Watercolor Abstract Samplers: Exploring Watercolors And Marks To Add Interest In Your Art

1. Welcome: [MUSIC] Hey, I'm Denise Love and I want to welcome you to class. Let me show you what we'll be doing. In this class I got lots of fun projects that we can work on and this is a great way to color swatch and sample out different watercolors, figure out how your colors work and how they work together and how they spread on the paper and then we can add some fun marks to our pieces to create art as we're going. You can see in my sketchbook I've got lots of different pieces that I've created on this exact concept, testing out colors, and then figuring out what I like and then adding some yummy marks to make a beautiful little abstract piece and some of these are so beautiful that had definitely want to frame them up and hang them. I actually show you several in class. If you just put a frame on some of this, you've now got a completed piece of art. Even though some of these are done in my sketchbook, I think they're going to find their way to a framing [LAUGHTER] thing where I take it out of the sketch book and actually frame it up. I think they're so much fun and so beautiful. I do several things in this class in our sketchbook. Just working in different sketchbooks so that I have several surfaces that I can be working on and then moving onto watercolor paper after the fact, after we figure out what we love and what inspired us and what we created, now we can create larger pieces. We also jump into doing some color studies in a little bit larger block format rather than this wispy abstract format. Then I still go back on there and maybe add some marks and make it into a pretty abstract and we decal the edges. Maybe we have some words in here that we love or we can make these quotes or scripture if you wanted to make these into some type of cards with beautiful writing on it, perfect for practicing your lettering if you like to write or you have beautiful handwriting so these were super fun. I like them because they're a little bit larger blocks of color and I can see in here, what that color does with a little more pigment or a little more water and how that spreads out. These are really fun and informational for yourself on working with watercolors. Then we move on to some larger pieces that are really beautiful and definitely ready to frame when you finish them because like look how beautiful this is. If we just met that up, it's finished, beautiful. These were inspired by color palettes that I test it out in my sketchbook. I decided, okay, if I like a particular color palette, maybe I would try that again in a larger piece. Different mark-making, experimenting with some different supplies and seeing how they do and coming up with larger pieces of abstract watercolor art that I think are so beautiful and every time I sit down to make these, I'm pretty happy when I get up from the table when something like this is what I created. I hope you enjoy this technique, implying in your supplies and experimenting with color, because this is going to be a fantastic class for really getting you comfortable and creating something pretty with your watercolors. I'm super happy to have you in class so let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Supplies: Let's talk about our supplies that we're using in this class. I'm doing several color study projects and then a few larger pieces that would be inspired by your color studies. I'm working in some sketchbooks. I have a couple of different sketchbooks here that I work in just because I've collected them and I like to try them out and just see what it is that I can create on different types of paper. This is the mole skin sketchbook, I think this is probably five by seven or six by nine. Let's see what that is actually, five by seven or five by eight. That's a five by eight, and this is a really good size. I particularly like doing the color studies that we did for this class in this size sketchbook. They come out so beautiful than a painting them in this direction. Look how pretty all of these are. That makes me happy to come and now look at my sketchbook. This is the other sketchbook I'm using in class, and this is a set of two. I believe our teaser, they're a little bit larger. They've got same white paper as the mole skin. These are about 110 pounds. But it gave me a lot to experiment with having different sketchbooks. Here's one that we do in class. Just different ideas that I'm working out. I like to do those in a sketchbook. Even though some of these are so beautiful, I'll probably cut them out and frame it. In general, my sketchbook is for working out some ideas. I do recommend you have a couple of sketchbooks. Also do several of the projects on 140-pound cold press watercolor paper. Any of that cold press that you have is fine. The 140 pounds is a nice weight for playing on. Also use some artist's tape to tape off my paintings and then peel the tape to reveal the finished project. Any watercolor paper that you want to work on. I also have watercolor and I haven't video where I show you all the watercolors that I have. It's a little of noxious. You don't need all the watercolors out there in the world to do this project. Pick a set, learn that set, and go for that set. As you learn what colors you like, start separating those out and saving those. You can get down into what you can consider, your color palette and the colors that you love. Out of the different brands that I have every time I use a color and I think I love this color. I pull it out of that box and stick it here on this little wood play that came inside of a box that I got off of eBay. I've saved the ones that have ended up being my favorite. I can call these my color palette, things that I love to use go to colors that I know that I love in addition to experimenting with all the other colors that I have. Pick your watercolors, check out the watercolor video. I talked about the differences in the grades of watercolor and the different brands and what you might consider. I also have some watercolor brushes that I like and I like these Raphael. This is a Raphael 18, 0 and 3 slash 0. I also like these Aqua Elite brushes that I got at the Michael's. These are higher quality brushes and they run $15-20 a brush, so they're not cheap. But maybe if you just get one nice brush. Then I like this Number 10 and I like this Number 0 on the Raphael. If you just want one brush, that's probably the two that I use the most when I'm doing a little projects like this. They're about the same size and they come to a point. What I like about the one from Michael's is it comes to a nice point point like it's a nice firm point that you can then do different techniques that I can't really do with the Raphael because it doesn't come to a sharp point. But I do love this brush. Just use, find one nice quality brush and then like a medium size and then other cheaper brushes if you want to experiment with some other things but I do use at least one nice watercolor brush in class. But then because I like to turn all of my projects into as they start off as color studies, mixing and playing with the colors and figuring out what I like in a more creative way than just straight out color swatching. I've done the color swatching too, and this is much more fun. What you want to do to after you find a set of colors that work really well as a piece of art, is then save a little color swatch of those colors and what the colors were so that you could revisit this palette again. Because not only is this color swatching so that you can see what the colors are, it's also color combining so that you can figure out color palettes that you might enjoy working with with the supplies that you have. I love doing little color sampler is like this to play. Then in that, you can see that I have pencil mark or little mark making in there. You could do that with anything. You could use pencil, which is what I like to use. I have just a mechanical pencil that I do a lot of that with. I also have drawing pencils like this 12B is a good soft pencil. I have the Stabilo pencil that's fun to play with. Any pencils like that that you want to work with if you wanted to try the neo color crayons. They're really fun and that's what I've added some little circle details here on some of my sample sets. This is the time to figure out colors and experiment with some of your supplies that you might like to add on top of a fun little abstract piece. Then when you're done, you have like a finished piece of art rather than just a color swatch that you're making. That's basically the supplies that I was using in class today. I was just showing you lots of different things that you could consider doing and making and playing in your sketchbook and creating larger pieces of art. I hope you have fun in this class and I can't wait to see what you're creating. Definitely come back and share some of that and I will see you in class. 3. About Watercolor: [MUSIC] In this video, I want to talk about watercolors. There's lots of different watercolors out there and if you've got some watercolors, I definitely encourage you to use what you have in this class. But I wanted to just talk about the different grades of watercolor out there. It's the same theory with watercolor as it is with acrylic paint and oil paint and any type of art product that you're buying. The less expensive the product, the more student grade that product is, the less pigment it has in it, and the more fillers it has. If it's a real cheap watercolor, it's going to have lots of fillers and less pigment. If it's a real expensive watercolor or a nicer grade of watercolor, it's going to be very pigment heavy, very saturated, a lot less fillers are going to be in that product, which is what adds to the expense of getting art products that are very pigment heavy and more artist grade. For this project to getting started and for doing color studies and small studies on small paper, you can start off with the cheapest watercolors out there just to get a feel for it, decide what colors you like, how the things blend together and really start working with this material. I have several cheap ones [NOISE] that I happen to like. This is a little cheap set from I think I got it at the **** Blick for a couple of dollars. Those colors are nice and vibrant. It was a couple of dollars. [NOISE] Something like that is just fine to start with. This is called just a watercolor compact paint set. [NOISE] Something like that, you could start off real cheap do that, some student grade paper, a good watercolor brush, and you'd be set to go. The next thing that I have that's also like a student grade, but I really love these, so I do have a couple of them and they're really cheap. You can get them at Hobby Lobby and Michaels. l think this one might have been at the Blick and there's lots of colors in there. I'm not worried about mixing the colors on a cheap set like this. There's some colors in here that I've almost used completely out because I like them so much. But what I like about this is you get a lot more color choices than the little tiny one that I showed you. It's inexpensive and the colors are fun to play with