Transcripts
1. How to Create a Beautiful Painting 'California Watercolor Style': Sometimes we're asked what's the most important thing in art? What's the best attitude? What is it that really gets you through the day? For me and all my students, we start every class with this little saying, "There are no mistakes in art." I'm Ron Mulvey and I'm a professional landscape painter and I teach art at the Crescent school of Art and Music. I've been a teacher for well over 30 years, I love teaching and there's nothing I'd like to do better than to teach you on Skillshare, so welcome to this class. I would say this class will be for beginners and also for people in between, and also for even advanced people. If I've been looking through all the Skillshare programs and I know right away if there's something there that I might need to know, I probably would click on this class and pick up a few tips, art professional, you decide you are going to be an artist. Well, for me, it was in 1962, I guess I was about nine years old, it was Easter time, and I've got noticed that I had won $ 2 for coloring a bunny. I figured if I could make money coloring bunnies, I might as well put some time into this, a quick view of the class broken down very similarly, number one, watch the demos, get to know the method. Number two, get your own material together and use what you've learned in the demos to produce your own art. Number three, subject matter is your choice, everything is about essentials, when you get the essentials done, you've got everything. Let's get started. This is too small a brush, but this is just right. There's a bit of a green tone here, but that's okay, I'm going to wiggle a brush and we're just going to fly over like that, there we go. Motion into here, coupled darks right up here, got three,1,2,3. Now, I see I'm getting closer to my project here, I'm thinking I could make these dark green eggs, I could do dark green here, the eggs will just be not hatched yet. Where's the other part of the egg now? See I can have that other part of egg on his head dripping down turned into something. If you studied Picasso, you'll see that by the end, his fiddle art, his paintings were fairly fast, he wasn't fiddling around with details. Maybe I might work on a little picture like this and that might be something I might do apart from [inaudible] , this is one that I might do for the class with very minimal drawing. The road is off centered, see instead of putting in the middle, it's off centered. Good teaching, good tools, good attitude, great picture.
2. Important Tip: the Right Amount of Wet: If you're going to take advantage of this style of painting, which was founded in California, you have two options. One, just gets your paper into somewhere that holds water. This is all dried acrylic, I'm afraid. I've given up trying to keep the acrylic off my butcher's tray. Once in a while on the summer, I'll leave it out in the hot sun and it'll all come off. So there, what am I doing here? I'm not wetting my paper, I'm saturating my paper. There's a difference between wetting paper and saturating it. I'm going to leave that in for awhile. You notice I'm just using an older piece of paper good on one side, little dirty on the other. That will probably take 10 minutes to saturate. So it's like preparing your vegetables before you make a soup. You prep your vegetables in the kitchen for 10 or 15 minutes while you're busy herself doing something else. So this is part of the process, if you want this result. This is an English paper. It's a little different than the French watercolor paper. It's more cotton in it. Now you see that paper is still buckling. But as I add water to it, copious amounts of water, that's why I suggest you get some big brushes. You need brushes with lots of water. Put little more water on the back of my slick piece of board and pop my paper down, and it's ready for a California painting. Lots of water. All I have to do now is take my dry rag, take off the surface water. If you don't take the surface water off, the paint just spreads too quickly.
