Pulling the Puddle Part Four: Small Shapes

1. Introduction: Welcome to pulling the peddle Part four. I'm Chris Carter. Okay. Part four, I'm going to be showing you how I pull the puddle in smaller areas in a pair painting. We're going to continue our pair series in part four, and then you'll have a nice collection of at least four great pair paintings that you can map, tack onto your wall, frame, whatever you want to do. In part four, I'm going to do another pair painting, and I'm going to create more small sections and show you how I pull the puddle in these smaller areas. When it's all pieced together, it looks like a beautiful stained glass window. 2. Paper: In this lesson, we're going to prepare our paper, and it's really simple. I have three pieces of paper, Rebs BF K paper, print making paper so that I can do three different variations of the drawing and then I'll pick one and I'll paint that 1 ". I've made a template for myself that's 6 " by 9 " it's out of a file folder so that it's thick enough to easily trace. My reason for this is that in part one, two, and three, I did some other pair paintings, and I want this one to be the same size so that I can frame them together. Okay. Do I just put this somewhat in the middle. And then with a pencil, I trace around. And that way, I have a six by nine inch square. I'm not sure if you can see this line because I do it lightly, but you saw what I did. So in the next lesson, we're going to draw in our pairs. Okay. 3. Drawing the Pear Part One: The other three parts of pulling the pedal, I drew an imaginary pair. For this lesson, I'm going to use real pairs. I'm going to use these two beautiful Harry and David rivira pairs. You can use imaginary pairs. That's fine. I just feel like I want to play with these pairs today. I have two because I also want the option of adding half a pair. I think that I'll cut this one. Okay. I half. Now I have these beautiful shapes. I'm going to draw variations of these beautiful pairs. I have two fountain pens. They are platinum carbon ink fountain pens, and one is a fine nib marked with this little green tab, and the other is a medium nib. I'm not quite sure I may switch back and forth. I'm going to start with the medium nib and I'm just going to playfully draw in my pairs to draw the pairs. I'll be using one of my styles of contour drawing. My point in this is to make a lot of small shapes. Not all small shapes because that would be boring and confusing and chaotic. I'm going to make enough small shapes so that you'll see how to do that. I'm going to start with this pair Okay seem to be having some ink flow problems here. Okay. No, I will switch to my other pen. That one may have been running out of. But for this, I don't really care about odd ball scratches because what I want is a variety of shapes anyway. Besides, I always just make do with whatever happens. It often can lead to some fantastic images that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. Now, this is an outline and sometimes a contour includes an outline or Maybe something more like this. What I love about pairs is that they have all these cool funky shapes there. Okay. This is a shadow. And let's see. I'm also going to draw my outline because I want one of these pairs to go off the edge. You can make it as as you want. Okay. I think that I want to put another shape in here because this is pretty much the same shape as that. I'm going to look for the section right in there. I have a lot of shapes. That's one version. There is the hole that I could put in there, but I think that there are enough shapes going on and I'm not going to do that. This is one variation. Let's move on to another variation. 4. Drawing the Pear Part Two: So this time, I'm going to do it very differently. Haven't moved the pairs. Here's another version of a contour. Here's the shadow. In this case, I'm going to put the chopping block in. I left this so that this pair can overlap a little bit because I like that. Okay. Pairs are great because you just can bend them and you don't have to worry about how real they look. Because you're going to look like a pair, no matter what you do. Pairs are very forgiving. This time, I'm going to put the hole from the pallet in, and this is a bit of a pair shadow. Okay, so I have a lot of little pieces there. This because this is going around, even though I don't see it there, I need to connect it, so Okay. That's variation two. And now for the last variation. What I do? I'll make it very geometric. How about that? All right. I'm going to start with this one and I'm going to in this case, I'm drawing just the outside shapes. It's not so much con. Here's the hole. I need some other shapes in this case, so I am going to do the chopping block. So here are my three variations. Well, I'm going to paint them all in, and I'll show you the results at the end. But the one that I'll do for the demo, I think this one because I have all these small areas. I'll choose this one to do the demo for the class. 