Watercolor Cardinal Step by Step | Paul Cheney Artist

1. Introduction: everyone fall here today, we're going to learn how to make this painting of a red cardinal. I've broken down this course into several small video workshops. We start by breaking down our painting into small little sections that are easy to follow, creating a road map that you can use to build this painting step by step. It's meant for both beginners, intermediate, even advanced people. Everyone can learn something along with the courses and they along with the videos. There are a lot of material for you. Download. There is the reference picture for you to down. This is a full color, high resolution image of this painting. Please do not distribute or copy it illegally. Use it on Lee as a reference picture for this painting. Along with that, there are two separate. I can see this two separate guy guides for you to follow, which sorry guys outlines for you here. They're like a dark outline if you like, and you don't want to go to all the trouble of drawing your painting or sketching it at first you can take this, hold it up to a window with your watercolor paper over top and trace away if you wanted to be a bit more challenging. The there is one here with a great system on it. And that's what I use when I'm trying to establish where all my lines and images go there. Step by step instructions on how to go about doing this. You can download all of these plus a materialist, other instructions and everything from the course materials. I hope you enjoy his workshop. I hope you learn a lot. And please, please poster paintings here when you're done so that I can see them. I'm happy to give you any feedback that you like. Thank you and enjoy painting. 2. Materials: Hi, everyone. Okay, we're going to look at painting this cardinal today, and first thing we're going to do is we're going to break down our painting, and then we will do it in little sections to show you how I put the painting together. Before I do that, I'll talk a little bit about the materials that will be using today. So here I have a palate with some red, yellow, blue neutral tint and a earth tone burnt sienna. So the red in this case I'm going to use a cadmium red. You could also use a cadmium red hue. You could also use pyre all red. This is a cadmium yellow medium. You could also use Hansa yellow, medium and the blue here that I have is in to go. You could also use a an ultra marine blue or a fellow blue and mixed that together with your neutral tint or Payne's gray. If you don't have those, a black will work. And I'm gonna use these two together to make my blacks, and I'll show you that later on. And then the burnt number here, I'm going to use on the tree branch. Okay. Um We're going to get very colors in the red with the red and yellow, and we'll change the value of those by mixing them together and then adding more or less water. I'm also going to show you in our first step. When we break down the painting, I use a water soluble graphite pencil. And should that not go smoothly, I have a need. A bull eraser. You need one of these. Need a bully racer? Get it? See what I did there. One of my favorite puns for brushes. Today I am going to use these high in Jordan. This is their Siri's 400 which is a mix of sable hair and riel, Ansari sable hair and synthetic hair. And this is a great brush because they're durable. They last a long time. They come to a fine point. You get a bit of best of both worlds. They're great for a beginner. Okay, we'll next. We'll move on to breaking down the painting and I'll explain what that means in the next video 3. Breaking Down the Painting: So what do I mean when I say break down the painting? What I mean is simplify it. Make it easy for yourself. Watercolor painting is a tricky medium, and there is absolutely no reason why you should make it any more difficult than you possibly have to. So what I do is I give myself a many advantages as possible before I get started. One. I start with a good clean drawing or outline or reference and a reference picture that I can see. I can zoom in on for myself. I usually paint them from my iPad when I can zoom in and see all the details New melt if I want to see the whole picture, What we're looking for when we're breaking down the picture is we're looking for the dark areas, the light areas, which are the difference in value, which is called So I like to give myself a road map as to where those are because when I'm painting quite often, especially here, for example, where the red will come into the black, I want those colors to sort of blend and make like a magical mixture together. And so to do that They both need to be wet for them. Both need to be wet. I need to do this pretty quick. This has to happen kind of right away. I can't let it dry, so I need some clear guidelines. Okay? I also want to not have to erase everything. That's why I'm using a water silo. Pencil pencils aren't 100% water soluble, but what they are is a will dissolve. They will also in areas where I know that I'm gonna have darker areas. They also help me achieve that deep, dark value that I want to get. So there's nothing wrong. And what I do is I will go in and I will come in and I won't draw these areas out as well as I can. This area in here that kind of outlining right now is the eye. And inside the I, there is a white kind of white ish light ish. It's not really white, but it's a lighter area. And I don't want to hate using masking fluid. It's just a mess. So I just want to make sure I know exactly where that is. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through and find areas like this and I'm gonna mark them down. Where are these dark areas? And we're going to do so when I would paint. I'm just grab my brush. Everything's what Everything's happening nice and quick, but I'm just following along with the little road map that I've made in this area. In here, there's a lighter area over top was kind of a no under area. Now, depending on the style of the painting that you want to achieve, you may or may not want more detail, less detail. You might want to be more loose, a more abstract. So this is really up to you. One thing to be wary of. If you put a line on the paper, you are gonna find it really difficult to paint outside that line. We've been trained all our lives to paint inside the line paint inside the lines. You went outside the lines well, with watercolor painting. You kind of sometimes want to go outside the lines. You wanted to be abstract. You want it to look flowing active motion. You want to see all these great wonderful things that watercolor painting is well known for achieving. And that's probably one of the biggest requests I get from people is how do I loosen up? How do I How do I, you know, not paint so tight or so rigid? Well, one way is less lines in some cases, no lines at all. I'll post a video sometime down the road of a painting without any drawing at all. And quite often those are some of my most popular paintings. That that people like and tend to buy right away are the ones that where I don't do any drawing. But for this case, before we get too far ahead, let's just focus on what am I doing here? So right now I'm actually going in with my water Sobel pencil. This one is a six B, so it's soft pencil, it's dark, and I'm just kind of market. Some areas here that I know are going to be dark, and I'll go through and do that on the whole painting. We don't need to go through all that right now because you can decide for yourself how much of an area you want to do and how much you don't. A nice thing about the water soluble pencil is it's going to mix with the paint and those two things together. So where I want that sort of muddier, darker value value or deeper value which we'll talk about when we do these areas, this will really adds to that. It helps it. If I was doing a very light color, pale colored area, I wouldn't want to have all this pencil in there because it will muddy up those light, bright values if that's what I was trying to achieve. But in this case here, I'm I know where these dark areas are and you could see like my alliance. There's no over. I'm a reason to them. I'm just kind of like dark, not dark, dark, dark. That's all I'm trying to see here. OK, I got this little bit of it division here where there's some brighter areas on the top, OK, and I'm again. Just don't worry so much about making the perfect line. You're just trying to establish zones. This is going to be in here, and this is going to be a very lighter value, like really vibrant red color up in here and in here and here it is going to be right around here. There is almost like an orangey color is almost an orangey color in here. Over here, I've got some darker colors, and sometimes there's gonna be a divisible line where I don't necessarily want my colors to bleed together. This area in here I find when painting cardinals I like when the black blends in and mixes around with the red. I really like that. And so in in this case here, I know where those are. So if I want to, I can keep them wet. And I can make those paints blend together if I don't keep them wet. Well, that I end up with dry water marks on top of each other. Nothing wrong with that. But that might not be what I'm going for. Okay, so here we just define my quick sketch that I did a little better. That's what I can see what's going on when I'm doing my my painting, OK, now the feet, they look intimidating, but they're not. We're gonna do those last and, uh, don't worry. You get it when I show you just down here a little. There's a few areas here where there's some light definition in the feather. I'm not gonna worry so much about those now. We're gonna use a technique called lifting to achieve that, and I'll show you that after, But for right now, I've got a pretty good guidelines as to what I want to paint where I want to paint it and whatnot. Then you can see I didn't spend a whole lot of time on this, and I'm not crazy worried about where my pencil marks are where they are. I just went to town and did it. Okay, great. 4. Painting The Eye: Okay, so first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna just get warmed up in our painting. And we're gonna do that by starting with a safe area. What is a safe area? Well, a safe area is just a defined area where you could put color on. It doesn't really matter how you put it on as long as it goes on and it's OK. And the area that we're going to focus on is this area Here in the eyeball birds eyes have usually two colors to them or to use to them. There's going to be like a light brown color inside here and underneath where I've already gone over. I'm leaving that white area in there. OK, but underneath there is a dark area right now, just kind of putting this brown. I'm using my burnt umber here. You can also use burnt sienna, but generally burnt number or wrong number there, right out of the right, out of the box there they're coming to work with. So I'm gonna put that on there. I didn't put a lot of paint. Now I know you can't see my palate because I'm zoomed in here, but I want to be able to see what I'm painting. But right now, grabbing some of my neutral tint. Okay? And I'm gonna grab a little bit of my blue, and I make sums together because I want a nice, deep, dark value here. Okay, so now I'm just marking out this ibo on there where the pupil is okay. And if I put it in together where there's still a little bit of a little bit wet on top of each other, they will blend in okay around this area here, in the very tip of my brush. I'm just going to drop out mine. I was calling black for the sake of he's here. Your dark color. You don't have to use the colors that I'm recommending. You use like goodbye at the value of the color. The value of the color is essentially in the simplest terms, and I'm not. This is not the correct definition of it. So don't come back and say that's not what value means value. The color is how dark that cholera is. What's the density of it? Okay, you can learn about value in some of my other videos. But for now, So, for example, you could use, like a deep, dark purple. You could use a dark blue. You could use whatever dark color you want. Um, so now essentially, we've got our eyeball painted. Okay, so