Watercolor, Gouache & Acrylic: Layering and Blending in Different Mediums

1. Trailer: Hi. My name is Ana. Welcome to my new Skillshare class where I'm going to teach you all about blending and layering with watercolors, gouache, and acrylics. We're going to start this class out with a demonstration of supplies needed in class. I've created a chart for you to see the difference between mediums with demonstrations. This includes the differences between building up color and color mixing with each medium. I will also demonstrate how to paint gradients with each medium and color blending and observe how each medium reacts to wet paint over dry paint individually. We will dive deep into layering and different ways to layer paint depending on each medium and most importantly, background order. This is the number 1 thing when painting with watercolors or acrylics or even gouache. How to create a dark and light background depending on the medium changes so much. In the end we will make a final project where we create the same painting using two different mediums of your choice. I really hope you enjoy this class. I put so much effort into it and I've been thinking about this topic for so long. Backgrounds are really tricky and it's just basically answering a lot of questions that I've been getting online. I really hope you enjoy it and I really I'm excited to see all the projects that you upload so see you in class. 2. Supplies: Let's get started with supplies right now. I have all of this laid out here for you. What I want to get up before I even explain what each thing is, is basically just letting you know that there's a couple of different ways that you can take this class. Let's say you only have watercolors. It's fine to just do the activities with watercolor. Or let's say you have watercolors and acrylics. It's fine to use the transparent exercises with watercolor and the opaque exercises with acrylics. Or let's say you only have Gouache, and acrylics. You can also do a mix of that. Basically what I'm trying to say is that this class is going to teach you the difference between all these different mediums. I want you not feel respected, went ahead and used what you have and you'll be fine. But all the activities that I designed for this class are meant to demonstrate the difference between using transparent paint, an opaque paint, and we'll get into it. I'll explain right now what each of these are. But I just wanted to have you see it all laid out first. The basic supplies that you're going to need for any of these mediums is water. All three mediums, acrylic, gouache, and watercolor or water-soluble. That means that you can water it down using water. In this case, I'm going to have two glasses of water handy because the way I'm going to teach you this class is by mixing, doing the same activity over and over again with all different mediums. It's not recommended to mix the same, not use the same water for your acrylics as you would with your water colors. I have two different glasses of water here. A lot of people also generally enjoy having one tab of water for dirty and one for clean. It's also a recommendation just to have two different waters handy. Paper towel is always necessary for most paint mediums. A pencil and eraser is always basic. I have an assortment of brushes here, you can see these brushes. The way I paint with watercolor is not the classic like very loose style that you see. It's a little bit more defined. The brushes that I use anyway are synthetic brushes. It means that the bristle is a little bit rougher and harder, as opposed to like the classic watercolor brushes that are super soft and flowy. In this case for example, I just keep going back to these brushes. They're the Windsor and in your University series. There's synthetic brushes and I get a lot of different round sizes. Four of them are from here. I like these when I use them for all different mediums as well. I think there are good brush that can handle different types of medium. These some liner brushes. These are a little bit thinner, and these are from Princeton. Then, I have a couple of flat brushes which are good for blending acrylics and gouache. These are just some regular synthetic flat brushes. These are going to work fine for me. Now, we're going to move on to, I want to explain the first one which will be watercolor because it's the medium that I use the most. If you've taken my classes, you've probably seen this pan set before. This is my watercolor pan set is from Schmincke. Here is the brand. It's my favorite watercolor brand. I just keep going back and back to it. I have a lot of different types of watercolors that I use as well. Here's [inaudible] that I like from Winsor & Newton. The way that I mix my water colors is that I have this whole big area here, these pallets, and it's all a mix of different. Right here for example, I have some purple that I like from Daniel Smith and I have it here in the palette and then maybe I'll add some of this [inaudible] here, but I can mix this with all the rest of the paints, and same goes for these are good, These are vibrant. These are liquid watercolors. In the next video, we're going to dive deep into the differences between all mediums. I'll explain more about this. You can see here that there's different types of watercolor as well. This is what you will need for watercolor painting. Next we're going to gouache. One of the brands that I like with Gouache is Holbein. Holbein also makes watercolors. It's a Japanese brand and I like them as well. They're in general, pretty opaque and Gouaches also known as opaque watercolor. We'll see the similarities as we go further along. But these are, this is a type of Gouache that I like to use. I think Holbein is a good brand. Obviously there's a bunch of brands out there, but I think this one is pretty good and reasonably priced. Then a lot of people that use Gouache usually have some extra white wash. This is from a brand here in Mexico, Atl, but you could just get a large one from this same brand and that would be fine. Just letting you know that you will usually need to use a little bit more white than what comes in a small little tube like this. This is what I have for Gouache, very simple. Then you need a palette like this. Watercolors, if you use a pan set, you'll open it up and you can use the tin as as your palatte. But with Gouache, they usually come in two forms. I saw them once on Amazon and these little jelly tabs or something, but I mostly see them like this. You do need a separate palette like that. This is what you're going to need for Gouache, and lastly, for acrylics, I'm going to show you the different types of acrylics that I like to use. I have this Liquitex brand and these little tabs here. These acrylics are heavy body acrylics. They're glossy. Acrylics can be more opaque or more, more glossy. Again, we'll get deeper into that in the following videos. But this is a brand that is professional. It's pretty good. It's heavy body, it's glossy, so it'll give you a little bit more of texture if that's what you're looking for. Then, this brand here is a Mexican brand that is called politec, and I like this brand. It's super affordable. The colors are nice and as opposed to Liquitex, these are more, they're more opaque and they glide easy and we'll demonstrate that again later on. But just so you see that there's different types as well. Acrylics will need to have a palette as well. See, this is a palette here, but this palette has a top to it. This will seal in the moisture of your acrylic paints. Acrylics will dry in turn, basically into plastic on your palate. Again, we'll explore and explain more about this later on. But it's nice to have a pallet with a little top like this. There's many different variations and types that you will see this in. This is the one that I'm going to use for this class. Lastly, although what I'm going to get into again in the next video is a little bit about surfaces that you can paint on. But I have this Canson watercolor block and it has a fine surface. There's not much texture to it, which is good when you're using all of these different techniques because [inaudible] acrylics usually lay flat on your paper. You don't want all that like watercolor texture they usually have. But then again, watercolor can only handle being on watercolor paper. I like this block, as the type of paper to use for all three mediums. Again, acrylics and Gouache can be used on different mediums, which I'll get into in the next video. But for this class we're going to use this block here. I always, always want you to remember that you don't necessarily have to use exactly the same things that I'm using, whatever you have tried out. It's very possible that it'll work and the only thing I'm going to be strict about always is that you do need to have actual watercolor paper to use your watercolors. If you are used to using, let's say mixed media paper for your acrylics and you want to try out watercolors for this class, it is necessary to have something that says watercolor on the cover. That's it. That's what you're going to need for this class and keep in mind that use whatever you have and try to make the best of it. If you have all of this, take the complete class. If you only have watercolors, Gouache or acrylic, or only two of these, you can also take this class. It's going to be fun and it's going to be so amazing to see how you use these different mediums and different ways. Now we're going to go on to the next video where I'm going to dive deeper into the differences and similarities between all these mediums. 3. Medium Basics : I made this chart for you, which explains the basic differences and similarities between watercolors, gouache, and acrylics. What I'm going to do now is go over all these different points here and I'm also going to upload this PDF to the class so you guys can have it and always refer back to this chart if you ever need to. I'm going to go one by one here and obviously I'm going to start with watercolors because I do paint in all three mediums, but watercolors are like my base. I thought I would start here and then go towards gouache and acrylics, so a really quick overview of these three different mediums is that all of them are water-based and they all do work really different though and they dry different and the texture is different, but they're all water-based. That's the number one thing that makes them all the same. For example, oil paints are not water-based and you need to use different. You can mix them with water and you can mix water with all of these so that's the biggest similarity. I'm going to go one by one, right now I'm going to start with watercolors. I'm just going to put it here. I also brought some paintings that I've done. Obviously these are in my style and I never want my classes to be necessarily about you wanting to paint in my style, of course that's fine too. Whatever I'm teaching, I obviously want you to practice, but just showing you how I use these different supply and I think will be really helpful in explaining each point of view of each medium. We have here, I have a little extra watercolor block here so that you can see there's different sizes and different textures as well. If you've taken my other class, we've dive really deep into all different watercolor supplies and right here I have the first one that I showed you, which is the canson block. I'm just going to go through all these points and just play around a little bit too and in the meantime, show you some different paintings that I've made throughout the years and what examples I mean with this list. Number one, watercolors work best on heavyweight watercolor paper, which is high in absorbency, which is going to be one of the main differences between the other opaque paints. This is pretty much the only place that you can use watercolors and have it work effectively. It comes in different presentations like pans, tubes, and liquid, these are the most commons. Again, see this is an example of liquid watercolor. This is an example of a two watercolor, and then right here I have my pen set, which is what I really like to use as a base. When I mean a base, you can mix and match all of it together and it works just fine and also, you might be wondering what's up with my palette here. The colors that came with this set are three rows here and then the last one was left blank and this is where I like to add my special little watercolors that I collect. What I really like about watercolors is that there's always these fun like pigments coming out and this is a unicorn pigment, which is really fun and this is a little bronze one that I have here, and someone in a class that I taught in New York gave me these little glitter one, it's just really fun and this is a creamer, this really nice black that I like to use, just demonstrating that you can also mix and match within your pan set and not only on your palate. That's the presentations that it comes in and it's obviously water-based paint. Its luminous and translucent, which basically means that it's bright paint, and it's transparent. It uses the white of the paper for different values, which is really important. If you notice here I used to really wash here. That means a lot of water and a little bit of paint and if I used more paint, more opaque and a thick mix, it would be more opaque and I'll show you exactly what I mean with these three examples here. These are three examples of paintings that I did using monochrome, and if you've taken my very first class, you will know exactly what this is. It's basically using your watercolors and it's the same way that you would use ink, for example, it's just using one color when hugh and then watering it down to get all these different values. This is what I mean by it uses the water in the paper, here's another example and here's another. All of these three, there's no actual color mixing in any of these, what there is, is a difference between water and paint, if I have, for example here, the white of the paper here is giving me this really light blue as opposed to the more concentrated paint here, which is giving me this deep turquoise. That's what I mean, with gouache, you will actually mixing your white to make lighter colors and with watercolor, you will mix in more water to make your lighter colors. This is a really important one, timing and drying is crucial, this is super important watercolor takes a little bit longer to dry. See this is still wet for example, here, and if this were acrylic, this would've already dried a few seconds ago, obviously when we paint with watercolor, it's important to have whatever is. I'll show you this example here and actually we're going to do this really fun moonlight thing in this class, which I've had a bunch of people asked me on Instagram about, and so we're actually going to do that here and it's going to be really fun, here's a little example of this valley here. If I paint the first strip, I have to wait for this one to dry completely before I can paint the one on the bottom because the colors will bleed together if I don't wait for that to dry. That's a really super basic example of what I mean by timing and drying is crucial. Then this is a really important one, traditionally it must go from light to dark. I'll show you a couple of examples of what I mean here. This is going to be the number one difference, if I could choose one, would be the way we layer and we will really dive deep into this, in this class. This is a question that I get a lot as well, and it's all about layering and backgrounds. In the example of this painting here, if you were to be painting with acrylics, what you would do is probably first do your background, which is this black and green gradient, and then wait for that to dry and then paint these lighter leaves over that. That's a very simple logic with painting but in watercolor, you have to switch all that off and think to yourself, what is the lightest part in this painting? That is how you are going to start layering. You have to be really, really mindful of saving these light parts, here for example, let's take the leaves because this is a simple way to explain this. The very first thing I painted here are, for example, this green side of the leaf, although like green sides and then I wait for that to dry because of what I said now timing is crucial. You don't want that to blend with your next layer that's side-by-side, so I wait for that to dry and then I paint this darker green on the other side. Wait for this to dry completely and paint all around every single leaf with my black paint, so what I'm doing here is circling around, painting around and getting into these really tiny spots, it's actually challenging and you do have to practice low on your pulse but in this culture classes, there's a lot of comments and questions in the discussion board and a lot of them are someone showing you a picture and being like, hey, how would I do this with watercolor? I always end up having to explain, ''well, it's going to be tedious because the way that you work with watercolor is by'', here's another example, ''is by painting around whatever lighter shade you have with a darker one, '' in this case, the first thing I did was painted the banner here, and then I did the flowers, and then I waited for this to dry completely and then I painted the green all around, circling all around, really detailed until I got this really cool green gouache, not wash, gouache background. Then timing is really important too because then see for example here this area here had already dried and then I picked up there, and so I have this little mark, but I personally like that, I like how that looks, it's a style that I've chosen, but there are other ways to have a seamless background. It's important to reserve your white and light values when layering, that's what we just explained right here and then correction is tricky, no painting over to fix mistakes, this is a big one. With gouache and acrylics, it's really nice to mess up and then just paint over it with the same paint that was underneath. With watercolors, this is not so easy since we're not using opaque paint, but translucent paint, it's really tough to correct your mistakes, you have to be extra mindful when you're painting. Activates and reactivates with water on pallets, basically that means that this paint has been dry for awhile, I just come in here with my brush and pick it up and that's it, it's not paint that's going to dry on the palette. It's spontaneous and varies in texture when dry depending on the amount of water and type of paint and paper. This is really important too. I have this example, it's fun here and I think it's a pretty good example to show you what the watercolor, this is a more of a loose technique that I used and I