Transcripts
1. Introduction to Pulling the Puddle: I'm Chris Carter and I'm your teacher for the class in pulling your puddle. I'm delighted to share with you the very first technique that I was ever taught about 40 years ago when I was an art student. Now I'm a full-time artist and I worked both in abstract and realistic work in watercolor and then Goyal, I traveled the world teaching about color techniques of watercolor and drawing. And today I'm going to share with you that very special technique that I call pulling the puddle, which I have used probably every day since I first learned it. And we're gonna do a very simple project today, which will be fun. This will be a funky little painting of a pair that you can hang up in your house or give as a gift. And you will have so much practice in pulling the petal in this simple project that should only take you an hour to do. And I then encourage you to go about drawing all sorts of very simple things. If you're more advanced, you can get more complicated with your drawings. If not just to dissemble things and have fun, the more fun you have, the more you're going to paint, the more you're going to draw, and the more you're going to master your techniques. So let's get started with pulling the puddle. Thank you for joining me in this class.
2. Materials: I'm going to start off by going over the supplies you'll need. Y'all need paper towel, a piece of paper, watercolor paper. Now I have two here. I use Reeves be FK, printmaking paper. I just like, I would like to feel that I like the way that it absorbs the water color and it holds the color. I also will use Arches, cold pressed watercolor paper. Use of at least a 140 pound. 140 pound is fine. 90 pound is a little bit light. And because we're doing washes, it could ripple on you. So try to stick with a 140 pound. In addition to that, you're going to need a pen or a fine tip marker. I use a Platinum Carbon Inc. Fountain pen filled with carbon ink. Platinum Carbon Inc, because it's permanent and I can lighten watercolor on top of it. You can also use a micron or any kind of fine tip marker that's permanent ink and won't bleed. Really, you only need one brush, maybe a number six. I believe for this project, I also used a larger one and number eight. And I used my little Da Vinci small watercolor travel brush. And that was for the very last section where I painted in the tiny shapes around the border. You can get away with just using one. You'll need a water container. And I like to dab and my paints to begin with. Then I either use this pipette water or I use a water drop or that way. I keep my paints clean and I'm not using a dirty brush to just moisten them. You'll also need a pencil and a strip of paper that's half an inch wide. Or I'm also giving you the option of using a compass. You'll only need four paints, a yellow to red, so you can get away with one red. But depending on what colors you want to choose, if you're using any violence at all, you'll want to cool red. If you're going towards oranges, you're going to want a warm red. So I have an ultramarine blue, which is a warm blue. And that's for my violet. I have, this is an oriole and it's a cool yellow. I have an alizarin, It's a cool red. And cadmium red, which is a warm red. You'll also need some kind of a mixing palette. Really, any kind of mixing palette we'll do. It can be a hard boiled egg container, has great little spot. I did want to mention about the paints. Paints come in either tube paints of different sizes, or they come in campaigns. And these pants are the ones that fit inside of sets like that. What I do is I get empty pans. That's a full pan, that's a half pan. And I squeeze two paints into them and then they dry and I can re moisten them. I like the consistency of two paints better because I travel a lot and I use these little traveled kits. I do need them in pans and that's why I squeeze them into paths. So that's it. You need a paper towel, paper, a water bucket, a brush, pen, a pencil, a strip of paper, paints, and something to mix them up.