we basically went in with burnt umber. We painted a round circle, leaving that little white area here we painted in brown Circle with the burnt umber, and then we went in with our darker color. In this case, I used, um, blue and neutral tint and just to make it sort of a denser color by Massino's together. Sometimes you can paint like a blue underneath, and then you're black or neutral tent or Payne's gray, whichever overtop in magazines and printing that's called a super black. So you'll find that in the magazine will print. The first layer will be 100% sign an and then over top of that, you'd have 100% black. The reason being is black is a very pale color. It's not really a color. As you know, it is more of a grey washy color watercolor. It comes a very pale, and if you put on too much, it's very granular. You can use that to your advantage, But again, I'm getting ahead of myself there. But, um, just so you know, it's OK. Something to put if you want a deep, dark color. And I'm going to show you that right now. So what I'm gonna do is I want this black here to be super dark black. I wanted to be really rich, so I'm gonna mix together in the next video. I'm gonna paint this area in hair. No, what I'm going to do in the next video, we'll be a little bit more advanced. I guess. So we're gonna do to areas in the next video. We're gonna do this area in here with the black is and then we're gonna do the top of the head here. We're gonna do it. Sort of an under layer first of the blue on here. Then we're going to do the black or neutral taint or whichever color you choose to use and the red at the same time so that they're still wet. So first, I'm just gonna paint this undertone here blue just to develop. I want some density. I want that dark value. So first I was gonna put an under painting on 5. Painting The Head: So now that's problem. We're going to paint this dark area under here with an under painting. I'm just going to use now. I'm zoomed out a bit so that you've been seeing my palate over here. I've got my Prussian blue. You can use ultra marine blue. You could use a little blue. It's there's not a lot of times people will tell you Get this particular color, this particular pigment you can essentially, there are There's blue, there's red and there's yellow Those are your main colors. And when people tell you get this one or get that one you know it doesn't really matter which one you're gonna develop ones like you're gonna develop preferences and such like that that you're gonna like better than others. And also, if you have reason, I'm telling you this More importantly is if you have Fei lo blue and and you're saying, Well, Paul's using Prussian blue Now you go and spend another $20 on a tube of pain just to paint this one painting. When I first started painting, I had some watercolor paints that a friend of mine put into a pallet. I didn't even know what they were called. It took me years to figure out what I called. My favorite Blue was actually Prussian blue. And if you look at my logo, my owl painting, which was painted with that, paints those pigments. It's the reason why the Owls blues, because I didn't have any other colors. I didn't have any darker color. So I was just using painting by value and in turn, that's fun of how I developed my painting style. So I'm kind of grateful for that that lesson And I think that's important to pass on that this isn't about what materials you used. Value is far more important than color, and that means the lights and the darks establishing that, giving it that riel look of three dimensionality. So why is that the case? So let's just say, for example, that I painted this part of the cardinal darker than I painted this part of the cardinal would I wouldn't look like a cardinal. What's wrong that cardinals faces backwards? But if I paint this see blue and I paint this yellow, it's still going to look like a cardinal is gonna have the black mass with the dark mask around the face, and he's going to have the lighter area for the feathers, right? And we would probably still recognize it as a cardinal, we might think. OK, there's something off about that, cardinal, but you would know that it's a cardinal, you know, that no one has ever once asked me why my amel is blue. I've had five year old kids walked by, Look at it and go who? Oh, they don't know or care that it's, uh it's not the right color anyway, saying you should paint everything the wrong color. All I'm saying is that don't worry about it right now at this stage of the game, use what you have, so you gotta blue. You ought to read. You got a yellow. You can paint pretty much anything. As a matter of fact, if you take your burnt number here and you mix it with a ultra marine blue or fail Oh, blue and add in a tiny little bit of your red, you'll get the neutral tent that I'm using here. In fact, that's what my neutral tint is. My neutral tent is burnt sienna, not print number, but you could use birth number. It is ultra marine blue because it's the cheapest of the blues for me to make. And it is a magenta, not red, but cooler, a bit cooler than this right here. So but I could easily use that to, and it would just change the change of Hue slightly. But I could add in a bit more this with that, and that's essentially what that pig paint is right there. So it's already just a premix. The reason why I have a premixed is because I use it a lot, So that's why I make it. That's what is there for. And it's also great to add in for dark areas, and we'll get into that later on. So now let this dry a little bit, okay? And now we're gonna go over top of it with our neutral tint. And we're going to do, say, this part here of our cardinal first, and when it will do this in here as well, I want to do them at the same time because I want those colors toe bleed together, okay? And you'll see what I mean in a second. So I'm gonna use two brushes for this one. And the reason Because I don't want to clean them in between. I'm gonna go relatively quick. You could clean my guests if you want to. It's only the edges that I really need to worry about on the dark. I don't need to worry