5. Intro to Bonus Quick Color Wheel: A special treat for you before I go ahead and start painting in the drawing. This special treat is that I have inserted another one of my mini classes into this class. The class that I have inserted is one about making quickie color wheels. The reason for this is that we're going to be playing with more shapes and have more choices of colors to add. I would love for you to have excellent results in your final pair painting of this pulling the pubble series. I've included an abbreviated version of my more extensive color mixing class. The Next two videos will be the quick color wheels. Right after that, we'll get back to our pair painting and you'll have whatever colors you decide to use to paint it in. That's what you'll use. If you know all about color and color wheels and you know exactly the color schemes that you want to use, go ahead, you can skip the next two videos and just move right into painting your pair painting. But if you're not real familiar with mixing colors or choosing colors for your paintings, then I suggest that you go ahead and you watch the next two bonus videos and you make yourself a little color wheel and you limit your palette of colors so that you're sure that your colors are going to look extraordinarily beautiful together. All right. Enjoy the next two bonus videos. 6. Quickie Color Wheels Part One: Okay. Today, I'm going to show you how to make your own color wheel with the limited palette that you choose to use. I suggest that you do this each time you change one of the colors in your limited palette so that you have a reference of the beautiful full color scale that you can create. Okay. I've chosen six pigments, a cool yellow, a warm yellow, a warm red, a cool red, a warm blue, and a cool blue. And on another sheet of paper, I've written down what those pigments are. My cool yellow is an Areli. My warm yellow is a gamboge, My warm red is a rose Tyne. My cool red is a permanent magenta. My warm blue is ultramarine blue, and my cool blue is Joe's blue, which is a thalo blue. First thing I'm going to do is moisten my pigments. These are all two pigments that have been squeezed into full pans. Okay. Now, I have a bucket of water here, and I use the three container, you can use any bucket of water. I have paper towels. What I will now do is shift over to my sheet that I'm going to make my color wheel on. What I want to do is I want to line up my color wheel in the same way that my pigments are. So my cool yellow, warm yellow, warm red, cool red, warm blue, cool blue. I'll just paint in the pure version of each color, washing my brush off very carefully between and wiping it on the paper towel so that I'm sure that it's clean. It doesn't matter which colors you use for your warms and cools as long as you choose from the category of being warm or cool. And I have included a list of those pigments in the notes. Okay. Now, the rose Tyne is a pretty cool red. But it is warmer than the permanent magenta. It's the rose Tyne is not as warm as as academum red would be. Okay. Okay. I just want to show you that you can use any sort of colors. See this permanent magenta leans toward blue. The rose tyrene leads toward yellow, and that's what makes the difference. We're simply going to begin with the cool yellow and working quite quickly around this way then I'll blend these two. Moving around. Blue needed to soak a little bit longer. Okay. And I'm going to blend the yellow into the blue rather than the blue into the yellow because yellow changes so quickly. Okay. If it starts to bleed over that way, you want to wipe it up a little bit. You just want to see what the variety of hues are that you can get with these pigments, and that's pretty amazing, isn't it? Okay. I wake up the extra so that I can see what the colors truly are. There you are. With these six pigments, you can get all of these beautiful colors. Then, of course, you can get neutrals as you mix all three together. But I like to make a color wheel showing the actual pure beautiful hues that you can get as you're working with just six pigments, a warm and cool of each of the primaries. Thanks for watching. This is Chris Carter. Okay. 7. Quickie Color Wheels Part Two: Here's a bit of a bonus lesson. Let's say you're out in the field. You're either doing some urban sketching or your own planar in a field somewhere. You have your travel palette with you, you have your nesting water containers, and you have some scraps of paper. You want to use a limited palette, but you're not really sure. You didn't bring all your extra reference wheels with you and you want to say, I forget what's possible, or I just want to have a reference of what's possible. You