Quick & Loose Moody Sunset Watercolor Landscapes: Using Reference Photos

1. Introduction: Hi, Welcome. Hello, Hello, Hello, I am so excited to be painting four sunset landscape pieces from four different reference photos today. These lessons will be kind of short and sweet so that we can keep things simple and as frustration free as possible. We'll get to focus on keeping things fun and loose and kind of maybe taking our own adventure versus being tied to what we see. We'll go over some color choices and we'll see if sometimes we'll have to pivot. So we'll see what happens when we have to change our ways and try something different. We'll play with composition. We'll be adapting to some maybe choices we're going to make within these photos. And I want mostly you just to have fun. I want you to explore. I want you to use these reference photos as a suggestion. A suggestion and an invitation to have fun. We'll go over some ways that we can make landscapes a little more doable, right? So that they're not so overwhelming. When we see these reference photos, we don't get so scared. They're like, oh, don't know what to do? How do I approach this? And we'll make sure that we're having fun. Because I'm a firm believer that watercolor is very, very therapeutic. And I want to share that with you. I want to show you that it can be fun and it can be carefree. And we can just embrace the challenges. We can change our minds if we need to. And we can play with different colors and different ways of doing things. And there are no rules. So I'm hoping that you'll see these reference photos and at least one of them will intrigue you. So grab your paints and let's get started. I'll see you next lesson. 2. Class Description: Welcome back. I just wanted to talk a little bit more about what this class will be about. We are going to take four reference photos and make them ours. We're going to explore, we're going to look at these reference photos and decide what we like, what we want to add, and what we might leave out. What calls to us, what works for us, what doesn't work for us. We'll talk about techniques and how we're going to paint our skies and our foregrounds. We'll talk about how to add our mid ground. And then we'll finish up with some details. And I just want you to remember that they don't have your pot photos, don't have to look like these. They can veer. You don't have to stay on this railroad track of how to do something or how you think you should be doing something. Just because someone is doing it one way. You have the opportunity to explore and create your own journey and follow that path. So by the end of this class, I hope that you'll have four projects. Whether they're my references or other references. You are actually open and free to choose your own if you prefer. But I would love to see you post four projects that you chose. And I'd also love to see the references, so please share. And you can also start a discussion or ask some questions if you have any of those. And I am just really excited to see these all together and to see the techniques that you choose to use or maybe ways that you haven't thought about trying before. Maybe there'll be something new in here that you'll be like, oh, I need to try that way. I have yet to do that. Or it'll be just a reminder that maybe you haven't done it that way. Or just an invitation to practice some things that maybe you haven't been painting lately or maybe that you've been intimidated by. So I am super excited to see what you come up with and I'd love for you to share them in the class project section. There'll be plenty of instructions at the end of how to do so. And I really hope you'll join me. Enjoy, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Materials & Supplies: Let's talk supplies. The first supply, the most important supply ever, ever, ever, is 100% cotton paper. This is Bauhung paper. I also use Arch. The next supply that we'll need with our paper, we'll use some tape. The next supply with that is our plexi glass. You don't need a plexi glass, you can just tape directly onto your board. You can tape onto cardboard. You can tape on anything you like. We do use a little bit of bleed proof white. You don't have to have that. You can also use a white guash. We have a titanium white from M bran here. I do like to use a flat wash. I like to use some sort of round using a flat brush. You'll see me use a dagger. You'll see me using this mop style kind of liner. And you'll also see me using this liner which I dubbed my bird. My bird liner. Okay. Also in addition to this, I always have a soft cloth nearby to wipe and blot off paint. Also, to rest my brushes on, I will have a spray bottle full of water. Any spray bottle will work. I will also have a clean cup of water. This is a handmade one. I also have my palettes in front of me for mixing, So this is one of my mixing palettes. I do not wash them. I keep them dirty like that, so that I get a fun mix of colors. I have another, so that's three clean mixing wells. And then one of the most important ever, ever, ever, ever, is paints. I love to use handmade paints. These are my Masha handmade paints. I will also touch a bit with Steak Stacy's from Steak Kiwi, her handmade paints. And I also use Addison. I do use a lot of different paints and these ones because I feel you can use what you have. Another one I use, I used, and this one, this is for my portable palette. These are American Journey and Da Vinci. If you have any questions in regard to supplies, ease, reach out. Or you can also start a Discussion and Discussions tab. And I'll be happy to help and maybe explain more of what I use. So let's get started. 4. Warm up: Color Swatches: I do typically gravitate towards handmade paints, but I thought I'd share with you this palette. I put together, I filled the half pans with paints from Da Vinci in American Journey. They're just colors that I picked out that I thought would be nice to have in a palette. So if you had something around these colors or if you weren't sure what colors would be helpful in a palette, this is pretty much it. You know, I pick a pretty well rounded, basic color, set here. A warm red, a cool red, some yellow, some blue, some purple, some greens. And at the last one I pick a buff titanium that's tinted with blue. And so that could be really amazing with skies. And I just want you to explore the colors you have, so I won't get caught up in telling you each color is in this palette. But I did want to share with you that you don't always have to use handmade. You don't always have to use commercial use. What you have, use what you like, what you gravitate towards, what makes you happy. The colors you know that excite you. The colors that you happen to know, that you kind of lean towards or that you just feel really warm towards. Right? You want to work with things that make you happy. It's also important to work with, I think, a well rounded palette at times so that you can push your boundaries instead of maybe gravitating towards the same colors all the time. But I think both can be nice. It can be nice to try things that you're very comfortable with or try things that are new, right? Not try things, but use things that you're very comfortable with and then trying stuff that is new to you. And so I just, again, wanted to share this palette with you because I enjoy putting colors together and deciding what would work. So this palette was put together so that I could use it plain air, outside painting, and I would have enough colors to get me through painting a typical landscape that I like. So I hope you find colors you love to. 5. Warm up: Foliage Pracrtice: Okay, so midway through this painting, I decided that I needed to practice these shapes that are in this reference because I wasn't 100% sure that I could paint these at command like that. I'm not usually very good at that. I usually need to practice something before I try it. So I decided to take the smart route, and I'm glad I did. After all this ended up turning into a good little quick little practice for me to just kind of see where I was with this and what I felt was good or not like how Dre by brush there. So I'm just using different brushes. That first brush was a liner and then I switched to around. And now I'm back to another kind of a longer script liner round type brush. And I'm just playing with all these different brushes. I did speed this up because I didn't think you needed to see it step by step. It wasn't necessarily a tutorial on how to do something. It was just showing you that you should practice or maybe maybe offer you different shapes that you could explore. So if you were like, I don't like those either. Maybe I'll treat these different ones. Oh, I'd like the leaf she tried, or I like this other one. And so I just wanted to put these out here in case, as an invitation as well. To, to explore and to see what works for you and what comes easier for you or what comes natural, or maybe there's something you want to try. And so you get your piece of paper out too, and try with your different brushes. So