Watercolor Gems & Jewelry

1. Watercolor Gems and Jewelry: Hey guys, welcome to Watercolor Gems & Jewelry. My name is Ana Victoria and we're here in my hometown of Cancun, Mexico. This is one of my favorite places in the world to paint, and I'm super excited to teach my fourth skill show classroom here with you today. This is not necessarily a beginner class, but I will definitely take you step by step beginning with super basic warm up activities, then we're going to do some gemstone practice. Finally, we're going to be painting an amazing piece of jewelry using just watercolors and ink. For this class you will need; watercolor paper, paints, a variety of brushes, white ink or acrylic, and of course, water. I am here to answer any questions you might have along the way and of course, I'm super excited to see everyone's project. Thank you for joining me and let's begin painting. 2. Supplies: All right guys, so this new class is very, very fun. We don't need too much except for basically our watercolors and our paper. But I'm going to go through the list of supplies right now so that you guys are ready and have everything you need. Number 1, we need watercolor paper. This is my favorite type of watercolor paper. I like it for a few reasons. One, it's pretty cheap, it's not expensive at all. You can find it on Amazon, on Blake, just different supply stores. What I like about spiral paper like this is that you can work on different projects at the same time. If you go back to my beginner class, I talk a lot about different styles of paper, but for now I'm just going to use this one. You don't need that much information on different paper for this specific class. As you can see, I have a few different projects here that I've been working on. That's a little practice for the beginner class for those of you who have taken the class. That's what I really like about this paper, just that I can work on different projects at the same time. This is a cold press paper. It's nice and thick, and it'll work perfectly for this type of class. Now that we have our paper, we are going to need some watercolors. These are my current favorite watercolors. It's a German brand called Schmincke. I've talked about these before. Again, if you want to know more about supplies, I recommend you go back to my beginner class, we talk a lot about different types of watercolors and just different brands and this is just basically a pan set. As you can see, this is what my pan set will usually look like. I'll have different sections of paint here. You can tell how I'll do blacks here, blues here, pinks around here, just keep it all in different sections. I didn't want to clean this specifically because I wanted you to see what it looks like usually. This is the paint we're going to use, and I also wanted to show you how this is just a portable, smaller pan set. Right now we're in Cancun, we're in my mom's house. I like to travel and paint a lot, which is one of my favorite parts of watercolors. This is a French brand of paints it's called Sennelier. It's a very, very cool brand of paints. But I also have Winsor & Newton paints, just different brands, but this one is very, very nice. It's just a smaller version of this basically, they're both great brands. Then we're going to need some white ink. This is my favorite brand of white ink Copic, it's Japanese brand. You guys can also use white acrylic paint if you need it, if you don't have white ink, but there's a bunch of different brands. Again, I'm going to refer to past classes because this is my fourth Skillshare class. I've done several classes that are geared towards certain topics. I have a class that talks a lot about white ink, which is going to be watercolor and mixed media. Again, if you're interested in learning more about white ink, go back to the mixed media class, I talk a lot about that. But for now, this is basically what we're going to use is just Copic white ink. I really like it, it's very opaque. We use this for details a lot. Make sure you have some white acrylic or white ink. Then of course we need some water. This is just a glass of water and a paper towel. I like to use kitchen towels or you can use a cloth or a rag or whatever you have. Then we have some brushes here. I usually carry around a variety of brushes. As you can see, I have different shapes and sizes. I've been into the Scotsman brush lately. It's a round brush, and it's a number 10. Number 10 is nice to fill in larger spaces, and then I'm really into this Princeton Art and Brush Company, round brush. It's a number 6. This is a medium-sized brush for filling in larger spaces too. But I really like it because the tip is nice and thin like that. With watercolor, it's really cool that you can, depending on how you hold your brush. If I press this brush down, I'll fill in a larger area. If I lift it up like that, I can get nice details and thinner lines. I'll practice all of this with you. But just so you guys see what kind of brushes I'm into now, and then we always need a small thin brush. This is a size 0 brush. I have a couple different small brushes for details here. This is a university series. This is actually just a student brush. It's a triple zero, and it's just so nice for very, very thin lines, very nice for details. We're going to use this a lot after we do a few layers with our gems. Of course, I will explain everything as we go along. Then I usually have this beat up brush. It's got some paint stuck in here. It's not the best brush, but it's good for splatter. You need a flat brush if whenever splatter something, which is very cool in watercolor if you want do some final details. I'll keep this around in case we feel like doing that at some point. These are just some extra small and medium brushes here. This is basically what you need if you have a size 6 and a 0, that will be more than enough. Just showing you what kind of brushes I have here today and we are ready to start. 3. Warm Up Activities Part 1: We're ready to start the class now. If you're taking my other sculpture classes, you'll notice that I always like to do warm up activities. We end up doing pretty big projects and to get to that place, we do a lot of smaller activities first, just for you to feel more comfortable and get into the swing of things. The warm up activities for this class consists of the following things. First of all, we're going to do a little recap of transparencies and white ink, which is what we really get into in the beginner class. But I'm just going to do a quick recap here for you guys to warm up. Then we're going to do some simple geometry activities, a few circles. Finally, we're going to end the warm up activities with a diamond cut, which is going to be a baguette, which is this rectangular diamond cut. For you guys to get ready, you should have a piece of paper. You can do this like I did. It doesn't really matter how you lay out your page, but this is just a nice organized way. You're going to need to draw a square, just like that, with an X in the middle. A triangle, with these lines here, you just meet in the middle, very simple. Then a little diamond with with an X in the middle too. Very simple shapes. Then here we have three circles. You just need to use a little compass here, a little circle maker. Or if you have, for example, one of these, you can just grab this and do a circle around it like that. Just like simple drawing tricks. Here, this is a very simple drawing. It's just a rectangle, right here, two triangles, and then two parallel lines like that. Very, very simple drawings. But this is going to be the base for our warm up activities. Feel free to set a page up just like this, if you want to start out and go exactly the way I'm doing it. I can give you a moment to do that, or you can watch this first and then do the drawings, whichever way you feel more comfortable. Warm up activities. As you guys know, watercolor is all about transparencies. If you've taken my other classes, you'll know how I talk so much about this, about how the water levels are very important, just like how much paint versus how much water you're using. It's like the best part about watercolors is being able to have these different tones with just one color. I'm going to do a little quick exercise here. I think I'm going use a little bigger brush for this. This is a number 6, a round brush. You can use whatever size brush you want as long as it's pretty big. It needs to fill up certain areas. I left this trail a little bit clean. Not too much paint here. We need a fresh surface for this. We're just going to start out with a little bit of water here. Just some nice, clean water. You're going to choose one tone to do this exercise. We're at the beach right now so I'm really feeling these cool tones. As you can see, when I start to paint, I usually like to prepare my paint a little bit. All I'm doing is adding some water to this color here. Just getting some moisture in there. It'll be easier to pick up color once we have this taking a bath for a bit. There we go. I have my water here. I'm just going to grab a little bit of the paint, not too much, and mix it in with this water, because this is a nice navy blue. It's a very pretty color. There we go. I have a very translucent puddle of water and paint here. I'm just going to do my first level using this tone. We're just going to go here and start out. If you haven't taken my other classes, this is the very first exercise we start out with with a beginner class. I also want you guys to see how much water I am actually using. I have a very nice puddle of water here. I don't want it to dry up. I'm just pushing the water around, like that. There we go. Very soft. Having some extra water in here is going to give you a really nice effects once it starts drying. This is a very, very transparent tone here. What we're going to do is just work it up to have a darker, more opaque little square or little rectangle of paint. Now I'm just grabbing a little bit more paint. Here's my old puddle of translucent paint, adding a little bit more color. Each time, it's going to be a little bit darker. This is level 1. Now we're working on level 2. You can see how it's already looking a little bit more dark here. Here we go. This is the quality that watercolors have over every other type of paint. If you're using, for example, acrylic paints, you're going to need to mix white paint with a color to get different shapes with that one color. With watercolors, we just need one color and different amounts of water. As you can see, this is a one, this is a two. We're going to get darker and darker as we go. A little bit more paint into the puddle, trying to make it not too dark. There we go. See how I'm using just one color in my pen set? It just depends on the amount of water that you use. So the less water you have, the thicker your paint will be, the more opaque it will get. As you can see, as it gets darker and darker, I need to pick up some paint more often. There we go. That's a midtone. This is going to be important with all the other exercises. You guys need to really have this down, be able to control the amount of water versus you use for different transparencies. Here's my little puddle. I'm going to add just some more paint. It's getting pretty thick, pretty dark. There we go. As you can see, this paint is thicker. It gets a little tougher to move around. There's not as much water as there was in the beginning. There we go. Also notice how all of the work I do happens here on the pallet. You're never going to grab paint directly from here to here. It always has to go through this process first. Here we go. I feel like that could be even a little bit darker. There we go. We have 1, 2, 3, 4, and now I'm getting to the last level, which is going to be very, very opaque. I'm going to take it as dark as I can. You can see how watercolors can get very nice and thick too. It also depends on what brand