3. 'Brush Surfin' Materials: This is the Purdy brush. It's about $15 and it's just available in any paint store. Purdy, it's called a cutting brush. It's on an angle, like that, and it's synthetic. You can see the bounce. Advantage of a big brush is that you have to work broadly. You can see that this whole wash was put on with one little movement of this brush, or a brush similar to it. That's the Purdy brush. Let's just put that right there. This one here, I discovered on the Internet, I was looking up Picasso, and they're advertising the Picasso brush. Apparently, Picasso used house paints when he painted because the house paints were shinier. This is what a paint chemist said. Some entrepreneur made a Picasso brush. It's called Picasso. I paid $8.79 for this. It's a great brush, less flexible as these Purdy brushes. See the Purdy brush is really springing, which is nice, but this one actually even holds more water and is less expensive. It holds lots of paint and that's what I went and did. When I did this, I did a little shard of red and then the blue at the top. Okay. I'm not sure what these are. I found them in a store once. They might be for silk screening. They're called Loew Cornell. They work really well too. See, if you're working with smaller pieces of paper, you don't need a brush that holds enormous amounts of water. This is a little brush too. That'll work. I bought about five of these for $10, and this is a smaller version of this one. Here we have all kinds of wide brushes. We have a real handful. All these brushes together might've cost $100, but if each of them was sable or a squirrel hair brush, probably have $2,000 with the brushes. These are called Hake brushes. They're from Japan, China. They're used in Asia. They're just made of goat's hair. They work very well. I've used them for years. We have our basic flat brush, which would work too. We could use this, about $12. Last but not least, our Chinese round brush, which I have used before too, and they hold lots of water. What wouldn't work? This would not work. This would be for details. You need to have a big brush to get started with the California Style Watercolor. There's my jug of water. Always use a big jug of water. That way you don't have to clean this out all the time. Because as soon as you put your brush in there and there's not enough water, you're going to be rinsing and having to empty it in the middle of your painting session. So have lots of water available. This is my other palette. You can see it's a deep well palette. Of course the fail of scene will stain it, but it's all dry. It doesn't affect. I could put yellow in any of these. Basically, three colors to start with. Let's say I started with some phenosine. I can put a little bit here. It's automatically tilted, so the water's going to run down. It's perfect. Then I can take my brush, put some water here if I want, a little bit here. I can mix up different strengths. This is a wonderful little palette, 99 cents, and I got a few of them here. I've got two of them, so $2. Pigment is just another fancy word for color, and color is red. The hue is alizarin. So pigment, color, red, hue, alizarin, alizarin crimson. Number one. It's a good staining color and it's transparent. There is alizarin right there. Next, cobalt. Cobalt blue makes the best violets. Ultramarine blue, deep greens, moody grays, cold blues. Thalosin blue, very versatile, gives you good violets, very good darks that are transparent. It's very transparent. These two are not as transparent, so they have to be used a little thinner. Whereas this one, you can use quite a bit of it before it gets pasty-looking. Of course, our yellow for today is Azo. But you can use Indian yellow, you can use Hansa yellow, you can use Azo nickel yellow, or nickel Azo yellow. All those yellows are transparent. Yellows like yellow Ocher, those are a little more heavy and they have their place too. Here's your basic setup, paper. If you're left-handed, the palette is on the left. Come across here, you can put your water over there too. Trick is not to, when you're dipping, have your water come across your paper. So you don't drip, you come around from here. The water, position it where you like it. The basic paper we're using, this is a little bigger, but piece of paper that fits there, maybe seven inches by 10 inches, not too big.
4. West Coast Morning 'California Style': Here we have, right hear the number one paper, 140 pounds, soaking wet. It's been soaking for about 10 minutes. You can see it slaps down. It's quite saturated. See how it slaps down. If it doesn't slap down, fall down, it's not wet enough. A little trick is to, because it's been soaking, you want to take off the surface water. You can use a cotton rag, I like using Kleenex simply because there are pure and clean and I just let them dry out and you can reuse them. It's the only time you can reuse a Kleenex. I'm going to take some cobalt blue and let's do what's called a Dispersion Test. We're just going to touch it and then we're going to watch it disperse. The cobalt doesn't disperse too much. Next one I'm going to try is the Thalo theme, very little water, mostly just paint. Will do a little test with a stroke. There's the Alizarin crimson. You'll notice that it's dispersing more. They're all starting to disperse. I'm going to try the Indian yellow. You can see that the Thalo, and the Alizarin crimson are winning. Here we