Rolling Stones - A Whimsical Mixed Media Workshop

1. Welcome: [MUSIC] I'm inspired by lots of different things, and some of those inspirations come from nature. I don't know if you've ever been to the river and seen the beautiful flat stacks of stones that somebody creates, that are a temporary beautiful tiny little art installation. Finding just the perfect stones and just the perfect stack so that they stand so beautifully. Sometimes you'll see photographers take the most wonderful photos of the shooting towards a sunset with those and silhouette. I've just always found them fascinating. That's what this class was inspired from. I'm calling it Rolling Stones, and we're going to create some wonderful, lovely little pieces of art inspired by stacked river stones. I'm Denise Love and I'm a photographer and artist out of Atlanta, Georgia. I cannot wait to show you some of the wonderful little projects that we have in class. We're going to start off by making ourself a super fun, a little mark-making guide that we can then use over and over through the years to inspire us to be a little more creative, think a little more outside the box on the marks that we might consider using in a piece, and to remind us that we can just look up and say, let's try this mark this time in the piece that we're doing. I love making this because I'm going to hang it in my room and I liked making it pretty because now I can put it in a little frame and stick it somewhere here in my gallery, and be able to very easily look up at it and be inspired when I'm creating. So we'll start off with a little mark-making project. I love doing that. Then we'll get into the different a little projects. We'll work with some watercolor on paper or different paints, whatever inspires you and some mark-making and create stone pieces. We'll also create some pieces where we cut up some pieces that we painted or we cut up scrap pieces of old paintings and things that we've got leftover, which is some of my favorite types of art to make where I make big pieces of art and then I cut them out and then I've got leftovers and then you're thinking, what do you do with these leftovers? This is one of the projects that I like to do with the leftovers. We'll experiment with lots of different little colorways. I've got lots of fun examples and pieces that I've done for myself that I think are really going to inspire you to create some beautiful rock art for yourself. So I'm really excited to have you in class. I can't wait to see what you're creating. So let's get to it. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Your project today is a little bit twofold. I want to see what mark-making you came up with as part of your little mark-making project. If you put it together in a fun little format like this, I'd really love to see it because I want to be inspired by the things that you thought up to. Then your other assignment is to do one of the projects in class, whichever technique that you ended up really loving. Come back and show us what you created. I'd love to see all of them if you create a bunch, [LAUGHTER] but at the minimum, come back and show me one. I want to see these. I find them so delightful. They just make you happy to look at them and I want to see what you came up with. I can't wait to see those projects and I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 3. Supplies: [MUSIC] Let's take a look at the supplies that I'll be using in class, and I encourage you to use what you have and to pick what you want to use in class, because this is some project that you can truly use anything you've got. Some of my very favorite pieces are ones that I use collage material with. This is some pieces that I have done for myself way before class, so I'll be doing other pieces inspired by the ones that I've created. But some of my very favorite ones are the ones where I use cut up pieces of art to create these. They have the most detail and the most fun little marks, and they have definition of different stones in a way that the solid watercolor wants, for me don't, and from my own personal preference, I do like doing the cut-up pieces the best. We'll actually be doing a couple of different projects on the cut-up pieces because I've done those a couple of different ways. One of the ways is using old collage material from other pieces of art that I've created and cut up. That's a technique that I love to use a lot. I will then cut pieces out of these pieces I've saved from the past art projects I've done, and create yummy delicious little stones with the most wonderful detail and color out of those. I want you to collect all your old art that you don't love, that you're willing to cut up, or if you've done some of the abstract projects where you might get a big piece and you cut little pieces out of it, these are leftover scraps of those. Those are the best, the best. It makes me even more excited to do some more of that because I use those things for all good stuff. [LAUGHTER] This is like a collage project but it's not, the abstract collage we're making some rolling stones with ours, but super fun. I'm going to do a couple of different cut-up projects here to show you the different ways that I've done those and really enjoy. Collect all your collage materials, that's going to be a really fun project. I like to glue the collage stuff down with Yes paste, it's acid free. You could use glue sticks, you could use whatever glue that you want to use. I like have an acid free because then it's going to be more archival, and it's going to stay really nice for a peace throughout time once we frame these in hang-up because I loved framework hanging up in little gallery, settings in my own house, and then you can of course, give these away as gifts and sell them because they're just so delightful. I like Yes paste. You can use glue sticks, you could use a liquid glue. Some of these are too thick for matte medium, but if you've got the thicker matte medium, that could be a good glue for you. Just decide what glues that you're interested in. I also have some water and a watercolor brush because I will be doing some painting and one of the projects will be doing some painting and gather up whatever paint material that you would like to experiment with, but I absolutely love experimenting with my supplies, and finding stuff that maybe I wouldn't have normally used. I get the monthly art box subscription that I turn off internal and depending on, [LAUGHTER] how many art supplies I have that I haven't used. But in that sketch box, I got one month these perilous transparent watercolors, which is watercolor on paper, That's really vibrant and you just get that wet with the brush, and that is putting watercolor on your brush to paint with. These have just turned out fabulous. I have the big set and then the smaller bonus set of colors. I love these colors in this little bonus sets. I'll probably be playing with those in class today. These do get on your fingers when you're using them. You have to be really careful about touching pieces of art after you have those all over your fingers because that will smear on your paper, but I'll try to be careful here. What I really like about these, is the vibrancy of the color. There's so much more vibrant than just a standard watercolor. Just to give you an example of a piece that I've done in the past, they're just so vibrant and yummy, versus this one that I had done with like a Daniel Smith watercolor and a transparent metallic watercolor. You can see the difference in how much more vivid these are. I've also done them softer. This is another one I've done with those same colors. It doesn't have to be as vibrant, but they really are like super exciting to me. I wanted to just introduce them to you and show you just another art supply that you might consider. These go a long way. I know this little piece of paper you're thinking, there's not much paint. But I have done tons of projects on these, and you can see they've got like a little spot where I may be I hide some water on there and then I just keep using them. You do have to like set these out and let them dry, you can't just put water on it and then stack them. That's like I'll have paper all over my desk, [LAUGHTER] the different colors that I've experimented with, but they do go a long way. I've really enjoyed playing with these. If you've never heard of these or you've come across them in art store and you think, what is that? These are super fun, but they are just watercolors. If you don't have these or access to them or you don't want to check them out, then just use your regular watercolor that you have or your acrylic paint or whatever it is that you're wanting to experiment with. You could use your water-soluble crayons and use those as watercolors like I did in one of the classes. This is a leftover piece of art from that. See how pretty those are. I love that. When you make the water soluble crayons wet, they give you a different look. [LAUGHTER] Definitely play with supplies you have, but I wanted to introduce you to these fun peerless watercolors. I've also got my Derwent Inktense pencils over here. They are also water soluble. I love those because they're more intense in color. Because I was thinking intense watercolor, I wanted to do Inktense pencils and mark-making and fun stuff to go with it. I do play with these a little bit in class just to show you some fun things that you could do pencils, but you can use whatever pencil or colored pencils, watercolor pencil, anything, neo-color crayons, you could use any of those in the same fashion as I use these for this class. Then I've also got just a couple of mark making tools, I like the Micron Pigma black pens, this one happens to be the one size. I also liked the O5 size. I'm going to have to dig through my box of pens and find the larger one, but this is fun and I've used this quite a bit recently. I also have a Faber Castell walnut brown, Pitt Artist Pen, and this is a brush rather than just a little tip. That's fun getting little different marks with those. I also loved my posca pens, and so I've got a gold one and a white one out here to play with. We'll see what we get. I also like my gold paste, so I'm using my little fun thing of gold paste because it's so beautifully shiny in the pieces that I do that it's just my very favorite art supply, and I did a discussion on my main profile page on what this art supply is for my favorite art supplies, and I found this at **** Blick and on Amazon. You can check that out. I think that's going to be the most of the supplies you can make these on any type of paper that you'd like. I like it to be at least a 140 pound, or the 110 pound. Watercolor paper I've been using cold press paper myself, playing in these before I dived into projects that I was going to make for class. They're really fun. I do like the paper to be a nice enough watercolor weight that it's not going to warp on the ones that we might do as pure watercolor. Any cold press watercolor paper is fine. I've been using the Canson because I got a great big pad of it and just cutting out the sizes that I wanted off of the big sheet of it. I encourage you on this project, use any supplies that you have. We're going to experiment with mark-making and watercolor in different materials for our nice little mixed media pieces, but you can see how this really lends itself to anything that you'd love to experiment with. If you play with the peerless colors, I'd love to see your projects that you do because I love how vibrant, beautiful those colors turnout. Hope you're excited to make some rolling stone art with me today, so let's get started. [MUSIC]. 