this is around a different brand. And I'm just going through a lot of different brushes to see what feels right, to see what can make shapes. I'm liking what shapes come natural to me. This shape did not come natural to me at all. I've tried a lot of times as you can see. Although honestly, to really get ahold of something, I feel like you probably should at least try 100 times. And I probably didn't try that many times, the more the merrier when practicing and just keep going. Try all the brushes, right? Try the rounds. Try the liners, try the daggers. Try the oval, try the cat tongue. Try the calligraphy brush. Try them all. I really just can't say it enough. You just never know what's going to work for you that day. What's going to feel right, right? Maybe you want something softer and smush here. Maybe you want a wispy look. You can fill your page with grasses. It is an open invitation to do what you like and explore. And now I'm just making loose flowers because I do tend to like loose florals and fog foliage, foliage that's a little on the looser side. And I think that's what turned me not into doing the first ones very well is they were so precise, right? They look like these little duck bills or pointed duck bills and I just couldn't get that how I wanted it. I was comparing to the reference way too much and I couldn't let go of that. So it was hindering me. Right. And they feel like that's what happens a lot of time with tutorials or reference photos. We get so stuck on how we want it to look exactly like what we're seeing. And we just have to accept that it's not going to because we have different skills and different levels. And that's good. That's okay. That makes us unique, right? That makes our work, part of us and part of who we are versus just, you know, copycatting and cookie printing. Cookie printing, I'm not sure if that's a cookie cuttering. Cookie cuttering out different, cookie cutting, different, the same thing that someone else says anyway. But it really is just a time for you to test out your brush. And you know what, You can watch this and if you want to save this section for when you are on the class project that this goes, takes place in, you could actually come back to this and practice at that point. And you'll know it'll be noted in the, in the tutorial. I'll add a little text notes so you'll know that this can go with that. And you don't have, this is not a necessary class, obviously. You can just listen and be like, okay, cool. She wants us to try different shapes. Cool, got it. But you can take it for what it is, take it for what you need it. If you want to practice some shapes, go for it. If it's not in your plans today, that's cool too. So then there's just these leaves. I try, I'm just trying all these different things to see what potentially would and could work for me and what I felt like doing. I really love the idea of silhouettes. First, I was very tied to what they had in the picture, but I have to remind myself that that's not always what works out for me and it's okay. And so this is just paper. I'm just practicing on cotton rag paper. You can use what you have. You could use a lesser expensive paper for this, but on an ideal world, you'd want to use the same kind of paper that you're painting on, which I didn't do. So I am kind of breaking my own little, I won't call it rule, but my own little, you know, thing here by not using the same paper because, you know, your paints and your paints and your brushes and your hand all work different on different kind of papers. So, you know, in hindsight, I really should have used the same paper, but that's okay. It's just practice. It's just for fun. I did switch to another round for these leaves. Just playing with different rounds, different tips. You know, you can use a larger brush and sometimes they have a finer tip, you can use a smaller brush, and sometimes it just has a fat tip that just doesn't do anything for you. Brushes are very so differently that I always tell people just to keep trying and trying and trying all the brushes to see what you can get. So again, this was just practice and just some play and it's odd. I think I ended up with the very last one. I'm like, yep, this is it. These are the ones I'm going to do. So take your pick, take your page of practice and see what works for you, and you can add it to your final project. Or maybe you'll just stick with the original because you like them and the shape is great. So I see you in the next lesson. 6. Class Project 1: Sunset Wheat : Hey, welcome to class project number one. I just showed you a brief collection of the paints I'm using. We'll put that together. And one of the techniques, so if you miss that one, go back there and I will show you what those paints are for this first project. So I'm using a flat brush to wet my paper all over. I have it taped down on all four sides to a plexi glass plate that I like to use. And I am just mixing up colors with a round Tintoretto brush. If you have any questions about those brushes, I can let you know what they are. I was going to say I'll link them, but I'm on the wrong topic for that. What I'm doing, I am just getting color on the paper. I took the reference. As you can see. I'll post it up on here and you'll see what I'm doing. And I'm trying to simplify it with still keeping the suggestions of what's there. Well, I take out the fuzz on my paper, so I'm just getting the yellows in. I'm getting that hint at that peak, at that blue sky, trying to keep that little little sun ball right there. And I'm just picking that up with a wet dry brush and picking up a little more with a dry cloth. And when I say wet dry brush, I just mean a wet brush that's actually not soaking wet. Right. So we're not putting more water onto the paper. We're actually able to pick up what's already on the paper. So it's drier than it normally would be, but not so dry that it is smearing. Right. There's a difference. I'm just adding some orange for the horizon here. And these colors you can use whatever colors you have. That orange is really a bright one. For me, I did mix up two colors from that palette to get that orange. And it's pretty darn bright. But that's okay. We're going to mellow it out. We're going to add to it. We're going to just hope it creates this kind of atmospheric looking thing, right? So I'm also mixing in some browns, some more orange. I decided that was too heavy. I'm just looking at the picture and going back and forth thinking what I can add. What I can take away what it needs and what it doesn't need. And it's, there's less of an instruction. It's more of how you feel, right? And just playing and doing these over and over and over, honestly. The best thing you can do is just do these over and over and over. If I'm going too fast, I do move fast and I'm not even speeding this up. Just go fast. But it frees me and lets me kind of just less focus on the details and just kind of be loose with the colors and let the colors kind of do the work, right? Because this paper is wet. We wet it before. So it's technically, it's wet on wet, right? And so we're letting the paints kind of play with each other and seeing what they can mix. That's why you'll see me going back and forth, back and forth with different colors and trying things again, even if I already tried them. Sometimes you got to try them again. Right? Like I'm messing around with this brown right here, not feeling it, not liking what it's doing. But I try not to give up too soon. Because I can help that evolve on its own. And I can help change it. And see I'm tilting my paper here and that can help move the color and the paint down just a little bit. And even if it's a tiny bit, it's crazy how it does work. It does make a difference, even just those tiny bits. And so I'm just bringing some orange up into that sky, trying to warm the whole thing up, trying to make it work, hoping it works right, because I'm trying to show you, so I'm hoping that it does. So I'm adding some more yellow here, a little bit more concentrated right by that white. So if you have white, you want to add something a little bit darker. Even though yellow is not technically dark, I did make it darker. Sometimes I use my finger like that, I don't love that I do that. But sometimes you can just dull something enough to kind of, you know, I wouldn't say erase it, but could just kind of diffuse it. Diffuse it, that's the word I'm looking for. And so again, back to that white. So when you put something darker around the white, it kind of helps the white pop more, right? So that's why I did that. And I'm just going to keep kind of building on this initial layer here. And, you know, you could let this dry at some point and you could re wet and add more that way. Or you can just keep working as long as your paper is wet, you can keep working on it. If your paper does start drying, you would want to finish drying it. Either make it dry or let it dry. And then you would continue with another layer of water and go from there and just keep adding more. And you can do that as many times as