have Hansa yellow, that's H-A-N-S-A. So there's our dispersion, that's on 140 pound paper. Now you can see, if I was painting, if I wanted that affect, fine. But as the paper dries and we put the paint on, the second time, you'll see that my dispersion is less. The paper's wet. When I swipe the brush, the color will disperse. Then I might clean my brush again, get some red, a few globs at the bottom there, that's okay, and I will put some red in. Notice that the paint is mixing on the paper. Here comes the yellow at the bottom. Getting to know when and how much water to use, that's the art of watercolor painting. Paper here's just wet. It's not shining and now I'm going to do a quick little landscape. Going to use this big brush and this big brush. I wet the brush, that's called priming the brush. Get little of the water out. I'll start with a yellow on the corner of the brush, two corners and I'm just going to put some yellow right through the middle of the paper, clean the brush off, take a little red, put it through there, clean it off and at the top a very small amount of Thalo blue. Once the rags are great with watercolor, you pretty much need a lot of rags. I'm going to take a different blue, I'm going to take a little bit of cobalt blue and I'm going to tilt my board and I'm going to go on an angle. I'm going to take this brush and I'm going to twist it. Next thing I'm going to do, it's going to downsize my brush and I'm going to get a strong Indian yellow. While this is drying, put another one through here and here. Notice because the paper is wet, saturate it, I'm not getting any hard edges. I'm going to now go a little darker here. Put some vertical chain. I guess we've decided by mountains. You'll see this hard edge here, you soften it. Just bring my brush over there, put a little bit of angle here. The nice thing about really wet paper is you can pick up things or take them off as you want. What I'm going to take now, is a smaller brush and I'm going to mix up my first secondary color. I'm going to go with a very strong Thalo blue and Alizarin crimson. Remember I'm painting upside down. So what you seen is what you're getting. Now if I want a little reflection in the water here, you can put it in like that. Turn it up, because this is dark and we had a little dark here, to match it. Maybe it will work. I want to get lift a little bit here with my brush right off. Lift. See I've got a little hair in there from the goat's hair, but it's looking good. Now, if I really want to pick this up, I'll take this brush, dry it off, and then I will hold it up and slowly pull it across. You don't want to do this too many times as the paper will get stressed. But, if you do it a few times, it will look great. Then I might put in another [inaudible] up here. I think what I'll do here is I'm going to put a little line on an angle like that. Enough brush. One there. Last but not least, take a little brush like that, pull straight down. This will look different in about five minutes. It won't be as dark. Now, notice how I'm lifting some of the paint off. This looks a little bit more like a marsh over here. Bang this a few times, get sum texture. Now, we're going to let that dry and see what it looks like in a few minutes. Here it is after drying, for about five or six minutes, you'll see those little marks at the top. So when your paper is wet and saturated, if you hit it with a blunt object, you'll get dark spots. Okay, here we are, about 35 minutes later. I'm just lifting it up here so you can get a better look at it, the paper is still wet and damp. So you can see the dark marks have really shown up well. Now, because the paper is still damp, I can put some more dark's in here. I'm going to take a little bit more of yellow, and I'm going to give it a couple of sweeps. Let's just see what happens. Now, it's drying up. See that dry stroke there? I like that. I'm going to just try that again. We're going to just straighten it out a little bit. The brush dries out at the end and we get a nice little dry spot there. Could do the same here, then sweep it. Nice sweeping strokes. I don't always use that yellow, but maybe I'm thinking if this is going to reflect down here, I might just leave a little bit of it's showing. Nice. I'm getting some reflections in here now. Now, tilting the paper. Okay. We can soften the edge hear with just water, because the paper is wet still. But look what I'm getting here, Some half little accents here. I think what I'll do here is I'm going to get as dark as I can get with Thalo seen and some Alizarin crimson. I want to hold that brush up here. It's going to leave a couple little white spots showing there. See those little white spots? Then now look. Just tilt the paper this way. Got a nice reflection here. If I had not wet the paper about an our ago, this would not be working. Now, notice how it's clean here. I haven't touched it. Clean, clean, clean, nice reflective quality. There's very little detail. I have a nice spill in here, and a little white area here, and here. Sometimes it's not the best to have one huge dark area. So what I'm going to do is, before it dries, I'm just going to lift off [inaudible] here like that. So any little effect that you'd like to have. Oh, I see there's another little white spot there, I might just add one. Three is a good number, and one down here. Okay, that's enough. Don't touch it. Know when to stop, and let that dry.