you're using, and what color too, of course. If you use a yellow, a canary yellow or something, you won't get these shades. But I'm using a very dark navy, ultramarine blue, so I get some nice thick. There we go. So this is just a little recap on transparencies. If you are new to watercolors, I highly recommend you go back to the beginner class. We do this a bunch of times, I talk about it a lot. Even if you are not new to watercolors, I encourage you to do this again. It's a really nice warm up activity to get into the swing of things. So again, lots of water, a little bit of water. See how I just use one tone, one color here and I got all of these different variety of tones. So we're going to let this dry for a little bit. Once this dries, I'm going to show you how to do a little bit of white ink over this just as a little warm up. Also with water colors there's a lot of waiting around and letting for different stuff to dry. In the meantime, I'm going to start painting these guys and then I'll go back and explain the white ink up here. So we did this now where we have these transparencies, we have different levels. What we're going to do now is start to apply. So our final project, or what we really want to do in this class is start painting gems. It can be like natural gems or it can be different cuts of diamonds or gemstones. The thing that they all have in common is that they reflect light from different areas. So when you have reflections, you have these lighter tones, which is going to be where there's more light, where there's light bouncing off of it and these more opaque darker tones, which would be these and that's where we have more shadows or where the cut is going away from the light. This might sound a little bit complicated right now, but we're going to do it super simple. We're going to go step-by-step here and you'll see that it's not as hard as it looks. So we just did our first warm-up activity, I just painted different levels of transparency using just one color. As I said, with watercolor, you have to do a lot of waiting around. So I'm going to do this in real time so that you guys see how you can start painting in one section and another section. So you don't have to wait for the paint to dry all day. I'm going to start painting these simple geometry shapes while I wait for this to dry and then I'm going to show you how to use white ink over the simple shapes, which is going to be a big part of our final gemstone painting. Simple geometry. I'm going to show you how we're going to start layering and how to paint very simple shapes and you're going to see how it turns up looking like gemstones, which is what our final project here is. So basically what you're going to do is I'm just going to use a little bit of this leftover blue paint I had here, mix it in with a little bit of this turquoise that I had on my pen set, which is the super cool part about watercolors, you make up your own paints. I like it to be very natural, very organic, that's why I keep my pen set like this. You'll see that most watercolor artists usually have this layout on their pallets. So I'm just going to start with this. We have a very simple square here. It's just a square with an X in the middle. I'm going to start painting one of the sides. See how I'm using a very, very transparent wash here, something like this level one. Lots of water and just a little bit of paint. Here you're going to try to be very, very careful with your precision. Again, this is not necessarily a beginner class. If you guys have not taken the watercolor for beginners, I highly recommend you do. There's a lot of exercises to help you control where your brush goes, sort of like what I'm doing now, pull some precision. This is just like getting your lines to be pretty straight, controlling your brush the way you hold it, everything's important. What I did right now is just fill in one of these little sections here. It's pretty watery right now. As you know, with watercolor we need to wait for our stuff to dry before we can paint whatever is next to it. So if I were to paint this triangle right next to here, right now, it would just all blend in together because this side is still wet. So what I'm going to do right now is I can paint this top triangle here because the edges will be dry here. So just a little bit of method to painting watercolors. I'm just going to grab a little bit more of this turquoise. I'm not necessarily sticking to one specific color now, but I'm pretty much into blues, so we're going to go with that. Also, remember it's super important to move your paper around. Sometimes it's easier to hold it this way. Because for example, if I had my paper that way that I had at first, I would use my hand and cover this up and it's still wet. Also feel free to move your pad around just so you feel comfortable. I just use my hand for support a lot, so I needed to flip it around. So again, a little bit of pose and precision here, just trying to get some very nice straight lines. Again, notice the amount of water I'm using. So here this is a midtone, like what we have here, like half and half, half water, half paint. Just grabbing a little bit more water there. If you notice, it bled a little bit into this little point here, but that's okay, it's not a big deal. It actually looks pretty cool. With our first square, we have the top and bottom triangle's filled in. Right now, if I were to paint one of these sides, the whole thing would just mesh in. So we need to wait for these two to dry in order to paint these two on the sides. For that, I'm going to start with this guy, the triangle. This is basically the same exercise, we're just going to do it a few times with different shapes. Also I'm going to start playing around with color. I'm thinking a lot in terms of gems for this specific exercise just because we're going to be doing some gems. If I think of green, I'm thinking of like an emerald green or something like that. I love tool tones too. We have some nice green here, as you see, I really like mixing it in with whatever else I had on my pen set. In here, I have some other greens that I've been using. So again, something that I really encourage is for you guys to make up your own colors. It's just so much better to use this organic mix of paints instead of just grabbing straight from your pen set and on here with water, you want to mix it up, have your own special colors. So here I'm going to have a little bit of emerald green. I'm just going to do one of these sides here. Actually, a little bit of this blue just bled into here and that's fine, that's great. We can have a little party in here in this triangle with a little bit different tones within the same triangle. So I just painted this section here. As you can see, this is very wet still, so I have to wait for this to dry in order to paint either of these. So you can start to grab this rhythm with watercolors where we need to work around our paper in order to just not sit around waiting for our paint to dry all the time. So I have that emerald one going on. Now I'm just going to grab blacks around here that I'm going to start to use. So I'm going to use just a little watery transparent color here and I'll do the same thing that I did with this one. We're just doing it a few times so that you guys can practice. Sometimes if you feel that you have too much water on your brush, just clean it like that. I have enough water here to fill this in here. Now I'm just going to have some rounds and blacks here and just grab some of this here. So you can see it's a little bit darker than this here. There we go. As you notice, I'm also playing around within these shapes. I just added a little bit of more darkness up here, a little bit lighter here. This is just the way you're filling it out. At this point, we're still waiting for these guys to dry up here so that I can show you the white ink, but I'm going to check out my paper and see if I'm ready to paint one of the corners. A good way to do it is what I'm doing right now, which is taking it towards the light. I can see that it's pretty dry on this side and on this side. Now I'm ready to paint this triangle here. If it's shiny, it's wet and that means that you can't paint there. Again, I'm going to flip my paper around just like that. It's easier for me to do this right here because if I had my paper this way, I would mess up this triangle here. Just also nice tip for working around your paper, moving it around is totally fine. Now, I have these turquoise lens here. There we go. A little bit of this. I'm just using some blues that I had here and this leftover green. There we go. What I want to do now is get a little bit darker here. I'm going to go towards four or five levels here. Remember, what we're doing here is just getting different tones because we want to work with reflections. This class is all about light and reflections. It's the most important part when we're working with gems. Also, I'm going to show you a little bit of how to paint metal, which also has a lot of different shines and reflections. Here we go. I'm going to do a little bit of blue here. There we go. Nice. Awesome precision work here. We go. We're just going to let this dry a little bit. I'm going to see if I'm ready to paint somewhere else now. This side's still a little bit wet. Sometimes it also has to do with the type of paint you're using. Some of them dry faster than others. I think there's black water [inaudible] here was a little bit of leftover paint from other brand, and it dried pretty fast. I'm ready to do some edges on this diamond here. I'm just going to use some more concentrated. I'm doing blacks and browns here. You can also touch it to see if it's dry, just like this. This is ready. I'm just going to go in here. This is pretty, pretty dark. I think it's almost too dark for me, so I'm just going to get a little bit of water. Here we go. Just water it down a little bit. You can always do that with watercolors. As long as your surface is still wet, your paint is still wet, you can grab just some water and take it down a little bit, just like that. Here we go. I'm going to see, I think it's still a little bit wet here. Sometimes if you have a little puddle, it's going to take longer to dry. Right here, I have a little bit of wet paint still, so I'm going to continue with this guy here. Again, I think I'm going to flip my paper around just a little bit. Thankfully, this is pretty much dry, so that'll be no problem. I'm just going to grab maybe have a little bit of brown here. We're starting to play around with color two. I'm just going to grab a little bit of different tone. There we go. We're starting to think in terms of gemstones and diamonds and different cuts. If you observe these, you'll see how different reflections have different colors too. I'll post some examples and just references for you guys to see what I mean here. We just took a little break to wait for some of these sections to dry. Keep in mind right now we're in a tropical climate, so humidity is a factor too when you paint with watercolors. That's why I always say there's no exact formula to anything. It's just the conditions of where you are, the type of paper you have, your paints, everything is a variable, but you just have to be a little bit patient sometimes. Right now, I'm going to do this little triangle here, which is our last section in this first square. I feel like I need to do it super, super transparent. Right now it's just a feeling, I'm just playing around, but I feel like the light is hitting it on this side and it's going to be darker on this side. It's just playing around right now, just experimenting. I'm grabbing a very, very translucent turquoise, greener tone here for this last little guy. Something very important to keep in mind is that we're going to do a lot of layering. It's important to have some of these very translucent layers because if we're going to