3. Drawing Your Border: In this video, I'm going to show you too easy method of marking off your drawing space on your five by seven inch pieces of paper. The first, my preferred method is to use compas. You can set your distance and then I'm using a whole stack, which makes it easy to use this as a guide for what I'm gonna do is I'll have the edge, usually where the point is across there. And I'm very lightly going to run it down the edge. Now the other method is to use a strip that's pre-cut. I have two strips and will determine which size is best. And you can use a regular pencil to mark these off. Just gonna put it along the edge so you don't have to use any measurement. You just have a strip that's consistent. And when you decide the size you want, you can do that on all your papers. This one I think is a little bit too big. It's not going to give us much working space. After testing out a few sizes, I decided that a half inch strip for a half inch border, which is the same as 1.27 centimeters or 13 millimeters, is just about the right size for me and it's probably the right size for you too. So I got a strip half an inch out of a file folder and I'll file folder, it's a little stiffer, which is good, and I carefully lined it up with one edge along the outside. And I draw a light pencil line. Depending on the paper you're using, you can either erase this later or not. I don't erase when I'm using the Reeves PFK printmaking paper because it ruins the surface. When I'm using regular watercolor paper, I use a white eraser and I can erase that. So that's just good to know in the future. It's one of the reasons that I draw directly with ink so that I don't need to erase. So now we're going to do the outline around so that we have a definite area to pull our puddle through. And I don't use ruler because I like it to be a little bit more creative and I'll show you why as we move along. So I'll make a somewhat wobbly line and then in a sense, straighten the line out. But I'm making other little closed shapes, which will be fun to add some accent color into. After. In the next step, I'll be drawing in an object.
4. Drawing the Pear: For this course in pulling the puddle, I'm not going to get hung up on drawing. So I'm going to practice doing just some simple pear shapes to warm up because I'm just gonna go for it on my paper. All right, so I can make some pear shapes. This one doesn't look too much like a pair, so I'll know to avoid that. Here we go. Now you're not going to worry at all about the drawing. This is about pulling the puddle and we're going to end up with a funky fun painting to put on your wall. I'm going to start with the stem. There's my pair of stem. Right now. I'm going to make a pear shape. Now that pair is smack in the middle. Which means that when I pull the puddle, I'm going to have to do it really fast to get around to here before this part dries. So what am I gonna do? I'm going to pretend that I have a bit of a pair shadow. There we go. I like that better. Let's put a highlight. Okay, That's all really easy to do, isn't it? There we go. There is our pair.
5. Mixing the Right Consistency : Before we mix any colors, we have to choose the colors mix. In this case, I'm going to choose an analogous with one complement color scheme. We're going to use yellow, orange, yellow, yellow, green, and violet. Now we're ready to mix up a nice big puddle of paint so that we can pull the puddle and lay a beautiful smooth wash down on our painting of the pair. I use a very limited palette in most cases. And here we have a cool yellow, a warm yellow, one red, cool red, warm blue, and cool blue. And it really doesn't matter what the names of the pigments are. Because as long as you know whether it's warm or cool, within its color family, you are pretty good to go. So these are the colors that I'm going to use. And first, I will mix my violet. And for mixing violet, I use a warm blue and a cool red. I start by dampening the pigments in my palette and letting them sit a little bit so they soften up. Now these pigments, I've squeezed into the half pans from two paints because I like the consistency a little bit better. You can also work with Pan. These are the pans, pan paints that you've purchased already squeezed out into the path. You'll just need to let the water sit a little bit longer to soften the paint so that you don't end up with too much water and not enough pigment. That consistency you're trying for as the consistency of about 2% milk, up to whole milk, half-and-half is going to be too thick. So let's try this out. Okay, this is probably too thick. It's almost okay, but you see it's not really flowing very well. It's very hard to get a puddle. And you can see perhaps that it's already starting to streak on less expensive paint. You'll find that they're even globs that don't dilute. You can start to see streets, okay, the difference between that and the right consistency. Stock still get a nice dark, but see how it's flowing down. You can see it moving. Now if you want it darker, still. See that's going to be nice and dark. But it won't have streaks. At times when it's this thick. When it dries, it will be a little shiny. So that's not what we're going for. We're going for a nice rich color that's still translucent. Can see the puddle adding to the puddle and it just flows down nicely. That's a consistency we're going for. So you make sure that you mix up enough of your color to cover the area that we're going to paint in. So you don't have to stop in the middle of painting or a sexual dry and you'll end up with a streak.
