WATERCOLOR ESSENTIALS: All The TECHNIQUES, SKILLS, & INFO I wish I'd known when I started painting!

1. Welcome & Class Intro: My name is Mona and I am so happy to be here with you today. I'm a self-taught watercolor artist, and I've loved everything to do with the arts. But my true passion is painting. Acrylic painting has always been my favorite medium. Oil paint and watercolor. They've always terrified me because I didn't know how to control them. And all I could do this, think back to elementary school when I'd put my paints and mix them up and be excited and put them on the paper and they'd turn into mud. So I've always painted with acrylics. It's always been my go-to, my comfort zone and my happy place. I mean, who doesn't love it when you put the paint on the canvas and it stays exactly where you put it. I believe anybody can paint and it's a skill that's developed over time. Over my last two years, I have set a goal that I was going to learn how to watercolor paint. I told myself that I would dedicate some time every day, and that's what I did. And it's been a joyous adventure, sometimes a little bit stressful and frustrating. But for the most part, I've loved it. There are some fundamental building blocks that we must learn before we get started in watercolor painting. In return, if you put in the effort, you will learn to create some amazing artwork. Watercolor is a free and expressive medium that can create some truly magical textures that you can get with any other paint medium. That's why I'm here today. I want to teach you all about beginning watercolor skills. In this class I've put together all in one place, everything I wish I had known and wanted to learn when I first started my watercolor adventure, I had to go looking all over for things and it took me a long time to put it all together. Now, I know some of you might be thinking, I've never painted with watercolors before. And where do I even start? Well, don't worry about it. This class is perfect for beginners. But if you've already had some watercolor experience, then this class is also gonna be a great refresher for you. We're going to cover all of the basics. We're going to learn about color swatching and pink consistency. That's a huge one. We're going to cover intentional or unintentional covered color bleeding, gradient color washes. That will give you the ombre effect, which is a must learn when it comes to painting beautiful skies. And it's a huge game changer for me when I learned how to save the whitespace. And of course, we're also going to learn to create some magical textures. That's my favorite lesson to teach. We'll use things like salt and alcohol to create some really unique effects. And the best part, you don't need any fancy supplies to get started. Just get out whatever you have on hand. If you're like me, you had watercolor paints and the cupboard that sat there for ten years. And I'm embarrassed to say if I would recommend investing in some good quality paper, you're going to want to make sure that it's at least 140 pounds or 300 GSM, either cold press paper or 100% cotton. If you have no idea what any of that means, don't worry about that because we're going to go through that too. That will save you a lot of frustration. I pull it, I promise you. Now there's a list of supplies that we're going to need in this course. And it's listed in the resource section and the about section underneath this video. But we're going to go all over all of that. So that's it, friends. I can't wait to get started and teach you all about the wonderful world of watercolor painting. Let's grab your supplies and let's get started. 2. Let's Talk About Brushes: Hello and welcome to our first-class today. In this first lesson, we're going to go over brushes. And we're going to talk about what kind of brushes they are, what strokes they make. And we'll just go through them quickly. I don't want to spend a lot of time on them because I wanna get painting with you. Now. I had been collecting brushes for many, many years. I've been painting for over 35 years. So I have quite the collection. I have brushes from oil brushes all the way down to watercolor brushes and everything in between. So there is no need to go out and buy all these brushes today. We'll go over brushes later when we start our project of what we're going to need and what I will recommend to start this course. But for today we're just going to go over what they are and what they're used for. And-a-half quite array here. So first we'll start, we'll kind of go from left to right. And then I'll make some brush strokes to show you what they do. So right here, this is a master touch scrubber brush. They come in lots of different shapes and sizes and lots of different brands make them. Now they're a very stiff bristle. They are used to lift out color. And I will show you that in a minute when we demonstrate how they're used. So there's many different sizes and you have to be careful with these guys because they can do a lot of damage to your paper. So the next thing we have, our wash brushes. They, we use these a lot in watercolor and they come in lots of different dials. This particular ones I don't use very often. These are hockey brushes. They're basically the same size. The same type of brushes. This this I use all the time. These I don't use unless I'm painting something very large. And I've only used them so far to lay down water. So that's why they're not stained like these ones. You can get these off Amazon. These are made out of, in fact, all of these are made out of goat hair and go terrorists very soft and holds lots of water. These are hockey brushes. I'm just going to move on over here either way. This is a mop brush. They also come in lots of different shapes and sizes. These particular ones are rounds, ovals and these ones are round. They also hold a lot of water and I like natural hair fibers. I know a lot of people don't like that and don't agree with that. And that's okay. They make synthetic versions and all these brushes, which is what? These ones are there, Royal and lag Nicole. Now you can get these at Hobby Lobby. You can get these off Amazon. You can get them at Walmart. They have these brushes pretty much everywhere. Most of my brushes I buy are for master touch. So you'll see a lot of master touch brushes here. But these are for laying down lots of water and big washes. So I'm just going to put some of these away. We talked about those. They're flat brushes. They are also used for the big ones are used for laying down lots of color are big washes. You can come in all sorts of different sizes. These flat brushes can be used as your shader brushes, but they can be used for making fine lines to. So those are our flat brushes. These are angled brushes. You can see there like a flat brush, but they have an angle ped on them. And they're good for cutting around things that you need to make a detail on. And I will show you some of the I don't use these very often, but we'll go over the strokes that they make. So these are some of my new favorite brushes. These are filbert brushes. They are sable hair brushes also made by W lot. They come in many shapes and sizes. They are a lot like the flat brush. Instead of having a flat top, they have a rounded top that's tapered. They make great brushstrokes that have round edges on them and they're best for flowers making fantastic flowers. Favorite. They come in a set of nine brushes. This is my fourth step that I've bought. And the only reason that I have them in oranges so I can tell them apart for my student brushes, which are black and I have them all put away. These are WL brushes. You could get them. I've bought them anywhere, $20-30 depending on if they have them in stock can supply and chain demand. And but right now they're running about 23 to $25 for nine brushes with real hair. That's fantastic. They hold a lot of water. That's why I like them so much. And I also like them because they're a natural bristle. And if I lose the tip of my brush, I can dip them in hot water without getting into the barrel of the brush. Water will bring it back down to a point. Now you didn't, these are liner brushes. Now this is also known as a rigger brush or a liner brush. And they come in different sizes. The ones that are long and have given you a nice, springy, less control of a stroke, you can get some really cool look like script or really squiggly. They're great for branches, grass. And then if you get into fine detail, you can get into a liner brush with the 80 bitty teeny tiny bristles. So those are liner brushes. They're also called this point spoiler, but this particular risk is lighter. Couple of brushes that I have up here. This is just a makeup brush. You might see me use this in the future. I use this when I erase. I don't want the pencil shaving, eraser shavings shedding on my paper and I don't want to smear it with my hand. I'll brush it with a cheap just a cheap dollar store makeup brush. I think I got this at Walmart that you use with masking fluid. And when we'll talk about masking fluid, liquid, latex, that kind of stuff later. But it's got a nib on the end that you can draw with or, um, and I've used this so much. You don't ever want to use your good brushes with masking fluid because this is what happens to it and you can't wash it out. So this is a masking fluid brush. Now this one here, and I have quite a bit of them and I liked them a lot. I just I don't use them unless I'm traveling. They're fantastic. And most of these I've got when I bought sets at pans of my palettes. But these are travel watercolor brushes. And you can see in here, I don't know if you can see that, but it has water in here and you twist the head off and you can take it with you and paint on location. These are great for that. They're really good. They come in different head sizes. They have flat, they have rounds. I think they have some filbert and they have all different brands. So they have some really nice ones that have like a squeeze ball here. So you don't have to struggle so hard with pushing the water out. But these are fun. I've used these in the hospital waiting room when my dad was having surgery. So these are fun to take. I know I know people who've taken them on the airplane as well. I haven't gone anywhere for awhile but you can take them on the airplane as well. So these are the brushes. So let's go over what they do. 3. Brushes Demonstration: All right, let's jump in here. We're gonna go over brushstrokes and what they do and what the, what the brush looks like on paper. So we're going to start here. This is the wash brush. You can see here. I hope you can see that in the frame there. This brush is goat hair, and like I said earlier, it holds lots of water. This is one of my favorite brushes that I use when I'm doing skies or landscapes. Cityscapes where I need to put down a lot of water. So I'm just going to wet here the top of the paper and give you an idea what this brush will do. So we use it that's called a wash brush. I'm washing the paper right here, right now I'm going to grab some blues and it'll put it in a nice wash of color. I can get a little bit darker than that. See that? So pretty good. Actually go darker. My teens aren't that wet mixed here. There we go. That's what I'm after. Just a nice thick wash of color. You can see that you can cover a lot of ground, a lot of paper with this brush. I didn't tell you this is master touched paper. This is acid free paper, 140 pound, cold pressed. I didn't put it on a tape it down. So we're gonna get some bustling because I just threw that water on there. Okay. We're just going to go on because I want to show you what the stroke still here. So this is our flat brush. I have two different sizes here that we're going to test. This is the bigger brush. Now, you can throw down. You can do this same area with this size brush. You just have to do more strokes and to cover that in. But you can see it gives a nice clean line, clean straight line. So I can go back in there, right? You can see that this brush will put lots of paint down. We could cover a little amount of area. You could cover a lot of area. So that's the flat brush. You can get good crisp little lines here too as well. So that's our flap. I'll just show you with a small brush here. This is just a smaller size. For this exact same thing here. Just smaller. You can make those lines as thick or as thin as you want depending on where you help the brush. So that's our flat brush. This is one of my new favorites. This is the filbert. This could also do all of this up here if you only had this. But what this brushes fund for is you can see with the flat brush you got a flat edge right when you started and stopped? Excuse me. I'm getting over a cold so my voice kind of cracking in and out and I apologize for that. This brush will give you a flat wash, but you can see there when I started, it gives me a rounded edge, right? You can also get those flat lines with this brush. You could cover a lot of ground with this brush. Do a lot of washes with these brushes are known for, is their great for making flowers. If we think of flour strokes, there's, if you're in a compound strokes who got a C stroke? Press, drag and release. Right? Then you could do some compound strokes where you make flower petals. So there's lots you can do with this brush. Press drag. So that's the big one. I can get carried away and do a whole lesson. And just practicing brushstrokes In this particular video is just to show you what they do. So if I wanted to do a real quick flower, I kid me, think of what kind of flower I want to do here. Let's do a cherry blossom. Press drag, drag, drag. And you could do roses with this brush. They do roses beautiful. There's a cherry blossom there. I'm going to jump down to the smaller filbert. Let's add in the black centers with a cherry blossoms. Not a bleed up to it. Okay. So could also do a really pretty rose here real quick. And we'll start with small strokes. And then you go into C strokes. You get the idea here how that brush does nice round edges there. So that's just a basic really quick Rose. Know if that were to dry, I could go back in and spend more time and put highlights and all that stuff. But I'm just giving you the idea of what the basic shape this brush makes today. So that's our filbert. Let's go down here. Jumped to the angle brush. Let's see if this head is going to drive me crazy. Okay, this is the angle brush. I got two sizes here. Put a little bit more paint in here, k. Now this does a nice straight line as well. So when you put it down, you have it in an angle you can see there. But this is the kind of stroke you're gonna get. Again. You can get nice lines with it. Okay? If I dropped down to the smaller brush, you could use. Now, all of these strokes I've done, you could do with a round brush right from the beginning. But the reason they make different brushes is so you don't have to work as hard basically. But when I started watercolor, all I had was round brushes. I mean, I had all of my brushes from all my painting with oils and acrylics. But I didn't have watercolor brushes. But of easy leaves. If you have an angled brush. Okay. It's good for cutting around close corners and that kind of thing too. With the little guy first. Now you can see that his bristles are closer together, so we're gonna get a little bit of a different stroke, but we're gonna get the same general look, right? So you can go upstrokes for grass. Makes really good grass. If I pull it down, I get the edge of the graph, right? This one had strokes that look like loose graphs. This gives me the edge of the graph. Okay, so there's that, this one basically is the same. It just has a wider, wider pattern. So he'd give me little thinner lines with this brush. So that's our fan brush. Really great for grasses. Little lines that are even kind of book like that. That's grass fan brush. Okay, let's go into, you remember our main key brushes. These are our brushes that we gave a really bad haircut to use these, like I said before, when I do leaves, trees, I'm going to stamp in grasses anything that I want to have, some kind of pattern texture but not really patterned. That's kind of sporadic as well. So if you think of trees Right? There's some leaves for tree. See how easy that was with that main key. Brush, bad haircut brush. The reason I told you in the other video, I've got that from Paul Clarke. One there. Let's take this one and put some little red flowers in that grass. Little wild flowers. This ticket here. And stamp it in that dress. And it'll just look like there's little flowers in there. Now we'll get into pink color consistency and all that kinda stuff later. But so I gotta, gotta mess right there. But you get the general idea that you can stamp in some flowers with this bad haircut brush. You can actually buy brushes that are monkey. Or you can just use an old one that you have and give it a bad haircut. Okay. Now, into my favorites, everything I've done so far I can do with these brushes are my go-to and 99.999 per cent of the things that I paint, I'll use round brushes for. So for a round brush, you've got your rounded edge and then it straight column, right? Mrs, flat and straight. This is angled or this is round. So you get a round tip and a straight line. Straight line. So what can we do this? We can paint anything with this, but if we're thinking flowers, you can do oh my goodness, everything that this brush, There's some sunflower strokes. Finish this one out. I'm going to just jump back and forth between these two round brushes. So you can see here it gets your tip lines. You could do real fine lines. And round brushes come in every size. Along with all of these, they come in all different sizes. So pretty much anything you can think of. You can paint these brushes. It's one's good for anything. It's like that's why I said it's my favorite, It's my go-to. Some sunflowers in here. These are great for compound strokes to who can do your left? So you can get good compound strokes. You could do leaves with this one, just like we did leaves with the other one. I've painted portraits with round brushes. I said most everything I do is with round brushes. Alright. Here, let's put in to a pine tree. By tapping and the round brush. We're gonna do a whole lesson on trees. Before we paint some landscapes, which is really fun. I'm already got some video for that shot because I taught a lesson on it to my private students. We did some lessons on trees. Just a real quick. Now with watercolor, you had let that dry and you could go back in and put more detail, more detail in this rows. You can do anything you want with the round brush. That's why he's my He's my go-to. Paint the tree here. So I can show you this liner brush. Paint a tree. Please just gonna go off in different areas. Nice going to cover some of this stuff over here because we're just practicing. You think of a tree that splits off all different ways. Okay, so this is where I use my liner brush a lot. I use it for buying anything I need little springy Twinkie. How good that makes little twigs coming off that tree. And not down in together. What you do is you just wiggle it. And that's what gives us those branches. Like go up. And you could either go in with your flat brush and fill in the leaves. You could use your main key brush to fill in the tree leaves. You could use your round brush and do your brow brush, dry brushing. Tie this tree so the ground here. Someone can read in there. If you do lots of stuff with this round brush, that's why it's my favorite here. Can either tap in and around beliefs there. You can splatter. Gonna get into that thing, but texture as well. So, yeah, those are our brushstrokes there. Of all the brushes that I use on a regular basis that you'll see me paint with through here on out. 90% of it, 99% of it will be with my round brushes, liner brushes once in awhile, a flat brush and well, that's a wrap up this lesson. I want to thank you for your time today and spending this last half an hour with me going over watercolor brushes. And we learned a little bit about types. They are what they're used for, different sizes, and what some of the strokes look like on paper. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave that in the discussion section below, and I will happily answer any questions that I can. And I look forward to seeing you in the future lessons with review of paints and paper. And we'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Let's Talk About Paper: Hello and welcome. Today, we are going to talk about paper. Over the last year-and-a-half of my watercolor adventure, I've spent a lot of time exploring different brands and types of paper. So let's talk a little bit about paper. When you go to buy your paper, you're going to want to look for paper that's in the 140 pounds or 300 GSM. 140 pounds means that a ream of paper that's 500 sheets, that 22 by 30 ". That paper is going to weigh that Reims going to weigh approximately about 140 pounds. And the 300 GSM means that is 300 g per square inch. So what this boils down to is you want to purchase a paper that's thick. Thick paper will buckle and warp less, and that paper will also hold water longer and you'll be able to work with the paint longer. Watercolor paper ranges 90-400 pounds. And 90 pound paper is very thin. So we want to stick in the range about 140. Anything over 300 is pretty much a board. So buying paper in the beginning it was kind of overwhelming. I generally stayed in the cold press, acid free paper. In the beginning, I tried lots of brands. I tried brands that were the academy student brands all the way up to brands that were more cotton in the student to professional range. These are two of my favorite brands and they are on the lower end of artists dreams papers there, uh, who, who their Norberg London. They are a tough paper and they hold water well, I get good color values on them. And I'm able to do all the techniques that I like to do. And then I'm going to share with you here in future classes. Now as a beginner, I would recommend that you start with a pad of paper there gummed on the top. And you can pull out the sheets of paper and you can washi tape them down or use painter's tape and tape them down to any solid surface that's waterproof. This will leave your paper less likely to warp and buckle. And you can use that paper. Then after it's dry, you can use the other side. And I would recommend that you use both sides of your paper when you get a little bit more comfortable and you want to branch out of the pan, you can maybe choose a spiral watercolor journal. These are pads as well. You can go round and tape the edge with washing tape. And then I clamp the edges. And then I would recommend in this one as well, you can paint on both sides of the paper. Now this is a block of paper there gummed on all four sides. They come in most every brand and all of the types of paper. It's my preferred method of painting as I don't have to tear it out and tape it to a board. They're less warping right from the beginning. This is my cotton paper which I really liked by the Hong Academy. This is my Yahoo who acid free paper. You can find it in most every type. You have two types of paper to choose from. When you're ready to go purchase your paper. You can choose an acid free wood pulp paper, or you can choose a cotton paper. What's the difference? Well, the difference is going to be the strength. Their abrasion resistance sees the longevity and the price. Wood pulp paper is the cheaper of the two. It's going to be a great paper. I've tried a lot of them. I've tried a lot of them here that are not on my desk. So I know that there's a lot of good acid free papers out there. They're just not as durable as cotton paper. They've had all of their naturally occurring acidic components removed. So they're not going to turn yellow or discolored rate over time, but they're just not going to be as durable as what as cotton paper, cotton paper. It's made with winters. And those cotton lynchers are the pure source of cellulose and their fibers are longer than wood pulp. And so it makes the paper more durable and it can take a heavy treatment. Okay, So you've picked your package of paper, either chosen acid free wood pulp paper or 100% cotton. Now let's talk about texture. You have hot pressed, cold pressed or not, meaning not hot pressed. Or you have rough. Now, hot press paper. Has The least texture surface of all the papers. It's not my favorite, That's my least favorite. It's been pressed between hot metal rollers during the production. And the hot press paper is favored by those artists that like lots of detail. Think botanical artists. Or if you'd like to do ink and wash and you're not going to use very much water, then this is gonna be the paper for you. Those who, who like lots of detail, hot press paper tends to be least absorbent of all the textures. And watery washes consider on the surface for a long time because it doesn't soak down in. Beyond watercolor painting. Hot press paper is great for detailed pen, ink and graphite drawing. Now let's talk about cold pressed paper or not being not taught pressed. It's made by pressing that Pope between two metal rollers. And it has a slight texture to it. And depending on what brand you get, will depend on that texture because every manufacturer is rollers are a little bit different. It has a slight texture to it and it's the it's the one that I prefer to use the most. It's well adapted to many different painting approaches. The paint will sink into the little dimples on the surface, which is so fun to see what texture you're going to get. But it's also leaves the paint alive to where you can watch the paint move. Cold press paper tends to be a little more absorbent than hot press paper. Now, rough paper, as it sounds, has the roughest texture of all of the fibers. That's because those rollers, when it's pressed, are filtered. And so they get very big dimpling in the paper. It gives some wonderful results when painting. If you're using granulated painting, it's going to fill in all of those crevasses and leave you with some awesome textures. And you can create great textures with the dry brush effect as well. So rough is really fun. If you're into bold paintings and aggressive paintings. It may not be for everybody though, but it is fun to play with. I want to thank you for joining me in this last 10 min. As we discussed watercolor paper, we talked about how you can buy your watercolor paper and the packaging that it comes in. We talked about what types of watercolor paper there are and what they're made out of. We talked about the process of making watercolor paper. And then we also talked about the types of different textures. I hope that you learned something from this class and that it was enjoyable for you. I had a fun time. I look forward to seeing you as we talk about watercolor paints. 5. Watercolor Paint & How It's Made: Hello and welcome. I'm so glad that you're here today is we take this crash course. In one of my favorite things. We're going to talk all about different kinds of paints and the brands and what kinds they come in. So hang on. Let's talk about paints. Watercolors are made from powdered pigments. These pigments are found all over the earth, from stone to gemstones, to our earth. Dirt, even to the food that we eat and the plans that are on the Earth. They're all ground down and processed into our favorite colors. Then they're mixed together with a binding agent, which is called gum arabic, which comes from the acacia tree. Glycerin is then added to make it smooth and soften it and it slowly mold over with a rolling stone to make it a smooth formula. Have you ever heard the term being mold over? That's where it comes from. Now you can't forget water, 10% of the paint as water. But you'll also have things like AUG scale, that's a wetting agent, but it's now more commonly being replaced by synthetic versions. Honey is also added to help with the flow of the paint and it keeps it soft and it helps with the rewriting process when the paint is dry. Now clove oil is also used as a preservative. Alright, so let's talk about paint pigments and what that means. First, let's talk about staining colors. Whether a color is staining or non staining. That means depending on the brand and the manufacturer and how the paint was made, some paints have very fine pigments. Those pigments will settle into the dimples and the valleys and the crevices of the paper and make it very difficult for that paint to be lifted off. So if you can't lift off the paint, most likely you have a staining color. Most good brands will label on their box or the back of their tubes, whether they're paint is a staining or a non staining color. Here I have three tubes of Grumbacher Academy watercolor paint. Now on every good brand of watercolor paint, be it in pounds or tubes. There will be a P number. P Y is for yellow, Pb is for blue. Prs for read. These codes have a number associated with it, but tell what pink pigments were used and mix to create that specific color. So this international color-coded index is a pretty cool thing. It helps us find our favorite colors when different brands mean their paints different colors. Now, granulating colors are some of my favorite paints to play with. Granulation happens when the heavier pigments sink to the dimples in the valleys of your paper and give you beautiful textures and effects. Some brands make specific colors just for this purpose. We're going to move on to one of the last distinguishing characteristics of paint. Transparency. What does that mean? Well, some paints have different transparencies. We look at this chart, you can see that it has squares on the color boxes. Some are colored in, somewhere halfway colored in. Some are clear and some just have a line through them. Well, the one, for example, like the white, is colored in, that means that that paint is an opaque paint. The one next to it. Yeah, lemon yellow is a transparent color, which means you're gonna have to make multiple layers to get a dark rich color. Now, if you look right underneath that, fresh purple has a line through that, which means it's semi-transparent. And the one after that is Hooker's green, and it means it's semi-opaque. And while I have you here on this picture, if you look, they have stars on the pictures. Those are the light fastness codes. And the more stars, the better the light fastness. Meaning it won't fade over time 6. Paint Brands, What I Using Now, Beginner Recommendation: Okay. Watercolor to come in sizes five millimeter up to 20, 1 mm. Now, there are some brands that go larger than that. But this is the size that you're going to find for the most part, there's two there's becoming sticks which I don't have, I haven't tried that yet. They come in wallet, watercolor, pencils. They come in inks. I'm trying to think of what other inks and dies. And then 11 thing that I bought for my daughter for Christmas. So they haven't tried yet. I bought her sheets of watercolor. So they're little they look like little pieces of paper with pigment color on them. And then you activate them with a wet paint brush and can paint right on your paper. That's kinda cool. I haven't tried that myself, but she says they're fun to paint with this Artesia's for my first sets. And I painted a lot of pretty pictures with them. And these master touch. Okay, then I branched in two once I got to a point where I wanted to start getting a little better, I branched into the Winsor and Newton Cotman. That was my first dabble in a good quality mid-range paints would be Banko. I could find Reeves, Paul Rubin. Some, some artists, professional artists could put Paul Rubens into the low-end of a professional category and that's where I met. Those are the ones I like to use. The Artesia's, the master touches. Those all fall in the mid-brain. What's the difference between before I jumped to the next thing? What's the difference between these travel sets like this that are in the past versus a tube of paint? Nothing really other than this is wet inside the tube and this has dried hard and you have to reactivate it. Okay. So that's the only difference between the tubes and the pans, depending on the company. And what type of palette that you have purchased will determine whether or not you can purchase individual pans to replace them. So that's the difference between tubes and pans. That's it. You've got the wet paint in here. This is dry and you have to reactivate it. Also the convenience. If you want to go somewhere and you have your palate and pat a block of paper and a brush. You can go out on location and you can paint. I've even painted in the waiting room, can either do stationary here and leave them in your tray like I have here, or you can travel with them. I don t ever wash my trace and I'll tell you why I love color theory of color mixing. You're gonna get colors that you don't have in pans if you make them yourself. So I don't ever watch this. I always confined to a color on here somewhere that I can use in the painting that I'm doing. If I need to get down to the the original color, I'll just use a clean paintbrush and clean it out until I can get down to that original color. So maybe some purists, watercolor artists would be like posture paint palettes, but I don't, I feel like it's money down the drain. Then you branch into the artists professional. So you've got Academy, which is the GPS, the students K, and then you get into the artist and professional grades. Those would be brands like married my blue, M Graham, Daniel Smith, white knights, poor, ram brands. Some would put the Paul Rubens in their millennia a Winsor and Newton professionals. But I am excited to take that next step, but I'm not there yet. I'm still comfortable in what I have. I want to use for my husband's sake, kinda want to use up some of the student paints before I start branching into the artist paints. But I know that it will level out once I do take that step What do I have here now that we've talked about the difference between paints and pellets and brands. Basically, I'm like, I like if you want to start out and buy your first palette, I would say get a Winsor and Newton Cotman. You can find that for anywhere between 18 for a twelv set about this size. Two I got I got a steel on this one. This is 246-810-1214. And I got this one for 21. And I think it was a misprint because the next day it shot up to over 30 to have those two extra colors in there. Two extra blues. I like Winsor and Newton is a good starter travel set. But there's nothing wrong with any of these. Right now. My favorite is these main ones. I told you that these here are tube paints that I've just put into my own palette. These are Paul Rubens. Paul Rubens has different sets of paints. These are the brights. They're super pigmented, they're fluorescent. You can paint some fun things with these bright paint. Palette. Here is basically all my Artesia premium watercolor paints here and the tubes. When I leveled up to my wheel. This is a those of you that would want to know this is a rollbacks. We'll that my husband got me for Christmas. When I level that my paints, I used to have my Artesia premiums in here and I leveled them up and bought new Paul Rubens and now they're in here. So I moved all my Artesia's into this travel set and I can just refill it when they run out. Let's see here. These ones are also Paul Rubens. There the rest of the set that I didn't have room for in my tray. So when, when I want some different colors in here, I need to color swatch, see, so I think that's what we're going to color swatch width is this Paul Rubens set? And we'll talk about why we color swatch and why that's important. But these are my Paul Rubens. This is an old tin that I had from some old watercolors that I didn't like that we're chunky and I threw them away. And you can buy these individual trees off the Amazon. You put a magnet on them and put them in your own tree. Don't know if I showed you yet. I repurpose anything little tins that I can find. Now this is wash, this is not watercolor. I mean, it is a type of watercolor, but it's a chalk based watercolor, so it's more opaque. But I just wanted to show you how cute that is. My elbow tokens. And they're just the same. I had leftovers. That one, the magnetic state in the tree. So there you go. So these are fun to travel with those or Paul Rubens, those are my main, I think I opened these. I'll just show you real quick again. Like I said, I don't wash them. You have to buy the whole palette. And I've got these in November and there's only a handful of them that are close to the bottom now. So they last quite a long time. Very creamy, highly pigmented. They have good color fastness on them. Some of them are more transparent, some of them are more opaque. And I really like the variety that comes in this particular set. So let's see here we've talked about the tubes. Now. What do I have here? These are fun. These are a whole different different type of paint. These are Japanese watercolors. These are cure a Talkie. These are a fact-based paint. From my understanding now I may be wrong on this. They're not begin this photo. You want to go vegan by a traditional watercolor. They're fun to paint with. I do know that they're highly pigmented. They're great for color fastness. What's the difference between here? Well, these are the professionals. Brant and these are the artist? No. Yes, these are artists. They're not students. So these one cost me eight, you can get them anywhere, $18-25 on Amazon. These are Mozart come bomb for Mulberry, a mobile phone. That phone number, I'm dyslexic. So if I say things backwards, I apologize in advance. But how are they different? Well, besides, when they come, they do not go clear to the surface, to the top of the pan. So if be like, oh, I'm not getting very much, I can't get that out. I'm not getting very much paint in there because they don't look very deep. But that's a pretty good chunk of paint in there. As they, as you paint with them, they will shrink up in the paint pan. And that's nothing doesn't affect the way the paint quality. You can see in there how that's shrunk away from the sidewalk. It doesn't affect the way they paint you just spraying with water and they reactivate them. These are Japanese full pans. These are full pans this side. Okay. So these are the same and then I bought over in my Artesia paints. So when you paint with them, they are when they dry. Watercolor paints, dry matte, finish. Japanese watercolor paints dry with a sheen or a shine or glossiness to them. And they have just a really pretty look. Now if you paint with them, sure enough, they do give you the look of matte finish. So that is the difference here with these. They're very fun to paint with their very creamy and are just something different to fund it, to branch into your paper and your paints will make a difference. So eventually, start with whatever your budget can afford you. And let's start painting in our next class. Thanks for joining me with paints 7. Color Swatching & Why You Should Do It: Hello, hi, I'm so glad that you're here with me. I love color swatching and I want to talk about it and why I think it's important and why you should do it. I used to do it just for fun, but I learned about color swatching towards a little bit into my journey about the time I learned about pink consistency. And I wish I knew where I learned this, I could give credit to that wonderful person. I know it was a girl, but I can't remember where I learned it. Why do we color swatch? Well, first of all, your paints will show up differently on different types of paper, different qualities of paper, different brands of paper. Hot press versus cold pressed, 100% cotton versus wood pulp paper. So that's one reason to color swatch. Another reason is to see what those colors are that are in your palettes here. Either fresh from the tube or in your palettes. How they're going to show up. Different papers react differently with your pain. These are this is a sketchbook from Hobby Lobby. It's a master touched fine studio. You see that? Master touched fine studio. This is a cheap sketchbook. The paper is not great. So you can see here, they don't necessarily look like the color that's in the past and the pan, right? So that's red. This pan looks darker. This one looks darker than that, but it's actually lighter and Pinker. This one almost looks the same color, but it looks a little bit darker and it's more pink and a little bit darker than that. So you can see what they look like in on paper versus what, what you're looking at on your palate. K. So this is a wood pulp paper. The texture is very fine texture of the paper. Okay? So to compare this two really good paper, this is Bo Hong, 100% cotton paper. Okay? And this is the same palette that is here. You can see just by looking at this top row, if you're using a good quality paper, you're going to get a better result with your paint. Ok. So this red looks pretty good as far as, you