start painting over them, we're going to need a lighter background in order to do this. You'll see what I mean as we move forward. But it's just important to keep in mind right now that we need these very light tones, especially in the first layers. Again, watercolor is a lot about layering, a lot about lighting for paint to dry, and then painting over that once again. Here I am with this emerald one and I'm really filling greens right here. This was an emerald color and this has a little bit more yellow in it, just different tones of green. I'm just going to use a little bit of water here. Notice how I hold my brushes in a different way too. It's all about feeling comfortable and just getting the best, just feeling nice how you hold your brush, how you can have more control of it. There we go. I'm waiting for this section to dry now and then we'll be done with our first layer of our simple geometry step. We're just going to wait for this to dry a little bit. When I come back with you, I'll have painted this little triangle in and we're going to start layering and doing white ink. I'll be back with you in a sec. At this point, we've been waiting for these to dry and I just filled in this last little triangle we had here. I think it's still a little bit damp. You can see you again, if you can move your paper round like this, it's shiny, it's still a little bit damp. You can tell right there. I'm going to go back to the transparency recap and white ink while these guys dry completely. I'm just going to show you how to use your white paint over your watercolors. Again, if you're interested in this technique, please go back to the watercolor and mixed media class. We have a whole video on white ink and different types of white ink and just how to use it. Basically, what I have here is just, again, it's my favorite brand is just a Copic. It's a Japanese brand, opaque white. There's a bunch of different brands. You can also use acrylics. Let me just clean my brush a little bit so I don't get some paint in there. There we go. I'm just going to grab a little bit of this very opaque paint like that. You can even see how the texture is very, there we go, gloppy. Right here we have a little bit of concentrated ink just right there. I'm just going to cover this up. We won't need that much. We'll be able to use this, I think for this whole activity. Your ink or your acrylic can also be watered down. You can also have different levels of transparencies here. We're just going to play around with this for now. I just have some very concentrated white ink right here and I'm just watering some down right next to it. Just like that. You can also use a little separate dish if you want for just whites, which I would usually do. But right now, again, I'm in Cancun. I'm traveling, and this is what I have and this is what works. It's still fine. I'm actually going to flip the paper around just because I want to have easy access to these guys here. What I'm going to do is just play around with white ink. I have a little bit of white ink mixed with water here. You can just see how I'm just going to do these little lines here. Notice how what I really wanted to show you here is. The darker your watercolor paint is, the more contrast you're going to get with the white ink over it. That's just something to keep in mind. In this class, we're going to do a lot of layering. We going to layer watercolor with white, and we going to layer watercolor with watercolor. Just a little playing around with this. We can really notice the difference on this last one. When you have a little bit of water down ink, you're going to get more translucent effect and you can also get a very nice opaque white here. This is just playing around, just starting to feel your paints. You can also practice this transparency thing a few times if you haven't gotten it down, it's a little bit tougher than it looks, but if you took the beginner class, you should be fine. I'm also just going to play around with a little bit of watercolor here. Just for you guys to see what the layering is going to look like. We're going to do a lot of layering. Again, for example, I'm talking about my last classes to my past classes because this program that I have is working up. It's really nice for you guys to take more of these classes so that you can get the full experience. In our watercolor texture class, we did this a lot where we did layering with watercolor on watercolor. What I want you to notice here, remember when I was painting these down here where I said, you're going to need some really transparent areas so that you can work in your layers. If you have a really nice transparent area here, you can do layers with more transparent paint, and you're going get these nice effects where you can see how it starts layering as opposed to if you have a very opaque background here and you want to layer, well, you won't be able to see those layers that well. Just for you guys to like start noticing the difference. If you have a very dark background here and you want to do some white over that, that's perfect. If you have a very transparent layer here, you can do some watercolor layering and that looks great too. This is just a little bit of warm up for this part here. We're going to start applying it to the shapes now. What I'm going to do is just flip my paper around and we're going to start working this technique on actual shapes now. We're going to start to give it just some intention, a specific form. I'm just going to flip this around now. We just do a little bit of this simple recap with transparencies and just a little example of how we use white ink and other watercolors to layer. Now we have these very simple geometric shapes. We have a square triangle and a diamond shape, with an X in the middle. We painted different sections on each one. Now what we're going to do is start to actually do something that's going to look a little bit like what we're going to paint, which is these diamond cuds or these gemstones here. We're just going to play around. Don't get too serious here. It's just like the beginning exercises. What I'm going to do here is start to go from the middle and go out like that. We're going to do these. There we go, like light reflections. We're always going to go from the middle, and then just out like that. This is just a warm up for what we're going to do later on. I'm going to do this here. I'm not doing perfect shapes, they don't have to be all the same. Basically, I'm just playing around with. There we go. I had some blue here, I've just grabbed some, mixed it up here, it doesn't have to be all the same tones. When you see gemstones, you'll see there's a million different tones within just one gem, that's just because the light reflects so much. I'm going to flip this around so it's easier to work with. There we go. As I told you, when we have these darker areas, you won't be able to see the layering as well as we could with these, so I went a little bit darker. Just playing around right now. Also I want you to keep in mind that this brush isn't the smallest brush but it has a very nice fine tip here. That's great for me to do these thin lines and then go thicker but if you feel more comfortable using a smaller brush like this, you can definitely do that too and see how I get very, very thin lines here. There we go. Then we can fill it out like that. It all depends on what you feel best using. This little brush is going to give me very nice, precise lines. There we go. I'm just going to do this here and I'm going to play around with color too, maybe I'm going to add a little bit of purple here, there we go. Just playing around, I'm not really thinking of anything specific right now, just doing a very simple repetitive activity here where we're just deflecting light from the middle, just like this. Super simple, super warm up activity, we just have a very simple square divided in four. This is just warm up for you guys to start feeling how we're going to layer our different watercolor sections here. Right now I'm just going to continue this layering with all these shapes. Just take a look, this shouldn't be too tough, I'm just going to start layering from the center. I just finished painting these little details here, we just started layering. As you can tell, this looks way different than it did when it was just a simple square divided with an X. Basically it's just to start to warm up and start to feel how this whole layering thing is going to go. This specific class has to do a lot with lighting and reflections, and just getting different tones within one shape. Here I have a basic blue. I don't know, we're thinking of colors so it might be like an aquamarine or a sapphire. Here's a little green one which is like an emerald, and then I have this earth tone black and gray one here, that little diamond. So yeah, super simple, all I did was triangles and then here's some thinner triangles that go out. We're all starting from here, going up. Right now, we just did layering with watercolors, and as a final touch for these, I'm just going to do a little bit of these white reflections, so I'm just using my white ink here. That's why I wanted you guys to practice with this one on here, so that you would feel comfortable with your white ink or you're white acrylic. You'll see how, for example, this is more transparent but if I do one of these up here, we're going to get some nice contrast. There we go. Remember, these are just warm up activities, don't worry too much if your lines aren't perfect here, it's okay. There we go. It's also a practice form, these are straighter lines. There we go. Right now I'm just going to do the same thing on all three shapes, I'm just giving it an extra bump of light here. Remember that you can't really use white watercolor, you need to use something a little bit thicker, which will be either ink or acrylics for these final touches. Right now I'm just going to keep on doing this, just going from the center, going out. Here's very thin triangles which are reflections. I'm going to do it on all these and then we'll start doing our circles. I'm finishing up these little white reflection details. Notice how I went heavier on one side than I did the other. It's just a play on light, I feel like I did a little bit more white on these right side here, it's just to give the effect of all the light is coming in through here, so there might be some more white reflections going that way. But you can see this was our very first exercise, already starting to get this effect. Right now it just looks like these cool geometric shapes but when we start applying it to more specific shapes, you'll start to see how it's really going to look like a diamond cut. 4. Warm Up Activities Part 2: Now we're just going to try out something a little bit different with these circles. I'm going to do something very similar to what I did here with this first one and then I'm going to do something here like a glass sphere or maybe a metal sphere. It's just a different play on reflections and then this one here, we're just going to do a bunch of little triangles. For this one here, I really didn't draw out this star here, but it's very easy to do with no pencil. It depends on how you like working too. But as you can see, I have a little dot here where the center of the circle is, and I'm just going to do exactly what I did here on this one. I'm just going to do a little pie, very small pieces of the pie. But I'm just going to do it directly on this circle. It's just practice. We're just practicing here. I'm going to start out with a little bit more translucent layers. I'm just loosely doing these circles on this guy here. I feel like I have a bunch of white edges right now. I'm just going to let that rest for a little bit and then we're going to start with this metallic one. This is a little bit of practice for the one we're going to actually start painting, for example, like