Watercolor Advent Calendar: 24 Days of Christmas Magic in Simple Postcards

1. 24 surprises until Christmas: paint and soak in the festive spirit: My name is Hannah. I'm a professional artist and the painting instructor. And I just found out about Advent calendar. From Ukraine. It is an Orthodox country. We celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January, and we don't do as confounders this year. I'm staying in France for Christmas, and streets and shoves get decorated. I really don't feel the fastest mode. So I decided to create it. I've got Christmas decorations, wrapping paper, and other necessary tools for this DRY Christmas project loaded on Christmas movies. And that's crazy. I think this Christmas countdown is a beautiful tradition and a perfect way to create a festive mood. Join me on this creative 24 day journey filled with beauty, been cuteness, watercolor tips and tricks. And of course, Christmas spirit. True to add them calendar every day is a surprise. You will be able to open only one painter per day. No snake pigs. Come here to check this course everyday to unlock the painting gift of the day. I can't tell you what's inside because I don't want to spoil the surprise. But I will tell you that you will only need 20 min per day to finish it. And no previous experience and what eye color? Okay. A snake big. Just for a minute. There will be snowman, caramelized apples, toys else, and so much more. You will learn how to blend watercolors, mixed colors using the color wheel. Paint Christmas like sparkles, and create colorful postcards ready to be given to someone you love. Every day, I will open a lesson in this course and you will find out what you are painting. Every day. You will learn something new, create an inspiring watercolor postcards, and get a Christmas spirit boost. And most importantly, every day you will get a little closer to Christmas. It is a perfect activity to share with your family and friends, making art together. The first lesson is open. Go find out what the surprise is. 2. Day 1: Christmas toy: We started our admin calendar with a Christmas toy or Christmas bulb. Horrible. Well, in my case, I would like to show you how to paint a Christmas toy called Christmas tree toy. That is a little bit unconventional. So instead of a bulb, I will sketch a toy that is in a shape of a teardrop. Actually, we used to have a lot of dose. I'm on the tree when I was a child. But this one is going to be shown in perspective. So we make our painting a little bit more interesting. The toy is lying down on the side and the nature of shadow is going to fall this way. Then it has this golden stripes. I'll carefully show them on my sketch. And the one here on the side. It's all shiny and glittery. And we will demonstrate that in watercolor in a minute. Because I have so much yellow, which is a very light color. I don't want the pencil line to shine through my watercolors. So I will lightened my sketch by carefully go in over, over the sketch with my kneadable eraser, removing the dark lines so they're almost invisible. So if you don't see them pretty well on the video, that's perfect. This is my intention. So I'll start with the lightest colors, which are yellows. And I'll take cadmium yellow, nice warm yellow color. And I'll put it right where I see my golden strokes, stripes. And because this object is three-dimensional, it has a highlight and even the light yellow part has a highlight. That's why I dilute my yellow just a little bit here on the side. And I keep it nice and concentrated here in the bottom. And we'll do the same with the next stripe. I'll make it almost white here on top where there is a highlight. Because the light is coming from here. And you can see that I apply nice concentrated yellow pigment in the area where I want to have a highlighted place highlights. I will dilute my stroke so it's not sharp with a semi wet brush so it doesn't carry too much water. I have nice strong highlight here. But also while I'm moving loan, I would like to add a bit of orange to show the three-dimensionality of those stripes because they follow the shape of our toy, right? So I'm ending orange, which in my case, slightly darker in terms of tone. And I follow the shape of my stripe here on the right side of it. So I do not touch the left side, which is highlighted. And here the same, I'm basically following exactly the same path as I did with the yellow color, but with orange. And if the outline is too sharp, I clean my brush, rinse it over the tissue and carefully dilute the sharp edge so that the highlight is nice and soft. I also do it while my first layer is what? That allows me to get this nice soft color transition. On the right side there's more shadow. And that's why I don't have a very distinct, noticeable how the highlight. But I also can add more of my orange down. So when I say orange, the color that I'm specifically using is called quinacridone gold. It's nice, warm color is not as vibrant as cadmium orange, e.g. it literally looks like gold. And I think it is a perfect color to show the three-dimensionality of our toy here. Working on top of yellows. I think cadmium orange would be way too bright for this. Also, we need to point out the hat, like so with a string so it can hang on the tree. Another way, I picked up some of the hidden cradled board and show some of the shades on top of my yellow. Now while all this is getting dry, I want to mix the color for the shadow that is here under. And the color I want to use is blue with orange. So I take in then turn blue and some of the orange in it. And I get nice kind of brownish mix because those colors are complimentary and they are right on the opposite side of the color wheel. And while I'm mixing this, I switched the brush for a slightly bigger one. And we just clean water. I create this one wet layer, one stroke where my shadow is going to be. Then with my first brush, I pick up the pigment and just place it here. Now, I want to add a little bit more of orange. And there. Then I wash my brush, rinse it over the tissue and sort of dilute with the same brush. My line under the shadow here. I also want to have a little bit more of orange here, because our bright yellow colors are literally reflected in the shadows. Now, if your shadow misbehaving and coming into their x and neural want, you always can correct it with a wet brush, but not dripping wet. It should be just slightly wet. So you can remove the pigment and you can finish working on it by lifting the remaining pigment with the tissue. And that's it. Now we have our shadow. I just want to have a slightly darker color as close as possible to the tip of the toy over here. The reason to it is that when you paint three-dimensional objects that cast shadow, this is called the cast shadow. The shadow is the darkest in the area where it's touching the object. And as it goes away, it becomes lighter over here. So here it shouldn't be almost transparent and light. And in the area where it's touching the toy, it should be the darkest. I'm using, bright red. And then we'll carefully fill in in-between the yellow part. I don't have too much liquid in my brush, meaning that my brush does not carry water, almost doesn't. And the pigment in my brush is not watery. It's a pretty dense. Now I created those two lines. Now I'm washing my brush, rinse in it Over the tissue, and with the remaining liquid in my brush, I'm carefully diluting the red. So it's much lighter, almost transparent to achieve the same feeling of highlight right there. So the point is, I want to have nice and concentrated red in the bottom and on the top, but in the middle here, there will be a highlight because of the source of light is coming from the left. The color must be much, much later. In here, I do the same. I just created the most concentrated rest strokes. And then wash my brush, rinse the water, and with the remaining liquid that I have left. I'm carefully diluting the edges. Making this part as transparent as possible, almost lean into white. To create this feeling of a highlight. And I am moving on. Make sure to have your red pigment. Nice and thick, concentrated, thick, not thick like if you would use gouache or acrylic, but thick in a way that it's not diluted with water. So you don't need a chunk of pigment hanging from the tip of your brush here. But at the same time, the color should be nice and concentrated. Also, if you notice here in the bottom, I don't go all the way down to the tip of the toy. I keep it yellow there. They're just a small detail, but I think it's important. I love this painting to dry literally for like 5 min just to make sure that red is getting dry. And you need to evaluate it by yourself to make sure that red is completely dry. If not, just leave it for drawing just a little bit longer. Meanwhile, I'm mixing a darker tone of red by adding green into it, because green is a complimentary color, is the color that's going to make red darker, almost less, also less vibrant and calmer. And carefully with this mix, I'm adding a bit of a shadow here, in the bottom, here on top, and on the side. Just to make those colors pop. Wash my brush, rinse it over the tissue and carefully dilute the layer. If it feels too dark or too thick. Then move on. When we paint glass objects and our toy is made of glass. And I think the very specific thing about reflections is that they are dark and sharp. That's why now when I'm marking my reflection on the toy, I allow it to stay relatively sharp. My strokes are pretty dark and defined. Here on the right side. I will make the whole size slightly darker. So I add my darker mix almost everywhere, not just where the infection is. To show that this is the side that has less highlighted and this one is highlighted much more. I'll also add a little bit of blue into orange to make it darker. Because orange and blue are complimentary colors, they are in front of each other on the color wheel. They allow to create darker and calmer Colors, tones when you mix them. Because I only add a little bit of blue. I didn't neutralize those two colors. I just made orange a little bit calmer and darker so I can show the darker sides because if we make red darker, we also need to balance with the orange and orange or yellow or golden side of the toy should also be slightly darker, as well as the hat. Just like so. In the final part is the glitter, which I will paint with white gouache. If you have white watercolors. You can also try to do that. I find gouache nice and thick, which will allow me to get those bright spots. Just make sure that your spots are super tiny. They do not leave a big fat bubble of paint should be very, very small and delicate. And if you have an actual glitter, you can just do that. Nobody stops us from exploring all the creative options. Here we go. They want is complete. 3. Day 2: Caramelized apple: Day two, we paint caramelized the apple. As usual. I will start with the quick outline, a quick sketch for the painting. And I will draw a very light circle that will resemble an apple. Then here, following the curved shape on an app of an apple, I will create this banded line, which will separate my red part of caramelized apple with a sugary white part. And from top here I will have a candy cane decane. Just like so. It's calling here from the center as well. I will have a little kinda like Merry Christmas sign over here. Another candy, some berries and a nice touch of bow. Like so. And here there will be some shadow that naturally the apple cast on the table. I'll start with applying clean water here on the bottom of the elbow. This is where my sugar, white sugar part is going to be. And to show the three-dimensionality of this part. Because the light is coming from left side and naturally the right side will be more shadowed. I'll put a little bit of a blue pigment here on the bottom. Because I've put water before. It allows the pigment to nicely spread all over. So this will account for our shadowed side of sugary apple. And now I will just leave it to dry and work on candy cane. It has this red stripes, but the candy itself is white. So I'll do the same and I'll just create a light shadow with very light blue color, the same room that I just used here. And I will show this shadow part on the side, on top and on the right side of an actual cane. And I'll leave it to dry. Later. We will add the red stripes, and this blue part will give us a feeling of three-dimensionality of the candy itself. So while all this is getting dry, now we should work on something that is not directly touching the wet parts. So if I put red on the apple, I'm afraid is going to leak into this water that I just applied before. So I will paint the little sign, the little tag with Merry Christmas. I'll take raw sienna, which is a very nice light brown color. And create the first layer with burnt sienna, which is a little bit more vibrant brown with red tone in it. I'll add some sort of a shadow on that tag and also leave it to dry. As I'm working on smaller bits and pieces of this painting, I'll switch to a smaller brush, which is also synthetics. So I have more control over the water that I keep unreleased. I will paint some of the berries, but I need to be very careful not to touch the wet parts. So I'll start with this berry. In this one. I don't want to put the berry here because it's going to touch the wet area of the tag. And now I honestly don't have a choice But wait for everything to get fully dry, I think is going to be maybe ten, 15 min because the paper is cellulose, so dries much faster, then we can add new layers. I want to actually paint the white part of an apple here. Actually, I want to paint the red part of an apple. I'm carefully going around the tag and I'm using bright red. I'm not a big fan of Gangnam. So bright red is my choice. Here with a slightly darker tone of red. Right away. Paint the berries. The darker tone of red is achieved by adding green into your red. Because green is complimentary color. It allows you to get more calmer and darker tones. Somewhere up here there will be another candy. And on this side there will be more berries. I want to make them slightly darker so they're just easier to identify on the background here. But not to worry, we are going to add shadows and that will sort things out. So now I get red and green. Achieved darker tone. And I'll place this darker tone right under the tab, where it naturally cast shadow. And in-between the berries is also a good opportunity to outline some of the barriers and just show their shadows. So I follow the shape of a bearing and I drop slightly darker tone on them to show that they're three-dimensional. And because I'm doing this while the whole thing is still wet, it allows the pigment to nicely move around and creates soft color transitions. Now I get some red and I will create stripes on the candy cane. The task here is to follow the curved shape of the candy cane. So the stripes, they cannot be just straight with a nice and vibrant with color. I'm creating those bended stripes on the candy gain. And as I go down, they almost disappear. And we don't see them behind the rest of the apple. Now, with the same darker tone that we already mixed, the red plus bits of green. I will carefully add a little bit of a darker shade just to make our candy cane even more realistic. So I add this darker color, not everywhere, but only here at the beginning of the stroke. And maybe here in the end of it. But just very tiny, very delicate touch. Actually this other candy on the side also deserves a little bit of tone. So. With the gray color, which can be created by diluting black. But this option, I don't really like much. I try not to use black. So the other way is to mix complimentary colors in the most balanced way. In my case, what I did, I just do blue and orange. I mix them equally to get this sort of gray tone. I got a little bit of red. I touch it by accident and it leaked into my tone that I'm working on right now, but it's fine because it's totally logical that red color will be affecting the object nearby. So the candy should have some of the reflection of Fred. So while things are getting dry and the tag is empty, I can take a very dry, very thick red and just write something, e.g. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, wherever there is going to fit in there. It's always nice if your text is following the curve of the tag because it's rounded. And if you're not sure if you can fit all of the letters proportionally and balanced on the tag, you can first write them with your pencil and then just outline with the brush. Now, the berries are dry. I would like to get some darker tone of red and just define the shape of the berry a little bit more. So it is visually separated from the rest. Because we have a lot of red here. Also, I will take a clean brush, get some clean water, and put water at the bottom, where will be my shadow? Then? I'll get the same gray tone I mentioned before, the same I used for a little candy over there. It's a mix of blue and orange. Now just edit carefully where the shadow must be. But remember that the shadow is the darkest where it's touching the object. So I will mix a darker shade and just edit here to make the apple stand out even more. Also with those semi wet brush, I carefully that the bottom to achieve sort of softer line of the shadow here. You can also pull it a little bit further under. And now I just need to finish the stripes on the other candy. Also remember to follow the curve. So your strokes must be bend it and not perfectly straight. And then the last thing that is left to do is to add the bot. And I would also want to add some of the sugar refill with gouache. But because the paper is already wet, the area is already perfectly white. Of course, the white gouache is not going to be visible, but here in the border where white meats, red is a perfect opportunity to add those tiny details and create this sugary feeling of a caramelized apple. Now, the final touch will be the bowl, but you need to make sure that everything is perfectly dry before you add nice and thick black color. I'll carefully add the bowl with a very dry brush. Barely paints. But this is my whole point. I don't want to have watery stroke here. I prefer to have a broken line instead of undefined watery stroke. Here we go. This is the painting for they do see you tomorrow. 4. Day 3: Christmas bow: Welcome to day three of Advent calendar. And today we paint a bot, nice and colorful red bow Christmas book. As usual, I start with the sketch. And I just want to mark the sort of main outline of the bot. How big it is, how far each part goals. Like e.g. here I see that I could go larger considering the size of my postcard here. Yes, I think this is fine. Now, I will remove the lines that I don't need. I use a kneadable eraser as usual. It carefully removes the lines without leaving any dust behind. And overall it's just a very gentle to watercolor paper. Now, my bot has stars, so I will mark those stars so I know where they are because the yellow so that I don't accidentally paint them with red. Here the tissue is a little bit bended, so I will see only half of the star and it will add more of a realistic feel to our painting. You really want to balance with big stars and small stars so that the whole pattern looks more natural and not overloaded. So when I finished placing all of my styles, I can move on and start coloring them. I'll get cadmium yellow. And carefully we'll place the pigment on the stars. But the trick here is to not cover the whole star completely, but leave some of the areas untouched, like a broken line. Your layer is not perfectly even. This will give you more of a feeling of the tissue that is little bit bended and it's reflected in various ways. So this will just give us more of a realistic feel. As I said before, some of the stars are not visible completely in there perfect shape because the material banned in certain places. And that also affects the way we see the stars. My pigment is very concentrated, very bright. Because I want to have maximum of color on the bow. I feel like here it's not enough. So add more stars. So it kind of balance out the whole bowl, the button. And I'll also add tiny yellow line that is on top of the bow over here. Just to make it shine even more, but it will be more striking and visible when we will paint red, because red is definitely a darker in terms of tone. And that's why yellow is going to shine even brighter when it's going to have this contrast. Here in the middle. Alright? Because I used a very thick yellow pigment on my brush, almost didn't carry any water. This was a good opportunity for me to save time and start painting with red right away. Because otherwise, if your stars are wet, they're going to leak into the red of the bowl of the tissue and it's going to ruin the shape of the star. So if you use the wet pigment, you want to wait for your paper to be completely dry. Now, I get nice and concentrated. Red and I'll start from the left. I'm right-handed, so it's easier for me to start from the left and move to the right without being afraid that my hand will accidentally smudge whatever I painted before. In basically using negative space technique. I'm outlining my stars. As I move with my pigment from the left side to the right. You need to have just enough water on your brush to make the pigment flows so it doesn't paint to dry. And as I go close to the yellow outline that I painted earlier, I tried to keep this outline clean of red pigment so I don't accidentally cover it. I also remember to keep the brush loaded with red in high density because I don't want my red to be too light and too transparent. Here I want a nice vibrant colors. For the other side of the bowl, I'll use a darker tone of