know, these strips here, I was trying to do a layering and I think this paper is just junkie. But I think when I hit it with that second layer, it just lifted the layer underneath. So this is what poor quality paper will do. This is just one layer, but I felt like I needed to put another layer on to begin with because they were so dark. So you can see the carmine here is really pink and it's very vibrant on the 100% cotton. So this is a good way. This is one reason I color swatch. I want to see on the particular paper that I'm going to use, how those paints are gonna go down. Whether they're gonna go down very crisp and clear and whether they're going to be a nice flat wash or if I'm going to have problems with peddling. And like this one here, this is just one layer C. And so I didn't get a really even coat and a little bit did it. So maybe it suggests this particular shade, but it looks like this indigo is a granulating color. This is a really good example of that. So this is just one example. These ones here are royal lag nickel. Okay? So these are very, very cheap paints. These are cake. They're very chalky, they have lots of additives and preservatives in them. These are definitely in the student grade. You can get these at Walmart. And I think they were like the under $15. You can look at them and say, Okay, they look chalky, right? But I want to see what they look like on my paper. And you can see here when they dry, they really start to separate. So I'm going to hold this up here so you can see better. You can see how they pull away, and they can really see that choppiness to them. Key. Now here is another example. These are the same These are the same paints and they're on a different paper. This is Ms. Love paper. It was a it was a pad of paper that I had and it was really junky paper, so I ended up using it just for color swatching in the beginning. So you can see even on this paper, that it's separated even more. So this is what a really low quality watercolor paint is gonna look like. Okay. These ones are the actual Ms. Love paints that came with this pad of paper. There also a a lower grade paint. You can see how they separate. You can see that choppiness. You can fill the choppiness to them. I would like to go back and put this these paints on a 100-percent bot Hong cotton would be interesting. Color swatch it just to see how they laid down on 100% cotton paper. This is wood pulp. Okay, this is a difficult press wood pulp. But you can see how that would be very frustrating for a new student that was going to paint. And they can't figure out, why aren't my paints doing what my teachers are doing here on the screen? Or if you're in the live class, you've brought what you've had and you're trying to paint. What I'm painting or what your pay teachers painting. This is also a piece of that, Ms. Love. These are my Artesia watercolors. Now I use these Artesia's for almost like the first, I would say six months that I painted and I painted a lot of really pretty paintings with them. Any of that, okay. These ones actually know. This one is Artesia's. So you can see that they do give you some good, you can do some good paintings with them. This is not finished by any means. This was just a play around one day. I was practicing skies. I like the sky, so I threw in the Hobbit hole, but this is not done. Okay. So you can see we start to have a downpour ear. So if you hear thunder and lightning or you don't see the lightning, but if you hear the thunder rumbling through my house, really started raining hard. K. So these Artesia paints, I have used them. I've used them on really good paper. I am have some really pretty paintings I did with them. But on this particular paper, you can see how poorly they reacted. So another reason to color swatch. We talked about those ones, that's the bot Hong k Here are these are my mailing paint on this particular paper, they went down fairly well. I think my page here was a little bit tipped because this is the new page, so it it ran a little bit. But they went down fairly clear. We're going to get another big boom. They went down really nice. You can see how saturated the color is, which is nice. You can also see how what you're gonna get with the iridescent colors, the pearlescent colors there on the bottom. Another, this really surprised me. These are my kids paints. They brought home from school. So I threw them down here. I wanted to see what they would do because I hadn't painted with them. And for colorblindness, they did really well. I would save for even wash of color, maybe not so great. Okay. But I have a feeling that they would go down really nice on arches or even bow Hong. So that would be fun to color swatch to see the difference. These ones here are this other set from my kids brought home from school schools out this week. So this is praying. And you can see here they didn't really kind of puddles. Okay, they, they didn't really spread out. And I think that's because of the pain and the additives that's in there. Okay, Another good thing here that I've recently started to do is write down the number of the paint. K. Remember we talked about the numbers like PR is for red, P, Y is for yellow, PVs for blue, and then they mix colors. Okay, so I put down the color number of the color. I put down the name And then I started writing down if the paints have it, what their their key would be. So we've got transparent. And it's a permanent paint. This is a staining color and it's transparent. This is a permanent, transparent and staining. So I like to look at these for references for that too. These are this palette here that are Winsor, Newton, cotton Cotman. Here is the Winsor and Newton on this miss love paper. See just doesn't look great. But when you put it on a better, better paper, it goes down Better. Look, see. I would if this was the only paper I had, I wouldn't trust these watercolor paints from Winsor and Newton that are supposed to be so fantastic. But when you go up in quality of your paper, it makes your paint look better. So anyway, there's many reasons to color swatch. Those are just a few. Besides, it's fun. One, I just want some downtime and I want something that's not stressful and I don't have to worry about making a masterpiece. Sometimes I'll just color swatch. I always do it if I get if I get new paints, that's color swatching one-on-one. And why to do it now? Well, now it's your turn to have a little bit of fun. I want you to get out your paper. I want you to get out a pencil or a waterproof pen that you may have. And you need to make a graph. You need to have as many boxes as you have colors. So whether you're using paint tubes or a paint palette, it doesn't matter. I'm using a size, looks like about a size six in my watercolor brush. There. You go ahead and use what you're comfortable holding and whatever you like to use. I'm color swatching out what Paul Rubens. I'd love to see what you have. And if you would then take a picture of that and share it with me in the project section below. I'd love to see it. I went to thank you again for joining me in this lesson as we talk about something simple as color swatching and why it's important. And I look forward to seeing you in our next lesson. 8. Paint Consistency: IT'S GAME CHANGING!!: Hi, and I'm glad you're here with me today as we do this short lesson on inconsistency. Before we get started, I'll let you know what our supplies are. I'm just going to use a watercolor sketchbook I have here by Artesia. This is 140 pounds cold press paper. I have a number eight sable brush and we need that I'm going to use. The brush is going to lay down a strip of water. When we get to painting wet on wet, I have a glass of clean water. I've got a towel to tap my paintbrush on when I need to. And then I'm going to use my Paul Rubin paints here in the color of rows. Let's go ahead and get started. I have taken and drawn five small circles on my pad here, cross in my watercolor sketchbook. You can do circles or squares, whatever. If you want to take a minute and draw those out and push pause, and then join me back here. You can just do light circles in pencil. Okay, so pink consistency was a big one for me. It helped me learn values of paint in the color scheme. And it also helped teach me the consistency that I needed to paint on the paper and how that consistency will react, whether it's wet on dry or wet on wet. There's a big difference between those two. After you get done drawing those up here on the side, we're going to do wet. On dry. I'm just going to write it here, the side of my circles and above my circles in this order. I'm going to write t from left to right. And then I have coffee, milk, cream, and butter. Okay? So we're gonna learn these different mixtures. Basically it's taking your paint and thin innate down to these consistencies. Okay? So I'm going to hold my palette here so you can see and I'll go back-and-forth between my palette and my, my paint here. When we talk about T, we're going to talk about the thinnest and the lightest value that we can achieve in this water color, k, t is very light. It will stain if it spill, but it's very clear and it moves. It has some tint to it, but it moves very freely. So I'm just going to take I've already pre wet my paint over here and I have a little loose watercolor puddle here in the bottom. So I'm going to just bring that over here. Now you can see when I first bring it over, it doesn't move very fast, right? So I'm going to wet this down and dilute it. Tell it is quite thin and very runny. You see how that moves around on the palette here. That's plate. Now, this is just a white ceramic plate. I bought it at Walmart. I think I've mentioned this in some of the previous videos for $1. So it's nothing special fancy, you just use what you have. Okay, So this is super thin. It's very runny, right? Okay. I'm actually going to dilute it more. So what would be some of our something that we were painting that would be in the T stage. Cain as I'm talking about it, I'm going to paint this circle in C, so it's very runny. And when I run my brush through it, it fills it in so fast that you didn't really know that I had a brushstroke there, so it's very runny and very light, almost very watery. And then I'm just going to paint it wet on dry right inside that circle. Try to make that wash is even as they can. So that's nice and clear. Very thin, and very runny. Okay? So some things that would be in this value would be like rose petals that had the light coming through them or highlights. Sometimes I do skies with sunsets that are in this hue. And value light value k. So we're going to just take this now and darken it up so it goes straight into that wash. And I'm just going to add a little bit. Now coffee is a little bit thicker than t. If you spell it, it's going to stay more. It has more color to it, right? But it's still quite runny Okay, So see there it's still running quite a bit, but we're darker, right? Or darker than the t. K. Want you to take that now, this consistency and peanut here in the coffee circle. And you should be able to see it quite a big difference between your tea circle on your coffee circle. You're going up in the darkness of the value. So this is one step up in the value scale. We're still very running, right? That would, if I were to tip that glass over it run pretty fast. Okay. So we've got tea and coffee that we're going to make it a little bit thicker. Now with milk, milk stage is what normally paint. This is the consistency I normally paint in. One take a minute here again and tell you that I'm on Main Street again, so please forgive me for any traffic sounds. I live right by the high school, so it's quite, oops, sorry, it's quite busy. And, um, I'll try to edit that muffled traffic out the best that I can. Okay. So back to here. This is milk. Okay. With milk, it's little thicker. It doesn't move as fast. It's definitely darker in color, right? Thin that down just a little bit. See how we're moving faster. That's the milk stage, where it's darker and thicker. They coffee. And where a darker value. These would be your mid tone values in a painting. So let's just go ahead and fill that circle in there. That's nice. Light, little bit darker, quite a bit darker. K now, not only are we can for Cream, make the paint darker, but we're going to make it thicker. So it's going to not move as quickly on our board and it's gonna be darker in color value. So if you think about cream, if you have cream and you knock it over, it's going to kind of puddle little bit if you had just a little bit of cream, right? See how much slower that's moving. If I drag my brush through it, it takes, well, let's see. It's not playing along here. It's slower to, to come back. And it doesn't run as fast as coffee or tea, coffee and milk. So I'm just going to thicken this up just a little bit more. We want that to run really slow. But not B. Thick and sticky. See it still runs, it's still puddles. That's a nice consistency there for cream. So we're going to take that and we're going to fill that right in. That cream box or circle, whatever you chose to paint. I chose circles because I had a washi tape here. It's like, Oh, I can just trace that real quick. I always paint this lesson with my students because once I learned how to control Consistency, sorry about my sniffles, I'm still getting over that. Once I learned pink consistency, it really helped me become a better painter. It helped me in my value scales when painting, I got out of the lines there quite a bit. Let's make the best circle that you can. Okay. There we go. Okay, so that's cream Light, little bit light, little darker, a little darker. K, We're getting into close to the main color that this would be straight out of the tube. Okay, now I'm going to set my paint palette down. Because what I'm gonna do is I'm going to, I want to make my brush, a thirsty brush case. I'm going to clean my brush out and I'm going to tap it so it's still wet. I don't want to go straight into that paint. And I don't want you to dip down in here. I don't want you to have water in your brush. I just wanted to if you have your tube of paint, that would be even better. Just take the paint right out of your tube. But this should be nice and sticky. You should be very thick. Your brush. Okay. And I did not have any dripping water. I've wiped all the water out of my brush. So this is straight paint. And the more I rub it in here, the thicker it's going to become in the my brush. So you really want to be able to see that paint in the brush. You can see it here in the head. Okay. Go ahead and paint in your butter. And it should be, you should be able to tell a big difference in the way that paints and covers in the butter stage. Now if you're using an Arches paper or a rough paper, or you're gonna get some really good texture here. Butter is good for the dry brush stage. So if you take your belly of your brush and just skip it across your paper, it shows the texture through your paper. Let me see if I can't be phones disconnected here. Shoot. Okay. Let's bring this in. If I can zoom this in here, you can see they'll be able to see your individual brushstrokes with butter because it's very thick. It's almost like painting with acrylic paint. Watery acrylic paint, of course. But then you'll get these nice brushstrokes. Okay, I've got some puddle and happen in here on my cream. I'm just going to take and make that a thirsty brush. And then I'm just going to set it here on the side and my brush will soak it up. So I won't have any puddles. So we don't want puddles on there. We want to be able to see that the best they can so we can see. So you can definitely see that there's a color change, mostly on if in-person. But you should be able to see a dark value here between cream and butter. So you'll start out, these would be your skies, your water. And then you'd move in to your distant mountains, trees. These would definitely be everything in your foreground. 9. Paint Consistency Continued: We do need a separate container of clean water. For this next step k. I'm going to zoom this back out again so we can see our project here. I want to see me. So I have clean water and my dirty water. So what I'm gonna take, I'm gonna take my hockey brush here. And we're gonna go because I have creams set up here in my palette. We're going to go backwards now. So we're going to take this hockey brush. And I'm gonna move my clamp because I have a feeling this is going to want a bow on me. So if you're, if you're doing this in a sketchbook, make easter, you have some clamps to clamp down these edges. If you are doing it on a piece of paper or another way to make sure that you've I'm sorry to throw this in here late, but you'll want to have taped down your paper. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to lay down a nice even coat of water down here. Yeah. I'm glad I put that on there because it wants to go on me a little bit. We're going to, I don't want any puddles. I just want a nice even coat of water because we're going to do is introduce this paint thicknesses to this water and see how it responds there. Okay. So we're going to start right out of the bat. Should have left my brush out, but we're gonna go right one to make that a thirsty brush, right back into that cream and load your brush backup. Again, don't get any water in it. Don't dip it down in your water to thin it. Because we want to, we're going to take that butter and we're going to introduce it into the water. And we want to see what that does. I'm going to paint a rectangle here. Now you can see that it's bleeding out. But it's really quite staying right here where I'm putting it. Let's see if I can zoom this in here for you. Okay. So it didn't bleed, but it's pretty much staying right here. We're going to drop down. I'm just wet my brush here. And what we have here is cream. Remember we have cream in our palette. So I'm going to take the cream and I'm going to put the cream in the water strip and write that in there. And you can see that the cream because it's wet, is bleeding out a lot faster. It's a thinner paint k. So we're going to go backwards and take our cream here and we're gonna make it the milk stage. So it's still pretty dark. Moves a lot faster than the cream. But it is thinner and lighter. So I go No, no. Okay. Let's mix that back up again. So because it ran. So get back down in here to the milk stage where it's kind of thick but it moves fast. We're going to paint that in right here. I might have to move these over. I do have a bit. I just use the same brush. Do have a bit of a puddle there. Okay. So when you hit the milk and the water, it spreads out quickly except for where I got it. There in that puddle. It's spread out quickly. It's a lot thinner than the cream. Okay, so we're going to go down and make this. Now, I can see, I can see that my paper is starting to dry out, so I'm just going to spritz it a little bit right there. If yours is drying out, go ahead and either re-wet it with clean water with your brush or if you have a spray bottle, but don't spray over here. Okay. So we're going to thin this down again. Go back into the Make this in, I'm going to bring this out. And to make this thinner up here in this corner, we want to be in the coffee stage. So we're going to bring a little bit of the color up. But it's quite, really quite runny, right? Right in here. For coffee. If I tap my brush, it comes out pretty, pretty easy. This is coffee. I'm going to put that on the water. We should see it bleed out a lot quicker and find those edges of the paper there as well, except for I've got a puddle. Okay? Okay, and then with t is our lightest where this value, someone just take a little bit. Fact, what I have in my brush is probably enough for the T stage. And we'll just introduce it right there. You can see it's very watery and it's just going to wet. It's going to follow. It will take a minute. I'm going to hit this with a blow dryer and let it dry. And then we'll go ahead and compare and talk about how it does here. Okay, So now we're dry here. We can really compare them. If you look in the tea on the wet on dry and the T on the wet on wet. It really spread out into where you can hardly see that there's any color tone there. It will always do that. Wet on dry is always going to paint a little bit darker than wet on wet. And it will continue to just bleed out and find wherever there's wet and it will stop. So if you have a hard line and you haven't gotten clear to the edge of your page, you will get a