4. Mark-Making Project: Before I get started with our projects, I thought it would be fun to come up with our own little mark-making guide. I used to have a little one that I had up on my studio wall behind me here. But I read that wall and I hung up framed pieces of art from different classes. I've hid my little cheat sheet for different mark making things from myself. I don't know where it got too and I pulled everything down to rearrange and I thought this would be the perfect time just to make myself a new little mark-making idea guide and start fresh. I thought, why not make it fun and pretty? Just see what we can come up with so that we have a guide to look at so that when we make some of these pretty little art pieces, were not thinking, I can't think of a mark or I can't think of an interesting thing to do in this blank space of whatever it is that we're creating in class. I just want to start off with these. I've got some watercolor paper that I have just divided up into like a little grid. Then I thought I was going to just do a big grid. Then I thought, well that's no fun. Then I thought, let me make little grids and use one of my paper cutters to cut out a fun shape. I have this viscous cutter. That makes this really fun shape. This is what the piece looks like when it cuts it out. I thought I need to use that and create my own little mark-making page. What I did was just thought up two dozen different marks and dots and lines and shapes. Then cut little piece out of the center of that to put on my big sheet over here that I'm creating. I've got one more here that I messed up on, but then I thought, does that really matter? Let me just go ahead and finish this out. I'm basically putting a little triangles on this piece of paper. I'm going to cut a little center out of here because triangles are fun. Interesting marks to make. These don't have to be perfect. They can be messed up in the middle. It's just something to give yourself an idea that you can glance at and say, oh, I love these vines or oh, I love these triangles or oh, I love these lines and to give yourself some mark-making ideas as we're creating our rolling stones. When you sit down to your table, you you know how many times I've sat at my table and then my mind goes blank. Then I'm like, oh, what do I want to create? I don't know, It's not working out for me. I'm feeling discouraged. I'm just going to not create anything because now I'm overwhelmed. I find if you have things like this guide of some of your favorite marks, I mean my favorite marks. I love dots, I love lines, I love scribble. I don't necessarily think to do shapes like this shape I'm doing right now, but maybe if I had it here in my idea guide, maybe I would use this shape because I don't know what it is about sitting at your art table to create some great masterpiece that your mind goes blank. Especially if you're looking at a white page. Some of these little techniques and secrets or how I get past white page paralysis. That's what I call it. A lot of times getting me past white page paralysis could just be scribbling on the page for my first layer. Just scribble and mess up that white page and then see what can I create. Let me just go ahead and finish out these little triangles. We will create our little page. These are not stuck down, I was just experimenting, thinking what do I want this to look like. I was moving these around and see some of these are really light and some are really dark. It's fun to move them around to where you want them and then I'm going to glue them down to the page and then you could frame that and hang it. It's so pretty. You could have a different color background. You could paint the background and glue these little squares on top of the random background you painted. Now, that I've thought of that it's such a great idea. Why didn't I think of that before? But nothing's glued down yet, so we're not locked into anything currently. But we could do a whole messy background with paint and pencil and marks and whatever and then glue these on top. How beautiful that be. Not ruling that out. We'll give it a moment to percolate there while I'm drawing these triangles. I'm not good with patterns that require thought while I'm talking because then the pattern then end up like it's supposed to. I do the triangle the wrong direction, but that's okay. This is just our idea guide. Doesn't have to be perfect unless you want to make it perfect because you're going to frame it and enjoy it forever. Some of the most interesting art are some of the experiments like this that we do. Let's say you get it all in there the way you want it. What I love about this is then you can just cut that piece right out. Lookup on that was and now we have our little random triangle piece that we created. What I thought I would do, which I could still paint the back of this. Wouldn't that be fun. But I think for the moment, I'm going to go ahead and attach these on my paper just randomly like a habit. I can scoot these around until I get a layout that I like. I can switch out dark and light pieces to make it like a more pleasing flow. You can get pretty creative with this. As it's just your little sample piece that we're creating for ourselves. That's so pretty right there. Look how pretty that is. Then I'm just going to take a little bit of yes pace when I get them where I want them and glue each piece down. This would be the perfect project for a glue stick. The glue sticks I have though, I don't know that they're very sturdy. Then just glue each piece down. You could leave enough room to write more making guide above if you wanted. Could do all stuff with a project like this. I'm not even worried about if all of these are perfectly placed. I just want something that I can then tack up and refer to and enjoy for years. Once I make one of these, I'm using this thing for a long time. Just to give you an idea of different things that you could put in your little box to come up with your mark making things. I have done triangles with a big heavy pen. I've done with a lighter weight pin, some botanicals, I've done some dots, some squiggly lines, some very heavy lines with a thicker pen. I've done heavy lines that I purposely smudged. That was fun actually, smudged one and then I thought, oh, I like that smudge. I've done scribble, so to remind myself, loosen up and scribble. I've done little boxes of hash marks, one-way hash marks in other way hash marks in other way. I've done little squares, I have done dots, I love dots. I've done really light lines that vary in the pattern and the way that it did. I've done some very heavy dots. I've done some dashes, the little dashes are one of my own favorite go-to marks, where it's just like a series of lines there. Even though I do a lot of these quite frequently in my art, as you're sitting to create, you might just not remember what some of your favorite marks are like I don't know how to. You might be thinking, I'm never going to forget, but sometimes you do. Then these are just some little v's. You might pick a letter that you like, a v, a w. These are little rainbows or little use whichever way you want to do those. That's fun or you could do it side-to-side. A nice random recognizable shape is fun. Little circles, that's fun. I'm just giving you some ideas of different marks that you might make. Then we have it put together in a guide here that we can refer to for our art. These are just lines hashed back and forth. This our triangle one that I just made. Got some little daisies that I drew out. That's a fun little shape. Also got like almost like a gingham look. Heavy lines crossing each other just like a whole series drawn this way, whole series drawn that way. Also got some little raindrops, that's fun. You can do all these in a square grid if you don't want to go to the trouble of making this little sheet like this, but I just love it. This is like a brick wall. That's fun. Just some lines that's nice and easy. Then I really love lines. I think I got them all. Let's take a look at these lines with dots in them. I love those heavy dots. If we just take a look here at some of the ideas that I came up with. I will photograph this and put it over as a PDF for you to download on the projects page so that you can enjoy make use of all of the ideas that I thought up. Then you can create some more of your own that you could think of. It really does help to have a sheet like this to refer to that's hanging in your art room or maybe sitting somewhere where you can see it quite regularly. Because then you could think, oh, I like dots or, oh, I love the botanical or, oh yeah, let me do some of these lines, oh, I really loved the ones with the lines and the dots. It reminds you of some of your favorites or to step outside the box and do something that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. This as a little first project. I thought it would be really fun because I was going to go ahead and just make one for myself and set it back here. That when I'm making my rolling stones, I'd have something to look at without having to stop the tape and think what I want to do here and then start recording again. I thought, what if I'm going to make this for myself? I might as well make it for all of us. Then hopefully inspire you to create one of these for yourself. I did it all in black because I thought, well that's going to be fun to see which pins are still working and to experiment with line weight, which I've haven't done in a long time. You can certainly do these in color. I almost got out my pastels and I was going to do some marks with pastels. But then I reminded myself that I don't normally finish those with finishing spray often enough. I'd probably smear my wonderful design before I ever got to use it. So I was trying to use things that didn't smear that I can then maybe frame up and look at it over and over. Here is our mark-making guide, McCall on our project because I did turn it into a project. I hope you find that these little marks and this little guide is useful when we get to our rolling stone projects. I'll see you back in class. 