you want. Quite honestly, sometimes it's helpful because you're less likely to get a muddy, muddy scene going. So now here I'm just adding that dark base because in our photo, which, you know, my photo doesn't look like, my picture doesn't look like the photo. And that's okay. It's inspiring you to choose these colors and do what you like with them when you have a reference photo. I'm a strong believer that you don't have to follow that reference. You can let it inspire you and take you where you want. So what I did was when it was still wet, I just suggested those background trees and shrubs and bushes very lightly with just some water down paint. Not too watery though, because you don't want to introduce a bunch of water because then you'll get blooms. But not necessarily a bad thing, right? Blooms can be fantastic in many ways. And so if you don't mind blooms, let them be. If you do then don't use as much water. And if you know enough about blooms, then you'll know this already. So here I am, letting that sunlight come through my stalks of wheat or grass or foliage, whatever you want that to be, really. I with these reference. This is the first one. With the other ones I'm going to show you as well. I'm not a stickler to the exact details of the references. And you can be, if that's what you like, that's what you prefer, that's what you need. Do that for me. I'm taking it as a suggestion. And I'm just going to let my brush do what it wants, and sometimes I'm capable of making really nice little, cute little wheat grass things, and sometimes I'm not. That's okay. It can change from day to day and that's okay. Again, that's okay. I feel like we get so stuck in this thing that once we learn how to do something, we should be able to replicate it every single time. And for me, that's not the case. Often I'll find I can't replicate a thing over and over again. I don't know why different brushes, different different day, different mood. I don't know, the moon, maybe it's a full moon and it just happens to be. This actually does happen to be a full moon right now. Not when I painted this though, so who knows? So I'm just adding these little details. I did switch to a thin, finer liner. This is a script liner I'm using here. So script liners and liners are fantastic tools for any of these fine little things. For me, I'm not handy enough to use a round. I just cannot get those fine details. So for me, a liner is absolutely must. I have many of them and I do have a few favorites, but they change actually. So pick up your other tools and use them and see which one you like the best. You'll also see in another one coming up. You can practice over and over and see what works best for you. You'll see one of those techniques if you want to go back and maybe you skip that one too. There's a techniques video where we just go over and over some strokes to see what brushes work for you, which brushes don't. And hopefully, that will encourage you to go back to your brushes and kind of just give them a play, a play time, right? Exploration. Instead of just letting them sit in the cup and just wasting away. Use those suckers, right? Decide that maybe I do like this brusher, maybe I don't like this brusher, maybe I forever don't want this in my cup anymore. And I just recently did that. I removed 28 extra brushes that I just decided for now I'm not going to use. So I took them out, slimmed down the cups. Put them away for now. Right. It doesn't have to be forever. But for now, I put them away. And hopefully that's going to help me use the brushes that I do want to use more often. And as I keep going, I'll do the same thing. Again, I'm making these wheat stalks away from the sun, a little bit darker. I did leave the wheat stalks that you can see coming through the sun. They are either a lighter, burnt sienna or they're just a lighter, anything. It doesn't have to be burnt. It can be whatever you want it to be. You can do purple wheat stalks and you just make the lighter part in the middle there. I am just letting this brush be sloppy and messy. On these little floral portions, whatever you may call them, if they are wheat, then the little, the weak grasses themselves, just letting that be really loose. My favorite color go to color for this is typically sepia. This palette does not have that. So I did just mix up some colors and into a brownish color. And there's lots of videos on mixing colors and how to get a brown if you don't have a brown that you like. I do like convenience colors myself, so I do prefer to have a brown versus mixing a brown every single time I need a brown. Again, that's a personal preference. And totally up to you, with me, there is no right and wrong in water color. Maybe the only thing there is one thing that I do probably insist on that is 100% cotton paper. But if you follow me at all or ever watch my videos, you'll know that that is one of the things I am. I'm pretty a strong believer. I'm 100% sold on 100% cotton paper. It will allow you to do things you just can't do on other paper. It will allow the water to do things that it can't do on other paper. It' allow your paint brush, it's just magical and it changes your whole game and you just have to use 100% water color. That is my final rent. Okay. That is probably one of my only rules. Otherwise, use what? You have used the paints, you have used the colors, you have used the brushes, you have use the tape, you have use the pellets. I happen to love ceramic pellets. That doesn't mean that you can't paint off plastic pellets. If that's what you like, you can do what you like. You can use a water colored brush, you know the kind you fill up with water. You can use a round 12 if the tip gets really fine. You don't have to use a liner on these foliage pieces I'm doing. You can use anything that will give you a tip. And if you have a steady hand, you can use anything that will get you that fine line. So again, I just want you, I know these are less of a step by step. Let's do this, do that, do that. But this is more of an invitation for you to explore. An invitation for you to play with color. For you to play with the brushes and the tools that you have right now, versus me listing off all the colors that I love that I think you should go by. Do I think you should go by them? Sure. If you love them and if you have the finances to do so. Absolutely. I love this set I put together, this set off to the left is American journey from Cheap Joe's and Davinci, the two together. Rumor has it that they are the same company or not the same company, but they are made by American Journey, is made by Da Vinci. And so these colors just work really related well together. But mostly, I find that most colors do work really well together. I mix and match all the time, all the time. I have no qualms with it. I work with several handmade paint makers and, you know, I straight up tell them that I probably will mix their colors with other people's colors. So for me, that's just part of the magic and it involves all this love from all these different peoples and makers and then as artists putting it all together. And it's just, it's magical for me. And so for me it's very exciting. If you also, I should touch, if you want a tutorial that's maybe a little less chatty. There are so many out there. So you know, I am a little bit more on the chatty side. So if that's not something you like and you need more detail and you need very much more instruction, there are so many amazing makers here on skill share, I highly recommend that you just try so many until you find what fits with you. Okay, so I kind of fine to finish that foliages just playing around the script liner brush, I am going to use my metallics, my shimmers. I had to show you those and I'm just going to sprinkle a little bit of shimmer in there. I did add some little birds with the fine laner. Again, they're just V shaped birds, Very, very simple. You can practice on a separate piece of paper. They're very fine, you can hardly see them. But I like it. It's my hint of birds, just a little hint. And so I'm just sprinkling a little bit of a golden, kind of a warm golden color on there just to kind of give it a little bit of something and I didn't want to go in the sky, and so I use this piece of scrap paper, and this is, this shimmer is called Soca and it's one of my favorite colors. Actually, if you need more information on it, I'll be happy to give that to you. And you can start a discussion. And I'll happy to link it there or send you a message or however we need to do it here on skill share to make that, make that happen for you. But then I'm just going to add a little bit more in there because it's so pretty and why not? And that is really about it. We're about to take the tape off and you can keep going with as many details as you want. You don't have to stop because I am. You can pause me all along this way. You can listen to me first and come back. There are so many different ways you can treat these skills. Chair projects, you know, you don't have to do what they say all the time. You know, don't always