5. Lifting Technique: To lift off a shape, the best way is you take some water and what you do is gently put the water on in the shape that you want. I want to make this like the light is spilling over on an angle. You actually paint the water on very carefully and gently, don't rub it hard, just let it sit there. While that one's sitting, it's dissolving the paint. I'm also going to bring in right along here, I'm just gently putting some water on here. You can actually submerge a watercolor if it's done properly into a bathtub and just let it sit there and it'll get all wet and it won't disturb the paint. But my reasoning here is, because there's light coming this way, it's going to reflect in my water also. So gently putting the water on my water. I'm going to let it sit. Now, there's two things you can do. You can get pieces of gauze or you can get blotting paper, or you can just take your rag and just gently put it on. Roll a piece of tape. Thing is, not to move the rag, just to let it absorb some. A Kleenex will work. I like the recycled materials because I never run out of them. I've used my shirt, a sock. So there we are. Then I gently pull it up and I've lifted a shape. Now, I take my hairdryer, dry it up. Don't sit around waiting for the paint to dry, dry it up quickly with the hair dryer. There's a famous painting of Rembrandt, he used his thumb to smudge something. You could see here that the actual cloth is making a pattern when I lifted it. Now I'm going to lift two more areas right here. On this angle, all I'm doing is putting water on it. Wherever the water goes, that's what lifts off. So to get the right lift, make the shape with the water. Do not rub it with your brush. You'll destroy the top of the paper. It takes a little bit of time. These are dry. I'm going to now extend it a little more, get the shape I want. Because the paint is bone dry, you'll get what you want. You can also do this when the paint is wet. It's a different lift. We'll learn that in the next lesson. This is a dry lift. Now I take my Kleenex this time, you can actually see the shape. This one, I'm going to make sure clean here, straight across. This one I'll role just because I want to really get the light coming through here. See? Okay, there we go. Kleenex works well. See I'm getting a nice light form down through here. Now, I can also pick up this shape here, and I'll show you how. The next method is called the wet drag. You'll see, the reflections usually are the same shape as whatever is up here. So I will pull that over eventually, but this angle is going to reflect this way. So here's another way that we can do it, is you gently push the brush down and come across like that, once. Clean off the brush, dry it a little bit, give a little wiggle and pull. What's the disadvantage of this? I'll show you. Unless you're careful, we're destroying this lovely green here with this purple. What you need to do also is lift off at the same time. Whatever pigment that you have dragged across. Either method works really well as long as you don't really drag too hard on the paper. So now I'm getting a nice little shape here, and I'm going to pull it across on an angle, just like this is on an angle. Reflections are always pretty much the same as what's up here. Here we go. Let's start off on an angle. When I edge on my Kleenex, get my roller. Every time I lift, I'm producing a very nice luminous effect on my painting. Okay, hairdryer time. This paper is bone-dry now. Definitely, I used a hairdryer. Now it's time to do a very, very, very important technique, it's called cutting out some white. I have my utility knife. You can never get the white paper back. As white as the paper can be with lifting, you'll always be just a shade down. It looks like I'm going both directions by going one direction and a slight lift. I'm going to get right down in there. Too much of this renders your picture mechanical. But I get a good white there. I can pull a few more on an angle in here right through this reflection. Homer, Turner, lots of great artists have used this little technique. There's three, one, two, three, a long one, a medium one is called, baby bear, mama bear, papa bear. We got a big papa bear here. I'm going to pull out a little bit of white in there, it's yellow. Then a baby bear here, which is just a little bit. There we go. The one thing I'm going to do next on this, as far as lifting goes, is to soften this edge right here, it's a little too strong. Knowing when to stop is important. I'm just going to rub it until I see it soften. Now the brush has picked up some of that blue, and I'm moving over a little bit. It's a different way of lifting. I'm going to take the brush off like that. I don't want this hard edge in my water, I want to soften the entire edge. Now it's getting a little purple here. Gently clean off the brush, tap it. The last one. Now this is an echo of this color or tone you see. I'm going to look at it and I'm going to pull it in. This is why I like these half inch or inch flat brushes. Gentle is better than being too aggressive. Tap it, nicely done. Now we've got one there. I'm thinking one, two, three, I've got one. This is an oblique. First one doesn't render much for me. Second one, paint starting to dissolve, I'm getting a better result. The third one, see where I'm coming in there, I'm starting to see my shape. There it is starting to come. Clean the brush, always clean the brush. The paint is starting to lift. Now I'll use a Kleenex, and I'll probably get a pretty good result here from lifting. Nice, good. I'm going to add one down this way. Gently just wiggling the brush, wiggling in one place, wiggling down right to the bottom. Get a nice vertical there. Pat it, very good. Water is reflective. So we're looking through here. Creating a few little very subtle rays of light going straight down, hopping over the brush. I'm going to pull it in a little more. I'm going to pull it up almost to that little white line there. There we go. That's better. Okay. I'm going to let that sit. Like it. Lifting.