5. Experimenting With Color: I want to start off our project. This is actually could technically be project one and two because I do this in two different ways with the same technique basically. These are some projects that I've done in the past where I just paint right on the paper and create my stones and let them dry and then come back and do fun mark-making and such in it and around it. But I also make fun little stones just like this and then go ahead and cut them out, and I will tell you that actually, these are my more favorite pieces to do because I like the definition of each stone that the cut gives the stones and so I actually start both of these techniques in the same way. We'll call this project 1 and project 2. I've got all these fun, little peerless watercolors over here to play with. The big one is the complete edition, so it's got lots of colors in here. The thing about these is if I use a color, I can't just shut it because then this paper's wet so I actually needed to cut these out of here somehow. You can see some of these I've used. This go a very long way. You get a little bit of an idea of what the color is on the back, but not exactly, but it's close. I like this green a lot. Look at that, it's bright. It tells you a little bit about the colors in the transparent. This is a fun set. I also have the bonus set which I'm going to use because these are lots of little squares that I can say, oh, let's try this, and let's try this, and I can then see the little colors. That's why I think I need to just cut these out of this book, which I might do if we see a color in here that we want to use, like, look at this yummy pearl gray. That's really pretty with stereo violet. Look how crazy that looks versus the color. I might do that, but what I'm going to do is I've got just some 140 pound cold press watercolor paper. I'm just going to eyeball it and tear the paper into strips that I can then paint. You got to be real careful with these watercolors if you go this route. If you don't go this route and you just use whatever watercolors you've got, that's fine too, do the project, however, it inspires you. These get on your fingers as you touch them, and then you touch your paper and you get this on your paper so that is a drawback to it, so I do keep a little microfiber cloth over here to rub my fingers on and I have some baby wipes if I feel like my fingers get too dirty. I feel like I've already made this whole piece of paper dirty, so what I'm going to do is go wash my hands. I'm going to cut my paper up just like I'm doing here. I'm just going to tear it and then tear this in half and just have some different sized papers to paint on and I'll be right back. Now I got a whole bunch of just random size pieces of paper that I cut the bigger piece into. I can make a whole bunch of these in different sizes. This is a really fun way to color swatch, and then once you've got the colors you think you want to go with, see how they blend and how they work and how these different materials blend and work together. I'm thinking I want to do something with some reds and oranges so let's just go ahead and start painting. I'm going to do a bunch of these and then we're going to use these in different ways. Then the reason I like to do a bunch, because then if we get something we don't like, we can very easily just throw it to the side and use it for one of our cutout pieces. I really like yellow ocher. I want to do a yellow ocher. I did one a while back that was yellow ocher and some red and I was like, oh my goodness, I love the way these blended, and so in my mind, I want to do that again but I'm not seeing it. There it is. Look how pretty that color is , I like the ocher. I want to do ocher and a red, so I'm just putting my brush in my water, smearing it around this highly pigmented watercolor and I'm going to make things that look like a stone because we're calling this rolling stones. If you want your stones to be individual separated stones, then you need to stop in between each color. If you want your stones to have colors that bleed a little bit, then you can go straight from one color to the next. I want this, let's try the scarlet. That's a weird color in it. Exactly why we do stuff like this so we can figure out what these are. This is chrome orange. Then once I get the colors on there, I actually want these to do some fun blooming and separating, so I'm going to go back in and dab water on parts of it, and then if I think I don't like that, we'll just see what we end up with later and we might love it you just never know. Once these dry, they look completely different. I could come back in here and dip some color in. If I thought, oh, I'd like to see a little bit of this over here, we can dip color in. Then let's say that's done for this one and we're going to set it to the side we have to let these dry. I would encourage you with the watercolor no matter what brand you're using, if you're trying these out or if you're trying out your own, set them to the sun, let them dry for hours or overnight. Don't beat tempted to heat gun these because really it's like you didn't let the watercolor do its thing. Let's just move on to some other ones. I want some pink and orange and stuff so let's just see. Look at that color. I'm just drawing, this is azure in red. I'm just going to draw lots of stone looking shapes and we may end up with some that we like, like you could do tall stones. We can come back in here and draw some little stones, and on the side, and don't worry if you don't love it at this point because we can cut these up if we don't love them. A lot of these I've done and I thought, that's terrible. Then I've set to the side and I let them dry and I'll come back and thought, oh, that's not so bad at all. I want a blue and green. That's not the green I want. Let's just see. There's a mountain green. This is how you get it all over your fingers too because you have to touch them and it's so highly pigmented. That's the color I want right there. That's olive green. I've decided that's one of my favorite colors. Then there's a real pretty blue that I like, also. Mountain green is pretty. Not the one I was thinking though. There's a real pretty blue that from the backside really draws me towards that green. This one right here, Alice blue and olive green, look how pretty those are. So let's go ahead and do something with these. You got to be careful with what you've got on your fingers when you go to touch your paper, but I can already tell that this olive green, when I use all of it, that's going to be a sad day. We've got a bigger paper here so I'm going to do just bigger stone shapes. I'm just going to do some round shapes and we can come off here to the side. We could do some little stones off to the side down here. Be creative. I'm thinking of river rocks almost that you see at the river and there's these flat stones stacked on top of each other and you see these wonderful photos that people take of those at the sunset with the stack of stones, that's what I'm thinking here. That one's probably not going to be my favorite, but we'll see because once we cut some of these out, I think I'm going to do another with the blue and the green. When we cut some of these out, we can totally change what we did. Just going to stack these. You could do some fat, some skinny, some big, some small. Get real creative here in how you're doing these. Touch some water in. Don't be afraid to let the colors touch. When you're thinking, what colors do you want to use? If you don't know what colors you want to use, think of colors in the color wheel. I'm using blue-green, so those are complimentary colors. You could also think opposites. We could do orange and blue, or I also like pinks and reds together, which are colors that sit next to each other. Get out your color wheel to on some of these and think, what can I do to make these colors more exciting if you're not getting what you're thinking you should be getting. Then dip some water in there and see how you can get those colors to move and balloon. Then set it to the side and don't touch it again until they're completely dry. Let's try this rose red see what color that is. Look at that color. Now I want this with an orange, look that daffodil, yellow is a yellow. How about this one? This one is cadmium yellow. That's not quite the orange I had in my mind, but let's just go with it. This is scarlet lake. This is why I like doing small pieces like this as like little color samples almost because scarlet lake or it's nothing like that color that just got on there. I'm also, while I'm doing it, making a few extra marks too, which are fun because we might use those as little bitty rocks sitting outside our piece if this is something that I cut up. We could just come in here with a totally different color and dip it in and see what that does to our overall piece when we're finished. I love doing stuff like this. I just could color sample all day on a project like this. This is how you're going to figure out what your colors do. Here's a turquoise. This is blueberry wing blue, blueberry butterfly wing blue. Look at that color. This is how you figure out what your colors do. I like doing it in this format. Let's go with this Myrtle green. Because I'm going to end up with stuff that I might think I don't like that color and then I can set that to the side and not use it again. Let's try this golden yellow, since this one is apparently going to be crazy anyway. Again, just drawing stone shapes. I just want to see, and if you got any dots out here, you might come back and add some more dots. We might or might not keep those if we cut this up. I'm just setting all these to the side. I would normally throw them on the floor or behind me to give myself a whole bunch more room to work. It's hard to do that when you're tethered to a camera. Turquoise blue. Look at this, this is neutral tint. That might be fun. Let's try a neutrally one. Oh, yeah, this is like a Payne's gray. Again, just doing some fun stone shapes. I love this olive green. Let's do that. Come back in here with this blue. Now I can't read the color, but it's that pretty blue that I like so much. You can just tap that color on there. We've got some mountain green. Let's see what this color is. Mountain green, look how pretty that is. That is pretty, that's even prettier than I expected. It's a little turquoisey. Some of these I'm thinking, the composition is not what I'm wanting, but in my mind I'm thinking it doesn't matter because I like to cut these up anyway. If you're getting splotches like this and you're thinking there's no composition here, like here, is there a composition there? Maybe not. But in the end when we're cutting our little stones out, we can create our little composition and create something into the piece that we want, when we're finishing. We don't have to have a composition right up front here, but I will say, when you go back with you mark making, that'll dramatically change what the entire piece looks like, so don't get discouraged. And you want to look at it today, because what you're getting tomorrow. That is hiliotrope and yellow ogre. But look at that color. That just made me excited, now I'm hesitant to put another color on it. But I almost want. a redish. Look how this is blending in, that little bit of blue that we dipped in, pretty. I liked the mountain green. I don't know, maybe we'll just do, that one is pretty. This is Rose red. That is pretty, let's put that there on that side there, pretty. Then what was this yellow? That was this one wasn't it? Yeah, it was the yellow ogre. We might come back in and just tap some of that ogre around, and see, what are we going to get? Because the goal really, for me, is not a perfect lay of water color. The goal here for me is color that's blooming and giving me some excitement and merging in with some other colors. Look at this one, I hope when it's dry, I love it as much as I do right now. The problem for me is, this is when I'm doing my photography too, is I'm looking at the back of the camera thinking, I'm going to love this, It's the best photo ever, and then I'll see some other ones, and then I'm like, "This is terrible, I'm going to hate it." When I get to the computer, it's the exact opposite. Let's try this peacock blue on. Let's do this chrome orange. The colors I ended up loving, the compositions, and the pieces that I thought were going to be my very favorite like maybe that one that we just saw, when they dry I'm like. Same thing with the pictures, when I get them on the computer, and I'm looking at the pictures, the one's that I thought were going to be my favorite, are never my favorite. Little oval shapes there, don't think I'm going to like that one, but we'll see. I'm doing as many as these as I can, and you can be a lot more exacting with your color than I'm being right now. Look at that great color, this is point center red. This is my time to play and experiment and just see what I get, and if I end up with something that I really love. Look at that color. That's rose red. Then I can come back and get more serious with what I have going on, what I want to accomplish with pieces that I'm doing for real, that I'm serious about. That's a yellow. I really want a good orange, That's a yellow. 