going to be washy. So I'm going to lay in colors for shadows. So I'm picking those cool colors, the violet and the blues. Now, as in with the watercolors, we aren't going to be able to put whites on top. So I really have to think about where my lightest values are. I don't think I'm going to have any pure white areas here to keep, but I am going to want some areas to be much lighter, for instance, here in the sky. So I have to lay down far less pigment there, starting with the shadows and looking at directional mark making. I'm going to just start laying in some color here. So my marks are gestural and that they sort of flow with the form of the tree. And I'm going to move my hand around so that I'm looking at all areas of the picture at once. So it's a loose gestural. Remember that when we hit things with water, that color splotches out, There's that word again, that it really does. So I don't need to put down as much color as you might think. And as I move towards the front, in front, I'm going to use a warmer blue for those shadows and change the direction. This is the reflection. So I don't have to put in a ton of color right now. It's popping around here. Let's see. I think I'm gonna go back to my ultramarine blue in the front. We want to weight the color so heavier colors can go in the front. And some of the colors that I pick, maybe a little bit surprising because I'm not grabbing green. Remember we said that we were building up color. Moving my hand in the direction of the landmass and I've got an orangey color under here. And wherever I see some of those lighter colors, I'm going to throw that in. And just keep looking through the picture and throwing those in. The color, then I'm going to use for the water will not be a blue. Remember we want to build the colors up. So I actually am going to make a drawing correction and you can do that at any time. I want to. Leave spaces where my clouds are going to be. That will be the Cloud reflection in the water. It needs to be just a little bit lighter. I did not put that in yet. So moving through the drawing again, here's my bottom, and I've got some darks. The fun part will come when I start hitting this with water. We'll do that in a minute. So now that I have kinda like a first layer of color everywhere, we will make the magic happen. We're going to hit it with water. You'll notice that in some areas I have more than one color in this under wash. And the reason I did that is because I know that those areas are going to be really dark. So to build up the darks, you're just going to layer up primary colors. So we have some blues and reds happening in some areas. Again, I'm using my smaller brush, but I'm still thinking about directional mark making and trying not to do too much mixing. Remember that when you mix more than two colors, you're going to start getting mud. And we don't want the mud, but look how that covers the area. It's getting rid of your white. And it gives you a great base to continue with your line work in areas that I want really, really light values. I'm just going to pull some color from the other areas I didn't actually draw there. Those will be the clouds later on. So it makes very nice base. Also think about that in your drawing. You don't have to complete all areas you can leave some washy are probably the sky won't have a lot of line work and some areas, maybe the areas in front, maybe more detailed. And they will have more line work. As you move through your drawing, you can make decisions about what needs to be dark and heavy, hopefully the things towards the front and what needs to be lighter and cooler. Probably the things in the back of your landscape. For instance, the sky is a very light wash of pink. So when I hit it with water at you can just barely see it. Because remember we can't make the sky lighter later. It's got to remain that way. So there is our very, very light sky. Here are the shadows in the tree. Remember, we want to think about directional mark making. Which way is this tree moving, growing? How does it sit there in space? And as we go back in the landscape, I've used less pencil so that it is less saturated. So somewhat of a lighter touch with those pencils. So the base colors again, or warms and cools. I did cools in the shadows and warms. Later on, if those warms are too warm will cool them off and or neutralize them. So I'm going to just keep adding the water to all of these areas. And an important step, we'll be letting them dry. Remember that if you go over wet areas with line work, that line will get really, really fat. So unless that's the effect you want, you really have to be patient and let the work drive. Similar to watercolor. If I feel like maybe an area got to saturate or is too wet, I can always pick it up a little bit of a paper towel or tissue. So you might notice when you hit your paper with water that it might start to buckle a little bit, but as it dries, it straightens right out and we