6. Big Sky Watercolor Part 1: The paper is ready to receive paint. Now, I'm going to take my little sketch, that we looked at earlier, and I'm going to put it right up against the camera in front of me, and I have this one too, of the up in Alberta, Canada, and so I have them in front of me. I have all my brushes here. I have my rag. Actually going to draw it with the brush first, and I'm going to use my little brush. I'm going to take a middle color, which is just, it's going to mix up a little orange. Over here I have some Indian yellow left, but I'm going to take a little bit of the Azo yellow, and I'm going to stay with a mid orange like this. Because a lot of the California watercolorists, began their picture with a mid tone. So maybe I'll just put the picture upside down. This picture is going to go upside down in front of me, and I'm going to see if I can just get what I'm doing here with this. So I'm going to draw. Oh, look at that. Look at that shape there. There's the road, and there's some little trees there, I think in shape. The paint is more or less like tomato soup, not too thin, not too thick, and I have some obliques coming in this way. I'm just looking at my picture upside down. I got a vertical here. That's about intimate, take a of couple little sky marks in here, and maybe a little bit like in there, and then the rolling hills coming back down here, and that's it. Brush goes in the water, cleaned off. Let me turn it around, and see what we have so far. Oh, nice. If you don't mind, I'm going to turn it around this way now. But just to show you that sometimes given yourself a little bit of a challenge, if you're really good at drawing, drawing with your left hand for awhile or draw standing on your head. This something different. Now, I've got sum big shapes here. This is getting exciting. I need to move to a big brush. I can use that brush, or I could use this, which is the Picasso brush. It cost me $8.79. This in a Sable brush, cost $350. This a pretty good deal. I'm going to prime it. I'm going to dry it, and form a paper. My paper might be drying. It's okay. I put more water underneath. This is getting exciting. It's starting to work. We don't have to panic about the paper drying now. If you only do surface wet, you're always spraying the picture with a little automizer, and then your paint goes all over. I'm going to take a little bit more of that orange, on my brush. Look at this big brush here. It's, oh, [inaudible]. Just got try this. There it is. Remember, don't bee afraid to tilt your paper. Clean paints, make a clean picture. I'm mixing over my pictures so I'd be very careful. So there is my soupy red. I take a little bit of this red, it's going to be bold. I've taken my brush and I've gone over to the tree, and up, and then I clean off my brush. Am I going to boss that paint around with my paint brush? No, sorry. I'm going to tilt it. Tilt it, tilt it. Oh, I need to soften an edge there. See the edge here? Soften the edge, soften the edge, soften the edge. Beautiful. That's it. Now, twist at this way now. Just twist this way. Got it. You can do the slap technique. See how it slaps down. If it doesn't slap down, fall down, it's not wet enough. Now, because I've already done the first session and let it dry, I take my Kleenex now, and this won't take any paint off. What it does, because we've used staining paints like [inaudible] and Alizarin crimson, and it looks like I used a little Indian yellow and this one, it's a warm orange yellow. What I'm doing is taking the surface water off. All the water is inside the paper. It's saturated. It's not going to dry quickly, and when I take the water off the top, the paint is not going to spread all over the place. So I'm going to do a little dispersion test, like we did in the first part of the video, and what I do is I generally take a little corner, and just try somewhere, wherever I'm going to be putting some which is here. See it's not going anywhere. So I'm okay, and don't worry if you didn't want that there, it comes write off, because the paper is wet. It's not sitting in. So I'm going to take my Picasso brush, big brush. I'm going to lift this up [inaudible] , turn it upside down, wet my brush. I'm going to move everything over here. You can see exactly what I'm doing, and you see. Oh, there it is, looks like a little fish swimming in the aquarium. Pad it, rub it, touch it to my rag. All the