and they're good enough, but they are student grade and they're very inexpensive. These sets are fun to play with, so I've played with them lots. I like them and I'd recommend something like that if you're looking to get started and you want a lot of colors to play with and you don't really want to spend all that much to experiment. The next grade up, in my opinion, is the Grumbacher. I've got the Grumbacher Deluxe opaque set and the Deluxe transparent set. [NOISE] You'll just have to play with these collections to see what colors you like and you like them transparent or opaque. Out of these sets, for what I've done with them in the past, I have preferred the transparent set. They're very similar colors, but slightly different because depending on the color it is, you're not going to have the exact color in the transparent as you have in the opaque. But for what I've done in the past, I have preferred the transparent set and it is the set that I have used the most. But it is fine to have all the colors. [NOISE] Really bad about thinking I need all the brands and all the colors and all the options when I get started on something, when really that is going to paralyze you more than anything and you'll get stuck because then you have too many options and you don't know how to narrow them down. You don't know how to figure out what color should I use out of the 200 colors that I have. I really think collecting art supplies and using art supplies really is like two different hobbies. [LAUGHTER] When I think of doing a class, especially a class like this, I immediately think l have such a good idea. I can't wait to film this. I need to go to the art store and see what new art things I need to get to go with this class. It's like an excuse to go art shopping. It's ridiculous. [LAUGHTER] With this class I had that exact same thought yesterday. I thought, I want to start filming this tomorrow. Maybe I should go to the **** Blick. Maybe there's some watercolor that I need that I don't have. You can see out of all that I have, by the time I get done with this, you'll definitely see how obnoxious my art collecting is. You'll see that I have way more than I could ever use, all the colors that I could ever need and I still feel the pool to go to the art supply store and look for more. [LAUGHTER] The Grumbacher is nice because it's a medium price range. I would consider this a more medium line of paints. It's a little better than the student grade, but I would not say it says premium as some of my other brands that I have collected throughout the years. But it is a really nice set to have. [NOISE] I do like the Grumbacher. If you're looking to step up from the very cheapest that you can find but you don't quite want to invest in the most expensive out there, the Grumbacher sets are fun and I do love the transparent set personally. It's the one I've used the most of. But that's not saying that the Deluxe set wouldn't be better for projects that we're doing now. This is just what I've done in the past because I have collected watercolors off and on over the past 10 years depending on what idea I had my mind and what plan I was going to use for him. I use teaching a class or something like this as an excuse to go find more. [LAUGHTER] What I have here leftover is what I would call artists grade much nicer watercolor sets. These are going to be on the higher end of the prices. You're going to easily spend anywhere from $5 to $25 for a color or a tube of paint. They are the most saturated with color. They're going to stay nicest, the longest. They're the most archival and they have the most colors. The Sennelier is a set that I had gotten a long time ago at an art fair that came to town. I really like the Sennelier. This was a collection of set colors that it gave you. It wasn't ones that I picked out. I didn't really understand. For years and years I wanted all the colors, but I don't like all the colors. You're not going to figure out that you don't like all the colors when you're painting until you've tried them all out and used them and thought, I don't like this or I do like that or I love this or whatever. You'll see a couple of these that I have pulled out of here because really not that long ago in comparison to how long I've had all these paints, I went through the different nicer, the Daniel Smith and the Sennelier and pulled out what I might consider my own color palette. These are the colors that I've played with and I was using and I thought, I love that color, let me add it to this specific little set of colors. Now I'm collecting all the ones that are my very favorite. What I like about these little tiny tabs is it will tell you on the side, I don't know if that'll focus for you, but like this one says 659 XY10 Sennelier so that I know what color that was in that pot. This is the Daniel Smith color, O29 cobalt turquoise. Even if you get blank ones of these and you venture into say, making your own watercolors out of natural pigments, which is a direction I'm heading in because I have all the supplies and I just hadn't got to it yet. If you buy little blank half pans, which are what these are called, and you make your own colors, if you will write on the side of that, what that is, then you'll know as you're painting, what color it is that you're using. This is what I would consider my personal color palette out of the probably 400 colors that I have. [LAUGHTER] I'm cannibalizing all the paints that I have to make my favorite set. I've seen other artists do this before and they make up their own paint palette of colors that they love. Then I think now how long did it take them to divide down and decide those are the ones that they loved, whereas I had initially picked out a random collection and now I have all of these colors that I don't necessarily love, and then I might never use?These are not cheap so I do think it's nice if you can start narrowing down your color palette and colors that you love before you run out and buy all the colors like I do. [LAUGHTER] This fun set, this is a Sennelier set that is a really nice set. These are Daniel Smith. Daniel Smith and Sennelier, both come in tubes of paint in addition to hard pans of paint. This is the Sennelier, this is the Daniel Smith and it doesn't look like a big tube of paint. But let me tell you, this dove goes forever. So it really is a good big tube of paint as far as paints go, even though they're not nearly as big as like an oil paint or an acrylic tube of paint. These will last me forever. Like I haven't even gone through a quarter of any of this. What I've done is if I had tubes of paint that I liked. I've actually got this cheap plastic palette at the art store and I was using that for a long time and I tried to write on here what the colors were so that I would know. But I also used this as my paint palette and so some of these, I'm not sure what those colors were if I have worth of writing off. But I could guess, like this one here is missing the words because I've used it, but I think that might be cobalt. So as you work with the colors enough, you might just recognize what your favorite ones are. This is a nice way to split out some of the tube of paint and be using it and then these just re-activate every time you need them to. So these are nice and a good way to keep up with tubes of paint like these. I have several tubes of paint, I've got the Sennelier, the Daniel Smith, there's some gouache in here. I just have a little bit of everything. You can buy Daniel Smith, has little hard pans. These came in a little set of the sketch box subscription that I had for a year, so I've got fun things that I never tried through that. Here's some Cotman watercolor. I also have somewhere in here, Winsor Newton. So the Cotman is a Winsor Newton, and I also have in here some Grumbacher somewhere. So you can get little tubes of the watercolor in a lot of different brands. I actually like having the little tubes as I was doing the projects that we're going to do in this class. I like working with the wet watercolor and then being able to come back later and still use those colors because I was using them on my ceramic palette. Which if you don't have a ceramic palette, you can use anything you have, you could use a dinner plate. But some of these colors I spit out, I really like this green and I really like this teal. Then come back and keep using these. But then I thought, well crap, now I can't use my little palette for anything else until I use up my paints on there because I don't want to waste them. So in something like that, you may want to have a dedicated palette for these paints, or you may want to spit them out in a little tube like this. Then I also just came across this fun little thing at an online art store, and it's just a little watercolor holder. So I might squirt the colors in here and let them live in this rather than my main palette that I like to use for all of my painting. It's a nice little divot that you can save painting. So I might be using that going forward rather than my yummy ceramic palette here. So Sennelier super nice brand, lots of good colors, very saturated. More so even than that, you hear people talk about Daniel Smith all the time and it is one of the nicer brands. You see I have this little wooden box of all these yummy colors. Again, I have finally done the smart thing and started separating out what I would consider my color palette and the colors that I like using. I've started to pull those out. Because if they're sitting in the middle of this every time I come back to it, I think what color did I like? I don't remember and now I can just have it separated. The Daniel Smith comes in little tubes and it also comes in half pans in some places. Then I did the really smart thing for this set, you're not going to find this as something that is just for sale anywhere. I went online on eBay and I looked for Daniel Smith, lots of paint, or you can look up some Emily, lots of paint, Grumbacher, lots of paint, whatever it is that you happen to want. There are people out there who sell this stuff pretty cheap. This person had created whole collections of half pans of all the colors that they had and put them in a nice little box and sold this little box for I wouldn't say super cheap, but it was like 100 bucks. If I went out and tried to buy all these colors, I's easily spend probably three or $400. So I got a deal. But again, I might not use any of these colors. I might only use these 20. So in the end it's probably better if you figure out what colors you like working with and that's the colors you invest in. Rather than everything that I have done over the last ten years every time I thought I had a new idea and I couldn't wait to experiment with each of the colors and each of the types of paint. So what I'm going to do just to give you an idea of what each of these does is I'm going to do a little sample of each of these and just show you what you might expect from a student grade versus a medium grade versus an artist grade. So let me get myself situated here and we will do that. Before I do that, I want to talk about watercolor brushes. So I do have specific watercolor brushes that I enjoy working with this type