listen to us necessarily enjoy it and make it your experience. So that's it and we'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Class Project 2: Moody Branches: All right. Let's get started on your next project. As always, we are going to tape all four. If I can find the end of my tape all four sides of our paper down on a surface, it can be your tabletop if you prefer. If you don't have a plexiglass. I really like the plexigrass class. That way I can tilt the board around as I need to twist, spin any of those things, which I do often turn my board around to get different angles and better positioning and whatnot. So I'm going to pop this reference photo up, which you see now just to give you some ideas to think about what we'll be painting. So we can see that I really was drawn to the sky. I was drawn to the silhouette, whether or not mine looks exactly like that. That's not the goal here. The goal here is to get the feel, the suggestion, the part that inspires us, right? So I'm used this round mop brush and I did wet my paper. I'm sorry, I didn't show that. I made sure it was nice and wet. And I am just using some grayish, blackish color here to kind of get in that really moody top portion of that sky. And I'm not doing anything particular. You can go side to side. I'm not really sure why I choose to do this texture texture stroke and I guess that's probably why I do like the texture, you can absolutely win 100% hundreds percent do a very smooth and sometimes I'll smooth it out later. So just because you do a text textured stroke like this doesn't mean it has to stay that way. You can smooth it out. Will it be the perfect gradient smooth later? Maybe not. But if you want the perfect gradient smooth, go for it in that way. So I'm adding the gray, I'm adding the pink, I'm adding the orange. I'm just trying to feel this out right now. I don't plan my colors in advance again. I won't call out the colors so that you're not stuck using the colors that I'm using. But you can see from the picture it goes gray to pink to orange to yellow. So that's I'm gonna follow that kind of a feel, right? Am I going to be exact? No. Am I going to match the picture? No, but I'm going to be adding these colors. And in the beginning, make sure that you do get your paper nice and saturated with water. No puddles or pulling, but you definitely want a nice sheen on your paper so that it stays wet. And of course, you're using 100% cotton paper, so it should stay wet for the duration of the time that you need it to stay wet. If not, you can always add a little bit of water to it, even right now. If it starts drying, you don't necessarily want to do that. But if you maybe thought you didn't get your paper wet enough, you can go ahead and add it. At this point it would be okay. And you could spray it if you wanted to. Or use a brush I like to spray. It will affect your paint at this time, but we're so early on that you can fix that owl and just keep adding more. So there you go. There I'm sweeping. I love a dry brush. I love love, love. Can't tell you how much I really do love, but I also love that there's still texture and so that's what I do like about adding the paint this way, you'll leave texture, right. But there are times when I really do love a smooth gradient. So we all just have our preferences and time and place, right, And season for everything. So I appreciate all of it and I like to play with all of it. So again, you can do either one. Again, I'm just going back and adding more color to the places that I think I'd like a little bit more intensity and a little more color. And I like the way that this opera pink that I grabbed is mixing with the orange opera pink can be pretty darn fun to use. I know it's not maybe a popular color to some people because it is a fugitive color, which means it's night light faced, so it would eventually fade over time. But I'm not super concerned. These are practice pieces. These are playful pieces. These are fun pieces. I'm not expecting anything to be on a wall for 20 years, you know. So take it for what it is or what you will. And you can also add things on top. You can add fixatives, you can add all sorts of stuff. They have tons of products out there. Just do a little research. So I'm sweeping again. Again, I have not dried yet and I'm now gathering my liner type brush. It's kind of a different liner brush, but essentially it's a liner brush and I'm just trying to add some texture. If you remember for the picture, which I'll pop back in, there was some texture going on in this corner from the trees, but maybe they were slightly out of focus, right? So I am doing this wet on wet. So that these branches will just kind of have an idea, suggest that there's more tree back there, more branches. I'm not trying to go for the exact shapes right now. Actually, if you know me, I don't really ever go for the exact shapes. But I did switch to some orange right here. And so I'm adding some orange branches down there just so that, you know, not necessary that they're orange branches, but the light's hitting them. So they're going to look lighter, right as they're kind of blown up in this bright area of the sky. And I'm just going to keep going with that and keep playing with it until I kind of have what I like. And that'll be different for everybody. You can follow the picture, you can make up your own branches. You can make up your own story, right? It doesn't have to follow the narrative of the picture. This can follow your own narrative, your own decision making. This is your creative process through your creative journey, your everything. So do what makes you happy. If you're in the beginning and you feel safer, maybe just following along with me and the photo, that is awesome too. You can do this three more times and change it each time as you go. So I just decided to do a little more sweeping. And just so you know, that hockey brush right there is completely dry. It is my dry brush forever. I never wet it. I do wash it nightly. So it lays flat to dry overnight. So it is always dry. I never put it in water. It can go in water. It's just that I like to designate that as my dry brush that I use for sweeping. Okay. So I'm just adding these little details. I did switch to a different brush. Oh, did I switch? No, I did not switch. I still have my liner brush. Any thin tip brush will do. Again, see, I'm obsessed with that sweeping. So why am I sweeping it that many times? Because the paints have kind of bled out, or maybe they have extra lines in them. And I'm also sweeping those branches so they're not so they're just more loose and organic. Right? And so I did try, my paper is completely dry right now, so I did pick up that same brush that I was using, my line of brush. And I'm using, you know, any kind of brownish, grayish, darkish. It's totally up to you. That corner right there that you just saw me grab the paint from is kind of my whatever goes corner, it'll end up being like a black or blue brown. Sometimes we'll add greens to it. It's kind of like, it's just a rec, I don't wash that pal very often, so it's just kind of a miscellaneous pile. So yeah, this lots of dark colors. What I really liked about that reference picture, this reference picture is that it had a very vibrant background and then you had these dark silhouette style branches and leaves and whatnot. So I just really tied to that or called by that. And so now I am adding little, kind of like little nubbins where maybe the leaves fell off. I'm not really entirely sure it didn't really super study. I'll be honest. I don't really super study photos. I maybe should more, but I don't want to be so caught up on what the photo says. Right. Like I said before, I want to tell a story that maybe is my own as well. And so for that I like to, you know, and here I am moving, turning my paper, it's easier for me, especially with branches and trees, to rotate my paper so that I can access those corners and those areas. So I am just trying to stay very loose with these branches. I'm trying not to be too particular, these take me a lot of practice. I'm still working, progress on getting branches how I like them, and kind of getting a more free feel on the branches. And so that's what I'm doing here, just trying to go light enough. Trying, I might be trying too hard and usually that's what happens when I try too hard. They feel too positioned, if you will, You know, like too exact so I don't know. Maybe maybe do a scratch piece of paper and just do a bunch of branches on there to kind of loosen it out. Get it out of you. Kind of shake it up a little bit and just kind of let go. See I'm spinning this board all around. So yes, it's kind of hard to follow, but it works better for me to kind of move it all over like that. I, again, I am just still adding little bets here and kind of seeing what works, what doesn't work, and hoping for the best. Quite honestly, a lot of these are not necessarily practice but the accumulation of what I've learned over the years and over all the classes I've also taken on skill share in other places. And so I like to just take what I've learned and try to demonstrate that here. And for anyone else who you know wants to listen and share that with you. And just kind of, I don't know, it's less of a teaching and more of a, I keep saying this over and over, I know. But it's more of an invitation to just to explore and to find what works for you, right? See what inspires you. Maybe this photo doesn't, but you find one that does, and then you go from there. So I am going to wrap this part up of this one soon here, and we'll go to the next video. 