red by adding a bit of green into it. And we already know that those colors work great together because they're complimentary. They create nice dark tone. Allowing me to create this feeling of volume on the bow. Since I'm here and the paint is still wet, I can use this as an opportunity to create very nice and soft transition in tone without having to go back there and correct anything with the wet brush, e.g. this is a good way to create the feeling of a banded tissue. The important part is not go too crazy and not add the super dark tone. And now we can move to the other side of the dock. I'm trying to be careful not to cover my yellow outline. Yellow stroke that I created earlier. Then also, I want to keep my pigment bright and concentrated. So I'm making sure to not have too much water in my brush. Here. I love this part not covered on purpose, because I will do the same thing I did before. Mix my darker tone of red by adding green and create the shadow. Over here. However, as you can see, I'm not really covering the whole part inside of the bowl. I want to keep some of the red shining through. Also. It seems like this whole side is slightly darker. So what I'm doing now is adding darker tone to portray the contrast of the light part of the bowl where the tissue is bended and the shadow. So by creating contrast like this, I can realistically portray the way the tissue folds. Because some of the stars are falling into this darker zone, into the shadow zone. I also want to make them slightly darker to reflect the shadow because they're part of the tissue can be in shadow and do not cover the star with the shadow as well. While this is getting dry, I'll move to the one on the left. So now I have my first layer and write up. I will create the shadows. The darker tone. I think here the color is a little bit too light to dilute it with water. So I can reapply red just to intensify the color on my end. Without delay, I will move on to the final part of the bow. So after carefully outlining all of the stars, I'm doing exactly the same thing. Mixing darker tone of red and working on the shadows. Since here my shadow is lightly touching the star, while also making the star and been darker using darker tones of orange. Now I think I just need to leave the bot to rest and to dry, and then I can add the final details. The final touches will be to add some textures to the stars. And I'm using quinacridone, gold, orange color, that really looks like gold. It's quite different from a typical cadmium orange. If you compare the two, you'll notice the difference in color. For this. I'll prefer something that is warm and not so vibrant as cadmium orange. So you can also mix your own orange by combining red and yellow, e.g. cadmium yellow and cadmium red. And you will get something that is closer to handle crud on gold rather than to cadmium orange from the tube. So I will suggest you do that to believe light. Barely noticeable spots on our stars. And the final, final touch would be read with some red, with a little bit of black in it, but just tiny bit. It's dangerous to go too much with black. And with the most, the most contrast, the darkest areas of the bot will be pointed. With that mix. The area where you have the most shadow, the darker shadow will be the place. To put this darkest strokes. Also, I'm making this area slightly darker to resemble the shadow. In here. Just need to be very careful to not add too much of the dark tone. So be careful with your black. It's always important to know when to stop, especially when you're working with dark elements. In watercolor, you cannot make things lighter. So if you put too much of a dark tone, you won't be able to remove it. So I pointed out all the folded areas of the bow. And I think we're done here. See you tomorrow. 5. Day 4: Snowman: Welcome Today for young today we are painting cute little snowman. First. I'll just mark where it will be the head and the body of the snowman so I can visually understand the location, the composition of my painting. And even though it's just one little snowman here, I still want it to be central on the paper so it doesn't lean too much on the left and the right to the bottom or high up on the paper. So by outlining the main two circles, it just makes it a bit easier to see if my snowman is in the center. And I think it's fine. So now I can add the details and some facial features. The snowman. So here's the carrot nose, eyes, cute little chicks, smile. Chin, and the hat. Now there will be little buttons and the rest of the body. Alright, I think turn out pretty well. I remove this couple of lines that I don't need. And also make sure that your sketch is very light because the snowman is mostly white. So you don't want the pencil line to be visible through watercolor layers. The secret to achieve in nice and smooth transitions in our little snowman would be to use wet on wet technique. And that's why I'll take my natural brush. And first, just apply clean water everywhere on the body of the snowman, except the nodes. Even though those you can actually cover it with water because we're not going to work on it right away. So it will eventually get dry and we will paint it later. What's important is the whole body. You don't need to touch the head as well. This can be worked on separately. Now, I'd like to take nice blue color or something warm, e.g. with their marine ultramarine blue or in downtrend loom, I'll go with Indian trend because this color doesn't granulate. And I would prefer to not have granulation effect on my snowman. But if you would like it, go ahead and use ultramarine blue. So now I'm adding this blue color right where the shadows should be. So e.g. here there will be a shadow from the hat, which is very natural. Then on the cheeks to show that those chicks are three-dimensional. And I will wash my brush, rinse it with, re-instate against the tissue, and carefully smooth out some of the strokes. If I feel like they're too sharp. Right the way while I'm still here, I'll get a little bit of orange, e.g. cadmium orange is gonna be fine. I'll add a tiny stroke into the cheeks and maybe into the chin. If it turned out to be too bright, you can also dilute it with a semi wet brush and carefully pull the pigment into a different direction. I'll also add a little bit of orange here, right into the shadow. Make it smooth so it doesn't stand out too much. And move on. The bottom of the snowman might be even already dry because I'm working on a cellulose paper and this paper gets dry really fast. So I can reapply clean water once more and do the same. Now add a little bit of blue right on the side of the hand. And just let it soak. There will be some blue here on the bottom of the valley and on the back over here. And of course they'll need a little bit on both feet. Right away. I'll add a tiny bit of orange into the same place where I had blue. The reason I added the orange color to the snowman, even though it's not very difficult, is because I want to create this feeling of a warm light shining onto the snowman, like e.g. if there is a candle, candlelight or a warm lamp light, I think this is going to add some cozy feeling to the painting. But now we need to wait for it to get completely dry and then we will be able to and new layers. Well, my layers are getting fully dry. I can use this moment to paint the hat. I'm using, right red. But there's no preferences. You can use cadmium red as well if you want to. And carefully create the hat. And along the way I am marking the strokes that represent the pattern on the hat. I leave some of the strokes white or other. I create read strokes and leave white area in-between. That on its own represents white stroke. So basically using negative space technique by outlining the area, I actually create. The white line. Then with the thin brush, I'll just leave super tiny almost invisible marks on the white areas, The White Stripes of the hat. To just give a feeling of a pattern. Of course, it is so small that it is virtually impossible for human eyes to see. That's why I'm unbothered was showing anything in particular. I'm just leaving literally dots. But it looks like there is a button. Where here I'll take a darker tone of red, which we already know how to create. By adding grain into red. Or even a tiny touch of black. I am creating the darker tone on the hat. And at the same time, I want to show the texture on the hat like it's needed by adding strokes like so. And those strokes, those lines they resemble needed material. Like a sweater. So while I was busy with that, the rest of my painting gets super dry. So I can be confident that I can move on and work on the shadows. I will mix blue and orange because those two are complimentary colors. And I will achieve gray color. With that gray color, I will be able to outline some of the shadows even more specifically. So e.g. here on the cheek. I can make the shadow a bit more noticeable. The same time. Show the part where you see the smile. The same here, I will make the shadow on the cheek a little bit more noticeable. And also dilute the stroke with a semi wet brush so it doesn't stand out too much. If it's too sharp. I'm diluting it with the semi wet brush and also use it as an opportunity to create a shadow under the nose. Because the long carrot nose definitely drops the shadow. I will intensify the shadow under the hat. Then with the remaining color that I have left on my brush, I'll just carefully outline the body of our snowman. So e.g. the hands here, here as well. Bailey in front. The back of the body. Here my my line is pretty sharp, so I'm diluting it with the similar brush. And I want to mark the buttons. But first, I'll start with the orange color and then I'll add black. Because it's always better to go from lightest to darkest tone. And those will be my last steps. So while I'm waiting for the rest of the body to get dry, I can paint carrot. Somewhere in-between orange and red. There will be a carrot nose. Here my layer is trying with a sharp edge, so I'm removing it with the center with brush carefully. And also while my main parts of the painting is getting dry, I can create the shadow right under the snowman. I'm aware that it might leak into the feet of the snowman, but I don't think it's gonna be a catastrophic going to merge naturally. And I don't think it's such a bad idea. But here we need to have a very clear distinction between the tones. So here the tone should be definitely darker. Show that as a shadow. And then if it's going up into your snowman, you can just move your paper like this and to let the pigment flow down instead. Also, you can correct the tone if you need to with the semi-log brush removing the color. Just like so. I've got a little cauliflower happening in the belly. So I am trying to remove the edges of it with the semi wet brush and it's working out pretty fine. So while the bottom is getting dry, I need to make sure that the face is dry as well before I paint the eyes and the smile. So now when the painting is completely dry with the darkest tone to black, I can create the eyes, some of the shadows, the smile, the buttons, all the details. Your stroke should be very thin and delicate. And here I'll add a little bit of a shadow on the inner side of the hat. And I think that would be it. Our little cute snowman is ready. 6. Day 5: Christmas socks: Welcome to day five. Again, we are painting Christmas socks. I'll start with outlining the area of the blanket. The main line of the blanket. Like so. And there will be Pete wearing Christmas socks sticking out of the blanket. One food is done. Here's the other one that is right under. And pair of socks of the neighbor of another person. Right here. Here we go. This sketch is quick and simple, and I'll start probably with painting the blanket first. It's going to be very light and watery yellow starts with a watery pigment of light brown color. Rashi and I in my case, like so. Then I'll take concentrated green and then blue and then red. And I'll just add some sort of squares right into the blanket because it's still wet. From my first brown. The color is pretty diluted. It blends into the background and creates this nice soft color that I think fits pretty well into this. A plank. From here, I will go with the nice and bright blue. And then I will change the strokes, the colors of the strokes. Every time I create a stroke, I touch the other layer a little bit so they have the chance to connect and kind of bleed into each other. This is a good opportunity to practice mixing, washes. And I will finish off with green. I might as well just take red and sort of continue this stroke like so. I just need to be careful and not make the stroke to straight. It's a blanket, it can be perfectly straight. And here in the bottom I've got all those colleague followers. So what I will do, I will just mix them with the green. And that's it. With a very, very dry black. In my brush. I will mark the area that shows that the blanket is folded little over here and here. But this part is much lighter than in the beginning. I don't want to drag too much attention to this blank. I just want to create the feeling of. Having a blanket here. Cool. Now, I need to wait for the top part of the blanket to be fully dry. I can paint this ox. I'll start from the top with red. Then I'll leave a little bit of a whitespace because there will be some sort of a pardon, button. Then I'll take some blue and continue painting the soak all the way down to the heel. Here I'll add some red right away. Kind of forgot about it. So it's going to be a little bit mixed with blue. I'll make the hill red. And also the rest of the sock will be read as well and go out like this, resembling a pattern. I can finish working with the blue color. Make sure not to have too much water in your brush so it doesn't leak into the red parts of the sock? If it does, I don't think it's a big problem because well, it's a sock. It can have all sorts of different colors and patterns on it. So not a big deal. Then I will start painting the sock over here. And I just need to remember that OK on the left is still wet. So if I touch it, it's going to bleed into the one that I'm working on right now. Well, that would be not very nice. So I'm just mixing up colors. Now. I took a little bit of yellow without really clean my brush. That's why it has this very light salad kind of look in color. But this is really just, you just play with colors, let them bleed. Connect a, and essentially they'll just look more playful and in the best watercolour traditions. Then there will be some, another pattern and another. And as I approach the heel of my sock here, I need to be very careful. Barely touching the one on the left so that they don't connect with each other. I kinda want to keep them separated so they don't leak into each other. And mission is successful so I can continue building up the patterns of the SOC. Ms one, it looks like an elf. And I think I'll finish with a red as well. Here we go. The two socks are done. Now. I just need to make sure that they are completely dry so that the colors don't bleed into the new sock that I'm going to paint. And after I'm sure that everything is dry, I will finish. The remaining two. I use the hairdryer to speed up my train situation here. If you don't have time to wait for the paper to dry naturally, you can do the same and use a hairdryer. I do exactly the same thing as I did with my first soak. With the only difference that it might be slightly darker than the one on top because well, it naturally gets some of the shadow. Oops. Don't leak too much. Yeah. So what I was saying that and gets some of the shadow from this sock on top. So it would naturally be a bit darker, especially as it concerns the reds. And actually, for red, I'm not even cleaning my brush. After blue. And I dip my brush into red right away, which gives me a bit dirty field of read, more into the purple side of things. But I think it works perfectly because it naturally creates this darker tone. And this is exactly what I need because this sock is under That's one. The second sock, I start with a darker tone of green, which I can achieve by adding red into green. Something that we have been doing quite a lot in this course of Advent calendar paintings. So you probably are very familiar with this already by now. And all this to achieve slightly darker tones. On the sock that is hiding behind. Now, I'll get darker red and then darker green. And the good part is that because those colors are complimentary, I don't even need to wash my brush. To paint those. Feet in a sock in the bottom is way easier because you just keep adding tones on top of each other without really thinking about the transparency or clarity or whatnot. Just using the colors that are already in your brush because we need Darker, muted tones to show that the socks are covered with shadow. And here we go. We have our Christmas socks under the blanket, ready. 7. Day 6: Christmas bells: Welcome. Today's six, we are painting Christmas bells. As usual. When you start your sketch. Take the moment to think of the location of your subjects so they don't appear too high up or on the side, or basically leaning towards any side of your paper. Because it would be said to find out that after spending the time draw in your sketch. You'll see that the subject is not in the center. This particular Christmas bells are actually the Christmas tree toys that you can hang up the tree. So that's why they look a bit flat. And not as a real three-dimensional bells. But it's not a problem because there's gonna be an interesting challenge for us to work on. The colors. Here. The color palette is going to be limited. And we will work on portraying this metal texture. Of those bells. Mostly we will use blue and orange, complimentary colors that are sitting right in front of each other on the color wheel and create. Perfect. Couple. Of course is usual. Remember when you're creating your sketch, make sure to keep the line light and almost invisible for yourself. Because you don't want the pencil stroke to shine through your watercolor layer when you will start painting. So here I marked the most important parts of the bells, and I think I can start working on the colors. I'll start with the lightest color, the orange. However, I would also want to add some of the yellows, cadmium yellow and cadmium orange. For that matter. To create nice highlights on the toy. Here, I'm basically balancing between orange and yellow. Just add in one color to another. While they're still wet. While the layer is still wet, I will drop some cold blue that will show the reflection on the side of the bowl over here. But I need to be very careful that this blue doesn't touch the yellow parts that I painted because this will turn yellow into green. If your lines start to create sharp edges, you can remove them with the semi wet brush and to make them softer. Meanwhile, I continue creating the bowl and then mix it with some of the yellow. Now, I will take in the trend blue, or we shouldn't have it, you can get another warm blue lake, ultramarine. And edit on top of the bowl over here. And here. I wanted to start creating shadows right away while my layers are still wet so that the colors turn out to be soft. Because most of the pigment that I used was orange. Combined with blue. It gives me a nice darker tone. Here. I feel like the color is a bit too pale, so I'm going to re-add some of the orange just to brighten up. And I'll do the same here as I feel like the color is not vibrant enough. Now, I'll start painting the ornament of the bell, which is in light yellow color, almost golden. Now we'll keep it light from the rest of the painting. However, the parts in-between will be more resembling metal. So I'm not going to paint here right away because I know that the layer is still wet and I don't want it to bleed into my bells. I'll start working on this part. I'll take some of the orange. Then I'll get in the intron blue without doing the cleaning my brush. And immediately create strokes that are going, of course to leak and bleed into my orange. But that's exactly the feeling of the texture of the metal bell that I want to achieve. I'm doing the same, outlining the ornament that I painted with yellow before. So that this ornaments stands out even more. So the whole idea is to balance between orange and blue. Allowing for the orange to show up a little bit here and there. After I am adding blue color. So with my blue, I'm not really covering everything. I just drop it in certain places and I allow the pigments to flow because the area is still wet. The colors, the pigments are basically doing the job for me. I'm just watching. This larger area will be probably a bit more orange. So generously cover it with orange first. Then I'll start. And in blue. And just let it flow. When I reach the bottom with this yellow stroke, I want to show the texture that looks like a thread by adding orange so that the yellow is still shining through, but you can recognize the texture of this ornament as well. And I'll do the same here, that the yellow appears to have a bit of a shade. Here in the bottom. The opening of the bell. I'll start with orange. And then I will introduce blue into it. I keep this area clean for awhile because I will be back there with lighter tones. And I don't want to touch it yet with the same very light orange that is not pure orange from the palette or from the tube. But a little bit muddy because I touched blue with it. So it's kind of like a calm down, quiet orange color. I'm showing those textures on the yellow parts. And I'll finish the bottom and I'll finish the top over here. The top is pretty dark. So I take a orange with blue, mix them together and get some sort of muddy brown color where there's more orange in it. And add it on top. Just like so. So one bell is ready. And with the same manner I can work on the second one. I'll add light orange first, and then I'll start introducing blue. The next section. This is the final section. The blue into my orange. And with the muddy orange as well, create texture here in the bottom on the yellow stroke. To create the feeling of a thread. And now I need to let those bells dry so I can add some textures. This barn got dry so I could paint in right now. And now, I'll leave it to dry. The painting on dry, the colors get lighter as it usually happens with watercolor. And now I will do my final step. I'll mix a dark version, very concentrated version of orange plus blew. My complimentary colors, my pair. That literally will be the king of this painting. And with dry pigment on my brush and barely paints, I'll just outline the shadows on this toy. Christmas Christmas bells. At this point, it might even look like black. But it's not. It's a mix of two complimentary colors that one way or another is going to be visible on paper and look better than just black. If your stroke turned out to be too dark. You can always delete it. Here in the places where the bot is bended. I'm also creating the shadow and diluting it right away if I need to. If the stroke is too sharp or too dark. Like e.g. here, I don't want to leave it like this. So I will smooth out the edge to make it more natural than shadow here underneath. This is a good opportunity for me to separate parts of the bow that are not very clear. Here with a very concentrated mix. I will create the texture of the bowel by basically painting the thin lines down on each section. When it comes to the ornament, I will create darker shades right under each curved part so that it stands out more and is more clear. Here is the same. I'm just create in very thin, delicate, dark strokes and also separate the threads. Here on the bottom. The final part will be to make the opening of the bell little darker. I'll carefully dilute the sharp stroke. And if I got some of the pigment from the bottom, I can just refresh it and add the new orange pigment. And that's it. And then I'll do the same with the bell on the right. Remember to keep your brush stroke very thin and the pigment thick and dry so that you have full control over the strokes that you're making. And here we go. Our cute little Christmas toy, as in Christmas bells, is random. Now. See you tomorrow. 