6. Finishing Colors & Adding Marks: [MUSIC] Let's go with this pink. I want a pink and an orange one. That's my goal. Let's do this up here. Let me go for that. Maybe we can tap some of this chrome orange up here, let that grab on in a spotter too. Look at that, that's pretty more than that. I really think I'm going to love this one. [LAUGHTER] I'm just using all my little pieces of paper here. Then tomorrow, when all of these are dry, we can decide which ones are going to be stones, which ones are going to be cut up for other stones and see what do we end up loving. Here's a purple. This is called mauve. That's a bright purple, look at that. Let's do chrome yellow, let's do yellow. That's more orange. Let's do cadmium. Maybe I'll come back with that mauve. Let me just dip some in. Other places, this is that chromium yellow. Then we'll dip some water so that we get it to bloom in pretty ways. I love water color blooming. I'm just not one of those people that wants all the watercolor to sit there and be solid and it's own thing, I want it to bloom out and give me something to be like, oh, there's a spot for a mark. [LAUGHTER] What have we not used? Here's ecru, and how about ecru and blood red? [LAUGHTER] I have some called grass green. What else do we got in here? Look at those. Look at that. Let's try this. We've got Jacqueminot red, that's a weird name, and blood red and ecru. Let just see what we get. Again, just drawing some stone shapes. That's a pretty bright pink, that reminds me of, I think it's called Opera pink in the Sennelier. Look at that. I think that might be the blood red because that looks like dried blood. [LAUGHTER] Now we know. Look at that. That's the ecru, that's more of a dark ocher almost. I'm actually going to take that red and rolling it into the pink. Maybe we'll take some of this pink. Well it ended up here in unexpected spots. You know what, that one that was so pretty with that blue tint in it, let's just take some of this butterfly wing and see if we can't tint some blue in there to just be a surprise, like a delightful little color surprise. Then we're going to tap some water in here to make that color bloom out. I want to see what that gets. I don't know, that blood is a blood red, it's not doing what I expected. [LAUGHTER] Now, I think I've got some splotchy colors to work with. I can maybe see one or two that might be a good for stones, tomorrow we'll see, and we'll just see what we get when these are dry tomorrow. So I'll be back. These are dry and I got to tell you so super exciting. I'm definitely a rich color girl. Look how pretty some of these are, beautiful. [LAUGHTER] I like these colorways. Well, some of them don't necessarily look like the stones at the moment, so you might be going, oh, I don't like these, my stones don't look like stones. These are going to turn into yummy little projects like this. A few of the ones that I really love, I'm going to do like this where I actually keep the stone on the paper I painted it on. But some of these that I think, oh I love it, but I want it to really look like tumbling stones, I'm going to cut up and put on paper by themselves. That's why I said that this a two for project, we can do some on the paper and keep them like they are and we can do some that we cut stones out of it and attach it to a different piece of paper. I'm going to use my inspiration card of different patterns and marks to give me an idea of what I might want to draw on my watercolor pieces. I have made this into a PDF for you. If you want some ideas, you can print that out and then you can continue adding to your library of marks after that, and just see what you can come up with. I'm thinking that you might have a goal, like set yourself a goal of using say, three different marks in a piece to push yourself past your normal, what you might normally do. If for instance, in one of the pieces, I might do these lines with the dots on them, I might choose to do some little dots, I might choose to do some pretty botanical lines, I love lines. I also love these little daisy flowers. Look how pretty those little flowers are in this little piece. I wanted to challenge myself to do at least three different types of marks. We'll see in this piece, I went with the colored pencil and I have some larger dashes, I have some pretty little daisies, and then I have some white dots and some little decorations on our little sides stones. On this one, we can see I have dots. I have circles with a dot in it. That's a great mark. That's not in my idea sheet, but it is a great one to add to your sheet. I also have lines with a dot at the end of it. That's super fun. I have some botanical leaves with some dots running in them. Then I have some little swirls inside of a piece here and then I've used my little botanical pieces, so you can see you can definitely use more than three. But I want you to set yourself the challenge of at least three. Here I've done white dots, botanical piece, little swirls. I've also done colored with the color pencil. Consider that too. You don't have to do everything in white or black. Here I've got some dashes with the colored pencil, lines, I've got some little swirls here in my little rocks. This one is a bigger piece of art that I cut up. But I have some botanical in here. I have those lines with the dots. I have some little swirls out here to the side. In all of these pieces, I have at least gone with three different types of marks in here just to add interest and to keep your eye moving around. Then this piece is a big piece that I've cut up for pieces of art before and was in my bin of scrap paper, and so a lot of these are just going to go with what's on them and maybe some extra marks or some botanicals coming out of it. I want you to think how can you add interest to your different pieces? Consider at least three different types of mark-making. Consider using something other than wider black sometimes, and we'll go from there. Then one good way to define the stones if they're all blended like this and you're like, oh, it doesn't really look like stones, one good way to make those really look like a stone is to outline each stone with a black marking pigment pen, and then let's just start going through some of these. I zoomed in a little bit so we can see what I'm doing here. But let's just say that I want to make three different stones out of this mesh of colors. I could easily just come through with a thin line around the edge of what a stone might be and turn that into a stone. We can just outline all three of them like that and just visually turn that into some different stone shapes. They don't have to be perfect, you don't have to keep your lines inline, you're just mentally turning that into a shape that you might visually recognize as a stone shape and then we'll do our mark-making inside of that. We could come back with some lovely dots, which I always like. I really love how these colors blend and do their little thing there in this piece and that little yummy surprise of blue. This one is just so delightful. Just fine, little delightful surprises. That's how I'm going to think of these pieces. They're just so delightful. [LAUGHTER] When I look at them, they bring me joy. The colors are wonderfully vibrant and they just make me smile. [NOISE] It really is the little details that we tack on here at the end that are going to make these so wonderful. I think here in our yellow and orangey colored stones here, I'm going to draw some of those lovely little daisies. I did dots, let's do some daisies. Let's see what color do I want the daisies. How about I want it to be like an orangey red. Maybe we'll go with this Derwent color. This is cherry. [MUSIC] That's really lovely. Maybe I want some lines in here, or let's see, what do I want? Maybe we do want some orangey colored lines. This is Sienna gold in these pencils and maybe I just want to get some lines in there. I'm using the watercolor as my guide for stop and start points. If I see a natural bloom of color in there before it swaps to a darker color or before it changes color, it's almost like a really pretty natural segue for me to start and stop a color. We could put a little dot at the end of these if we wanted to. Just visually have that stop at the dot, that might be fun. That's really pretty. We could also take our pin. You know what I want to do? Maybe we will do some white on these and maybe do some different shapes on the little bitty at rocks. Maybe we will have little swirl, maybe some little cross hatches or little plus signs. Maybe some dots in there. We've got some up here at the top. I could maybe circle those with a dot. You can see I'm really doing more than just three patterns, but I want you to challenge yourself to do at minimum of three. Then maybe if we want some pretty little vines coming through here. I have actually found the vines easier to do if I draw a leaf on all one side and then come back and draw the leaf all on the other side, they're more uniform and match up better than they were when I was doing leaf, when I was trying to get them all go in at the same time. Really works out better, and more even if I do one side and go back and do the other. Look how pretty that is. You can also make these little dots here almost look like flowers. I could extend that up like it were a little set of flowers out there, add some leaves around that and it's like we've turned those dots into little roses there. That's really lovely. Then I could also come out to this other side and do dots and lines and more decoration if I wanted to. Almost feel like that needs one other little leaf to even it out. Look at that. That is really pretty, and delightful, and fun. The goal is to do this with all of them. But the very first project is to pick the ones that you like and say, these are going to be my actual stones. Look at this one. This one I'm going to go ahead and turn into little stones, by just giving them a really light outline. You could do this with graphite or pencil if you don't want to do it with pen, if you're not confident with using a pen or you just feel like, I'm going to mess this up. Then you could do this with a pencil, graphite, anything like that. I figure if I'm going to mess it up, that's okay. We've visually delineated those as different stones. At this point too I could already know that I'm going to want something coming out of this pretty rock right here. We could do some flowers out of there, we could do some dots to imply flowers. I like to look for opportunities where I'm thinking, oh yeah, that's a good spot for something to be there. Whether that be a vine or a flower or a set of dots or another little rock, some kind of decoration, just something. Look how pretty, that is. So pretty. Now I've got wonderful gradients and blooms here with the way these colors did. I love that. I'm going to do some dots, and I'm going to use the little swaths