our final project for this class is going to be painting a ring. The ring has a gem on it but it also has a silver band around it. Just a little bit of practice on how to do these objects that are also reflection, for example, glass, metal, this kind of material. Our first layer is going to be a very translucent circle like that, and remember I'm doing this in sections, so I wait for one to dry while I start with the other. Here we go. Just a little nice transparent circle. That's all we're going to do for now. I might write here metal, just so you guys remember what we're doing. Then this last one, we're just going to have a lot of fun doing triangles in different shapes. We're not necessarily going to go from the center out, but we're going to go all around. This is also some nice practice. I feel like I might want to use some pinks and reds for this one because I've done a lot of blues and greens already. This is a really nice hot pink I really like here. I believe this is a little bit from this tube set that I had and I just left some here and it's just really nice. I'm just going to start doing triangles, random triangles here. You'll see this is just another fun warm-up exercise and you'll see how we'll use it later on too. But I'm just doing a bunch of triangles right now. A little bit of different transparency levels too. Just small triangles all around the circle. Right now we're waiting for stuff to dry stage with this guy here, which is like a fractal, triangle, diamond we've got going on very loose, just filling it, and I have this metal sphere here. I'm just trying to see if this is dry yet to see if I can do a second layer, but I feel it's still a little bit dump. So we're going to start working with this one which is similar to what we did up here. By now, the edges on the sides have dried. That gives me the liberty to start painting whatever was next to each circle. Already this is dry now. I just did another layer here. I know I'm saying this a lot but watercolor is about finding this rhythm too. If you would sit around and wait for one area to dry, you do a lot of waiting. I like to show you guys how I work too, while I wait for this little area to dry, I'm going to do another layer here on the little metal sphere we have, and I'm just going to grab a little bit more concentrated. I'm doing it in silvers. I'm going to go like this here,very loose, I'm not really paying that much attention right now, there we go. Now we're going to have this layer dry while I continue doing my little triangles on this last circle. I might use the smaller brush now because these triangles are getting tight. I've decided to use more pinks and purples for this one here, here we go. I'm just going to continue doing triangles, filling out these little spots. For example, this one has dried here. Now I can go in and close these triangles that I have here. You don't have to think too much about these, but just try to figure out how you're going to put your triangles together. I'm also thinking in clusters a little bit, I have a little bit darker ones here and I'm doing a little bit of lighter ones around here. Again, it's just really experimenting right now. You don't have to think too much about it, but it's just to prepare yourself for thinking in reflections and start to feel out what these shapes are going to be like. I'm going to keep on going here for a bit. Now we're going to do final details on these three circles. As you guys might start to notice, our shapes are actually starting to look like something. From just a basic square, basic circle, we came to this fun play on reflection and transparencies. Don't think too hard about this. This is just practice, just warming up. Right here, what I did was just divide the circle into different fractal sections like that. I think I might do a little bit of white detail on this. Here we go. Just a little bit of playing around here, just a little bit of layering. As you notice, again, if we have white ink over watercolor, you'll be able to notice it more if it's on a darker tone like that. I'm going to grab this round brush. I like this round brush because the tip isn't really pointy. It's just round like that. So it helps us out with this shape I'm going to do right now, just going to grab a little bit of my darker watercolor here. We're doing a little silver sphere. Just playing around with these reflections. Not really concentrating too hard on the shape, but just so you notice, there will always be one side that's darker, just thinking that the light is on this side. Here we go. So maybe a little bit here, too much and a little bit around here. There we go. Just for reference, I don't know, I'm imagining that the light is coming from up here, so it's like it's coming from here. You can see how it's darker on this side. It just helps out to know where your lights are coming from. See how we did a few layers. We did first very light layer which is like this tone here and then we did a little bit darker on the edge, which is like this and then we finally did some few darker spots, which is something like this level here. So it's just so you guys see how important it really is to get your transparencies down and how fundamental it is to layering, especially when we're doing this reflection playing and lightened and shadow. Now finally I'm going to start playing around with this triangle one here. When we paint our larger diamond, which is going to be our next exercise, we're going to apply what we learned here to do a big diamond cut. Well, triangle layering within these shapes that we already have. We are not necessarily following any rules, we're just layering triangles over triangles. See not all shapes are exactly the same here. All triangles are going to look different. Some of them are going to be long, some of them are going to be shorter. So I'll definitely post some pictures of some cool diamond and gem pictures, I think might work as references. But if you just Google diamond cut or gems, you'll find a bunch of different images that'll really help you just to get an idea of what these cool shapes are made out of, how they're composed. Now you can see how we're starting to get these different reflections out of different sides, and it's all just layering. That's basically what it is. The light is coming from all different angles, all different spots here. Again, see how important it is to leave some of your initial layers very transparent. This really helps us start to lift up our painting and get these nice, just this nice dimension, nice layering. Right now I'm using one of my smaller brushes, it's a little zero brush. This is a pretty small shape I have here. I need this fine tip to help me out. But it really all depends on what size you're using, what size of circle you're doing actually. Now within these small triangles, I'm doing even smaller triangles. That's just the way that these diamonds are cut. They're meant to shine, so we have different cuts at different angles. So you can see these different reflections on different areas too. I'm just going to keep doing this for a little bit, and then we're going to do a little bit of white reflections on these guys too. I'm going a little bit darker here. You can have some few super dark ones to have some contrast, but basically what we just did here is just a bunch of different triangles, different shapes, nothing too complicated. It's just the way you look at it, trying to give it some intention. Right now we're just practicing, but especially for our next activity, you're really going to see how all it is, is what we're doing now. Just apply to a very specific shape instead of just plain circles. So here I'm doing my final little details here. I have different shapes of triangles within each triangle. It's all about layering dimension. There we go. So this is what it looks like now. This is only watercolor. What we're going to do now is just do a little bit of final white details here. Here we go. Just a little bit of this here. Remember the light is coming from here, so not only as a side lighter. Let me grab a little bit more concentrated ink just to get it a little bit thicker. We're going to do just a little bit here too, to get some nice contrast. Here we go. Very simple. I just smudged paint around like that, but it's these transparencies that give us the effect of metal that we're looking for here. [inaudible] that figure there. Now I'm going to go back to my tiny brush here and just do some final details on this guy here. There we go. So this is why I love white ink. You can just do these final little details to make it really pop. Now you can start to see how there's so much dimension to the circle that started out just being a bunch of triangles, but by layering, we're getting a really nice effect here, and it all depends on what shape you apply it to. That looks cool already. You can keep adding and adding, it depends on how shiny you want this to look. I think I'll just do one more here, and maybe a little one here. That looks pretty cool to me already. I love how just using different colors makes it look like a different gem almost like a ruby. Well, its not a ruby because it has more pinks than reds, but you get the point. Now I'm just going to do just some final details in here and also feel free to experiment. You'll see too how these reflections are sometimes cut in the middle like that. This is all just practice, just playing around and just starting to see this in a shape like a diamond cut. This division like this where it's not just straight lines like that but it's cutting these reflection short, that gives it a really nice just look to it. By now we have transparency, recap, and white ink, then we took it up a little bit just simple geometry. We had a square, a triangle, and a diamond shape just cut in the middle like that. Took it out and then here we started to play around a little bit more with reflections and this is a more of an abstract form but it really is starting to look like a cool diamond at this point, and this is just a little example of how we're going to paint metal which we are going to be doing. I think the one I chose is silver for the last project, the final project which we're going to paint a ring. But if you change the colors around, let's say you use ocher and more browns and stuff, it can be bronze or gold. Just to finish up with our warm-up activities we're going to do what we learned here, but apply it to a certain shape. We're not just going to do squares and circles now. I actually drew out a little rectangle here, which is this diamond cut is called baguette, like the bread. It's going to be very simple I'm just going to do this with you guys so you start practicing on an actual diamond cut now. That's what we're going to do now and then we're going to move on to our second project. Okay guys, so we have already practiced a bunch here now we're actually going to take it to a diamond cut. This diamond cut is called baguette, it's that very cool long diamond you see. I'm not an expert on gems or anything I just know of a few cuts. All it takes is really doing your research online. What we're going to do here is just follow the way that diamond is cut its super simple. We're just going to apply what we've already learned. I think I'm into greens right now maybe it's because I'm in the middle of the beach and I have a bunch of nice tropical plants around me. What we're going to do is, here we go, remember draw the shape out first, it's very simple a rectangle, two triangles, and then two parallel lines. I'll put up an example of this two, just for you guys to try it out and actually want to play around with color a little bit more. Just adding a little bit playing around with my greens, here we go, so I'm going to flip this around remember that you can move your paper around in order to make it more comfortable for you. I think I want to keep this section, this