are done with the water. Remember you don't want to keep hitting it with water. So now we're going to continue to try and create some spatial depth by bringing the front forward warmer and more saturated, keeping the back light. We might think about redrawing edges and line work. A good place to look for shadow and light, ease and edges. As the bushes kinda stack up, you're going to see dark, light, dark, light, warm, cool, warm, cool. So we're going to think about that. And surprisingly, a really good color to build up darks width is going to be a read, especially as you come towards the front of your drawing. And it's not that I want to make my grasses red. It's that it's a great color to create a dark width. Remember I can always make my darks darker just like with the watercolor. Cannot go backwards though. So now we have a large orange hill. So instead of leaving that Hill orange, I'm going to put a almost like a veil of color over it and do the blue. It's neutralizing the orange. And it's going to start referencing the Green Hill. I did not pick green up. And I may never pick the green up in this drawing. We're going to move through the drawing and build up those colors. We have a very pink water. I'm going to, well cool it off a little bit. I've got a sort of a cooler lilac color here. And we're going to cool that water off a little bit. And I'm going to pick up a green, not to make anything green, but it's also a really good color to build up a dark. Remember we build up our darks by layering colors with the colored pencils. You can just keep going with those layers. They will just go right on top of each other. And remember, it's wonderful because it's not a physical mixture of the paint. It's more of an optical mixture of all the different lines and colors. So I'm moving through the drawing, I'm building up darks. And you see I end up with a handful of pencils. You'll also notice that one color isn't isolated to one area. We're integrating the color throughout the drawing by using it in various places. So remember as I move through the drawing, my goal is to create spatial depth. And the way that we're going to do that is by bringing the front into sharper focus of detail. Saturation of color, meaning it's going to be brighter, heavier, darker, pushing the back by letting it stay lighter. So I am almost finished with the drawing. As you can see, what we've done here is build-up areas of dark and light and detail. More in the front. As we go back in the landscape, we've kept things very light. What I think the drawing needs and what's really fun to do is some line work. And I've sharpen my pencil, I'm ready to go. And what I wanna do is just clarify some form with some edges. You don't want a harshly outlined things that will flatten them. But I do think that we need some clarification of edges and line work and that's sort of just re-establishes form that might've gotten a little fuzzy in your drawing. And we can sort of bring that back into focus with some nice contrasting line work. And because this is a drawing, you want to see some line work. So it's not remember we talked about tonal and linear. So the tonal usage, you can see more in the sky. There's no line work. It's very quiet and flat so as the water. But then we get into a lot more detail and action in the front. And I think that I will stop there. And that is our completed color pencil, watercolor. 9. Acrylics: Now we're going to mix things up a bit and work at the easel and exploring acrylics. So in this lesson you're going to learn basic techniques such as layering, scumbling. As they pertain to acrylics. There are some differences and we'll explain that to you. We'll also be looking for optical color mixtures and how to work with the acrylics so you can achieve optimal paint consistency. So let's just talk about acrylics in general and their characteristics. So what really differs acrylics from the other mediums, the other water-based mediums we've been talking about is the binder. So the binder and acrylics is a polymer and the polymer is a plastic. And the great thing about this polymer is as the acrylic dries, it's going to seal. And what that means for us is that we can layer over color and it's not going to mix up the previous layer. It also means that the light is going to react differently off of the surface. So whereas in a gouache you have that flat light in the acrylic, you're going to have more of a shine to it. It does dry a little bit darker than you think it will. And what we're looking for still is most of the time and opaque coverage. Now, it can be diluted. We will work wants you to begin with. But the clue here is that we're not going to dilute it solely with water. We're going to use something which is a GAAC or GAAC. I know it's funny to say it is another polymer additive. If you add too much water to the acrylics, you're sort of losing their ability to adhere and to seal. So you don't have to be scientifically