about painting it in perfectly round here. It's just where I want these two areas to bleed together. Okay, so that's why I'm using two brushes right now. Okay, So on my first brush, I'm just gonna grab some my cadmium red here and right out of the box. It looks pretty close, but I know from experience a bit of a crueler color. So I'm just gonna grab some of the yellow and you can see on just these paints are how easy they re wet these air. My handmade paints and, uh, you didn't grab him. And the way they go, I will generally use a larger brush when I'm painting Is I like big brushes for this, though again because I don't want people to feel they go to go out and buy a really expensive brushes to complete this painting. I'm just gonna premix a little bit. Is blue over here because there's a darker area but the top. So again, normally I use a larger brush on many of you that have seen me painting before. Will say, Oh, that's a pretty small brush for such a big painting. The reason I'm using this brush is one. It's not expensive. It's a good quality brush, and it's within the price range of anybody that wants to do this. I will. So first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to just get some paint on there, okay? And I can see right away. It's a bit, you know, I have to paint on there, and that's a bit orangey. So I'm gonna get a bit more red and, you know, again, there's no don't worry so much about how this goes on. Just get it on and, you know, the less you tend to stress about your painting, you'll find the better, it turns out. So I just grabbed a bit of water there because I want to lightness up gradually as I come down. This area here is a bit later, so lightness up as I come down, okay, so just feeling that I was trying to get a nice even wash using artists. Great paint is the key to getting a nice even wash using cheap paints. That's where you find they get all streaky and stuff and see how these here will just come down here together. Another thing I'd like to point out is I'm using hot pressed paper. Hot pressed paper allows your pigments or paint. Sorry. I often say pigments because that's what they are. They allows it to sit. It takes longer for it to dry on your paper based with those areas their nominee grams of my neutral tint with number. I wanted these to bleed together. Okay, so I just want where you want them to touch before it dries. I'm just going to get that in there. See how nice and dark that is going over top there. So in this area, here is a fair bit of water on this, and I'm going to get a little bit less of my new dropped 10 is in here. There s a darker is. It's kind of a grayish loosely Washington color there. Okay, you go back. It's more red. It's a war going back and forth here just to get this, um, color under here. This putting this color underneath is essentially giving that shadow. That's there. Okay, you can go back and forth. You had a decent paper, decent paints. You can go back and forth a fair bit. Okay, Don't worry so much about, uh, you know, you don't want overwork it because you'll ruin the sizing. You want to be scrubbing there for hours. Nearly less is always best. But don't Don't worry so much about, um, that at this stage at this stage, learn more about the technique. So I get Don't worry, if you're painting doesn't work out fantastic. You know, it's more about technique. So what I just do there? I took some clean water and I took another, took my brush, and I pushed that clean water in as opposed to. So that's one way of getting, like, this lighter area in here. Okay, I'm essentially lifting, but I'm creating some nice shapes and patterns as I go along. And I could go back in here and grab some more. That neutral tent, really any get in and finishes off by covering up this dark area there to see how those colored by not using one color of loan going back and forth the two colors, you can see how nicely they blend in together in there. Makes it a much more interesting painting. Then if you're just put on red, put on black, put on yellow, the water and the paint. They do wonders by themselves without our help. I'm gonna leave this area down here for now because we're gonna do that next and again. I want them to blend in together to this really nice division on there. And I could make that more clear later on if I want to make it more decisive. Like where the two colors meat get in a little tighter, make that white area a little bit less overpowering. I might even grab a bit more yellow in here. Just, uh I didn't so interest. Okay, So essentially, these air still dry, are so they're still wet, not dry, because what we want over here on the back, I'm gonna do some lifting to get that area on here to see how those paints started to dry. So what I'm doing because paints, it's that pigments are never dissolved in the water. There always there always there so that you're moving around a little wet puddles of sand. And that's what makes these lines and shapes. And here where the watermark drives back, it leaves the particles of pigment particles and leaves those there Okay, so that's going back and forth. It's blue. Sorry, neutral tint. Very difficult. I'm getting better at it. But it's a hard thing to do this and talk. It's easier in person. But that said, I'm getting better. I'm kind of enjoying this video process. So you've got our colonel head here. Leave that like it is for now. Well, let that dry. Then we're gonna jump down, and we're gonna do the body down to about here will fill in this little area here something we're gonna repeat similar to what we did. I left the blue there, as you can see, because that will be covered later. And I may if it's still very blue, I may go back over with some neutral tent once it's dry, but I suspect once his dries, that will be pretty close to the color that we want. Oops. I think I didn't do their prints off this smaller brush I didn't add in a little bit of red That's gonna come down over here. Head is floating a bit funny, so we'll do that and then 6. Painting the Body: So are painting is dry here. Now we're going to move on to the body area here. As you can see, we've got