project. But I do have other watercolor brushes over here and they're fun to experiment with. Some of them have different shapes and you can do some fun things with those. Some of these have rounded half-round knife-edge looking shapes, square, different things. But I like this shape the best. It comes up to a point and it's more rounded. These are the ones that I like best. This is a real cheap one. I think it might have come in one of these watercolor sets. A watercolor brush usually has bristles that hold a lot of water. That's what makes them really nice for doing watercolor. This was real cheap, doesn't even have a name on it. These, I got at an art show. They are the ones I like to use the most. These are Rafael's, and I've got an 18 and a zero and a three-slash zero. So these sizes, I've actually, for the size abstracts that I've been working on, really liked the three slash zero and the zero because that's a really nice size. They're really nice shape. They hold a lot of water and they have held up really nicely. I do have the bigger one just to play with too. But these right here, the Raphael, you might get those at the Blick, you might have to order those. I got them in an art show. So I haven't really seen those as often out that you can buy and they're not cheap that's an artist grade watercolor brush. You can go to the Michaels or the **** Blick or any of the art stores and you can get student grade supplies all way up to artist grade supplies. The better your supply, the nicer your piece of art will be when you're done, but when you're just practicing and starting out, you might start with the student grade. These I got at Michael's not very long ago to play with and I really like these because they come up to a really nice sharp point, which allowed me to make some details and do some things on my paper that I might not have been able to do with the softer point, like I can make marks and things. These are Aqua Elite and I've got the 610 and 12 I like these three sizes for what I've been working on. So this is a nice and these run under $20, I'd say 16 to $20 between the three. So they're not cheap, but they are really, really nice. So start off with whatever your budget is. If your budget is student grade then start off with student grade, get some brushes specifically for watercolor. I do like this shape that comes up to a point. So get that shape in a couple of different sizes to experiment with and you'll be set to do some of these different projects. So I'm going to pull out some paper and we'll do some little testing of supplies here before we get started. [MUSIC] 4. A Bit More About Watercolor: What I want to do is just test out how hard or easy these are to use. With the watercolors I like to activate them and let that water sit there in a little bit. You can take a spray bottle and spray all your colors when you get started to activate them if you want. Sometimes they're just too hard to do anything with to begin with. This is probably the very cheapest that I got. I think it might have been a $2 sampler set. Look how pretty, and rich, and yummy that color is. That's fun. Let's just do. I'm going to do a little bit of all of these so that we can compare. Let's just pick out this yummy bigger set. Well let that activate some, so that it'll let me pick up some color. At this point I'm not too worried about the color of my water so it's going to change colors as we're going, but as that water gets dirtier your colors are less crisp, and clean, and clear. We'll look at that now. A big difference in the two that I just did and it might look a little different when it dries, but this is a tiny bit grainier than that one. It might be just be a difference in the fillers. That one is really super pretty, that first one. These are a variety of whatever these tubes are which are nicer colors. Let's see, I want the Grumbacher. Here we go. Here's the Grumbacher. Let's do the Grumbacher, deluxe transparent and deluxe opaque and see what the difference here is. I want to do a red again because it's what I've got going on here, so let's just activate these a little bit. These little things come out so you can move them, but I'm not sure if they sell these. I'm sure they do to replace them after you use them, I would hope they would. I've never gotten down far enough where I've needed it, so let's just see. This one right here is the opaque. Then let's try the transparent. With the red, opaque, and transparent look pretty similar actually, but there is more pigment in this. I can definitely see that. It looks like I'm getting the same color with each of these which is fun to compare. Since I'm not positive what all of these colors are, this one is cadmium red. Let's do that. This is randomly something over here in this thing which I would consider for the most part nicer colors because they're the Daniel Smiths, and the Sennelier, and the Winsor & Newton. Let's just try. Oh, look at that. There's some tubes of paint, and then let's look at the Sennelier and the Daniel Smith. Let's do this one. I might activate one of these, maybe this one. That was real pretty, little different color. Set that back here, let's come back to this color. There's a lot of color in that, but that was very interesting and actually resisted a little bit my paper. That's a Daniel Smith, Perylene Scarlet, but look at how heavy that color is. That's got more saturation than any of these other ones that we've done. I'm going to set this out here because I've already got a red that was out of one of these tubes. It might have been this one. Well, let's just put a red out and let's use the paint wet because we're using the paint dry and we're activating it. Well, you don't have to do that. If you're using these watercolors like this, you can use the watercolor wet. You would add water to your brush and come right over here to your pigment and jump right into that. I do actually like working with wet watercolor instead of dry watercolor sometimes. That's really fun. Look how saturated the amount of pigment in color is in that Daniel Smith red. That's crazy. Some of these have started to dry. Now I really like the super cheap set a lot and I really like the Daniel Smith one a lot. This is really pretty that one. I like the way this one has different movement and the different ways that it dry. You can see all that texture and pattern there. I like that and some of these other ones are still drying, but that's a very interesting paint experiment there. I like the chipset, I like the Daniel Smith set, the best. I do like working with wet watercolors. This super fun and at least experiment and try out your colors and what you've got and just see how does it work and how do you like it and how does it move? Does it make any fun texture in there? Does the color separate some of these Daniel Smith ones? Especially the color separates and you get two different colors. That one is so saturated, it's just crazy. I love that. Fun little experiments there to try out with your paint brushes. Now what I really like to do and what we do normally when you're color swatching is normally you color swatch on pieces of paper like this. I write the color and then I can come back and say, all right, I want to use this purple and this bright red and this orange and I'll know exactly what those are. I can pull colors out that way after I took all the time to color swatch these. Now I can see exactly how all of these look on paper. I can see this moon glow, it actually separates color. Until you just do some basic color swatching tests and examples like this you're not going to know what these do, but a more advanced version of that is what I want to jump into with some of our abstract projects that we're going to be working on. In that first one is going to be small abstracts that we create, but they're color studies at the same time. What colors do we want to try to mix and what little piece art can we end up with? I can't wait to jump into some of these projects with you. I hope that seeing how the different watercolors look and the different grades and the different expenses that you may be looking at, I hope that was really helpful. I will see you in class. 5. Sketchbook Practice: [MUSIC] Let's take a look at some of the things that I like to do for color studies and to practice and to just get to figuring out my supplies. I have some sketchbooks here. These are 200 GSM, which is a nice weight. It's not the 140 pound, which is 300 GSM that I like to work on when I'm using nicer watercolor paper and this little pad here is 140 GSM. See even like that, less expensive artists' pads that you can get at like Michaels and stuff, the 300 GSM is what I really love but most sketchbooks come as 200 GSM, which is probably 110 pounds rather than 140 pound and that's okay for different projects and what I like to do with these is experiment and scribble and I'm going to show you some of these that have things I've just played with. Just trying out and not everything is successful but then you'll get to the point after you play enough with things that are not successful and then you will get to something that you're like, that's amazing and that's where I started coming up with these color swatch samplers. That in the end I thought they were rather beautiful and as you get a little closer, you can see some details in there in addition to color that I have added because I like doing the color and then coming back and turning it into a little piece of art. Then just to show you how pretty something like this is. This isn't just a little mat that I got at the art store but that right there is really pretty and ready to frame. Look how beautiful that is. That would be a really beautiful thing hanging in the house. I'm loving that. Having a little set of maps, this is a five by seven mat, you could put it in the 8 by 10 frame if you wanted to frame it yourself. Having something like this to come back and look at your art and frame it out so you can see what you've ended up with is really nice for seeing what you got and how beautiful it is and not everything works out. These look terrible. Some of these that don't work out, I will then draw some botanicals on top of it and I have a little book that I got at the bookstore, 20 ways to draw a tulip and 44 other fabulous flowers by Lisa Condon, and I love this because it just gives me examples of different flowers that I could try and I like to draw on top of, say, a watercolor color study or background or just little swatching that I like to do sometimes and we can come back and draw pretty botanicals on top of it and turn it into something pretty when it really wasn't working out before because what was under there, it was ugly and I was really disappointed and then I thought, well, let me draw a flower on top of that and then I liked it. [LAUGHTER] Here's another one that I did and also had some metallic paint in here that you can see as I shine it in the light. I think a metallic gold would be beautiful on these and I really loved this one. We could frame that out pretty nicely, how beautiful that is. These are what we'll be doing first and we can do them. Look at that one. I love that one. We could do these in a