8. Day 7: Frozen berries: Welcome to this open. We're painting frosty berries. I'll start with outlining the stem or the branch. Yeah, it's more like a branch of the tree where those barriers are. A main leaf. A couple of those leaves, not going to just leave one. So the berries are going to be here. I'll just mark and main mass of those barriers. Then there will be a leaf going away somewhere here. Interesting thing about those leaves that they have very sharp edges. So they're very easy to recognize. Also, the challenging part for this painting will be the first, which we will create using white gouache. And as always, keep your sketch light. Even though we're going to work with Britain dark colors. These are going to be light, light, green tone. So you want to keep your sketch nice and light. Alright. Yeah, I think that's enough of the leaves. There's really a lot of leaves. And the point here is to paint the berries, so I'll keep the composition sample. We can start painting. I think I'll start with the leaves and then I'll add the berries. And interesting thing about the leaves that in some areas they are a bit warmer, so it's a lot of yellow. I see a lot of yellow on those colors. So I'll take a mix of yellow with emerald green. But there are also some parts of those leaves that are in colder tones. So e.g. a mix of blue with green. So I'll take cerulean, which is a cold blue color, and I'll add bits of green into it. So it is still a green color, but it's lenient towards blue. If you have two requests. That could be also a good color to use here. Also, my layers are really light. I'm not trying to get the concentrated, dense colors here. And I think that's also going to play a role for this feeling of a frosty winter and frozen leaves. So I'm really just mixing here a warm green with cold green. So I mix the colors where green is leaning towards yellow and another green is leaning towards blue. With a darker tone of green. I will add detector immediately. Matter, just make sure that the color, the paint is pretty thick in my brush so that I actually see the stroke and it doesn't disappear. When I painted. Another warm leave. Here and here. Now add some clearly defined edges with just pure green. Here the leaf is curled and bend it a little bit. The part that is banded will be with the cool blue color. But the live inside will be warm. So there'll be a lot of yellow in that green. Then this leaf will be more cold blue colors. And finally, I will paint the branch with also first, starting with cold blue. And I'll add a bit of green into it. So we have this first under painting, the first layer of green for the leaves, but I will be back to work on the shades and also on the frosty part. After waiting for a bit for my painting to get fully dry. Now when I'm sure that everything is dry, I can start working on the berries. First. I will just apply pure red. I use bright red on each berry. And e.g. now, while those berries are still wet, I'll create a darker tone of red by adding tiny bit of green, as you probably already know by heart. And create a bit of the shadow. To show that those berries are three-dimensional. The goal here is also to separate one from another by creating shadows. All right, once that is done, and move into the next one. When you're working on a big mass of barriers like this, at some point it will be difficult to keep track on where one is finished and the new one starts. Just keep in your mind that they're all rounded. So when you're going to add the shadows, they always need to follow the shape of the sphere. So e.g. right now, if I start creating shadows, I will always follow the rounded shape of each berry. Some of them are going to be darker because they're literally deepened side. And some of them are standing out on top. They have more of the highlights and shadows. E.g. here, the right side will be a little bit lighter to show the highlight of the berry. And now if I start adding darker tones of red, I'll be able to separate those berries by following the curve of their shapes. Here we go just by creating the shadows of each berry. We can show that those are three-dimensional subjects. However, I will still add some of the shades in a bit just to intensify this feeling of three-dimensionality of each berry. Now, I'll use a hairdryer to speed up the drying process and continue painting. My painting is dry again, and this is the moment when we work on the darker tones for each part of the painting, for leaves and for the berries. So essentially it's going to be only two colors, green and red. But the difference will be for the darker tone of the stem or the branch, which is green. I will add more of, I will add a bit of red. And to achieve darker tone of red, I will add just a little bit of green. So I'll just play between those two colors and find a balance. To create the shades that I need. Here, I will just refresh a little bit the shadows on that leaf. Create a shadow here. Here as well. Also, if your stroke is too sharp, you can remove it, diluted slightly with the semi wet brush. But remember to keep just a little bit of water in your brush. Otherwise, you will drop the liquid into your painting, into your paper and dilute the layer that was already there. Below. Like here, I'm carefully diluting my sharp stroke just to show soft transition of the color from the darkest one to the lightest one. And here as well. But here I won't dilute the color. Just show the dome, the darker tone. Alright, and now I'm going to do the same, but for the berries. And this time, I'll have a bit of green in red. If you feel that you can't reach the darkest tone here, you can add a little bit of black into your red. Just be very careful not to use too much black. I'm carefully outlining each berry so that the shape of each barrier is more clear. But do, but resist the temptation to circle every berry. Because that will look like a cartoon. We're working with shadows. And using shadow, we create the shapes of the berries. This is it. My final touch would be to add some frost using white gouache. I clean my brush. I don't want anything except the white on my brush. And now with the dot like moves, I add tiny, tiny dots of a concentrated gouache on the leaves, creating this feeling of frost. Just like with previous paintings, you really want to make sure that your strokes are very gentle and very small. Otherwise, otherwise it's going to look like no, you paint in beatings. You feel like your brush got muddy because of all the other pigment and the bottom, you can watch it and pick up some of the fresh gouache. There also can be frost on the berries themselves. But here be very careful to not overdo it. So it doesn't look like way too much of white stuff. On to Paris. It's mostly the leaves that have the frost. And you want to go all the way to the edge of the leaf, but still keeps some of the green color of the leaf shining through. Otherwise, you just meet the paper with your white gouache and white gouache on white paper is really not going to do much for you. So you need to allow some of the green to shine through your gouache. And finally, I'll just drop a few tiny, tiny, tiny drops on the barriers. But if you feel like you can't reach the very, very delicate thing, Spot. Better not to do it because if your spot is going to be thick and rounded or looks, it will look like an actual brushstroke. It's not going to look very natural on the painting. And while our our calendar painting of today is unlocked. See you tomorrow. 9. Day 8: Coffee and gloves: Welcome to the eighth, and we are painting a coffee mug, but it's not very typical coffee mug. Somebody in very cute Christmas gloves are holding it. I'll start with marking the opening of the mug. By drawing an oval. I need to show the width of the ring. And I'm not drawing the whole mug completely because half of it is hiding behind or under the gloves. You need to compare that both curves are the same size, they're proportionate. The thumbs are also the same, the same size. Here's the bottom of the mug. And I also will add a few marshmallows inside. And I think I need to make this oval a bit larger, a bit more open towards us. So yeah, inside there will be a marshmallows, just tiny squares and triangles, little cubes of marshmallow. And how about we add a gingerbread man. He's going to sit on the side of a mug. Here is going to be his head, little hands, and feet. Alright, so now I need to evaluate the proportions. That one side is not bigger than another. And remove the lines that I don't need. So I can see my sketch clearly. I need to remove the drawing, the line, the pencil lines so it's not so visible so that the pencil graphite doesn't shine through my watercolors. First, I start by placing clean water on my gloves. I want to use wet on wet technique to first mark the shades of the clubs with a very light blue color. The gloves will be white and red. White with red button. But I don't want to leave with just pure white. I want to show the three-dimensionality of the glove, which means I need to show the shades. And the best way to show shades on white is to use blue. I'm using in downtrend blue. Because it's everything is what the colors are. Blending and moving nicely and smoothly. And I can help a little bit with my brush if I need to direct where I wanted to float, I'm not covering the whole glove. Just the area where the shadow will be, which is the closest part of the glove to the monk. Okay, If you've got a sharp edge, you can always diluted by blending it with the semi wet brush. Touching the edge with the semi wet brush and pulling it carefully into the direction you need. Now while it's wet, I will add a tiny bit of orange into my blue to make it slightly darker. And also I will get rather gray tone. And with this gray, I will mark the darkest areas on the glove. And again, if you happen to have a very sharp stroke, you can dilute it carefully with the semi wet brush by touching the edge and pulling it away. The darkest area on the glove will be right under the sun and the area where the thumb is touching the mug. But that one we will paint separately. One we will work on the mug. While all this is getting dry. I just wanted to dilute the sharp edge of blue. Yes. So while this is cut-and-dried, I will work inside of our coffee mug or just paint coffee. Basically, I'll take brown. In my case, it's burnt sienna and start painting inside. Carefully outline in my marshmallows. I remember that I also have a gingerbread man sitting there. To achieve darker tone of brown, I need to add blue. And this is the same rule that we use for complimentary colors when we talk about orange. Because brown doesn't exist in the color wheel if you look at it. But it's considered to be in the orange scale, is desaturated. Orange. That's why we use the same rules, color mixing rules for creating darker tones. So now I'm just showing them coffee. The texture of coffee and separated my marshmallows. Also drop in some little spots and dots that will resemble maybe chocolate chocolate powder. And if I mix blue and brown proportionately, so the same amount of blue and the same amount of brown, I'll get grade or rather gray leaning towards brown. I'll add more blue to it. So there's more of a blue tone in my mix. And with that, I'll show the sides of my marshmallows just to show that they are three-dimensional. Here, just want to show the edge of the rim. I'll drop some little dots to resemble the cow or chocolate. Now that I'm done with this, I can paint the mug. And I just made sure that my gloves are dry so I don't have to worry that the mug color is going to leak into the glove color. I'll create nice gray color using those complimentary colors. But here I want to play with the tones that the colors that create this gray. So if mixed equally, it will be great. But if you add a little bit more of orange into the mix, then you will have orange standing out. Then you can add a bit of blue. So that blue stands out. And I want to play around with those colors that create my gray. In the bottom, the microbial, the darkens because we almost don't see it from the shadow that the gloss of dropping. And if you have sharp edges, carefully dilute them with the semi wet brush. With the very light blue, I will just mark the shadow on the cup Rim, especially under our gingerbread man. And while I still have a little bit of blue orange mix, I'll add a bit more orange into that mix and mark the edges, the edge, the end of the class. Now I want to paint the gingerbread man. I take Hanukkah and gold and first, go with, with the gold. You can use cadmium orange if you want to. Right away, I'll get some burnt sienna and drop it on the head and the body. But I will not cover everything. I'll let some of the orange shine through. I will also drop a little bit of blue into my very CNL to make it darker. And mark the shadows. On the gingerbread man. They won't be everywhere, but mostly on the right side of the body. I'll just let him write. And while our little gingerbread man is trying, I will paint the patterns on our gloves. I'll take bright red and I'll start marking the patterns on the thumb. And here, it's not really important what the pattern is. I'm literally just randomly moving my brush on the paper. But what's important is to follow the natural curve of the hand. So make sure that your brushstrokes are not straight. Your vector is not completely straight. Also at the back, like further away. The hand in glove that we see in perspective. I make it a little bit darker by adding grain into my red. And as we move to the front, the colors will be pure and clean again. Here as we come closer to the shallow part of our glove, remember the one that we covered with blue. I also will make it darker. So I'll add a little bit of green into my red to show the thickness, the side of the glass. Then the patterns in front, again are going to be with a nice pure red color. I'll add a slightly darker tone here. Just to show the three-dimensionality of the thumb. And we'll do the same for the other hand. As we go further away, the colors are a bit dull. So we add more green to red. Here, following the curve of the hand. I'm marking more of the patterns. Make sure you read is nice and vibrant that you don't need to reapply another layer of red after. And also remember to repeat the same pattern that you already did on this hand. So it's clear that the pair of gloves are from the same set. Here in the shadow. Pattern is going to be a bit darker as well. And this allows us to create this feeling of three-dimensionality. To make this graph look more complete with a very transparent blue. I am marking the outline because the background is white in the conifers wide, so we need to show the separation here. But do this with a very light blue tone with white gouache. I'll carefully mark the ice and the smile of our gingerbread man. Then there can be a couple of buttons, maybe some decor. Cream. If you don't have a white gouache, you can use white gel pen. It's gonna do the job. Now with I'll take blue and add a little bit of black into it to achieve pretty dark tone. And with that, I just want to show the main, the darker shadow here where the thumbs are touching the mug. And carefully delete the edge so it doesn't stand out too much. It will also visually show the width of the mark. And maybe here on the side just a little bit of a darker blue. And right under the rim just to show its edge. And that's it. The painter know today is Friday and I can't wait to see your postcards. See you tomorrow. 10. Day 9: Christmas wreath: Welcome to the 09:00 A.M. today's surprise painting is a Christmas wrath. Of course none of the Christmas is possible without the href, and we need to paint one. To make it simple. Best to just draw two circles. A small one and the bigger one. So it would look something like a doughnut. Right in the middle of your postcard. If you're not sure of your circle drawing skills. You can use some round objects like a coin or a cup or a candle or whatever you can put on a and outline. You don't need to worry about your circles to be perfect because this is a rough. There will be branches of fine sticking out, pine tree sticking out everywhere, and it doesn't need to be perfectly round and polished. I just want to know how far the branches will go, how big the circle inside will be, and how wide the actual Ras is. That's why I need to make those circles for myself. So when the both circles are ready, I can start placements, some elements, e.g. little bowl, maybe some berries. We already know how to paint red berries. This was one of our postcards of the day earlier. Then technically everything else, we will just improvise. There can be some little elements here and there. Some light, maybe some other berries. But also there will be lots of lights that we will paint with watercolor directly. So what I want to do here is take green and paint directly wet on dry. I will only leave white areas for the elements that I mentioned earlier, like berries. But don't worry about having it perfectly outlined because we will paint over it anyway. You just need to show approximately where they're going to be. And everything else will be covered with green as our first under painting. Now, while it's wet, I'll take very concentrated yellow and I'll start dropping some yellow. It's also pretty watery, so it will create some sort of qualify hours, which is what I want. Because this will imitate the lights on our rest. I'll do the same with bright red. I'll get darker tone of green, which already know how to do by adding bits of red into it. And with this darker tone drop, I will create the shadows in-between the pines, the pine branches. In some areas, the needles are going to stick out a little. But mostly for now, I just want to create this balance of lighter and darker area. In our S. If your paper got dry, you can get more of green and add the liquid that you're missing here. It's okay if you're a pigment is watery. This is actually going to even help you to create the shadows that we need in-between all those pine branches. Remember that we'll reserve some of the areas white. So that will be other elements of the rest later. Especially under the bowl, there will be more shadow, so the brain is going to be pretty dark. Now. I will repeat what I did with my lights. I'll take more yellow and drop it again because our paint is wet again. So it gives the opportunity to have this shiny blobs of yellow. You can also use those as an opportunity to add some of the needles sticking out here. And they're going to be a different tone of green because it's going to have some yellow in it. I also realized that my bottom is a bit wider than the top. So I am balancing it out right now. And another, of course they're not going to be very clear. But in this method doesn't really need to be perfect. We just need to give the understanding of what there is. On our href. Instead of painting every single detail, the postcard is really small. So we need to use more of an impressionistic approach to painting. So when the general mass of red is done, I need to get darker tone and show the shades in between the berries. So it's more understandable. What they are. These are going to be pine cones. And I just put a bit of brown, burnt sienna. I'll add some blue into it to make this brown darker. And I will create the texture of the cone. And I will have to be back to this place to, to make the shadows a bit more clear. Meanwhile, I can paint the bot. It's going to be red. Now with a darker tone of Fred, I will show some of the shades on this silky material. Just like we did in our previous lesson where we learned to paint a bot. The same shadows on this Strike silky material. I will intensify my red just a little. And I'll add some of the green around so that I also can show the shapes bit more clearly. I have this branch with various sticking out here. I think. I'll add maybe more here on the bottom so it doesn't look so lonely. Once again, I marked the shadows. I'll finish detailing pine cones. They got dry already so I can just show the texture in dot like moves. And I think my final touch here will be to get very concentrated yellow once more and drop some point, some spots with a very concentrated color. So that actually covers and paints on top of the dried watercolor layer. You know what I think I'll do the same with white gouache. Just a little less. And I'll show the edges of the ball so it's a bit more clear. Visually separated. Paint a branch on which the berries are located. I also realized that my ref is located a little bit too much high up on my postcard. So I need to fill up this space and the bottom, I think I'll just add a couple of bells. So this element is going to balance out the proportions on my painting. I'll paint them with yellow. Now I want to wait for it to get dry so that I can add another layer. I'll take some transparent black and mark the shades on the bell. Also take a dark blue. Glossy subjects always have a very sharp reflections on their surface. That's why I needed to wait for my layer to get dry first. That the new layer has a nice defined stroke. Define the edge with the concentrated lack of trust to finish. Their reflections on my bells. Sharp and clear. And they need to hang on the string. So, and the two strings. Now I think the painting of the day is complete, and I'll see you tomorrow. 