waited for it to dry and then drew over it with a micron pen, but you can see there's a lot of different texture in here, the transparency, the way it dries, it's all very fun and loosen, and you get these, some people call it the cauliflower drying, like this here. You get this texture within the paint that's not necessarily flat. You get all these playful, mysterious textures whenever your paint is dry. That's something that's different with watercolors as opposed to acrylics and gouache. These are the topics that I wanted to go over with watercolors. Now, we're going to go onto gouache in the next segment. Moving onto gouache. Gouache is really interesting because it's known as if acrylics and watercolor had a baby, so they're like a mix between both, and they have their own qualities too, but they have a lot of similarities that you can have with watercolors or with acrylics. This is a really good medium if you're someone that wants to paint with watercolor, but likes a little bit more of opaqueness. A cool thing about gouache is that it works best on watercolor paper, mixed media paper, and tinted paper, etc. You can actually play around a little bit more with your gouache and not be restricted to only using white watercolor paper. For example, here I have some craft paper, actually black paper, which is really fun, and some craft paper and gouache will work perfectly on any of these. It does use less water than watercolor, even though it is water soluble, I'll also dive deeper into that. It typically comes in a tube form, and obviously, basically what you do, you just open up this little tube and put a little bit of that on your palette, so I have some orange, some white, and some yellow here. It doesn't come in a pen set like watercolors do, but it does come in tube. They are matte and opaque, but can also be watered down for a transparent looks, I'll demonstrate this really quickly. If I add less water, I just actually cleaned my brush off, so it can be actually pretty thick paint. You can see here, there's not much transparency going on. But if I actually clean my brush off, and I'm just picking up a lot of water here, even more water for rinsing it off, so I'm just picking up more water each time. If you take a look at this, it's not going to dry exactly the same way watercolor would, but you do get these nice transparencies that watercolor gives us. It's like a nice intermedium of watercolor and acrylic in that way, so you can use it this way or this way. Sometimes it's referred to as opaque watercolors or middle point between acrylics and watercolors, which is what I said in the beginning, and it typically uses less water than watercolors. It's still water-soluble, but it's more dense, so you can see here, by the way I'm mixing, how the paint is a little bit thicker, you can feel this nice texture to it and I'm going to add a little bit of white here. Instead of watering the paint down with more water to make a lighter yellow, I just added a tiny bit of white to this mix. See how it's really nice and opaque, especially when you add the white. This is really opaque here, and then again, I'll demonstrate that you can go in and add just some water, but it's not going to mix the same way if you add a color next to it. If this were watercolor, these two would blend really nicely together now, but the way that gouache works, it doesn't really work out that way, you have to go in and do some of that work yourself here. What else? It reactivates with water on the palette and the paper, which is really, really interesting. Let's say I leave as palette out overnight and that's perfectly fine, I don't have to cover everything, I can just go back and once it's dry, I can reactivate that, which is the same with watercolors. But something that is really interesting, and this is really going to affect the way that we layer and mix is that, it also reactivates on your paper, so for example, look how quickly that dried too, it's so different from watercolors, the watercolors I use in the first demonstration are barely drying now, and this gouache that I just placed here has already dried. But something really interesting is that if you add water, it will pick up the color underneath, which is really different, and that doesn't really happen with watercolor because, watercolors stains more into the paper and is meant to be layered, so if I go in like that, it's not going to have the same reaction as gouache does. This is something that's really important, and that is something that pretty much only gouache does because acrylics doesn't do this either. So this is an important thing, it's once it's dry and the paper, we'll also reactivate with water, this is a big deal when we're going to start layering and mixing. Dry layers react to wet paint over top layers, which is what I just went into. Then darker colors tend to dry lighter and lighter colors tend to dry darker. The way it dries, you have to be mindful, and if you want something that's really light, you have to add a lot of white to have it be that really toned down pastel tone that you want. It's something to keep in mind. Then layering is possible from light to dark and dark to light. This means that right now if I wanted to add some white paint here, if I wanted to paint over this, I could. See this is almost dries off. With watercolor you can't really do that, with watercolor, you have to leave that space and rescue your whites. With flashy can layer, either way, you can go light to dark or dark to light. Then the texture is flat, and then a mixed texture because you can usually get this really flat look like we have here, and then once this dries, you'll see what it does, it doesn't do the exact same thing that watercolor does, but you can get a little bit of texture and you can also force a texture if you want, for example, your brushes to, let me just add a little bit of this purple here. You can also get texture by layering in a different way like let's say I'm going to layer here, so it's starting to mix already, I'm using these two complimentary colors. You can see that there's a, different type of texture, you can see the brushstroke more like that. You can see the stripes of different texture with watercolor. It's more about what it does on its own in these like the way it dries and the cauliflower effect and all that. One last thing I wanted to show you gouache which is really, really fun and really cool. I'm not sure you guys know about yet, because I just recently started experimenting with that, is that you can actually almost turn your watercolors into gouache painting by adding a little bit of white to your watercolors. I'm pulling my watercolor pan in here and I have my extra white gouache. If you don't have gouache paint, or you don't want to invest in a set, buy some whitewash. This is going to be really fun for you to test out what it actually feels like to paint with gouache. What I'm going do now is just grab a tiny bit of some purple and I'm going to mix it in with my white gouache. You can also mix these together. This was white gouache with just a little bit of purple watercolor that I had here on my pen. Then look at this amazing lilac that I made with that. If you're really wanting to have your watercolors look, the word I would use as chalky. It would have this texture that's like more opaque texture like this. You can play around and mix a little bit of white gouache with your watercolors. That's a really cool hack and tip if you don't want to buy a full set. I just wanted to show you that you can also paint on colored paper like this, for example, all tested out here. You can also paint over here, which is really cool if you want to have, let's say like a background with a different color. Whereas with watercolors, you can't really do this because it's so transparent and watery. See it doesn't really show up that way, but with gouache you can do this because of its opaqueness. It has more pigment, it's more opaque. Here's a couple of examples. Here's an example of something that I did on black paper, which is really interesting because I use some white gouache to mix together with my watercolors. This is actually block watercolor paper. It's really a rarity, a the student gave it to me, and I think it was in New York class. I wanted to play around with it and I had some golden can stuff. Here's an example of how I mixed some white gouache with some watercolors. I picked up the tint from the water color, but it still has that white opaqueness for the clouds. Just a little demonstration that I did for you of how you can use your gouache paints in a more opaque style. I didn't paint the background, this is just some blue paper, like that. It's also interesting to play around with that. That's pretty much it for the basics of gouache, and it's a really, really fun medium. I enjoy it a lot too, and I enjoy all of them, but this one has a lot of attention going on now. Right now I'm going to switch over to acrylics. I'm going to get this out of the way and I'll demonstrate that next. Onto acrylics, I'm opening up this liquitex heavy body acrylic. I also have a couple of these old tubs that I showed you. Right now, I'm using this palette here, which is the one that you can cover up like this so your paint doesn't dry. We'll explain more of this later. I'd like to start off by saying that I have a long history with acrylics. I actually started out my career before I really got obsessed with watercolors. I was really, really into acrylics and I think it's a wonderful medium. It's so diverse, we'll go into it here. The number 1 thing that I think is really great about it is that, it works on a larger variety of surfaces. Mix media paper, wood, tinted paper, Canvas, craft projects, etc. Many times when you're wondering like, oh, I wonder what kind of paint I can use to paint these big butterfly wings or whatever. It's going to be acrylics, acrylics are really noble for that. I'll show a quick example here. Put these two side, I'll just open this one because it's really quickly available. I have some of this paint here, you can put it here. It's very opaque, and it doesn't use much water. You can obviously water it down, and you can make your mixing here. The way you mix your paint is going to be in this type of palette, and you can also just paint on paper. See, this is why I like this paper. It's so smooth, and you don't get a lot of texture so that acrylics and your gouache can also work well. See, I'm actually watering this down and it's still really opaque, that's the difference between gouache and watercolor here. Then you can also have some texture like that. You can actually leave the paint thicker this way, so you get this texture, which is actually one of the last point here, but I jumped the gun. It works on a larger variety of surfaces. I also have this little mini canvas here, which is an example of what a canvas surface would be. This is just a tiny little sample one. But if you want to paint like really large canvases, you can also use acrylics for this. Whereas, watercolor gouache might be tricky because let's say a little bit of water gets spilled on that, it'll just fade away, and acrylic just works really good with canvas, and it also works great with tinted paper and black paper just to name a few. There's a bunch of different services you can paint on. This is opaque paint and it can be matte or glossy. I like matte better, which is like this, and then these here are glossy. I'll show you what it looks like. There's a little bit of burnt sienna here, and you can already see the texture, it even looks really different here in the palette. You can tell how it has this shine to it, and you'll especially be able to see that once this dries. I'm just bunching on a bunch of paint here. It's really different, especially when this dries. This will look shiny and glossy, and this will look matte, so it's like two different kinds of acrylic. Then possible to paint using tools like brushes or palette knives, which is really cool. Some people see these little palette knives here, and this is an example of what they look like. I don't really paint this way, but a lot of people really enjoy using these palette knives. They're like little spatulas, and you can just layer the paint on in thicker texture like this onto your canvas. They're water-soluble when wet. I meant to say water-soluble, not watercolor soluble, when wet, but they're water resistant when dry, so this is really interesting, as opposed to, for example, what we did here with gouache, where we were able to like reactivate the paint with water. You're not going to be able to do that with acrylic, and that for me is actually a plus. The way I like to paint, I like my layers to stay the way they are when I'm doing acrylics. I'll show you a couple of examples. But for example, here, I'm pretty sure this is still a little bit wet, but there you go. It's almost drying. You can see you're running water over it and it's not going to pull the water, it just stays there, which is really nice. Again, here's some gouache that dried a while ago and you can reactivate it like this with water, which can be good for mixing, but it all really depends on what style you want to be painting in. The paint will dry and turn to plastic if left on open palette. For example, the paint that is right here on this palette, if I were to just walkaway, go have lunch, come back, it will most likely be dry. You can almost just pick it up, that's the way that I like to clean these kinds of palettes with acrylics. I just pick up the dry paint, and it lifts up like a big plastic thing. If it doesn't pick up, it's like a pain in the butt to dry, and you have to scrub there. I recommend either washing your palettes immediately, waiting for them to dry, and lifting it up like plastic, or always having a cover on like this so that then the oxygen stays out and you can still use this paint because it can also be a waste, and that's something that I really like about watercolors. You don't really waste any paint at all, it just stays there forever. It dries quickly on canvas or surface which is a plus too. A lot of people find water color, I don't know what the word is, annoying or tedious, when you have to just keep on waiting for the layers to dry, and it's more of a patient process, whereas acrylic, it's much more quick to be able to layer and stuff. Waterproof, one's dry, which is cool. If you drop a little bit of water on your paper, you'll be fine. Easy to correct mistakes by layering over paint. This is one of the things that I really love about acrylics that if you mess up, it's easy to go back. I'll show you an example here. For example, with this painting, I did this with acrylics. I'll actually go through the layering process, which will probably be helpful. I did the background, even though it goes from light to dark, which at the very center has this really light peach, and it starts to have this gradient here with this mot, this purple, and the purple eventually turns into black. If you take a close look at the background, that's what it looks like. But I waited for that to dry completely and I started painting the flowers outwards. You can see that there's white over black here, no problem. You can also see there's a little bit of texture which I purposely left in the little petals. What I mean by being able to correct is, let's take an example. Let's say I was doing one of these petals, and I dropped my brush or just went overboard and painted a little too much of the white over the black, I could just wait for that to dry, and then with the same black with my background, paint over that and you wouldn't really tell the difference. Correction is a lot more friendlier than it is with watercolor, and that's something that I really like with acrylics. I have some more examples here. Dries quickly on canvas surface, water-proof easy to correct. This is an interesting one. Layers from light to dark and dark to light, which is really one of my favorites. This is a painting that I did so many years, probably 10 years ago, of George Harrison and it's very flat. The next one is that it can be flattered textured volume depending on the brush stroke. In this case, I used opaque water color. I believe it was actually this brand here which is more opaque. You can't really see that much of a brush stroke. If you go really in, you can see a little bit of texture, but it's pretty flat. If you use the stroke differently like I did here, and you can do this on purpose if that's what you're going for, you can actually get a different texture with your brushstroke. It's totally different from what you would get with watercolors, but there are different mediums and they do different things. Here, for example, I'm pretty sure that I painted, this was 10 years ago, but I'm pretty sure that I painted the pink, the background first, and then went over and over. For example, the centers of each flower are light yellow and they're the last thing I painted, and even though the petals underneath are a darker blue, that doesn't matter, you can layer that way and it works out fine. With watercolor, it would be a totally different story. Here's an example of using tinted paper. This is like little peach paper. Oh no, wait, I thought it was, but it's actually a white paper and I painted the whole background pink first. Here's another example similar to the first one I show you, and it's also a dark background which I painted first, and it gradients into light yellow here, and then wait for that to dry, and then I went over with the acrylic, then the lettering at the very last. Just some examples here, some little really simple florals just to show you what it looks like it's really flat and it's a nice look too. It's just different from watercolors. Then these are some feathers that I painted also, so long ago, probably 2010. You can also see the way that I layer here is really different because for example, this large black feather here, I painted the black part first, waited for that to dry, and then went in with the white acrylics and did the little dots, and the lines and stuff. Same here with a blue dots, so just the way that you layer and blend is really different. It also, just like the brush stroke and the texture, it looks really different as some watercolors would look. Those are the basic differences. Each medium is special in its own way. I personally prefer watercolor as my base medium, but a lot of people I think, try out watercolor and want to force themselves to use watercolor when in reality, I think that maybe another medium might work for you better, depends on your side and what you want to achieve. This class I think, is going to be really interesting for everyone to also maybe get out of your comfort zone and try a new medium, and you might discover just loving something that you never thought you would. I'm going to upload this little chart to the class, and now we're going to continue with actual activities. 