section, and this section a little bit on the brighter, more transparent side and maybe I'll do these two a little bit more opaque. That's just to like play around with the lighting, just for you guys to start to train your mind a little bit. Remember, you want to paint in sections which is a cool activity to practice this too, so here I have there we go, and this is going to be like an Emerald gem, maybe a paradox. Not really thinking of what Gemini is just going with what I feel like color right now. I have some nice greens here I'm just going to play around with all the different greens, here we go so if you observe this gem this is the way this diamond is cut. It's cut in long lines like that, so it's very simple this one goes like this, this one goes like this, these guys go like this, same here, and then the middle line that goes straight again. Super simple. Actually I'm going to start painting, just remember to be mindful of whatever color you have. On the side try not to paint wet next to wet, otherwise it'll all just blend in, and I'm just going to keep painting these long sections, and then after I finish with this layer we'll come back and do some reflection work like what we did with these guys, so I'm just going to keep painting this. You guys do the same. We're just finishing up with this diamond cut baguette. This is the last little section in painting before we start doing details. But as you could see, it was super-simple, was just a rectangle with two triangles, and then we have our shape here in the middle. What I'm going to do now is just play around with these layers and just give it some shine, some depth. I think I'm going to grab a little bit of blues here, just to play around, super transparent, get some nice turquoise transparency here. There we go. Lots of water. I'm just going make sure this bottom layer is dry enough. I think we're good. I'm just going to do a little bit of layering here. Just painting over, not everywhere. I did a little shape like this, I pulled it out and then ended it diagonally. I'm just improvising right now. It's not really a specific drawing to this, it's just playing around with how these rocks work. They're all cut in all different directions. It's important to keep that in mind when we paint these. It's not all necessarily always going to be just one way. Here, I'm just playing around with some transparencies here. This is basically how we just give depth to these mineral shapes. I was just really playing around with these different reflections and shadows, just try to capture what these minerals do when we just look at them. It's really fun to just play around with this. See how it already starts to look a little bit more lively, just some volume to it, just by adding these little layers here. I'm going to do this a little bit with just watercolor layering, and then you can play around with a little bit of some whitening for final details. We did a little bit of watercolor layering, and now I'm going to see if I can still use this ink I have here. Yes, still working here. First of all, when you look at these cuts, you can see how the edges go up like that and they specifically reflect wherever they're cut. Here is a really thin brush. I think it's a triple zero. I'm just going to do some very fine lines here, just to help me out where this cut actually goes. I'm going to just start out here, and just lightly go around the edges like that. I'm going to really grab a little bit more of this. Now, I have a pretty good pulse by now, I'm not intimidated by these really thin long lines. Again, this is not necessarily a beginner class. If you guys feel that you are trembly a little bit with these fine lines, I would definitely go back to that beginner class. We do a lot of practice on these pulse and precision exercises, which is just basically figuring out how to do these very thin lines. This precision-based activities. There we go. You can really tell how these little details are really helping it pop, really giving us a nice idea of what shape we're working with. What we're going to do now is just some random shiny spaces here. They're usually little triangles. Very fun, just playing around, working with my transparencies, with my ink too. Sometimes I'm going to do something like this here, just give it a little bit about. Then we can also do some extra reflections in here. This is just as much as you want to play around with it. I just finished doing some white detail on this diamond cut. I'm not really even looking at a picture right now, I'm just playing around with the shape. But you can see it already looks like this cut. What really helps make it pop like that is just these transparencies and especially the white ink at the end really gives it some nice detail. I like to even do little dots here and there, just play around with. That really makes it look like it's this translucent object. I think I'm going to leave it around here. I might go back in and do a little more detailing, but I think it looks good. I think it looks like what we want it to be. Right now, it's just some practice with these shapes. Just to recap what we did here, these were some nice long warm-up activities, very simple shapes. But I really wanted you guys to start to get the idea of how we're going to go around with layering, and just which order we need to paint in. Basically having to have one side dry completely before we go on to the next, having the whole thing dry completely before we start layering our second shapes. Just a little quick idea on how to paint metal. In this case, we did some silver-like metal. Basically here we are starting to break it up in a fractal shape, which is really what the knot-knot natural cuts are generally, but like diamond-shaped cuts usually go around in different ways just like that. Then here we have a more structured one which is like the baguette cut. I might just play around with it for a little bit more, but this is really where we are, this is really what we end up wanting to achieve in this very first activity. It's just basically some practice on doing diamond cuts. Our next activity is going to be actually applying this to a nice big geometrical gemstone cut, which we will do next. Do this, try to get it down, please let me know if you have any questions, I'll do the best I can. 5. Gemstone Practice : All right, class. We just did a bunch of practice on transparencies, and just like the way light reflects and how to do these different effects. Now, we're actually going to put this into practice with the shape. This is an actual very simplified shape of a diamond cut. You can see how it's a circle and then it's cut into different ways. It's actually a hexagon, which means, wait, no this is an octagon, sorry about that. It has 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 sides. This class has a little bit of complicated geometry in it. I love geometry, I'm a super big fan of figuring out how to do all these lines. Just like the way, I'm a fan of actually drawing the shapes. But I don't want anyone to be held back during this class, I want you guys to be able to keep moving forward if you're not a big geometry fan or if you have a hard time drawing. I'm going to show you a very easy tip. I've had a transfer drawing like this onto your paper without having to do that work at all. I learned this I think when I was like in elementary school or I don't know if it was high school, but it's just a super simple transfer drawing trick. What we're going to do here is we're going to flip this page around. I actually I'm going to upload a few of these as examples for you. We'll have diamond cuts in different shapes and maybe a few raw gemstones, like crystals. You guys can try the same exercise out, just with different drawings or feel free to look up whatever drawing here into. You can just google crystal cuts or diamond cuts, and you'll find a bunch of these, especially if you put the word outline in there. I'm just going to flip this around just like this. You can see how I can see through the paper here where my circle is, like this area here. There we go, and I'm actually going to use. Hold on a second, I'm going to go to the back of my paper here, because what I'm going to do right now is just basically use my pencil, try to get maybe B pencil, an HB pencil. Just darker pencil if you have it. You can also use carbon paper if you wanted to trace this, but this is a super practical tip if you just really want to, there we go. I'm just basically drawing all around the back of his paper wherever my gem is going to be. If you can see through the light, I covered everywhere the actual diamond is just using a pencil on the other side. Now, we can just flip this over and we have our drawing here. I'm actually going to go back to my page right now, just hold on where are we? At this point, what we have here, again this is a simple trick. If you're into geometry, feel free to do your own drawing. This is for people that are not interested in geometry and just want to go straight to painting. I'm going to grab this here, harness center as best as I can, and I'm just going to grab a little bit of some washy tape I have here in my studio, and you are just going to put a little bit of tape on the edges just so that the drawing you're going to transfer, it doesn't move at all when you're actually, here we go, tracing your drawing. There we go. This is where the drawing is going to be. What I'm going to do now is just draw over the gray lines. I made them gray in Photoshop because I want them to be lighter than my pen. I will upload a few of these for you guys. What I'm going to do is just start tracing basically over the shape. Try to make these lines pretty firm, just so that your transfer be successful. You guys can just print this transfer sheet at home or whatever maybe you have an office next or whatever near your home, here we go. Try to keep the lines as straight as you can, it's easier if you work in shorter sections, just a little tip too. We're just going to start closing these guys like that. I'm just finishing up tracing this diamond cut we have here. Remember to do a little bit firmly so that you get a nice transfer. You can see how it's all drawn out here. Now what I'm going to do is just basically lift up a sheet of paper, here we go, and magic we have a drawing. Now, we don't really need this anymore because we have our final drawing here. Again, remember you don't have to do this, it's just for people that are interested in really drawing it out and figuring out the geometry. Or if you just want to move on and continue with the class, feel free to do this little trick. I will upload a few worksheets so that you guys have something to work with. I'm actually going to just fold this up and put it away, we don't really need this anymore, we're just going to put it over here, and we have a nice drawing, really nice perfect gemstone cut. Just going to take a little moment to decide what color tones I want to use, and I'll be back with you in just a second. I was thinking of what colors I wanted to use. I feel like I've been using a lot of blues and greens and felt something different. I basically just googled yellow gemstones just to get a visual reference, and this really popped out. I love yellow and I don't use it that much. I decided to do a citrine or yellow topaz or yellow sapphire. I just googled it quickly just to really get into the color references. For example, like this is not necessarily the same cut, but I feel like it's just a good reference for color tones. This one says trillion cut yellow gemstone, zirconia, so that's just like the cut. But I just like to look at it quickly just to see, that has a lot of like ambers in there and a little bit burnt sienna, a little bit of black. You don't need to look at a visual reference necessarily, but I like to do this sometimes just to get a feeling of what I'm going to be