8. Class Project 2: Part 2 of Moody Branches: Welcome back. I just wanted to keep these segments in smaller parts so that potentially you could do this in two bits if you didn't have a full 20 minutes to work on this one. This one is a little bit longer than some of the other projects, but I think that is kind of a fun one and therapeutic in a way. You could do the sky first, you could let that dry overnight if you wanted to and come back to the branches. You could also do it where I stopped and come back for the leaves and just kind of take your time. I am going to rotate between my liner brush and between a smaller round brush. So I'm going to keep adding more branches as I see they might be needed. Like here I'm adding another one and I'm trying to let that brush do its work. I'm trying not to hold too tight on the brush when I do these branches. Almost like I've had some people say, it's not funny. But it's interesting because it's probably the only time they're like welcoming that, you know, arthritic type shake or any kind of wrist shaking, you know, as you have issues or whatnot. So I have had some people say, you know, that shake really works for my branches and I'm like, oh yeah, finally the tiniest silver lining to, you know, something that's pretty crappy. But I just want to say that, you know, letting go on these branches is kind of the key. It's like that, organized chaos, right? And so these leaves, I'm using a small size two. I think I rotate between like an tra, round two and whatever else. I have an artifi round two and I'm just, you know, I am kind of getting painstaken on these leaves only because I feel like maybe they are, I don't want to say the highlight of the piece, but they are kind of the showcase. And I kind of was really drawn to this because it felt like they were almost like hearts, almost like a little love note right hanging from the tree. And so I don't know, this just kind of like called me and so here I am taking way too much time drawing these little hearts in these little branches. So yes, I could have sped up this process. I am usually a pretty fast painter, pretty fast talker, and I do try to get out a lot of extra like see me off to the right. They're doing a lot of mixing and stuff. I try to take that out. So you're not necessarily bogged down. But sometimes it, I feel like it's kind of nice to leave that in because it does give you time to also do these things, right? So if I'm just cutting all those out and barreling through, which I do often, but also it makes that class shorter, that project shorter. And so it's more, you know, accessible to some people that don't have the time. So it's kind of a double edged sword. So you'll see me do both, but I do prefer to keep the classes shorter. Obviously, I feel like that's more interest for the majority of people. The majority of people don't have a lot of time. They don't really want to listen to me ramble for that long. And I do tend to ramble, I feel that there's such an opportunity to share with so much said I love and so much amazing things about watercolor. And getting the opportunity to talk to you about that just makes me happy. And I have you as a captivated audience by default, so I think I will just keep talking away. And so yes, if you do prefer not to hear me talk, I mean you can mute me. I know that a lot of people do not like chatty demos or tutorials or any kind of thing, so it is perfectly okay to mute me. There are a lot of demonstrations that have no sound at all. So you know what works for you, works for you. And do it by all means. If my voice irritates you, just just mute that sucker. It's fine. I will not take offense to it at all. In the least. I watch, like I said, I watched so many tutorials and tutorials. I am one of those people that does have to listen to all the words and what they say and the instruction. I like to learn any single thing I can. I am holding two brushes in my hand because I'm going back and forth so much. Have you seen people hold it in one hand? I've seen that. And I'm a little clumsy, so I'll usually end up dropping something. So I just hold them in two separate hands and do it that way. And it just, I'm just enjoying this process even though, yes, it's a little slow going and it might not be the most exciting to watch. But again, I like to chatter a little bit because I feel like it kind of feels like we're painting together versus me just painting at you or for you or something. And I'm not an expert, but I can share so much passion with you about learning, and about exploring, and about staying curious with watercolor that I feel that, that's, I wouldn't say just as much, but I feel like it has equal amount of, not leverage but equal amount of like, enjoyment, right? I enjoy listening to people while I paint. I almost feel like I'm painting with somebody or maybe I'm at a class or maybe I'm just with a friend, somebody who's talking, you know, like often I'll want to put a podcast on, but it's hard to listen to something or audio book. It's hard to listen and retain and absorb that while in focus painting. So I feel like if I watch a Youtube or listen to somebody like that, I feel like it's easier to listen, listen to. I don't know if that makes sense at all. Anyway, so I'm just adding more details. I do mess this up over here, just don't do this. I know often most of you paint how you feel like you want to paint in the moment. Not often do you feel do exactly what I'm doing. So that's an awesome part. So whatever I'm doing here, I messed that up. But let's just pretend it's a lot of branches that maybe got tangled, that grew funny, and they're just kind of stuck together. And that's okay. Nature's not perfect either. So you know what, maybe there was a storm in this really strange branch just. Fell from above and got caught on this other branch. And it happens all the time out here. We get branches stuck in trees and branches all the time, and I'm pretty sure that's what happened out here as well. So we are going to go with that and just pretend that's there. I do however, really like the way that really tumbly looking branch area got really dark against that yellow. So maybe I was onto something and it wasn't half bad, you know, because for there to be light, obviously there's dark and dark to be light. So I feel like whenever you have something really light, you definitely need to have the dark next to it to make sure that really pops and vice versa. Right, when there's something really dark, you got to keep those lights. And lights are hard to retain. Luckily in this one we're not really dealing with that in that way of retaining white. But still, I'm still playing with these darn branches. And again, I could have got you skipped all this out of here for you, edited it out, but I guess I felt obligated to leave it in, in a sense because we all have struggles. We all have to pivot, we all have to overcome. We all have to take a look at our reference, our inspiration and be like, well, is this the direction I want to go? And it's just paper though. So if it's not, just try it again, finish this one out and try it again. It could try it again. I've done the same picture. I think eight, maybe 12 times, but I know for a fact there was one that was eight. I want to say there was one that was like 12. It was one of your paint your styles. And it was a very, very, very frustrating one. But I just kept trying to do it over and over. What I should have done is take a break and come back to it, but I didn't. I kept going. And so I do say if you're frustrated, I'd take a break and maybe find a different reference. It can be anything. It can be something similar with a sunset, with different types of trees, different type of silhouettes. You can just go on your own. This is a very easy one where you don't even have to use the reference, right? Pick three colors, make your sunset background and add some branches. If you're watching this beforehand, it's an absolutely easy one to, um, kind of make what it works for you, right, To customize it to your own self and to what you prefer. I am just going nuts with that branch. I wouldn't say I'm loving what I did there, but it's okay. It's all a learning experience and that's really what I'm doing this for. To get that muscle memory, to get that playing with the paint brushes right. To make sure that I can take away something from this that I can learn. I can learn from my own stuff and I learn from my stuff all the time. I might even learn more from my own than tutorials. But I feel that