11. Day 10: Red cardinal: Welcome. Today we are painting now that cardinal, this is the cutest winter birth, and our bird is going to wear at Christmas sweater. First I want to mark the main two circles of the body of the bird. So the body of the head to make sure that the bird is sitting in the middle of my page. And that it's not that it's everything is proportionate. So the bird is in the center. Now I can define the outline a bit more clearly with my pencil. Feet, weighing. And that little link over here. Then a little tail. Now I'm drawing the face. He's got a pretty big beak. Here will be the black part. And I will draw the scarf. Going to cover a lot of his body. Maybe a little shorter. Alright, so now I need to remove all the unnecessary lines. Don't forget the branch the bird is sitting on. Alright, I think everything is proportionate. And I can move to watercolor part. I will start with a nice warm red color. Will actually, I'm using this new color from Rosa, flame red, which technically is orange. The pigment to pigment inside this paint is a pigment, orange 73. It looks like red with some orange tone in it. And if you don't have it, you can take your red, whatever red you have, and just add orange into it to mix your own color. So on the left side of the head, I put this flame red. And on the right side, I put bright red. And I mix again with the flame red. Just to have a nice variety of warmer and cooler. Right colors. I carefully go around the eye and also the beak. But the black part. We will be able to paint over the red so I don't need to worry about it. The top of his head is really cute. So I mark it with a thin strokes. Paint around the beak. Right now. I covered the whole area because I know that later on I will be able to paint over with black. So I take my flame, flame red again, adding some bright red. Here's the branch, so I keep it white. And they're tip of the tail of the wing is over here. I will get some blue and mix it with orange to get some sort of gray, dark, dark gray tone for the inner side over here. And I'll add a little bit on this side. So just to let it flow into the wing, I work out the details of this wing later on. I just wanted to put the first foundation. Right now. Just remove the dark tone. I think it's taken too much space. I just want it to be on the side. Then there is the body. I'm, I remember that I have this curve over here, so I need to be careful. The feet here inside the color is much darker because it's in shadow. So I add a little bit of green into my red as its complimentary color, like you already know. To make the color darker. And with my flame red, I continue covering the bailee of the bird. Carefully go around this curve. Here right under the scarf. I'll put just a little bit of a shadow. And I need to finish the tail. But here is the bottom of the body of the bird. I need to wait for it. You can try so I can add the tail because it's darker and I don't want the dark color of the tail bleed into this light part. We also have a wink, which I will add later. For now, I need four. The bird. To get dry. I'm using black color, but I will leave white highlight to show the three-dimensionality of the eye. And the overall shape of the eye is more like a teardrop. I don't want to make the bird look like an angry bird. So I decided that the shape will be a bit more rounded rather than a straight line on top. Right away I'll mark some of the black area around the beak of the bird. And this is also an opportunity for me to correct the shape of the beak if I need to. Carefully go down all the way to where the scarf will begin. Right away for more realistic, feel. Our bird, I'll get a darker tone of red. To paint the shades. Here on top. This weird shade that separates the head here under him, but just a little bit. The same darker tone. I will create the texture on the wing. I will mark the outer line of the tail, which is lighter. But the inside will be in darker tones, which I will paint a little later. Actually, I think I will do it a bit differently. I will cover the whole area with flame red. Drop some bright red as well, and just leave it to dry. And later I will add darker tone on top of it. Use it and layering technique. I'll also add the wing over here. Always remember to continue your line. I'm under the branch because the wing doesn't disappear just because there is an obstacle there. And with darker tone of red. I'll paint the shadow inside the wing of the bird. I can also paint the beak right now. I'll start with a flame red. On top of the beaker. I'll try to leave a nice light highlight, highlighted area. It's almost white. And then I'll add red in the bottom. And I'll just let the colors blend in. A bit more dense shadow inside of the wing. Over here. The scarf will be green. I'll mix a darker tone of green for the shadows. The rest of the scarf will have patterns. But I'm not going to draw the actual image on the scarf. I'll just leave some areas on Blank and with dot like moves, I will create a feeling of the pattern. Right under where the parts of the scarf is showing up. There will be a bit darker shadow, darker green. I'm pointing it out right away. Here on this side, the scarf is a little bandits, so it's gonna be a little bit more in a grayish tones. There is a shadow on it. So the white color is not pure. And this part of the scarf is more visible. It's a bit folded. There's some textures, some patterns on it. Here where we see it folded. I'll add another shadow, and I'll leave this part too dry. Meanwhile, with brown color, I will paint the branch and with a darker tone of brown. Now I add the shadow immediately while the branch is still wet. I can also paint the inside of the tail over here. The book, I will carefully mark defeat of the bird and also marked a dark area under the branch once more. While I was doing all that. This curve cut dry so I can continue working on the patterns. I'll finish in the same way as the part of this curve here on the left. With white gouache, I will carefully add patterns here on this curve. Then finally, I will mark the texture of the tail inside. Also on the beak, I need to separate the top part and the bottom. Very, very carefully, making our bird smile. Am, that would be the lesson of the day. See you tomorrow. 12. Day 11: Lantern: Welcome to day 11. We are painting a lantern. In this painting, the tricky part is going to be actually the drawing part. And make it easier for yourself. You want to imagine this Lantern as simple form. E.g. the tip of the lantern can be a pyramid without the dip. So if you start building a pyramid and let's say it goes up, the lines go up and they meet somewhere here on top. But we didn't finish it. So we just need to make the roof over here. Here will be the side of the pyramid. The wall is gonna go up. But for us it's just a line that helps us to understand it. We're not going to actually keep it. Then from here, the size of the Lateran. And here we'll have the bow. He and I will also add some branch from the pine tree. So now I need to finish the inside of our left turns. And the inside of it. They're actually going to be the light, the light bulb. Now I'm just adding the details of the lantern itself. The tricky part that there will be darker lines that are outside and more muted colors inside of the lantern because the light, so we need to account for all that. One we're going to paint with watercolor. This time, this painting, I will use wet on wet technique, but I will apply clean water only where the Lenten is. So I will cover the first half of the sheet may be a bit more than a half, but I don't really need to go all the way down. The reason for it is that I want to create a soft light or that the lantern is shining. And for that, I need to lay down the first underpainting for this postcard. And I will use a nice warm color, cadmium yellow in my case, and apply it in the heart of the lantern in the center. And create some sort of a circle going all the way outside of the lantern that will resemble this shining. The goal here is to achieve this very soft light layer without hard, sharp edges, which is possible because of the wet on wet technique, the wet, the wetness of the paper allows me to have to paint the circle without the sharp edges, without the outline of the circle itself. So now that we lay down the first underpainting, I need to wait for it to get dry and then continue working in layering technique. Now that the painting is dry, it got a little bit lighter. And we can see that the middle of our lantern, the light is very bright and concentrated. And as it goes outside of the lantern, is much lighter and diluted. And I want to make sure that there is no sharp edges. So you don't see the actual circle that I was painting. And if you do see the edge, you can just remove it like so with the wet brush and it should go away easily. So now I want to paint the top of our lengthen and I will use two colors for this. Requires is nice blue color with a green undertone or reverse green color with blue undertone in it. And I think it's a really nice color. To portray the lantern. On a side, I will rather add a column called blue color. The frontal part of the tip of our lantern will also be cerulean. As I'm painting it over, a yellow. Yellow is shining through and it also gives us this green tone. I will make a darker tone of my turquoise color by adding red. And I will create a shadow over here. On the side. I also got this cauliflower, which I don't really like much, so I will cover it by applying a fresh layer of glass. But I still need to refresh the shadow that I created in the beginning. Just like so. Well, this part is getting dry. I want to work on the parts that are inside of the length and they are yellow because of the older light than the lender and shines, but it's not a pure yellow color is rather orange. Orange with a mix of brown even. So, I'll take her hemoglobin, gold and work inside. So here's the inner side of the lantern shining. And because this is supposed to be black, I'll add a little bit of brown texture here and there to make it look like the darkness of the actual literal color is shining through. But it seems to be yellow because, or because of all the light that the lender and produces inside. I'll also paint with. She looked good on gold. And I'll mix it up with brown, burnt sienna. Right away. I'll add bits of blue into my brown to make it darker. Following our color mixing rules. Just make sure that your colors are not too bright. Because you need to imagine that this part is behind the glass and glass of the lantern, so it can be very crystal-clear and vibrant. Here in the bottom it's a bit darker, so I'm adding tiny drop of black into it. While I was working on this part, the top got dry so I can continue working on it. I take the same took was switched due to rule them here on the side. And paint the top. While we're here, I'll get slightly darker tone and drop it in the bottom of this little dome. Then finally finish with a string. I also add some elements to make it look more realistic. With the darker tone of took was. I want to show the textures. Now we can paint. I'm using bright red and laying down the first layer of the bot. Remember to keep the color very concentrated so you don't need to reapply it once more. I can also grab some yellow and drop it here on top because it's only natural that the lantern is shiny and the yellow light on our bot with a darker tone of red mark the shadows. Here to show the realistic side of the bowl, we need to play with the contrast between light and shadow. Now on each part of the bow, I will add darker shades of red. Now I need to leave this bowl to dry before I add the final touch with the darker stone to separate each part of the bow. Meanwhile, I'll take a very concentrated black color and I will finally finish our lantern. It's very delicate work. You want to make sure your lines are straight. Now things are coming up together. Make sure that your black doesn't get to light and to kind of grayish when it dries up. For this, you need to make sure that it's a very concentrated when you're first applying it. And since I already have black, I'll grab a little bit of red into it. But it's still mostly black. And we'll just separate certain areas of the bow here. Now, I'll just paint the branches of pine trees. And we'll be done for today. I start with yellow first. Again to show that the lantern is dropping light, yellow light and everything around it. And then I'm switching to green. Alright up our mix, a darker tone of green and in red to it. And work on the shades. While the first green layer is still wet. Under the same on the left side. Again and darker tones. And that's it. We are done for today. See you tomorrow. 13. Day 12: Christmas gifts: Welcome Today 12th, we're painting Christmas gifts. And the challenge of today's painting will be to actually work in perspective. And because basically every gift box is a built-in clock, almost like a building cubes in geometry lesson. So first, I will mark generally where each box will be. So I can think of the composition. Somewhere here. I will place a little intro. Here. I think I'll have a bigger box and a smaller one right in front. And to make this a little bit more festive, I'll also add Christmas ornament, Christmas tree ornament, little balls here. And here. Here I can place a little star, maybe one toy over here. And maybe that's enough. So now that I have approximately figure out where each of the box is going to be. It looks alright. Maybe this box should be a bit longer. So there's equal distance between the subjects and between the subject and Yan to the end of the postcard. And now I will need a ruler to actually figure out how those boxes should be built. Every box is located in different position, which means that we see each box from a different angle, which also changes the way the box is deformed because of perspective. So e.g. if the vanishing point somewhere here, this is the imaginary horizon line, I'll draw it right on my table. And if this is the vanishing point, then every line should meet in that vanishing point. Because every box has different angle. Each box will have its own vanishing point. So we can't use the same vanishing point for each box, unfortunately. But it also makes our painting much more interesting. So one box is ready. Then let's, let's draw the small one. E.g. if the bottom like this. And let's say I want these lines to go away this way. The vanishing point for this box will be somewhere here. Every line of my books will meet there. Now, here I have the bigger one. I'll draw the bottom lines first. The sides connect them. And let's say the vanishing point for this box somewhere here. So now I need to connect every corner with it. We have a couple of boxes left. So one is pretty long over here. And I wanted to make it a little bit more complicated like this. This is going to be the bottom and the vanishing line for this one. It's going to be here. And because of this choice, the side of the box is pretty much invisible. It's very, very thin over here. This side. Superior thing because of the perspective. Finally, there will be a box on top, but I need to clear up some space for it first. This box is going to be sticking out somehow this way. And it's going to, yes, I think it's better if the vanishing point is here. Alright? Maybe this part is going to be a bit closer because it's touching this box. So I'll make it shorter. So now I need to remove all these lines. Then. They don't help me anymore. So somewhere here I will. Potent little angel. Just going to be a little toy. I think it's cute and it fits the mood. And as I mentioned before, there will be some other Christmas toys, Christmas tree ornaments, just to create the ambiance. Alright? And now we can start painting. So the box here on the left will be golden. You can even extend my box a little bit further. So it's closer to this big one. Right away. I will add a tiny bit of blue to make it darker. To show the shades on the side. I can't paint this box right away because the colors are going to bleed into each other. So I think I'll work on this box. I think I need to remove the lines even more because they're way too dark. And I don't want the pencil line to be visible through very light watercolor layers. So this box is going to be Kraft, Kraft paper books. I will leave some parts. They're a little white to make it look like the paper is glossy and shiny. I'll grab some burnt sienna. I just used a Rosanna by the way, and switching to burnt sienna. I remember that I have this toy over here. So the top undecided or slightly darker. And there'll be some shade from the toy as well, right under the toy. Just wanted to show some textures on this craft paper in which the boxes wrapped. And while those two aren't getting dry, we can paint. The angel. Also need to make, make it lighter, weight too dark. The angel's face is going to be light brown color or maybe golden even. So I take quinacridone gold, and I also used a little bit of burnt sienna in the beginning. Then. She's wearing red coat. And right up, I'll get darker tone of red and create shades. Separate the arm. You know, paint the hat. There should be another arm here as well. Alright, now I think I'll paint this little box over here. And eight will be green. The darker tone now add the shade right away. And moved to painting the star. I'm using cadmium yellow. Cover the whole star first. And then without even washing my brush, I dip it into quinacridone gold. And just mark the shades on the style to show that it's three-dimensional. Now, I think my first box is fully dry, so I can also work on it. And it's going to be green. I'll lift the pigment to make this glossy. Part. C, effect of the paper with the darker tone. Show the shades right away. Also must be a shadow under the angel. While we're here, I can also add some of the details on the angel. Just separate the arms, the line of the scarf, and the body. Maybe the head. Of course, paint the face. Remember to keep your read, write and concentrated. Do not dilute it too much with water. So you don't have to go back and we apply more pigment. The front is ready. Now I need to get a slightly darker tone of red and show this little shade in the bottom of the box. And actually with the same darker tone. I will paint the side of the box here, especially where it's disappearing at the back. Behind all those other boxes. It should be darker than the color of the angel so that the colors do not blend. Mixed too much. I started with the light or with the dark tone first and moved here to the front. I think it's easier to work this way. Then we can paint the top of the box. And I want to leave a super, super thin line between the top and the bottom just to show this glossiness of the paper as well. I also remember that I have this Christmas tree ornament here. So I need to paint around them. Basically using negative space technique. With a darker tone is also dollar. I am covering the back for our box. And that's it. Alright, so we have a couple of from Christmas ornaments left to paint. And of course, we'll need to work on the patterns of the actual gift. The wrapping paper. Christmas balls are made of glass, so the highlight is very strong. And that's why I'm not worried about blending the colors. I actually leave a very bright highlight on purpose. Now this box lost its shadows, so I will refresh them. And I also didn't mark the shadows that the boxes are dropping. The boxes and the toys are dropping on each other. So I'm marking bits of shadows here as well. Now I'm working on the packaging, mixing different colors so that they are still in the same color palette. I am painting those stripes. Will also add the buttons on the paper itself, but a bit later. For now, I just want to finish the general feel of the boxes. The green one will have the Red Bull. But painting over a dark green color can be challenging. So I use a very thick red pigment and the same here. Of course, the color isn't going to be pure, but it's still very clear what it is. There's also this guy that I didn't finish. I'll make him green. There are also golden tips on each toy that needs to be there to be able to suspend our toy with a thick black pigment. I will create the highlights and reflections on the bubbles on those Christmas tree ornaments. And we know that when we paint glass objects, the highlights a very strong and the and the reflections are very sharp. And by accident, I got a drop of water here, which is now completely diluted my biggest box. And we need to save it. So I will quickly reapply red, trying to hide the cauliflower that is appearing. Right now. I think I think I've done it. Okay. I was very close to ruining the postcard. And yeah, that's a relief. I will mark some of the patterns on the golden books with blue and with green. I will also create patterns on the box that is in craft paper. So as you can see, all the colors are in the same color palette. Very repetitive. And that gives a balanced feel to your painting. And I'll start painting the shadow, especially here in between the boxes. It should be the darkest, almost black. Then as we go out, it becomes lighter. I agree. This trunk diluted, dilute. Dilute the stroke immediately and almost completely so we don't see the edge of it. And the final part is to use gouache to finish the patterns on the gifts. I finished working on the patterns. It really can take time to go over each pattern to show it. So if you have the time, go for it. If not, you can just keep your boxes in without any patterns. It's fine. And I edit here to our little angel. And that's pretty much it for today. So I hope you enjoyed this lesson and I'll see you tomorrow. 