sketchbook. We could do these on loose pieces of watercolor paper. These are what I want to work on first and I would consider these just little abstract tests that I've done and see this was brighter, this was with the cheap set, this little two-dollar set, I think it was. Or maybe this was this set here. I pulled the blue and the green and stuff out of this collection and the colors are brighter, which is okay but they're not as rich as the nicer brands to me. They are very vivid and I did like how it came out and then I also was doing some of these in my larger books because I like to just do large watercolor studies and watercolor swatching. These are real fun for seeing how the colors mix and then you could come back and draw shapes on them. Like your bigger background examples and I'll come back later and do something with those and again, not all of them work out. Look how terrible that one is. But if I draw flowers all over that it probably will be really pretty. Here with some examples. This is a good example of one of these worked out like I wanted. One of them didn't. If I have a little mat here. Look how beautiful that piece is right there. That's ready to sell as a piece of art. It's so beautiful. This one I would need to work on a little more. Not all of them end up looking like I want but I did have fun with those and this one, just so lovely and I've got some other little marks and details in there finishing it off. This one. Really lovely, and I did not like it to begin with, but after I finished it, I actually did like it and we could probably frame this up and that would be a pretty piece of art or the front of a card or who knows, we could do something fun with that. Here's one that I was practicing on that I did not finish yet. That's when I was playing. This was all wet on wet. This is what happens if all the colors are wet and meshing together. This is what happens if they're a little bit drier but still allowed to blend a little bit and I don't like the wet on wet so as we're doing these and experimenting, you'll see what you end up liking if you want them to blend a whole bunch like this, or if you want them to separate out a little bit, we do have to have a little bit of patience and let those layers dry a bit. These are drier now. Look how different each of those are, this one really being the most saturated with the heaviest amount of pigment for sure. Still fun to look at those after they're dry. Another watercolor book that I like to play in. Here's one where I've actually experimented and drawn different shapes on there and then one where I actually did, do pretty botanicals and shapes and marks and just played. Then I got to these pretty ones again. Let me get my little mat here. Let's see, is this a big enough for that? Look how pretty that is if we frame that out. These are just beautiful. They started off as color studies and then I thought, oh my goodness, I love this so much. Let's go ahead and finish that into a piece of art and I did some marks. This one, beautiful, love that. I love ocher and reds and pinks and stuff, so I like to play with the ocher or the Naples yellow. This one turned out real pretty. I love that. It's a gray and some greens. Here's another color block that I was trying to do and I did wait for the layers to dry and I like how they do that and then I was drawing on top of them. They weren't completely dry. When you start doing your marks, if they don't completely dry, they'll smear into the water. I will definitely be working better on those where I let them dry more before I do additional mark-making. But look how pretty that would be framed up in a mat. I love that. I love having a little mat so I can look at them and see. Those are fun. These are the sketchbooks. As far as our first project goes, you can work in a sketchbook or you can work on watercolor paper. I also have a 140 pound inexpensive paper because they had these at the Michel's buy one pad, get one pad free and I got a whole bunch of these. We might be working on a few of these at the same time. You could cut these in half and that would be a really nice size. You could work in different sketchbooks. The first sketch book is arteza. These are artezas. The other sketchbook that I showed you was a mole skin. But you don't have to have a nice sketchbook because you're just making stuff in here, playing and experimenting. They're not necessarily meant to be beautiful. You might not want to invest in the most expensive sketch books out there. You can get inexpensive ones. The artezas were not very expensive. They're going to come in about the a 110 pound weight. But I do like that weight for these experiments. Then I do take these off. I'm using some artist's tape from the art store. You can also use painter's tape. That works really good. What I'm wanting to do really is give myself a framed out piece of art when I'm done, even though I'm working in my sketchbook. [LAUGHTER] some of those that I have finished that I showed you, I really, really liked. They may be coming out of the sketchbook and then be framed up and hung somewhere. I want to be able to look at them later. I'm going to put this one to the side for a moment. I actually have these colors that I've considered are some of my favorite. But the purpose of doing something like this is to get to know your colors and pick out colors that maybe you haven't tried before and start experimenting and figuring out, okay, what do I love and what do I not love? Then once you have a color palette that you love, you might take some strips of watercolor paper and make yourself a paint palette of color. If you've got some of this that's been dripped on or something, just cut out some little strips to say color palettes that you particularly love. I like having a couple of strips ready and then if I fall in love with a particular color palette, I'm ready to save it. We're going to save, if we find one we love, we'll save it. Now, working in sketchbooks like this, I like to have two or three ready to go so that I can go from book to book. We might go ahead and tape off our other ones. I'm going to go get a clean cup of water and I'll be right back. I've got a couple of brushes out. Let's go ahead and just add these brushes here to our water. I've got my Raphael and ones I got at Michel's. I'm not going to use the cheap brush because I just think that those bristles are just crazy. They're not good. But I'm going to put these all in some water and get them ready. I've got the Daniel Smith and the Sennelier sets out here because I want to continue experimenting with the colors that I own to see if there's any other colors that I want to add to my collection of ones that I've decided I like. I may use some of those too in my color studies. What I like to do is I like to get a little color on here, let it dry a little bit, add a little bit of the next color so that in the end when we're done, we've got something that resembles one of these that I've been working on and that gives me a chance to see how the colors interact with each other, whether they looked good, did I like them? Were they brighter and more primary than I intended? It just gives me an idea. I really loved this and I'm not sure I wouldn't have gravitated towards this pink that's almost like a neon pink. But man, that might be like my favorite color now, I think that might be this one which is this Emilia Color 659, which is this quinacridone red. I really liked that. This rose opera, the 659, that's the rose opera. That rose opera is almost like a neon pink. It's that pop that made this particular set exciting. I might want to play with that again. But it's very interesting to make those observations and to try colors together that you've never done before and just see what color palettes am I going to like. Let's just dive in and I have not pre-selected anything here. I'm just looking at these colors. I really like green gold, so I take that back. I did pull these three out of here wondering if they were going to be colors that I wanted to add into here. I have a green gold already in here. This is green gold. This is rich green gold. What's the difference? Those colors, do I like them, do I think I'm going to like them? If you're nervous to put color down on your page because you really do want to create something pretty, what we could do is just go ahead. That's way more yellow than I even thought. Let's leave this other green gold. If you're looking at that, thinking, I just thought, what is the difference in these two colors? Do this little game where you draw them out. The rich green gold is more yellow. That's very interesting and I don't know that I like it. This one is not nearly as heavy in color as I expected. That's rare earth green. I think that's a Daniel Smith color. This one is cobalt green, pale. Again, that might be why I didn't pull these out. They're just not very saturated. I don't know if I even like them. That's a very interesting little experiment there. I don't like rich green gold, I don't think. [LAUGHTER] Let's just do one and then we'll continue. I think this might be green gold too, like in this Then we had one, which one is that? It' brown pink. Now, how did they come up with brown-pink? Let's see what this is. See, it looks like a green gold, that's called brown pink. That is very interesting. I'm not sure that I love it though. Having little swatches over here where you can narrow stuff down is really, really helpful. Let's see what this is. It's a gold color. This is a yellow ocher. No wonder I like it. I like yellow ocher. [LAUGHTER] [MUSIC] 6. Adding details in our sketchbook: [MUSIC] Let's start off with yellow ocher. We'll add to from there. Now with these, I've taped off a square and I want to very organically paint up through there because I want to create something pretty an abstract in addition to doing my color studies. So that's real pretty. Now that I'm looking at that, look at this quinacridone deep gold. That's pretty, let's see what that is. So it's an orange. That might be interesting. If we throw in one of these blues that I wasn't sure about, that might be fun if we do that because that's a crazy color palette and it's in the blue, yellow family. I'm letting this dry a little bit as I'm talking to you. I think I'll go back with rare earth green, which I wasn't too sure about. But now that's drying I do actually really like it on this paper. Sometimes you got to let these dry before you can see if you like it. Like now that I've let that dry, I really like that light color. I might come back through here. It's not completely, that's got way more color. I must have let it activate longer. So see how letting that color sit and that water sit on your color longer. Let's that really activate the paint. You just can't use them completely dry. They don't work out very well. This is very interesting and we are going to love it. I don't know. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll sit there in front of the TV and all of this will be out on the dining table and I will just do a couple of these and let them dry and experiment. I'm watching TV while I'm doing it and it's just so nice to relax and let your mind work a little bit, but relax at the same time. That's very interesting. I don't know that I love it. I don't think I'm going to add it to my color thing yet. Then while this is wet, then I sometimes want to go ahead and draw on it and so if you're wanting to add to this and make it more of a little mixed media project. You can do that with a pencil, which is what this is. This is my mechanical pencils that I like to use and I just like to draw lines and mark make and maybe do some fake writing. These would be really nice if you wanted to make them into inspiration cards, and you could write inspirational words on them. You could do scripture. You could write a scripture on top of this. If you like scripture, you can do a favorite poem or a very cool saying that you like. This can be the backgrounds for some really fun mark-making and words. You can draw with the STABILO pencils on top of this. I like doing the STABILOs. You can use your POSCA paint pens with this, which I like to do a lot. I also really like gold so I have the POSCA paint pens and gold that would be really good for mark-making. While I'm talking, I'm letting this dry a bit. You can also play with your Neocolor crayons. You could play with just about anything that you can imagine. I also have some really nice tipped pens that would work great for this. Those Micron pens work great for this. Any kind of color pencil. I also have these oil pencils, Pitt oil base in this fun color. Anything like this. You can draw on top of watercolor with and add marks and interests and other things. So this is getting pretty dry. I like to go through with pencil because it's subtle for this type of project and maybe do some scribble. Also think it's fun to add some marks, so I'm going to come through and do a little mark making. I draw right on top of the watercolor, whether it's wet or it's dry, the pencil marks right on top of it without smearing. It looks good. I like these little rows of lines, so I like that and I like it with the scribble. Then I like some implied writing in here personally, so I do a little scribble that looks like some writing. So this is the perfect time to play and experiment and decide what marks do you like. You might do a whole series. I've decided I like the little bit of scribble. I like the rows of lines. I like a little bit of writing that looks like maybe I've got something in there and you don't know quite what it says, but it adds to it. Then when I think I'm done, I'll go ahead and peel the tape. Then I try not to get outside the tape because maybe I want this to be a finished piece, but if I do get outside, it's far enough outside where I could tear all the edges and make this a really pretty finished piece with deckled edges, which I'll do that in a piece later on. But just looking at this right here, let me see where I put my, there it is, my mat. I could see if I'm going to frame that out, if it's going to cut that little piece off or just look and just see what I ended up with. I just like doing that. So as this continues to dry, a lot of times I don't love the colors as they are wet sometimes, but when they get fully dry, then I'm like, whoa, now I love it. So don't judge a piece while it's wet. Another thing I like to do is take a finer 0.1 and then as these are drier, then you can come back and do some mark-making in here so I might take a different color than I've already used, but it might still be a blue. I like these with a nice tip on them because now I can come back and add dots or marks or lines. Again, get a little more yummy detail in there with some color. I like doing that too. You can just play and experiment and see just whatever it is that works for you. Maybe I'll do another set. If it's wet, that's what it's going to do. So depending on how wet or dry it is, these are going to merge into each other or give you nice clear dots. If you don't want the merge, wait till it's dry. Very interesting there. So I might just leave that as it is for a moment. Then two, do I need anything darker, do I need more of any particular color? I just like to look and make these decisions. Then set that to the side and I move on to my next color study. I'm going to call this a little mini done abstract color study. So I love that one. Let's set it to the side so it can dry and I will get one of these others that I have prepared. Here we go. I think I'm going to play in this little set of colors that I know I love. Let's just use this Michaels brush to see how it's different and maybe I want a ocher and maybe a rust. Just put some water on some of these. Let's see, ocher and rust is nice. Maybe whatever this medium brown is. That's a Sennelier 20, something. Let's see. That's a 205. It says Raw Sienna. So I've got Raw Sienna and then 623 is Venetian red. Then this other one is Daniel Smith, Yellow Ocher. So let's just see what we get. I'm going to start with some Yellow Ocher. I do really like when you get this scrubbed brush look where it's not solid. To me, that adds a little bit to my vision of abstract [LAUGHTER] and we could use our heat gun in here. If I want to make sure these layers are dry and not blending, I could dry that a little bit with my heat gun. So if you're in a hurry and you don't want to wait through some of these drying times. See now, this is almost the same color, but a slight tiny bit difference, and they look similar too. Let's go back with this. Look at that color. Now that's a color. Now, have we allowed enough blending? Do I want to go back in here with some more water and blend those together or do I like them all separate? Liking those separate maybe. Maybe a little more water and maybe let's see. Here's Lapis lazuli, genuine. Let's get that way. It's a similar color, but let's see what color that is. Filling in a little bit of the white spots that we've got going. Those are really pretty. Look at those colors. What was that? The 623, that Venetian Red is such a pretty color and we can go ahead now too. We can let it dry or if you're using pencil, we can go ahead and make some scribbles in there and just add some details. We can just go ahead and be doing that on the wet watercolor. Just don't put your hand into the water, the wet part [LAUGHTER]. I'm trying to keep my hand off the wet stuff. I've already decided, I like the scribble, the sets of lines and a little bit of scribble writing as my particular elements for this series, and I'm just going to consider it a series even though it's color studies in my book. Because this might lead to larger series in watercolors, it might lead to larger sets, might lead to more projects. So I've already decided for this collection. These are the elements that I like so why not go ahead and be using those. Then two, we can come back in here. We could do now that I'm sitting here thinking about it. We could come in and this is going to make a mess so we might just take some little watercolor sample pieces and just hold off the rest of our paper there. We could do a little bit of paint splatter in here with one of these colors, maybe the red. You see if we keep it off of our paper there, we're not splattering on everything which I have done and then when we peel the tape, it's still a clean page. That's really pretty. Now I'm really loving that right there. Let's let that one dry. Let's go ahead and pull back this first one that we did because it is mostly dry. [MUSIC] 7. Finishing up our sketch book pieces: [MUSIC] See if there's any final details I want to add with the blue because I stopped right here because it was all wet. I wanted a few more dots in there and then I'll call that one good. That's really pretty. Now the colors have started to dry and it's very interesting. I don't know that that's my colors but I do like that we experimented with those colors. Let's go ahead and pull out the third page that we prepped. This is why I like having lots of loose pages or taped off or lights of two or three sketch books that I'm working in at the same time. I think I want to go with the blues and the greens. Maybe orange, let's do orange and red because, let's go back in with some orange. Let's do some orange and reds. I really like these two I think which is the quinacridone fuchsia and the cadmium orange hue. I do believe those are the Daniel Smith. I could do a red. I could do like one of these reds. We've got the perylene scarlet. Let's do perylene scarlet. I like yellow ocher too. Let's go with this yellow ocher. Here's some options. Let's just see. Let's just start off with the orange. I really like this orangey one here almost better. That's a Sennelier 623 which was the venetian red but the venetian red was very red, so maybe not. I like this 659 which was the ocher red because it was almost the neon red. Let's start with the orange. Oh my goodness. Now this is orange, like orange, orange. [LAUGHTER] Again, I'm just [inaudible] as we go. You going to be careful if you let any water pull up next to the tape because you'll end up with a weird line that you weren't really wanting. If we want to speed this along, I do like it to be a little drier. Just takes a second and then say I want the medium brush. Yeah, I want this medium brush here. Let's go for this. This is the quinacridone fuchsia. Wow, I like it. That's yummy. This is more vivid than I had in my mind but it is yummy. Now, one thing I might do too as I'm going, I might put a little of this here on an extra piece of paper and then we do this orange. This could have been a better way to pick out a color is to look at that one. I do like the vividness of the red in this. That's very interesting. Then I might go ahead and do some scribble. Sometimes when I'm doing these I do doubt the color choices but we're working in our sketchbook. It's not a big deal. It's not like I've ruined anything that's important. This is my time to play and experiment and discover. Even though I doubt the color choices, I'm giving myself the permission to not love things when they're done. That's really important because that's how you make these discoveries. That's how you figure out the colors that you like and the colors that you don't necessarily like and narrow down the things that you want to work with and the marks that you want to make. That's how you discover your style. Discovering your style and getting to a point where you have a style is simply a process of narrowing down what you like and what you don't like and making the elements that you like be the things that you do over and over. Look how pretty that is right there. I think I'm liking this one. Then if I want to hold up my little framey thing and say, am I going to love it? [LAUGHTER] Maybe I will. Because a lot of times too I surprised myself and end up liking things that I didn't think I was going to. After this dries a bit more we could come back in here with some crayon. We can get our nail colors out. Let's just hang on. Let's draw this. Really like what that looks like now that it's dry and this is another scenario where I wanted to all the colors. [LAUGHTER] I have the mac daddy set of the video crayons. But I like these because now I can look at something like this and say, okay, what color do I want to use as an accent with the colors that I've