it's just the perfect learning opportunity really just to keep painting, painting every single day and not stopping right. I paint one to 3 hours every day. And sometimes it's for me, sometimes it's strictly intuitive, sometimes it's tutorials, sometimes it's just playing with stuff like this and seeing what will come of it. And it doesn't always work. But I'm going to add some shimmer because I love shimmer. I've been adding shimmer to almost everything lately. These are my cosmic creation shimmers. These are mostly what I use these days. And I'm just going to take a little bit, any color really, it doesn't really matter what color you pick here. You can go with a darker, you can go with the lighter, you can go with a golden, you can go with an orange color. Anything honestly works. I did add some of that mud color, that darker brown, black mud color from my quarter and I just sprinkled it in, so that was a little bit of texture within the leaves in the branches, so it wasn't just like cut and dry because, you know, there's always like some sort of texture and I kind of like that grainy feel of like an old picture with maybe like lint and stuff kind of sitting on top of it. So that's another reason why I don't mind if my paint bleeds under this cheap tape I'm using today. I normally will use whole bind tape, but I'm trying to get through my other cheaper tape and so it may blade through. And I don't mind that because it kind of gives that rustic vintage feel. All right, I am splattering some shimmer on there. I am using a round brush and I just tap gently. You can practice all sorts of ways of shimmer, shimmer, all sorts of ways to splatter, and there are lots of different ways of thought. I typically grab a size, two to four to six round brush in splatter away and I get the ratio. Try to get the ratio correctly with the water in the pigment. There I am adding a few birds. I just like the simple, simple V shaped birds. And I got a little heavy, so I'm just dabbing it off with a cloth. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes that paint dries super fast. It's crazy how fast sometimes. Alright. Tape peel. That's a wrap, you can skip the birds. If you don't like birds it's okay. Do what you like and do what makes your heart happy. And it didn't bleed out the tape too bad, even with this less expensive tape. But again, I wouldn't mind if it did. So that was about it and I'm pretty darn happy with this one. Turned out you could go dark with the colors. You can do all sorts of different things with your colors. It's up to you again. It's your journey, your fun. And I hope you take the invitation to play and explore. I'm just going to add on all the brushes I used a round, a little round, and my liner, and my flat that I use for the wash. And what else did I grab? Oh yep. Another little artifyilver, black velvet, silver brush, and my flat for washes. I love that little flat for washes and my hockey and that's it. So I'm super excited that you joined for this one, and I'm looking forward to painting the next one with you. So join me and we'll get started. Let's see the next lesson. 9. Class Project 3: Sunset Before the Storm: For this lesson, I thought it would be fun to use these handmade paints by Stacy. They're Sta Kiwi paints. This is my collection. The colors I have, each reference. By the way, I did mix up the paints I use, but use what you have and use what colors you like, what color is called to you. Just explore with what you have. Again, as always, I'm rewetting the paper, wetting the paper here. I'm going to get some sky color on there, get some blue. And I'm going to kind of go light at first and you'll see me gradually build up. So I'm just sweeping some color on there. I'm trying not to be too picky. I am using a round brush here and I'm just kind of sweeping some of the blue in the horizon, foreground below area, because I see some blue in there. Now, if that's not correct, you know, do what you feel like. It doesn't have to be exactly what you see. It can be what you feel, what you think, what you want it to be. Right. This is our world. We can create it how we want it. Right. It doesn't have to be an exact thing. I thought I'd go for the sun, then I decided not to splore together. I didn't want to create green with the yellow and the blue. So I'm being mindful of that. I'm, there's kind of a invisible barrier there, sort of to speak. And I'm going to add this orange here to kind of help with that glow. And again, I'm going to not go too far into that blue because I don't want to make it too muddy or gray. But I'm kind of okay with most of those things. So it doesn't really bother me extremely. Because see now, I'm just going to add the orange in there. Anyway, it's a reflection, orange and yellows and a little bit of hint of a red. And do whatever colors you like. You can even add a magenta in there. You could, you could do a red. More of a purple red. Really, it's anything. I'm adding kind of an orangey red here, not a head mixed up. And I'm just playing kind of, I'm kind of glancing at the reference, I'm kind of thinking about what I want to see. I'm kind of trying to make what works right. Sometimes it doesn't even matter what you want to paint. Sometimes you just have to go with what works for you and what, you know, your abilities and capabilities are. So I'm adding in the sun, erasing it. Again, I didn't really wasn't feeling what I was trying to do. And some days are like that and it's okay. You can take some, give some take some again. Take it away again, give it again. And that's water color for me a lot of the times, right? It's a give and take game. It's a balance. It's adding in, taking out, putting in more trying different brushes, switching things up, that kind of thing. And so now I'm taking a brighter orange. I think this is a funny name like Safari orange, or Safari Sunset Orange. And I'm adding that and I'm going to dry. And I'm going to dry. And I'm going to rewet my paper. So I rewet the whole thing. I'm not sure why that didn't show. I did kind of cut some of the extra R movements out when my arm crossed over the screen so that you wouldn't have to see that I did rewet the whole paper so that I could add in these clouds. And you want to rewet so that you don't get hard lines. Right? So anytime your paper starts to dry, you want to fully dry it. Right. And then rewet it 100% the whole way through again so that you have an even surface to work on. If it's partially dry and partially wet, you end up getting with these hard lines. And sometimes you'll end up adding too much water and you'll get funny blooms. And sometimes those will absolutely work for you. And those can be very much a joy to play with, right, To have fun with. And they can add excitement and unexpected outcomes that you're not really used to or maybe that you're not usually thinking that you want, right? But sometimes it really, really works out. So I did use a dry brush and I swept that sky a little bit and I like to dry sweep a lot. You'll see me doing it a lot and so that it kind of just lessens the harshness of those clouds. And I'm not really sure what I was doing with those clouds and I'm still not really sure how I would tackle that. It's been a while since I've really played with clouds. Right here, I'm taking my round brush and I'm just going to pick up color. And then I'm going to blot out that center and make a little sun area, a little glow of light coming from that area. You can also add a little bit of guash later on, or a little bit of a little bit of a white water color to just spread that paint away from there. You could also drop a little bit of water in there. Sometimes that works, you can explore with different things. It just depends on what kind of effect you're going for. I did want to define that horizon a little bit, so I'm just adding a darker color there just to kind of accentuate that because it did lose its everything adding more to the sky, The clouds just slowly adding in bits in here. What I do is I look, I stand up and look further back. I am using a dagger brush for this, by the way, which is kind of an interesting choice for a lot of people. I love the dagger brush a lot, and I love my hockey brush a lot. That's the dry sweeping I'm doing again, and I just go back and forth with that, add some in, and take it out, and try to get that glow that you see in that photo. And I really don't know how to do that. I've come across this a few times that glow and so I struggle. And so this is just a time for you to play and see what you can do. And, you know, you might get it the first time, be like I don't know. Again, why does she keep struggling? Because I want to share with you that it's okay to struggle. It's okay to wonder how someone gets that and not know how and want to learn how right and want to explore. And I take a lot of tutorials for these reasons so that I did cover up my son, so I'm going to have to go fix that again and that's okay. I just knew that I wanted the whole sky to be darker, so I decided to kind of start over, if you will, or not start