14. Day 13: Christmas cookies: Welcome to the 13 per painting, Christmas cookies. I will locate three Christmas cookies on paper. For now. I'm just quickly outline in it to let myself know where they're going to be. And after that, I will spend more time on defining the shape of each. This one. I think I can move it a little bit to the right. Yeah, I think this makes more sense. And now I can spend more time on defining the shape of each. Remember that those are cookies so they don't need to be in a perfect shape. Make sure to not make anything sharp in these cookies, there should be no sharp edges. That won't look very realistic considering we are painting cookies here. Okay? And the stuff inside, I won't be drawing with the pencil. I don't think it's necessary. I will just leave it like this because the main guest of today is my skin film. And I will mark all of the white spots on our cookies with this masking liquid to protect it. So I don't need to spend time on painting around of each drop and pattern and whatever button they will be on the cookie. And I can just safely paint over it. Now, I will remove the lines. I will make them lighter so they don't stick out too much through my watercolors. And we can start. All right, To do this, you will need an old brush that you don't really use. Another bucket of water, clean water, and that is not the same that you will use for watercolor. And we can get some of the mask and film on the brush and mark the areas that we want to protect. It's safer to wash it every time before you dip it again. Mass can film, will destroy your brush. But if you wash it regularly, yeah, it might survive for a bit longer. This is also why I'm using a separate bucket of water for this painting. And now I can do them the same, but for other cookies. Alright, so now I need to leave this to dry and we can start while covering. The masking liquid is dry. So now let's save to start painting outside from the one on the left. So it's easier to move from left to the right. And I'm using burnt sienna. Just covering right on top of all of the marks and spots that I created with masking liquid. Here, I know that the cookie is hiding behind the other ones, so I need to be careful. Maybe make it a little bit wider over here. Right away. I can mix a darker tone of brown by adding blue to it. And, and a little bit of shadow here and there. Just to show the three-dimensionality of the cookie. So while this little cookie is getting dry, I can work on the other one so that they don't touch each other. Even though they're all the same color. I would prefer if they do not bleed into each other anyway. I can play around and add different brown, e.g. raw sienna. And immediately while this whole thing is still wet, I will add darker tone of brown, just the same as I did before with the heart. This time I will also drop this darker tone right under the masking liquid to make look, to make it look like the cream is three-dimensional. It's standing out and also cast the shadow. And if some of your strokes look dry, you can take your brush, wash it, rains that against the tissue. And while it's still a little wet, you can dilute the sharp edges where you need. And now I just need to wait for this to start to get completely dry so I can finish the one in the middle. I continue with the same colors using raw sienna. And right away I get some burnt sienna. So why do I need to wait for this little star to get completely dry? I can create some of the shadows underneath. I'll get blue in the trend, blue at some brown into the same brown that I was using before. I need to find the perfect balance so that the color looks gray and doesn't lead, doesn't lean towards one or another. And carefully mark. Shadows. Also delete the stroke so it has a softer edge. I feel like this is too much, so I'm removing the pigment. And while it's wet, it's very easy to do. Just pick it up with your semi wet brush. Here. It looked a little bit into the star that I don't really worry about it. Maybe a little bit over here as well. So it doesn't look like those stars are hanging in the air. And the shadow here can be a little bit darker. Since those are two cookies that are very close to each other and the area in between should be darker. So now I want to leave those cookies to dry completely so we can remove our masking liquid. The favorite part of all of my students. Removing the masking film. Now, I will just finish by adding the final sheets. So I mix a dark tone of brown. And now I will carefully underlying every button. Every cream frosting that we painted and show the shadow underneath. This will give us a feeling of three-dimensionality. I'm placing those shades on the right side. Because the light is coming from the left and naturally drops the cast shadow on the right. I would also need to show some of the shapes of the main star in the center. Maybe dilute some of the sharp edges if need to. Also take a very, very light diluted blue and carefully drop it as well on the white area. That we just freed from the masking liquid to also portray the shade. And instead of keeping each creamy part, I want to show the natural color of it, but portraying the shade side and keeping the highlights just white, the whiteness of the paper. Well, I have the blue in my brush under the same for our final star, which I'll not to cover the whole thing in blue. It's only in the shade, only a tiny, tiny part that shows three-dimensionality of the cookie. And again, I'm creating this very thin lines right under the creamy part. To show that it's three-dimensional. It cost even a small, but still a shadow. Keep it limited. Don't overdo it. Don't add too much of the dark pigment. We still want to keep it light. I feel like this star is missing a bit of texture. And here we go. We have our cute Christmas cookies complete for today. See you tomorrow. 15. Day 14: Elf: Welcome to day 14. We're painting and its usual, I'll start from marking where my subject is going to be on paper. And since it's only one else, he's going to be in the center, the main hero of our postcard. So here will be the head, maybe acute head, the body. And I want to make him really long feet, wearing this very typical alpha1 shoes. So the feet are going to be long and that's why the body will be pretty short, something like that. So now that I know approximately where my hero is going to be located, I will mark the details. I'll start with the face. Here will be the eyes. Nose, pretty round. Nose in the smile. It's rather cartoonish. Nobody stops us creating characters the way you want them will be pointy ears. The scar, of course. And long thin legs. I didn't finish this curve over here. So the scarf of course. Hands, arms, the other arm. The other arm he is going to hold, let's say a Christmas tree on a stick. Here we go. Our quick little sketch is ready. And I didn't really go into lots of details like patterns on the coals and stuff like that because all that we will create with watercolor directly. I just wanted to see where all the main elements are going to be. Maybe this shou should be slightly bigger. Alright, now I will go over with the eraser to make the lines lighter because I push the pencil really hard. So you can see the sketch on video. And we'll start painting. I'll start with a very light layer of raw sienna for the skin tone. And I'll apply it using wet-on-dry technique. So directly with the watery paint on the paper. On the face of our little elf. Yeah. I think that's the only place where the actual skin is. And I'll just add golden hair. By the way, just made it, make it flow. Using quinacridone gold. If it flow too much into your brown, you can carefully remove the color. But I kinda like that It's softly entering the area of the face like so. While we're still here, I might take them a tiny bit of burnt sienna, which is slightly darker brown color compared to raw sienna. And I'll just mark the texture, or rather the shape of the ear. And softly separate the outline of the face from the ears. Like so. And maybe just mark a little bit of the shades on the hair just to show the texture of the hair very softly. Now, I will paint something that isn't directly touch interface. So e.g. how about we do the hat on top? And since it's Christmas hat, it will be, let it be in stripes. So it's going to be red stripe. Nice concentrated. Red. I use bright red. Then there will be green. Concentrated, emerald green. As you can see, I do it immediately. So sometimes the color will bleed into each other, then it's fine. It's going to be the same effect like we did with the socks when we were painting Christmas socks. I kinda like that those colors are mixing and bleeding into each other. In the best watercolor tradition. Some of the greens I would intensify right away, so they're nice and bright. My brush also doesn't carry that much water. That's why the colors don't bleed into each other like crazy. So there's more control over what's happening on the paper. I think I'll just finish off this. The tip of the hat with the grain like so. The front of the hat, I will mark with a little bit of blue on the sides to show that it's white, but there is some little, a little bit of a shadow on it. So we show that it's three-dimensional by using a little bit of blue for the shape. Now I can do the same with the scarf. For this curve, the lines are going to be not horizontal, bud vertical. So I'll do red and then green. Then red again. They're part of the scarf that is lower, like underneath. I will make it slightly darker. So it's going to be darker shades of red and darker shades of green. And because those two are complimentary colors, I'll just one of each a little bit to make it darker. So bits of red into green to make green darker and then bits of green to red. To make red darker. This point, you don't really even need to wash your brush. You can just dip it into the next color. Changing the proportions of red or green depending on which color you need to have darker. Then this tail of the scarf. And I got really bored of painting those stripes. So I think I'll just finish the scarf with the larger stripe of green. And that's it. And also, you want to take care of the shape or fewer scarf, more or less proportionate. And I'll also paint the pads. There'll be green. Now. I will paint the face. I'll take what I had and mark the chicks. And I'll also outline the smile. And with blue, I will outline the shadow on the nose because it's big and rounded. Then I'll go back to my burnt sienna and go ahead and mark the hairs. Once more. The ears, the circle the nose. The ears are even want to show that they're pointing. Neutral black. I mark the smile and the eyes. I also want to mark a little shadow that the shadow under the nose. Here on the side of the hat. The same blue. I'll also mark the mittens. And I will paint the long legs in the socks. Dishonorable, not variety. Green and red because it's way too long. So it will be just red and white. Stripes will be between red and white. Before I go further though, I would like to show the outline of the legs. I should have done it before. So I'll take blue. And the second leg. I'll show the sort of a shadow. But also it will help me to show how wide the leg is and give me an outline for the leg so I can create stripes. So I'll leave it to dry. And while the socks or drying or thiazole, whatever that is. I'll paint the rest of his outfit. Here where it's closer to the scarf, the red is going to be darker. And with the same darker tone of red, I will show a little bit of a shadow under the scarf. And here on the side. I wanted to start to be bright reds, so add more red because I know it's going to get lighter after it will get dry. So I'll make it concentrated from the start. And of course I forgot to add the other arm over here with the gray tone, which I will mix by taking blue and add in a bit of orange into it to get some grayish tone. I will mark the shadows on the mittens. And now it's time to finish the socks. It reminds me when we were painting now caramelized Apple with the candy cane. And we were painting those red strokes following the shape of the game. So basically that's what we are doing here as well. When we're following the shape of the leg and creating those red stripes. Now I think I'll paint the Christmas tree out in green. Here I'm carefully outlined in the ear of our ELF. And finishing the tree. By the way, I'll get slightly darker tone of green and just mark shades. I'll get very concentrated. Yellow, just like we did when we were painting wrath. And drop it to imitate Christmas lights. Right here in the bottom. I will also finish with the shoes. I want to make the outline of the nose a bit more clear. Mike, so the same brown, I'll paint the stick. And now I just need to add some shades on the show. And I think this will be it. And today's painting is complete. See you tomorrow. 16. Day 15: Oranges and cinnamon: Welcome today, 15:00 A.M. we're painting dry tangerines and cinema. For me than dreams are the ultimate symbol of new year. And at home in Ukraine, usually for Christmas time and new year, the House would always smell tangerines. And I would always have like a kilogram of those at home waiting for me. And I didn't know it. Associates with New Year and Christmas for me personally. So I guess I'm biased. And painting the tangerines and cinnamon brings out some warm feelings for me for sure. So a marking the approximate location of my subjects here. There'll be star nice and tangerine slices. But I think I'll put the tangerines a little lower there, somewhere here, like so. And here will be another star unease. Maybe a couple of smaller slices of tangerines and the back and the background, or the background and here the foreground, just for the sake of composition. Alright? So when I decided on the composition, now I can go with the details. I'll mark the main circle of the country, the main opening of the slice. And the second circle inside will show the skin of the tangerine. Closer to us, the skin is going to be a little wider and further away here, it's gonna be a little thinner to show the perspective. And here will be the center. We're going to see it pretty clearly because the tangerine has dried up. And we're going to have this visible sections of the venture in as well. Then the second slice will be right here underneath. So I just mark this keen on the second entering and the last one is on the bottom. We also see the skin of it, but not the actual sections inside. Like so. And the star needs is going kind of lean on this pile of tangerines. And well, basically it's a star. And the only interesting part here is the little section inside that looks like a boat. And that's what we're going to mark mostly with watercolor. I also mark it with the best cell just in case. But the main job will be done with watercolor. Then here on the right, I will mark my cinnamon. There will be another star, nice on top. Now when I'm painting, when I'm drawing the front of our cinnamon sticks, there's also some width to it, so I'm showing it with the pencil. It's important to show this width because it's going to ultimately show us the three-dimensionality of it's going to show us the three-dimensionality of each cinnamon stick. Alright, so each sort of cinnamon sticker is outlined approximately. I have my approximate outline for the slices of tangerines over here as well. And on the bag is gonna be blurred out because it's somewhere on the background. And I will remove the lines, go over with my kneadable eraser to make the sketch lighter and start painting. I'll start with tangerines and I'll use hillock ridden gold, nice warm orange color and applied everywhere on my tangerines. The right side is going to be slightly lighter and the left side will be more concentrated. I'm also actually, I'll apply the same color on my everywhere on all five tangerines. And this is going to be my underpainting for tangerines. And I'll leave this to dry. And I'll do the same for cinnamon with cinema now, also use quinacridone gold. I will apply pretty translucent color. Pretty diluted with water. Everywhere on my cinnamon sticks. Here on the side. I went a little bit too far. And actually as we're here, we can mark the shades. And I'll take orange and add blue to it to make it darker. To achieve gray tone. Is those two complimentary colors create gray or brown if mixed in unbalanced proportions. The closer we are to the subject, the darker will be our shadow. So I will intensify it right under the tangerines and then lighten it up as we go away. Immediately I will dilute the hard edge with a similar brush. Also go between my star nice and front. As you can see, I'm balancing between my brown gray tone that is lenient towards orange and some places or towards blue. So it creates this intricate change of color. For our cast shadow. While I was working on those shadows, my oranges then drains and we'll basically my whole first layer to dry. So I can start working on the textures. I'll take another concentrated load of I cannot grade on orange, yellow, green, and gold. Sorry. Mark the insights of country. Work in some sort of triangles. So I mark one triangle, then I take burnt sienna, and I only make a small line on the edge to show the edge of this specific section. And I'll do the same for the next section. This way we're going to demonstrate this very dried out texture of Howard contraints. The next section I'm painting. I leave a super tiny thin line in-between the sections that my first light orangey layer is shining through it. And with concentrated brown. Again, I just show the side. You can also add a bit of glue into your brown to make it darker, make it more spending out from the other colors that we're using here. So it's more noticeable Excel. And I keep moving a little bit separated from the previous section with a thin line. I'm not directly touching my previous section. And I create again the shadow with a darker color. It's important to wash your brush every time you want to pick up your orange color. Because you don't want to bring the dirty brown into the first section that you're going to paint with pure orange. Also, as I come closer to the front, my section also can have a little bit of a broken layer, so to speak, so that the first layer or the whiteness of the paper, the first orange layer is shining through. I'll also go ahead and finish all the sections with orange. Remember to keep each section separated with the thin white line. When I say white, I mean, the first, very first layer that we put with our light transparent orange color. I'm going to take cadmium orange and outline the skin like so. And then I'll get concentrated. Burnt sienna and go again. If it's so concentrated that it doesn't paint and it's super dry and it breaks off. This is perfect. This is gonna give us even better feeling of a dried out orange skin. Now, I will continue with the same sections underneath the first slice. Remember to separate each section with the thing On cupboard and painted line. And also remember that there is a light skin in front of us as well. And then I'll take brown, burnt sienna and blue and get it very thick and concentrated. And I will place this dark color right under our first conjuring to create the shadow. Now with a very concentrated brown, burnt sienna, I will outline the skin again just like we did with the first circle with the first lies. Then again with the darker tone of brown. I want to go over the skin of the circle of the slice. That isn't the very, very bottom. It's going to be the dark is because of all the shadow that those slices are dropping on it. However in-between, there will be almost black and also very thick, very dense paint. That's going to show the shadow between the last two