4. Transluscent vs Opaque : The first lesson is going to be in building up color and mixing your paint. I'm going to divide it into two sections. It's going to be translucent versus opaque. So the first area here, I already did a first trial for you and I'm going to do the second one along with you but I wanted for you to see it dry as well. So the first one is going to be, gouache is going to play on both sides. This is really interesting. If you only have water color and gouache, you can do this exercise perfectly. If you only have acrylics and gouache, you can also do it but just in a different way. What I'm going to do first here is demonstrate how to build up color in watercolor and then how to mix color in gouache, here. You can see that they look kind of similar like in this part here but then this one already looks a little bit different. You can tell that it's more opaque than the watercolor. Then in the second one, this area here, this row is acrylics and this bottom one is gouache. They actually look pretty similar here so you can't really tell and there's not that much different. When dry they actually do behave pretty similarly. I'm going to start out, if you guys have taken my other watercolor classes, you know this by art. I think this is the activity that I start out in my very, very first class and it's like a monochrome, like building up color. I have my pen site here but I have this palette that I'm using for my gouache but I'm going to use it with a little bit of water color too. I'm just putting a tiny bit of Payne's gray watercolor, which is one of my favorite favorite hughes. We're starting out with just a little bit of water. The main difference that you're going to see here is how water is used in all different mediums. With watercolor, there's always a bunch of water and it's really mindful in the way that you mix and the amount and stuff, it really changes. My first value here is very transparent. We're painting this little square here. That's really watery transparent. Then the second one is just adding a tiny bit more paint. Just a little bit more. We have a second value here that's like an intermediate. Actually, it could even take a little bit more. Then the third one is, I'm going to try to get it really opaque and mix it in with my water. So I have that really deep, deep value here. That's pretty much how translucent paint works. It's going to be the same thing with gouache. I'm going to demonstrate that next right here underneath. This one is already done with gouache and you'll see that it pretty much acts the same way. I have here some of these Holbein gouaches, I just laid a few of these on the palate and I'm going to start by also having some water and then adding just a tiny bit of this paint here. Gouache can be mixed with white but can also just be mixed with water and it'll behave in a similar way to watercolors. I have that first square there and then second square here. I think the biggest difference is also in the way that it dries. It looks pretty different once it's dry. Then I'm going to try and get a really opaque one here. You don't even need to use that much water when you want to have an opaque layer. See how the paint is like really creamy. So that's a really opaque layer. This is the way that you build up color using the translucent technique. You can do this with either watercolors or gouache. Then the next thing I'm going to demonstrate here is how to actually mix color. I'm just using two colors and middle intermediate here. In the case of watercolor, let's just use some of this Payne's gray that I had and I have some magenta here on my palette. I'm just going to start with the first square. Here is just a plain magenta that I have on my palette. It's just a medium value. Then what I'm going to do is actually mix this magenta with some of the Payne's gray that I had laying around here and I get that really, really nice, deep purple like an eggplant almost. Then finally, we're going to clean my brush and then use just some of the Payne's gray directly. So pretty similar in the way you mix colors here is just by combining these two and you'll get this intermediate one. Now let's do that with gouache. It's going to be pretty much the same. This is the gouache that I had from this exercise. I'm just going to do the first one here. Then I'm going to add a little bit of blue gouache on to this one and I'll get deeper purple. I'll add a little bit more. Then finally, just a little bit of the blue gouache directly. So really very, very simple. One of the things that we will begin to see as all of this dries is how we are going to get these really interesting textures with watercolor and gouache is going lay a little bit more flat. That's part of the technique. I wanted to have these two different blocks to demonstrate that if you're using your gouaches similar to watercolor, you can get similar results. Now I'm going to show you how to use them in an opaque way here so that you will get similar results to acrylics. I'm going to just take a second to move my watercolors out of the way and then bring in my acrylics. I just finished the translucent part and now I moved my watercolors out of the way and we have some gouache and some acrylics here so that I can teach you the opaque side of things. The main difference here is that we are actually going to incorporate white paint into the mix, which is really cool and it's totally different than what we do with watercolor. I'm just going to move this up here and have our main focus be here. The top side here is acrylics and the bottom side here is gouache. I have my two palettes here. This is my acrylic one and this is my gouache one. I'm actually going to use my acrylics first. Again, I'm lifting this up here, which is going to keep it from drying. I'm going to mix a little bit of white paint first, so that's some white acrylic. Then we are going to turn that white paint into some green paint. See how the texture is really different. It's really creamy and thick. Number one, we have a little bit of white paint here. Also the way that you mix is really just like the paint feels so different than even gouache and watercolors do. By the way, I did change my water here. I'm starting a new medium so these are quick activities. I just added a little bit of green to my white and I still feel that it's a little bit too green. I'm going to grab a little extra white in just with what I had on my brush. I'm mixing a new color. See, already the entire technique is really just different, the color mixing style. If I were using watercolor here, I would have a lot of water, a big puddle of water and instead here I have a lot of white. You can add just a tiny bit of water to make it smoother. We could move easier. Look how much I'm lathering this up. This is the way that I like to prepare acrylics. We're starting out here and we have our first little square and as you can see, it's very smooth, not much texture to it, it's lying flat. It's also really satisfying. Second step, I already had this one that I thought was a little bit overboard, so I'm going to go in. Actually, I'm going to add a little bit more green already. So added a little bit more green to that. This is a better contrast here. Then I'm just rinsing my brush a little bit because it already has this white mix in it and I want more green. So I'm going to grab more green and just mix it in with a tiny bit of this other mix that I have here just to give it a little bit of that white chalkiness. That will be my final value. You can also just add a little bit more of water if your paint is sort of getting stuck. I feel like that's good now. So the main difference in this whole thing is these. The very first one, the water with the white. That's what's going to make it really different. Now we're going to do the exact same thing using gouache just so you can see and also try out. I love it when you guys post all of your trial runs and experiments and all the warm-up activities because I really encourage everyone to actually do it, not only watch it, it's how you prepare yourself for the harder activities that come later. So I'm just rinsing my brush here and now I have my gouache palette here and I have some white. I'm going to grab some white gouache and you see it already. Just the way that it makes is so different from acrylic, even though it look similar, it's just a total different thing. Here we're going to start to observe how the lighter tones tend to darken when they dry. Here right now this looks like very, very soft and pastel-like and I have a feeling that when this dries, it'll get a little bit deeper and darker. So number one value is a lot of white mixed in with a little bit of ocher. The next one is we're going to grab a little bit more of the ocher and mix it in here. I feel like that's still too dark. It's a little lighter. That's the middle value and then we're going to use just pretty much almost plain ocher for the last one. So this is going to begin to dry now and we're going to start to see a little bit of the differences as well. Right now you can observe that, especially the texture in watercolor is really, really different. What makes a big difference? Now we're going to go to color mixing here. This is the same method no matter what medium you're using. But I'm just going to demonstrate it quickly just to finish this page here. Now we're going to go with acrylics, which is my top palette here and I need another color. Maybe I'll do a little bit of this, it's light violet. So I'll turn the light violet into, so I barely used any water. It was just the water that was on my brush but the paint is flowing really nicely. Then I'm going to mix this in with, maybe I'll use a little bit of this mix. So also something that's really different when mixing with acrylics is that you're already incorporating all the mixes that you made. So for example here, I had some of the white mix with a green here, and I'm just using that directly. Whereas with watercolor you would have to water down some fresh paint to get the same light value that you wanted. Here I already have it on my palette which, just different ways that you would use a medium. I'm mixing what I had left with this mint, actually needs a little more of this. So this is pretty much the way that you make colors. I really like having a big palette with all different sort of tones going on there. You get a really nice organic personal palette when you're not like super detailed on, I'm just using this green and this blue, but like kind of playing around with the entire palette. I almost had forgotten how much I love acrylics, but I really do. It's such a great medium. So that was it, pretty simple color mixing, just mixing two colors together to get the center one. Then finally, I'll do it with gouache and then we'll move on to the next exercise. So this was your first lesson. It's a very simple lesson, but it's really important for those super basics of how to mix. Now you can tell also the richness of the color in general is really different with opaque paint as it is with translucent paint. It's a different look. I'd never want to say that one is better than the other. It's just different and it really depends on what you're going for. But you can just see it like the vibrance is different and this is more luminous. So just different ways of painting. Right now, we are going to move on to actual color blending. This was the main difference between translucent versus opaque, and so on to the next video. 5. Color Blending: Now on to color blending, which is also a very interesting part. What we did in the past video is just color mixing, which is just basically how to mix colors. But here we're actually going to do these gradients, which surprisingly is very different in each of these mediums. I did three that are already dry, so you can see it first, so it's watercolor, Gouache in the middle and acrylic at the bottom. What I'm going to do now is just go through how we're going to blend with these. If you've taken my other classes. We've done these a few times before, but I'll just redo it here and feel free to do it for yourself as well. I have a little bit of the Payne's gray from the past exercise here, this is watercolor as well. I'm just going to start out with this Payne's gray here, which is a nice watery mix. I am actually going to turn it into ocher. If you've taken my other classes, you've done this before and it's basically all the real work happens right here. We're going to mix in the ocher little by little on this palette. A little bit more each time. Cleaning it so that it doesn't interrupt the one next to it. We're finishing it up with a little bit darker ocher. Here actually I could have done a better job, but since it's still wet and I'm going to go in and just drag it a little bit if this was dry this wouldn't work, but since it's still wet, we can play around with that a little bit. See, it's a nice little color blending here a nice ombre gouache gradient. Very simple with watercolor. We've done this many times. With gouache, it's going to be a little bit similar where we have our mix in the palette and then we add in the color to the same little dish area here. But I left this here purposely. If you see the brushstrokes over, we're actually going to go in and do a little bit of dry brushstroke after which is something very specific to gouache that I really like. Let's go ahead and get started here. I'm going to flip this over. Actually I have some gouache here that I can, see, this is what's really cool, you can reactivate it since I used it passed. It was already dry in the palette but gouache lets you go back in and keep using it. We're starting out with this yellow here and I'm going to dry my palette and add a little bit of orange. Each time, a little bit more orange. But you can already tell that it doesn't do the same job as watercolor does, You can actually see the streaks a lot more. I'm going to go in with a little bit of a darker color here and darkest at the very end. If you observe this color mixing, it does look really different to the watercolor. Watercolor blends and then gouache stops and continues with the next color. It has its pros and cons, but something that's really cool is that you can wait for this to dry a little bit or go in with a flat brush. Then do some blending like this as well. Which is a different technique, but it's also, it looks pretty cool too, and it looks different up here because my paint was more opaque and here I used it a little bit more translucent. But if you were to wait for this to dry completely, you could also go in with a little bit of water in your brush and paint over it. I can actually demonstrate this on the one that's already dry up here like this, so you would go in and do this like this. That's going to give you a really, really nice color blending. You can also just do it like this and leave it that way, but it's just a nice demonstration to teach you how the actual wet paint really reactivates as much as you need it to. It's something very specific to gouache that I find interesting. Then lastly, we're going to do a little simple color blend with acrylics. I have this out here, I'm going to add maybe a little bit of blue here. Actually, I think I might use a flutter brush for this. I'm going to start with this green here and I'm actually going to mix it with some white. I'm going to make a new color here. I have this mix here. This is going to be my base mix, and then I'm going to slowly add in some of this blue here. But I'm using a flat brush, this time I feel like it's a little bit easier to blend acrylics with a flat brush and then just adding a tiny bit here and putting it all into the mix like that. With acrylics, it's cool because you can actually go back a little bit. It depends on how much pressure you apply. It's the amount of paint that will be on your brush. Slowly turning this into the darker blue, see like right here, I'm just going to dab a little bit and have my dryer brush and go in and you can blend over, which is really cool. Adding in more blue to this big mix here. This is actually very, very different than watercolors. With watercolors, you want to leave it alone and not really go back in and mess with it that much. But with acrylics as long as it's still damp on your paper, you can go in and continue blending. For example, here I have these streaks that I don't like that much and I'm just going to go in with a dry brush and paint over it. See it has like a really, really nice flat texture now. As it dries, it will continue to get flatter. Right now you can see the streaks, but when it dries, you won't be able to see it. This is a really simple lesson, but I feel like it's really important to begin to understand how each medium works differently. Obviously, there's a lot of stuff in water color that you can't control. Here there was a bit of excess of water, so we've got this little cauliflower texture here, which I personally really like. I love that about watercolor. Then with gouache, we have these two different versions, which this one was using the paint a little bit more opaque and this one was a little bit more translucent. It looks more like what this would and then here's the two versions I did with acrylic, which as you noticed, I used a flat brush. I like using flat brushes to blend with acrylics better. You can go in with your damp, dryish brush and paint over to make this look more seamless. Just a few differences in color blending. Try it out, use whatever you have and please post all this because I really like seeing all your progress and how it's going. 