mathematical about it, but really you don't want to go more than half dilute with water and you don't want to just work with water. Make sure you have some of this wonderful GAAC. And as the paint dries, you have a sealed protected surface and you don't have to put it under glass, which people really like. Alright, so let's talk about supports. You can work on a board, but I like to work acrylic on canvas, so we're going to work on Canvas today. These are store-bought canvases. They're already stretched, which is wonderful. But I always recommend to my students that they just saw the canvas. Another, actually two times. When you buy the canvas from the store, it will be just so I don't like the rough surface of the canvas. So I just do it two more times. And let's talk about the paint. Of course, a little bit more. Again, I only have six colors plus white. I've got a warm and cool of each primary plus the white. And as in other mediums, my suggestion would be to buy the best quality that you can. There are student grade acrylic paints in what you're missing in the student grade paint, which you're not paying for is pigment. Pigment is going to give you the color. Pigment is going to give you the coverage. So again, if you can, you're want to buy the best level that you can, but remember it's only seven tubes, so that's where you make up for it. Alright, let's talk about our easel setup here. We want to keep it ergonomic. You are standing. Some things to think about the easel height that I'm painting it. I don't want to be painting down or up. I'm about Nice Reach arm level. You'll notice I'm not standing right on top. I want to get a little bit of gesture and that is a huge benefit to standing, is that my stroke is going to be looser and more gestural. You'll notice I still am not using that wouldn't palette with the whole thumb hole through it. My palette is on the table, flat. Lots of mixing surface. I've actually got the paint in a stay wet palette in that I can lay my paints out, paint, mist, cover, and be ready for the next day. What I don't want to do though, is leave my mixing area dirty. If I do that, the acrylic plastic and the pellet plastic will fuse nicely together. And I will have a heck of a time trying to get that paint up. So I do wipe out the middle of my palette at the end. The paint is all squeezed out and ready to go wherever you will see that as I paint, I'm always again fussing with a little bit of water. It's a little stiff to paint with right out of the tube. Okay. So as you look at my canvases, you'll see that one is violet and one has a beautiful Alizarin crimson ground. So we have a canvas on top of which we put a ground. The reason I do this is so that when I'm painting, I don't have to concentrate on getting rid of the white canvas. It's already gone because I love colors so much. If I have a ground, I'm already reacting to the color. You'll notice one is cool, one is warm. If I have subject matter that is mostly warm, I want to paint it over a cool ground. If I have subject matter that is mostly cool, maybe like a landscape. I want to use it over a warm ground to lay the ground. I'm going to mix a more watery paint so that the coverage is not opaque. You'll see that it is a little bit more transparent. I'm going to brush it on in one direction. It doesn't have to be perfectly even. And remember, you don't want a real thick coverage, you just want a nice, almost like a glaze over your white canvas. I'm going to use a bigger brush for this. If you are the brushstrokes, the better. And again, it's my softer synthetic brushes so they don't leave a lot of stroke marks. So my ground is dry and now I'm going to show you some brushwork as we create some swatches. Then you can see me do some over painting after the swatches are dry. You'll notice that I'm waiting for the paint to dry before I put the next layer on. This will avoid unintended surprises of colors mixing or dragging, or getting muddy where you didn't want them to. So over the violet or cool canvas, I'm going to mix up some warmer swatches. I'm going to do one that's darker and one that's lighter. So you'll notice I've dipped in water and in the GAAC for my consistency. And the trick again is to use enough paint so you can get it to flow. You don't want it to be too thin because I do want an opaque coverage. So let's see what we have here. Nice. The good news about acrylic is that if it is streaky, I can go back in and correct it by doing another layer. But I think that we're good. I think we've got enough pink going on here. So I chose a nice big flat brush. All I'm going to do now for my second swatch is mixed some more white into it. So I can show you some contrasting over painting. And here we go with some lighter colors. It's really important to mix thoroughly, again, on the palate. Get rid of the surprises that lurk at the top of your brush. So you don't get a streaky color when you meant to have a flat one. There we go. I