slices of tangerines. Now I want to leave those injuries to dry because we will have to come back and work on the textures to make it look more dried out and kinda crispy. We only can do that when the paper is fully dry. We are going to work on the cinnamon envelope, burnt sienna. I'll start marking a very bright color of our cinnamon stick. And I'm only mark in the areas that are the darkest shadows. Also the top line. I want to I want to dilute it to make it lighter. So it's not very sharp, It's softly transition into the lighter color. And here at the back is going to get much darker. So I'm using the same dark brown here. And then again, I'll take a concentrated burnt sienna and only place it where the shades are. Inside of this kind of curled snail looking part of the cinnamon stick. And again, the sharp line will be carefully diluted with a similar brush. Right up. I'll take the darker tonal ground and the shadows that we need here. And I'm doing it immediately so that the color blends and smoothly. This is our technique. We work in layers. First we created the lightest layer, that was our underpainting. Now we're adding a second layer that allows us to see a bit of a volume of our subject. Then we'll be adding the final layer that will work out the details and also show us the volume even more. Right away. I'm adding darker tone. Let the colors blend smoothly. Using this approach, methodically, we will paint all the rest of our cinnamon sticks. One of the smaller parts of cinnamon, you can blur the right brown color to kinda cover everything a little bit. Which will also give us a special effect, special feeling of the texture of the cinnamon stick. We're going to use it to our benefit later on. So the idea here is not to completely cover the first layer of your pain to the new layer, but allow the first layer to shine through. Then u1, the feature that only watercolor can give us. I also want to take a very light brown, almost transparent and go carefully touching the lightest parts of my painting. Specifically here on the cinnamon side, so that it doesn't look perfectly like yellow or brown. So the texture is a bit uneven. And now I'll just keep it to dry. I will leave it to dry. Meanwhile, I will paint thundering here. I use the same approach, but first I'll quickly mark the sections of the venture in the narrow banded. I also leave white blank area in between each section. While my sections are wet. I'm adding bits of burnt sienna. Extra. We also have this other slides of tangerine and the back. It's going to be kind of not in the focus. So I'm going to make it very, in a very loose style, so to speak. Like so. Now the tangerines here got dry. So I can work on the vectors. I'll get very, very dry. Brown. It almost doesn't paint, as you can see here on my palette. I'll make it slightly darker blue. Or you can also add a tiny drop of black if you want. But it's still should be. Brown is dominant. And I'll mark carefully darkest areas of the slices of the sections which are painted in shapes of little triangles. And the dryer your strokes are, the more feeling of a dried tangerine you will get. You can also help with your finger and just move the dry pigment. It also can stick out a little bit into the lighter part of the skin to resemble the texture of the tangerine skin more in a more realistic way. Also in a very hard, there will be a tiny dip like so. So it looks like a little volcano crater. Now they kind of ignored our little star anise. So I will mark the underpainting with very light grid on gold so you can use yellow or orange. Another the same for this little guy. The most important part is to mark the shades in between the cinnamon sticks because they are piled on top of each other and naturally they will drop shadow on top of each other. Here I also want to show a little bit of a texture of sort of like, uh, would, would like extra are just a few strokes and I'll dilute them so they don't stand out too much. This one, I also show this lecture, but also following the curve of the steak. Here we go. The silicone stakes are ready. Quickly mark triangles of the tangerine over here. Now we just need to finish any stars. Stars, the approach will be the same. I'll mark. Shades with the burnt sienna first and finish with the details. The shades would be on the side. And inside the little boat. You'll see what I mean when I'll start outlining them. So first I mark the side and then the little opening inside, ending up on the side. And like little boat inside. So now it looks like a kind of I'll leave this to dry and meanwhile, I'll work on the other star. Nice. Here we'll see more of the actual opening inside of our little boat. Now, I will, again makes a very dry and dark brown just like we did before. It's a black and just detail. The darkest areas of star anise. So inside the opening, inside our little cannula, I'll quickly mark bit of a texture for the phone. I'm dried tangerine because it's in front. We see more of the detail. Then at the back. Here we go, our paint enough today, it's finished. 17. Day 16: Christmas bunny: Welcome to this 16, and we're painting at Christmas money. I'll quickly mark the location. A little bunny on the postcard. Binding is going to wear Christmas hat, of course. And I think it's more or less central and proportionate. So now I can work out the details of my drawing. So here will be one eye and other eye. The eyes are sitting pretty far from each other. It's not like human eyes. So do not place the eyes too close to each other. Hi ni knows. I'm also marking the outline of the face. And even though the binary is going to be mostly white with some drops of like brown, orange color. I still want to see the outline of his head. Here's going to be the ear, body, too fluffy feet and the back leg. And now I'll just remove the lines that I don't need and we can start painting right away. So I'll start with applied clean water on my bunny. And I'll get the same orange I have been using the whole time. She had occurred on gold. And very light, transparent, almost diluted with water, layer, will go down on the bunny. On top of wet paper. I'm not painting with yellow everywhere. It's going to be weird. But I dropped some this orangey yellow color here and there. Just to show the fluffy. The same time, I'll get a bit of cerebellum. Also make it pretty transparent. Mark here at the bottom. And maybe the back leg. It's important that your blue doesn't meet yellow and turn into green because we don't want to have a green bunny. For that reason, you can also use e.g. raw sienna instead of yellow or orange so that the color doesn't contain yellow in the pigment. There's no pigment yellow in the actual paint. Now that it's done, I'll get burnt sienna, but very light and transparent. And I'll drop some of it here and there. Inside the ear, around the eye, above the eye on the area of the nose. The cute little cheeks. And then clean the brush, rinse it over the tissue, and carefully soften all of the strokes that I created to carefully integrate them into the background, into the whole first layer. At this point, we don't want any sharp lines be visible here. Then again, with the same brown. I will mark a little bit of I'll put a little bit of a brown layer right under the head of the bunny. And then here on the feet, the back leg. And again, everything is very watery, flowing, make sane. Changing. No sharp lines nowhere. I'll get the darkest brown. And mark here at the bottom the area that is between the legs. Under the belly. The one that we almost don't see because of the shadow. Shadow. And also on the back leg as well. There also will be a little bit of a shadow here on the side because of the hat. Inside the ear of the bunny. Outtake. Very transparent, pink like ketamine or moderate, very diluted. And I'll mark here inside the ear. And I'll just let it dry. Now, I want the bunny to be completely dry before I continue working on him. So that's why I will paint the red hat. I'll take a nice concentrated red, bright red. Place it on the hat. Remember that red can get very light, but we want our red to be nice and concentrated. So make sure you apply a thick layer of it right away. So you don't need to return to this place again. Now, our bunny is fluffing. So I rinse my brush, wash it, rains it, and then carefully dilute the sharp line over here where the hat is meeting the body of the bunny. The other fluffy areas of the hat also won't be sharp, so I will dilute them as well. This line where the whiteness of the hat meets the red part. I will make it soft and diluted. And since I'm here, I'll just put some clean water on the whole area of the white part of the hat. And then I'll get some cerulean, blue cerulean color that I had before and just put it on the head to show shades. And even though the hat is white, the shades can be marked as blue. Oh, Grey. Can get some gray as well. Now you need to make sure that you're binding is completely dry. And we will continue working on the details. I'll take burnt sienna, add little bit of blue into it to make it darker. But I want to make it more towards gray. And with this darker tone, I will mark the shadows on our bunny. So here will be a little bit of a shadow on the ear, on the tip of the ear. And also inside. Then the sharp line that I've got here on the side. I will dilute with my brush against the darker brown that I mixed. And again, the darker areas, darker parts that I'm adding now should be edit selectively, not everywhere. Otherwise, our white bunny is going to turn into gray bunny. Also. I'll mark the nose and the cheeks. Over here. In right away. I'll add a tiny bit of the same pink color over here. And I go again to mark the firm. On the money. Here right under the hat is going to be a little bit darker too, because the head is dropping a bit of a cast shade on the head, on the face. And it shouldn't be visible everywhere under the hat. And with less watery gray color. I'll mark the feet. And with the light brown. Just want to mark the tiny hairs here and there and everywhere. But by doing so, I'm showing that this money is fluffy and certain. I'm hairs are more visible than the others. The cheeks, I make a little bit more orangey and standing out. Here, I've got cauliflower because I had too much liquid in my brush. So I'm going to fix it by carefully removing the pigment, the semi wet brush, and spread it everywhere. I mean, not everywhere, but in this specific area of our bunny. And the way to work with cauliflower says that you need to apply more concentrated and dense pigment. It doesn't have to be dark, it has to be dense. So thick to stick basically on the paper and do not have too much water in the paper. So that's why it's going to bleed and flow everywhere. Now if you're sure that the area around the eyes is dry, you can paint the eyes with a very dry black pigment. The other, I make sure they are proportionate. Same size. I'll add a little bit of a brown shade path in here on the side. And again with the black pigment, I'll mark the nose and the mouth. The mouth is barely visible, so I'll do it with light brown color. So the fluff here under the head is a bit darker and this is the place, the part that's going to separate the head from the rest of the body. So I want to market once more. This way using negative space technique to help outline the head and separate it from the fluff of the body. And with a very dark red. I'll mark the shades on the hat. We already know how to create this feeling of folded material. We did that many times. Paint in the bowl. I got a bit more red to help dilute this dark tone without creating cauliflower. Because otherwise, if I will just use wet brush, there will be water in it and it will create a cauliflower. And we can avoid that. Now I'm going to take a rigger brush with a very, very thin, delicate results and get some black, very dry. And I'll carefully create the whiskers. And I also get lighter brown color so that the whiskers are not so dark. And add some more. So they're not like super dark black. I also don't like how here the black is. The black created a spot like that. And I will carefully remove it with water and tissue. But it's a dangerous affair. So if you're not sure your brush can create thin and delicate lines, better not to, but I'll just skip this step and not paint the whiskers. I'll also add a few details on the feet. Just to show that texture. I'll add a couple of strokes with dark brown to show some hairs again, like I did before. And completely forgot that other one is flying there. So I'll get dark brown and create a shadow. Remember that the shadow is the darkest in the area where it meets the subject. And then gets lighter as we go away. And now we're done. And I'll see you tomorrow. 18. Day 17: Christmas candle: Welcome to the 17th, where a painting, Christmas candle. I want you to think of the length of your candles. The candle should start somewhere here. Closer to the top of your paper, of the paper edge. It's going to be pretty small. And then the in the bottom there will be some decor like raspberries or pine cones, maybe a Christmas tree, needles. So now I will make the outline a bit more clear. Remove the lines that I don't need. In this sketch. Here in the center, there will be a candle awake. We already know how to paint soft light that's coming from the lantern in our previous, one of the previous lessons. And the idea will be pretty much the same for the candlelight. So now that the elements of my sketch or pretty much clear, I can start multicolor in, and of course I'll remove the dark lines before I do so. Just like with the lender and I will start from placing clean water first in the area of the candle week. And I'll also cover our candle just a bit. I don't need to go all the way down or cover the whole paper. And now I want to take a bit of heterochromatin gold, a color that is in-between orange and yellow. It's pretty light and transparent. And first, I'll place it on the candle. And you see how transparent the color is. Very light and gentle. I don't want to go outside of my candle width. And here I will create a soft circle around our candle week. So in the middle, it will be pure white and only yellow shiny in spreading outside. I can make this orange color a bit more concentrated, closer to the candle, week, to the light itself. And as it spreads away, it becomes lighter and lighter and more transparent and eventually disappears. So this is one of the most important parts. It's done and we need to make sure it's completely dry. Before we continue. I used a hairdryer to speed up my drying process. Took a couple of minutes, and now I'm ready to continue with bright red color. So Britain light transparent. I will start applying it. Here on top of my light, he levied on gold. And you see the beauty of watercolor. In action. You see how light yellow color, orange is shining through the red. Showing this beauty of transparency of watercolor. Now the side of the candle will be more concentrated. Red, less water, less diluted. So feel free to load your brush with a pretty thick red color. On the left side, my red will be slightly darker. There'll be a bit of a shadow. So I get a little bit of green into my red to make it darker. And also dollar, there's also the beginning of my core. And on the left, the red is lighter. Fossa here you see that because the layer was still wet, the color touch the wet area and bleed. That's not a big problem. We can always smooth out this part with the soluble brush. I'll also mark the center from which they can. The weak is burnout with a bit darker red tone. And I'll show bits of texture here on top of the candle. Again once more, we need to wait for the candle to get dry so we can continue working on the rest of the painting. Alright, I will continue with painting berries. And I'll use cadmium red instead of bright red. And you'll also see the difference in the temperature for those two red colors. First, I lay down the main, the main first underpainting for the berries. Now I can make this red darker and work on the shades in between the Paris. You need to find a balance that the color is not too dark. It doesn't look like black, but still dark enough to see the separation between the barriers. Now I want to take a green, I use emerald green and mark the green parts of our decor. Again, this is just first layer. Of course we're gonna be back and work on the shades here. I just wanted to mark where those elements are going to be in the first place. Now, I'll put the base layer for the pine cones. I'm using raw sienna. And right up, I'll get some burnt sienna. I'll drop some of the paint immediately to show the shades and the textures, an even texture of our pine cones. And the details will be worked out later in the layering technique when it's going to be dry. Now it's more clear where all the elements are. I can finish up with the berries where the darkest red, I'll add some of the barriers that are less visible and also darker because of the shadow that's being cast on them. One more time, we need to leave this painting to dry completely so we can finish off with the final shades and details. As you can see, my red color became pretty dull and not as bright as it was, which is typical for watercolor and especially for red paint. So that's why I will refresh my layer and also use this as an opportunity to underline this edge of the candle and make it stand out more clearly. So I get a very concentrated bright red or bright red. And start at the rim of our candle and pull the color down. Now this also helps me to create this texture of the candle that is kinda dry. Not perfectly smooth. I got a bit darker tone as well. The most important part here is that your paint that you are applying now on top of existing layer is not watery. If it's watery, if there's too much liquid in your brush, it's going to pick up and delete the previous layer. So you need to make sure that you refresh layer is thick on your brush. The paint is thicker on your brush. And I'll mark the center once more. And some of the cracked parts. They can go here in our flat area on the top. Now I want to take a dark brown, burnt sienna mixed with blue or even black, and go over the pine cones to show their texture. I go here is not to be hyper-realistic. I just want to create this feeling of the subject that I'm painting so that the person who is looking at the painting can immediately understand what it is without me having to outline and detail every little thing. That's why. Working on shades and shadows. The subject is the way to go. By creating the contrast between shadows and light. You can create volume and also make the subject familiar so that the viewer can immediately recognize what that is. I'll do the same for the berries, again, darker, darker, red, and create the shadows. Especially in-between the Paris. Now we'll do the same with the green part and in shades to our branches. And I left it for the end. Because using green, I can fill out all the gaps and connect all the elements together. Because in the end of the day, all of them are sort of hiding and mixed in specifically with the Christmas tree branch. So grain here is sort of a uniting color and uniting element for all the parts of the decor. Here in the bottom, I just want to create a sort of very light feeling over shadow so that our candle is not flying in the air. I'm using green for it, which is not typical for my usual cast shadow color. But I feel it's, it resonates nicely with everything that we've painted here. And finally, I will add a very, very transparent stroke in the bottom of the light, diluted so it's almost invisible. Then you want to give it a couple of minutes to get dry. And then we will take a very dry black and actually paint the candle week. And so all the elements are connected. There's no white blank areas between the barriers or pine cones or the branches of the Christmas tree. Everything is united. A. And now, I don't think there's anything else to add. That's why we are finished with today and I'll see you tomorrow. 