6. Wet Over Dry Paint: So please notice that I have some fresh water here. We're going to have to change up the water quite a bit during this class and I have a couple of different pressures. I have a couple of flat ones and my basic round brush, it's number 6 that I've been using. I prepared this activity for you by painting different dry rectangles of watercolor, wash and acrylic. Now we're actually going to see,for example this is a lighter colored glaze, how each layer reacts differently when exposed to paint over it and to water over it, which is also a really important part with painting with each of these mediums, and we're going to start. So I have a big mix of all. I have a bunch of pellets going on here but I'm going to try my best to demonstrate and talk to you and explain what I'm using each time. I'm going to start out by painting over this first glaze with watercolor. Again, see how the watercolor dried and it already has this really interesting texture and the washing acrylic or more flat. Actually, I used a little bit of the glossier acrylics here so you can see more of a paint streak. It's a little bit different than this flat one that I've been using, but it's still acrylic and also here I just painted really quickly, blue and then green and see how it's blended on its own and here there's pretty much no blending. So we'll play around with that and talk about it. So the first thing we're going to do is, I'm just going to demonstrate pretty much. It's more of a demonstration this part is how different colors react over dry layers. So in the case of watercolor, it's really important to let your under layers dry if you want to layer over that. Also, since it's translucent, one of the ways that we actually mix color is by layering dry paint. So here, once I had this like blue background and I paint a little bit of pink over it. The mix of the blue and the pink is going to give me this really nice pilot. So it's also a way to color mixed with water color by layering dry areas. Something else that I wanted to demonstrate here is I'm just going to drop some water here. It's just clean water and see how it reacts. I'm going to leave it there. Then I'm also going to go back just to my palette here and have a little bit of this burnt brick color and a little darker color over the darker color. It's really not going to work that well. See, so you can't really see much of a contrast with this layering because they're both already opaque. So this is really not the best way to layer watercolors. Something that can happen with watercolors is that you can also like overwork your paper. So it's not really going to change much if I paint over it with just water. But if you just keep going at this, it can eventually I don't know, there's this thing with watercolor where you almost have to leave it be and it does its own magic on its own. But I'm just showing you how it lifts up a little bit of the paint, but it doesn't really change the essence that much, this doesn't look that different than what we had initially as opposed to wash which is really going to change. So second part here with gouache, we have this first transparent area of gouache and I'm going to just demonstrate here. Here's my gouache and I have this magenta here. Similar to the way with watercolors, we will also be able to layer that way. But here you can pretty much cover up what you've had underneath and you can go in with some white as well, which is something that really doesn't happen here. So you can go in with white and pretty much erase in here. You can grab some white wash and go over your watercolors like that and these mediums work really well together and no problem. See for example here, you'll see it even more because of the high contrast. I'm just playing around showing you what all these look like. So here's going to be a big difference since washes are more opaque than watercolor. If we use a color over this already really dark color, we're actually going to see some results. So I'm going to go in here with, I'll just use some of this white with all color and that we had. You can see that I can actually paint over this and you'll actually get a really nice just brush stroke over the darker color which you can't really do here. Something that's interesting too, is that I was speaking to a friend that paints with wash exclusively known as saying I like it gets to me a little bit that the undertone of the color that's in the first layer will blend into the over color, for example does here. So if you keep going over it, It'll begin to blend into the blue as well. If you can see that because it reactivates once there's water on this already dry layer, it will reactivate so you can see how it's blending in and you can also see small streaks here, and I was saying that part gets to me and she was saying that's the part that she loves most about gouache, so you can use that to your advantage as well. Finally, something that I feel like is really interesting with dry gouache is, what I was teaching you in the past activity is that you can grab just a little bit of water. I have a flat brush here and just some water in a damp brush you don't want it too wet and you can actually go over this and keep blending this way. So it does see it does re-activate and you can manipulate it once it's dry, which I feel is really interesting and it's just really different from the way that you would use watercolors. So I'm going to go back in here, see how different that looks now, it used to be a streak in the middle line separating both colors. But when I go back in with just the plain water, you can actually manipulate it even though it's already dry, which I feel is really interesting. Finally, with acrylics, some watered-down acrylic it doesn't actually look that bad but it's not the way that you would usually use it. Have this little pink here and it won't really be transparent even though I mean I can water down and, but it'll still be pretty opaque and you won't really, this is not the best way to blend your color. If you want to do is separate layer with acrylics, you would mix the blue with a pink and get a purple and so on. So this method of blending is very specific to translucent paint and then opaque paint really just is for layering like that. Again, really cool you can also go and doesn't matter if the color is darker or lighter you can just paint over and over and once this will dry you can paint over and over and there's like a million different layers you can do in and that'll be fine. Something very different from gouache as opposed to acrylic is that if I paint over this, I won't get the pickup because acrylic dries and it becomes this plastic textured. So I can almost, if I were to paint this whole thing I could basically just cover up the entire blue square. Which is really different as what happens here. Especially if I wait for this to dry and I can actually add a second layer to make it a little bit more dense and opaque. Lastly, there will be pretty much no reaction, see, I'm adding water to this, but once it's dried, it is not soluble, so it doesn't really affect the paint. It's totally different than what happened here with the gouache. So just some really important things to keep in mind. All of this is going to be really important when we actually begin layering and in doing more complex activities. But do this chart for yourself like really just experiment. You can also play around and see what happens if you add some, acrylic over some gouache. See it's already taking some of the blue from the gouache and I had this white paint with acrylic. So it's really interesting to just actually just play around. I really encourage that in all my classes like experimenting, playing around. See here's a separate second layer. It's already way more opaque and covers everything that we had underneath. So yeah. Actually if you guys took my very first class, which is the modern watercolor techniques, and we did the galaxy the star night. You could actually grab some of this white acrylic to make the little slider with the, I'll just do that quickly with the stars like that. So playing around, experiment, test out all the different painting that you have see how they interact with each other and also what happens once it's dried and if you know what you can pick up with layering and reactivating with water. That's it for this lesson and now we are going to actually begin more intense layering and we're going to do a really cool sunburst moon, whatever you want to, you'll give it a name once you see it. 7. Layering: The next lesson that I'm going to teach you, is called layering. This is probably one of the most important aspects of these different mediums and how they work. I brought this painting here because I've been asked a bunch. I do this type of moonlight many times in my work. It can go either from light to dark like this. See the first one is light and the rims get darker as it turns into the night sky, or it can go from light to dark. Let's say you were doing some sunshine, you could do this in yellow, orange tones and it would be a fun. Lesson like that. So I'm actually going to teach you how to do these and I'm going to use translucent one and an opaque one. For a translucent, I think I'll use watercolors and four opaque. This one here, was done in quash, but I'm going do when here in acrylics, it's pretty much the same thing. I'll get deeper into it as we move along. On our final project, I'm actually going to integrate one of these moonlights into our painting. So it's going to be one of those core things where you practice something that looks easier and then you integrate it into something huge at the very end. That's gonna be really fun. We're going to start out. The good thing about having these two different areas, is that watercolor can take so long to dry. Even as these layers are going to be drawing, I'm going to continue to move on with the acrylic so that'll keep us entertained. I just wanted to show you this. This painting actually has a few examples of layering. In this case, for example, with the watercolor, each strip was painted. You paint this one first, then leave this one blank, and then paint this one second, leave this one blank. Wait for them to dry and then fill it in so they don't bleed into each other. Then once all of this is dry and painted in these little leaves at the very end with more opaque watercolor. This could be easily done with acrylic or gwas too, but you wouldn't have to have the hassle of waiting for each area to dry just because drying time is just so much quicker and there's no bleed. But then on the other hand, if you take a close look at this watercolor, I use this Daniel Smith watercolor. Is called Moon glow. Oh, no way, this is Lunar blog actually. You can see the little particles of pigment separate. It's almost like a magnet. It's really fun. Also these fun textures here. I just really enjoy the textures with watercolor. So that's just a personal choice, but you can do this painting in all different mediums and that's what we're going to begin to do now. Let's start out with layering. I have some freshwater here. I'm actually going to keep this clean water here for my watercolors. I'm actually gonna grab a little bit of a larger brush. This here, is the clean and then I'll use this one here for the acrylics. Similar to what we did in the very beginning where we're working up color, what we're going to do here, is actually lay down a base layer of watercolor. Actually, I haven't even decided what color I'm going to use. Maybe this violet can work or let's see. I'll actually use this Payne's gray. It's a really nice dark color and it's similar to the example that I showed you. I already had some here on this tablet. In the case of watercolor, the only thing that you need here, is one single color. In the case of acrylics or gwas, you're going to need white and a second color. So we're going to start out here. We're going to start out by mixing some water in with this paint. This is going to be our little area. I would usually use my watercolor palette here, but it's full at the moment. This will work too. We're going to start just by painting a large circle. I'm going to do it freehand. You can draw the circle perfectly if you want to, but I like the look of a little bit, the wobblyish lines. So see how it's very, very translucent, very transparent. It's just a very simple Circle. Which in the end, we'll have many, many layers over it. I'm just going to wait for this to dry right now. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to work on the opaque example, which is very helpful. Waiting for water going to dry is just a pain sometimes and some people even use hairdryers and stuff. I don't know why I just like to do its own thing naturally, but using a hair dryer it can help to. Now I'm going to grab my acrylic paint and we're going to go in and let's make a new mix here. This dark blue I think this one could work. I'm going to mix this dark blue. I'm actually going to make a brand new color. So one of the things that I really like about acrylics, is making your own mixes. I'm going to mix a little bit of this ultramarine with some [inaudible] we have here and we'll make a brand new color as our base, and then we'll work in some white with that. So in the meantime, I think I'm going to start out with this large flat brush. What I'm going to do is actually I'm going to go from dark to light instead of light to dark. In this case, you'll see what I mean. Starting out with a base layer here. With acrylics, it takes a little bit longer to mixing your colors and get them all unified. Now I feel like I have a really nice space color. What I'm going to do is paint the darkest circle first. Again, just going freehand here. Look how smooth that is. It's so nice and smooth, it's actually really satisfying. So here's a nice perfect circle. I'm just going to get the edges to be nice and clean. I'm actually going to go in with the smaller brush and just make these edges really perfect. I'm just getting a nice perfect circle. Right now, you might be wondering why do they look so different now. Like the first base layer that I did here was the most transparent one when using translucent paint, aka watercolors. The first layer I lay down here was really opaque, the darkest tone that I'm going to have. You're going to observe how the way of layering is totally different with both mediums. It's just opposites, its total opposites. What we're going to do now is, see I'm waiting for this, it's almost dry actually, but we are going to wait for these base layers to dry a little bit and then we'll come back and do our second layer. We waited just a little bit for these bottom layers to dry. I have a feeling I might be coming back and back as layers dry because when you do the watercolor version, it can take up some time. Not because it's necessarily hard, just because of drying time. So each layer you are going to do here, is going to be pretty translucent. You're not going to use much opaque paint unless you need it at the very end. But it's a really good example of how layering with watercolor works. Even though we're not making the paint darker, we're just adding a second layer and that will make it darker. It's very, very subtle. It's going to be really beautiful in the end. Observe what I'm doing here. I'm laying my secondly layer. The reason I like to do this without a pencil as well, is that since we're working with a lot of translucent layers, your pencil can pretty much ruined the flow of it and the beauty of the pure water colors. This is my second layer now, I'm getting closer and closer to the center where I'm going to reserve some space for my glowing moon. I just felt it out. It already looks so beautiful because it's just so subtle and we're also going to get some really nice texture. I'm just moving around the water a little bit here. We're going to let that dry for a bit and now we're going to continue with the acrylic burst. What we're going to do is basically just add a little bit of this white paint to this larger mix that I have here. Instead of layering translucent layers, it's all opaque so whatever I paint over now, you won't be able to tell what was underneath, basically. I'm going to test it out first and see if it's light enough, I think that will do the trick. Now I'm going around and leaving an exterior rim. It doesn't have to be super perfect. I like the wobbliness to it, but at the same time, the brush stroke is very clean at the edges. Right now, as you can see, I already did this area here, but the watercolor here is still wet and it's going to take a little bit longer to dry. You can see it. I can even move it around like this a bit. That sometimes even helps if you're waiting for it to dry, you can distribute the paint around the entire wash and it will give it a little bit more of a texture. I'm doing that now just to help the drying process along the way. In the meantime, what I'm going to do is start making the third layer here. I'm going to add even more white and put it into this larger mix. Make sure to really clean your brush properly because acrylic will stay on your brush and you don't want to pick that paint up for the third layer. I'm just cleaning it up a little bit. Now you can also just test a little bit. I feel like it needs a little bit more white to make a real difference. There's more contrast. What's cool about that is that you can test it out a bit, but then you'll be able to paint over it and you won't see that little test area. I feel like that's enough contrast. Now I'm going to go in here and paint this third layer. We're already starting to see the depth in this one. In the meantime, checking back with our watercolor, this is still wet and we still cannot work on it. I have a feeling we might even finish the acrylic one before we even get a chance to do a third layer here, but that's a really important lesson in water coloring, how timing and patience is really important. I'm just going to continue to add some more white to this blue mix that I have here. Each time I'm going to lay down a new layer, the color will get lighter. Eventually I want it to be very white in the center. I still do have to wait for this to dry just a tiny bit. It's almost there, maybe one minute then it will be dry. Now this 1, 2, 3, this third layer has dried already with the acrylics and I'm going to go in and paint a fourth layer with the lighter blue. I really like using this flat brush for layers like this because we don't get the streaks like we do with this round brush. I wanted this to be really flat. As I continue to do this, we're going to notice that the second watercolor layer is still wet. It's not dry yet, and it just goes to show how different drying times are in both mediums. It's just totally different. Let's say that we have this painting here and this is what I'm doing right here. This is a reenactment of that. The thing is that when you're painting with watercolor, you have to really think of your process around the entire paper. For example, when I painted this, I didn't concentrate exclusively on the moonlight. I would paint one layer, while that dried, I would go back and paint let's say the first green areas here. Then once that dried, I would go in and paint a second layer, wait for that, go back and paint the large areas in the mountains. As I do that, the third layer would have dried, I'll go back in and then come back here and paint. Watercolor is about, I've said it from the very beginning, timing is so important. It's the most important aspect and we can see that clearly here now. We've already advanced so much on the opaque part and the watercolor, it's been a while now and we're still waiting for this second layer to dry. I'm going to continue to paint, each time I'm just going to add to my acrylics a little bit extra