straight line where your waterline is, but where it was in-between. You can see how wonderful we have soft edges here, okay? So our T and our coffee, I'm going to draw just a little v here. And they are our lightest values. Okay? Our coffee and milk. I'm going to draw another V here. So we know that these two, these two are our mid-tone values. Now if you want to print this up and do a printed on a printer, that's all fine and well too. I like to just have this in my sketchbook. And I do this with my students so they can really see how that consistency is going to work when we do a wet on wet, because most of my projects I like to do landscapes. So we do a lot of wet on wet painting. Our cream. There's definitely a color difference and all of these are cream and milk. And sorry for the loud row road. Or our mid to dark values. And then our butter and cream. There are darkest values. K. Again, this is great for dry brushing. Now, when you get into the butter stage, butter stage will completely cover pencil. And it will complete, for the most part, it will almost. If your light enough with your pencil, you can get away with cream and butter both covering pencil. You can see the outline of your pencil marks on milk, coffee, and especially with T. So in these areas, if you're ever drawing anything, you're going to need to either really makes sure that you have a light under sketch or you can go in. Sometimes. Sometimes depending on the paper. And this one we'll sometimes depending on the paper, you can use your kneaded eraser. Okay. And you can erase out that pencil to get rid of your pencil lines. But just know with tea, coffee, and milk, you're going to see your pencil lines. This gives us a really good object lesson in how your paint in different thicknesses. That's what I mean by consistency. The thickness of your paint, how it reacts with water and how it also paints on wet, on dry. And then when you will use these tones, so this is always something good to have as a reference. And something I wish I would've known from the very beginning. But I learned to, like I said, I learned it quite a bit into I'm after I learned a lot of techniques and this would have been handy to know. Okay, how do I mixed up these panoramics up this paint to get a light tone. You know, how is it going to react if I, if I put a creamy or consistency, there's something that I noticed with some of my students. They weren't somewhat paint when we'd start first painting. Like are even first, for example, when we did some color swatching, I would have some students that would paint really light. And they would be painting in the coffee and milk stage. And then I had some that would paint really dark. And so once they learn this lesson, then it leveled that playing filled out and we could all paint the same picture. All have a little bit different look, but we can pretty close to have the same picture when we were done. So this is the, the consistency that I have in my watercolor sketch book. The very first one I did that I use a lot. I've done it many times. I'm not going to pull them all out. Just show you. I know I have at least two more sketchbooks with this with different students that I've done. So this is watercolor consistency and how it reacts with wet on dry and wet on wet 10. Intro To Watercolor Basic & Supplies: Hello and welcome to this class on watercolor basics. I'm so glad that you're here today and gonna be with us as we go over this lesson. This is one of my favorite lessons to teach. And I think it's very crucial before I jump in with any painting with my students, I make sure that they do this exercise. Alright, well we're going to start. The first thing that we're gonna go over real quick is our supplies. Today we're going to use a size 14. This I save. Then if you have one, I'm going to use a one-and-a-half inch hockey brush. But if you don't have one, you can paint it in with your size 14. Worry about that. If you don't have one of these, this will do everything that you need today. But I am going to use this. Things that you're going to need. You're going to need a small bottle or a spray bottle. I like to paint on ceramic as it moves really well. But if you have just the pellet, something that you can mix your paints on, that would be great. I have two glasses of water here, one from my dirty water, and one for my clean water. This is a piece of 140 pounds, 300 GSM. Go home. 100% cotton Academy paper. You don't have to use 100% cotton. I did do this exercise on actually I've done it several times, but I've had camera problems each time. So I've done it on cotton, I've done it on acid free, and I've done it on hot press. So you use what you have. I would suggest not starting out on hot press as it's the hardest to paint on. But I would suggest if you haven't gone out and bought your paper and you're thinking about painting this here with us in the future, I'd either get cold press paper or 100% cotton. It's just gonna be easier than the hot pressed. And I'll show you why later. So we've got our brushes, I've got a rag, wipe my brushes on. If you have paper towels that will work. So here's my water and I'm going to use my Paul Rubin paints today. So you use whatever paints you have. I'm just going to use these because they're here and it's convenient to just use it right out the tree. So let's jump in. I'm super excited 11. Wet On Wet Sample: Let's jump in. I'm super excited for this. So what is wet on wet? Wet on wet is when we take the paper and we wet the surface and then we add paint to it. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to take some clean water. And I'm just going to paint a circle on this, on this side of the paper. Now, you will be able to see your circle because it will be, it'll have a nice shine in a sheen to it. Can you see that and see if I can get it to there we go. Reflect right there and you can see that circle has a nice sheen. You shouldn't have any puddles. K. It should just be a nice circle. And you can see that it's nice and shiny. That's what we want for wet and wet. Wet on wet. I'm gonna take I'm gonna use a let's see. Let's go with a scarlet red. Actually this is red matter. I have to look at the right color on my wheel here because I changed some of the colors. So this is read matter. This is a semi-opaque. And as you can see, because this is wet when I hit it with this paintbrush in there, it's going to come alive and spread. We're going to take this and we've gone over paint consistencies already. So this is in between milk and our orange juice or coffee. And you can see as I hit it in that water, but it will just bleed and move around. Now what's cool is anywhere that I painted water this red will go it will not go past it. So wet paint always follows a wet. Wet follows wet. So anywhere that you have wet paint, wet, wet surface on your paper, wet, the paint will travel there even when you think it's dry. But if you touch it with the back of your hand and that surface is cold, any coolness to it at all. That means that your paper is still wet and you do not want to touch it with a paintbrush or any kind of liquid on your brush, paint or water until that surface is no longer cold. What I'm trying to do here is just make a nice even wash. I go back and forth, try to get it as smooth and as even as possible. And this watercolor will continue to move around and bleed around. And as long as my paint surface is shining, see if I can pick that up and show you again. It's got that nice sheen to it. It's got that nice glistening sheen to it. As long as it's got that wet surface, we can continue to work that circle. Now. If this was a big surface, the pit area that you painted first will have already started to dry. But as long as this is shiny, you can work on it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to rinse my brush out on a tap it on my paper towel here. I do that for two reasons. I do it to see if my brush is clean. Because you can see, see, I've still got red on my brush. I'm going to rinse that really good in the dirty water. Rinse it in the clean water. Okay, I can see here that my I don't want my brush to be really sopping wet. So you can see here that this is still nice and shiny. It has a very wet sheen to it. So I am okay to go ahead and pick up another color. So let's see. I want to take, let's take some allylic or a purple color here. And we're just going to be here. Now whenever you introduce paint into a wet surface, you either want to have at the same consistency that you have or a little bit thicker. Because if you put too runny of paint in there, it's going to push that paint away and it's going to cause a cauliflower or Blossom. You can see here that paint is moving. So anywhere that we introduced this peripheral, it will just move and play around. So I'm just going to mix this thing because I want a shadow down, down this side of the circle. Now what you don't want is if your paint is getting a little bit thick here, see, I've got a little bit of a roll of paint. You don't want to have a roll of paint anywhere because that has more pain in that area. It's going to leave you with a little bit of an imperfection. Let me grab some ultra marine Now I can see in this area of my painting, it's starting to get less shiny. So that's telling me that I'm running out of time with being able to work on this. I'm just going to drop some ultramarine in here, ultramarine as a granulating color. It's one of my favorites to work on because it will, these two colors will kind of separate as it dries, give a really pretty, pretty effect. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna quit right here. I think this is going to lift up some of that rolled edge down here because I don't want that dripping. Okay. So this is wet on wet when you can play with it and that paint will continue to move around. You can get some beautiful color washes, which we're going to talk about down here and a little bit. Okay? So you can see these colors in here. I'm still shiny. So if I wanted to, I can work on it, but I'm starting I can see that, that that water and paint is starting to soak into that paper. And soon here, I don't want to cause any blossoming. I'm going to stop right there. Okay. I'm going to grab some more water. We're gonna do it again. And this time we're going to paint a big rectangle. Now. I just put clean water on here, but my water's little bit tinted. You don't know if you can see that in the camera, but that's okay. Sometimes it helps you see where you're putting your water. If you have a little bit attuned. However, if you're doing a soft edge, I will show you where I had some tint or dirty water and it causes a problem. But up here it's not going to be a problem because I'm going to paint in this whole area. I'm going to switch over here to, let's see, back to my wheel. I'm going to use a yellow IC. Let's go with this. Is it. So yellow? You could use a cadmium yellow. So it's your mid tone, It's not lemon yellow. And this particular one, I'm not going to blend it. I'm just going to drop it in. And I want the paint to do what the paint is going to do. This is kind of some of the spawn spontaneous color painting that I love. The unpredictability. You can control watercolor to a point. If you know the techniques, but you do have to relinquish a little bit of control. Let's put some orange in here. This is permanent orange. You don't have permanent orange. You could use orange, yellow, orange, red, and cadmium orange. I'm just going to drop some orange in here and let it do what it's gonna do down in here into the milky consistency. Because I want, there you go. I want that to move around a little bit more. Now I'm going to wash my brush out completely in the dirty in the clean. Tap it a little bit on the side, see if I can bring that down little bit. I just kinda drag it on the side. I'm not totally getting all the water out of my brush. And now I'm gonna go over to ultra marine again. And let's make that a coffee. Coffee stage. I'm going to drop this in now. I'm not going to mix it. Because if I mix that or that blue, but that orange, I'm gonna get a green brown. And I don't want that. I just wanted to to spread around naturally on its own and give us some pretty colors. I don't want to mix it with yellow because I don't want green. But I do want that look of blue and orange together. I think it's kind of pretty sometimes when it has been contrast in colors. Now, blue or blue is not completely a contrast in color. Orange and purple would be contrasting colors, but they do have enough of a contrast that they do make each other pop. And that's why I like to eat with them and just drop some more color in there. I want that bridge, it's spreading out. I want the rich mess of that blue. I'm still pretty shiny up there, so go back and get some more yellow. I'm dropping some more yellow here. Those colors play. And be alive and move around. It'll give us this really cool tie-dye effect on marbling. Look in effect. Okay, So we look at our circle is no longer shiny. It's nice and Matt now, well, it's got a little bit of a sheen to it, but I wouldn't touch it. Now our block next to it is super-duper, shiny and super-duper runny. So I don't want to move it around too much because that paint will move. But they wanted to show you that this one is no longer as shiny as this. So we don't want to mess with that anymore. And this is going to start, this stem here is actually starting to dry. And I want to wipe up some of these puddles. Now, this is called a thirsty brush. When you take your brush and you tap it out, it's still wet. But if you take it and you debit along that paint, it will lift those puddles out. It'll just drink it up like a thirsty, thirsty brush. Now because I picked that up and move that around. I did get the green brown that I wasn't after. And I can show you in some of the other ones when we compare them what I was after. So if you don't want your paints to move around, don't move your board. Her Don't move your paint as much. But that's okay. 12. Wet On Dry Sample: So I'm going to take some of this bright lemon yellow. Now we're gonna go into wet and dry. So with wet and dry, you just paint directly on the paper. Okay. And we're gonna make another rectangle here. Now, I like to stay in my paint consistency. The majority of the time I paint in the milky stage. If I'm not telling you what stage that I'm painting in, that's where I'm at. Okay. Now, one thing I want to tell you is when we first put it down, it was wet on dry. But I had some what more wet up here. So I went back in and brought it back down. But this is going to start drawing before I get down to here. So I'm not going to touch this anymore. I'm just going to let it dry. Now over here, I'm just going to take some more of that yellow and take the tip of my brush. And I'm just going to draw some yellow lines through here. It out. Clean it on my clean air, clean water. And I'm going to grab some yellow, orange. And I'm just going to paint few orange lines across there. And you can see here what I'm gonna do, I'm just going to go down the color wheel and then paint some red. If they bleed together, That's okay. I'm just going to paint a couple of them. If you want to downsize and use your size eight on these lines. If you're worried about making straight lines, getting a real thin line, you're more than welcome to do that. I'm just, I'm just drawn some lines on here because what I want to show you is that when that paint is completely dry, we'll be able to paint over it. Now, see right here. Because I hit because I hit that red and the purple, they're bleeding together. And that's okay, That's fun. Now, take that thirsty brush again and just lift some of that. I want to do it too much because I'll lift the paint out, but it's running there, so okay. So let's go back up here and finish our wet on dry and we will be done. So okay. What do we need? We need our pen, okay? Since this is dry, I'm gonna do this part and work right to left because I'm or left to right because I'm right-handed. I'm just going to take here in this yellow box and draw a little flower. And you can draw your flower however you want. I'm just going to do mine like a daisy. I'm just it's just a little just showing you that you can draw on wet paints for wet on dry. You can paint on wet paint for wet on dry. Like to just make some scribbles sometimes. And you can paint different colors on wet on dry. That is totally dry. Hay. So when you paint on wet on dry, it won't move at all. Let's take some crimson red or this is permanent red. Permanent red is an opaque color. So this is not going to be see-through. It'll stay pretty dark. For the most part. This is my size eight brush, but I can still hear it a really fine point. And because I loaded up the belly of my brush, all that paint will flow down to that point. But it doesn't come out unless I touch it on the paper. Move it out of there, but that's okay. So you can paint other colors, not just layer the color itself, but you can paint other colors over wet on dry. Any anyone that is wet or dry for that matter. As long as you do it carefully. And you don't push too hard. You can. And you have good paints. If you have cheap paints, some cheap paints will lift really easily. Okay, So there is our little flower there. I'm going to just paint some strokes over this colors over here so you can see. And you can do the same as well. I'm going to switch, got some green there. You can see the colors through your paintings there. Let's see, Let's get a little bit. How many blue? So let's do some failover. We'll just draw this way across. So you can see all of those different colors in there. Now, because I went over the blue arrow for the green, I'm gonna get some bleeding here. But I'm not gonna get any bleeding on those colors that are underneath because they're completely dry 13. Intentional Color Bleeding Circles: Alright, now we're gonna do something fun. I call this intentional color bleeding, or color bleeding, but I'm going to intentionally make these colors bleed together. So I'm going to start here with a light yellow, lemon yellow. And then I'm just gonna put contrast in colors by each other. And we're just going to paint circles. Now I'm going to be in between coffee and milk. More, I would say to the coffee stage, not so creamy milk. But I want these circles to have some. We're going to paint right on wet, on dry, but I want these circles to have some paint in them. I don't want them to be totally dry. Circle. I wanted to have a little bit of paint still in that. So I want to get it as smooth as I can. I'm going to take the next color in Wikis. You kinda have to work fast. I'm going to take and go over to an ultra marine blue. I choose ultramarine Noah, It's my favorite. You could use a fellow Fellows, a really bright color that would be a pretty one. K. And I'm just going to a small circle up here, but I'm going to intentionally kiss them together because I want to see what that color is going to do. Because wet paint follows wet paint and that yellow circle is still wet. So they'll either push into each other or they'll bleed into each other. And you never really know what they're gonna do. That's what's fun about this exercise. I'm going to drop down to my size eight brush because this is just a smaller area. When you have a smaller area, you generally paint with a smaller brush. Okay, so over by blue, I'm going to put an orange here. I'm going to kiss it up next to the orange one up. That's so pretty. I'm going to kiss it next to the orange one and I'm gonna kiss it up to that blue one. And I'll see what the blue, the orange went into that and oranges going into the yellow. The orange went into the blue. Okay, clean my brush. I'm gonna go with, I don't know, let's do a rose red. And we'll just paint it up here. Let's see what this one does. We want to keep it away from that rectangle up there at the top because that is still wet Even though It's starting to not be shining anymore, there's no shine to it that is still wet. And if I were to touch it, it would make that pink move and we would get a cauliflower in there. So a cauliflower is a blossom or a let's see, they call it a blossom, cauliflower, a background. And depending on what you're doing, will depend on whether or not you want that back from there. I think this one right here. I'm just going to paint some water. Want to see what happens when I paint? Just a little happen to see if the water went into the paint or the paint went into the water. To follow