of colors to determine my start stops points. I love how this one goes from this maroon to this soft goldy color with light pink in-between, I just love that. [NOISE] I love the interests that you get with all the balloons of colors. So pretty. I'm going to do some lines with dots and just go around that little area right there, because how fun is that? I just draw some intersecting lines and then I just come back in and add a few dots on top of that for the interest. It almost looks like we're draping the stone with a beautiful necklace , this little decoration. Look how pretty. [LAUGHTER] That's really fun, we can come back in and just see what else do we want here? Just keep on adding and decorating and making things. Layering. It's the layering that makes these so pretty. I almost want to go with this mustard color. Maybe we'll come back in here with some dashes. Look at that. I like this color on color when I do these dashes because then you can add some more decoration and interest in there without overwhelming what you already have going on, and I love that because maybe from a distance you don't notice these little details, but as you get closer you're like, "Look at this. I didn't even see that from way back. That feel I love that." [MUSIC] 7. Final Touches And A Surprise Piece: Here we go. Look at that. We picked one color out of this, this lighter shade of watercolor and put the dots in there and we can see a separation of some other colors that just add to the interest. We could make these other colors into like daisies or flowers if we wanted. That might be interesting. We could also do something like this, or maybe we do a circle, but maybe we do some lines and we let this little balloon be the outside of that flower, which I'm liking that. Let's just do that here and we could do that in black too, but let's just do that in the gold. Then we can just let the outside of that be the edges of the flowers. Then I want to do it over here too, because there's another bloom right there. You can do it with contrasting colors. You can do like I'm doing with similar colors. Look at that. I love it when I think of something and then it does what I was hoping it would do. Get this red, violet, this lavender color and we'll do one of these right here. It's almost like we have little flowers sitting on the rocks just from the natural formations of the watercolor. Maybe we'll put one right here. Look how pretty that made that. I love that one. I'm not sure I'm done with this one. Maybe we want some, let's see, what do we want? We could do some little swirls. We could do gold. Do something in gold. I could do some little rocks, I could do some little swirls. I could just do dots out here if I wanted some little dots going. Get creative with some of these things that you're thinking and try to use as many, that's pretty. It's like the underside of the rock that these dots give. That's really pretty. Look how pretty that is. I want you to think of at least three different patterns to do on your rocks. I want you to think of if you're going to have any little botanical pieces coming out of here, if you'd like to draw, maybe you could put a bird or a butterfly sitting on your rock. Maybe you can have some dots or other little rocks here on the bottom. If this were a piece that I were cutting out, I might cut out some little pieces of rocks to be on the edges. Let's think about some of those fun things. Look how really yummy and delightful, just these two are. You can see how fun you can sit and do these for hours. Great for color swatching and then turning your color swatch into pretty little pieces of art. You can frame these, you can make them into little gift cards, gift tags, anything like that. I really love this blue, so let's make something out of this blue and again, we can make these into their own little rocks by just circling them. See I like how this one, they are really wonky, that is really fun to me. If you need to just draw part of the line and turn the paper, definitely do that. I'm trying to leave the paper still and obviously, that's not the best thing sometimes. Then if you've got some that come outside the lines like this, let's turn this one into its own little set of rocks. Maybe we have some extra rocks out here. We have some little side rocks down here. Look at that. We just turned that into a super yummy little stack and then I really loved these lines. I'm going to follow this little bit darker blue color in here and give my next rock a Pretty little necklace I think out here, I'm going to do some dots. Looking at this, I'm thinking, do I want the dots in this little swell of color here or do I want the dots in this larger swath of solid color? What's going to make that the most interesting? I feel like I'm going to do the dots in the swell. I want in the lighter part of the swell. The dots have a little ending place and you can see the darkness around it. I don't want to cover up some of that darkness. I want to just follow that line. That's my own personal preference. You can decide when you're doing yours how you want to follow the color or not follow the color Be careful when you're doing lots of dots or something repetitive, especially like on some of these that are super repetitive, my hands get tired and my marks get really sloppy. Especially with dots, if you're doing a dot, you got to be careful to go straight up and down. Sometimes I have a tendency to want to come in from the side and then the dots are more like lines. They're not nice clean dots. Just keep that in mind as you're doing dots. How you're holding your pen, if you get lazy holding it and dotting down, you get lazy dots that don't look crisp and clean and like a dot. It looks more like a lazy line. That really ruins your pattern. Look at that. A little swash of dots in there. I love that. We could also come in here and maybe I'll do that with a color though. Let's come in here with some blue. What blue do I want? This is bright blue. Let's just do it. I like the little daisy flowery look here on that other piece that we just did where we did a circle and some lines out. I'm going to go ahead and give this one a big flower. That's pretty, look at that. Maybe a little dot at the end of that flower, maybe that's the stamens and it's splattered onto the rock Then we could come back too and just go ahead and give some pretty dashes out to the rest of this. I call it dashes because it's longer than a dot. I'm doing it in the color on color look. Not only do I want you to consider using at least three different pattern choices in your piece, I also want you to consider one of those pattern pieces not being white or black. Do a tone on tone or a color on color and show me what you've got with that. I'm thinking over here, I could do these little bull's eyes like little swirlies on these rocks. Look at that. Super fun, I love that. Then you just got to look at it and think, am I done or do I need some more decoration? What else can we do to finish this off? Maybe around these little rocks I have little dots possibly just as an interest for that little area, it doesn't have to be all exact, but [inaudible] We can add some little pieces of greenery coming out from the bottom, like something's growing out from underneath it. That would be fun. I do like these little rocks here that we have on the sides, so maybe I'll give them some little decoration. Look at that, super fun little extra details and decoration. Love that one. Some of my very favorite. We're going to call this one the first project, where we just decorated the rocks on the watercolor paper. That's going to be our project number 1. But because we had so many that we did, and I want you to do just as many as I did, a whole little pile, take several pieces of paper and cut them up into these yummy little piles, I want to do the second project using our leftover pieces here to see how we did a little bit different and how it delineates the rocks a little bit differently. This is the first project. Let's take our leftover color swatch samples and rocks here and move on to the second part of this project. For the next part of this project, we need to have some of little pieces of clean paper cut up, so that's what I've done. I've just taken one big piece of paper and cut different sizes out of it. I was a little more random cutting that for this. But if you know that you're going to be doing several pieces that you all want to be the same size, then you could be more specific about the way that you're cutting these up. Now, I want to take some of our pieces and do our mark-making and our designs. Then we're going to cut these up because I can't tell you how much I love to cut stuff up. Cutting up art is probably the most fun of all the art that I enjoy doing because then I'm not thinking about composition, I'm not really thinking about how are all the pieces meshing together, I'm thinking more of, let's play, let's have some fun, let's do some things that we might not normally do, let's test out colors and supplies, and I'm not trying to create a masterpiece. Then when I'm all done, I know that I can then cut up some part of that random mess making and make something beautiful. I can change things up, and I can swap things out, and then I can add final details to get that masterpiece that I might have been hoping to get when I sat down on my table. We all create in different ways. Some people are very exact and want to do things in a specific way, and some of us are not as exact and want to work a little bit more serendipitously and I am that little bit of serendipity. When I work, that's what I enjoy. Let's use this color. That's how I get pieces that I love in the end. This is called leaf green. But let's see what we can get here because this one has these crazy yummy spikes of color. Look how amazing those are. That's what I like about some of those handmade watercolors that are made with pigment. They separate and give these really yummy strong spikes of color that sometimes I don't get with regular watercolors as easily. For this part, I didn't delineate the stones like I did on the pieces that we were going to keep on our piece of paper. I drew the stone out to visually hone in the edges of each rock so that you in your mind made those into the stones that you intended. If you want your stones to be more defined when you're painting, then you're going to need to paint the color, let that dry, paint the next color, and then you'll have definite circles, whereas I wanted colors to blend and mesh and move and do funky things. In doing that, I'm going to get patterns that I wouldn't get any other way. Let's see. Like this right here, this is delicious, it's super delicious. What do I want to do here? Let's see how different looking over here at my mark-making board. I've done dots and I've done dashes. Do I want to do some yummy pattern up in here, do some vines. I do like my little lines with the dots in it. That's one of my favorite things. What we could do that I've done on a piece in the past is I did a bunch of those lines with dots and then we cut these out and then you can just randomly see those. In doing something like this, we don't have to confine ourselves to the little pieces of color. We could go outside the lines and have those lines coming into the frame because when we cut these out, we're going to be getting some decoration and things that are exciting and unexpected. Why don't we do that? Let's just do something crazy here. That's