white to this mix here. I'm going to do as many as I can of those until this second layer dries completely and then I'll come back to you guys and we'll do a third layer here. It's been a few minutes now and we can finally say that the second layer is dry. It took about 20 minutes for it to dry completely. I'm going to go back to my watercolor mix here, which is the paint cream and we're going to do the third layer with the watered down mix. I think that it can actually take a little bit more. We can see the layering start to work here. It's getting darker as we layer and even though the main mix is still pretty watered down. Now we wait for our third layer to dry. Again, it will take awhile, especially since we are in the tropics right now. We are in Cancun, Mexico and it's really humid here, so it even takes longer to dry. Again, it's just a reminder of how patience is important with watercolor. In the meantime, I'm going to continue with this one and actually it does feel a little bit over saturated right now with the layers and this still looks a little bit wet, so I'm going to give it a little break too. I'm actually going to go get a glass of water and whatever and come back in about 5-10 minutes and wait for it to dry completely and then I'll continue layering with the opaque one and hopefully, the third translucent layer has dried as well. So we waited about half an hour now for all of this to dry completely. I'm just going to come back and I'm going to continue with the fourth layer of the watercolor moon glow. Just painting around here. Again, there's no real trick here except I'm just doing this over and over again. The results are going to be really cool. It's going to pay off in the end. Specifically with these watercolor ones and this one too, as I get closer to the end, the areas that I'm going to be painting get smaller. So there's less surface to cover and that usually means that it's going to dry a little bit quicker. So it'll get a little bit easier now, a little bit swifter. It's really going to pay off. I think this technique looks really beautiful in the end. Again, a really important thing with watercolors is timing. So as you notice, I'm taking advantage of all the wet edges around and while it's still wet, I'm moving the paint around just like that. It's really important to be mindful with watercolors. I'm actually dragging the paint as much as I can. With watercolors, you always have this little puddle of water that you're dragging around. That's what I'm doing now. That's also going to limit the drying time with the next ones because I have a little bit less water now. Now we're going to wait for this one to dry. In the meantime, I can continue to paint the inner circles here. Eventually, I want the little inner moon to be almost white. So I'm going to actually vamp it up a little bit. As I mentioned before, opaque paint tends to dry a little bit different than when it's laid down. So here, I thought this one would be a little bit lighter. Still not enough contrast for me here, so I'm going to start out even a little bit more white in the next one so we can actually see a bit more of a difference. I'm just going to keep doing that and you guys can watch. We are finally on our final layer here. It does take a while to dry and we actually stopped the camera a couple of times and waited for it to dry and came back. I'm just telling you that so that you don't feel frustrated when you're painting your own moon glow and just know that watercolor takes a lot of patience. We've finished the acrylic one way before. As I explained in the first video, acrylics dry way faster than watercolors. As I continue to paint the final layer here, the paint has gotten a little bit more opaque. I'm doing that on purpose because what I really want is to, this moon glow to be part of a bigger sky like this one here. So what's going to happen is that the outer edge will eventually blend into the night sky. Right now, it looks a little bit strange on its own like that. But once it's in its night sky context, it really takes on new form. We are done. So you see if I were to take this element and put it into a night sky. I think I'll integrate one of these into our final activity so that you can re-do this in a way that actually is part of a landscape. A few differences here. Just to point out that I do know that you could, for example, with acrylics, you don't necessarily have to paint every single circle over and over again. You could actually just paint the edges around but I feel that this gives a different dimension that it's part of the magic of paint. So that's why I do it layer by layer like that. As you can see the moon here is similar to the size here, but what we did is we went opaque to light and then here we went light to opaque. This one here has started from the outer edges going in and this was started in, going out like that. A couple of differences is obviously, you can really tell the depth of watercolor with the transparencies. I feel it's just really special. The translucent nature of the paint is something that's really different. You can even see. Another special part about watercolor is how a little bit of extra paint accumulates around the edges. So if you take a close it'll have even that extra crisp rim around each circle here. I think that makes it really special as well. With acrylics, it's much more of a flat layer. It's faster to paint but you don't get that intense depth that you would with watercolor. So that's just a little difference. This one was painted in wash, but it's the same process here. This one was painted in watercolor, but it's inverted. So I wanted to show you the differences here. In this case, it started out being a really transparent layer first, and then we went inward with more layers and more layers and more layers until we got the darkest sun in the middle. If this was in orange it would be a cool, like a sunrise or something. Yeah, I'm really into painting landscapes with really simple like spacey landscapes that's part of the work that I do and this moon glow is something that I repeat over and over in my work. I don't know, I think it's really special and I really thought it would be a good way to show you how to layer your paint depending on if it's translucent or opaque. Now we're actually going to a different topic, which is painting backgrounds. So this is something that I get so many questions on. A lot of people have trouble figuring out what order to paint in. We're going to do a really simple exercise next that will help you out with this. Then eventually, we'll make a larger project with all that stuff that we've learned together. I'm excited to see your moon glows. 8. Background Order: In our final warm-up activity, we are going to start to work with background order. This is something that I get a lot of questions about on Instagram and even in sculpture classes for people that wanted to take it to the next level. I brought a few examples here of artwork that I've done that have really full in busy backgrounds. I wanted to talk you through just the basics of how these are achieved. The case with watercolors, we've said over and over again, is that you begin from light and take it to dark. Whereas with acrylic or wash, it's not necessarily that way. It's more of layers in a foreground or background. Here I have this example here and I'm going to talk you through what I painted first and how the order went. In this case, for example, these little really light yellow stars that you see all around here first, this was all sketched out first, very detailed in the shapes basically. For example, I started painting all these little stars first, which are really light and then the rays of sun and each planet and the flowers, the foliage, all of this stuff is painted before the background even begins. Once I painted this base drawing of the florals and the planets, I wait for it to dry a 100 percent and then I actually think I might have just used some of this Payne's gray mixed with some indigo and I make a really nice wash with that. Then here, basically, if you look really close, what it's all about is painting all around these shapes. You have to have some pretty decent brush control here. If you go back to the modern watercolor techniques class, the very first one, there's a lot of precision activity and that's exactly what that will help you with to do this stuff. You go in and every tiny little spot inside of here is painted over and we'll do a few examples of that in this session here. Just a few examples of when I would paint the background until the very end. This is another example, I painted the moon first and then I painted all the flowers and here's an example of a leaf where the little vine in the middle is the lighter yellow. That would be the first part. I would wait for that to dry and then paint around it with these green leaves and then wait for that to dry. Eventually layers and layers, the blue will be circling around these leaves. Again, it's quite a process, but I feel that it's really rewarding in the end. My style is very much centered around starry nights and it's the work that I repeat over and over in my work. I brought these two because I think they're really interesting that they're sort of sister pieces. I wanted to show you side-by-side the differences of having a light background and a dark background. I just painted these for my upcoming retreat in Morocco. I do a watercolor retreat every summer in different destinations and for example, last year with Sicily, this year is Morocco and I plan different workshops for you guys. In this case, we're going to paint some Hamsa hands or Fatima hands and it's like the same base drawing, but the way that I painted it is quite different because in this case in the pink one, the background is very light pink, light wash pink and the first thing I painted was all around the hand. I painted very light pink, very watery and I waited for that to dry and then over the pink I painted directly these ogre leaves. There's no circling around, but the pink is light enough where I can layer over it with this ogre and it'll still look good. Then eventually the very last thing I did was the black area that's inside the hand in this case. In this one it's different because the background is really dark. I actually painted the leaves first, waited for that to dry and then painted all around it with a black, similar to the other ones that I've showed you. Some final example, I brought these because they're acrylics that I've done in similar styles. We talked a little about these in the beginning, but I just wanted to go back to it and explain that the layering process was totally different. The very first thing starts out with a circle gradient that turns into the black eventually, just like we did in the building of color exercises. This is the same thing I'm just doing a circle gradient from peach to purple mob and then it goes all the way back to black here is same, both yellows. The first thing I did here was actually paint the background and then wait for that to dry enough and then start painting the florals roles within here. You can actually even use your pencil over the dried acrylic as a little bit of a guide, and then you can erase that once the entire acrylic is dried. It's also even the way that you would use your pencil work is different and same with this one. Just a couple of examples to show you how layering is so different with different mediums. Here, this is the final one that I want to show you, this is watercolor with some black India ink around. That's why it's really opaque and I like using ink with watercolor because it's very watery and it just flows really nice. Again, what I did here was just paint all the flowers first, all the leaves, all the bugs, wait for that to dry and then go round with my black ink and very delicately paint around each shape like that within here. Being very mindful to not have the the outer layers touch here so that I would get some definition with the little leaves. It's delicate work, but I feel that it's really worth doing. I love how it looks in the end. Now that I've explained a little bit of this, we're actually going to go on to make four examples of backgrounds of our own and I'm going to go with two watercolor ones here. One is going to be a dark background and one is going to be a light background and then I'll do a wash and an acrylic. You'll see all the similarities and differences and choose what you feel as most appealing to you as well. I have my clean water for each different medium. I'm going to start out with watercolor and I actually sketched out the two designs that we're going to do in watercolor. We're going to do a similar design for each different square here and we're going to start with these two. I think I'll start this one with the dark background with watercolor. Just like I explained with the other versions we're going to start out. Have my watercolor pen here and I have some greens. See the way that I use my watercolor pens is we just reactivate it with water whenever you need to, so I like to have my green is in one area, my dark's in one area. Right now it's honestly a mess, but usually I'll have a lot more organized with a color scheme. We're just going to start here and I think what I'm actually going to start out with, is I'm going to go step further here and with a little bit of yellow, we're going to do the little vines within each leaf like this. We're going to wait for that to dry and in the meantime, I'm going to grab a smaller brush. I've got my winner brushes here. I'm really enjoying this one lately, it's a Princeton brush. I like short brushes like this. They feel more comfortable for me and I'm going to grab a little bit of ocher paint , mix it in somewhere here. That's going to be the base for my little moon here. I might actually mix it in with a little bit of yellow as well around the edges, just like that. What I really like about painting with watercolors is how intuitive the mixing process is. While the paint is wet, you can still add in some extra paint there and it's just really feels very relaxing to me, not that the others don't, but this is something specific to watercolor that I just really enjoy. I'm also going to go ahead and actually, I'm going to paint this line here and now it looks a little bit thicker than it will be in the end. But keep in mind that I'm actually going to paint around this. This is just my base layer for a darker background. Right now as I painted the moon and the stem, these little lines in the middle have dried you can just put your finger over that to make sure. I'm going to grab a deeper, sort of like a forest green here that I have mixed in here and what's going to be cool is that I'm actually going to take advantage of the wet stem here and have a little of that lead into this stem just like that. Already I'm beginning to use the theory of the layering with the watercolor and the delights must go first because already the little stems in the middle are my first layer. Whereas when we do acrylics, we'll see the details will be the actual final layer. Very interesting to see how each medium has its own order. I'm going to continue to paint these and keep in mind that I really do want you repeat this same activity a few times depending on what means you have, and I just chose a leaf and a moon. It doesn't really matter what kind of drawing you do as long as you find something that is easy to layer. I'm moving this around because it's easier to move my hand this way. I'm just going to continue on and I'll be back with you when it's time to do the background. As you noticed here, I just went in really close on each side and I had my little yellow background here. Now what I have is these nice little leaves with light detailed line in the middle. But again, keep in mind that I did not do this later and said I reserved the light colors by painting around them. That's super important with watercolors. Right now as the leaves that I just painted dry, this one is going to be different. This one is going to be a dark background and I'll do this in a light background. What I'll actually do is I think I might play around with having it be a little grayer in the back. I will start off with this yellow and I'll add some ocher here. This is a really simple wet on dry wash here and I'm going to make it quite watery. When you're painting backgrounds like this, it's all about timing. It's all about having the paint. See I'm doing it actually pretty quick because I don't want the paint to dry out and I want to be able to continue with the same area that I've been doing here. I'm going to go back here, grab a little bit of this yellow and start turning it into an orange. I'm adding a little bit of orange. I've got my sort of like a sunset background here, where you can already see the moon start to appear. Have you guys ever had that where you can see the daylight moon? It's my favorite. I'm actually going to go around in this case and then go around the moon not touching the pencil here, just going right around the edge and putting a little bit more vibrancy in there. Again, with watercolor, it's really important to be mindful of your pencil lines. In this case here I painted over it because there will be a darker color on the leaves and you won't be able to see it. Here with the moon, what I'm going to do is I just painted really close to the pencil but eventually once this dries, I'll just erase it, so I'll have a really nice clean line there and I can even leave it white and that will look pretty cool too. Now I have this background, I'm going to wait for that to dry. In the meantime, continuing with the watercolors here. Now that the green leaves here are pretty dry, I'm going in and just clean it up a little bit. I really like keeping my watercolors very nice and clean even though it's going to probably cover it. It's just this thing I have where I want it all to be quite the least amount of pencil as possible. Now here comes the interesting part. Now I'm going to go all around here and I'm actually going to paint the night sky and I have a mix here of different purples and indigo and stuff that just are lying on my palette, again, watercolor reactivates with water. Even though this is already super dry, I'm just going to go back in here and make this work again. It's going be a nice dark purple sky. I'm going to start on this side here. Again, it's really important to move your paper around so that your hand is comfortable, especially in this very detailed kind of work that we're going to start to do here where you have to get really close to each shape like that. Usually when I work this way i have two brushes really on hand. I'll have this for example and then I'll have my liner brush right next to it in this hand here. Then