already got in here. I could come in here with an orange, maybe this color that's called orange and now I could do some mark-making and different lines, maybe some dots, maybe some little lines just in something. Just extra little bitty details that you might not see from far off. But as you get closer to the piece you start discovering these little marks and extra interesting pieces that are in here. Maybe we'll do some circles. Maybe I'll do some more down here. Look how pretty that is. Then as you get closer you start to see the nuances of the color and the details that you've added into what really started out being a simple color study. If we go ahead and peel the tape off, even though I'm doing these in a sketchbook, after you do enough of these you might keep your work surface clean enough where if you loved it you could cut this out of your sketchbook and frame it as a print. Look at that. Oh my goodness. That one is so pretty. I'm loving that and perfect scenario where you save a color card and write each of those colors on the card and then you could revisit this color palette again because as you're looking later, you're not going to remember what colors went into that. I hope you enjoy doing color studies like this because I want you to experiment with your colors and then after you get something that you really like color wise, turn them into little mini abstracts. This would be a perfect sketch book project to do at night when you're sitting in front of the TV because watercolors don't have to take up that much space. Look how pretty that one ended up. Totally love that. This one for some reason I'm just really drawn to very bright colors. Then I would say this one, even though I do love how it came out, probably not my favorite color way. But I hope you enjoyed this first project doing a little sketchbook explorations and color studies and then just adding some details to the top to make it into a fun abstract piece when you're done. Because these are some of my favorite to do myself in these books because now I feel like my sketch book of art meanderings are worth showing off and playing in. I can then pull this out in a class and get excited because I'm like look how amazing this turned out and it was basically a color study to start with. I hope you have fun with this project and I will see you back in class. [MUSIC] 8. Color blocking: [MUSIC] In this video, we're going to do some more color abstract, color swatching play, but in bigger color blocking. What I like about this is it allows you to see color in larger swatches. You can work wet on wet, or wet on dry. This is a wet on wet so all the colors really blended in with each other. I don't know that I love it, but I don't necessarily hate it either. I could go back on top now and do mark-making and scribbles, and I probably would end up liking that as a background. But I was experimenting and that's exactly what some of these exercises are for. They're for experimenting and figuring out, what do you like, what do you not like, and what can you do with that? I'm going to do a few of these larger color block color swatching, and then we'll make some marks on it and turn it into a little bit of abstract art. What I've done is taken some paper, not in the sketchbook this time, I'm just going to work on random pieces of paper that I can then scoot out of the way, and I've got some tape off the edge there sticking to each other. But I've prepared three just to get started. I want to work fast, and I want to do each one a little different, and I want to do rows of color. If you work on more than one at a time, then you can put one to the side while it's drying a little bit for the next layer. I personally would like these to be less smudgy and a little more stripy along the lines of this page on my sketchbook rather than this page, but that's just my personal preference. I do encourage you to give both of those a try and then see what you like. I'm going to work here in some of the colors that I've decided are some of my favorites. I like this blue-green fuchsia shade, so I'm going to start with that on this first one and get some type of striping. Then I'm going to sit that to the side and let that one dry. I think on this next one, I will start with say green. I'm going to do each one a little different, but I'm going to stick in colors that I personally like. Then on this third one, let's start with this yellow ocher. I like that. It doesn't have to be completely even, you can have a darker color on one side, you can come back in here, make it heavier pigment, play, just see what it is that you think you're going to like just by experimenting. I want the next layer on this one I think, to be a green. They don't have to be the same size. They don't have to be the same color all the way through. We're just experimenting here and seeing what it is that we can create. We started with green on this one. I think I'm going to go back with, let me tell you that green was chromium green oxide and that blue was rare earth green, and that ocher was yellow ocher. I think all three of those are Daniel Smith. I'm going to go back on this one. See now that right there just taught me a lesson, that yellow ocher is more vivid [LAUGHTER]. Or maybe I picked out a different shade, I don't know. It doesn't look the same as that one. Maybe I had dipped it in another one. That's very vivid. I don't know that I love it [LAUGHTER]. I think I'm going to go back with this terracotta color, which is the Sennelier color. Let me see what that is. I'm pretty sure that is the Venetian red. That's that terracotta color I liked so much. That's Venetian red. Let's go in there with some Venetian red. Yeah, I like that. Let's go back with this one here. What color do we want to do next? I think I want that to be a little smushier, so I added a little water right there so that it did blend a little, but not so much that they were in with each other. I actually liked that crazy bright color on my sketch board there. I think that was this one which was that Venetian Opera. Was that the name of that one? Opera rose. The Fascinelli Opera Rose is this bright, bright one, but man did I like it. Depending on how much water and color you pick out, you see, we could make that real bright, and crazy, crazy neon, or we could have made it real light and more like a pink. That's fun. Let's go back here to this one. Is that the one that's next most dry? Let's see, what do we want? What is this color here? This one is quinacridone burnt orange. That's a crazy color. Look at that. That's the fun of experimenting like this. You're going to end up with some surprises you weren't expecting. That's pretty bright. Let's see. Let's try this Aussie red gold. Might be too close to the same color, but, okay, that's very interesting. Let's try this one here, which is the Venetian red in the Daniel Smith. Yeah, I like that. I also wish I had done these in different little widths there, but it's kind of the things you figure out as you're going. Let me get that off before it gets stuck here. I want there to be that bright goldie one, let's see. Do you remember what that was? Well, I hope that was this one here. I forget as I'm going, but I think it's this one. I'm going to add in just some marks in here because I want to. That's fun. I also think I'm going to go ahead now and scribble on this one, and we could do some marks in here. These little extra details at the end are what make these pretty to me [NOISE]. That's fine. Let's pull the tape off the first one. I was just doing that with a pencil. You can do it with whatever you want. I like the graphite with the watercolor on these. Not all of these will come out. I've got some that turned out terrible. But if they do turn out, I'm really excited about it. In the end, it's color swatching that I was playing with there. That one's very interesting. Let's go on to the next one. I wish I had done different size stripings here. [NOISE] That's okay. Let's go back with that same color, Venetian red. Where did I use that color there? I think that might have been that color. Let's see. [LAUGHTER] Oh, yeah, that was that color. Let's just do it real dark. There we go. That was different. [NOISE] I might take that Venetian red and do some mark making higher up and pull that color in. That's why I like this brush from Michael's because of the nice tip on it. Look at that nice little line that it gives me in there. I really like that a lot for a detail. [NOISE] I just get a lot of color right there on the end. Then as you get into a rhythm, those lines are so pretty. Look at that. I like that. Let's take a graphite. This is a 2B pencil. It's just a bigger graphite pencil to see about drawing here, giving us some scribbles and some lines on there. That's pretty. That's almost pretty just like it is. I don't know if I want to add anything else to that or not. Look how pretty that is. Let's pull the tape off and take a look at where we're at. We can always continue adding to our little samplers. But if you get to a point where you think, oh, I'm thinking I'll dig that right there, don't be afraid to stop. Sometimes I overdo it when I'm thinking maybe I'm just afraid to keep going and when I'm all done, I thought, no, I should've stopped. [LAUGHTER] This one, the colors are so beautiful that we should make a color card of these so that we remember later what we used. That one's pretty. I wish I had been a little less even with the stripes, but look how pretty that is. Another thing that I like to do and we'll have to let these dry before I can do it, is cut these with with tearm so they've got a pretty edge on them. Let's finish this one. This one is so crazy now that I almost don't even care what the last color is because I don t know that I'm going to like it no matter what we do. Let's go back with that red and maybe come back to this green. [NOISE] Then give us some more color up here. I could go ahead and start marking on this. Let's draw this. [NOISE] These colors are pretty rich. I might get out the Neo crayons and see if we do some mark making if we like those. Let's see here. Normally what I would do because I really didn't plan on using the Neo Crayons, for instance, on these, but we're doing a little abstracts after we get our color study in there. What you might do then is, say, what other things can we bring into this? I might normally limit my color palette and pull those together before I start. But because I'm doing this in this way where I'm doing a color study and I'm like, what else can we add to it? This is a case where I might like to have all the color options to then decide, here's what I'm going to do. I'm filling this color here, which is a sepia. In this case, we could do some lines and we can do some shapes. I pull out a different color. [NOISE] Some of these I've never used before, ocher. If it's a piece that I'm feeling I don't know if I love this or not, then that might be the time to try out colors you've never tried before and just see how they work on top of other colors. [NOISE] I'm just drawing some circles on this one. That's not to say that these colors wouldn't work great for somebody else. This just doesn't happen to fall