crazy. That totally went in a direction I wasn't expecting, but I was so inspired by my personal project piece that I had done that I just showed you because some of these, I do a lot of these projects as my own personal little projects. I like to just play at my art table and experiment, and then when I hit upon something that I'm like, this is fun, I think people would like to play and experiment with me on this, that's how a lot of these classes end up happening because then I just can't wait to share what worked out at my art table for me. Little bit of serendipity in there. While this is maybe not some amazing art project that I'm going to put into a gallery, it is an art project that got me working at my art table, practicing with my supplies and having fun. I think I'm going to step outside the box again here and use my favorite gold paste and just smear some of this somewhere as a decoration because I figured out if I smear it beforehand, it'll be the same level as the paper, if I smear it afterwards, which I did on this one, it's hard to get my palette knife to smear from one level to the next. I'm going to try some smearing here and then we're going to cut this up. But look how pretty that is. You might do this and you're thinking, I'm going to cut this up, and you might get done and think, no I love it like it is. I don't know how many times I've done that thinking, I'm going to create this and it's going to be a piece that I cut up and I surprise myself. The surprising myself is the best part. Let's get ourselves a little palette knife here and do some yummy little metallic smudging. I love all of that, my goodness. Now I don't want to cut this up. So lovely we might keep it like that. Then if you want to keep it like that, let's just say that you surprised yourself and you thought, look at that, we could actually come in and define the stone after the fact if you wanted so. I actually love this one so much that we might just do this and then I'll do the cut-up piece next. But look at here, let's just go ahead and define this stone. I'm doing it really lightly, I just want that edge truly. I love it when a project just takes a different direction and you're like, never mind, I'm not going to do what I intended here, I'm going to let this project do what this project needs. This project needs to be a stack of stones. We'll cut up the next one. If you do like I did and you do something like some pretty metallic piece on top and you don't want to draw on top of the metallic part, just draw around it. This blue and green, look how pretty that is. We defined those little stones. We have that yummy little brightness. We could also come back since we're going to keep it, go ahead and do something fun here on our little bitty stones. Let's just go ahead and define those out as little rocks, maybe we'll put some dots around them. Look how pretty that is. We're going to keep that as it is. I'm going to start the cut-up project after this one. Once you've put something wet on top of these, you need to set that to the side and dry, don't stack it with your other things. That was a delightful surprise. My point on this is don't be afraid to get outside the lines on that. Just see if you create something yummy and spectacular and different than you even expected. That's mostly dry. It dries pretty fast. Maybe we want a little tiny bit of gold down here on these. I just like this little bit of shimmer that they used to do. We get that. Look at that, now those little rocks shimmer too. Super fun. I have a little bit of gold left here on my palette. Let's just go ahead and let those do their little thing there. We're going to call that one our little delightful surprise as we were working. 8. Cutting Out Stones: [MUSIC] Let's actually get one that we're going to cut up. This one looks like a bunny rabbit to me. I really like this one and these two, and I love the colors in this one. Now the point really is to draw as much pattern as we can and just see what we can get. Let's start again. [LAUGHTER] I'm just going to come in here with my marks and decorate this piece. The more of these you do, the more likely you are to end up with a delightful surprise that ended up so much nicer than you even expected. You're like I'm going to change my mind on what I do with this piece. That's why you need to do more than one. When you sit to do these projects, do 15 of them and all different colors and let them all dry overnight and then come back and say, ''What are we going to create with these?'' Look at that. [MUSIC] I really like that where we've got it. Let's go ahead and say that this is going to be one that I cut up and we can always decide to add more details to it after the fact. But look how pretty these already are. What we want for this is we want some random sized pieces of paper where we can decide what we want to do for them when we're done. Also, want some glue so I've got my YES paste over here. I say yest, but it's YES. Y-E-S. Basically what we're going to do is cut stone shapes out of here and I'm not trying to be super exact. I'm just following the line of the color and cutting some ovals like it's a rock stack. I don't want any sharp lines and I don't want big whites-spaces, but I'm looking for something like that. I'm going to do this on each of the little color separators that I've got going here. You'll see when we start to put this together, how this really just gives us such beautifully dynamic pieces. There's this super sweet little color right here that I think would be a fun little mini piece of rock. We're going to just cut that out too. Super fun. Let's take these pieces and see what size piece of paper this needs to be on. Look at that. I think it needs to be on the smaller piece of paper though. You can see too now we can change up the layers. I don't have to put them down the way that I painted it, which I technically painted it like this didn't I. But as you're looking at it, you're thinking that's lopsided. It might not be the right formation. We can change up where these stones go now on our piece of paper. Then we have this little bitty one is the little cherry on top. Or maybe that's a little piece that goes down here at the bottom. Maybe our stones are wonky on each other. Super pretty. I'm digging that right there. Let's go ahead and glue this down. [NOISE] I get wonky so let's go ahead and let this be a little crooked. Now, this paste you can still, you have a minute or two before it's completely down. We don't like where it's at. We could come back and do some shifting. That's there. I have some wax paper that I like to use when I'm gluing stuff down just as protection for the piece as I smash. [LAUGHTER] Smash it down nicely to be all nice and flat. Get some wax paper out of your kitchen to do that with. I love that. Then we can look at this and decide, what else does it need? Do we have enough decoration? Do we now need to add any additional little elements or something coming out of a crack? Or maybe we want some pretty vine. Just something pretty maybe coming out. It's your choice there on what ends up being your little fancy. Look at that. Sometimes there's just the tiniest little details that really make those sparkle. Then we can come back in with our paint pen and we could add some pretty little decorations and dots if we wanted. [MUSIC] That's really pretty. Look how pretty that is. I just like all of this and the way it turns into a stone and look how different that looks from the one that we did that we painted that's flat. You get a completely different look and feel because now these are almost three-dimensional. We could change the direction of the stones to something other than how we painted it, and it makes it exciting. When I say rolling stones now you can feel the movement in the piece maybe they were tumbling down the hill and that's where they landed. That's the feel that makes me so excited. I really love the pieces where we do cut-ups of bigger pieces of art or bigger pieces of the stones that may be just merged into a blob. This is what I love doing with those. This was a piece of art that I cut up, and so in the next project, I want to actually just get scraps and collage material and create something with the cutup pieces, not something that I painted specifically for this class. I hope you enjoy the difference in these two little projects using color swatches that we created and just different colorways. I want you to do lots of different colorways and when you get pieces that look like this that you're thinking no, it's ruined. Then I want you to cut the stones out of it. If you get a surprise where you're like, wait, I'm loving it before I even cut it out, don't cut it out. [LAUGHTER] Take a different one and cut it out because look how fun all of these are and something like this is going to be the most exciting cut-up piece, so definitely don't throw it out. [MUSIC] 9. Painting Scrap Art: All right, for this next piece, let's do something like what some of these cutout pieces that I've shown you that I've done in the past that I really love. These are some of my favorite pieces when we do stuff like that. Let's take a look at some ideas that I have, and the way that these cut up pieces really come about is this is the leftover scrap pieces from other projects. Some of my classes, I'll show you where we'll paint big pieces. Just all over the place. Painting on the piece of paper, not even worrying about composition and color. We'll just go on while having fun and we end up with the ugliest piece of art you've ever seen. Then we cut little pieces of art out of that. Just to give you an example, which I love pulling these off the wall to show in class like this is one where I did a great big giant piece of paper and I cut this little piece of art out of that piece of paper. When I do that, I have lots of leftover scraps. People ask a lot of times, what do you do with those scraps? I tell people those are perfect for collage. So I did a collage class on how wonderful these scraps are in pieces of collage. I also have done a dot class where you cut dots out of these and make a wonderful piece of art out of it. Then this is another thing that I love to do with scraps or maybe I'm just setting out to create some yummy rolling stones. I'll paint a big piece of paper and just cut it up for this reason. I've got some in that purple color way that I had cut up for that project and not used. Basically, what I do when I'm cutting these up is I just cut odd shapes of stone as big as a particular piece of paper might allow. The smaller the paper gets, the smaller the stone I cut. You can see these little tiny stones down here are normally the little edge of a piece of paper that you're like, okay, this is no good. I'm going to throw it out. Like maybe this right here. You can see if we pick the right spot out of it, we get some pretty little decoration and patterns, so it's not, don't throw these away. I thought this one's really pretty with that. This is a handmade paper, so don't forget or just be aware, maybe some of the pieces in here are pieces of your art, like on this one, this is pieces of my art. This is a handmade piece of paper. So treat these a little bit like collage and use pieces of your own art. Use pieces of handmade paper, perhaps. I particularly love this paper. It's one of my favorite. I'd like to find another big piece of it because it's the most delicious texture and it works in so many things. I love this paper. I also