I will grab a little bit of paint with the liner brush and really go in the deeper edges like this first. What's actually giving the stem the real shape is this part here where I'm painting the background because I'm giving it a little bit more form and see those stemless stick but here I'm going to do some wobbly edges around it so it looks more organic. Now that I have this little detailing can go in with a larger brush that picks up more paint and more water and it'll be faster to fill out spaces where I don't have to worry about it drying so quick. Another tip might be again if you referencing my modern watercolor technique class again, if you guys remember, you have the possibility to use salt. I think salt looks really cool with deep backgrounds like this because it can be like start texture so it's all about playing around that way. Now I'm just going to continue to paint all around and just we're going keep the video rolling and just really observe the way that I'm doing this, how I switch around from the liner brush to my number 10 brush here. It's just a thicker brush and I'll be back with you when I'm done with this part. So I am on the final brushstrokes of stark background watercolor. As you can tell, it's really important to have two brushes with you. The things that are really important with this is timing and precision. Not only do you need to get in there with these really fine details and what their liner brush, but then also not concentrate too much on one area because you need to keep a constant water flow moving, right? You need to move it around your paper and this way you'll get a really nice clean background where there's no real separation here. You can see how it all basically blends in with each other, right now its just drying and once it's dry I may add in a little like star details in there. But right now I'm just going to let this be for a while and then obviously, since we painted a whole background here it's still a little bit wet when you paint larger surfaces and especially watering one like this, it'll take a little while. So I'm just going to wait for this to dry a little bit more. In the meantime, I think I'll do gouache now. Let's grab this pallet here. I'm going to do a gouache version now and with gouache version, I think what I'm going to do is also do a dark background but I may add a little gradient or something to mix it up. I just mixed a couple of different violets and blues here and kind of laddering it up a little bit. So we're going to start with this darker blue up here. It's a little bit watered down so you can see it's still kind of watery. I'm going to start adding a little bit of white as well. The way I like to use this kind of chalky, it makes it a little bit more dense. See the difference between the translucency and that chalkiness here. So watercolor on its own gives you this sort of special texture and in this case with the gouache, I'm going to just go in here and make something different. So I finally got this consistency that I wanted. I wanted to be a little bit thicker, a little bit more opaque. So as you can see the brushwork here is really, really different than it is with watercolor since I have this opaque background, and I'm just going to finish off with just a dab of some water up here just slightly moist, fresh, and just going over it once to keep it all integrated. I wanted to do a pretty seamless gradient here and I think it looks pretty good now. Again, acrylic with gouache can go over a few times until you feel it looks good and that looks good to me now. So now we have to wait for this to dry but in the meantime, what we can do here is paint a background with some acrylics so that you have a gouache and acrylic. For the final square here I'm going to use acrylics. So I've done watercolor, watercolor, gouache, and acrylics and I'm also going to keep it in this sort of daytime concept. But I think I'll do more of a radiant gradient, which is a circle coming in from the center. I'm going to grab a little bit of white first and just move that in there a little bit and mix some paint here. While the paint is still wet, I can still move around the gradient in the colors and it's very, very smooth. Now moving around to the edges. I go on with this, a smaller flat brush here, it's going to help me with these edges here. So notice that the watercolor paintings had a drawing as a base and the acrylic and gouache. Don't because what I'm doing here is I'm actually painting the backgrounds first, so it wouldn't make sense to paint, to draw anything at this point. But if you want to use your drawing as a guide, you can actually wait for this to dry and then go in and draw over all this. Once it dries you can erase the pencil over the acrylic. So now I'm just going in with a little bit of water with my brush. The paint is still relatively new and moist so I can still go in here and do this little gradient. That might have been too much water. We're going to go on with my brush and keep it dry, go around like that. So having a dry fresh really helps out with acrylic paints, especially when you're blending like this. All right, so the backgrounds for the gouache and acrylic, as you can see, we're a little bit more work. It's just a little bit more brushwork and blending. Timing is also important because you don't want your gradients or you're blending to dry completely so that you can keep on going in there. And that's specifically for this gradient. This one is linear, this one is like a radiant one, goes out like that. We have our two backgrounds here. I'm going to wait for these to dry it pretty much, and I'm going to continue with this watercolor one here. Give me a minute to switch back into watercolor mode and will begin with this guy. Moving on to the second watercolor one here. Actually flip it around. I don't want my hand to be all up in this. The first thing I'm going to do is erase the pencil that's inside of the moon. It's really bugging me and I really want it to be nice and clean. So I did that and just sort of erasing everything that I can now around the edges. So we have a nice clean squash here. I really like how the moon looks like that it's pure white and it's negative space. So I painted around the moon and left it white so that we would have that color there. Now I'm going to go in with my medium-sized brush. It's my number six brush, and I'm actually going to start painting the leaves. This style of layering is going to be a little bit different than the first watercolor one because in this case I'm going from light to dark. This means that as long as I'm leaving my final details to be the darkest in the layering order, I can go in the regular order that you would. What I'm going to do now is begin painting these leaves here, and I'm going to do a little bit different than this style. I'm just going to paint the full thing, but I'm going to add a little bit more gradients here, so this is a little bit warmer. Now I have my basic leaves painted. What I'm going to do now is just grab a little bit of och-re paint and mix it in with my greens here. This is what I'm going to use to paint the stems. I'm going to go in. What's really nice here is that I can go in really, really thin with my liner brush. Throw these little details. In this case, my precision work is more in these detailed lines and not when I'm traveling around the plant like that. The stem is very detailed. I'm going to wait for this to dry a little bit and then I'll add in the little details that go in the plant. In the meantime, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my beloved starry night, and I'm going to grab a little bit of whitewash. Again, remember the wash can work well over watercolors as well. It's a really good compliment. You could also use acrylics, but I think I have a brush here and it's handy and I'm just going to use this to do a little bit of starry night details. I'm grabbing some transparent whitewash here. It looks a little bit darker than it actually is once it dries. It'll fade a little bit. Always important to get the edges. I'm going to wait for this to dry a little bit and I will be back to finish the watercolors and then continue on to do the gouache and the acrylic versions. Continuing here with my little starry night and I have these transparent circle. So this is something else that I like about gouache that it can act as watercolor as well, where we have these fine transparent backgrounds. I'm going to do a couple of extra stars and go back and circle in more stars here. The sky is pretty much done here, and now I'm going to go in and layer over on this one. We're going to do the actual vines of the leaves and I'm going to play around a little bit. I'll do it a little bit different just so you guys see what this can look like. I have my liner brush ready and I'm going to start detailing the leaves. I want them to look a little bit different than this, so I'll do a different type of leaf. I'll just do really fine lines that go in and out like that. I finished my little leaf here, and I thought it might be a fun idea to go in with some transparent watercolor and just add some extra leaves here. Just to play it up and just for you to see how, different it acts when your layers are transparent in the background, especially since we have yellow back here and it's not going to interfere with our green. It's just going to give a little bit of a warm pop. I'm just going to continue and just add a little extra details here. I just finished the two watercolor backgrounds. I wanted to add in some extra layers here of plants, just so you see how it works to go over and over. I can keep going, I can add more detail here and I can add designs. I'm going to go ahead and do it. This is a crescent moon, but maybe I can add a full moon to the design, because it's already dry, and you can go in and work with this that way. Just to show you different ways that you can lay your watercolor. This is with the dark background. This is with the light background. Now, we're going to take a little break and continue with gouache and acrylic here. We're going to do a similar design, but it'll be obviously different because of the medium. Right now I'm just mixing my gouache paints here. I'm going to do similar leaves like what we have here, and just so you see the process, it's very different. As I've told you before, you can paint dark to light with gouache. Not a problem. This is a little water down, so it lifts up the texture in the back. The big thing with gouache is that the less water you use, is going to be the best way to have an opaque layer where it doesn't pick up the tone from underneath. But now I'm actually going to play around with a little bit of color here. I'm adding a little dot of darker green to have some texture. Just using a tiny bit of water to moisten the paint. So now I have these broad brushstrokes, and I'm going to actually go in here and clean it up and make it a little bit more exact. I'm using my liner brush here. Now I'm going in and fixing up the edges and at the same time, I'm adding the stem design. So as you can see, I didn't really go with a flat style here. I more or less blended in the colors together. You can keep going if you want to play around with more color blending here. Just don't overwork it, because you'll begin to pick up the blue from the background. It's like a balance of having enough water for it to flow, but not too much where you begin to blend with the background. I'm just doing a little bit of extra brushwork here. That's enough for now. I'll actually add a little bit of extra white here. I'm going to do a white moon and hopefully the white moon will pick up a little bit of the blue from the background, so you can see how it blends that way. So I am just free handing this right now. So as this dries, it will begin to be a little bit more transparent. That's what I'm going for now. I want it to look a little bit dissolved into the background, not too opaque. But if we want to do opaqueness, we can always do little stars like this, similar to there. We'll have a few that will be watered down as well, like this. I'm just mixing my deeper green here with a little bit of blue and violet, just to make it a little bit like a dirtier color. You can go over and paint with a darker color like this. I think that's what I'll do and then I'll go in and add some lighter details later. I decided to add just some last minute shadow there. I'm going to go back with a little bit of white and the green mix. Just for fun, I'm going to add a few little details, another example of how it's easy to go from dark to light with gouache, like glistening in the moonlight. I'm going to go back with some pure white and fill in my stars here. Then this little moon here, I purposely left it a little bit faded, but if you wanted to have it be darker, you could always go in with some darker gouache and then just do that there. Finally, I'm going to switch over to acrylics, and we'll paint our final one here. Now I'm just preparing my palette for my little acrylic painting here and I have some of the stuff that I use throughout the class. I'm just going to add a little bit of this liquid texts ocher here, it's going to help me out a little bit with the color mixing. I'm going change my water as well to just almost fresh. This is what I used to paint the background here with the acrylics. Right now I'm not going to do background work, so this is going to go back here. I'm going to begin mixing a little bit of green here with some ocher. I want the colors to be earthy because this feels like a desert vibe almost to me. I'm just mixing up the colors here. I also have a little bit of this yellow that we use for the background and it's also going to help us with the mixing. On the palette, as you can see what I was talking about in the beginning, the colors are going to dry on your palette and you can almost lift it up just like that, like a piece of plastic. Usually when I paint with acrylics, I like to keep it this way and then wait for it to dry and then just lift it up. I feel like it's just the easiest way to clean it in my opinion. I'm going to start with my deserty greens here. I'm actually going to make it a little bit darker and then I'll do lighter details like here. I'm just going to go straight in. As you can see, this is really opaque. I'm going to do it more of a flat version, as opposed to with the gouache where I played around with a little bit of color. In this case, I'm just going to go really flat. This is the look that I'm going for in this case. I have my base so I'm going to go in with a thinner brush and then have a little few brush strokes that are going to help me out to define. Something that I feel is really interesting is also the way that your hand movements change depending on the medium. With acrylics, I feel I have really smooth lines and they just move a little bit different. Even the way the stem is, is different than what I did with watercolors or gouache. I always find that interesting. It's just the way the medium is working with you. Now I am going to go in with a little bit of white and I'll do a similar crescent moon to what we have here. In this case, I do want it to be quite opaque. As you can see, as opposed with gouache, the color from underneath picks up a little bit in. With acrylic, you have a little bit more coverage, especially if you do a second layer. Right now, I might wait for this to dry a little bit. Right now if I were painting with watercolors, I'd be pretty stressed out in waiting for everything to dry before doing whatever is next. But in this case it dries so fast that I don't have to think about that, that much. But still in the meantime, while this stuff dries completely, I'm going to do some extra leaves on the bottom. I really like color mixing with acrylics too because I just love grabbing some of the background paint with the foreground paint and mixing that together. Then I get a mid tone where I'm going to do this mid leaves here and ultimately with a little bit of a different style, like a rounder version. Something that I really enjoy about painting with acrylics is that you can layer pretty much any time you want. Right now, I'm going to go in and actually even paint over this guy here, and going in with the light color and that's perfectly fine. This is something that's really different than it would be with watercolor. For example, you can't really layer a lighter color over a darker color, so that's something that's special to this type of paint. You don't really have to have too much drying time. It's a lot more noble in that sense. Now I'm going to go in and fill out the crescent moon. I'm going to grab some of the same yellow, but just adding in a little slight touch of red, and maybe some of this liquid takes the ocher. I want to mix the color really good here so that I don't have streaks because I want a flat layer. I'm just going to go in. It's little light orange, which is perfect. I don't want it to be too intense. Now finally, I'm just going to go in and with a liner brush, do a couple of details. I'm going to use a little bit of light yellow and a little bit of this green, and go here. There we have our four different versions of leaf with moon. I think this exercise is really important for you to do depending on what supplies you have. If you only have watercolor, you can do these too. If you have watercolor and either acrylic or gouache, try this out as well. The layering style is totally different. All this practice stuff really helps us understand just the basic process and method behind each medium. Now we have done a lot of practice. After this video, I'm going to get ready to do our final project, which is going to be this big, cool lotus flower with the glowing moon in the dark sky. I think you guys are really going to enjoy painting something like this, and with everything that we've done, I think you'll nail it. I think it'll be really easy after all of this and I'm excited to get started. 