6. Basic Technique: A key to a nice smooth, streak free glaze is mixing enough paint. Now you see I've added a lot of water in here. So that's why I want to make sure that I get mostly pigment out of my pans because I'm already diluting it to make enough. And I'm going to mix a nice rich dark so that I have a lovely contrast between the background and my pair. I'm using cool red and warm blue. I can go a little darker. Notice I'm not adding more water. I'm adding more pigment. Test this out. That looks good to me. I'm ready to go. I'm not going to be mixing anymore paint. I'm only going to work with this puddle that I have. I'll be using a number eight and possibly a number 4 brush to lay in the world only going to work out of this puddle. And I'm moving my painting around so that I can start at one end and move around. I have my board at a bit of a slant. Not a lot of the slant, but that way the water, the pigment is always running down and it doesn't move back up to the area I've already painted. So you want to really add a big puddle to start with. And then you're really just pulling that puddle down and you're not going to want to go back up to the areas you've already painted. You simply are guiding this puddle down. When you need to turn a corner, you turn the paper and keep adding to your puddle. And you see the dark part right along the edge. And see how nice and smooth It's looking above my puddle edge. As long as I keep the edge wet, I'm perfectly fine. It's when the edge starts to dry that you end up with a streak. So you can see why you don't want to have to stop and mix more paint. There are ways to vary the color that I will teach you in another class. One little step at a time, you get to be a master of this or at least fairly proficient, then you can move on to playing with adding color and also graduating it so that it goes from dark to light to dark again without any streaks. See how I'm keeping this all wet while I turn this corner still pulling down. And because it's wet, gravity works in my favor and it's going to go all the way down, see how it's moving. I hope you can see that in the video. You'll definitely see it when you're doing it on your own painting. And you're really the captain of your puddle. I'm going to steer your puddle in the direction you want it to go. Now, just because I'm coming to the edge does not mean that I don't keep adding to the puddle. You'll see what I do when I get to the very end of this, which I am fast approaching. Then I will use the property of a sponge, which is to soak up. I'm going to do what we call wicking up. Right. There's a puddle there. This is where my paper towel comes in handy. I dry off my brush and I carefully without scrubbing the paper, I gently skin the top of my puddle. I don't rub color off and I wake it up until I don't see a problem anymore. And then I let it dry. Look at how beautiful that is. That is a seamless wash. This is a technique that I've used more than any other technique. I know. I propane, I splatter it. I work very dry with dry brush into all kinds of techniques with watercolor. This is the one that I have found most useful in the 40 plus years that I've been painting. You master this and you will have the world at your fingertips. We're going to let that dry completely and then move on to another area.
7. More Puddle Pulling: I'm ready to paint in the yellow, and I've chosen to paint the table part yellow. So it's this little section and this section. Now, I could paint this whole thing and then glaze over it with that. And maybe that's what I'll do just to show you what it's like to do a wash over the top of another wash. So I'll start at this end and work my way around to that end. I've mixed from my yellow, I mixed a bit of my cool yellow and my warm yellow. Once again, I put a nice big puddle. I'm using my number eight round brush. Again after cleaning it. I've also started with clean water, which I'm not dipping my brush into until it's time to clean it. But before I mixed my yellow, I changed my water. That's how I keep my colors nice and clean. I could paint around the shadow, but I'm not going to, I'm going to glaze over the top of it. You're going to get three different approaches to laying the puddle down. In this video. I'm pulling this puddle, see there's the puddle Still. And now it's a pretty big puddle. So I want to creep up. I'm I'm drying my brush off a little bit. Not completely. But I don't want the puddle to bleed into my blue. And once again, when I get to the bottom, I'll wake it up. Hey, not much to work because I've been gently working at along the way. Now I also know that I want this highlight to be yellow. So I'll paint that in. Didn't need much of a puddle to make it reach the whole distance. Once again, I wake it up. Now I'm going to let it dry in this direction because if there is any moisture