a lighter area up here in the top and we've got a darker area down here That is from the light coming down and essentially causing the shadow down here. Probably the exact same color from here to here. But what we're seeing is the chest sticking out more so that's a lighter value than the darker value down here s O, we will move on to does that area there. Right now, we're going to add in a little bit of the neutral tent over here and over here, we're gonna leave. The feet were gonna come across here at the branch and we can paint this in at any time, this dark area here because it will be completely separate. So we're gonna try and make a little bit of gray up in here on a few other things that were going to do later on is we're gonna add in some more red up here just to give another layer to give some dimension to that. So it looks like there's a bit of depth in there, and I'm going to show you a few little trick with regards to giving The impression of depth over here is Well, okay, so for now, we're going to grab some red and yellow, and I'm seeing red and yellow again because, you know, I used to say, Use this color, use that color. And as I mentioned before, use what you have. So got some red here and get I should point out that use what you have, but try for what it's worth to use artists. Great paint. I cannot stress that enough. You'll see. I got a lot of water here, and that's because I want I'm covering a larger area, smaller brush, and I want to make sure that these areas stay wet on a so again, use. Ideally, you would do this with a larger brush that just allows you to do this much easier, right? It's bigger areas. A bigger brush makes sense, right? You see here they're already starting to dry. So trying todo as quick as I can, adding in some water here. Now there's a bit of it. It's a bit of a warmer, warmer up top here so I'm adding in some yellow. And again I'm discovering the area. No worrying too much about detailed stuff like that right now. Essentially. Just painted a big ready yellow blob. Okay, so darker is down here. I did some more Red has an undertone such and you could see how quickly moving. Just putting the paint on my brush. So what did I do there? I had less water. More pigment. Okay, I gave me that writing in some of the neutral tent here. You see how quickly I'm working? Well, something you might want to try. And a very valuable lesson that I learned Probably the most viable less. And I should say that I learned is maybe it's not best to try to make a painting, right? So if you were to say, just this area in here, this basically blob of paint don't worry that it doesn't Whether or not it looks like a cardinal. Just take a scrap piece of paper and just try to make this beloved paint. But try to blend the colors together, right? If you have all of a sudden, if you don't have to worry about how how it looks today. Does this look like a cardinal? Not locally, cardinal. You take the stress out of it, and you just practice that because if you could make that shape, you can essentially do the whole painting. Right? That's all we really did was miss this area in here. So let's put some pigment up in here. So you have too much water in there, so it's a bit light. I can either lift out of which I will do or could have let it dry. Which probably would have been a better thing to do in this case. Will just put some paint on in there. We'll get that up in there, Okay? No, what we've got going on here, we've got our They put some Payne's gray in over talk. You could see that sort of money to down a bit. I'm gonna brush here. There. Better to get those out sooner rather than later. Also got some pencil marks in here. I didn't rub on the paper hard enough to get those out, so I will just come back in there. I'm actually gonna lighten this up. I wanna I really want to highlight this as the the center of this painting. So throw some water in there and look what's happening when I put the water in there. Remember, I talked before about how the pigments work. How they how it's actually you're not. They suspended, they're not. They're not resolved there always there. So I put some clean water that pushes all the little brains and particles out OK, But it also gives us that illusion of depth, right? These brothers air over top of these feathers. This is quite a dramatic example of it, but it's a good it's a good listen to her. So leave that for now. Okay, again, how I achieved that will do it over here again, where there's a little bit of a highlight in this picture about some clean water on my brush. I'm just pushing in there. No, spread that out down there, coming in over here and do that. Look at that interesting shapes of a darker area down here in the bottom, and I might even just make this a little bit darker. I can Well, it's still wet. My that's another thing that's good to practices. When do you do things? Is it wet enough to carry that on, jumping around a bit here while I talk. Is it wet enough to for those paints to spread out and to blend properly? Or should I wait, Let it dry and then just put another layer. Those are things that you learn gets. If we just did just this shape in here without worrying about making of Cardinal Bird for or anything for that matter. And just practice with your pains like take some scrap pieces of paper, sit down with a glass of wine. That's what I prefer in practice. I can't remember who it was. I wish I could. That told me, Why are you bothering to make a painting every time? Just learn how to paint? Just learn how the paint works? And that was probably the most valuable lesson that I have ever learned. And uh, wow, what a difference that ever make to me that I just focused on, You know, I was focusing on making paintings like by making this painting perfect as a whole, and by the time I was done, I had spent a day sometimes trying to make a perfect painting, and I was so wrapped up in making the perfect painting that I really wasn't paying attention to what I was doing. And I wasn't really learning anything. Um, I'm just over here. I'm just makes him my neutral tentacle that read. So not making a painting just