can actually get some more paint happening here. Okay, So while we're letting that dry, I'm going to rinse my brush out and go over to the warm canvas. And to get some contrasting swatches, I am going to mix some cool colors. Let's do a warm blue that is the cyan blue that's over here. And again, I'm using the GAAC. I'm using some water. I'm going to mix a little white. And as with some of your other mediums, a little bit of white does help aid in the 0, the opacity. And just make sure we have enough paint here. So there's nothing worse than thinking you've got enough paint for a swatch and then having to re-mix the color because you didn't. So don't be stingy with your paint. Ok, got all the surprises of my brush. And look how that warm, cool contrast pops. That's nice. That went on pretty easily. Okay, now we're gonna do a lighter swatch as well. So we're changing the value. Paint, water, GAAC. There we go. Let's see how that looks. So remember we have three ways of creating contrast, warm and cool, and value changes and complimentary what we have here are warm and cool contrast. Alright, so I've got my swatches painted out and I'm going to let them dry. Remember that you want to work wet into dry this way you have more control over your colors. You won't get mud and you won't get streaks. Alright, let's mix some paint and do some line work on top of the swatches. I'm going to use two different brushes. I'm going to use. One of my brights and one of my rounds. So the rounds will make that sort of finer lines and the flat, we'll do some flat work. Okay, So remember, we're going for contrast. So first I'm going to mix a green to go over the pink. So I've got my primary blue and my cool yellow, which makes a lovely green. And I am going to put a little bit of white in that as well. It will help aid in the opacity. Remember, you want to use enough paint is got to flow off the brush. So the great thing about standing, as I mentioned, is gesture. So notice that I'm not holding my brush here and leaning and close and working this way, but I'm actually standing back and holding the brush back. So then I can move my whole arm and get that line going. I feel like I didn't mix up enough paint, so I'm going to hit that again. Going to mix up some more paint. We can go over things with the acrylic. It will not bring up the previous layer. So it's a big benefit to the acrylic is that it's seals itself. So let's see if we can't make that line a little bit better with a little bit more paint. And there we go. Yep. Yep, that's working better. Okay, Let's move into a fatter brush. This is my flat, and keep mixing up more paint. I'd say it's better to mix more than less. That way you can control it and get your intended results. So we're mixing, we're putting the Jack in. I've changed the color up a bit. I rather like that color. Let's use it. So we can do some flat work and get some contrast going there. Nice. Over the red swatch. I'm gonna go a little bit cooler. So clean up with your brushes. It's really easy in-between. I'm going to grab a paper towel. You always want to be controlling the water on your brush. You're going to need to wipe it as it comes out of the bucket. You have no surprises. It's really enough to clean them for the next color. That's all I need. Alright, so we're gonna do some cool work over the red. So I think this time I'll go to my cool blue. That's your ultramarine. Always be mindful of mixing in your GAAC. It'll take a little of that green to go a bit blue-green here. And you need to have the patients to really do the mixing well on your palette. You'll also notice that I cleaned the palate in-between. I like to have enough clean room on my palette to really mix and see what I'm doing. Alright, let's do some line work over here. I think this should flow pretty well. Oh yeah, that's nice. Let's try some flat work on that as well. And again, mixing to get rid of the surprises. And you can see that as the paint dries, it will get a little bit darker and you'll be able to judge if it's the opacity that you want. If it's not, you can go for it and reinforce or kinda juice up that color and look up perfectly opaque. That is. Okay. So let's move on. Again, wiping the brush down. So I've got that paper towel in my hand. I'm always wiping and managing the colors. We're going to go for a warm color over the blue. Let's mix up a violet. So remember that violet is going to be your cool blue. Andrew cool red, which is your in Acrylic, a quinacridone. The names will sometimes change as you move from media to media. Here we have a Quinacridone that's like your Alizarin crimson. Let's get some white happening in here. Because that blue swatch is a little bit dark. And I'm rolling the brushes again, getting those surprises off. Also, I don't want to mix my paint with a huge brush even if I'm on a cover, a large area, because you don't want all of your paint as you're trying to mix it to be eaten up by your brush. You