in here, I don't want it to bleed back up into the other area. So while I'm mixing up my next color, I'll let this dry for mixing my green. You see I'm using a yellow green. I'm going to start with the yellow that I've already mixed. And that way it will be consistent and will work well. So I'm scooping up a bit of this. I want to keep this because I may want a little bit. I know I'll want a little bit to go into these little shapes round the edge. So I want to say that and I'm saving my, my background violet, That's looking a little bit, well, very blue violet now, but that's fine. So mic, I've scooped up some yellow to put into there. And then I'm not going to go with my blue violet to mix into my yellow because there's too much red, it will neutralize it. So I'm going to go directly to my cool blue, which is very, very strong blue. So I don't want to add a lot of it. I want a nice yellow, green. I'm going to mix just a tiny little bit into here. See how it turns green so quickly. I wanted to be a green enough that it's different from my yellow and a little bit more. And you notice that as I make it green, it gets a little darker. Okay, I think that's perfect. I'm going to let that dry a little longer. In the meantime, I'll also mix up my yellow orange. And for my yellow orange, I'll get clean water Just as I use the yellow that I had already mixed to make my green, I'm going to use more of the yellow to make my yellow orange. And I don't need much of it at all. I'll need some for the outside edge on lead, some for here. And then I'm going to use it right, epidemic. And for my yellow, orange, I'll add a bit of warm red to my yellow. And I'm going to go ahead and paint my yellow orange in here. And even though it's a small area, I'm still thinking of pulling the puddle. And again, wake it up. Now we definitely want to make sure that this is dry before we glaze over it. I think it's dry enough now to put the green around, but we'll give it a few minutes because they don't want it to bleed up here. Earlier in this lesson, I mentioned about not leaving something in the center of your shape because it's hard to paint all the way around and meet up again while this is still wet. We haven't had that problem so far. We started here and went over to here. We started here, went to there. We started there, went down, we started there and went down. Now, I'm going to show you how to paint from both sides. Okay, because here to paint my green Perrin, I have to go around this. I have to start it into parts on either side of the stem. And I will end it down here after I've gone around this island out a highlight. Right here we go. And in your picture of a pair or whatever it is that you've drawn. If you don't want to go around, you can just leave the highlight out. I'm going to start dipping into my green. I'm going to start with a bottle and I will go to the small one to go carefully around the stem. And then I'll switch back to my big one. And this is a fairly diluted wash because I wanted it to be nice and bright and light. So it's a little thinner. I have to be a bit more careful than I did with the violet. Violet was a thicker wash. I'm nearing the area. It's kind of like a stream. It's going to go around the island. So do you see how I have to puddles now? So two petals that I have to keep with this puddle. And this puddle. And I'm gonna go back, oops, see, this is losing its puddle, so I have to add more heat the puddle going. And I'll bring this down and around and then meet up. So now it's one bottle again, it's still wet over here. Did you see that? I kept the puddle going on both sides. And then what do we do? We wake up. And you can see how it's all one green. And another class. I'll show you how to add darks and other colors into this pair. But the idea is for you to really learn how to light a consistent even wash, see and I'm not really touching the paper when I wake up. All right. We're going to let that dry. And then I'm going to throw in the shadow. I think it's dry enough to add my glaze over here, glaze wash in this case it's a glaze because I'm doing the wash over the top of another color. So let's see how it goes. Once again, I'm only going to dip into this puddle. I'm not going to dip into my water. And I think I'll start here this time. Now this is really important too. Not scrub hard against the paper or you will be scrubbing at the yellow underneath it. You want to just lightly pull the puddle across the paper. Don't forget to keep your puddle puddle. Often. People just won't have enough of a puddle. And I think that another layer, I want to keep it tip this way. And another layer onto my stem. I think I can add a little bit more yellow. Another layer of the yellow on my highlight, just to brighten it up a bit. And the last step of painting, we'll add color to the little shapes around the outside.