probably have spray bottle instead of that. Here we go. Spray. Moisten our paints and decide, I'm going to use my, my gb, cadmium red light, zar crimson, ultrain blue, and Joe's blue. Those are my standards. I'll show you my standards. I'm going to just start. Again, I always start with my yellows at the top. It's the way that I think. I'm going to make that nice and wet so that I can make my way around and wash it off, go into my gamos go into my cad red, and there, again, I'm going to bring the yellow into the red, not the red into the yellow. Okay. The halo is really strong. And then I'll go back into my yellow and bring my yellow around to the green. And I go for information. So I will adjust tweak this. I want to see what kind of violets I get down here too. So I may bring this out a bit. Okay to see what violets I get. That's a very quick out in the field color wheel with a limited palette. There's another step that you might like. Here are your pure colors. What about your neutral colors? Let's do it just a little bit in the reverse and put the cool yellow on that side. The warm yellow on this side. Then I'm going to have the cool red to mix with the cool yellow. That means that I'm really adding a bit of blue into it. Then the warm red. Now, the magic is about to happen to show you a neutralized file. A little bit more. Okay. All right. Watch this. Okay. Reverse those two and look what happens. Doesn't turn into a violet at all. It turns into a brown. Okay. So now I'm working my way over here. What I have here now is my toe and my gamos. Okay. Two very different color wheels from the exact same pigments. This is all neutralized, and this is pure saturation. There will be another mini class that goes into depth, a little bit more depth in mini bytes of why this works the way it does. Just make sure when you want colors that you go according to this arrangement. Okay. Cool yellow, warm yellow. Warm red, cool red. Warm blue, cool blue. Okay. Okay. What I did for this second one is I reversed them. I'll go over this one more time. This is the way that I set up my palette when I'm working. I have my cool yellow, my warm yellow. I have my warm red, my cool red, then I have my warm blue, my cool blue. This quick color wheel was made from this arrangement. In other words, my cool yellow, my warm yellow. My warm red, my cool red. My cool blue, my warm blue. Okay. Now, Over here, I did the reverse. Instead of cool yellow warm yellow, I reversed them and I had cool yellow there, warm yellow there. Instead of warm red cool red, I had cool red warm red. Instead of warm blue cool blue, I had cool blue warm blue. The reason that I got a brown here instead of a purple is because in my warm red, there's a lot of yellow. It's closest to yellow. There's yellow in it, and what happens when you add yellow to purple? You end up neutralizing it. Yellow and purple are complements and yellow will knock out a lot of the purple, you end up with brown. That's getting a little bit deeper than you probably want to right now and that's for another course. Okay. But I had to mention it to plant the seed because really color mixing is quite simple when you understand the science behind it. And the science behind it does not need to be complicated at all. It's about light. It's about the science of light, and that's why we see color in the first place. We live in a black and white world. We only see color because of the way that our eyes interpret light waves. So that's a science lesson and a very quick way to make yourself some fantastic color wheels from a limited palette wherever you are. Okay. 8. Reviewing Technique: A quick review of the pulling the puddle technique. Mix only enough water with your pigment to create a consistency that's about 2% milk. You want it to be able to flow. You don't want it to be too thick and you don't want it to be too thick. It can be thin when you want a really light value. But if you want a good strong color, you want to make sure not to use too much water. I'll do a larger section here, and then I'll go in and show you that it's the same technique in a small section. You want to keep the puddle going. You start at one end. When it's little like this, you have to be careful, but you still want a puddle. Can you see that puddle? And then you keep adding to the puddle and you pull it along. And you work somewhat quickly, but only as fast as you can control your puddle. All edges of the puddle must remain wet or it will dry and you'll get a streak. So keep that puddle going to the end of your shape. You see this puddle still moving around. Now my whole shape is painted in. At the end, you wick up the extra and it helps to work on a bit of a slant. You can tip your paper and I'm not touching the paper. I'm just touching the puddle. I dry off my brush to make it dry so that it can act more like a sponge