painting. For some reason today I'm like really into yellow right now. It's not what I would usually choose, but I think it's going to look really cool. Let's get started. What we're going to do now is just start picking out the colors that we're going to use. As I said, I don't know why but I'm into yellow right now. I'm just going to work up these different, have a few different yellows here, just get them a little bit working up here. I'm going to be using these guy's. Just all this section here is going to, I'll just prepare all the paint. As you can see, I have my yellows here. I'll probably be using this area here that has these burnt tones, a little bit of ocher. I have some ocher here, and there's definitely going to be these browns and blacks too. Basically, I don't want my colors too perfect. I don't like to use them exactly the way they come. I like to dirty them up a little bit. There we go. Remember, what we're going to do here is really apply what we learned with transparencies. It's really easy because we have the whole shape already figured out for us. Our first overall layer is just going to be painting all these different triangles with different transparency levels. I'm going to imagine, it's not necessary to do this, but I like to figure out that maybe my light is going to be on this side. That just helps me figure out that I might go a little bit darker down here and lighter up here. Just a little simple trick to get some cool dimension in there. It really pays off in the end. Basically, what I'm going to do now is just start filling in all these triangles, which is going to be super fun. I won't have to wait around for stuff to dry that much because I have so many triangles that are all spread out everywhere. I also want to encourage you guys to play with color within each triangle this time. We're ready to take it to the next step. Each little triangle can be its own little gradient in here. I'm going to go a little crazy. Here we go. Maybe do this at some point. I know there are some burnt tones in there, so I felt like I just pick up, start off with this color pace here. There we go. Not only am I going to have a lot of different triangles here, I'm going to have different color compositions within each triangle. If you guys like using salt, you can also sprinkle a little bit of salt in each ones of these. Maybe I'll try it in a bit. But right now I'm just going to start filling in these guys here. I'm just going to start doing that. Here we go. Okay. Guys, just so you know, I have a little bit of salt here. If you've taken my other classes, you know that I use it for some texture. Just so you know that I'm going to just sprinkle some throughout these little sections sometimes, not too much, but just for a little bit of fun texture in here. Here we go. Basically, we're just going to sprinkle a little bit on here. We can see how we're going to get some really nice texture there. There we go, just a little bit. We're not going to go overboard with that, but it's just a really nice effect, a fun effect. I'm just going to keep on painting my very first layer here. I'll be with you in a bit. All right. Guys, I am just finishing up our first layer for our gemstone practice. Just a little thing to keep in mind, it's not a rule, but I just try to do little bit of darker down here and a little bit of lighter here. It'll just give it a little bit more volume later. Remember, this is just the first layer. We're going to wait for this to dry really well, and then we'll come back and we're going to start layering with all our little reflectors. We'll start with some watercolor layering and then we'll do a final white ink layer. I just wanted to get you guys to see how I work this out here. I'm really happy with the colors I chose. I don't usually use these tones, but I think it's really cool. It looks almost like amber-ish. What I'm going to do is just let this dry for probably about 10 minutes, then I'll come back and we'll start layering our second reflection layer. We just waited for this to dry completely. Again, this is the very first layer of our watercolor diamond shape. I used a little bit of salt on mine, so this is a good time to scrape it off. I didn't use too much salt, I just like to use it sometimes for a little bit of texture. See how I have these little- I think they look earthy. There we go. I just wipe that off just to have a smooth surface here. As you can see, we already have a cool shape here. It's already starting to look pretty cool. What I'm going to do now, is just start to do all of my second watercolor layering. I'm actually going to take a quick look at my phone to see some references here. I like to do this live because I want you to see that sometimes you need to take a look at just how stuff really looks, just to have some reminder. Here, you can see I have just googled diamond cut, just to get a reference of how these shapes go. As you can see, there's a bunch of little triangles going in all different directions. We need to keep that in mind just to get a cool shape out of these. Basically, what I'm going to start to do is just layer, and layer, and layer. Right now, I'm going to grab this brush, it's still pretty good. It's got a nice fine tip. I'm just going to go ahead and start layering. I have some pretty transparent watercolor here. I am just playing around with smaller triangles within these larger shapes right now. Still using transparent tones of watercolor, just these nice, watery. Here we go. Then this thing that I'm doing right now is exactly what we did in the very first exercise. I'm just pulling this little reflection. As I said earlier, sometimes these shapes reflect from all different sides. We don't necessarily want to have all our smaller triangles be in the same direction. We want to play with it a little bit. I just started, and you can start to see how this concept of a cut is starting to come alive. Just with these smaller triangles that we're doing within the larger shapes. Again, feel free to check out references. It really helps to observe. I had to really observe all these shapes before I started to paint. Because I just wanted to figure out how they actually move, how they actually work out. With this specific one, I noticed how all of these little triangles are headed in all different directions. Also, when I'm playing with these watercolors too, these tone, I'm also playing with different transparencies within the smaller reflections. You can see this is pretty transparent here and then this one's a little bit darker. Also playing around with that. Right now I'm just going to continue going along with these smaller triangles. You can also go through two different ones like I just did right here. They don't necessarily have to stay within one little shape. They can go through two, like here and here, like these two. I'm just going to keep on doing this for a while. You guys do the same. Then after this step, we're going to actually do some final white reflections. Also, I'm going to try to be a little bit darker here and a little bit lighter here. Remember to just keep that in mind again. Here we go. I just finished my second layer of watercolors. As you can see, I did a bunch of triangles in different directions all over the gemstone. This is basically to start to give the impression of light reflecting off of all the different sides of the diamond cut. I use different tones, I use different colors, I use different transparency levels, and I also use different sizes of triangles. You can see I have some larger triangles here, I have some ones that are just on the edge, I have some tiny ones all around, like these little black guys. Just a bunch of different sizes of triangles all over the place. You can already see how it's starting to get this diamond cut feel. But there's one final thing we do to make it look really, really nice, which is of course, white ink. You guys know I love white ink. I think it's a really cool way to just make these reflections really pop. I'm going to get a little bit of fresh white ink here, just put it on my palette. Have some super concentrated stuff on this side and just some watery stuff on this side. I'm going to start out doing some larger triangles. Basically, what I just did with watercolor, I'm going to do with white ink now. It's going to give it a whole another dimension of shine and just light reflection. You can see especially here on these darker ones, it's going to look really cool. There we go. I'm just basically doing exactly what I did with watercolors, with white ink now. I have for example, this was a super watery one. I'm going to go grab some more concentrated ink here, and play around with this two. We have also different shades of reflection, different intensities. See how this one is a little bit lighter, once it dries it will set in and then this is a little bit more opaque. I'm going to do that around the whole diamond shape right now. Then we're going to do a few splattery details at the very end. Here we go. Just same as we did. Just pick some random spots and then you can go with the gems too, with the shapes too. I'll post some pictures of the gem so you can see what I mean by how all these different reflections are going around in different areas. Here we go. I just spent more than a few minutes. I just spent about half hour just doing all these extra white details. As you can see, it's pretty simple. It's just a bunch of triangles going in different directions. Here we go. I'm just finishing up here. I'm going to do a little bit of. See I think it looks pretty cool by now you can see how these white details really helped out and makes it look like it's more reflections, just the light hitting in different spots. I'm going to do just a little bit of to give it some extra sparkle. Just very slightly. There we go. Just a little bit of white splatter in some areas, not all around. Here we go. Just maybe on this side here, just a little bit here. That's about it. I don't want to go too overboard with that. I just did a little bit of extra white stuff here. I think I'm also going to do just a little bit, how when we did the bag out one like that, we did a little bit of white edges around. There we go. Around the corners. I'm going to do that very lightly on some of them, not everywhere. But just to give the impression that all these little corners are bunched up like this, it will usually shine on the very top. I'm just going to do that very delicately on some areas. It doesn't have to be all around, but these white details really help out and make the whole thing look extra sparkly, extra shiny. I'm actually going to grab a little bit more white ink here, a little bit more in concentrating. You guys can choose basically any color combination you want. In this case, it turned out being citrine, which is a very cool yellow-amber stone. There you go. Just very fine white details like that. It doesn't have to be all round just in some areas here. Went a little bit overboard there. There you go. I'm going to concentrate these lines more on this side now, just to give it some depth. Just so that we know that it's reflecting a little bit more on this side. I could go on for a really long time with all of these final details here. You can do as much as you want. I feel like I could just go on and on and never stop. But I think I'm going to leave it around here. This was your gem stone practice. What you did here was just basically put into practice what we learned in the warm-up activities, which was just transparencies, layering and white detail. It's the base of this whole exercise. Just practice. If you need one of my worksheets, you'll be able to download that. Or if you want to just google your own reference for a gem, you can do that too. This activity was in preparation for our final project, which is going to be painting a piece of jewelry. You're going to see how it might be very intimidating at first. You might see a piece of jewelry that looks super intricate, super detailed. But once you have this down, it'll be way easier to just go 100 percent and do without being intimidated and just going with it. I've just been doing these final details for a while now and I feel like every time I add something new, it just gets better and better and more volume to it. Feel free to just go crazy with all these tiny details at the very end. I'm going to leave it around here for now, and be prepared for your next activity, which is going to be our final project. 