8. Painting in the Border: And now for the last step, I'm going to add color, the same color I've been using, the yellow, the green, the orange, and the blue violet to the little shapes around the outside. And for that, I'm going to use a very small brush. I'm going to use one of my travel brushes. This is a DA vinci travel brush and it's really wonderful. It's a Kolinsky brush. So that really keeps a nice point. And depending on what shapes you have and where they are, you can just make your own decisions as to which colors you're going to add. I am pulling the puzzle still, just a very tiny puddle. There we are. There's the completed version of the pair. I've dragged the puddle in all these different shapes, large shapes, medium shapes and small shapes. And see how there are no streaks at all in the paint. That's a fun way to practice pulling a puddle. Because you end up with something delightful that you can frame and put on your wall.
9. Bonus Lesson - Separating or Granulating Pigments: Sometimes you may want to wash that has
variations like this. Sometimes you may
want to wash that doesn't have so many variations. Sometimes you may
not have a choice. What I want to talk about in this lesson is what
happens when you're using a pigment that doesn't
easily give you a smooth, consistent glaze or cover. These are the Derwin
graft paints. What I'm going to do is I
will mix up a bit of paint, and I will paint in one of
these areas. I'll use this. Remember for pulling the puddle, you want to make your puddle in your palette to start with and make sure
that you have enough. And I'll start over here. Now, remember the logistics. I could start here and go around or I could start
here and here and go down, but I have to get all
the way around here. With some pigments,
it might be easier. I could start up here
and move this way or I could start here. That's what I'll do. Now you can see it's
already separating over here into blues and reds. Now, if I wanted it to be a really smooth
consistent glaze, I would not use this paint. But what I want is a
little bit of texture. Notice I'm keeping
the puddle wet. Adding the puddle here
and pulling it down. Okay. I'm also doing this on a paper that I really
don't like at all. It's the Richeson paper, and I find it very difficult
to work on with watercolor, even though it's meant to be
a student grade watercolor. I was running out of my puddle. The paper is more absorbent
than I remembered it. Now that in the drawing is
done with a platinum carbon in fountain pen using a platinum
carbon in cartridge in it. Bumps and I don't have
my paper towel with me. I'm just going to have to
flick it on the floor. I go a little faster
with a smaller brush. But I like to use
the biggest brush I can as a habit so that I don't get so and I'm in control of the brush the brush. Not all brush is the size. Keep a nice point. This is a pretty
inexpensive brush. I don't remember what it is, but it's not a real pricy one and yet it really
holds a n point. Okay. Now, you can see looks
like pottery, doesn't it? I like that, and it
shimmers a little bit. See how the dark
areas are vertical. I'll show you here. I wouldn't want them
to be vertical here. I'm going to make another
part of the paint. And I'm going to show you that depending on what
direction you move, the result will be different. I know that sounds logical. It is logical, but it's
a decision you have to make prior to
starting your wash. What you're doing
is you're guiding the direction of the
graphite particles. I encourage you to experiment with different
kinds of paint. You couldn't possibly
get that effect if you were painting with any of
these van go watercolors. These van go watercolors
are fabulous. But if you want something
to look like pottery, you'd have to work really, really hard to get that. If you were using a pigment that didn't have the graphite in it or that didn't
separate like this. Can you can you
see this vertical, and you can see that
this is not so vertical, and you saw me drag
the graphite along.