the water. It followed our role. Wet paint follows wet water. Lift some of that out because I got quite a puddle. There we go. Okay, that was fun. Alright, let's take some green. Green is not a color that you see in nature very much. So I like to paint with it when I can. It's like it's going to move into the piece that it's nice and smooth that out. Well, it's still a purple. I got a lot on my brush there so I can quit. I'm going to do is wipe that back in my tray. Always like to wipe my paint to it right into my water because you're losing money. If I have if I know I have a lot of paint in my brush, I'll wipe it down in the tree. Okay, Let's see. Can we do red and green are contrasting. Think of our color wheel. They are opposite of each other. So that's why reading greener Christmas Colors, they pop and make each other stand out. That's what a contrast in color does is it makes it takes the other color next to it stand out. It looks like the red is going to go into the green and the purple. So you get the idea of this exercise. We want it to just one way. If you didn't want a color swatch in squares like we did earlier, you can color swatch in, in circles and let them bleed together. And then you have your colors that you have painted with, you know what they look on your paper, but you can also see, I wanted to do together. Okay, Let's do the red. This is one of those things that if you just want to de-stress and you don't want to have to worry about the masterpiece. Sometimes. I like to color theory, which is along the lines of this. But sometimes just painting. Circles can be therapeutic. The stressor. Okay. Stay low. Contrast in colors. Blue is so pretty. That's another one of those that is a really bright color. And you don't always find in nature. So with that exercises like this, that's interesting that that orange really rebuild that blue, couldn't get it up there in that corner, pushed it away. You notice that or not? Okay. Let's do another one. Let's get another color and then we'll do a water one. So let's do another yellow, lemon yellow and really went on that one. Now we'll just do a thirsty brush. This time I won't really. We'll just see how much that will follow. Barely touched it. And it's not sopping wet, so we'll just let it move on its own and fill that in, see what the bubble looks like. 14. Color Layering / Glazing: Okay, here's where we're going to talk about color layer. Now when you do color layering, we're going to do it in this next section. Because we don't use white. If you think about other painting like oils or acrylics, when you want to lighten your paint, you start by adding white to your color. We don't do that in watercolor. With watercolor, you start out with your lightest value and will deepen the saturation with each layer that we do. So when your watercolor dries, it's always going to dry lighter than you think that you've painted it. So I can tell you, right now, this is going to dry lighter and it's not gonna be this dark. Okay, so let's go with the purple. And how do we make our purple light? We add water, we want it very few can see that. It's very runny. That's what we want. We want we've done that water consistency. We're in the T stage. Oh, I dropped down there. See, this is a background. I can fix that though because it hasn't been too long. I'll show you how to fix that real quick. What I'm gonna do is I'm just going to take a little bit thicker paint than I have on there. If I were to put the lottery on there, it's just going to make that horse that background worse. So I'm just gonna go over it. Well, it's still down. A little bit of a thicker paint on that. So when I layered this one, I'll just have to remember that. I'm going to be a little bit because it always, it's already got a layer of paint here. I'm just going to have this one layer or more than the rest of them. Let's see, I got that background out only because I caught it right away and it's not a big area. If it was a big, huge area, I'm just most likely let it go or I'd wait for it to dry, 100% totally dry, and then go back in and put some layering in there and you can fix it that way. That's definitely down the road and the skill level. Watercolors blossom. Okay, we're gonna take some cerulean blue. And again, we're in the T stage, very light. And we'll just go with the very, very watery stage. Nice and light. No puddles. Try to smooth that out as soft as you can so your brushstrokes don't show. So nice. Flat wash is what this is called, flat wash. Okay, Then we'll take those red cells. Now that's too, too dark for what I'm after. I want that really almost the peak value, right? That is our first wash. We're going to do that three more times, but we have to wait for that to completely dry. We will work on these other ones that while those dry. Okay, now we're gonna go back up here to this layering color while these dry. So we're going to take some of that green. Remember we made it super light on what we're gonna do is we're gonna do a cross-section now. And we're going to paint that right over top. Now, this is very light. You don't want to scrub as your paint. You don't want to put very much pressure on. Because zoom this in here. It will lift your paint if you're too hard with these brushstrokes. Okay, so next we're going to do purple or violet color. Again, very watery, very light, very much in the tea. Consistency Hey, we're gonna do a cross-section back and forth. Try to keep it as, even as you can. If you can do it in one pass, that's great. For nice. Even wash that up right there. Thirsty, thirsty brush. Okay, now let's go on to the blue. Civilian blue. Again, very light, very watery. Now you can glaze color like glazing and layering with thicker paint. But I wanted to show you what. But how we'd like if we were gonna do a botanical painting or something with very light, like a rose petals in the very background that looks like the light is coming through them. They're gonna be this lightest value that we have here. So that's why I want to try to teach you to paint from your lightest value. Multiple layers to make your paint darker. Okay, let's go to lemon yellow. Again. We want to have that nice and watery, too much pigment even there in mind. Got it. Right here. That's too much pigment there. So I'm just going to water that down. And then do a cross-section right across that yellow square. Very light. Two hairs and some air. Bob Ross. I've loved watching him my whole life. Oil paintings, not easy letter where he says, But I did my toe and a little bit last year. And I only did two paintings. So maybe, maybe maybe I'll try it later again. Okay, so into the rows, rows, rib, and we'll put a little bit cross section of that square root. Finish that up. But we're gonna go back up here and put in our third and final layer of these colors. So let's start with the thaler green. Again, very watery, very light. You can tap it with the back of your hand. If it's cold. They're not dry yet. So just go in really light. I'm laying in that last layer paint. Okay. Where's the green? That's the wrong peripheral across they're not twist in it. You need the lie. That would make a big, big difference on our purple verifies that the wrong color. Wash it that are just going to spell it in half again. And try not the best with it. And lift, because it'll lift that layer, which I may have done a little bit right there. And let's see if we can see that. If you can see that line, I can fix it by dropping in a little bit more. I don't want to touch it too much. It will continue to move around and lift up what we've just put down. Okay, we're gonna leave it a go. Alright, now let's go to the civilian blue. This brand of civilian is not all Rubin. For some reason, paul Reagan didn't think it needed to have a cerulean blue and I use it all the time. So I put my master touch in there and I just am not like in that version of civilian blue, have a hard time weaken it up. Hey, there's this civilian blue, that third layer on there. Tap it out if I can lift up that. Now let's do the yellow. Might have enough yellow there. It's nice and watery consistency and lay it in their show. And I don't have enough thickness. Layer, yellow. And our third and final layer of the rows. I have a tulip that I painted from a wonderful teacher here on Skillshare that did botanical paintings and it was so pretty and this tulip that we painted had about ten layers of paint, at least on these petals. And it was so pretty. And it was all done by putting a layer down, letting it dry, putting another layer down letting it dry. We can do some amazing techniques with glazing and create some beautiful paintings. We're down to our two last boxes. So let's go on to gradient color washes, and then we'll finish up with soft edges 15. Gradient Color Wash / Ombre': I have a completely different piece of paper. I've taped it all down, like I've advised you to do, which I didn't do in the last video. I apologize greatly. I am sick. I hope you will forgive me about my voice. So let's try this again and see if the 100th time is the charm here. So I've taken my orange and I have it in mixed in the consistency of milk. I have my board prompt just on a piece of tape. I have a propped up, as they would say, at about a 30 degree angle. That's gonna help the water run down. We're going to start with the wet on dry method. This method is a little bit harder. What I would say is that I don't want you to get frustrated because this is a technique that takes lots of practice and lots of time to master. And we're just doing a little strip. Generally, when you do this technique, you do it in a big, large area and you cover your skies or water. But I do want you to practice this in both ways and you decide which one is easier for you. Now for me, I prefer wet on wet. I just get a nice graduated wash that way. But I want to teach you both methods. You can practice them. I would do this over and over multiple times. So what we're gonna do here is I have turned my board obviously from the last orientation and you guys had wet on wet, wet on dry. We did the gradient color, intentional color bleeding with the circles than we had the glazing. Now we're at gradient color washes, the ombre effect. Okay? So what we do is with wet on dry, it is important that we start with a thick consistency like this. And I'm going to start up here at the top. Now, you're lying there was the blocks of the color glaze k. So do this one right at the top. So you know that this is the wet on dry. Okay. I'll do it right here and pretend like this is my line. So what we're gonna do is we're going to really load up your brush. And you can see, when I load up my brush, I really drag that belly of the brush across the top in that paint k. So when I touch it, it's really the loaded. Now what we're gonna do here when we do a wet on dry is we're going to start at the top. It isn't important that as we bring it down, that we have a bead of paint here. Okay. It's starting to roll down, so I'm getting a little bit of paint here. So what is important is that we keep that beat of paint. So I'm just going to bring this down until my beat of paint starts to get a little bit thinner. Then I'm going to quickly put some more water here on my hand, a little bit thinner. Okay, so now I have thinner paint and when you do this technique, you kinda have to work quickly. That's why it, again, this is not my favorite k, But we started low. Now I'm backing that thinner paint into that bead of paint. And now I'm pulling that down and making a new beat of paint. And I'm going to pull it down gradually. And as you see, I'm starting to get a color change, right? So we can pull that down until I'm starting, my bead is starting to get thin. And it's definitely changing as we're bringing that down. I still have my bead. Can you see that row of paint? I'm gonna get my brush wet again. I'm going to add more water to that mixture. And you can see where I'm bringing it down. I've still got my beat of paint and it's getting lighter and lighter. One thing that's important that I struggle with still to this day is being a fuss bucket. This is where the perfectionist in me really wants to make this perfect. And with watercolors sometimes you have to let that go. So if I were to take my brush and go back up into this top, into here where I've done, this is already dry It's complete. It's a lot drier than way down here at the bottom. So if I were to go in and touch that, I'm gonna get a blossom, It's going to move. It's going to ruin that all. Okay. So you can kind of see my brush strokes, It's okay. I'm just going to take a little bit more water because I can't talk too much here. Okay, That's really ready now you can see how much that moves around. But it's important that you don't go back up in to that wash. So this is one reason I'm not a big fan of this particular method. Did we achieve a darker to lighter wash? Yes. But I'm going to show you a better wait for me. I prefer this way. Now I'm going to take this, my thirsty brush. Remember we talked about a thirsty brush and I'm just going to wipe up that bead because if I leave it there that wet, we'll move back as it dries up into that dryer paint. And it'll just give you grief and give your background and a line and you're going to hate me. Now, see, mine is not perfect. I've got a darker section. We got lighter. I introduce water up. Now here I have a little bit darker section and then it went lighter again. This takes practice, lots and lots of practice case. I don't want you to get frustrated, but I want you to practice it. Now I'm going to show you the way that I prefer to do it. If you don't have your hake brush, you can just use this brush here. But I'm going to use my hake brush king. So I'm going to take water and I'm going to paint a strip down this side. Okay. I'm just going to paint it down. This is where taping your board down. It's very beneficial. Because if you don't, your paper is going to work because we're putting water on it. And even with the tape, it's trying to buckle on me. So what I'm doing is I'm just wetting this surface and I've got a nice sheen on it. You can check it from both sides. You just tip your body a little bit and make sure you have a nice sheen. That's all I'm gonna do with that brush now. But I have a strip that's the same width as this. It's just right here in water. Okay. So I'm gonna go back here and I'm going to thicken that up again, back to the milk stage. I'm not going to dip into this again. I'm going to load my brush. Okay? Now if you're doing a big sky, you would have to get a bigger brush. Obviously, you'd use your hake brush to do this and go back and forth. Okay, so we're just going to take this brush. Now. My paper because I've been chatting here. This is where you have to work fast, is already starting to dry. So I'm just looking to see where my waterline was. I'm going to start here. And I'm just going to go back and forth. Now what that water on there is gonna do. It's gonna help this gravity of course, is going to move it. Okay? But it's going to naturally smooth out those lines as I've brought it down. And it's going to dilute the paint in my brush naturally. I'm just going to try to make it here. To the end. I'm gonna get a little bit of line there. I lifted, I can see it already. K. Now this piece of paper that I have is not 100% cotton. Okay? I'm not going to mess with it. I really, really, really want to come in here. And I think what I'll do is just tap it. I don't want to push it back and forth in there because it will it's already starting to dry on me. I just want to soak that up with a thirsty brush and get that line off there. Okay? Alright, that's where the first bucket and means coming. Now you can see as this is drying, I've got a lot more gradients, right? You can see the difference in the two k. This one just looks premier smoother. I don't see as many brushstrokes. It definitely goes from dark to light on the wet on wet. Now our wet on dry also goes from dark to light, but it's not as smooth and as creamy here as this gradient wash, right? So that's why I prefer this method. It's just a lot easier. You get a better transition, I feel. But I'd like you to practice both of these. You can do it on this paper, but on your own time. Practice this technique. Okay, now we're gonna go on to soft edges 16. Soft Edges: So I took a minute here and when it got me a container and changed out my water. So we've been painting a lot. If you want to take a minute here and go change your water from when we started, that's fine. Just go ahead and pause it and I'll wait with the wonderful world of technology here. Okay, So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my hake brush and I'm going to wash it out and I'm going to grab some clean water. And I'm going to pretend like this is section off to K. So this bottom box here, I want you to paint a full square of water. Just being a nice even wash of water with no puddles. Okay? So just make sure that your seam of your paper doesn't have any puddles and there's no standing water, but it's nice and wet. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna do a son. So when I paint skies a lot, I love to paint landscapes and cityscapes. And this paper's drain, so I need to talk fast, but I like this technique because it gives you a son that looks hazy and foggy. So I'm going to take yellow on my brush. It's about the consistency of milk. K I usually paint in milk stage if I don't say it. And I'm going to paint a circle here. And I'm going to leave the center white as best that I can make a circle. And it's going to fill that in a little bit because that whole sections wet on wet and that's okay. So I'm gonna take that yellow paint and I'm just going to brush it around. And what it's gonna do is it's going to travel to where there's no more water, right? We've talked about wet on wet. It's going to give me a nice fuzzy edge. I'm going to take a little bit darker yellow. The first one was lemon yellow. Now I'm gonna make this gradient k. So I'm just going to take some darker yellow and blend it in here. Whether you want those hazy circle lines. I'll leave that up to you whether you want to blend those out or leave them in. But just keep in mind of where the edge of your square is. I'm going to take a little bit darker orange. This is, I'm permanent orange, so it's a little bit stepped down and it's going to be bright. So I'm going to start out here and then back it up. Now I can see in my box here that it is drying already. Really well. I can see that line starting to move in. So I'm going to stop fussing with it here. Okay. Now this is still wet. I see a little bit of a sheen, but I want to stop and it's going to still continue to bleed out. Alright, so I'm going to leave that alone now. So now we're gonna go over here and we're going to paint a little bird. Alright. This is gonna be easy birds, so don't freak out if you see ****, I can't paint. I can't paint a bird. I don't want you to worry about it. Okay. I'm gonna take I'm gonna take a little bit of water here because I can see I've got a hard edge. Now really want to make sure that my brush is washed and it's thirsty. And I'm just going to run that wet brush right here along that edge of that sun. Trying to be very careful not to lift into it, but I do want that to bleed out a little bit more and not have a hard edge there. So I'm just running a thirsty brush right along the edge of that and it'll blend in nicely. Okay? Alright, it's really starting to dry on that square. So I'm not going to class. I'm a fuss buckets, as I've mentioned earlier, so I'm going to try to leave that alone. Okay, now I'm going to spend my wheel over here and I'm gonna go to cobalt blue. And I'm just going to pick up, we're going to paint this one on wet, on dry. So what you're going to need in this section is a water bottle. This is where the spray bottle comes in K, we haven't used it so far, but we're going to use it now. So I'm gonna take, I'm in between coffee and, and milk over here. And on this side, I'm just going to paint a little head. So it's gonna be just a little circle. We're just going to think shapes here for a minute. So this is a circle and this is wet on dry. So that's going to have a hard edge on it right here and that's okay. That's what we want on this little guy's head. And there's 100%, no, this is not cotton. This acid free paper Is second my painting pretty fast. So it's going to dry fast. It's I can't work this papers as long as cotton case, I'm going to grab some