essentials, one, two, three. Touch it to the rag, take a little bit off. Look how strong that paint is. So I'm going to add a little more water to it. Now, most of the water is in the paper. So I don't want to be using that much on my Picasso brush. That's where touching it two the rag is so important. Now, if you can look at the brush, it's like a felt pen, it's loaded. So I'm going right across, and look. You see? It's moving down. I can put one more sweep there. I think I'll put a vertical sweeping. Couple like that. I might even put one more there. There we go. You see? Watching what it does. Look it's going to hit this and go right over it. So now by turning it on an angle that way, I get clouds moving in this way, and I see I've got a watermark here, that's from the paper. So I'm going to get three. One, two, three. One, two, three. There we go. We'll just let that sit flat now. The trick is to watch it. Don't be always bossing and touching your paint. I take my little rag, I want to get that little white spot back. I like that little spot. See, gently. That is a great little move here. It's a little dot, dot the eyes. Just by touching it. There's another won there, leaving little white spots. See it's falling in there. Now if I want to, I can add a little more crimson in hear. You can have this all premixed. But I know this paint is not, this paper is fully saturated, so I'm not under any obligation to rush. I can think, and then I can act. I want to take my little sable brush this time. Prime it, touch it to the rag. Take a little bit of the paint and because the paper is wet, I'll just touch it to the rag and I'm going to tilt it. I'm going to put it right in here. Right there. Now you see that tree does not know that the sky is in behind it, so I will continue the stroke on the other sighed of the tree. I'll tilt it up just to see what happens. Really, I'm responsible for putting the paint on the brush and then on the paper, and then I'm responsible for watching. Now you see these, that would be great if there were trees there, but I don't want tree, so I'm going to turn it this way. It's going to run that way. I can encourage a little bit. Very small stroke. Look, see the blue is coming down in here. I could clean my brush. Very little water. Put a little bit of blue there, now the blew is mixing in with the alizarin and I'm watching, not doing, just watching. Then I tilt it up this way. Just watching it. Perfect. The paper is wet. I take a little yellow on my brush and put it in there. I don't want it too thin. I'm going to see I took all that. Touch it to the rag. Pick this up a little bit. Even this little I'm going to leave white. Can leave the road a little bit white. When to come on an angle like that. Then clean the brush off. This brush takes a lot of water. Why do I clean the brush? Well, because I want the paint to mix on their own. I don't want to premix them. Now I take a little bit of the alizarin, touch it. Remember, leaving bits of white is a very important and let's see what happens here. Will let this just wireless way across. If the clouds have that form, the shadows on the ground are really shadows of the clouds. The shape of the shadow is important. Remember, we have to pick up sum drips. Remember our class from the English watercolor. Pick up the drips. Now, this mark here is coming from the paper probably got scored somehow or maybe got roughed up. That's okay. We take things like that as a gift. There's a mark on my paper. That's a gift. I'm going to stick with the thalo because that might be just what you're using. But I could use ultra marine and I could use cobalt, but the thalo is out, so I'm going to use to thalo and here we go. We're going write across with the thalo, with a cool section. A little bit of cool. Here we go, just dripping it in, especially in here. A little stronger at the bottom. Let it tilt up a bit. Very nice. Now I can lift off the road. I want to lift the road off because I want to have it lighter. Look how easily that lifts off. Like that word lift. Leave the middle. I known in country roads the middle is a little darker. Might even lift off a little here to, look. See when your paper is saturated, you can lift out the color before it sets. That's a great little spot right there. I think I'll just extend that right over, see. Never get rid of all the white. There. Maybe the sun is really hitting us. I can bring the blue on that, seen.