10. Examples of Sketches using the Puddle Pulling Technique: Sometimes I get bored with the same way of looking things and never get bored with life or what I'm doing in life. But I do get bored with the way I'm seeing. I decided that I would reverse things. The banana of course was yellow and this ten at this pattern on it. So I just flip flop them. And then I put a design. It was a shadow that I put within the shadow. And I like doing that so much that I did it again over here. I played with those elements. And here you can see my little trumpet guy. And this time I put the design from the tin onto the trumpet and you can see that I made this a little bit brassiere. You're like the trumpet. Fountain pens is something else I'm a total freak about. So you have part of my fountain pen and some trumpet parts. These are the keys. Here is one of my squiggle drawings. And a trumpet part and a sphere done in squiggle. This is basically one line. It, it could be three lines, maybe four, but I just squiggle, squiggle, squiggle. I was never patient enough with crosshatching. This is my variation of cross hatching or stippling, where you just slowly build up the values to create the form. And I absolutely love squiggle drawing. You'll be seeing more as I go through other sketchbooks. Okay. This was this was a tea party. I went to a tea party at Renee's. I met her when I did a, a garden walk and get a plan Air Group painting during a garden walk. And I met Renee, who is fabulous and she invites me to tea parties at her ass all the time now. So this was from that and here we have a race. This was done for my son Michael, who's racing these big sailboats. And that was, I believe from a photo that he took. I don't often work from photos, but sometimes I have. And holly hawks, these were also at Renee's, she's beautiful, beautiful garden. This was holly Hawke, also from RNAs. And since you've got a sneak peek at it, I'll show you the next one. Herbs, we have majority basal oregano, licorice planned. Some are savory and lemon verbena. These are all from my garden. And I draw them first in ink and then I lay the water color down on them. Here we have one of my favorite sketches in my sketchbooks. It's renewed cherries, Northern cherries and seedless black grapes. I just, I just love what the colors do, the shape, the design, and the playing of transitions within each shape worked well here, mushrooms, we have tons of these little mushrooms, toadstools that grow in my yard every year. And this is just a selection of them. I draw the cell first and then, well, no, I don't. I draw the cell for sometimes. And then here I really like stepping out of the cell. But you can see I don't want the line across. So sometimes I'll draw something and then I'll plan for it to be extended so I'll leave it open-ended. See here this is overlapping it too. And that wouldn't have been possible if I had drawn the whole cell first. We have doll shoes, more family treasures for some reason we don't have the Dole's, but we found all these little doll shoes and once it didn't have matches in the adequately cleaned out the house. And we also found a series of colored sunglasses. And I believe these were from my son when we went through retraining his brain. When he was younger, during that period of time, he would wear different colored glasses in order to perform different tasks. So this is also a very special sketch for me. An old roll of film. I don't know what's on it, but that was from a camera when I was a kid. And no, there's mystery inside. And a very tiny glass baby bottle. We used to use these when we would find baby rabbits who'd lost their mother. And Every year we would find a few and we would try to feed them using these little bottles and never really worked very well. But we tried anyway, cherries, fruit, oh my goodness, you know, plant's fruit, vegetables. They, they really do. They give you every shape you ever, ever would want and such a variety of color. And then you can just invent and play with the colors. Just, you know, I, I, I go crazy going to a grocery store because I just want to stand there all dan and draw all the patterns of shapes that are piled up. The piles of tomatoes and the piles of zucchini and clusters of grapes. Anyway, I have just come home a trip. This is my backpack, carry on. I've always traveled pretty light and this is my gargoyles right up there. Here we have goggles and a wooden circle stamp. Some of the family treasures, these look like they were welding goggles of some kind. And we have a licorice plant. I love drawing plants. This was one of the plants that I've gotten at a local garden center and planet outside and the hanging baskets. And here we have colored glass. I found in the attic of my parent's home a box that was filled with little glass discs of all different colors. That's what this is again here, this cells. You can see, in this case, I did draw the cells in first and then drew the glass discs inside of them. We have the beginning of my glass inkwell series. The glassy ink wells are another find from the local flea market. There are 12 of these really wonderful thick blue, of blue, very pale blue glass ink wells. So I started another series of a 100 sketches, the ink wells and I played the color scheme game quite a bit with these here we have