more. Now. I'm going to paint a little oval connected to that head. Okay? Just think shapes for right now we're just going to paint a little bit of an oval. Now, if your wings backup into your orange because this section is in your papers down to here. Okay? If you get this bird up into this section, that's okay. Hopefully we have a little bit of dry time here between the Sun. And so if your wings go up over, it shouldn't cause too much grief into this fact. It's still a little cold, but it's still okay. So I'm gonna take, we've made a circle and an oval now appear on the top between the neck and the head. I'm just going to make a little, a little bit of an S shape and I'm going to bring it up to a point and fill it in a little bit. Okay. It's kinda fill that in. Now I'm going to make the front wing in front of it. That's the back wing and this is the frontline. So if they bleed together because they're wet and wet, That's okay. I can see where my wings. I'm going to make it a little tail here. Okay? Now what this wing, I'm going to pin it down a little bit and brush it up, brush it up, brush it up, brush it up, brush it up. Okay. Now one way to take my, I'm going to set my blue my brush down here. And I'm going to take the spray bottle. I'm going to hold it a little bit and I just want to spray right here on the edge of the wings and right here on the edge of the tile. And you can see what that's doing is it's causing this to run. And that's what we want on this particular exercise. I want that paint to hit that water that we've just painted there and introduce there. And I want it to spread and become a soft edge into that water that we just sprayed there. Okay. And into the tail. Now this is kind of an abstract way to do a bird's tail. This is not a realistic bird. This is just going to give us a nice soft edge here. Try to just hit the tail part. There we go. You can see how it's bleeding. That's kinda what I'm after. And my head and my bird is already dry. So I'm hug I want to go in and I want to fix that. But we can as you can see, he's drawing in different stages. Okay. So this is a lot drier. It's not completely dry. I'm sure if I touched it, it would really fuzz out on me, give me some grief. I can take these areas that have the puddles in them and just move them around a little bit. If I wanted to, I can wash my brush out and my dirty brush and my brush in my dirty water. Ignore my dyslexia. Okay. I'm just going to make a thirsty brush here. Now we talked about No, we haven't, we're talking about that in the next lesson. But this is lifting. I'm going, I'm kinda make some striations in the wings. I've taken wash my brush out and it's a thirsty brush. And I'm just going to drag it through that paint. Take it and drag it that way, and then drag it in that paint and you can makes them like feather separations. So if it doesn't do it well, wash your brush out, tap it off, and go back in and lift. And it'll fill in again. That's okay. Lifted up, back in, brush it out. Lift. We're going to talk about lifting in the next technique. So you're kind of getting a preview here. A little bit of a definition to that wing there before. Alright. So if we look back here, this has a really nice soft edge on it. This is a hard edge. You can see here in the head of this bird and the top of the swing. This is a nice crisp, hard edge. This is the soft edge. See how it's fuzzy. Especially down here, this is fuzzy. The inside of the Sun is nice and fuzzy. And you're getting some really cool effects and that tail and that wing where that's drying and hitting that water. Hey, it's making it nice and fuzzy and giving some textures that you can naturally do. Without the help of water, almost looks like an angel wing. I've done this with mermaid tails with my students and my kids before. Where you paint that in and you spritz it. And it gives us just kinda makes it turned kind of alive. So we're still drying here. This paper I'm going to show you here. I didn't grab it. I'll go back and above and type in what kind of paper that says this is actually a first-time that I'm using this paper. It's a Canson paper. So I'll put in I'll put in a picture of the cover, a binder pad. It's got the spiral binder and you can either leave them in or tear them out. I wanted to take this down so it didn't buckle on me. And I'm kinda getting a little bit of buckling in here. And that's okay. I think one thing that we did do and some of those other pages that we're going to compare here in a minute is some of them have a little box here. So as this is dry and I'm going to show you, I'm going to take a little bit of rose red and I'm going to just paint a box down here. The reason I'm doing this as I'm giving that bird some time to dry. So if I take a box here, I'm going to show you one more way to give you a soft edge. So I've got a hard edge here, hard edge here, hard edge on the bottom. And the paint is still wet. This is not my favorite paper for sure. Okay. So we've got a hard edge all the way around. Take my brush and we'll wash it in the water. I'm going to make it thirsty. So it's not completely dry just by tapping it here on this side. And I'm going to kind of like we did back here where we push the water from the side. I'm going to back out and paint a little bit and I'm gonna kiss the edge of that with my brush. And you'll see that it'll move into that. I'm going to get a blossom right here. I'm going to move out and give me a soft edge here. Now if I don't want it so drastic to where there's a possibility of a blossom here. Just going to take my brush is still wet and I'm just going to rub it softly along that hard edge to Harrison Samir, like Bob Ross says. So that's soften that edge and kinda got a hard edge there. So to make that softer, just dab that out, go back in and touch that with some water. Dab your brush and just bring that water out. You can see here that you've got a soft edge and a blossom. And a soft edge and a blossom. And that's okay. Because that's sometimes is in effect that we're after blossoms are not bad. In fact, there's a lot of artists like myself that love them and I love to use them. We're going to talk about blossoms here in the next section when we get into techniques. Now this paper, if this was cotton, wouldn't be getting such a drastic hard edge. There are a drastic background. This is my first time using this. So what I can do if you don't like that hard line is when this dries, you can go back in and I'm introduce another layer. But if you don't mind it and you're after that, look, I'm going to soften this edge to see if I can just do it here with out washing my brush because I just have a teeny bit of water in here and I'm just going to scrub that edge. Let's see what happens on this one. I've read, I've taken off that line. Let's see if we get a better one there. Right. Now we're getting really close to being done. Just wash off your brush and wipe it off here and we'll grab some yellow and give the bird a little beak. Let's give him some legs up. It's going to run into that red. I hit that red. Don't worry about that. Okay. Just don't hit the body because if you hit the body, it'll go back into the body. Now I'm going to grab my liner brush and we're going to just grab a little black and give him an eye. And we'll be done. I am so happy that you have stuck around with me and finished this project. It was a big one. So I would love to see your painting. So if you would share it with the class, I can help you if you have any questions. I can review it and give you some feedback. If you'd like. It's always fun to see what everybody is doing it after they've taken this class. Now, let's move on to our magical textures. 17. Welcome Magical Textures: Hello and welcome to this last lesson of our journey. In this lesson, we're going to learn about creating beautiful textures. It's one of my favorite lessons to teach. I like to call it magical cut textures. Because it's, I believe it's one of the fundamental building blocks to creating amazing paintings. So grab your supplies and let's get started. 18. Set Up & Supplies: So what are some of the techniques that we're gonna be learning today? Blossoms are forced backgrounds. They're also called water splattering, salt, alcohol dropping, saving the whitespace with masking fluid, lifting, dry brushing, pouring. This is Galaxy lifting. That's what I call galaxy lifting. If I'm gonna do a galaxy painting and paint splattering. Okay, So let's jump in and get going on this. You are welcome to use whatever paints you have. Like I said, this is my favorite class to, to do. And I, whenever I start new students, they have to take this lesson before we start any paintings because I believe it's that crucial and I didn't find these. I'm adding this into the I wish I had known this when I first started because I had to learn all of these different techniques in multiple different places. So I decided that when I started teaching and my very first, I did a workshop. That's when I put these all together. Now I'm sure other people have done it too, but these are the ones I use all the time. So that's why I've grouped them in this way. Alright, so let's get started. We're going to paint a few boxes and then we're going to, if you see me jumping around, I'll explain why. Let's go over real quick the supplies that we need. First of all, I used this is Stonehenge aquifer, 100% cotton paper. And I have made a grid which I will show you in a minute. And then I use some washi tape to tape off my lines so my boxes. This is what I did earlier. I just wasn't happy with that because they kind of went over with each other. So I thought I'll tape it off. If you don't have washi tape, that's okay. I have done it this way in the past when I've taught lessons. So as long as you can make your grid and you understand what each section is and it's labeled washi tape is just an extra. You don't need it if you don't have it. I did use a black super fine Creative Mark Penn that I was able to do my lines with and with a ruler. You can use any size paper that you want if you want to do it in. I think I've even done this in a sketchbook. Let me look here. So I've taught this lesson with some of my students when I've gone to their house. And so you can even do it in a sketch book if you want. The only one I don't have on here is the masking fluid. So if you want to use a sketchbook and you have that, let's see if I can get that in that shot evenly. There we go. If you have that, that's fine. You can use this two. So this is just a five-and-a-half byte eight, I believe. And if you have one of those, this paper is ten by 14 or 1510, somewhere in there. But you use whatever size you have, whatever, whatever paper you want. Cold press paper works great on this. This is cold pressed paper here. This is, this is the one that we're doing right here. This is stolen. Stonehenge aquifer. This one I've done, it's also cold pressed and this is a lower grade paper. It's the papers sold by Hobby Lobby. So these are just examples. You can do this on whatever kind of paper you want. This is one I did in class with my students too, so it's a little bit different as well. I'm going to use a bigger brush today. I'm going to use a size 14 and this is a thing gets a 1 " hockey brush, it's really soft. It is really I've had it for about a year's time to replace it and that's just going to be able to put down water. These two sections here with lifting and galaxy will be putting, putting lots of water on there for wet in wet. This brush here is a polar flow Creative Mark. Just find an old brush that you don't care about anymore because we're going to use that for the masking fluid. Masking fluid has a potential of ruining brushes. So just find one that you don't really care about. I'm going to teach you how you can help prevent ruining a brush. So I've got two jars. I use Dawn dish soap, it's the best for me. This is the masking fluid I'm going to use. It is by incredible white mask, less liquid, brisket. We're going to be playing with some rubbing alcohol. So you just need to have a little container, whatever size you'd have to pour a little bit, or you can just dip it right out of the bottle, which I might do two. You'll need an eyedropper. I bought a set of these Hobby Lobby in the craft section. Or if you have an old one, you can use that too. But we're going to need to drop her. I'm gonna be using my Paul Rubens paints. We're going to lean a little bit of gouache. You can use whatever brand you have. This as my Da Vinci gouache. I really like this gouache. It's good quality. This little tool here. If you don't have an old brush and you happen to have a masking fluid tool. This will work too. I might use both of these to show you how they work today. Not necessary. Just if you have one Indian know it is you can use it. This is a rubber eraser and it's what I use. It looks really grungy, is what I use to lift off the masking fluid. If you don't have one of these, that's okay. You can use your finger to get it off as well. We're going to be playing with some salt. Table salt works. This is kosher salt is just a little bit bigger. Both of these work pickling salt is a smaller, finer salt. So we'll play with both of these to let you know what different size pictures, but they make okay. I have two containers of water. As we've played in the past. You know, it's important to have and I've already cleaned some brushes, so I usually keep my dirty water on the right and my clean water on the left. I have a microfiber towel here to DHAP my paintbrush on and I do have my spray bottle to keep my paints wet. If you don't have a bleed proof waterproof mark, marker pen, that's okay. You can use a number two pencil, just a regular pencil to draw your lines. I want to take a minute and remind you right now that if you're not using a block of watercolor paper like I am, that's glued on all four sides. That you'll need to tape your paper down on the edges. Either ad that you're using or the watercolor sketch book, paper goes down. Or if you have an individual piece of paper that you tape that down to a hard surface that will prevent your paper from buckling. In this next lesson, when we're doing the pouring and we're doing the galaxy lifting where we're using a lot of water and a lot of paint. And it will also help you in picking up that board and paper like we need to in this next lesson. 19. Blossoms, Salt, Alcohol Dropping: So let's get started. I'm just going to wet my brush here. And let's see here. We're gonna do. The first one is blossoms or force backgrounds or water splattering. Whatever you hear. I've heard people in different regions of the world say at different ways, so I call it blossoms. Oh, it's also called cauliflower ears. If you ever hear anybody, a teacher that you've taken an online class, and they call it cauliflower ears. That's what they're talking about. So just go ahead and paint this box in. Just being nice, consistent. I'm in the milk stage. If you're wondering what texts, pink consistency I'm doing, I'm just grabbing it out of my pan and I'm, I'm in the milk. So what we're gonna do is while we have this wet, I am going to grab one more brush. This also is a size 12. So grab you and other clean brush. And what we're gonna do is tap some water in there. So you can see already what it's doing here. It's when you put water in wet paint, it's going to push that paint away and move it around so you can splatter it. Or you can tap your brush. And as it dries, you'll be able to see those blossoms bloom and grow. You can really see a good example of the force back runs in the blue and green of this daffodil painting right here. Okay, let's move on to salt. Now when you pick your color, I just wouldn't pick yellow because salt doesn't show up on yellow paint very well. So let's pick an orange here and just go ahead and paint that in this again. If I don't tell you what I'm doing, just really remember what I've said in the past that I usually paint in the milk stage. So just go ahead and get it in there with salt. You want to drop it in? Well, this paint is still shiny. See how I have a pretty good sheen on that. So I'm just going to take a little bit in my hand. What the salt does is really awesome because it will go in and wake up that paint. I'm just going to sprinkle that in there. And we'll see what these, so when these dry, they'll create some fun textures. Timing is pretty crucial when you're working with salt. You need to make sure that you drop it in the paint when it's nice and wet. Not too dry and you definitely don't want any pedaling. I love how the paint reacted to the salt in this painting. Up in the top left corner you can see those explosions that were created in that orange and the yellow with the salt. So pretty alcohol dropping. This is one of my favorites. I'm just going to put a teeny tiny bit, not much, just enough that I can use my eyedropper. So just know if you can see that in there. Let's see. If I write down in there. I just have a little bit of little bit in there. I'm going to take some blue. This is so fun. My little students love love painting. And using the eyedropper is with the alcohol. The thing that I want to tell you that I've learned over time is with alcohol. If you paint with alcohol and use it, you want to put it in one of the very last steps that you do because alcohol drops will repel any future paint that you put in there. And we can show you that. So this is really wet and shiny. We're going to just take it. And the higher that you drop it, the bigger, see how cool that is, the bigger your spot will be. So if you drop a little one, but it goes out and it spreads out. And these are so much fun where we have something that looks like raindrops have fallen. But you can see how cool that is. It pushes along with blossoming. It pushes the paint away. But where you drop it, the pink kinda comes up and then it splashes back down and you get some really cool. You can make mushrooms with these. I can see so much potential of how to use these. But just remember if you ever paint over there and you want to add more layers, if you get your paintbrush in it, it will repel any future painting. You do. The paint just doesn't like it and it forces it away. 20. Masking, Lifting: Alright, saving the whitespace, this is one that we're going to take our masking fluid. So whatever you have, I'm going to show you, um, yeah. The first thing we need to do with saving the whitespace is draw or paint. Whatever you are going to be needed to save the whitespace. Now I've done buildings where I needed to have whitespace saved beach scenes, where I needed to save the whitespace. I've done that flower I showed you earlier with the cool backgrounds in it. I painted water droplets will do that to those water droplets. Shoot, you paint with masking fluid. First one I'm going to do here is I'm going to use this masking fluid tool. And I'm just going to draw a little flower here. It's nothing fancy. Just something that you can save the whitespace. So if you have a flower you want to do is kinda looks like a little tulip. I'm going to draw some leaves on here. So wherever you put this masking fluid, when you paint over it, it will say that whitespace underneath. So let's see, let's just do a Smiley face here. What I like about this masking fluid tool is this little nut here. Allows this to open and close their better quality ones than I have I bought these ones were cheap. Gps offer, Amazon, they don't work that great. But they also, so you can get a different size line between however big your opening is. Okay. So what I'm gonna do is take an artist, an old brush that you don't care about anymore. If you, if you take a good brush that you have, so you don't have any that you just bought your brushes for the first time. If you do this step by putting it in the dish soap, it will save this brush because masking fluid is basically latex. Latex is a pretty sticky and very hard to wash out. Okay. So I'm going to dip it right in the masking fluid. Let's see here. We'll just do a couple of brush strokes. Well, this actually we'll just paint a box. Now with masking fluid anywhere. If you're trying to do a straight edge, you need to make sure you really have that straight edge because paint will try to get underneath anywhere that it can. So sometimes you might want to go over it and you don't have a very fast time that you have to work with this because it starts drying fast. You don't want to make masking fluid too thick. These actually might be a little thick