7. Big Sky Watercolor Part 2 : Okay. Let's see what this cobalt will do. Cobalt blue. This section hear is what we're working on write here. It's wet, but just a little trick. I'm going to see. It's pretty wet, but you see this as an atomizing. I might spray a little bit of water on just a bit, seen. That's wet, that's just right. Now I'm going to take a little bit of the cobalt. Remember we like to let the paints mix on the paper. Leave some spots, leave some white on the clouds. Then a little drop of the alizarin touch the drag, maybe a little more and more there and then let the paper to its magic. Don't boss everything around with your brush, let the paper do its magic. All like that, coming down right there, some darker, there we go. Don't be afraid of the little darker. Then we'll let that seems running you see, control the run, then for the tree, it's pointing up the tree. Clean up the brush. Don't lose that lovely yellow there, soften the edge. Well we have a couple more clouds there, came in there. I Like that. Just let that soften the edge. Touch the rag, soften the edge. Touch the rag, soften the edge. If you don't have a bit of a litany going on in your mind, you're like a dog following his nose or her nose, following any scent that comes along. Have some words in your mind at certain times that will direct to. Other time just be quiet. Soften the edge, don't lose the white. Can never get it back. Now I say look at that, I realize I want one more dark. Now that looks pretty bold, but remember watercolors dry lighter. Now, I'm going to let that move around a bit. Watching it, pick up the drip. Now cobalt does not move around the same as fallow. But just leave it, don't touch it, it will set in later. Might just blow this little. See how that disbursed it by blowing on it and I'm going to now get back my little shapes here, like that and look how bright white that is, that's perfect. Now I can start to maybe throw in a little bit of that was bold, but I want to set this tree off. Remember the paint is wet and the paper is wet. So we're okay. Paint will go where you tell it to go. Little atomizer, soften up that edge, put a bit cloth, lift a little bit off, clean off the cloth. See if you put that on and not quite what you want. Now, they've become far away hills. Look how easy the cobalt comes off. If it was thylacine, you'd have a stain there because thylacine is much darker. I've added a small little purple or violet in there. Okay, 15 minutes later, paper is still wet, isn't that great? Top maybe drying a bit, which is what we want because it's time to put it in a few darker accents. There's my three ultramarine alizarin enhancer, a little bit of the red on won part of the brush, a little bit of the blue and a little bit of the yellow. You can look at that and see that we have red, yellow and blue. A little trick from the Impressionists was broken color. You get the edge of this road. That's going to be tricky, but I can do this. I like that, I didn't really know what was going to happen. I see the yellow didn't come out. But that's okay. That's the tree that I did here. I'm thinking a bit here. We're going to continue that around along one more. There we go. I'm going to add one here and along the rode there's a gully in the road here. Notice I'm more less using the brush as what we call a tool rather than stroking it. I'm adding some tool marks, sum straight lines. Nice. I think I'm going to do this. I don't known why, but I know I'm not going to do that. Can't get too bold yet. Not yet. I just had to do something bold. Now I'm going to take my brush, and clean it again. Remember the paint is wet and the paper is wet. A little bit of rubbing there. It's for my shadow. I like that, a shadow area. Look at that. I have to admit, I was a little nervous there, but nervous is good. It's good in painting get a little bit swept off balance. No struggle, no merit. Now I'm going to leave that, and just a little touch there. No. Best thing is that the paper is, there we go, soft in the edge, there. It looks good and soft in here. I think I'm going to come right in here and soften that up right along the Kali. In the corner of my eye I saw a big cloud coming in here. A big, almost a storm cloud. See the ultramarine how it sits on top? Stay within that tree. I almost connected these two here, which wouldn't it will be okay. A big storm cloud coming in here. Look, it's darkening there, that's great. My tree is trying to show up. I'm going to bring it over. There, I are just added some dark in here. A little bit of water, see what happens here. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Timid is no good. Coming over here, we've got the big boy, there. That should do it. Wow! The paint only goes where the water. See that ultramarine sits on top whereas the thalo, which I'm going to take a little drop of the thalo here and put it into the ultramarine, just a couple drops to give it a little cf. I'm thinking that big storm coming in here. Wow, that's nice actually. Look at this, I got a little something going on here. Now, we're going to make sure that this doesn't watermark so a little mist. No, not mist. I want to bring this over more. Big boy, bring him in. There we go. I think a little blow. The trees really standing out now. But you see the roundness here and the roundness here, check and see if there's anything on there. I want to soften. There's my little white spotted, I kept it. I like to have something going this way. I'm going take a little of the ultramarine and the thalo scene. Mixing two blues is a great idea. I've got the two of the mixed, and I'm coming in on an angle like that and like that with a little tiny bit of red into it and let that sit on an angle there. I like the square shape here. The round shape got very shaped. Round, square, I got a curve. I was getting tensed. Look at that baby there. Better tilt that around the tree. Now the tree is even standing out more. If I wanted to create a windy effect, I go like this. That makes the paint spread, gets me a little exercise too. Oh, yes, look at went way up there. But no problem, just tilt it. Look at here. I never would have imagined that that little problem we almost had. Well look at how it's moving here. You see, let the paint do the work and then walk away from it for a few minutes. Just got my little. Oh, blue, blue. Maybe I'll just before I leave it. Take a little green here, see that little green coming on here. Let me put a little bit of green in there. There's a nice precipitation, we call them precipitations. Now, because the paper is wept, I can take the big guy here and go like this and get my field looking like that, see. Now let's check and see, still damp which is good. This is great here, we don't want to fool around too much with this, the light is coming from here. I'll push that spring idea with a couple of strokes going across the field. There is a nice wedge there, see the wedge. Bring this over here. Nice. Soft in the edges. What I like about these sable brush is, is very gentle on the paper. But these are great also for just tapping out. Trees, very nice. I think a little pinch of, just a drop of the green there. It's like a poplar. Over here, I'm not sure if I want to touch anything there. I think I'll intensify the yellow here. I remember "Painting comes to mind by John Constable. He had this real bright strip color in the distance. He painted in England. We can't help but be influenced by people. More bright yellow in there, there we are. We can just force some really good yellow accents.I like this where originally we drew it with this color. Is it's still wet? Getting pretty dry. You'll see the ultramarine how it leaves. You can see the ultramarine up nice and close here, how it settles into the recesses of the paper. Almost have a moon effect here. Now, this here is going to be something I will deal with right now. The way I'm going to deal with it is first of all, look at my original drawing again and I may draw a few of these little scattered darks and electric telephone pole. I might put it in, I might leave it out. I think what I'll do is take a strong orange because it's sunset, and what I'm going to do is turn the paper upside down, and put a little white spot here and give it a little and then turn it up and see what that looks like. Let it dry. I'm partial to this orange. That's it. I don't want the values to get too close here. I think I'm going to do is I'm going to come in on this tree a little bit with a dark green, take a dark green in here. There we go and pop in a few. I'm looking at my other picture hear you see getting some ideas from there. Just giving sum little spots here, taking the end of the brush, breaking through the boundary here. There we go. Over here I see, oh that's wet, I don't want to touch that one I think it's wet there. We're okay there. I'm going to bang my little brush here, get a little texture there for the foreground. Just a little, stubble in the field here and there, break it up a little bit. Next is the road we moving now just a very indescript gray, which is a little bit of all the colors, checked it on here, that's about gray, and I'm going to dry brush like this. Actually you come from here. Just run it up gently like that, take a little bit of here, a little bit texture on the road, especially in the middle. That's where all the gravel goes, excellent, I like this, it's good. A little more in here. Almost looks like houses. To make that set up stand out, I'll need something right in the middle, rub around with wet brush, there. It's one big tree there. The last thing I'm going to do is take my brush and give it a nice shadow right across here. This is not dry yet, but I think it will be okay. I'm going to take some neutral gray, little red, little green, a little bit of everything that's up there. But keep it on the violet sign, light and take a look at the original sketch, and bringing these shadows next, because we have it over here. I hold my paper, and on an angle, bringing it in right over the road just. Could be more trees over here, you see. I'm going with, I like that, maybe one skinny one here, there. Little bit of a bump in this one because it is a road, there. I'm going for real nice dark in the corner here, you got that strong red green dark in the corner, and soften it up a bit, a little bit of blue in it, and tilt. Bring it up with that. Break it up a little, great. Okay, so then I just let that sit and let it dry.
Ron Mulvey✏️, Artist / Art Teacher