over, but add another whole layer to kind of get more of an intense sky. And then I'm just kind of blending that intense sky into that already existing kind of muted upper layer, which I'll have to deal with a little bit. So again, I'm just adding some more color. You could have stopped and left kind of a pale looking background and that's okay too. I kind of don't mind that look, but I was driving for some more bolder, vibrant colors for here. So here we go, adding the sky colors in, Just taking some darker colors, trying to add the mood, the overall mood and blending of those all together. Yeah. See my arm. I did try to cut those out for you so they weren't so many of them. I do keep paints all over to the left, to the top, to the right, and so it's inevitable that I'm reaching across the screen like that. So I do try to get those out of there most of the time for you, but it doesn't always work. So I decided to go kind of more bold and see where I could get that to take me. So I'm just adding this darker color and just kind of playing with it and thinking and wondering like, okay, do I blend this? Do I sweep it yet? And you want all those thoughts to go through your head, like all the things that you learn or remember. And so I've just decided to kind of blend it together so my brush isn't super wet because I don't want to add necessarily more water, right? I just want to be able to blend without adding more water. So you'll want to clean off your brush frequently so that you're not just dragging that color around into the orange and padding it off on a cloth. I like to use cloths versus paper towels. I love reusable and plus they just seem to work really well for me. I'm just going to keep trying to add some of that orange glow to these clouds and see what I can do. I guess that's why I wanted to make them darker so that maybe that orange, the brighter orange would help contrast against the darker. And again, I'm not sure if it necessarily worked, but this is about exploring. It's about pushing your own boundaries. Pushing your own limits. And just kind of seeing where that could go. And yes, I keep my banana stickers on my sleeves sometimes because I go to peel banana, I will put them on my sleeve instead of in the compost. So that's what you're seeing. Sometimes I get so caught up in painting that I don't realize I do these things. That's just a little bit of my life, okay? More dry sweeping. Kind of getting these clouds to intensify, soften, build up the layers build up, the contrast build up. You know, just build it up. And I'm going to do the same with that horizon line. Just kind of trying to get it to go a little bit moodier but keep the glow right. That glow is obviously part of the main reason I was really attracted to this photo in the first place. How I pick photos is I just wait to see what grabs me. Wait to see what colors really entice me. I often like silhouettes, hence why, you know, I did this little series on basically silhouette looking type things, right? Silhouettes in nature and whatnot, and kind of waters and reflections and things that I try to challenge myself and make sure that I'm not doing something that just comes too easy. Because I want to learn. I'm really big on learning why I take so many darn classes. I take so many classes on scale, Share, and other platforms. And I just constantly want to learn. And I feel like I learn a lot from myself, but I also learn so much from others too. And just the practice, the daily practice really does it for me obviously. So got that horizon darker, I put in some, I guess you could call them land masses. So what I'm doing, I'm just softening up the top right there, so those are less of a harsh line and it kind of just bleeds into the sunset because I feel like this is a softer piece and they don't want this background horizon to be a, you know, very sharp line. I want it to be faded off in the distance because ultimately, our silhouettes up front will be our main focus. And if the cameras in focus, then that's what we'd be focusing on. We wouldn't be focusing on this background. So I'm taking my dagger and I'm doing that wet, dry thing. So there I'm going to go back for my son, which, you know, clearly I lost a long time ago and that's okay. Sometimes that happens, sometimes you mean to let it go and, you know, you can fix it later or build it back up later. And sometimes it just is what it is and maybe your sun changed positions and that's okay too. So I'm taking a round size two at your round and just picking up the paint again and seeing what I can do. Dabbing it off and, you know, it's all been dried what, two or 3102 times now. But still, depending on what you're using, you can pick it up, you can also add some white wash like I had mentioned. So I did take that little break if you wanted to check out that technique video to decide what kind of What kind of plant, what kind of foliage, what kind of design I wanted to do here. And again, that's in the techniques, and I'll label that for you if you skipped over it before you can go back and explore that. It's just a couple of minutes of exploring what kind of shapes you could potentially use. In this part, I wasn't feeling the other ones, I wasn't comfortable making them. So this is the shape I decided on. I just just went with a dark, you could potentially make the ones closer to the sun, a little lighter. I just went with a solid color for most of them. Wasn't really wanting to vary up those colors because I feel like this was so close that the sun, technically the glow from the sun wouldn't really come into play as you can see in the picture. And so I just had a few of these and I am using a script liner brush. So that is a liner with a belly on it, so it holds a little bit more. And then I decided to use this other. This is a really inexpensive brush, but it has a great, great tip on it. So I decided to play with that a little bit because the tip is so nice, and I knew it could get these little fine lines. But ultimately, I wanted to add some of these leaves here that I'm going to add. And I do like this brush for making leaves. And so I'm just going to add a little bit of leaves. And just because again, a reference picture says you have to make something a certain way, it doesn't mean you have to follow the rules, right? We're making our own story, we're designing our own, our own adventure. Or choosing our own adventure, that's what we're doing. So pick what you like. If you don't like this shape, don't do these, right? These, are these the perfect shape? Or are these what I would pick and do all over again, maybe not. But this is what it worked out to be, and this is what it is for now. And we learn. And we can do it again, right? We did it once. We can do it again and again, and again and again. We can do it however many times we want. It's just paper. It's a small under four x six sized paper. And, you know, if you buy a sheet like I do, you get, I think 16 out of 12 sheet, is that what ended up getting? I think And so I cut down my paper from sheets and I just get a lot of it. And so it makes me feel less stressed about using my good paper and so I do always use Bauhung and Arch paper. I find those are my two favorites. So that's about finishing up. You can add a little bit of gold shimmer splatter if you wanted to. At the bottom, I just take a little bit of buff titanium and add it to the sun right there just to give it a tiny more brightness. Although buff titanium dries very dull, so it will not stay like that. So I decided to add some Dr. ph Martin's bleed proof white and this is pretty white. So you want to be careful with this stuff. You don't want a white glowing sun necessarily like that. So I kind of end up muting it a little bit so it's not as white. I did add some birds, you can see there. I did my simple two little V birds and that's kind of become my little signature birds. Very subtle, very soft. I use my Shimon Fibonacci brush, which I love for birds, and that about wraps it up, take the tape off, and this is an endless possibility, you can make all the difference, sunset colors and all the different foliage. And so I hope that you enjoy and you can use these techniques elsewhere. 