like to have little pieces of art that maybe didn't work out to what I was thinking, maybe that day I wasn't in a good drawing mood. I also have some little collage bits that I've created for making collages with, so get all of your collage further together. That's perfect for this type project. You could use old book pages. This is another one and I particularly like it, where I was experimenting with water-soluble crayons and seeing how they turned out, so I think I'm going to make a stone out of this paper to show you how I might cut up a piece of art that may be I love the colors, but I didn't quite pull the idea to finish with different pattern and stuff. At this point, rather than starting from scratch and painting this and waiting a couple of days to see what I can do. I'm going to go ahead and paint one that I've already just thrown to the side. We're going to put some decoration in here, and then we're going to cut lots of little stones out of this and create our composition on our paper over here. I just love these colors, and this is the prettiest piece to me. But I don't feel like it's finished because I was doing color swatching for another workshop and this is what turned out from that color swatch experiment. Then I'm not one of those people that color swatches little squares. It just sucks the life out of my soul. I cut up a piece of colored paper and I will do color swatching this way to see what color is this? How does that work? How does it mix with the next color? What does it do if I add water to it? If I really truly love it and I need to remember the colors, I will put this in a little sketch book of ideas and keep the colors written on the paper beside it because if I want to do this for say, a whole project like a whole series, maybe then I want to have my color swatch and my pieces and all. I want to formally know what they are, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Then I'd write the colors out beside it and I'd have a record of that. If it's just something where I'm like, I actually love this, but I'm not going to do anything with it right now, then I'll throw it in my little scrap bin of stuff that I use for collage material, and then when I have a project like this. I'm like, now is the moment for this yummy piece of paper, because it is yummy. Look how pretty that is. This is basically an olive green and a blue, which must be the colors that I'm feeling right now since the other pieces that we did in class that was my very favorite are these blue-green pieces. I must be feeling in a blue-green mood. I'm trying to still keep in mind what I was thinking there on those projects. I want to do at least three different patterns in here and just make this a little more exciting. I want to have at least one of those patterns in a color. That's what I'm doing here with our little color. Depending on what mood you're in and how long you've been doing different projects. You'll get to the point where you have favorite marks and favorite things that you love to do and at the moment, I think one of my favorite things is those lines with the pretty little dots, so why not just go ahead and throw some of that in here. Because I'm doing such a big piece, I could actually have a second one of those in here. I'm just crisscrossing lines, and then we're going to add some pretty little dots or pearls or however we want to think of those. Because when I cut this up, those are just going to be nice little crosshatches, like in this piece I had done. It's just little detailed areas that then show up. Can already tell this yummy piece of paper that I hated to throw to the side because I thought, man, I love these color so much, I can't wait to think what this is going to turn out one day. I'm glad I came across it digging through my little pile over there. It's a nice little serendipity find, this was meant to be today. When you're going to do something like this, make your piece of paper, color swatching experiment, make it fairly large. We can get lots of stones out of this, and then we have choices. Then I just keep the little stones in our pretty little kitchen dish. These, I got at the world market and they're just the perfect little dish to keep little cutouts in. You can keep it for a project like this, or you can keep it for a project like collage. That can sit on a counter and be like decoration because I have things sitting over here on my dresser that's in this room. That dresser's full of art supplies. Then there's art supplies on top of the dresser as decoration because they're so beautiful, I want to look them him day. When I come in here, I get excited, what can I create? Look how pretty that is. I just want these lines with dots everywhere. Something else that we can do is we could pick one little area and do lines. That will break this up very interestingly. Now I've got dots, I've got lines, I've got some other color, not just white and black when I did those green things. Then my third little pattern is these lines with the dots in it. I've done at least three patterns. Look how pretty that turned out with those lines in it. I'm just trying to give you some good examples of how you can make things interesting in your piece By saying give yourself some goals, XYZ, whatever those goals are going to be and then you'll have something interesting when you're done. You won't then just stick to one line or dot. Because I'm a dot person and if I didn't think, what else can I do in here for interest? You might just get dots. But I also like that the original piece of this art has scribble, it has water where it moves stuff around. Look at that, I love that. I like that there's variation in color. There's lots going on in this already. Let's make this something glorious. I got several pieces of paper over here. I'm going to not even be super concerned about the stones that I cut out. But if you see something that you love more than anything else, cut that first. I'm just going to cut ovals out of these, following where the color is. Some of these ovals, I might make a little bit squattier and some of them, I might make more round. I don't want any rough edges. So if I got a rough edge, I'll just go back and clip that. Look how pretty that is. I'm going to cut little stones out of all of this. Then if we end up with splotches of color that you're like, what do I do with that? You're thinking, throw it away. We're going to make little bitty stones out of something like that, so don't throw it away. You can make them look like a peanut shape. They don't have to be completely oval. Because if they've got that little peanut shape, then there'll be a good stone for doing that little back-forth stacking, and that can add to some interest. You could do something like that. They don't have to be oval. They don't all have to be round. They don't all have to be the same size. If you get it done and you think they're all too much samey samey, then we can think of adding in other things like some contrast, some handmade papers, maybe another piece of art, maybe I should cut some pieces out of this to contrast the pieces in that. We have options. Because now that we're stuck in these, I'm almost like, do I want it all matchy matchy or do I want it to have some contrasty bits in there? What do we really want to have going on here? I love this one. Look how pretty that one is with those little lines with the dots in there. Love that one. I'm going to get rid of some of this extra paper. That one's really, really pretty. Love that. Then I'm not going to use all of these little cutouts in the same piece. That's why I like having a bowl to keep some of these pieces for future pieces. If you make these and you think, I love these and I want to do a 100 day project of rolling stones, perfect thing to have a little extra stone pieces available. Then if you've got little pieces where the clump is big enough to make a little bitty rock out of it, cut those little bitty rocks out of there and keep those too. Any bit of paper with color or pattern or mark can be a rolling stone. Then I just cut off any pieces that look sharp, that don't look like a nice little smooth stone, make a little stone out of it. We do have enough little bits leftover to have some yummy interesting stone. Any piece of color left, cut little stones out of them. Don't throw it away. Look at that one. See, pretty. I love this one has this little orange bit on here. Look at that. It's got that little bit of orange. We're going to somehow have to save this. Maybe it's going to be a long flat rock. Look at that. Got a little bit of orange in there, I love it. It's a little rock stack that is super interesting. Love that. This one has little bits of some blue and green marks on it, so maybe we've got another little long stone out of that. We're just trying to use every scrap of color that we can, don't throw it out. Look at that. I've got enough to play with. I like that this one has lines in it already. You could just sit here and cut these down to nothing and then you can throw away the little tiny bits that are leftover if you have to. Look at that stone. We've got five little stones. We're going to set all these pieces over to the side because there's still some color left on them. Don't throw out the colors. Now I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, do I want it all the same or do we need some other choices in here? Let's go ahead and cut up a random piece of art that I have and see if those are contrast enough or do we need to do something else? This is the creative, what do you want to end up with? How do we want to make this when we're done? I like having some choices. That one's pretty. Again, here's where I'm talking about. Don't throw away these little scraps because that right there could be a little stone. That's enough to cut out for a little stone. This right here could be a little stone. Actually, I like that bit right there. Let's make a little stone out of this one because it's darker and it's a nice contrast to these other little bitty stones that we have created. Look at that. See, it's a darker stone in there. Who knew that we were going to have so much fun playing like little toddlers cutting up paper. Because even though I'm thinking, this is not some great masterpiece, some big piece of whatever that I'm putting a gallery, some of these are pretty enough to frame and hang up and enjoy. Now we got lots of paper choices here and just need to decide. What I like about the stone project is you can scale these up or down depending on the paper that you're cutting up. For instance, in this original piece that I had done, and in this second piece that I had done, those are fairly large stones. Those were big enough pieces of paper and color. They were wide enough that I got bigger stones out of it. This one right here that we ended up not cutting up and this one right here that was just decorative, those are bigger, wider stones. But on the piece that I just added decoration to, I was sticking to the width of the color of those pieces, and so that might determine the size of the paper of the piece that we create. Because I don't want too much paper, personally. If I did this six by six piece, that's almost like there's too much paper leftover. But you might want to have a larger bit of paper to then frame around. So maybe it's not too much paper. Or maybe you want more than a three stack high stone, maybe we want a four or five high stack. You don't have to stop at three stones. I've done a lot of the three stone things, but maybe we want a larger stack there. Look how pretty that is. Now we're really going fun and wonky. 