know what? I think we could do, a lighter value can hardly see that over the blue. So I will wait for that to dry and mix a lighter color and go over it. But now I'm going to turn to my lighter blue swatch over which I would want a darker color. Actually. Let's do something in the warm tones. Let's do a primary red. That is your cad red. And again, these colors are colors from your color wheel. This is actual primary red, the closest on your color wheel. Let's do some hatching. You know, you're always fussing with the amount of water, the amount of paint, and that's okay. That way you know what you've got. So you see it isn't straight out of the tube. Nice. Covered better, right? And then let's try a little bit of the flat brush work with that. And you'll be able to see when I move on to painting our lemon, where I might want a flat brush and where I might want a round brush. And it's nice to remember that it isn't just gonna be one brush for the entire painting. It's not just about getting paint on the canvas. It's how you put the paint on the canvas. We were gonna go back to our violet, Let's do that. Another thing you might wanna do is missed the paint on your palette so it doesn't dry. I can also missed the blobs of paint in my palette. Again, it's water-based. It's going to start drawing as soon as you squeeze it out. Okay. So we said that that violet was too dark. We couldn't see it over the blue. So we're going to change the value. We're going to give it a lighter value by mixing more white into it. And I think we'll get a better effect. Let's see how that does. Is nice. That's almost like a white, but you can still see the violet happening in there. And let's try some flat brush work with that as well. Yep, we're good. Again, as this dries, if I don't have the opacity that I want, I can go right over it. So let's go ahead and set up your station. Remember, there are certain things that are going to make the painting process much easier for you. For instance, if you're right-handed, let's put your palette on the right hand side. And if you're left-handed, let's put it on the left. We've already talked about getting the easel at the right height, putting your pallet flat, and having all of your materials, your water, your GAAC within easy reach. Alright. 10. A Lemon in Acrylic: So let's create an acrylic painting of a lemon. In this lesson, we are going to work from dark to light, building up the body of the lemon from our dark washed the lightest lights. We're going to learn how to successfully handle those transition areas where the lemon moves from dark to light. To help make this lemon look more realistic and rounded and three-dimensional. We're also going to try to create some spatial depth in the composition by having the foreground advance in the background recede in colors that will allow us to really focus on your main event, which is the lemon. We're going to paint a shape out first with our lines and loosely fill it in with a washy paint layer indicating cools for shadows and warms for light. So first we're going to draw it out with the paint and then we'll move to the wash. Let's do that. Remember that you want to draw with a color that you can see over your ground. Again, don't be afraid to make mistakes with this medium. In particular, we can wash out any mistakes that you make. So let's actually mix up kind of like a lighter blue and sketch out our painting with that. Okay, here we go. So I've got these three lemons here. And I'm going to start with the forward biggest one. And I want to continue to look at the relationships of the lemons to each other. And this is a really good place to think about gesture to get that roundness. And you can always make corrections. Let's bring that body down a little bit. Okay. Going to indicate where some of the cast shadows are. Again, put in the horizon line because that will, let me have a foreground and background and change up those colors. Make a couple of corrections here. I think we're good to go to start painting. So as I start painting, I'm going to switch brushes. So I'm gonna put that tiny little flat one down and pick up like more splotchy round one. And remember, I'm looking for areas of dark and light, so I'm gonna do color changes for those areas. Sometimes squinting at your subject matter is really useful because you can block out details and just see those transitional areas of darks and lights in this lemon. The darkest area is in the middle. Remember, I am not going to yellow local color. Yellow is not enough to describe the darks and lights in this lemon, I will use yellow. Eventually, lemons are yellow and it is a primary color. So I'm going to have to do that. But for now, I'm not going to be terribly worried about the local color or the yellow color of the 11. Okay, So the darkest areas. I said it's kinda through the middle of this lemon. And I'm moving my brush along with the form of the lemon. I'm looking at edges of dark