within my color palette love like some of these others. They do not mix in such a way that I'm like, huh, that's not quite what I expected, [LAUGHTER] which you need these moments. You need these moments to go with the other moments of pure joy so that you get this stuff figured out. [NOISE] This is just white, I think. Yeah, white. [NOISE] I actually like POSCA white better than that. That was very interesting. [NOISE] POSCA pen is what I'm talking about when I say POSCA, POSCA white, the paint pen. Now that I've bought a paint pens, we could pull these paint pens over here out. [NOISE] This might be the fun time to experiment with gold. [NOISE] That's fun. Let's pull our tape off. I love peeling tape. It's like the magic moment when nothing was working and then you're like, it pulls it all together to a finished piece. Then when you're all done, it's still maybe that nothing was working, but [LAUGHTER] that's part of the fun of doing these little studies. You figure these things out. Now that that's done, that actually is pretty fun. What if we go ahead and make these edges hand torn. Let me show your hand torn edge real quick. This is just a ruler. I like using clear because then I can see and lineup with a line on here and hold it down and just peel the paper so that you end up with a really cool hand torn edge [NOISE] on the side there, giving it a really pretty deckled edge. Because it's clear, you can get the same amount [NOISE] of white all around the piece so that you get it look like it was on purpose [LAUGHTER]. [NOISE] You can practice that a couple times on whatever your least favorite piece is and get your little technique down pat. But look how pretty that is as a little finished piece. Even though the colors are insane, this is still a piece that I would probably sign and maybe put a year, and then that is a definitely a finished little piece of art, even though I like some of these others a little better. Now that we have finished this one, I would like a little bit more stuff on here. So I might go back with that gold. That was really pretty. [MUSIC] 9. Finishing up our color blocked pieces: [MUSIC] Do some scribbling, we could do some lines. I could have done inspirational words, it could have had something fun. If you don't have good handwriting, which let me tell you mine looks like I'm a doctor and you can't read it, [LAUGHTER] you could consider using a little tiny stencils and writing a cool word or something. These came from Michael's and it's the little plaid Folk Art Set and it's just a little set of a,b, cs, and 1, 2, 3s. What I like about it is, I got two sets of them because I tend to lose things, I had things for myself. What I like about it is we could write this out on another piece of paper and figure out. We can do this with paint too now that I'm thinking about it, but we can do a paint pen or paint. Now pick out whatever word you like, and do a little test and then you can see how much space does that take up and where would I need to start that? Then that can be your little guide that you can have just below, that you can then write out a fun word or inspiration or quote. If you've got really fun handwriting, that doesn't look nearly as bad as mine, then in gold lettering or white lettering or something that would maybe contrast this really nicely in a paint pen. You could go through and write a scripture or a word anything inspiring like that. I like that gold I'm actually going to write this one on here using my fatter paint pen. There we go. Then just see how that does. Perfect time to experiment is when it's not something that's really serious. I'm using this as my guide [NOISE] if you use a fat or paint pen, and you get the letters in there really nicely without having to trace it like I did with that pencil, and it's a little easier than if you're painting. [NOISE] You see through these stencils so it's easy to get them lined up since I can see where they're going. What they're going next to. Then if you're working on lettering, hand lettering, calligraphy anything like that now is the time to get that going and play. I could have done that in white, but I like how it shines in the light there. I think what I'm also going to do with this one is tear our edge, maybe a little tighter. [NOISE] This is the perfect way to make some of those art cards, inspiration cards, art prompts anything like that like I've done in my art prompt class. Perfect for something like that. We were doing acrylics in that class, but you could easily substitute everything that we were doing for watercolor. Again, just layering fun media on top of that, whether it'd be pencil or paint, or whatever that is, we could cut this with a nice edge, and use a corner cutter to make the corners nice. If we do it this way, we've got a nice piece of art ready to frame. Basically, look how pretty that is. I love that. Third one. I do like the colors. It's probably my least favorite, even though these colors are crazy on this one, I do like the way they've come out better on these two. So super fun project there. I hope you enjoy trying the color blocking and then do some mark-making on top to turn it into a little piece of art for these color studies. A little bit different and really fun compared to the color studies that we did first, which was more along the lines of abstracts and this way, less solid color, very similar colorways here, but different look to what we got so always fun to experiment. I hope you give those a tryout and have a little bit of fun with them, and I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 10. Larger abstract pieces: [MUSIC] In this project, I thought it would be fun if we went back and did a little bit larger piece of our small color studies that we were playing in. If there was any that you really loved, the colors. I really love these colors I really loved these colors. If there's any that you really liked the colors and you were thinking, I really like those colors so I might just come back and make larger ones of these. They're not even necessarily larger, but they're on freestanding sheets. Then I could tear the edges and do deck old edges and play and experiment in a single piece like this. This would be at the point where I've done my color studies, and I've figured out that there's some cool things in there that I really love. Now it's the time that I might be ready to create some art. I have these two, these green and blue. That is also I have, actually, I'm going to use them off here for the moment. I have the tubes that I had put out on this palette that I really, really liked. This was a Sennelier color. It is chromium oxide green. It was this green here. This kyanite genuine was this pretty purply color. I'm going to use that. Then that teal color I really love. Believe it's this one. Yes. That is the cobalt green. On this one over here that I really liked, and then there's this blue here on this one here that I really liked. That's the colors that I used. I used this kyanite genuine, which is this purply color. You've got the green, you've got the turquoise color, which is the cobalt green chromium green oxide. Then we have a little tiny dash of this very bright blue, which was also a tube. I have Payne's gray, that's another one to work with. That's really fun. This one right here is really pretty. I think that's that right there. It's [inaudible] this one's really pretty. It's this one here and this is the Naples yellow, which is that yellow right there. This might have been the Grumbacher. Yes. This one up here was the Grumbacher turquoise was this color here. I'm going to use those colors on this first one because I liked them in my sketchbook. That way I can use some of these off of my palette here because eventually, I'm going to take this palette and wash it. [LAUGHTER] I'm trying to be real careful. I want this to make a finished piece of art so I don't want to draw all over the paper, but I do get this paper dirty, so let me save it for another one. Let's do this one. I'm going to work up quick so that I'm not ending up with a solid, super-strong color there. I might use my drawing tool to draw some of these in-betweens so that I don't have to sit and wait as long. [NOISE] Then I'm going to go back with this yummy purply shade and drying. I just keep these colors a little more separated so that they're not all blending and getting all smushy, colored, and stuff, which I like. Then after I get that in like that, I'm going to come back and add some really strong spots of the same colors I was using so that we then get just another layer of color in there. These I might just do right on top of each other. I'm not going to draw each of these out. Working just really intuitively, really here. I'm not trying to create something specific. After you do enough of these, you may be trying to create something specific and just get something in there. Let me get those dry. You might have a little rhythm going after you create enough of these and you might want to be doing something specific but at this point, I'm still working very intuitively. [NOISE] I also had some color runs splatter. I'm noticing here on this other one that I liked that I might could have done it again, but each time you do these, it'll be a little tiny bit different and that's okay. That's your goal just to experiment, make pretty abstract. This is turning out pretty though. I'm going to go back in. I like the graphite pencil in the series. I'm going to go do some fun scribble underneath. You could scribble first if you wanted to if that's what was moving you that day. Do a little bit of scribble writing here, which if you've got a saying or a poem or some words or a scripture that you like you could add that right in here where you're scribbling. I'm going to make it where you think there's something there you can't really tell. We'll come back in with my lines that I love. As far as your mark-making, that is something where you want to get to a point on a whole series like this where you're doing a certain set of lines or marks or drawings or something that's very specific to you knocking little paintings off my wall but I have this little cheat sheet of little lines and things that I've drawn for myself that I hang up here on the wall above me. Here I'm using the set right here just to inspire me and give me some ideas on different marks and lines and circles and crosses and whatever. Then I might do for different pieces of art. You might make yourself just a little reference sheet of these and hang them up on the wall in front of you. Then pick a set for whatever series you're working on and include those in each of those pieces to pull that series together and make some continuity in there. Look at that. Now, this is turning out really beautiful. I'm going ahead and peel the tape because I want to see if there's anything else that I would want to add to this but I'm peeling this right here. When I'm pulling the tape and if it's on a piece that's more important to you than a sketchbook you don't want to tear the paper. I'm very careful and I tear it at an angle, going slow. You're less likely to rip any of your paper. Look how pretty that is. Really pretty. If you're using