by making, like, just put some paint on the paper and see what happens. Those were great lessons. I just notice I didn't actually paint over here enough. I left for guys. His leg is gonna be floating if I don't feel that in. So I guess what I did there because that I didn't want to have a long in there. So you like It's wet this area in here so that they these two problems would blend in together. Okay, so All right. Next we will do the beak. 7. Painting the Beak: Okay, We're gonna move on to the beak. Now. I'm gonna zoom this and just a little bit here. Sorry for the camera shake. That way you can see better what I am doing. Eso When we look at our at the beak, we can look at There's a lot going on in here, but it doesn't have Don't don't get intimidated by it. So essentially, we've got, like, a yellowish orange color overall. Got a darker shadow under here. And some of these things are common sense. There's a darker shadow under here, the lights coming this way. So there's going to be it's going to be darker down here. There's a little bit of a highlight area in here. There is a definite line in here where the where the beak is, and there's a little bit of dark. Hurry up there. So I don't generally worry too much about all those things. As long as the main things that I want to worry about our where the where the values are again, I keep coming back to value, and that's the most important. I believe that highlight area there is it is important. I think the dark area down here is important. And I think the highlight area here is important. So what I'll do is I'm gonna paint around those highlights just for now just to make it more clear. A stow what I'm talking about. Okay, so God, like your area appear. Come down here. Start there. Okay. See there where I'm talking about the highlight areas and some of the areas that because almost more orange than it is red. Well, it is orange. Essentially, um, and so I will those in there and I'm just gonna use thes blend in my colors a bit here while it's still wet. Where the red is there? Put the red on. Do this with this person. Probably switched this morning. Rush for this, but that's okay. Not too worried about how this will turn up. I don't want necessarily that that's not the right value in there. Okay, so it's not that way, but I don't want it to be so I'm gonna clean off my brush, takes a clean water. It's gonna press that in there like that. Okay, that's helping all that blended together nicely. Okay, again, we do that case. It wasn't over the clean. I should probably change the color I want. My water is getting a bit used and abused and some shadow. And okay, I don't want hard lines in there, so I'm just gonna blended in with some clean water. I bring this up. I noticed this is up here before now. This area in here again probably use a smaller brush down. Just get that right. Washed away too much. Okay, that sometimes when you're trying to add in a shadow and then blood in it, you use too much water, you push all the paint away. That's what happened there. Okay, ground on this. So I'm just putting in the colors as I see them. I see rats yellow. I see that shadow where there is to be a little bit less to find. I think what I'll do. That painting with the entire thing, right? Let it just bleed through. Yeah, that's working. You just have to make these things up that you go off, okay? No, too much. That is definitely too dark. So what I did there is I quickly grab some order and I lifted out of okay and I will see this week Me, you can look at you say it's not exactly the same. None of the whole painting is, and I don't want it to be. I wanted to be a watercolor painting. And again, this is my style of painting. You will develop your own style. As long as you practice and you keep doing it, you will develop a style, even if you try to copy mine. Exactly. You're more than welcome to do. You end up developing your own style. I have people that I followed, that his work I adore and I loved. And I said, I want to paint just like them And that was kind of my painting journey. That's how I learned how to paint by doing that. And I ended up developing my own style along the way. And I have taught people in person quite a bit. I see that happen with them. They develop their own particular style as well. So I'm just dabbling in some colors here, and I'd say we're probably pretty close to get that in that direction. Without that, because going okay, I gotta leave that like that For now, 8. Painting the Tail Feathers: All right, we're going to move down on to the tail feathers now of the bird so clearly darker than it is up here. I'm saying that this value in here, actually this value over here is probably about the same. Essentially what I've got And this is mainly neutral tent mixed in with some red down here . So grab some neutral tent is gonna mix up a bunch of it way we'll try with that. Probably a bit more. And let's just put it on. Don't. It's not spreading well enough like like it's not flowing. If you feel like you're driving the paint and you're getting more of a streaky kind of effect than a go at some more water, you can always keep it wet. We can always add more pigment in. Now, if we look up here, it's important to remember this part. Appear part of the tail because it's above the branch. Okay, so I got some more right in there on. It's not dark enough, So there we go. We're getting there more healthy. Dollop the old neutral tent. That's a very valuable, uh, color. Great for shadows. You can add it over top of things. I use it a lot in pen in ink drawings. Oh, very, very viable. Okay, so we've got some lighter areas in here, so I just craps in yellow, and I'm just going to push that down in there. Probably. No, that's too yellow zone. Read to that. And seven, a clean off my brush. Now I'm coming in here, and I am some clean lines down there. Just wondering. Give the A representation of that. They're there. They don't have to be perfect here. I will, uh, your brain does a lot to fill in the gaps. Watercolor painting is a great example that it's probably easier to get those lines in more when the paint is dry. I'm