9. Final Project: Transluscent: This is where it's going to start to get really interesting. Because our final project is going to be painting the exact same layout, same drawing, same design in two different mediums. One of your illustrations is going to be painted in the translucent method, which is going to be watercolors in this case and one of them is going to be in the opaque methods. You can either choose to do it in acrylics or in wash. Try to pick a simple drawing. I can also upload some little outline for similar drawing like this on the discussion board, if it might help you out. But I always always encourage you guys to use your own drawings, your own creativity, your own ideas, and apply what you're learning here to your personal style. For me, that's my favorite thing ever. But I also understand if you want a little bit more guidance, so those two options will be available for you. We're going to go ahead and start with watercolor version and then we're going to head over to the opaque version once that will be done. I will focus on each one and its differences. In the end, we're going to see a side-by-side and how different it actually was to paint in both methods. I'm just going to sit up here and we'll start with the translucent version. We're all set up now with the first version of this final project here. Just for some references, we're going to start out with watercolor, so I have my kitchen paper here and my watercolors, is my water, it's all set up. I'm just going to go through quickly. I really like to let you know that once you've done all the warm-up exercises, you're ready, you're actually ready to do something bigger like this. This larger project is going to be a combination of, for example, we're going to do a glowing moon here, which is this. In this case, I did actually lay out a little bit of guiding here because I don't want to get too lopsided, but not all of the rooms are painted, just a few guides. We're basically going to redo what we did here and we're going to do that here. The background will probably be that dark sky that I really like to do and we have a beautiful lotus flower here and a little icon of a crescent moon with some leaves. This exercise here is really going to be helpful when we're doing this one, especially this first version here, because this is pretty much what we're going to be doing in a larger scale. It means that you are going to start out by painting the lighter layers, which are going to be the petals and the lotus flower, the moon, the leaves and we're also going to practice rhythm a lot because I'm going to show you how you're not going to waste so much time. Like waiting for certain layers to dry. As certain layers dry, we're going to move along with something else. Having said that, the very first thing that I'm going to do is start with the original layer here, and I'm going to use my paint. I think I'm going to use the Payne's gray. I really like how this color turned out here. I think it's really beautiful and it's sort of auspicious for this whole design that I want to do here. I'm going to start by preparing some of my paint. I have this Winsor Newton Payne's gray, which I used in that past versions. I'm going to lay some of that out here. I'm actually going to flip it around. This is the area I like to use for a darker things. I have that here. Then, I'm also going to mix in a little bit of this radiant, Dr. Ph. Martin's watercolor and violet. It's a purple that I really like, and I'm almost out of purple here in my pen set, so this is going to help me off to get a little bit more paint. That's just a little drop there to help me out with the lotus flower. I want to do a pinkish, purplish, lotus, magenta, all those kind of cool colors. The very first thing we're going to do is get a really watered down version of the Payne's gray. You can see that I have dropped a little bit here, just rifted it up like that. Just like we did, that's way too much paint. I can still fix that with a bunch of water here. Do not worry. Watercolor, I like to make these little mistakes sometimes to show you that watercolor is very noble when it's still wet. Still really play around with it. I'm not being too careful now, like these droplets here aren't really bothering me because the background will be eventually all covered up anyways. That's not going to be a problem. Right now I feel like I have a little bit of excess water here. That's just way too much. What you're going to do is just lightly touch your water with a tip of some paper towel like that or a dry brush. That'll help you clean up any puddles that are just a bit too much. I'm going to leave that like this for now. I'm actually going to begin with a smaller brush here. I have my Winsor Newton University Series Number 6 brush, which I really like because it's round but it has a pointed tip. I'm just going to latter that up. We're going to start painting the initial petals of our lotus flower. I have a little bit of, this some opera pink here that I have from, I think it's a whole bind water color that I really really love. It's really nice and bright pink. I'm going to have that on this side as well. The lotus flower here, as you can see, has a little bit of edges where the petals sort of curl up like this on the sides. Those are in the end, you're going to be a little bit darker. Right now I'm doing the interiors. I'm going to just have a lot of fun with the washes here. I'm going to play around with combining different colors. It's going to be nice and luminescent in radians. I want the tips and the beginnings like the top and bottom of each pedal to have a little bit more depth to them. So I'm using a darker amethyst color on the tips and wherever the petal begins. This is a really fun watercolor technique. It's basically playing around with your wet areas for blending. This is going to dry and it'll look really nice once it's dry. So again, a big thing with watercolor is always, as you know, timing. This needs to dry completely before we can paint anything around this area. Therefore, I'm going to go over to this side where we haven't gone in yet. I'm going to paint the interior of this petal here. If we were using acrylics or gosh, this would probably have been dry by now and we wouldn't really have to worry about that. You can just paint on this side and it will bleed into each other. These are the kinds of differences that I'm starting to want to express to you of how different the mediums actually work. I'm just going to continue doing this same thing with the interiors of the petals as I wait for this larger circle to dry. Then I'll pop back in with you and talk some more about our next steps. Now, I've painted a few of these petals and I noticed that this is dry for the second layer. So if you remember those steps, I'm going to go in here and paint around to start my glowing moon effect. Actually, I'm going to get closer here because I want to get a real close look at what I'm doing here. So, I'm painting the outline for the full moon. I'm just going to paint all around and wait for this layer to dry. I'm going to continue to do the same thing, same step right now; painting layer here, waiting for it to dry while I continue to paint in my lotus flower. [MUSIC] I've been going about this for a while now and I painted my base layers for the lotus flower. I did just some simple watercolor washes, and as you can tell I did petal by petal really keeping in mind that I had to paint each one separately while waiting for the other to dry. In the meantime, each time I noticed that one of the layers here had dried, I went in and painted again my moon glow layers. I'm at a point where I don't have much to do in this area anymore, and I'm still waiting for this to dry. I have to think what else can I do while this dries here, and one of the things that I can begin doing is I can begin adding detail. I'm going to draw really fine lines and if you took my modern watercolor technique class, this is the moment when you pull out your Paulsonp precision practice because we're going to be painting a lot of fine lines here. These fine lines within the petals are like the veins, and this is going to be really helpful for showing us direction which way each petal is going in. Then another thing I can do to make time while this area dries here is painting this crescent moon and these little leaves that are on the side. I'm going to do that and I'm going to take just a little bit of slightly more concentrated paint, and I might even mix in a little bit of the Payne's gray that I've been using for this. That's a way that I really like to blend colors by unifying everything, and using some of the colors in this area for this area. I'm going to do that, now I'm just doing a little mix of some of the Payne's gray with a little bit of the violets that I've been using. I'm making a little mix here in this area, and I'm going to add a little bit of water because I don't want it to be too deep. I'm just going to go in and really carefully with my liner brush, I'm going in and starting to do these lines here I could use a little bit more paint. This is to add texture, I'm going to reference another class now if you took my class watercolor textures, we do a lot of practice in layering watercolors this way and it's just to give it some volume, some texture. As you can see, I'm not applying too much pressure to my brush because I want my lines to be really fine. It's almost like a 90 degrees angle here, you do need a really thin brush for this. In this case, this is a liner it's like a five zero but a zero double zero will work as well. I'm going to continue to do this, I may going to continue to do this part here with a liner and then once I notice that this actually dries then I'll be able to go in and paint another layer. It's all about timing, and it's all about waiting for a certain area to dry while I do something else.[MUSIC] I just finished painting all of my base layers now, and there is a lot of things that are going to change once I add the background. I'm going to note a couple of things that I think are relevant to painting watercolor backgrounds. Number one is I wasn't extra careful here and I do have a few like paint splatters and drops and stuff that, I knew were going to be okay. For example, right here I knew this wouldn't really matter in the end because eventually this all is going to be covered up with the Payne's gray watercolor, and I'm going to make it pretty dense, pretty thick. Another thing here is that if you notice these little icons that I did at the bottom which is a crescent moon, and these little leaves, it's not a very detailed outline, I just laid down a base layer. But what's really going to give it the definition is everything that's going to be painted around here with the dark watercolor is what's really going to make it pop. The other thing I want to keep in mind is that I actually want to add some stars to the background, and I might do a little bit of splatter at the very end, but I do want to have a couple of defined stars around the entire painting. What I'm going to do now is with my pencil, I'm just going to draw out where these stars are going to be. I'm going to actually paint around them with the watercolor, so now I'm just sort of improvising where these stars are going to be. I'm doing six point stars which I really like integrating into my paintings, something over here. Then I want to make the background be integrated with my entire layout design. I'm going to have a star be behind this petal here, I'm actually going to draw the star here and have it be obvious that it's underneath this petal shape this way it'll be integrated. I might do one up here just a few little details, and then I might do a couple of different shapes here. Maybe I'll do like a cross star like that, and I might have one else up here. The reason it's important to lay these out with my pencil right now is because now I'm going to begin the process where I paint all around my painting here with the actual background. I'm actually going to let the six brush rest, and I'm going to be using my number 10 and my liner brush here. I'm going to have these two always handy, and I have some of the Payne's gray here which is what I'm going to use, which is the color that I used for the glowing moon. It's going to look really cool because it's going to be integrated in the end, the last edge here is going to be similar to the color of the Payne's gray the value that I'm using it's really going to tie together really nicely and you'll begin to observe how. I'm going to start painting here and I'm going into my Payne's gray, and just preparing a little bit of paint. I'm going to just dive in and begin painting around the lotus flower. I have some edges here that I'm filling in, and this is a really important part. The thing you do not want to do is draw the entire outline and then fill it in, you want to start filling in the larger spaces as you go. Otherwise, if you like paint an outline first, that will dry and you will be able to see the separation with the outline and the actual background and you don't want that you want something more natural and seamless. Although the liner is helping me out, outlining a couple of areas, I am immediately going in and filling that out while the paint is still wet. It's more of a seamless transition here, and I'm really being mindful of my wet paint filling in certain areas. I'm going out now, and a really important thing to know here is that you really want to work in these sort of sections where you're being mindful that your paint isn't drying, and this is where timing is really important in watercolor because although I will get some texture that it would be really hard to avoid, what I am trying to do is get my background to be pretty integrated and where you don't see too much separation of where my paint has dried and where I continued painting. So having said that right now, I'm going to go in with some water and then just paint around the edge here just to keep it moist, have a bunch of water here, and then I'm going to go in here with more Payne's gray and I'm going to flip my paper round, like so, and continue painting in this area here. So while the little outline is still wet, I'm going in with my larger brush, and just finishing up the area here. Then going in with the larger brush, and this is where the moon glow meets with the background, and it's going to be pretty seamless because it's almost the same tone now, but just having it been dried first, we'll give it a little bit of separation there, and then here I'm going to let this rest for a bit because it's a small area. See this is why it's really important about timing. Right now, I'm not going to continue here, but I'm going to go here because I have a larger open area. So I'm going to go in with my Payne's gray really quickly before it starts drying, and I always like to leave a little natural order around the paper, and I think it gives it something really extra nice here. So remember, it's always important to flip your paper around so that your hand feels comfortable, and I'm just going in, the light border. I'm going to need a little bit more paint. This type of background, which is pretty concentrated watercolor, you'll use up quite a bit of paint because you're using less water and more paint. This is how you get that opaqueness. See like we have here, and I'm always going back and checking if the areas where I still have what paint. So I'm going to add a little bit more of water here, a little bit more water here. I just don't want it to dry up while I'm continuing to paint on this upper area. So I'm going in here and painting the star outline, and once I finish the whole thing and it dries, I'm going to actually erase the pencil inside and that will make it look really clean and nice, and this is the best way to get some really crisp white in your watercolor paintings is by leaving the negative space. I think if you took the watercolor and mixed media class, I have three different methods to having white over your watercolors, and my favorite is negative space. The other ways are by painting over it with white ink or acrylics, and also you can use masking fluid, but I think this is the most precise of all the methods, and it just looks really crisp and clean. So you're getting in here with these smaller details, and in the meantime, while it's still wet, you're going in with your larger brush and filling in these spots, and also something you can do is that you can actually play around with your texture here. This is still wet, so I'm going to add a little extra paint here because I do want to have some of that really interesting watercolor texture that we got, and in this case, I don't want a flat layer, I want some texture in there, the kind of stuff that only watercolor can give me. So that's why I like to add in some seed, now we're having some really cool effects here already. Okay, so now I'm actually I'm going to abandon this area for a bit because it's a smaller space than what I have here, and I want to continue with this area because I don't want this to begin to dry. So it's all about like timing and being a little quick from where your painting and I'm going in here, and I'm going in here and continuing to paint in this area here, and again I'm just going to keep doing the same thing that I've done in this area all around here. When I get to this area, I'm going to be really careful and the black part will actually be the outline will gives us the shape and the form, and I'm just going to continue to do this until I fill out the entire paper and I'll let you watch for a while and then we'll comment on the final details at the very end. We waited for the background to dry a little bit before we go into the next steps. But I wanted to just make some important observations here. As you noticed, now this looks way more defined than it did when I only had the initial watercolor layer. Actually painting around the shape is what's really going to give it that crisp fine line. Something that I'm going to do now is actually go in and once my paint is dry, I can now erase the pencil markings within the stars and it's going to look extra clean and crisp. For me, this is a really important step because it's these little final details that really make your painting come together. What we're going to do now is I'm actually going to get rid of this dark water which we used to paint all this darkness here. Get rid of that and have some fresh water here. I'm going to use my flat brush that I've been using a lot to mix with the acrylics and gouache. I'll actually reuse this liner here. I'm going to grab a little bit of fresh white gouache here. You can also use ink or acrylics or the gouache if you have it, it just needs to be an opaque white paint. We're going to do a little bit of splatter around the dark sky. We're going to try to not hit the actual flower. A little tip to do that is just preparing a little bit of a paint here. I am going to grab this paper. I'm just going to shield it a little bit here. Going in and doing some little fine stars. I'm doing really fine and tiny ones in this case. We can fix that with a little bit of paper. I'm glad I made that mistake here because then you can see how to correct that. That was an area that wasn't completely dry yet, so when the wet gouache fell in there, it opened up this entire area. Since it was still wet, we could go in and correct that with not much of a problem. Then this I'll keep here, it'll dry and we'll turn it into a larger star. It's part of the spontaneity too of painting. Just going back in