the analogous with one complement, the dominant being the orange, yellow. And I would draw it in first with fountain pen and ink and then lay the washes down. This is Reeves PFK printmaking paper. Here, few more ink wells with some extra tiny bottles that I've collected over the time. So we have a lily drinking cup holder on this side. You can see on this one that I also allowed for the bottles to be outside of the cell. Same with this. I plan to head. Where in fact, what I may have done is I may have drawn the ink wells first and then drew the cell around them. I did do that on occasion. This looks like I used a dip pen instead of a fountain pen. I love gardening. We have my trumpets again and the little trumpet guy and plants, my p's are starting to grow the little piece. And then I, I think I faked that one to add the piece him because I don't think that they were growing it. But this is again, my cells. I loved playing with the cells because it forced me to really create design elements and I began to understand design a lot more. And here we have another family treasures. Now the family treasures were really wonderful when we cleared out the family home after my mom passed and then after my dad passed, there was so much stuff and my siblings didn't want it. I didn't want it, but they were real treasures from our childhood. So what I did is I started to draw them in my sketchbooks. And that way I can make prints of them. I could share them online with people and the stories are still here. I could probably spend about half an hour telling you stories about all the different elements in here. One I'll mention is this glass lady, which I did keep. I do have the glass lady and she opens up and she's she holds jewelry. I think a rich originally, she was to hold hair. Women would collect their hair and then braided and make amazing florals out of them sometimes for funerals, but sometimes just as decorations. This, this has a lot of history in it. Here we're back to the trumpet parts. We start today with two very odd pieces of family treasures. This is a spiral wire pig metal that sat on my mother's desk and she would put her bills and her letters in the slots over here we have a very creepy doll. This came from the SS New Amsterdam and the 30s and 40s. I know the Egan's had to I don't know how it ended up in our attic, but I found it. And I ask Kathleen if she's still had the two dolls and she said No, that would have been lost to long time ago. And they only had one. So now this scary-looking fellow sits on the staircase in South Portland, Maine, two steps down from, from its mate. Now this was exciting to me that my mother had some odd collections. We tried to get away from her elephant collection, so she started collecting moose, but we kept giving her elephants. And this one, I was intrigued by the fact that the moose might actually step out of the cell. And here we have more of the color scheme game going on. Now this is a family treasure. It was a gift to my mother when she was pregnant with my brother in 1959. And it's this keep it all kind of thing. And more of the glassy wells, more glass ink wells, more glass ink wells. Analogous with one complement I was playing the color scheme game series are fantastic for playing the color scheme game. And really learning about color value and color combinations. Okay, another glass inkwell. And these adults were given to me by Melvin Jamison way back when I was probably 11 years old. And he was kinda my boyfriend at the time. He had a wonderful model train set in the top floor of the Cape, Cape Cod house where he lived. More glass ink wells. And this started another new approach to the series and to just change things out a little bit, I hit the glass inkwell back there. And the last sketch in this sketchbook is the inkwell. Totally hidden. We see just the shadow. So I play around with these things. It's been, I'm learning something along the way. I learned about design. I learn about composition, color, and just playfulness.
11. The Next Step: Now that you've completed your project, the next thing to do is to snap a photo and post it here as a project in the class, I would love to see what you've done. And if you would like some feedback, I'd be happy to give you feedback. It can either be privately or publicly here on the class project site. And then where do you go from here? Well, you take another piece of paper, take out your pen and your paints. You draw something else with closed shapes. Mix up some paint, whatever colors you like to the right consistency, of course. And then you just go ahead and pull the puddle and you make one after another of fabulous little paintings that you can hang on your wall, you can share with friends, you can make cards out of them. It's just such a great way to improve your drawing, to improve your painting, to learn about color. And the more you pull the puddle better you're going to get. And the quicker you'll understand so many of the other techniques that I'll be posting for you, these little many classes are just great to take a snippet of something, learn at a little piece of the time, master it, and move on to the next thing. So I hope to see you again. I'm Chris Carter and see you back in the next class. Thanks for joining me.
Chris Carter, artist, illustrator and explorer