because it will determine your drying time. So if you're working on a painting where you need a lot of masking fluid, you might want to let that dry, um, for quite awhile. Now I will tell you a different papers will affect masking fluid. I have some see. This one did really well with masking fluid. I used it on this bridge and it did really well. The paper didn't tear. This book is 100% cotton. It's viva, I'm sorry. I like to decorate my sketchbooks. This is VBA and it's a very different type. I don't know if it's handmade paper. I need to go in and look at it more. But this paper does not do well with masking fluid. I did that same flower, just did it in a different way. But the masking fluid ripped when I was taking this up. So whatever paper that you're doing, in fact, this one I've had problems with in the past. So we'll see how this reacts. Sometimes it can tear your paper, so you just have to be really careful when you remove it. That's I guess is what I'm getting to. Alright. You've seen me lifts or talk about lifting here a few times as we've gone along our journey through all of the multiple lessons that we've taken. Lifting this very important skill to learn. I think I'm going to lift with a green. You can lift, say you have a mistake when your paint is wet and you can lift as long as it's not a staining color. You think back to that first video, learning about paint when we did, let's talk about paint So our staining colors one was sustaining and didn't lift very well because the pigments in a staining color or finer and they go deeper into the paper texture. So this is lifting when let me clean my brush out. So I've watched it in the dirty washed it and the clear clean water. And then when it's wet, you can lift here too. So you just run it through a couple of times. Clean your brush, tap out the water because we want a thirsty brush. Remember when we talked about thirsty brush. Thirsty brush is when it's clean brush, but it's not sopping wet and it's just damp. So we're tapping the water that would huddle and we're just lifting that out. So if you think about a leaf and a leaf has veins in it, I've done it with flowers and the veins and the flour. So this is a bigger brush. You can do it with smaller brushes and get really fine detail. That again, back to that brush that I used for because we use the masking fluid in it or the dish soap. I can still paint with it. So I'm going to grab that. I'm just going to put some little lines in here. See, I didn't clean my brush. So it didn't it didn't really do much. It's gotta be clean brush. Lifting is getting back to your whitespace. Whereas masking fluid is saving the whitespace. So let's say that you are painting a project and you're like, oh shoot, I didn't mask this off. If you have a good color that is not a staining color, you can lift it back. Okay. So that's lifting. And then I'll show you here when this is totally dry, that you can go back in and lift with the good paint. You can also dab out lifting with a towel after you've wiped it. Okay. So that's lifting. I'll show you we can do that when it is dry to dry brushing is a technique that you've heard me talk about when we were talking about brushes. Dry brushing is pretty awesome when you are doing trees. Let me see. I have some examples here of dry brushing. So this all here is dry brushing. Now, dry brushing is usually in the consistency of paint in cream and butter, especially butter, you get some really cool textures. So let's paint a little tiny tray here and we'll do some dry brushing. If you wanted to practice this again later with a bigger this is dry brushing. So you have just took an and make a streak across there. I see, see some other examples of I did a whole lesson here with my students at they wanted to learn trees for landscapes. So we, we learned lots of trees. This is dry brushing in here. This actually right here. You can see that salt. So we're starting to get some of that effect going on. But that's what salt will look like here. So that's pretty awesome. This has dry brushing. This has some dry brushing. So dry brushing is when you use the belly of your brush to paint. Let's see. I don't think I have anymore. Those are all do one with my little students. It was just a quickie, one that we practice. Let me see right here. So we did this cat in a tree and this is all dry brush beliefs. So let's do this real quick. Let's take 21. Dry Brushing & Paint Splattering : One of your brushes. I'm going to tap it out and take a little bit of this brown. You can choose whatever Brown you have. I'm going to mix mine. This is brown number and burnt sienna. And I'm just going to draw a small little tree. Not a big one. He's just gonna go off in different, different directions. Use the tip of your brush. You'll get these fine lines. If you push harder with your brush, that's when you're gonna get more of I'm the thicker lines. So trees go off in all directions. Actually can come back towards you to give some dimension. This one is going to come back towards me. Okay? We're going to let this dry right here next to it. K dry brushing is you tap out all of the water up here. So we're tapping out a water and our brush, we're getting a thirsty brush. We're going to take, oh, let's see what color does really doesn't matter. We can do, Let's do this. Black here, k. So we're going to rub it in here and get it more into the cream stage. But I'm going to tap it so the water's not in my brush. I've got paint loaded in here. But if I tap it on here, It's not going to spread all over. So with, for dry brushing, we're going to use the belly of the brush and we're just going to go fast. So if you can see there, what it's doing is you're skipping. When you dry brush, you're skipping out. See, I'm pushing too hard. Money, use the belly of the brush almost down here by the, I think it's called the bill. So the further up here you push, you're going to get the paint out because the pink comes down. But if you use the belly of the brush, it's going to give you that fun. Dry brush. You can dry brush down here at the bottom of your tree where it's still wet and connect that tree to the grassy a tree should. I think I've waited a little bit too long. I can see that the shine up here but not here. If you catch this right enough and you put green, right? And dry brush across the bottom, and you hit that Brown. The brown will come down and link into the tree. So it looks like it's looks like it's attached to the grass. So this is dry brushing, basically it's skipping and you're getting the texture, the referee, your paper, the better dry brush effect you're gonna get. Dry brushes very, very, very hard to obtain on hot press paper because it is so smooth. And this Stonehenge paper or this off-white paper, it has texture but it's a smoother texture as well. Okay, let's go over here and do paints flattering. Because I want to have all of these before we do the pouring in the galaxy because we're gonna be tipping this board for paints flattering. You can use whatever color you want. So the milk stage, just fill in this box. K. Now you can do paints flattering in two different drying times in your paint. So say that you're painting a road or a sidewalk or buildings or rocks, anything that you're going to want. A texture too. Whatever your dry time is, you can, you can splat pink in it. So the first thing I'm gonna do is if you have your brushes handy, you can get a smaller brush. I'm going to do. The bigger the brush that you have. For paints flattering, the bigger the dollops that you're gonna get and the harder that you tap. Let me show you here. This is paint splatter in here and I used way too big of a brush and had too much water. So these are the bigger paint splatters. This is a medium-sized brush. And then this one is a smaller brush. This is what we're going to do. I'm going to take this, Let's see. This is a size two. Let's go back up to about a size six k. You're going to take a wet brush. And let's take, you're going to use whatever color you want. Let's take some rose red. Now if paint splatter and you want to be in coffee. Coffee, I would say coffee or milk consistency. Okay. So so paints flattering when you paint when your paint is wet? Oh, I waited too long. Let me do this. Okay. So when your paints flattering to things, and I always forget, you're going to want to cover anything that's important that you don't want to see how I splattered it up here and got it in the trees. So say you doing something and you don't want your splatters to go everywhere. Fact, I'm going to turn this over. You're going to want to cover anything around you. You don't want. This yellow is actually dried quickly. So our paint splatters here are not spreading out there steam. We're inputting them. Can you see that they're not spreading out? K. I use this technique when I'm doing gravel or sand. I'll splat when the paint is dry. I'm gonna do is just take my bigger brush here and just get some more yellow because this has dried. And I'm gonna read peanut over here and just give that another layer. If you wanted some textures, I'll show you examples. So some of, I've got some flower paintings that I've done where I want to texture to bleed and move around. So I splattered the paint. When the paint is wet. Splattering sometimes takes a little bit of practice to learn. Again, I'm going to be over here and choose whatever color you want. Be in the coffee stage. Now you can. I like to tap it on my finger. Some people tap it with another brush. The harder you tap, the bigger the dollops of paint. So these were little little taps. These are bigger taps. Now can you see how that's hit that wet paint and it's bleeding and moving kind of like our intentional color bleeding. It's going to move around because this is wet. Okay. I'm just going to be consistent here and teach teacher. So I'm gonna get back down in here into the coffee stage. If I get some on this side, it's okay with this red. Because I used to read over there. Now see you can see I'm getting paint splatters up on here. So you want to make sure if your pet splatter in your picture, I always make sure it's dry or in the area that you want to cover. Or you let it dry and then you can do another layer. Let's see how cool that is. It's definitely wet on wet bleeds here. Let's see. Let's get some blue. So blue in here. So now this is with my finger. I'm just using my finger. Sometimes you can do it with just tapping your finger on the brush. So over here on the dry side, Let's put some, I've painted a picture where I painted a clown and I want it to look like confetti was around him. There's definitely the two different sections. Wet on dry. The paint splatters stay in their form. So I use this a lot. I use both texture is actually, when I do trees, I'll paint them and I'll splatter some of the leaves in when it's wet or dry, brush him in wet. I'll show them here on the screen. So this is one of my favorites. I do this all the time. This painting again back because I just did this on thinking about it. These are all paint splatters and forced backgrounds. So these are these parts right here or drops of water. But some of this down in here, I splattered an end to the wet and wet. And so it bled nicely. Here's dry brushing. Okay. We're going to do this here in a minute. This is the galaxy. See if I have any more paints flattering. Okay. This is a good one. I did wet on wet where I splat splat it in when it was wet. And then on this side, on this green bush, the site one over here I spotted or when it was dry. So I had the dots that state instead of bled. There's some paint splatter in, in here for texture in the grass. And there's some paints flattering. See again, I didn't cover it up so it kind of got into places, the green where it didn't shouldn't, didn't want it. But I did put some down here in the foreground. Paint splatter and I use all the time. It's probably one of the most important textures that I use the most. I can show you some different Different ones too. But that gives you the best idea. So let's move that. Let's move out. Let's check here, k now this is dry. Let's go back in and just take this smallest brush that we have here. And I'll show you you can lift and a really good cotton paper. You can lift like an arches, almost all the way down to the white. And depending on the quality of your paper, will depend on how much you can do before you start to damage the paper. Now, I know because I've used this paper before. If I try to go any further than that, I'm going to start damaging the paper and it's going to start bawling up. You can just wanted to show you that you can lift lightly scrub, and then lift off with a tissue cotton ball, whatever you have. So this is lifting on dry. This was lifting when it was wet. Now let's go back over here. Your masking fluid is dry. So I'm just gonna do a real quick fun. Let's do an ombre. So let's take some. So to do that, remember to do an umbrella. We need wet on wet. So we'll paint that with water first. Clean water. Quite sure why that waters bubbling. That's where I'm going to take them in the cup between coffee and milk, probably more of the milk. And we'll just wash that across to purple. Okay, so we're going to start back here and come into it, and then pull it back. Okay, now let's switch over to a blue. So clean your brush. Some of this Prussian blue, It's really pretty okay. So we'll start back here, go up into the purple, and then bring it back down. Alright. Those will, because it's wet on wet, it will bleed together. Not quite sure what's going on with the bubbling. That's really weird. Rest my daughter clean my brush and I had some soap in it. I don't know. Okay. Now you can see here these are dry. Look how cool that is. You can't paint that even if you wanted to. All those cool little spiky textures and paints, water color, flowers are for, blossoms are forced backgrounds. They're very unpredictable of how they're going to show up. These little are ones you get little or spots. The bigger, harder taps are dropped, she'll get bigger ones. If you paint splat. Let's see what's in this one. You're droplets of water and you move it around. You can get them to move and make bigger blossoms. I liked these because they kinda look like flowers in the background. So that's kinda fun. And depending on your paper too, will also depend on what your backgrounds turn now. So that, that's, that's blossoms force backgrounds, cauliflower, water dropping k. Now our salt is dry. So you want to take your salt and just wipe it off into a garbage can. But you don't want to do this. You don't want to wipe it off until it's 100% dry. Because if you try to wipe your salt off when your paint is wet, you'll just smear it. So look how cool that is. I've used this in trees at Christmas or like in a winter scene where I want it to look like frost on the trees instead of splattering paint for leaves, I dropped salt in, which gave it a really cool texture. Looks like ice on the tree branches. And R group that's dry at this corner is still wet. I can see that. So this is our water alcohol dropping. This is still wet so you can see anyhow, cool. That's bleeding together because we did wet on wet on wet. Our leaves are dry here. Okay. Let's go back here and do our dry brushing. So take one of your medium-sized brushes. We're going to load up green. We're gonna be in the creamy stage. And your paint. When they tap out any water. Where's my thing here? And a tap out any water here. You can see it's in my brush. Use the side of your brush, dry brushing. It takes practice. So if you get done with this and you have extra paper here that you've done some of our lessons on the backside. Use both sides of your paper when you're starting out. So use the belly of your brush and just tap it. Hey, tap it. If you use the tip, you're going to get just puddles. You won't get that sponge to look. And fact, I'm going to show you here while I'm thinking about, okay, see how cool that is. Use the belly of your brush and drag it sideways and you get those really cool textures. Now another thing, you don't have to do this, I just have to have happen to have some here. This is natural sponge to see oceans. Sponge. I don't know what it's called. I know it's called something else besides sponge. But you can create some pretty cool textures with the sponge as well. So I'm gonna go back in and make it look like maybe some apples might be an apple tree. And see you can get some cool, cool textures with the sponge tool. You can get that kind of that same dry brush effect with a sponge that you can with the belly of your brush. You see that? Okay. I just happened to have that here in my drawer and thought about it. So if you have a sea sponge, they actually sell them in the craft store that's ripped up. Or if you have an old one, an old loofah. A loofah works. A loop has a little bit stiffer. This is really soft. So that's sea sponge. Okay, now I think everything here is dry enough that we can do these bottom two 22. Pouring \ Northern Lights: These are a little bit challenging, so don't get frustrated. If you don't get it and your first try, That's okay. It's kinda tricky. For my pouring experiment here. I'm gonna do. I'm gonna use darker blues and blacks, and yellows and greens and maybe some mob. So let's get some clean water. Let's use our hockey brush and our clean water. And we're just going to paint this one for now. A good sheen on here. No puddles, just wet hay. Because we're going to be using with a lot a lot of paint here. So we don't want puddles. Okay? And it'll work quickly here. So let's mix up. And if you want to mix up your paint to begin with before we start, that's okay. We're gonna be in the consistency between milk and cream. We're going to need a lot of it. Okay, so I've got my dark color. Let's get back in here. I'm going to use a lemon yellow. I'm going to use my brightest yellow that I have. If I were to do this and choose the paints that would be perfect for this. Would be more of your fluorescent paint if you have them. May lean. My mailing palette has some cool ones. I'm going to take this k, this yellow. Let's see. We're just going to put it in like that. Like that. Okay? Now we're going to work fast here. Because we wanna do this while this is all still wet. K Now take who I don't have a bright green. Let's make this one. Let's take like you want to make a fluoresce and tea green. So let's take the yellow and this is viridian. Lemon yellow and viridian. Can you see that mix there? Now I'm going to just lay this right in next to it or over it wherever you want. And I can see that my paint is drying. So, um, which is okay. Because you got your spray bottle here. Okay. And let's take some rose red and we're going to lay it in right in here. Okay. Now if I was painting with my bright colors, I would choose a magenta. Now with my Prussian blue, I want this pretty dark, so I'm actually going to take the Prussian blue over here and mix it with some of this black. I want more of a Payne's gray black, blue color. And then I'm going to paint this in all of these sections down here. Little bit. Sorry, I'm not talking much. But you just want to paint these sections in here, maybe some in here. Okay. Now we're gonna take this and add a little bit more of this yellow. Because you want these, if they're starting to dry out, you want to go back in and put some more in. But you want to keep the red away from the green or it will turn turn brown. So I'm tipping my board, which is then the paint's wet. So it's going to cause that paint to move. So I can see as I'm doing this, you're going to want to put some paint in here as it's tipped. Take more of the magenta. I'm going to pour it in. It's poured in from the belly of the top, the tip of your brush for it in. Okay. Maybe tip it this way. Maybe tip it up. If it's not running The way you want to sorry, I have it off camera. If it's not running, just hit it with your water, then it wakes up. Backup. Let me get it back down here. Sorry, I'm off camera and see how those are running together. At paint is really running. Let's tip it back up this way. There we go. Get it to run. Let's take some more of that lemon yellow color. Yellow and green. And I'm going to pour it and just with the tip of my brush, don't try to don't try to control it. Don't try to smear it or brush it in. Just pour it from us. Why I want really wet, really wet texture paint. That's awesome. Okay, Now see here, we're getting a line across the top. You just want to constantly wipe that and it will, it