and light. My darkest dark is really here, but my shadows are also pretty dark. Dark shadow under the lemon will attach the lemon to the tabletop. Without those shadows, my lemons would be floating in space. And wherever I think I see that darkest dark, I can use that violet little bit right there too. Okay, so I'm going to switch brushes now I'm going to grab a round brush and use it to loosely fill in washy areas of value, choosing different colors for the different areas of value, but not actually using white at this point, all the colors will remain saturated. So I finished my first layer. It is a washy, loose underpainting in which I've indicated the different areas of shadow and light. Not actually using any light colors, but actually changing colors, trying to follow the form of the lemon so that even though there's no yellow in our lemon, it will still read as a dimensional object. I've thrown in some color in the foreground, the background indicated where the shadows are. So as soon as this is dry, the next thing I'm gonna do is continue with my paint, making it a little more opaque, but using a broken brushstroke and letting some of these colors show through, I'm going to start warming the lemons up. I'm not going to use a real light just yet. I want to work from dark to light. So some areas of the lemons may have several layers. Okay, So we're at the stage where we need to take a look at what I've done here. I've built the lemons up with directional mark-making, warms and cools. But now I want to push the lights and the darks, both in the lemons and in the background. So you'll notice that in this painting, as opposed to the painting behind me, the finished painting of the lemons. I have a dark background and not a light background. So contrast can either be dark against light or light against dark. To make this light against dark, I want to push the light edges of the lemon. I want to bring out some shadows in the lemon. To do that, I'm going to neutralize the yellow with some violet. And remember, they are lemons. Yellow is a primary color. I will have to use some yellow. So let's get to work on that. I think the first thing I'm gonna do is establish some lights on the top edges of the lemons with a flat brush. I'm going to push that and jump a little bit here on this lemon as well, so that we have a nice light against the dark. And there's a couple of other areas where I have those lights as well. So I can push those. I see a couple of more areas. I've also sprayed my palette because the paint will start drawing on your palette. So you want to keep your Mr. Handy. Not a bad idea. I'm always using brush stroke to help create this round lemon. In for this painting, I can use both the warm and the cool yellow depending on where I want to go. And as I said before, remember it's never a one molar solution. Actually, the more yellow I use, the flatter this lemon will become. Because I will lose my shadows. I don't wanna do that. I need to bring the front of the table up a little bit lighter. So I'm going to grab a larger brush and go for a lighter value of I kinda like that, violet, the color. Do that again. I'm going to keep it more towards a warm violet because a warm color will advance. I'm just going to lighten the value a little bit. So I've mixed a warmer violet, more like a red violet. Let's see how that works. You can also do a little bit of dry brush work. Again, there's that scumbling word again, so that not all areas of this foreground need to be the same and perfectly flat and thick. I can sort of, um. Show through to that darker one. You want your foreground to be able to hold up the lemons. So it's got to have those darks underneath and the lights on top will hold it up. Nice. Let's neutralize some yellows and get some more shadows happening through the lemons. And a pickup, like a medium flat. For the neutralization I'm using the cool yellow are the primary yellow mixed into some violet? It makes kinda like just $1, $1 violet, you could say it's almost a bit grayish. And that way I can create some shadows where I need them and it's working nicely. Can eat some more transitional areas. And you really want to squint so you can see where the brightest part of the lemon is. It's not actually up at the top, it's kinda more in through there. So I'm going to dial that back edge just a little bit. Yep. And in my background, it doesn't have to be a flat color. You can work it so you have darker areas against your lighter areas. For contrast. That's a beautiful dark. Here we go. That way. What's in front looks brighter and lighter. Because of the contrast. They don't have to go over the entire background. Just where I want to show contrast from dark to light. We are very close to finishing the painting and wrapping up this lesson. At this point, what I would do is probably grab a smaller brush and put in some highlights and some smaller detail that you can see in the finished painting behind me.