any kind of masking tape or something that tears your paper, switch tapes because you're going to be very upset when you spend the time to make one of these, and then you tear it up accidentally. If we put a mat on that, beautiful, that is exactly what I was hoping for. These don't take long to make and they're really fun to experiment with colors and marks on a bigger piece, and then I would sign this right at the bottom. You could even come up with something interesting. I've seen an artist do a square with her initials that I thought was real cool, and so that could be your little square thing like that. You could sign your name, and maybe a year, maybe the correct year [LAUGHTER]. I could do something like that down there in the corner. Just come up with what works for you and what's going to finish your piece off. Then this is a piece where maybe I would want to frame it with a mat and so then I would not tear it, but I could tear the edges like we did on the pieces that we just finished, and we could do a torn edge like that, the deckle edge, and then we could float frame it and that would be really pretty too. Either way you want to finish your pieces would be great. This one, I actually am being inspired by the yummy bright colors here in my sketchbook. That's why I like doing a lot of things in the sketchbook, because then I can pull that out and I can tell right now that my tape is cricket, but that's okay. I can pull that out and be referencing it and enjoying it and being like, what is it that I used in that particular one? I feel like there is a purply color that I have not got out, that is not this one here, that I didn't add to my colors here, and it could be a Sennelier color, and it could be a Daniel Smith color. I might just look here because I was playing in a bunch of these. I might just pull one out like this, ultramarine red is real pretty. See, this is why you want to make yourself color cards. See that. That's probably very close. This is why you want to make yourself some color cards when you're creating things like this, because you are not going to remember what you used later. I feel like that color a little bit. I'm not really a purple person, so I don't do a lot with purple, but you're not going to remember what you used later and then you're going to be mad at yourself. Then I believe I actually was using some of these. Let's just go ahead. We'll get close. I'm not going to get exact on this one probably because like a dingbat, I didn't write this stuff down, but that's okay. Let me dry this a little bit. We don't mix all our colors together. Got some orange in there. Let's just pick one. Let's see what this one is [LAUGHTER]. That's pretty. When you're actually working on pieces that you're thinking, I actually want this to turn out pretty, that's a little bit more than I was thinking there, then you might take your little paper, your swatches and just swatch these out as you're going to see if you're going to get what you were thinking. Well, a little more water in there to spread that vividness out a little. [inaudible] a little bit wet. This next color was this neon one. That's it [LAUGHTER]. Let me tell you, this one is neon. Just to give us a little bite there. Let's say too, if you find some colors that you're really digging, let me draw some pencil on here, do two or three or four of these all at the same time of something that you love if you want to do a final series like this because you might not remember later what these colors were , like me. [LAUGHTER] It'll be really nice if you had several of these just done, and then you can move on to your next project rather than getting very upset with yourself for not writing them down. Like when I was doing this one, I wish I had done three or four pieces. All of the same thing, I love it that much. But this is just as fun, and I'm just now coming back in, mark-making lines, dots, more lines with my pencil maybe. Because after you get a rhythm with this and you get some colors that you like, every one of these turn out so pretty to me. I just love them. This is another thing that I sit and I do like my cutout abstracts that I love so much. This is one of those things that I sit and I do and I get it from my table and I love every single one of them, especially working in my little sketchbook, and I'll be sitting there just twiddling and playing and be done and be like, I'm so inspired. I just love when I get inspired like that. Like inspired enough to then show it to you. This may end up being something you really enjoy doing as little tiny side pieces of art, as color studies, as just working on some art practice, and that's really pretty. I do love the very first one in my sketchbook the best, but I'm sure loving this one too, and if I come back and do a bunch of these in the same color way, I'm sure every single one of them will look different, and at the same time, really pretty. I could still add some more after I pull the tape off. If I look at this and think later, I need a bit of this or I need a bit of that, I can do that. Look how pretty that is. My little mat and take a look at it. See, when you mat it out, it just completes it. It makes anything look like a piece of art when you put the mat on it [LAUGHTER]. Fun. This will be fun if you pick the mat that was a color in your piece and did that, sign it here at the bottom with your yummy artist's signature. I love that. Another one, look how pretty those two are, given as a little series, super fun. I'm going to do another one just because, and we'll see there's another colorway in here that what's inspiring, I really like. I like this ocher and red, and I also like this right here where it's the green and the gray. I did something a little different on that and I color-washed the whole piece. Why don't we color-wash this with a lot of water and a tiny bit of color? I'm just going to use this burgundy color that's out here, and color-wash it. You see that's a lot of water and a tiny bit of color. There we go. Then I'm going to come back with the gray and then the green, and then some marks and see what we got because that's what we're looking at there on our sketchbook test. If we do this while this is all wet, it will run just like that, it started to do. I don't know that I want it all to run. Let's dry this [MUSIC]. 11. Finishing up: I'll let that dry a little bit. That's the perfect example of if you do a wash on the whole thing, maybe dry it before you start adding your color because then it's going to swish all in and be I don't know, maybe swishier than you were intending. I'm going to do that. Let me draw that and then come in here with some green. Then I think one more thing that I used was this dark olivey green, which I'm not positive what color that was. It was this greenish amber by Sennelier. It's a really nice all of the dark shade. Then I can see on my little simpler piece that my little test piece that I was creating that that's what this color here is. I'm going to use that as my inspiration. I want it to be a lot of water and a little bit of color I think. I don't want it to be overwhelming. Maybe a little over here. Worked that color in as we go. Just adding a little bit of green in there, give us some contrast. I might go back to with a little bit of the deeper purplish shade. Too much water. Just layering now on top of the layers that already have on there. Then I've also used one of these colors and added some dots up here. I'm going to get a lot of color there on the tip of my brush and use that to create some dots. These are a little bit bigger wetter dots than I intended. I'll let those dry. Maybe spread that one out before it, Well, maybe I'll go ahead and spread those. I didn't quite do what I wanted. I'm just going to add some water and spread those out. Now that I'm looking at that I think it was actually this other color, what those dots were anyway. Maybe we'll come back with this darker color and get those dots back in there. That's it right there. See? I just want that nice little detail in there just to give me something different. I like to take different elements that I noticed in my sketchbook that I liked and then use those elements in my finished piece of art or the pieces that I'm creating, say outside of my sketchbook or the series that I'm trying to go for when I start creating a new series, and they're pretty. I've outlined different things that I didn't want to incorporate because I've tested them out. I really like them. We could use other things. Let's use our sepia. Create a color pen. I don't know what this is but let's just go ahead. Oh, yeah, look at that. A little bit of scribble in there, I like that. Little different than pencil. Just get some marks in there. Super fun. You can do that with charcoal. You can do it with your marks all pencils. Here's one that's got some bronze color, a Prismacolor, metallic gold pencil. That's fun. Let's see what we can do here. Maybe we want some long lines that just shine. Oh, yeah, that's different. They shine a little bit fun. Perfect opportunity to play with all of our little supplies. Here is a white Stabilo pencil, which doesn't show up at all. That might be a case where I pull out my POSCA paint pen instead of the Stabilo to get white if I wanted white on there. I don't know if I want white though. Maybe I do. Let's see if we can find a POSCA pen hiding. Here we go. So what do we want to do? Just maybe some lines. Because I already have dots on here. I don't want more dots. I have white space on here from our wash below. This white line here in our lightest green might be a fun subtle texture that we're adding. Well, look at that. That's super fun. Now we've got some extra definition in that light that we didn't have before. I'm loving that. Let's pull our tape off and see if we like where this has ended up. Then because I have a color wash on here, we should be able to see just a very light separation from the white to the piece of art. Look how pretty that is. Let's get our little test mat out and take a look. Oh, look how pretty that is framed up in like a little mat, center that up a little bit. So pretty. This too is one that because we got the little color around there, we could deckle the edge of this like we did on our original pieces. We might do something like this with the deckled edge too and then we could float frame it on top of a mat that was like either this really dark green or this purplish shade. How pretty would that be? Oh, that would be so beautiful. I'm really loving that one too. So of the three pieces that we recreated from our color study inspirations. These are all super fun and I could take these and frame them and hang them up and be very happy with all of those. I really hope you enjoy creating your color studies and then coming back and creating larger pieces with the colors that were most inspiring on your studies. Lots of fun little projects that we did today in this class. I'm really looking forward to seeing what color study abstracts you come up with. Definitely come back and share those with me in class. I want to see your color combinations and be inspired by what you found to be beautiful too. I will see you back in class.