10. Cutting Out Scrap Art Stones: Now that I've thought of this and said it out loud, it might be the way that we go for this piece. I like to place it, look how pretty that is, with little stones out here to the side, super fun. I like to visually place things to say is that where I want it or is that too much or did I overdo it? That is pretty. Now that I've got more stones in my thing, maybe this is the way that we need to go, feeling like this. I'm feeling like more than three stones here. Let's glue that down and we can decide, but let's say we have some left over. You're thinking, what else can I make with this? Now we can look at it like, maybe I've cut enough to be two stone pictures and let's just see what we can get out of this. I'm almost liking this with a little extra stone peeking out, how fun is that? Look at that. Little extra stones poking out of there, that's super cool. Another thing that we might consider, because I mentioned having something like these fun pieces of paper, what if we did something on the background that was completely different? Like what if that were behind the stones? Now we have even more three-dimensional something going on. Could be something with a lot of color, could be something like this with some pattern. Like maybe this is the start of our piece. Then I need a spatula so I can pick all these up. There we go, a piece of paper will do it. There we go, so I don't have to relay these out. What if we want to do that? We can then replace these if we wanted. But I want you to think a little outside the box and think, now I've done this as a straight project, what can I do to make this my own? What can I do to change this a bit? Look at that, see now, that's super fun. Now we have something in the background. Instead of our painting or our drawing or whatever, we have something going on back there that's a little different. We could still paint and draw on it or add some metallic or do something, but I want you just to think outside the box on some of your pieces and think, what can I do to give that extra dimension? You could also consider something like the wax paper, look at this as like a translucent paper. If I just take a piece of that. Maybe that's behind my stones instead of plain paper because it's like a three-dimensional. You could do handmade papers back there, like a rice paper would be really cool behind a stone stack. Just different stuff to consider there. I really love this one. Let's go ahead while I think about this one, let's attach this one. I like the wonkiness and little stones worked into the crevices. That's super fun. Then we might come back and do some extra little decoration on this. I really love this piece. Look how beautiful that piece is. It's so lovely with the lines and the dots. I think that's my favorite element on some of these pieces is the little bit of lines and dots that we can see. I'm placing these lightly because I want to be able to do a tiny bit of adjusting. Now I can see that I might want one more going up because I stopped it. A little short there, let's see. What else? Do like maybe a little piece, like a long piece let's see. That might be too long, we might need to cut that again. You've got to be careful not to do that. Yeah, be careful on some of these pieces of art that you pull out because this one has pastels all over it and it is not got a finishing spray on it so you want to be real careful, oh yeah, there we go, about getting art supplies all over your paper that you didn't intend because of that. Because when you're doing this, you want that piece of paper to be fresh and clean. You don't want, look at that right there, you don't want bits of color stuck down where you didn't intend it to be. Now I can go back in and I can just tweak it. Look how pretty that is. Then when I think, yes, I like where these are, then I'm going to take my piece of wax paper so I can just press down without doing any damage. We're spreading any art materials that I didn't intend to spread. Look at that. That's really pretty. Now we can come back with any extra final decorations that we want to do. We could do some gold, we could do some black ink, we could do all kinds of stuff. Now we can finish this off with any little whatevers. Like maybe I want to have come out of here, a vine with some leaves. I can just have that come right on up here like this. Then we can get our little. Again, on a piece like this where I think I love this, I don't want to get sloppy on it, I do think it's easier to draw the leaves on one side, moving the paper as you need to go, and then go back and draw them on the other side. I'm just drawing a teardrop shape there when I do that. It's not a specific flower I've got in mind. If you're a true botanical lover and you like drawing botanicals, you could definitely go forward in the yard and get some ferns or ivy, anything like that and you could mimic those more closely than a random generic plant that I like to draw with just pretty scrolls and leaves. That's what turns things into your style and your art and the things that define your pieces are the extra little details and things that you add to your art. That maybe I don't think of or I wouldn't do or I'm not good at or I don't have around me. That's the stuff that's going to turn these pieces into something uniquely you and yours are those extra details that you do unique to you. Look how pretty that is, super pretty. This would be pretty good with a butterfly or a bird. If you were really talented like that, you could draw a butterfly on a piece of extra little art and cut that out and stick that on there. I think I'm going to do just some extra little maybe circles with dots. Just some extra little doolallies here on this side. Just something visual. Doesn't have to be anything other than just a little extra whatever you happen to want. I like gold, I don't want to try to get some gold in there. Where is the gold? I've hid it from myself. There's the gold. This is my favorite gold. It is the Curie taky gold paste. I'm just going to add some random gold in there, look at that. See, it's just enough to give it a sparkle, but not to be anything special. It doesn't need to reason more than anything that you like it. That's reason enough, just because you like it. It doesn't have to have a purpose. But look how pretty that is. I like that a lot. I'm going to go for that. I just want things that shine on my pretty piece of art. I'm going to go for that. It wasn't anything specific, but I like the way it shines on there. That's really beautiful. We're going to go for that. This one, I'm still thinking, do I want the decoration underneath it? Do I want the paper not underneath it? I shouldn't have done that. Do I want the stones to really be a little river stack there and be doing their crazy, funky thing? Little stones on the side. Because we could make it wider. If we did two doing this, and we actually made our little stack wider. If you're trying to go on a bigger piece of paper and it's not big enough, you can really offset these quite a bit and make them look like they're precariously perched on each other, and that would make a really fun stack. Then we could throw some little ones in here to really make it seem like these little ones are holding up that stack. That would be fun. Look at that. See, now, that right there is super fun. It's talking to me. Then we got enough for our little stack here on the side. Look how pretty that is. I'm filling this. Do we want to move up a tiny bit? Look at that. I'm filling that. Let's glue that down. If you think that you're going to forget where stuff goes, you could always fill out your composition like this and take a picture of it with your phone, and then follow it. That's really popular collage technique, is to then follow your picture so that you don't forget what you were thinking and where things went. I like to place it really lightly with the paste before I stick it down good so that I've still got the option to move stuff around for a moment. Then even with the little stones here to the side, I'm keeping a low horizon line, like it's sitting on the ground even though I can't see the ground. I'm wanting that to imply that is the ground, and I don't want to put these other stones in a weird, awkward lower position. One want them to all be at the same ground level so that visually, you're thinking, that's the ground even if I don't have a ground in there. Let's just make sure that's where we wanted everything. I'm filling that, and then stick it down. This piece of paper that I'm sticking down on now is just a six-by-six piece of paper with a torn edge at the bottom, because I think it's a really nice presentation. This one was just cut on my little cutting mat, four even sides. Look how pretty that one is. That one just makes me happy. The vines make me happy, the colors make me happy. In this one, we'll just go back again and decide what extra little decorations can we do that will finish this off. Maybe I want some flower. It doesn't have to be any recognizable flower, but maybe we've got some actual botanicals coming out of here. I just totally made up that shape and hoped that I would like it, and look at that. It's actually really pretty. I know you think I'm crazy, but I'm getting old. I got no shame. I had a neighbor tell me the other day, I didn't think you were out of your 30s, and I was like, My, God, thank you so much. made Made me feel so young. I'm just drawing a pattern. These are just circles with a dot in it. I don't want just drawing on one side. I want it to even out somehow, but I don't want it to be the exact same. Then you can do some swishes of color. You could come back with color pencil. You could keep on adding till your heart's content. I think I'm going to add the gold because it's what I'm obsessed with. Pick whatever art supply you're obsessed with and just ride that obsession out. That's pretty. Just let that obsession do its thing. Look at that. See, now, that gives me little finishing touches. I get my little bit of shine. I've got something on this side and something on that side, and they're different. So they're even, but they're not even thing. I'm loving that. Super fun. I hope this project is fun and gives you an idea of how you can take pieces of art that you've already created that maybe you don't love, or color swatching like I've done, or handmade papers, or big pieces that you've cut up and you want to still keep that piece. This could make a good bookmark. But maybe we want to still keep that piece and make some little rolling stones out of it or some collage out of it. Hoping that you're inspired by the fun rolling stone project to create some of these really beautiful pieces out of some of these scraps of art that you've got. I hope you enjoy cutting the pieces out and making your own stone stack. I'll see you back in class. 11. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] I hope that you were inspired by some of these delightful little Rolling Stone projects, and I can't wait to see what your Rolling Stones look like too, so don't forget to make up a few pieces, have some fun in your art room and then come back and show us what you created. I'm looking forward to that. I can't wait to see it. I'm super excited to have had you in class today and I hope you had fun. I'll see you next time.