just going back and forth over here wondering what do I am? Just trying to get a bit more red in there. I'm not crazy about how different daddies up there. I want them to be want to look like it's part of the same bird. I don't want it to look like Okay. You know, sometimes things like that watercolor painting can get lost in translation. Okay, Lets start to dry a little bit now. Come back school over those areas again. What I'm doing is I'm cleaning off my brush and I even like a mom. I mocked the water and the paint on, and now I'm coming back and I'm dryer mop to lift it off. Oops. I will start my brush. All right. We made what? Paint this Hillary over here by the lake in a shot from this. I just got straight up new drug tent. Those of you that are interested I do make and sell my paint. You can reach out to me if you would like some. It's on my Etsy store, usually usually on my website during times of the year. I don't have it available. I'm just too busy and there's a lot off. It's very time consuming thing. Teoh, make paint that value over here. Just using the paint on my brush is I wanna make sure because they're the same in the reference picture. I don't want them to be different in there. Talk a bit more about that at the end of the video when we go over everything. But for now, thanks for getting pretty close. Honor. Bird here. Our cardinal. Okay, so that's it for the tail 9. Painting the Feet: We're going to move on to the feet before we do. I just want to point out when our paint drying here on the tail weaken. See? Look at how much lighter this is compared to these other areas. Appear which are similar in value. Mean it is lighter. It's not that dark, but it's definitely darker than this. So what's one thing we're gonna have to go over again after, But at the end of the video, the last stuff that we're gonna do is we're gonna go through and assess it and see where we can make corrections and changes if need be. Okay. Right now, we're gonna do the feet and the feet simply a two step process. I like to keep them simple because you can over complicate them and get really caught up in them. And they don't do anything to, uh, the overall image of the painting. I think anyways, especially with birds. So what? What are we gonna use for the color here? So what? This is here. I've been reading into the neutral tint and a bit of the blue. Okay, so I'm a century is kind of making like a I almost agree with a red issue to it. Okay, that's essentially what's going on in those feet there. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my paint. Nice, even wash. No stress. Just easy peasy. Just like filling in the blanks. Dark in that up a little bit. This is step one. There might be us to say step 2.5. A swell looking on it. Okay, so I've got some there now under here where the shadow is is a bit darker. So I picked up a little bit more pigment there and especially right at the base There. That is what the feet are essentially is. It's sort of like a to value life and a dark. So in between there, you've got some shadow, okay? And you've got some lighter areas and you've got some dark areas. It's going darker, always, but it's all of the birds upside down. Chances are it's gonna be darker underneath in the morning, and then it is on the top. Now we're really darker areas. When he grabs that neutral tint and a lot of water in there, it's why it so dark. That's a bit too much in their black. So I decided some water, and I just wanna pulling out there. Okay. Really? All I've done is I've made the wash now UK the, uh if I were doing a close up of the feed and they were, you know that you want them to look Riel, but you don't want to spend. I mean, I don't want to spend all the painting. In fact, when I first started painting, I always left the feet up because I thought they were How do you paint those feet? Like it's so crazy. There's so much detail. And, uh, I actually learned town. Well, that's probably the easiest part of painting. Okay, so again that up here, there's a bit of a highlight area appears trying to lift a little bit that out there. Okay, find these few little bit more here. You want that three dimensionality? You wanted to be flat just on the claws. I'm just using a bit. It's water. Okay. All right. Shot under here again. Neutral tent. Great for shadows. 10. Painting the Branch: Okay, We're going to do the branch now. The branch like the feet. A similar two step process. You some burnt umber in here? Just go down, sort of in the middle area. Okay, if you look closely at the branches, that would and things like that, actually a lot of different colors in there, So But for the most part, we sail branches or brown such and such. So I put some paint along the the middle there. Then I cleaned off my brush, and I'm just putting some clean water on top to make. So let's do a couple things. It's so I don't want to talk to be pure white, but it also grabbing, making some of that pigment from down here flow up to the top. Okay, so the clean water in the top, we've got a washing the middle and might make that wash just a little bit darker along the bottom Here. Okay, you can see already it's starting to get a three dimensional shape again. We're gonna go back to old faithful neutral tent for Payne's gray, whichever you like, and fill in the bottom here. This is our shadow. Look at that. shot on all of a sudden way more. No easy that Waas. So again, this is something that you can practice without making. Worry about making a painting. Just try this exercise, right? If you can get these colors to work together like this, that's half the battle. What arm? Some more burnt number. Just put it in there. That's gonna grab a bit of yellow. Maybe even some blue. Just a break up the branch to give it more there. If you look at the in real life, there's a lot more going on in there. There. There's a lot of different colors and things in there. Okay, again, It's all about values along as we've got the right mountain value is correct and our painting looks correct. I'm just using some more burnt number. I don't want to dry too late. I really want to stress how dark that