19. Day 18: Hot wine: Welcome Today 18, we are painting hot wine. This painting is actually going to include every element we already painted before, like slices of oranges and cinnamon stick and start a nice So we already know how to paint all those things separately. And today we're going to unite them in beautiful mug of hot wine. The view is a little bit unusual. We're going to see it from the top. So in perspective, that's why the proportions are slightly distorted. So the opening of a lag, of a cup will be an distorted oval. The bottom part of the oval will be a bit more open and the top will be a bit less. Now, the shape of the mug is pretty interesting. It's wider here, and it becomes more narrow as we go down. Here. On the side, there will be a handle. Alright, so now let's fill it up with foods. So there will be a big orange slice, then another orange slice and cinnamon stick. It also could be some berries or cherries floating in a glass. But the most important part here is to nail down the proportions of the cup so that the rim and the both sides of a mug, our proportionate. Actually it's a glass cup. It's made of glass. So that's why we also need to pay attention to the reflections of the glass. I will mark some of them with the pencil here. And we'll have a pretty big fraction here in the bottom as well. And maybe on the rims. Also remember that just because the elements of our hot wine are disappearing into the wine, it doesn't mean that we don't see them were still able to see them through the glass, but they're just a little bit distorted. So when you paint your or draw your orange slice, e.g. it doesn't disappear here in the rim of the glass tube. It goes further away down. It's just a little bit deformed because of the perspective and also because of we see it through the glass. And the same goes for this slice. It still continues here inside the bug. So now I will remove my sketch lines so they are much lighter and start painting. First, I'll start with the market in the highlights on the gas and the one that will become refractions later with a very light, almost transparent blue color in I'm using sodium here on the handle, here on the side just a bit. And under him, first, I want to put clean water. Like so. Then I'll get codename yellow. And I'll just put it on the edge of my orange orange skin. And I'll also go inside of the glass. Now, I want to dilute some of the edges so that they don't go too far into the whiteness of the skin. And maybe with some quinacridone, gold or orange. I will add a little outline just to show the color better so it's a bit more concentrated and fits well for this game. The same for the other one. I'll add a bit of more concentrated orange on the skin and especially in the area behind our star needs. Because it would naturally drop shadow on the skin of our orange because it just behind it. And also continue into the mug. Now I want to paint some of the sections of our orange the same way we did it when we were painting tangerines in one of the lessons. So remember that each section represents triangle. Here. Of course we don't see the triangle because it's hiding behind. It's too long. And we don't see the rest of it behind the other slides, but we know it's there. We also need to leave a tiny, tiny, tiny white line uncovered with pigment in between those sections. They're also much wider than the ones that we usually see in tangerines. Right away. I'll get a bit of burnt sienna on my brush and put it on the top of my segments. I'll dilute it so it doesn't look too sharp. And with the darkest tone. I will show the shadows here as well. Just as a preparation for the final detail that we will do later. Here, actually, I'll cover the whole thing with my yellow, cadmium yellow because it will help me to work on the starter Nice Later. This is the color that's gonna be my base anyway. So. It will help me along the way. Then again with burnt sienna, I'll just drop a bit of a shadow and marketing detector of those triangles. While I was working on this slides. The other one got dry so I can paint the cinnamon stick. I'll lay down my first layer with a yellow. And I'll add bits of shadows with burnt sienna. And of course, the rest of the shades and details will be done when it's going gonna be completely dry. Now, I'll take metal red, pink color, and I'll add bits of green into it to greed, much darker tone. Following our color mixing rules by adding complimentary color. And now I achieve nice and deep Bordeaux color. That will serve perfectly for us to paint the hotline inside the cup. However, before I apply the darkest color, I'll start with pure red, pure pink. And I'll mark some of the berries here. I'll have them highlights. So I want the ink there. I'll quickly remove it by diluting it with the brush and picking it up the tissue. Alright. So the pink color will be here outside of the rim and we will see some of the wine as well. Catching the oranges. Then the berries, cherries. I'm gonna be here. Here. Here. I remember that here there's the rim of the mug is going to be highlighted a lot. So I'm trying not to cover it with my red. Now, I'll can slowly introduce my darker mix. For the wine. The Bordeaux color. So I keep this area without any paint and work under the reign over here. With light pink, I will cover this slice of the part of the slice of orange. So you still see the orange, but it's still shining through them, but it's it's mostly pink. Here around the handle. I also keep some areas white, resembling the reflection on the glass. And we are using negative space technique doing so. We could of course, cover it with masking liquid. That would make that would make things easier. But there are more ways to paint then just covering things with Muslim liquid. So sometimes it's more interesting and challenging to just paint around. Here also, I'll carefully show the highlight. But it still will be much tighter. It will be lenient towards purple because blue with pink gives you a purple. However, still very light and transparent like so. Alright, here in the bottom, we also have some reflections on the mug, teacup. I will just mark it with a very dry dark pink color, leaving white stripes of paper in-between. And every time I'm drawing two or three lines strokes with my brush, that is almost not painting because it's so dry and leaving some broken line so that the whiteness of the paper shines through it in this will visually create this feeling of a reflection on the glass. Now with a very light pink, I will create a soft line here to show another shining on our reflected area. Here, I forgot to smooth out the red, pink color of the wine that is touching our oranges. And now add a darker concentrated tone as well to show that the wine is visible here. And it flows into our oranges, as well as here. In-between the orange slice and the cinnamon stick. The trick about painting fractions on the glass is that the reflections are always sharp. That's why I'm not worried that my edge over here is pretty sharp. I can smooth it out so it's more rounded. But other than that, the nature of reflections of the glass are always sharp. So you don't have to worry about soft lines and soft connections. Now I get slightly darker tone of brown of our burnt sienna. And I'll just work on their details and textures. Now with black color. I want to work on the reflections on our handle. Here is interesting because it's transparent. We can't just leave it white. We need to show all the other colors that are actually reflecting that are reflecting on this handle. That's why I'm using bits of brown that is probably from the table, e.g. and bits of red that are reflections of the actual wine. This is the last time we need to wait for the paint into before we try and finish with the final details. Now the fun starts when we are adding the final highlights on our painting with white gouache. With the rigor brush, which is very thing. I will mark all the white highlights on the glass, the glass cup. And it will really bring it to life. This is the part that really will make your glass texture stand out. We need to put it on the rim. Then a few highlights here in the center. Maybe under one of the berries. Then important here around the handle. Then here bottom of the cup. Also use this opportunity to mark some of the textures on our orange. Also little highlights on our starting knees. Not everywhere, just didn't few places. Now, I dilute my gouache. So simply too watery. And I'm placing a few spots here and there. But they need to be a bit more rounded to show that there are some other barriers inside the cup. We can also use the lifting technique to literally remove some of the pigment and reveal lighter color of the paper. The first lighter layers that we put there. And this will also make it look like berries. So to recap, painting, reflections on the glass objects. It's always about the contrast between a highlight and shadow. Even now, I place the black paint is trope almost under the white stroke to white highlight. To show the contrast between white highlight and this darkest area. Also quickly mark the bottom to show the shape of the cast shadow. And it will be dark brown color. It will also help you correct. E.g. the shape of a handle. If you need to. I would like to make it a bit thinner. Like so. By creating the shadow, we have the chance to fix the mistakes. Basically using negative space picnic. I'll soften the edge. As we know that the cast shadow, the shadow is the darkest in the area where it's directly touching the subject and as it goes away from this object, it becomes lighter. The lesson of today is complete. 20. Day 19: Nutcracker: Welcome to the 19, we're painting and Nutcracker. I sketch his head somewhere here, considering that he's going to wear a clown. That's also going to take some space in the top part of my paper sheet. So I need to account for the space is going to take away. I don't want my subject to be too high up on the page or too low. So it's always important to think about decomposition, where your hero is going to be located. So I'm briefly marking the face, like the mustache and the mouth, beard. And then the elements of his clothing. I think this part should debit writer. Now I will make my sketch more defined. I'm unclear. I guess the teeth, the open mouth is the most important part of the Nutcracker painting. Oh, maybe add some hair on the side. The rest of the details will be painted with watercolor. I'll start with placing the skin color first on the face. I'll use sienna. And I cover the whole phase of the Nutcracker. Avoid in the eyes and the teeth obviously. That's the first layer. I might add. Darker burnt sienna mixed right under the ground as a shadow. And I'll start painting the crown but from the top so that the face has the time to dry. The top of the ground does have golden color in it, so I removed the pencil line specifically there. I outlined the ground with the yellow and I'll also add some yellow stripes here and there on our king. So those places should be clear from the pencil line. So I'll grab the eraser and remove it as I go. But it's not really critical. For this painting. There will be some stones here, some precious stones, Ruby probably, but the red. So it's okay if I cover the whole stripe with yellow color, because red is going to work over it anyway. Alright, so I located my cadmium yellow in most of the places where I think it should be. And now I can continue working on the crown with the red color. I use bright red as usual. So right away with a darker tone of red, I'll add some of the shades on the side to give a feeling of three-dimensionality to the crown. Especially it would work well right under the golden stripes and never will amplify the red once more. While I was working on the crown, the face got dry so I can safely proceed with painting the hair e.g. and finishing the face. Uptake Van **** brown. And paint the curls. I can also paint a mustache. The beard. Opening the eyes. First with blue. And later on when blue will be dry out at like iris. However, I will add the eyebrows and I will proceed with painting the clothes. For now. I'm just coloring the whole suit with red, and I'll add darker tones later on. I run out of bright red, so I had to refuel it real quick. Now, I will mix a darker tone of Fred working shadows right up. I place a stroke diluted. Also fresh layer of red because it was too. Now anyway, how do the same shadow on the right hand? The paint is still fresh there, so the color flows more freely. Now with hemoglobin gold, I'll add some golden touch and work on shades on the yellow parts of my painting. Just to create textures. I'll add some decoration on the ground. Because it's so concentrated. It seems rather black. On the painting. The darker brown, I'll add the textures on the hair. Clarify the curls. No, fill out the empty space here. So it's not white. Looks more like. Just a shadow. Also add some shadows on the beard and mustache off course. Pink color, red in my case. I also paint little circles resembling the cheeks. Get very thick black pigment. Paint the iris to pain the teeth. More precisely to create a line that separates the two rows of teeth. Um, I would rather use a thin brush like a rigger brush to ensure that lines are thin. Indeed. So refresh the shadows. And the precious stones here with red color. And as I mentioned before, red is going to paint or yellow, no problem. The final Dutch would be to get some white gouache and add highlights. E.g. sparkles home the precious stones on the ground. Maybe some sparkles on the actual crown like so. You can also correct the shape of the eyes. If you need it. Maybe highlights on the curls. And then some sparkles on the suit. My Ruby's here are not dry yet, so I would need to wait for them to get dry before I also add some of the sparkles on them. I felt like the costume could benefit from additional details. With a very concentrated yellow. I will add some drawings on this suit. But the trick here is to have a very concentrated pigment. Otherwise it's not going to paint over red color. With the golden color. Kindergarten Gould. I'll outline or create a shadow under the precious stones to make it look three-dimensional. Like if they're standing out a bit. And I might add some details on the crown as well. One does time I'll get white and the sparkles. Finally, I'll add some sparkles here on the tools. Alright? And the painting of today is finished. I'll see you tomorrow. 21. Day 20: Letter to Santa: Welcome to the 20. We are painting a letter to sound. We are very close to the hand of this advent calendar, watercolor calendar. So I hope you have been enjoying it. I sure did. It was very fun creating all these postcards. And there's just a few more left to do. So. The composition for this painting will be a letter. Then a candy cane that is lying on top of the ladder. And there will be a couple of dried slices of tangerine, which we already know how to paint. There won't be a Christmas ornament over here. And maybe a bigger one over here. And a little pike cone, pine cone over here. We see it as a flat lay 90 degree. That's why it's just the circle because all of the details are going to be inside, painted with watercolor. And there's really no point for me to detail all of that. I think for the composition, It's alright, maybe I'll add a tiny, tiny, tiny Christmas ornament here as well to kind of balance out the painting. And maybe I'll make, I'll make the actual letter larger. Like so. And now I'll remove my lines, make the sketch lighter and start painting. For this painting, I will use wet on wet technique and I'll apply clean water everywhere on my postcard. After that, I would like to lay down some light layer of blue as a background, but I need to be careful for the blue color to not leak into the parts that I want to keep white or yellow, e.g. the toys there will be yellow, the orange slices obviously as well. And the letter will be brown. But it's better to keep it clear of the paint, the blue paint. So if you've got some of the paints leaking into the area you want, you can just remove it like so with the tissue and help yourself spread the paint. Like so. With the semi width brush. Now, I need to let the paper dry, but not completely. Just enough for the paper to be still a bit wet. But not soaking wet. Which means that now, when I will add a little bit of a darker blue color to mark the shades. The paint doesn't flow everywhere like insane, like it just did now. But it will stay on paper in a more controlled way. And this depends exactly on how much water there is in the layers of our paper. So now you can see that I'm adding the paint and it's not flowing as freely as it was in the beginning. And I'm washing my brush, rinse in it in carefully, softening the edges. So that there are not sharp mark just a little bit here. And diluted almost immediately to keep all of the lines smooth without any sharp edges. As you can see, all the cast shadow are on the left side. And this means that the light is coming from the right. So we need to be consistent with this, with where the shades are on for each of our subjects. And now we just need to let the paper dry. Now we can start laying down first underpainting for each subject. So first, I will maybe the first layer. On the pine cone. I use brown, burnt sienna. It's not perfectly rounded. Sometimes the circle, the parts of the pine cone are showing out outwards. So that's why the circle is not perfectly rounded. For the candy cane, I will lay, lay down light blue cerebellum and go all the way up. Like so. And under. Then I'll take a hemoglobin gold. Or you can use yellow or orange, whichever color you want to paint your Christmas Christmas ornament. And I will paint the first layer and leave nice bright highlight in the center. I think with burnt sienna, I'll just drop shadow right away. In right under the highlight as well. That's where the shadow is most visible. Then there will be another Christmas bow. And finally, the dry slices of tangerines. I'll outline the skin first and then paint little triangles. Remember to leave tiny white line in-between each triangle. And do the same for the second slice. Now let's think the candy cane got dry so I can actually paint the craft paper of our letter. We use raw sienna. This is my opportunity to create the shape of the candy cane. And maybe I'll take a bit of burnt sienna and just drop it here and there to make a feeling that the texture of the paper isn't even. So this is basically an envelope where the letter is going to be. Now we can go back and do the same thing in this struggle and work on the textures of each subject. So e.g. I'll get Van ****, make it slightly darker. I'll start with creating the shape of the pine cone. So it reminds me of petals. And I'm adding one petal, one-by-one. And basically go in circle. Every time I'm adding a new petal in the root of it, the color is darker. And as the pedal goes away, it becomes lighter. Now, I'll leave this to dry and work on the candy cane. And we already know how to paint it. Just follow the curve. Here we go. I also quickly get the darker tone of red too. I'll point out a bit of shadow on the side. With the darker tone again, I'll mark the shadows. I will also quickly Mark little thing that helps us do. The Christmas ornament. Suspend it. Hallmark the shades are here as well. And this one got out of control. I guess. I'll just have to make it larger. Like so. And again, with a sharp, dry stroke of burnt sienna, just like we did before. I'll mark the skin. And also a bit of shadow here with the dark tone. I'll also take a concentrated orange, the same I used before, in a grid on gold, and leave some spots chaotically to mark the textures on each section of our dry terrain. Now I want to go back to my code, to my pine cone and finish showing the textures inside. As I said earlier, we need to show the contrast between lightest and darkest areas of your subject. So basically the contrast between light and shadow. To make it look recognizable. And to paint a realistic pine cone is going to take quite a lot of time, I'll say a few hours because of all the details that you need to account for. That's why focusing on building shadows will help us create the illusion of a pine cone without actually going into details of building each as I call it the petal separately. So to make it look more realistic, we also need to show this cast shadow from the candy cane and make it a bit softer on the edges. I also want to take a second to show the frost on the Banco. This will give a bit more of a Christmas spirit to the painting. And at the same time help us define the texture and the shape of the pine cone. So it's a win-win. The painting of today is finished, and I can't wait to paint with you tomorrow. 