here and doing a little bit of splatter, just really delicately and I'm going to actually hand paint some more of the stars. Now I'm going to go in the same way we did the backgrounds, the four different backgrounds where I showed you little stars. We're going to do some of those here with a little bit of watered down gouache here. This is going to dry and it'll fade a little bit. But we're just adding in these hand detailed stars. I'm actually going to go in here where the splatter didn't touch much to unify the entire painting. Now we're going in with a little bit darker or concentrated gouache here. We're going to continue painting some individual stars, which are going to be the stars that pop out a little bit more because as you see, the background is already starting to fade a little bit. These are just the tiny background stars. Now these will give it some extra definition. Just finishing up here for some final thoughts on our first version of this lotus and moon glow painting. I really like how it turned out. The main difference we'll see here is the background texture will be very different than what we do next with the acrylic one. Just because of the nature of watercolor as a medium, it gives all these spontaneous watering mixes that we see here. Also the order in which we paint things are going to be really different. That's something important to keep in mind. The order of the layers, especially here where we define the actual shape more with actual black background than we do with the initial layer. All these different, little details that are really important to keep in mind. I'm just going to keep doing maybe a couple of more stars and this will be finished. Please upload this version into the class project. I really want to see what your different versions look like. I'm pretty sure all of you are going to be able to have some watercolors handy. This will be one that I'm really excited to see. Now we're going to go on with the acrylic version or opaque version next. 10. Final Project: Opaque: I have my new drawing here. This is the one that we're going to use for the opaque version of this beautiful lotus flower, and moonlight that we just did, moon glow, that we just did with watercolors. And now we're going to put this to the side and begin a brand new one just using opaque paint. In this case, I think I'm going to use acrylics, but if you have quash, feel free to use that as well. I'm going to, oh, one thing I wanted to show you is I was cleaning my palate and remember how I told you at the beginning that the acrylics can dry and turn into plastic on your palate. So here is what that looks like. You can just basically scrape it off and lift it up just like that. So this is pretty clean to have fresh, fresh start here. This is something that you don't necessarily do with quash because quash reactivates with water and acrylic does not. That's one of the differences between them and what we're going to do now. Usually when we work with watercolors, you have your pen, you have your pen set and, or your palate with a bunch of different paint's already mixed in here. But with acrylics, you start fresh each time. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start to lay out some base colors here. I'm going to move my painting, my drawing to the decide for a bit and actually just begin to work out what color mixing I'm going to do and I'm laying down some ultra marine. I'm going to mix a couple of the different brands that I have here as well, and I'll use some of this ultramarine here. The first thing we're going to do here once said I've laid down all the paints, I'm going to use, it's actually start mixing a little bit to have some basis ready, especially the base that I'm going to use for the background and for the moon glow. I have a little bit of black paint here, which I'm going to mix together with a little bit of violet and a little bit of some ultramarine because I want a tone similar to the Payne gray water color that I had. But it's going to look different because it's going to be in acrylics and I just want to have that nice base here which I'm creating now. I'm actually going to add a little bit more of this in here, and I'm actually going to add a tiny bit of white in here, so it's not pitch black, but more like a gray. I'm really putting some effort into creating the perfect base here. I have a nice imitation of the Payne's gray here with a little bit more culture marine undertone. I'm making a lot of paint here because I'm going to use this color quite a bit. I'm going to actually paint this circle a little bit different this time. I'm actually going to go around the rings just to show you a different way that you can do it instead of, so when we did this one, if you remember, we did layer by layer the entire circle. But in this case we're going to go around the rings and do that this time just to show you a different way that you can do it and they're both fine. This one I like because it gives it a certain depth but I went depth, but I want you to see the other one too, so you can see that there's just different ways to do this. I have this mix here and I'm going to have some of the white here as well, because this is where we're going to begin mixing all of this. Before we start doing the moon glow, I'm actually going to paint the background in this case, and it's going to be a pretty even background. The only thing I might do is I might have like a different glow coming out of the lotus flower just to play around a little bit and have something a little bit different here. I'm going to grab this blue that I have here and add some of this mix here. Just I just want to play around with my acrylics and just do something just different than what I did with the water colors, with the background. I'm going to start and I'm going to paint around. I'm actually going to go in with this brush for now. I'm going to go around my lotus flower, and as you can tell, what's really cool about painting with acrylics is, I don't have to be super, super precise in this step right now. Because I'm going to actually paint the shapes over this, so that's what's going to give me the real definition. Right now what I'm actually doing is just laying down a base layer. I'm going to do like an extra glow around the lotus flower, and right now it might look weird and uneven, but we'll work and work on the layers until it looks really, really right. I'm just painting around here. I'm not being too careful. This is what's actually really liberating about acrylics that you don't wash. You don't have to be too concerned about what you're doing because you can always go over and fix anything. Now we have this, now I'm going to go on with this grayer mix. I'm going to start mixing this and around here. I'm just going to leave a little reminder of where the moon was there, and then I'm going to add some of the Payne gray here. Right now it's obviously an initial phase and it doesn't look great yet, but I'm going to go on with my wet brush here and paint around here so that I can begin to get a really nice glow. By this point, I've pretty much covered up where the Moon used to be, but it's a really small icon so I wasn't super worried about that. I can just paint over the next and it'll be fine. Just starting in. I'm being mindful of this glowy background that I'm doing. at the same time I am not too afraid to cover up my lotus flower, but I'm not going crazy with it either because I do want to remember a little bit of the guides where my drawing is. I'm going back in here, using a lot of my wet flat brush here to create this extra glow here. we're actually going to have to glowing objects. One is going to be the moon glow and then the lotus flower is going to be glowing on its own. I have a sheet of paper underneath this, so I'm not too concerned about getting the background dirty. One thing to note already is that there's definitely a lot more brushwork when we paint with acrylics than when we paint with watercolors. With watercolors we let our paints do its own thing and dry however it wants to dry. With acrylics, it also depends on your style, but there's a lot more that you can do with your wet brush and in this case, there was quite a bit of that to create this little glow here. Right now it's all looking like this big mess. It's hard to define how it's going to look in the end, but we'll be fine. Right now I'm just actually going around here and what this gray that we created. It's actually going to need a little bit more layering here because this gray is the black base that I use, it isn't super opaque. We're going to have to go in and do a little extra work here.[MUSIC] Now it also depends on what brush stroke you're actually going for. Because some people like to have their third brush stroke be visible when they're working with opaque paint like this. But in this case, I'm trying to get as flat as possible. I'm going for a look where there's not much and there's not much to see except like a flat area. So as you can see, I've already just in time finished up my my paint, but I'm going to make a little bit more so we can begin with the moon glow.[MUSIC] I just made a similar tone of the gray. That's one of the things with acrylics is that if you don't make enough paint and you want to keep on using the same tone. It's something to keep in mind. It's always better to make a little bit more than a little bit less right now I tried to replicate it and it'll be good enough. But just something to keep in mind that like watercolor is a bit more free in that sense where you're using everything on your palate and things together and with acrylic, sometimes you want to really work on having the exact same tone that you've been using. Just something to keep in mind. Right now I feel like I did a pretty good job of replicating this, this gray that we had here. This paints grain. I'm going to begin the first outer layer of the moon glow. Now that I feel that this looks pretty magical already. I'm going to go in here and start painting around this circle for the first layer. It's going to look pretty similar to the background that we have. I'm actually going to double layer it. What that means is this will dry a little bit and then I'll go in and give it a second layer.[MUSIC] Right now I noticed that there's a little speck here that was left unpainted. I'm just going in lightly and correcting that I'm painting over a little drop of water fell here, but I can also turn that until a little star leader, which is what I think I will do. I also noticed a little bit of white here. I'm just going to fix that a little bit. Then going in just with a dry brush and blending that out. [MUSIC] What's cool about acrylics is that I don't have to sit around and wait forever to paint the next layer. I'm going to add a little bit of white to this mix here, and I'm going to grab some of the white paint here and mix it in here. That's going to be my second value and the moon glow. I'm just showing you a different way to do the circle Moon glow in opaque paint. Now the entire mix has gotten a little bit grayer. I'm going to go around and start to paint that base layer.[MUSIC] Now third layer going in and adding more weight to the entire mix here. This is a really great way to register. Time changing my values is just using the same mix of paint by adding a little bit more each time. Now I have an even, lighter gray here. I'm going to go in and pick a third of the interior in here.[MUSIC] What's interesting with acrylics or any opaque paint is that it really doesn't matter what you do in the area that's going to be underneath New paint. In this case I'm being really mindful of the outer edges, but the inner edges not so much because it's going to be covered up anyways. So in this little area here, I went a little bit overboard, but that's going to be fine because I'm actually going to fill in the whole area with a little bit more paint, so it'll be covered up later on. I'm going to go in and add even more white to the entire mix here. So each time this gray gets lighter and lighter.[MUSIC] I just finished painting the moon glow, and as you could see, all I really did was keep adding white to the same gray mix. The process was really different to paint this as opposed to with the watercolor one. I actually concentrated on this area first, and now I'm going to continue to paint in the lotus petals. I'm actually going to swap my water because acrylics do tend to get your water way dirtier than watercolors do. I'm going to be using different tones at this moment. I'm going just clean these brushes out and switch over to clean water, which I have here. I'm going to begin to paint in all of these petals. I have different mixes here of the violets that I'm going to use. I'm going to start mixing up some colors here. Also just making the bass tones that I want to use and figuring out what it's going to all look like. I'm also going to do a little bit of blending within each petal, but the way I did it with watercolors was just laying the paint down and letting it do its own thing. In this case it's going to be a little bit different. I'm mixing paint, but then there's going to be a lot more blending within each petal. I'm going to have this brush that's going to be a drier brush to help me blend the paint like this. I have my darker violet and marv here that's going to be my shadow colors. I'll also have some of the ultramarine here. These are going to be really good blending colors. You might have noticed that I lost my way with my acrylics with the background, and I'm just letting you know that right now I'm just looking at the watercolor one I did just to remember, and retrace where all the petals were, because I was losing them in there, but now I've drawn over the paint, and I know exactly where everything was now. I'm going to just continue painting in my petals. As you can see, the type of blending is really different than it is with watercolor. For instance, right here I feel like the first one I did is different than how the rest of the petals ended up being. What's really cool about acrylic is that you can just go in and paint over a certain area, and you can fix that if you want. That's exactly what I'm going to do here. I feel like I wasn't too happy with how it looked in comparison to the rest, and I've been using a little bit cooler violets. I'm just going to go in and repaint over this, and going in with my dryer brush and just blending this a little bit more. As I do this, I'm just going to continue to paint all these petals. I took a little break to just change my water because it was really dark now and I'm going to do the final details here. I'm retracing the moon and leaves that I covered up because it was getting a little bit too complicated with my circular background, but it's an easy little icon here. I'm just retracing that. Okay, so the two things that I'm going to do next is, in the way that I painted stars in the watercolor version, I'm going to do that here, but it's a little bit different since the medium is obviously different. I'm going to grab a little bit of white paint here. Just place that in here. I have a little bit of the ocher here, which I'm going to use for the moon. Just mix that up with a little bit of white paint that I had on this brush. I'm going to go in with a thin brush. In this case, since these are the top layers, I do have to be pretty mindful of these brushstrokes here. Instead of leaving that space and painting over it, in this case, I'm just layering over the dark paint. That is how I'm painting this little crescent moon icon. Now, with this ocher, I'm just going to mix in a little bit of the blue I had here to make some green. I want it to be a little bit of a organic green, not too bright, but a little more muted. I'm just using the ocher, a little bit of blue. I'm going in and painting these little details here. Here's my little icon. Finally, I'm just going to grab just another white paint here and I'm going to begin painting my star details here. Okay, so I'm just finishing up here, final details on the opaque version of this painting. Yeah, it's done. I thought it would be fun to take a look side-by-side at both of them, so we can analyze the differences for the last time. Bringing this one back, I'm just going to remove it from the book. 11. Final Project Comparison: This actually looks really interesting and it's something that I've been wanting to do for so long and I'm happy I finally got a chance to show you guys what this looks like. So it's the exact same drawing and it's done twice. This one is in the transparent version with watercolors. This one is in the opaque version, with acrylics in this case. The main difference, there's two big differences in this technique. One of them is timing, which is a huge deal with watercolors not so much with acrylics, and the other one is layering. So layering was super different in both. With watercolors, it's sort of, you have to think of ways to move all around your paper at the same time while you wait for a certain areas to dry. With acrylics, it's more like you concentrate on certain areas because you have your palate with certain areas of colors that you're working on and you don't want it to dry on your palate. The timings sort of factor in in your wet palate. That's what I would say about the timing with acrylics. The other factor of layering is that with watercolors, you have to leave the negative space in order to have lighter objects. In this case, for example, the stars were painted around the pencil marking, and in this case, the whole background is painted and then all the layers are painted over that, after that. I'm really happy I got to share this with you guys and am really excited to see what you guys come up with, and remember it's totally fine if you only have one or two of these mediums, do as much as you can. I'm really curious to see what you guys come up with, and I always encourage you to use your personal style and whatever kind of drawing you want. But I will also help you out and maybe I'll post a little template of a similar drawing like this so you guys can try it out. That's it. I'm really happy showing you the differences between these two techniques and also the timing for reference was pretty similar in both. It's just the way that we moved. There's a lot more brushwork, especially within the petals here and there it's looser, but then there's a little bit more detail. Just for reference there, the timing was pretty similar. Thank you so much for taking another class with me. I'm really happy to have you guys here again, and I look forward to more classes in the future, and as always to answer any questions you might have in the discussion boards and obviously looking at all your projects in the community, in the project gallery. Thank you for watching.