and I wick it up. Okay. And I'd like to leave just a little bit at the end so that there's some variety of the dark. Then I move on to another area because I want this to dry completely before I paint in the section next to it. I'll do that same technique up here in a smaller area. And I fill it. I drag the puddle. Can you see that I still have a puddle and I keep adding to the puddle. Even though I have plenty of paint there, and I tip my paper because it's just easier to work my hand in the same direction. Notice that at the end, I'll work into the puddle just so that I can get the fine t. Now I wick off. And now I'm wicking up the puddle. Now there's a teeny weeny shape there and a teeny shape there. So I'm going to make each one of those slightly different color. Just a little bit different. Okay. This is a lighter value. So I have added more water in this case to dilute it a little bit and lighten the value. Yeah, I'm still pulling the puddle. I'm not painting with dry strokes of a brush. I'm just moving it around. It's almost like working with clay. The important thing is to let each shape dry before you work in the shape next to it. The same thing will be done over here. I painted that whole section in in one swipe and now I'm going to go in and paint the smaller shape. Dragging the puddle down. Very slowly, I'll work around the whole painting this way. Take your time. Enjoy it, make some beautiful colors and see what you can do. 9. Painting the Pears: Okay. Now that you've had a quick bonus lesson in the colors that you can mix with a very limited palette. We're going to move forward and paint in the small shapes in our last pair painting in the pulling the puddle series. I've chosen the color palette that I went over earlier. I have an Oreo gamboge, a rose Tyne, a permanent magenta, ultramarine blue, and Joe's blue. I am going to be painting this in. I'm not going to be doing a lot of talking. I will be doing the same procedure that I did earlier in the pulling the puddle series. I'm going to be making a puddle, even though it's tiny. Enough puddle that I can pull it through the shape and then I'll be wicking it up. I'll be doing that a lot more rapidly because sometimes the shape is so small that I just put the puddle in and wick it up right away. I'm going to go through painting it. I'm not going to talk about my decisions of lights, darks, colors. I'm simply going to go through the whole process and you'll see the result. I hope that you to follow along, be playful with your color. Think about lights and darks, but don't obsess over it, have a good time and see what you come up with. 10. Conclusion: Congratulations. You've just completed part four of the pulling the puddle series. In part four, we concentrated more on having more shapes and using the same pulling the puddle technique to fill in all the shapes, both the large and small. The results of part four, this painting, this painting, and this painting. Okay. So they make a nice tryptic. They can also be combined with your other paintings. In part one, we made a tiny painting, and then we moved to making larger paintings all of the same size so they can hang together. We did this one and this one and this one and this one and a few more. Okay. So I was able to go through the basic technique of pulling a puddle and then pulling a puddle and making it work from dark to light. And then also pulling a puddle and changing colors while pulling the puddle and finally pulling the puddle in large shapes and small shapes. Along the way you learned some other contour drawing and hopefully you picked up the bug to do a lot more painting. So thank you very much for joining me in these four parts of pulling the puddle, and I look forward to seeing you in future classes. They'll just be little snippets of things like focusing on mixing greens or on special variations of contour drawing or drawing with a pencil, drawing with a fountain pen, maybe a little bit of oil painting. Whatever I come up with, there are always little snippets that are helpful to refer back to when you're taking some of the more enhanced classes that are on my regular website. I am learning a whole lot from making me because it breaks it down into little snippets, and I think that that's beneficial for you and it's beneficial for me. I think it makes my classes stronger classes, and it's easy reference for you to go back, do it again. I can always refer back to a certain class and indicate that that would be a good one to reinforce a technique that I'm presenting in a new class. I'm also going to be doing some classes on bookmaking, so that you can make your own sketchbooks, you can make a sketch book out of grocery bag, you can do all things. You never have an excuse not to sketch and not to paint. Thank you very much for joining me and I look forward to being with you the next time.