10. Class Project 4: Moody Field: Welcome back. We are rewetting our paper again. Like always, paper is taped down to a Plexi or whatever kind of board you would like. I am going to make sure I've really got the water white on here. I want to last a long time. Like pretty much in all of our four pieces today. This is a common theme here. These are the paints I'm going to use. I'm going to use some handmade water colors here, different than the ones I used before. I'm trying to mix it up just so that you know that you can use any colors you have. You don't have to use what I have. Use what you have for sure. Here I'm using a round, a smaller size, and I'm just sweeping on color again, always I start with the lights, so I'm going to try to bring in the sun. I'm going to try to bring in the light of the sky, a little bit of that gray just to get going. And just adding it slowly and slowly and slowly and building it up like always. The reason I picked this moody sky just called to me. I wasn't sure if I could do it justice. And doing this in hindsight, again, there are things I would probably change. And I always recommend people do things more times just to keep trying things to see if you could improve and ways to change things. Because there's always ways you wish you'd done something different, right? I think every time, even if you've done it five or six times, I think there's ways that you think, oh, I should have done that or oh, I wish I could merge all these six times together. So again, I'm layering these colors and I'm just trying to keep everything really loose. So far, I don't sketch anything in on these. I think they're loose enough where we don't need to. I'm building up these colors, these different layers of colors. Now, I would have probably made that blue a little less on the left there and the sky, I've liked this color combination that I've used for that sky. And I'm just letting things bleed together and kind of see what happens before I try to control it too much. So yes, I bounce around from the top of the sky to the bottom, to the side to the sun and that's okay. You can do it, whatever works better for you. If working from top to bottom works better for you, awesome. Do that. Because sometimes it works better for me that way as well. This one I was just bouncing around because I wasn't really sure how to tackle it and I just decided to, I usually start at the sky first or the sun. So start with the lightest and brightest places first, right? And then work your way up to the boulders. So yep, I did the yellows and blues and reds and the pinks and the purples. And then I did that big blobby blue on the side and then that darker color on the bottom. And I'm just trying to, trying to get a glow around that sun or those little blossoms of lights. And I don't even know how to do that. That is just something you have to explore and play with. And I am always a forever beginner, so I'm always learning new ways to do things in exploring myself. So I invite you to do the same. And I think that we can learn so much by doing that versus not exploring. Right? If we don't try, then then what are we going to gain, right? So try all the different ways. If you have a way that you know works, do that, absolutely do that. And sometimes that is better than following what someone else says, right? Because again, we all do things different ways and that's okay. So I'm taking a liner and I'm just going to start kind of pulling out a little flowers, a little foliage, little leaves, little stuff. And again, I'm staying loose with this. I did not dry my paper, so my paper is still wet. So these will kind of be fuzzy and out of focus, They won't have hard lines, they won't be distinct. But if you want them to be a little bit more so detailed, you can just not add so much water to your paint. And so that's what I am doing. I'm using less water. As you'll see, these ones over here have a little too much water. So I'm just kind of using that. I just did that as like some background noise so to speak. Right? Some background weed, some foliage, just some stuff going on. And the rest, I'll use a bit of a heavier pigment just without water so that the water doesn't spread. So if you just use straight pigment versus adding too much water, the pigment will stay where you put it. But if you start adding water, that's when it starts to move, right? Because you're putting water on water. So it just wants to, it wants to move around on you. So the less water, the more stuff will stay where you want. You can also, if it's your preference, just dry the paper now and then do your florals on top, or your little foliage on top, and you'll have no problems whatsoever. And it's not that I'm having a problem. You'll have, you know, finer lines, if that's what you wanted. I just kind of wanted this looser, sweepy, sweepier movement, right? I feel like, I feel like if you let them kind of be fuzzy like this, they have a little bit more movement in them. And I think that's a fun way to sometimes approach things. And so you do want to make anything that you put in front of the sun, probably a little bit lighter, if that's what you want to do. Potentially, the light would kind of make them glow a bit. Right? And I think that could be a really fun way to handle that. And I'm just adding little squiggles and little just, I'm not being too particular, I'm not trying to make a particular shape or a flower. It's just a loose interpretation of something. So if you don't know this about me, I cannot see things in my head. So if you tell me to picture a field of flowers, I can't do that at all. I can't even picture an apple on a table, That kind of stuff. I can't see it in my mind. So for me, it is a different kind of a challenge. And if you also deal with that challenge, then you know what I'm talking about. And it's very hard to just picture things. So you'd think, I would love painting from references, but painting from references is still pretty new to me. So it's kind of a new challenge for me and I'm trying to embrace it. And part of doing this is helping me step out of my box and embrace it and share that with you. That you can do these kind of things too, if that's what you want. So here I am just again, playing with more details. Adding and then I'm going to dry and I'm going to add a few more because I did want some of them to be kind of sharp. And so I love the mixture of sharp and then the kind of blurry ish so that you have a bit of depth, right? So the sharp ones obviously are closer to you and the blurred ones either maybe have some movement going on or they're just a little bit, they're a little bit farther back and that's okay. Whatever works for you. I did kind of mess this one up a little bit. I'm not sure what's going on. I got a little heavy handed, Didn't exactly work out. I try to dry it off a little bit and then I just try to wipe it away. And that sometimes is the best way to do it. I kind of just like erasing sometimes. So I just wet that a lot and erased it, and it went away. And then I got to start again and just kind of doodle something over it. But you will want to dry that after if you try to erase something like that. And, you know, looking back now, the sky didn't get as dramatic as I would have liked. If you check out the reference again, you'll see that the reference is much moodier. And so I think as we go back and look at our stuff, we always always see stuff, like I said before, always see stuff that we could do better or could do differently next time. And I think that's part of the part of the fun though, because there always is an invitation for next time, right? There's always an invitation to learn more, to do more, to be better for ourselves and to learn more. Um, and I think that's super important and kind of fun, but in hindsight, I also see that odd light at the top of the left. I thought, well, I was painting it too, but I just wasn't sure I wanted to touch it. It was kind of fun, even though we already have the sun, there's this like extra light, you know, almost how the light bounces off things sometimes and it makes a weird glare. So I did actually kind of want to leave that in there. And so that's another reason why I didn't cover up that area or try to go back and make it more moodier. I'm just blotting out some of the heavier lines down by that foreground so that it doesn't just have like a stick sticking into the ground. Adding my birds, which means that's a wrap. So just two little V shaped, very, very light handed birds. That's what I've been doing these days. Kind of making it my own little signature thing. Since I finally dowled in what I like. I thought I had one I liked before, but this is it. The two birds peel the tape off and we'll be good to go. And yes, I'm using some tape that bleeds and so right here I'm just using my brush to kind of lessen that with some water, and here we are. It's a perfect no, but it's a great invitation to explore and to have some fun and to try out different supplies and brushes and paints. And I hope you enjoyed it. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for painting with me. I hope you enjoyed these classes. I would love to see your pieces. If you would post them in the Project and Resources tab under my Projects. I will leave all the prompts here. You can upload the image at the title, at the description, and submit. And your picture will be there for me to cheer you on. Here's some more information about where to find things. I did post these on other slides as well, but I just wanted to be in double places. It'll be awesome if you could leave a review and let me know what you think of the class and if you have any questions or you wanted to start a discussion, there's a discussion and question tab there as well. And thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you being here and painting with me today and I really, really can't wait to see yours. Thanks for joining. See you next time.