6. Final Project - Painting Jewelry : We are about to start our final project now. Before we get into painting a piece of jewelry, I just want to do a quick recap of the past videos just for you guys. I'm going to show you some examples too of what the jewelry is going to look like. It might seem a little bit intimidating, but I just want to go over what we've just done just so you guys can go in with the confidence that you're going to need for this final project. Something you really need to keep in mind is using transparencies, being mindful of the shapes that you need to dry before going over or next to them. We're really going to do some of this metal texture in this final part too, which we haven't done except for this practice circle. Then we did our gemstone. Mine was a citrine. This is basically a big, enhanced version of what we're going to do now. You guys have done all of these by now and should be ready to go onto our final project, which is going to be painting jewelry. I chose this ring here. It's an aquamarine. It has two diamonds on the side and a silver band. Before we start, I'm just going to show you some examples of some pieces that I've done using this technique. These are actually some pieces that I did for Glamour magazine. It was a horoscope special and it was cool because each piece of jewelry was meant to symbolize a different sign. I believe this one here was Aquarius, you can tell by the blues, so just a side note. But I'm just going to show you these pieces and we're going to go over them so that you guys can start to understand now how I painted these and how you guys are going to paint your piece of jewelry. Basically, for example, this section here, you can see how I had a little color scheme, I had some blues and turquoises. Really, in this case, we're going to be paying attention to our picture. You're going to need a picture of jewelry, it's way easier if you do it then with like a real piece. If you have the picture, the light is captured in a certain way and you can really pay attention to where the reflections are. In this case, we had a nice reflection here and this was very intricate, a bunch of tiny little diamonds, which may be a little bit tough like the very first try. But don't worry, you can choose something a little bit more simple and we'll be fine. For example, this section here, this was a little piece of gold. If you guys remember our warm up exercises with painting metal, it's basically what it is. It's a very light, transparent wash of watercolor, and then we let that dry and start going over lightly with these a little bit more concentrated paint. Finally, always end with just this detail with white ink, which is really going to help us out. Same with these diamonds. These are basically baguette diamonds, but in a smaller scale, like what you guys did with the warm up exercises. Here's another example. This here, for example, what you guys did with the big gemstone would be an example of what this looks like in a smaller scale or like what we did in the warm-up exercises with the ones with a bunch of little triangles, similar to that. Except here we're really going to observe our photographs. Same here, I believe these were little pearls on the side of it, it's similar to what we're going to do with the metal and this here too. It's just all about doing lighter washes, lighter layers of watercolor and just going over and over. The same with these guys. It's all about detail, the final white paint is really going to help us out too. You can tell this one was for a scorpio. I wrote that down, it looks like a scorpion. Again, for example, in this case, the metal section was larger. It's like a rose gold. Very much just like paying attention to what the shape is showing me. For those of you who took my beginner class, if you remember the gradient section, this is exactly what it is. It's just paying attention, okay, there was a gradient that starts from here and goes this way, goes this way, etc. This is an example of using a lot of metal too, just in a different way. The first thing I did was just paint a very light yellow layer here and then started going over with the layers. I observed the images a lot. Just really paying attention to, okay, where does it go? Where these darker sections go? Where the light? Same here. See these are just tiny little diamonds, just like what we've already painted, in repetition, of course. Here's another example. This one, I wanted to show you guys because I think it's a good example of metal. Here, the metal was sculpted in a certain way. So there was a lot of movement to it. This is a pretty complicated design. But just to show you where we can go with painting metal. The bands here are a little bit more simple. Again, it's just a very light layer, and then we start going over and letting it dry. This one's a little bit more complicated. But it's still just layering in white ink for details. This was a lettering I did for the magazine, but we're not going to really pay attention to that at this point. This ring is a good example too. I really like the band for this one, and then it had a ruby in the middle. But sometimes if you think of a ruby, you don't think of necessarily having purples and yellows in there. But sometimes, you can find a picture that captures all these different reflections of light, and it's not just like a redstone. A redstone can have a lot of different colors in it, just because the way the light reflects in it. You can see how I did a little bit of outlining here, especially where the rock stood up. We did that on my citrine, on whatever you guys choose for gemstone practice. See these fine white lines. These things really help the gems pop. Here specifically, I really noticed that there was a major shine right here on this side, not necessarily around the whole gem. Well, here's a watch. You guys can choose whatever you want for jewelry. I think a ring is a good start because it's just usually one or two or a few rocks and some metal. You guys can go crazy, and then do this stuff if you guys feel you've got it down. But I think it's a good idea to start off with a ring. This is a ring that I chose. Again, it's metal. We've got some silver here or it might be white gold, I'm not sure, and two diamonds on the side, and an aquamarine here in the middle. I like this image because I feel that there's enough contrast here. I like how this middle part is way darker than the sides are. I just thought it would be a nice contrast for this specific activity, which is going to be our final project. We just did a little recap of what we learned in the first two lessons. Now, we're actually ready to start with our final project. I looked up a picture online. I looked for aquamarine rings. You guys can choose whatever picture you want, but you need a nice large photograph with a white background, this is going to work best for you. I just chose this one. There's a million different things you can do. I would definitely print this out if you can. If not, you can just look straight at your screen and copy it from there. You're going to need to have it drawn out with a pencil, just like I have here. I painted it a little bit darker than I normally would just for the video. Again, if you guys are not interested in drawing, if it's something that you feel it's too hard for you or that you're just not a good drawer because that happens a lot, some people say, "I love to paint, but I just don't like the drawing part." Use that trick that I showed you with the gemstone practice. You can totally flip this around, do your pencil back here, and then tape it on and trace over. You can totally do that, or if you like drawing, or if you want to give it your own spin, feel free to sketch out the outlines. Here, what I did was I didn't do all of the little reflections, but I did give myself a little bit of cues like where these darker shadows are going to be, for example, this little guy and this little guy here. Here, I also helped myself out and just drew out where these major reflections are going to be. Not every little single thing, but I did pay attention to these larger cuts here. Again, feel free to use the transfer trick. No problem at all. This class is not necessarily about drawing or a drawing class, it's really about painting and just the way to figure out how to do something with watercolors. First, we need super transparent layers when we start out with these projects. I'm actually going to start with painting the silver band here. When you guys paint silver, you guys are going to start to notice how it's not necessarily just black watercolor or just one color, you're going to be playing around with some blues and maybe some browns. You'll figure that out as you go along. It's also nice to give it your own interpretation. Here, I'm just going to start out very lightly with a very transparent watercolor layer. This class is about observing. You really need to have your picture right next to you and especially for the light. For example here, even as I'm starting out, I can tell how it's a little bit darker when you get here in close to the gem. So I'm going to have a little bit more paint in there. Not too much, but there we go. Remember, this is watercolor. We do like having some nice textures in here. This might dry because I have a little bit of extra water here. It might dry and do some funky stuff, and we like that. That's a good thing with watercolor. We don't necessarily want it to look like a picture, we want to look like a watercolor painting. So keep that in mind too. Don't get frustrated if watercolor dries in very mysterious ways, which does tend to happen. Just grabbing some extra black here. There we go. So as you can see, my palate had a little bit of blue in there. That's totally fine. Then I just notice here how it's little bit whiter. I can see a nice reflection on this area here. So I'm just going to use more water. It's really about observing, taking it slow. Don't try to do this super quick. Just take your time. Again, I'm going back in here and I notice it's a little bit darker. Obviously there's a little bit of shadow here. So you're going to pay attention to that too. There we go. Water is splitting into the water. That's totally fine. There we go. So we have our very first layer here. I just did the back work for this, the more simple part of the painting, which is this guy here. In order to continue painting the rest of the band, we're going to need this layer to dry completely before we can do anything else around the silver. But I want to see what I can do now. Actually, I can do these little circles here, which are holding on to the gem. I'm actually going to do it very, very fast. So these little circles here are exactly, exactly, exactly what we did in the warm-up exercises. Just we're giving it some intention and it's an actual shape holding up a gem. I'm just going to go in very lightly with my gray. Well it's gray because it's black in a lot of water. Just to have a little layer laid out here before we go in with the shiny stuff. It goes all around here, and here, and here. So we're just starting to lay these out. There we go. I would say try to go pretty light with these first layers. It's better if you went too transparent and then have to layer a bit more than if you went too opaque and then not have enough