will be okay if you get a white line because it will continue to, to move. Here, Let's take some more of the magenta, just pour it in. It was crazy here. I live in Idaho and I live in South Eastern Idaho. We don't see the northern lights here. And last week, there was a great big solar flare. Know, in the areas where you live if you've got to see it, I missed it. I didn't even know about it. I was so bummed because I wanted to see the northern lights forever. But my sister-in-law, I was able to get some pictures. There we go. See how that's moving. So cool, so pretty. But the way that we get this to work is you have to how about wet and just have patients with that? And let them move around. This is another technique that you can't really paint. But to get that to be more yellow, to really move, we've got two. There we go. See, that's really cool. We've got to have a pretty wet. Okay. I'm gonna take now that this is watch your dry time. If you're losing your shine, Don't mess with that, okay? Because it will cause a background and a cauliflower. But if you have it, if you still shiny, you can work with your paint quite awhile. Especially if you're using 100% cotton like this. Let's pick up that. I don't want it. I really want that green. Sorry, I'm painting off off camera. Let me put this back down so you can see what I'm doing. Pouring is one that you have to have to be able to move around. So if I've got off camera, I apologize for that. I can see someone here. I'm getting mat. So if you're getting mat, don't, don't try to touch that up here. I'm still shiny. So I'm going to bring that down it over. Bring it back up into that. Here. Again, more water. Get into that. Get into that coffee and creamy stage. Try to get that green out of there. I really want the green, I want the yellow. Clean water if your yellows getting muddy. This is all Matt. I don't know if you can see that this is super shiny. This is not shiny. I don't know if I want to do this. There we go. That will cause it to move. You just spray it lightly. I want this yellow to be a little bit more prominent. That's cool. I kinda got a streak through there. I'm getting into pouring because I'm in the tip of my Okay, now let's tip it. Let's tip it up. And I'm getting running here down this side now. I'm going to just wipe that with my rag. Yes, that's so cool. Okay. You're getting any paddling down the side, just wipe it with your rag. Because what happens? The reason I'm doing this, you can use a thirsty brush tool is because of your dry times are different. There we go. I love that. Let's let that dry. Oh, that's exciting. If you leave any water here along the edge, it will dry in different times and create a hard line and a background. So we don't want to touch this anymore. Let's just let this dry now. And we actually need to let this dry completely before we do this one, because we're gonna be moving it around a little bit too. And if we move, move it while it's wet to do this box, you're going to lose your cool. Soon as this light is this dries, you'll be able to see it. So actually here, let me get my blow dryer. If you have one, you can get one. Or you're a heat gun, whatever you have. And I'm going to mute, mute this and just drive this right here. Now let's look at this. This is so cool. Can you see that? I hope you were able to get this. Doesn't that look just like the northern lights or are going through there? It's so cool, so pretty. And you can't do that with the paintbrush. Wet on wet and moving the board. So now we're gonna take a little bit of loss spot here. You can see that I've had here before and my palette, so I'm going to clean a spot. If you have a white clean spot, that's great. If you need to clean it off. Let's go ahead and do that. Here we go. That's better. That's more white. Okay. We're gonna get that quite watery. Again, we're going to cover I've been using this, so I don't want to don't want to put a wet rag over by painting. So I'm going to cover anywhere I don't want splat. And then we're gonna make some stars. And we're just going to barely tap, try to get it down in the dark areas for your sky. These are your stars. My grandmother. Let me show you another way. You can tap them in here. Hey, are you if you have maya, all just happened to be here because I use them earlier today. If you have a fan brush, you can take your fan brush and get it in there too. And you can flip your fan brush. Now if you do it too much, it'll get really clumpy. It gives really cool stars. Cool. Can you see that? Kinda still looks shiny, but I like my new lights pretty bright here. So our northern lights. Now if you wanted to take that and make it a painting, you could put a black line in here. Let's just do that real quick. I'm going to take the black little heels. Don't do this unless your paints dry. Now we're going to take thicker paint. Rather than just going to use the tip of my brush can make role in your paint. I got a real good tip on there. The higher you stay on the tip of your brush, the finer you can paint. I'm just tapping it back-and-forth, making some pine trees. So it's just something that you can do. You see those trees? I'm not going to paint very many of them because maybe this is a tall one. Well, their baby trees. We were up here on a hill and this is tolerance. Bring that backup. I've painted. I can show you. I'll put them up here on the screen. I've done some galaxy or northern lights with water over a lake. I've done some with snow, did one with Santa Claus and a sleigh. I can put some of those up. Let me these are going off in the distance. Okay. You can see that very well. Put some trees down there and made it look like a forest over, over the northern lights. Cool 23. Lifting \ Galaxy Lifting: Alright, now let's go on to my favorite one. You ready? Okay, this one, you have to move and work fast. K, I've had a lot of students struggle with this one because they didn't work fast enough. Watercolor dries quickly. So you want to make sure that you have your paints mixed up beforehand. So I'm going to use blacks again. Use some of that Prussian blue because these are gonna be my outside. Okay, I'm going to show you here the painting again one more time so you have an idea of what we're doing. So I'm going to use purple, I'm going to use the viridian green. And I'm going to use black and blue and mix that into a really dark sky color. Like we did over here with the northern lights. It's gonna be a blue black. Again, this is going to be in wet and wet, so we're going to move quickly. And let me get my blue and purple here. I'm going to use a little bit of blue in this and I'm going to use some purple. So we want to have those wet here. So there's my purple. I've got a good puddle of it here mixed up. I got my black. Well, this more like a Payne's gray. I take that back and put it over here. So I can have the blue there. We go. See that Prussian blue. You don't have Prussian blue. You can use aquamarine. Use Aqua Marina lot. And I love it because it's granulating. That would actually look really pretty. If I had as true magenta. I would use it in here too. You can mix up some of that purple and pink here together if you want. Alright. Are we ready? We've got our paints mixed up. Let's take some of the cleanest water that we have. It's yellow, but that's okay because we're going to paint over it. If you have some yellow color here and it's not completely white, That's okay. Again, we're going to paint this in wet, not puddles. We just want a good sheen and a shine. If you have to pick your board up and look for your palate or your pad or whatever you're using. Um, we wanna make sure that we have all the surface covered. Good back-and-forth over it. No puddles though. Okay. Wet, nice and shiny but no puddles. Okay, here we go. Now let's look real quick. I'll set it right here as a reference here to look at. Okay, so when I put this dark color in first, I'll get it wet here. Okay, here we go. So we're going to lay this in right here in the corner. Right. And if it's getting gray on yeah. And it's not as dark as you want. Just go back in and get cream, butter and lay that in the water. That will give you your nice thicker paint. So I want some more blue on this side. Just paint that in there. Okay. As we get going, we're going to move this around a little bit. Okay, Let's grab some of that blue. Drop it in here. Drop it in. Remember that blue and drop it in. Put it back in your black. That's okay. All right. Grab some scrap, some purple. The purple back in over the blue k. I'm going to use green here too. Just don't put the purple by the green. Because if you put purple by the green, it's going to give you a yucky brown color. So I'm going to pick up some viridian green. Or if you have a bright green, That works too. But I like this viridian green color when I'm doing my Milky Way's, just don't tap it in your purple. If you, if you want to put it back here in the black, that's okay too. Just don't put it on the purple. Okay? Alright, so we can see we've got a really good team and a shine on this, right? Can you see that? All shiny all over? So we're gonna take our gonna take our Clean brush and we're going to lift, lift that section out. Okay. Over here, it's a thirsty brush, but in this particular painting we got a little bit more water in it. And if you see, because I've got that water in there, it kind of pushes that way. It gives it that fast looked nail. What you can do is you can turn it and tip it. It'll cause that pink to run. And that's what we want. We want that too to run and come back into that center. But maybe your galaxy has a little side bump out here. Sometimes galaxies go out. You know, you can tip it. Got it off camera here again. Just K9. You can go back in and put some more color in. I'm going to grab some purple because I kinda lost some of my purple. So I'm just going to put it back in here. Now galaxies have these funny squiggly looks. This is where we're gonna get this squiggle look in this stage and wash that out. I'm going to grab some of that viridian green. I'm going to put that in there. Oh, that's pretty I love to do in Galaxy paintings. Some of my favorite. Okay. Now we're doing lifting and pouring in this one. I'm just going to tip it and get those to run. Take a little bit. Not much of that white that we saw had over here in our palette, this, this wash. And I'm just going to rub it up through the center. Gouache is made with a chalk based paint. So it'll give it that fuzzy look. Let's put it down here. So you're kinda getting, you're getting the look with though. That's cool. You're getting the look with the lifting. You're also going to get that really cool photos that you can get with wash. All right. That looks awesome. I'm going to put that back down and I'm going to tip it some more because I want that to look really kinda almost looks foggy. I'm gonna take my smaller brushes, I'm going to get more of that viridian, that bright green. I'm going to pour it in there, just tap it in and sections in squiggles. You see that? I have to do it with the I recall when I tip that around some more. Get it to move. Fun. I really liked this painting. This technique. Again, I'm going to lift a little bit. Give it that foggy look. Maybe a little bit more wash. Put this down here so you can see take some more of that, wash, rub it up through the middle there. All right. I'm getting some getting some run in here. So if you're running, just rub your rub your oh, shoot. Okay. Oh, that looks so cool. Can you see that? I hope yours turned out as cool as mine. Kay? I want you to hit it with your blow dryer. Blow dry this out, and then we'll put Neil what? I take that back. I'm gonna get my smallest brush here. Because I want some of these stars to look like there. I'm still shiny. So I'm going to just take a little bit of that gouache and I'm just going to up, my birds are waking up. It's starting to get morning. They must get some dawn over there. It's early here. I don't sleep well, so I get up and paint. So if they start squawking, just know it's getting to be morning. I think my daughter was over here talking to me a minute ago. Alright. So we've added in some few drops. Now this is wet on wet, splattering. Fact I might, there we go. I might hit some. They're going to phase out and what that will do it, I'll make them look like they're back in the background. Okay. If you put, if you splatter in the sky like this, and let's see if I can get it to shine. It will look like they're more further in the distance and that they're glowing more in the distance. Okay? One thing I like to do and this is something you don't have to, because not everybody has them. But I have. Whereas it out. If you have any glittery paint, I happen to have some chalky paint set just sitting here. So I'm going to drop some little bit of a gold. Can you see in there? It's going to drop a little bit. Make it look like a vein of a gold going through there. I'm gonna do this where my paint is still shiny. Because I can see this center section is dry. It's mapped. So I don't really want to touch the golden, they're just going to put some gold stars. So anywhere that you're still Shiny. Morning, little parakeets, little buggies. This is going to spread out on there. So if you have gold, that's okay. You can put some gold in there if you don't. That's okay too. It's just an extra little fun. Okay, cool. Let's put those away. I've got a couple of different sets. My mailing sets have glitter paint and then I have some gen crafts that have golden them. So that looks so cool. Alright, let's get this dried and let's finish flattering it with some white gouache when it's dry and we will be done. That's all dry now, I have some gouache here that was thick. So what we can do is we can turn that into a shooting star. Not all hopes lost. Okay, let's take our wet brush, get it in that gouache. If you have a fan brush, you can use it. Let's cover Let's cover up where we don't want white. And we're gonna put our stars back in the dark areas. Looks like I need a little bit more gouache. I'm there. Now. If you only have white, That's okay. You can use that to, um, it just won't be as white. Watercolor is transparent, even though it's an opaque color compared to I'm white gouache. It's quite a transparent paint. I'm not worrying about this yellow over here, seeing how that was splatter. So we put in our white stars, some of these bigger stars, you can put bigger stars. So we're doing some depth. The little teeny stars look like they're further away. Now we can put in some bigger stars. They're closer to us, so that gives us some depth to the painting. This one right here smeared. I'm just going to Make it look like he's a shooting star. Some rigor closer up ones over here. Sure. We paint them a circle. This is at Yankee brush that I have not real great reason I use it in the masking fluid is because it has lost its zero point and tip. I've let the kids use it too much and they're pretty hard on my brushes and really rub them hard so it kinda has lost the tip. Okay. Some circles in there. You could paint a little constellation in there. That'd be pretty cool. Alright, let's lift this up and then we'll take our lift this up and look at that. That looks pretty cool. Alright. So now can you see the difference between the northern lights where we poured it in and really moved it. We did pouring here, but we also did lifting we lifted it out and then we put Guassian at which caused it to fuzzed out. So these are some of my favorite galaxies that I've done. So these two here, so much fun. They're fun just to practice over and over. There's one here. More purple. This one here. I did more of greens and the milky way down here. I didn't put stars in it. In fact, this is the very first one I ever taught. It's kinda just teaching the lifting part of it versus the pouring. So these are a lot of fun. Let's take our ahead and go in and take our tape off. And then you can have those nice crisp edges. So the washi tape, if you pull it at an angle, can go really slow. You'll have better luck not tearing your paper depending on what paper you use. So let's real cool. That looks very pretty, very cool. K. Now let's real quick, won't take this off and then we'll be all done. So if you don't have a rubber eraser, look, you can do with your finger. Just comes up with your finger. And the rubber eraser is just so handy. I know what I forgot to do. Okay. So I want to show you here. I'll do it real quick and then on a little piece, because I've got some here, dang it. I wanted to show you what this waxed it. Will do. You ever done an Easter egg when you were a kid and used a white crayon. Kind of the same thing, but we saved our whitespace. So masking fluid does really good to save your whitespace. See now see how I got off on that Smiley face. Anywhere that you have GFS or you missed. See, I've got some spots there that masking fluid will go down through. Kinda gotta be careful. See, I didn't get a real clean edge around there. Gotta be really careful sometimes. And use a good tipped brush, not a good one. An old brush that you can get a good point too if you want a crisp line there. So those are so-called. Let me show you real quick. On the backside. I'm one of these sheets of paper. Let's use this one. Okay. I'm just going to flip this over the cover so I don't ruin this that we've just done. Again, this is Stonehenge, Aqua cold pressed. This is not an oh, yes, it is 100% cotton cold press, so it has texture. Our wax stick real quick. If you're gonna do waves or you want to save some water, I use it like on the edge of the beach where I'm doing water against sand is take it and you go across there. Now when you hit it with Let's take a little bit the beach here. Let's put it on the bottom. You can see right in here, it'll hit that wax strip. Wherever I just painted that wax stick and it won't let you go across there. Okay. Let's take a blue that's got some black in it, so it's not gonna be true. So I'm just giving you the idea of what this does. Let's take some of this color here. Okay? So this is our beach. See there. It does really cool to save your whitespace. It's great with waves, it's good with any, anywhere you want a little bit of a sparkle. The thing with the wax strip that you gotta be careful of is that you do not do not, do not deny. Hit it with a blow dryer because wax melts, right? So just make sure that we don't hit it with a blow dryer. If you're using wax, just have to be patient and let it dry itself. Anyway. Just wanted to. That's another way we can save our whitespace. And anywhere, seeing how this is, I don't know if you can see where this is. Pooling after your paint dries. You can wipe that off and you can wipe those puddles off. So that's saving the whitespace with a wax strip. I have really enjoyed this and I hope you have a great day. I look forward to now that we have our basics down. Being able to jump right in and start painting some really pretty pictures. I have some fun things lined up for our future classes. Thank you so much for spending your time with me. It means a great deal. I know that there's so many teachers on here that you could choose and they're all fabulous. I appreciate you taking your time, your valuable time and spending it with me. So I look forward to seeing you in future classes and you have a great day. 25. Thank You For Joining Me In My First SkillShare Class: Well, we made it to the end of the class. Thank you for joining me in this watercolor basics adventure. I hope you found the information and projects enjoyable and informative. My goal in developing this class was to provide you with the fundamental building blocks that will help you with your watercolor painting. So you can feel confident in your artistic abilities. If you're just starting out in watercolors, I understand how overwhelming it can be. That's why I wanted to make this class comprehensive and approachable. And I hope it has been able to help you. I encourage you to share your paint projects in the painting section below. And I would love to provide you with any feedback and answers to any questions you may have. If you have a moment, please rate and review my class. Your feedback will help me improve future classes and I appreciate any thoughts that you may have to share. I love reading your reviews as well as Skillshare. Thank you for investing your time in this class. Watercolor painting is a wonderful journey and I'm excited to continue exploring it with you. We'll see you in the future. Thanks