22. Day 21: Christmas deer: Welcome to the 21. We're painting a Christmas, dear. Yes. I'm not planning to leave you without the Christmas dear postcard. This would be unacceptable. This is gonna be pretty funny one though. Because here our deer is going to look at us from the back. He turned around and saw us. So we will see his little cute tail. And on the back of our dear, there will be a Christmas ref, be some details and the bottom. But the point being that here's the queue tail, the RAF. And there will be the legs showing here. Right under. Our little deer is going to have a Christmas worth hanging on the back of his body. And the details of that wrath, I will decide and paint with watercolor directly. Of course, the antlers will be decorated with Christmas ornaments, Christmas balls hanging from them in the best Christmas traditions. And then I will need to lighten my sketch to prepare it for water coloring. I'll start with applying the first layer of paint, the underpainting. On my dear. There are some white areas around the eyes and also around the nose, which I intend to keep white. By simply outlining with watercolor using negative space technique or negative painting technique. And I'll slowly continue building the body of the deer. Going all the way close to my ref over here. Here I left a blank spot because this area is white and I'll just lightly mark the shades with blue Excel. I'm actually with the same blue cerulean. I will also mark the white area on top. I accidentally deleted my previous layer, but it's okay. I'll bring it back. And I'll mark the inside of the ears with blue as well. I'll take diluted black and just drop it inside to show the shape of the ear and the shades inside of it. Here's this hanging ornaments. So that's why I didn't finish the ear. I guess right up. I'll take burnt sienna, make it slightly darker with blue PM to work on the shades. On our dear. Pointed out the inside of the ear once were. And I think I'll paint the antlers immediately. Here inside. It's almost white, so I diluted, didn't finish the line with my brown color. And now I also included it. Then I take one **** which is a bit darker brown and the darker shade, especially on the front. Over here. Here I have my hanging Christmas ornament. That's why the space is not covered. It's also a bit lighter on the side, so I carefully dilute the pigment. Then with the darker brown showing the curve of each Sattler. Carefully diluting the white areas so it's a bit softer around the eyes. And now I will paint the Christmas breath. We already know how to do this. Just plays green first as the main base color. Gets darker tone of green. While the layer is still wet, I'll drop very concentrated yellow and let it bleed and flow. Do the same with red. Since I already have read, I'll paint some of the ornaments. For a finished painting, the inside, I need to wait for the main circle. The RAF do get dry. Well, we can paint something else. I can also carefully being the eyes with fewer black color, create little teardrops. Looks like a teardrop actually. Yeah, each eye. I'll mix blue with my black to paint the nose so that it doesn't look too flat. I can get darker tone of brown and mark a bit of lectures of the skin of the four of our dear, no monarch. Shades on our Christmas bubbles. Just a little bit on the side with a darker tone. And with the black pigment, I'll mark the strings on which they are hanging in while, while I did that, I think this part is ready to go and I can paint the rest of the body. I guess it's better if I painted the back before I actually painted the REF, but well, good thoughts are always coming late. Introducing a darker tone of brown. Detail has cute white outline. That's why I didn't cover it completely. I've finished. On the inside here we'll also see the legs, but they will be in a grayish, bluish tone. So I mixed a bit of blue, dark blue, to paint flags that are at the back. And I'm adding it right away even though I know they're going to blend and bleed with the current legs. But it's okay because I will later clarify the details over there. To save the time on drying while this part needs to get dry, I will work on this part to add white spots and highlights. So we will need a little bit of white around the nose, around the eye. Then under the nose there's this fluffy part. Also show it. Hopes that happens too when you're tired. So you can remove the pigment with the semicolon brush and the tissue. And here it's not a big deal, just dilute it. Highlights on the toys. Imitating differ. I also want to correct the shape of the firm here on the tail. Hey, now there's no other choice but to wait for this part to be fully dry so I can finish it. And now I only need to finish the legs. Make them stand out a bit, separate one from another. What the darkest brown I'm marking the shades on the leg. Also need to define the shade under the tail just a bit more so it's more clear. Finally finish. The rest, waste the darkest elements. So we can point out the textures. Maybe some pine tree the needles are sticking out on the side. Here are really allow my brush to go in different directions without much control. And most importantly, I want the shape, the outline of the rest do not look perfectly rounded. I want to see some nibbles of the pine tree sticking out. And finally, with the super concentrated yellow, I'm adding the lights on the left. And this is the postcard for today. I'll see you tomorrow. 23. Day 22: Christmas car: Welcome to Day 22, and we are painting a Christmas card. This iconic red car that associates with Christmas time, I guess. For everybody. As usual, I'm quickly outlining the main elements and location of the car. There will be, of course, Christmas breath in front. I guess I made it a bit too narrow. The front window is gonna be like this, much wider than the Mirrors taken out. You will see a wheel inside Christmas tree sticking out as well from the passenger seat and a bunch of Christmas gifts. I guess that was a pretty quick sketch and I don't really think I need to change anything. So I will remove the unnecessary lines with my kneadable eraser. I'll start painting. Of course, the iconic color of the car is red. That I need to lay down some of the basic layers to help us work out on the reflections and shiny parts of the car. So I'll put bits of very transparent blue lights as well. And on basically every part that's supposed to be white. Also the main frontal window. And this will be something that's going to shine through our next red layer and help us create more realistic view of the painting. While my basic first layer is drying, I will just paint the boxes so that we save some time on drying. Don't have to wait for everything to get dry. So I'll just make them all different colors. But the right between the three colors, green, red, and yellow. For this batch of gifts, I'm not going to create lines and look for vanishing points. This is useless. This would be more of illustration style postcard, where things don't have to be perfect. In measured, rather playful and funky. So if the colors bleed into each other. Now, this happening with my books. That's fine. Let them flow and next and play. So while those colors are mixing up perfectly with each other, maybe I'll just intensified the green. I think I can start working on the actual car. Here we reach the point where I first created my blue. So with the transparent red, I will go over it. I forgot there is my wrath here, but that's okay. We'll paint it over here. The color should be way more intense. Then here, the contrast between the very intense red and then a bit more lighter and lighter and diluted red over here will be something that will give us a feeling of glossiness of the car. I am carefully painting around the lights. My blue wasn't dry completely there and also I want to have the outline white here in front. The color is going to be a bit darker because of the rest, that's gonna drop shadow. But I will lay down this darker tone immediately, so we are ready. And here again, I am carefully painting around lights. We need a little bit darker tone here to connect our gifts with the roof. Darker red. Helping us with this. Then with diluted black color mixed with blue, I will show the kind of shining reflection here. And we know that the paint reflections on glossy objects, they can be pretty sharp and we don't necessarily need to always delete them. When the same color I will paint inside the lights showing the shades. Now, I need to wait for the paper to get fully dry before I continue. Now, I'll get a slightly darker tone of Fred and I'll go around over actually. My red car and marking the areas that are a little bit darker. That will help me to make the highlights then denied even more. Underlying light. Actually, this area in front can be employed more intense in terms of color. And this area here. Can he do to it? I'll paint the wheels. I'll mix brown with black. Something like doesn't look too flat when it will dry out. Then with darker tones, I'll add some shades on the gifts. Just to bring a bit of three-dimensionality to those boxes. Then I'll mark the Christmas tree that is sticking out from the passenger seat. Then I'll get black, neutral black. And carefully, I'll find this part. And also mark the wheel inside. Doesn't have to be that. It can be a different color as well, like brown, e.g. doesn't necessarily have to be black. Also, I will need to show some of the highlights on the lights again, what the sharp black color, just to show the glossiness of the surface. Completely forgot to paint the bottom of the car with the darker red. I will edit. Now. I shouldn't be much darker because we almost don't see it. It's covered with the shadow. Now, take a flat brush like this. And using lifting technique, remove some of the pigment, making the surface of the car shine even more in the middle as well. Now I need to wait for their painting to be fully dry so that I can paint the ref. And the final touches. Oh, finished working on the gifts. Just add a few balls and strikes. Finished the packaging. Just to make this painting look a bit more complete. And final touches, we'll be done with white gouache. And painting out today is complete. I'll see you tomorrow. 24. Day 23: Christmas tree: Welcome to the 20:00 A.M. today we're painting at Christmas tree. Did you really think I will leave you without a Christmas Tree postcard? Well, I kept it until the end. So the last two classes are the most Christmas Eve and most festive ones. As usual. As you already know, I just mark the area where my tree is going to be. I draw the main line, like a central line. And from it, I can imagine two equal parts of the tree, like two triangles. So I know how far it's going to go. And I don't really need to draw anything because everything is going to be done directly with watercolor. Without further ado. I will use our special guest again on the masking liquid. And I will mark the decor on our Christmas tree. I want to preserve it white so it's going to be nice and clean. And I'll just mark the area where the Christmas Christmas ornament is going to be. So basically, I'll just put bunch of bubbles on the tree. Also, maybe both, both will be red. And I want it to be pure red. So we need to preserve the space to make sure that our red color will be nice and clear. Some circles, the bubbles are going to be larger and some others smaller. So we have interesting variety of things. Right? I wash my brush. Remember that you want to use an old brush that you don't care about because at some point you're going to have to throw it away because masking liquid will damage your brush pretty badly. And now we just need to wait for our masking liquid to get dry and paint over. Alright, so the masking liquid is dry. We can start painting over it with green color. I'll take a emerald green, the usual color I use, and make it slightly darker, adding a little bit of actually black. But of course, the best is to use complimentary color to make it darker. And while I'm here and there, I add bits of cold blue theorem in my case and cover the whole tree. Now, just like we did with painting the Christmas wrath, I'm going to get much darker tone of green and work on the sheets. I will also allow my dark color to get outside of the frame, so to speak. The tree, to imitate all those. Needles that are sticking out from our tree. The more chaotic your moves are, the more realistic those sticking out needles are going to look like. So relax your wrist and just let your hand do the job. Also, I'll grab a bit of brown, burnt sienna. And I'll add the box on which the tree's installed. Of course, the colors are going to bleed a little bit. That's right. I also want to mix a darker tone of blue and drop a bit of a shade right under. I mixed my darker tone with the same brown, burnt sienna. So all the colors are harmonious and in the same color palette. So of course, all this part is blurry and mixed up, but it's okay. We're going to add the details a bit later. For now. I just wanted to mark the floor on which the trees standing and also give the time for the actual tree to get a bit drier. So I can add the darker shades once more. The color I'm using is a mix of green with a little bit of black. And now we need to give it a rest and wait for the whole postcard to be fully dry. Our paper is dry and the colors are nice and deep. And now it's time to remove the masking liquid. Now that the area is free of our masking liquid, I can feel it out. Ways to paint. With Constable be two colors, yellow and red. And selectively, our first, apply bright yellow here and there. The bows are also going to be red. As you can see how uncovering not all of the bubbles with red. Because maybe I will come back and fill out the remaining ones with the yellow because there's a lot of red. So to balance it out, I'll go back to yellow again. Now for the shades, I'll get a mix of orange with yellow. So you get something in-between. You and I'll add tiny bits of orange mix on the side. And then a darker tone of red on the bus to just point out the texture. And of course, on the ornaments. While it's getting dry, I will refresh the box. Then I'll make some darker green once more. To go over with the texture of the pine tree. And add tiny strokes here and there in a very chaotic fashion to make it look like the needles of the tree are just sticking out in different directions. Sometimes they are covering our ornaments. Just to make it look more realistic, the more we have the contrast between light and between the highlights and the shadow, the more realistically, our painting is going to look. Just make sure not to create too much of a dark area. Now, once more we wait for it to dry and then finish up with the highlights. With white gouache. I will mark highlights, not everywhere, but on some of the Christmas ornaments. Just to lighten them up. Just to make this texture of the wooden box little highlight on the ball. Alright. Should we add some sparkles on the tree itself? Alright. That's it. The postcard oxidase finished in tomorrow is the last day of watercolor and calendar. And I can't wait to see you there. 25. Day 24: Santa Claus: Welcome today 24, and this is the final day of our watercolor and vent the calendar. I can't believe we did all that. 24 postcards. That's that's a lot. But it has been really fun and challenging at times. And definitely very Christmases. I hope you enjoyed painting along with me. And I'm really happy for those of you who shared their creations. It was very exciting to see what you've done, or the paintings or the postcards that you've created, they all look amazing. And I hope those of you who were not posting, you will you have, please don't be shy. Share your postcards. And today, the last day of the calendar, we're painting Santa Claus. So I'm quickly outlining the face. I did like a little circle for the face. Put a hat over here. Here's going to be a beard. And the beard is going to go all the way down and kind of disappear into his cool thing. Here is going to be a little belt. And of course, Christmas gifts in a sac. So he's gonna hold big sack of gifts here on the left side. And we'll have some toys and all the possible things for kids. And and his father hand he'll be holding. Let's take what can stake. Okay. Why not? We already had an L who is holding a Christmas tree. So Santa Claus is going to just hold a walking stick. Alright. So approximately, I've outlined the details for the hour Santa Claus. So now I will make some of the elements a bit more clear, like the eyes, nose, big, fluffy beard is gonna go down here. A lot of this painting is going to be white. So we will use, we will use our blue to create shades. Big, boom, boom. Alright. Everything else will be painted with watercolor. I want to start working on our Santa Claus by first painting the background like a starry night. And we're going to use mostly loose style for this painting. I don't want to spend 3 h painting this postcard. So I'll get blue. I'll drop some of the darker blue tones like Indian trend mixed with fallow blue. So we have a bit more variety in the sky. Carefully, I go around our Santa Claus. Here's the Watkins tick and the arm. It got covered a little bit, but it's not a problem. I do want to make the edges soft though. The fluffy part of his suit. It's going to be white. So white and fluffy. So I want it to be softer and then dilute the edges with a semi wet brush. Now that we have the first layer on the sky, I'll drop a bit of ultramarine here and there. And I'll get water in my brush and just create coli flowers on purpose. I'll also take concentrated yellow and drop it on the background. Let it flow a and push the background colors. Same with red. And finally the same with white gouache. Now of course, we need to wait for our backgrounds to get fully dry so we can paint the center class. Alright, so now I will start with painting the face of our Santa Claus. I'll get raw sienna paint around the eyebrows because those are gonna be white and around the mustache as well. Then I'll grab some cadmium red and mark the cheeks. I lightly mixed the same red and brown together to put the mouth for the cheeks and want them to be rounded. So I am diluting my stroke and also correcting the shape of the cheeks. And with Burnt Sienna, I will add some shades in the area where we have the eyes to prepare this place for more details that will come later. Also a little bit on the nose. Again, this is not painting the eyes yet. This is just placing the first layer, the underpainting, the preparing the shades. That will help us create this feeling of three-dimensionality later on. Alright, so the phase needs to dry, and meanwhile, I'll get a bit of inventory and blue and mark the shades on the white areas of our cloth of Santa Claus. So here on the pump, the paint that into my white areas. So I am diluting the pigment and lifting it with the tissue and trying to revive this bubble. Bubble looking space. Click. So right now, I will continue and I'll put just a little bit on the mustache. Just a tiny bit. And on the beard, but beard first output water. And then I will add the shades to ensure that the color flows smoothly and we don't have sharp lines. And I don't need to correct anything. Make sure your beard doesn't turn completely blue. Remove the pigment if you need it. Alright, and I think I need to remove some of the pencil line because it's pretty dark and it's going to be visible. It's important to do it before you get the paint on water. Alright. Now, I will put some blue on the gloves. On the cloth again. He's got some fluff here that comes from the beard. That plays can also be somewhere between blue and brown. Yellow. Better not to use yellow because you're gonna get green. So better do some of the earthy colors like burnt sienna or raw sienna. Orange. Something that doesn't contain yellow in it, doesn't contain your hole in it. And of course here in the bottom of his coat, can also add some of the yellowish tone. So we can differentiate the cloth from e.g. a. Beard and the gloves. So those will be purely white. Maybe a tiny, tiny shade on the eyebrows. And I can paint the hat to cadmium red. It's very opaque, so it covers even the blue background that I created before. Now while it's still wet, I want to dilute the edge and make make it softer. So it looks like the white part of the head is really fluffy. Just like so. We'll get a bit of a darker tone of red and mark the shades on the material of our head. And also grab some darker stone, e.g. black mixed with brown or blue. But it should look like blacking the end. And I'll finish with the mouth and make our sample smile. I'll get a little bit of gray tone and put it under his lips. And kind of create a bit of a texture for the beard to point out some of the hairs. Then here on the side, there will be also some of his hair with a dark blue mark, the shades with diluted black. I'll just add again a little bit of feeling of the texture of the hair. Strokes. Now with darker tone of brown, which is brown mixed with blue. I will add the details on the face. So I'll mark the eyes, maybe some wrinkles. The painting is really small so you don't really have much of a space to deal that, but I want to show the nose. The shadow on the nose, at least nostrils, wrinkles because he's smiling. Shadow under the hat and under the eyebrows. A little. While I was doing that. Everything else got dry. I can paint this suit coat. I forgot to put the belt so quickly market with brown sienna, but I'll do the details later when it's gonna get dry. For now, I just want to mark that it's there. So I will immediately dilute the edges to make it look like the white part is fluffy. Here, the white part, I forgot about it. We need to put some blue shades right away. I can get darker tone to show the shades. E.g. here under the Belt and also between the arm here. Here I will mark the tail of the bag that he's holding, the gift bag. And to make it slightly different, I'll make it brown. So it doesn't blend with all the red colors that we have here. On the other hand, the other arm that is holding the gifts is here. I'll quickly dilute this line. The sooner you do it, the easier it's going to be too diluted, as opposed to waiting for it to get dry. And I'll get darker tone and add some of the shades above the belt, under the belt, and in the area where we see the hand, the arm bended with the gift bag. Also, I'll get darker tone of brown and market shadow here inside this leaf. And dilute. Might even add a bit of blue. Can then dilute this blue here as well. I'll get some darker blue. For the another, another arm. For another hand. With some blue. I'll add the Shades once more to just kinda revive them and intensify. Somewhere in some areas like e.g. here where it's in-between the sleeve, it's going to be darker. Like so in here, in the area where I forgot to put it, especially closer to the belt, can be a little darker. And now we just need to paint the bag of gifts. That's also going to be red. I'll get darker tone of Fred and edit immediately. Here at the back. Here in-between, where the bag is directly touching the body. Also to be able to separate e.g. the arm and smooth it out once more. All right. While all this is getting dry, I can paint the stick. I'll get dark brown. Also. I'll get very dry. Black and paint the eyes because he's smiling. Eyes won't be there will be barely open. More like just a line. And those trails, we don't really need to go into super detail to paint those gifts. It's more it's more symbolic just to make it look like there are gifts in there, but it doesn't have to be super detailed is the more of a fantasy of the viewer that is going to complete this bag of gifts and make it understandable for themselves. Also, if you do have the time, you can spend a minute and make those gifts look more detailed and realistic. And as I said, if you have the time, please do. Enjoy painting the details of the gifts in a bag or make the Sunda more, more clear and add the details that you see fit here. I will stop here. I feel like there's been a lot of time that I spent working on this postcard. And I would love to wish you happy holidays and Merry Christmas. Tomorrow there will be no postcards to paint. It's time to enjoy the day with your family. And I truly hope you enjoyed sharing those creative minutes every day with me. I'm looking forward to see your postcards and I wish you all the best in this upcoming New Year.