room for layering and transparency. There we go. This goes down here. I'm just going to finish up these little guys before we move on to any other step. I just waited for this section that I painted to dry. It's still little bit moist, a little bit damp, but I'm just going to flip my paper around just like this because I want to start doing some first layers here on the gem. Actually, what I'm going to do now is look very closely what colors am I working with? It's like I have some blues in there, but they're towards the green side. A bit of warmer blues, not purple blues. So I'm just going to work in some colors. I'm going to use this area right here. This will be where I'm going to pick up color for the gemstone. I might just work in some here. I'm going to grab some paint and just have it here. Remember that I always talk about this, how I want your colors to be really organic. Don't try to keep your pallet looking like this, and this way you can like pick up color from, for example, here's a little bit of green that I had leftover from something else. That's great. That's perfect. So here we go. I'm just going to start painting some layers here. For example, I'm going to start with this section here. I see it's like a very Midtone Aqua, and I helped myself out and drew it out here. Drew it out before. So this is just a very first layer to this gem. We're going to do this all around the gemstone. Just paying very, very close attention. That's basically what it is. Just observing. Really paying attention and really just going piece-by-piece. All of your transparency practice that you've ever done, this is the moment where you're going to apply it. You're going to be paying very close attention, especially to that. The color is important, but what's really important here is just figuring out where it's darker, where it's lighter. You just need to pay very close attention. Right now, I'm going to keep on going up here. I see this one is in the same tone range as this little section I painted here. If you feel you went a little too dark, you can just grab your dry brush and just lift up a little bit of paint. There we go. For example, this one I see is way more transparent than these here. So I'm just going to use a little bit more water. Remember, it's better to start out light and then work your way up if you need to. So just be mindful of using a lot of water. Try not to do just like concentrated paint until our final layers. We're starting out lighter and then working our way up to here. Also, another thing you need to observe is there's also shadows and brightness within each cut. So I'm doing this one right here and I just noticed that there's a little bit more shadow on the top part than on the bottom. So I'm just working that way too. Well, my page just got a little bit in here, just going to dab that. There we go. So basically, that's what it is. It's just paying very close attention, which is really observing, getting your drawing laid out nicely. It's going to help you a lot. Then I'm noticing that these larger ones here are very transparent. We can always go in with the white ink at the very end, but just try to respect the original reflections and shines. There we go. Then I can see here how, for example, there's this shape right here. That's the round triangle. It's going to be this one, but I notice that we're getting darker, but there's also some shadow in here. So I'm going to start out with that shadow. Well, it's actually a reflection, and then I'm going to go a little bit darker. There we go. There's a little bit too much water in there. There we go. This style of painting, I can't stress it enough. Like observation, just take a very, very close look. Look at all the different sections. Figure out how the light is coming in. Figure out where to do shadows, figure out where your paint needs to be lighter. Just be mindful of painting around your whole painting, not just focusing on one section, because as you guys know by now, watercolor is about layering. In order to get these cool layers that we have here, we're going to need to wait for the original layers to dry completely before we go on to the next phase. So right now, I want what I just did here to dry for a little bit. I'm going to do this bottom layer here, which is the bottom part of the silver band. Just going to go in here. Again, observation is key. I notice how it's little bit darker. This one is a little bit darker here, especially on this side. Then it gets lighter at the bottom just like that. Be careful not to use too much water because then you'll get a big puddle, just like I just did right now. Then here, you can actually see how this isn't as harsh, it's like blending in. So I'm going to do that here too. While this side is wet, I'm going to take advantage of this. So I really notice that this section here is pretty light as opposed to these darker spots we have here. So I'm just going to go in with pure water first. Also I'm starting to use a little bit of brown mixed in with my blacks and blues here. Remember, this is just the first layer. We can always work up to the darker spots. I did notice here that we have a little bit more shadowing. Obviously, the ring is going around like that. A little bit too dark there. Despite this very first layer too, we can already start to see some other reflections and, just like the basic layout for how it's going to look with this simple shadow. Here we go. So I'm going to go ahead and I think I might do a very soft layer here right now just to get a first. Because these are a little bit more harsh, like what we practiced with in your very first exercise. See how you can see these dark strokes here. These are going to be all with watercolor and ink. So I'm just going to go ahead and do a very soft layer just to have it all laid out. I do notice that we have a little bit of shadow just around here, just very lightly. As well as we do here. We're going to do the same on this side too. There we go. So I'm also going to start to do like my first basic layout for these two diamonds. If you guys take a look at this picture, these are diamonds. These are in theory, transparent objects with light reflections, but they are next to this aquamarine. So a little bit of a light of this kind of bluish shape here, bounces off to these two. So very, very lightly, I'm just going to do. So again, I didn't necessarily have that planned out right now. I just started to observe. I'm just looking at my picture and I see that these can have just a very light layer of this turquoise paint. Very, very light, very transparent. Right now, these two look a little bit darker than this one, but this is just our very first layer. Do not think that it's going to look like this when we're done. There we go. So I just laid off with just a basic kind of this is the undertone for everything. Meanwhile, I'm going to go, back to the gem here. I'm actually going to fold this here. I'm actually to fold this so it doesn't get in my way too much. There we go. So I'm just going to keep doing what I was doing with this gemstone, which is just observing, paying very close attention. Now, I can start painting the ones that are next to the ones that I already had done. Obviously, you have to wait for this to dry in order to layer whatever comes next to it. Well, you've been watching me paint. For you guys, it's probably been a couple of minutes, but for me, it's been about an hour. What I just did here was basically pay very close attention to what the different contrasts and colors that my gemstone has. I also did like the first layer of these two diamonds, and the first thing we did in this video, was start out the base of the silver ring. So now I'm finally ready. It's already starting to look like pretty much like a diamond, like a aquamarine ring. But we do need to start doing our second phase of layering, and I'm going to start on this side here. You can see how, for example, I'm going to start out by doing this little section here, which is a little bit darker, and then, later on, we'll go in with white ink for these super bright areas. But right now, I'm going go in with a little bit of black watercolor, and little bit of blue water color just for these darker spots here, I'm going to work on the silver band right now, and I'm going to work on these areas right here, which are also darker. It's the shadow of where the gems are lying as you can see here. So right now, I'm just going to do layer 2 of our metal band, which you guys already did practice for in our warm up exercises. Now the only thing you need to do just, I'm going to say this a bunch of times, just pay very close attention. Learn how to observe, learn how to look at these different shapes, learn how to feel that if you press your brush down like that, you'll get a similar shape. It's all about looking, observing, and figuring out how to get similar shapes on your painting. So now I'm going to go ahead and do that, and then, when we finish that, we can go back in here to the gems and do some second layering on these gems. Oh, and also, I wanted to say that sometimes you really need to find the good brush like for a specific shape. Like right now, I just grabbed this a little bit rounder brush. I think I like this brush because it's going to give me these rounder shapes here. So see, if I press my brush down like that, I have a nice round shape here, and then I can start. I can lift it up and it can be a little bit thinner there. There we go. So also play around with your different brushes, different styles of brushes. I think this smaller round brush is going work well for these shiny parts within the metal object. Also, if you pay close attention to this object, you're going to see that there's different shades of gray within this band. So right now, I'm going to do these first not super dark shades, and then I'm going to go in with a little bit more concentrated paint in later, and do a whole another layer. For example, here a good tip if you want to start getting it lighter. Here I see that it starts getting a little bit lighter. I just wiped my brush off a little bit to get the access paint off, and now see I have just a lighter base of paint. Then I can just grab a little bit of water, go in there. By this point, I've already almost finished up painting. Well we did the first layer of watercolor, and now we did a little bit of metones which is like half water, half paint mix. Before we go into white ink which is the super final detail stage, we are going to get into a little bit darker tones. This is basically the third layer of layering. Right now for example I'm observing here. What I said before this little section right here is a little bit darker than what's underneath and for example especially these metal sections have these darker areas on the bottom. For example I'll do a straight darker line here, to go in with here. I think I'm going to use a little bit smaller brush right now this is a zero I believe. Just to go in with a bit of concentrated paint and really start doing these darker details. I'm just trying to observe our diamond, see if there's anything else here on the loads, actually aquamarine. If we need a little bit of darker details. I think for example right here, I'm missing this little triangle here and this triangle here. Again notice how it's all about observations is just really looking at your picture and every little detail trying to get it. There we go. All these little details that really help us get a nice painting and nice detailed illustration. Right here I see this little triangle too, I'm going to go ahead and do that. This little detailing is what you guys are going to do now. Usually with any type of jewelry, this is going to be a case. There are so many different levels of transparency, and shine, and shadows as well. For example these in here these are shadows and obviously reflections, so everything is reflecting off of.