is. Underneath there. I just nicked the feet. There seems gonna wash that off a little bit. Okay. And yes, More dark, more dark. Okay, a little bit more Intra attended. I'm just going back and forth between neutral tent and then burned number to get that value . So now, one of the things you can see right away is that this value being as dark as it is is darker than how come This isn't darker down here. This should be darker. We've talked about that the last time. So the next video, we're going to go over some of these areas we're gonna look at. What can we change to improve on? What can we do? What can we add to it? 11. Finishing Touches: Let's take a look at some things here that we could improve on, maybe do different next time fixed this time, such and such. There are two things that they're mainly concerned about. The rest I'm pretty happy with the painting overall, Um, one thing that staring me directly in the face, the white around the eyes, the white isn't actually white. And again, I know I keep saying it, but we're talking about the value. That's what's wrong here. So again, the value we look down here, this value here is to light. This value here is too bright. See? Arrived. Uh, also another thing up here is I think I should have some more red up in here. I think this is too pale in here and quite the opposite down here. And this is too dark Now. There's a lot of pigment in here, and I'm not sure that I can actually lift this out. And I don't mind how it looks. I might try. We'll see how it goes. The first thing I'm going to address, though, is I'm going to I want to lighten that white area out there. So how do I do that? Well, I can I can actually just wet my brush because watercolor paints will really wet some extent. I could just pull some around on here. But what? I don't want them to be to money. I think it should be, like, more of a neutrally color. So I just grabbed a tiny bit of water down burnt Sienna there. And I'm just going to put a light wash overtop. I just don't, like, not down a little bit. I'm gonna leave a little bit of white over the top, okay, on. And hopefully that's not too much. Might be able to come back in and just move some of that out with my smaller brush. There we go. So I could still see it, but it's not dominating. It's not jumping out at me like out of that white area. Okay? Same thing for down below. Here it's too. It's too light. So I'm gonna have some neutral tint, some red and essentially what? What happened there? So why is that to light? Well, when we were using were spreading it out and we were trying to get those lines, and we basically just had It's just too much water, right? So if we had kept it darker and I had said, You know this, I wanted to look like the same bird up in there. And I think the key to doing that it's more about defining these areas up in here, right? As opposed to changing what's going on down here. What I mean by that is is this area in here in the shadow where we have been here, right? It's to continue on down in here. Okay? It's almost become one. See how I don't have a lot of water and the paints kind of streaking their bit. That's okay, bones it. As long as the valley again values what's key here in value? How dark it is. Okay, so it's a red. I might lose those lines in there, but I think that's a far better. Far better to get the value right. Then it is Teoh kind of encroaching on my branch here. Try and by can wash not out. You know, just little things that I like to go back and look at and say OK, what is this? What is this painting missing? And you'll notice when you do that, then it tenants to also you're painting will start to come together quite a bit. Try and put some yellow A little bit of yellowy yellowy. That's a technical term in here. Right in this up, if I can, you know, lifting. Pushing. Okay. So pushing. Why? Like pushing, pushing? Because I want the pigments to sit over top. I want this to thes these feathers in this area here. Come over top of the wing in the back. So I'm pushing a pigment away so they come over top. Okay, I can always of its way. Like up in here, for example, there should be a little bit more Push this down a little bit. The other area in here that I was concerned with was this area in here. Just grab some water. I said I wasn't sure if I was gonna try and fix it. Well, I didn't think about it long enough, I guess. And I am going to grab some clean water in there, and I just wanted to break not up a little bit and again, I'm pushing this over because that does overtop of the black. Okay, It is also a lighter area here around the eye. Push that down. So that's clean water. Remember, if I push it down, dry off the brush and I don't think like a mop, that's the one thing that another great lesson that people can learn to understand. Watercolor is trying to think of it like you're painting like oil painting or acrylic painting. It's it's more about, you know, putting the paint on, putting paint on lop off off kind of the karate kid thing, but painting a little bit of grayish color in here. So I want to add some more of that in there came so down here, it's a starting to dry, and I can see that it's a little bit too white. I'm happy with how it came out over the wing, but I wanted to be, um, great video washing night in there while still wet and, you know, just a bit of, uh, red. I'm seeing another layer up in here. One of the other things we talked about Kevin in red is a cool red. So that that in mind and putting it on, I just just not going right to the edge is I want some. I want some layers in there. I want it. I want some depth to it. And I think I am pretty happy with this card. Yes, I will say I might one second here, just up the top again. Just those whites. I just want to be really careful. They're not too overpowering. One of the things we tend to do is we get so worried about filling those areas in that we end up making them too big and too overpowering them. When we come back. You thinking, What? What what's what's wise, My eye going there all the time. Generally, it's It's the value that's not there on Yes, Okay, I say we're done. We'll let that dry.