Watercolor - Making your own paint from pigment

1. Welcome: [MUSIC] Hey, I'm Denise Love and I want to welcome you to class. Let me show you what we'll be doing. In this class, we are going to learn how to make our own watercolor paint using a pigment and some natural gum arabic, and some honey, and some glycerin. Then we're going to get them all mixed up into little paint panes to use from now on because once these dry, we can keep using them. I'm going to show you in this class how we make our paint, different options that you could use for pigment, suggestions on where you might look for pigment. Once we're done, we'll do a couple of little color samples with the pigment that we created just to see how fun and beautiful working with your own custom-made paints are, and then you can tell people that you made these paints, which I think is pretty exciting. Nothing is more fun than meeting an artist and knowing that they created the paint that they then have created their painting out of. I've been experimenting quite a bit myself. I have pigments that I got online, overseas and pigments that I got from local sources like the art store and you could go outside foraging for different pigments also, lots of options here. Super easy to make the paint itself. I hope you're going to enjoy how easy that is to make and then use. I can't wait to see what you're creating. Definitely come back and share with me some of your paints and then what you've created with them. I think that'll be super fun and I'm very excited to be here. I hope you enjoy this class and let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Supplies: Let's talk about supplies in this video. I've got a lot little general stuff and it's not too bad, but you need, first and foremost, some pigment. Whether that be pigment that you forged in your yard from a rock that you hammered into little pieces that you then pummeled into pigment with your mortar and pestle, or you purchased some at the art store, like I've got some art store pigments here, or online. I've got some natural pigments from Natural Earth Paint or some specialty pigments that are maybe super-special that you happened upon at an art store here or there, or online, or some that maybe you got from an artist. I've got all kinds of pigments here because I find pigments fascinating. You need some pigment and if you just want to get started with some easy pigment that's going to give you a win right off the bat, then I do like these Natural Earth Paint pigments. They're super smooth and they mix up really beautifully and it's a win every time I mix those up. Some of the artist pigments or pigments that I got at the art store. They may be a little thicker and I might need to grind them into a finer powder even than they come and so I do have my mortar and pestle here. You can get these on Amazon for about $35-40. You can find these in kitchen stores, they're used to grind down spices. I do love having it. I find it really handy when working with pigments. If I think the pigment is a little bit larger in size than I might love, like this yellow ocher has some large pigment in it, I might want to grind that down a little finer before making it into my paint. You will also need some Gum Arabic and Gum Arabic, I got this from Natural Earth Paints online. It's not very expensive and it is your watercolor binder. It's eco-friendly, it's nontoxic. I like using stuff from them because if you are allergic to a lot of paints or very sensitive to chemicals, making your own natural paint is so nice because then you can do things that you might have had to give up. Gum Arabic powder, we're going to be using that to make our watercolor base and this is what it looks like when we get it mixed up. It comes from a tree and it's really brittle. To combat that brittleness when we're making natural watercolor, we use a little bit of honey, which will add to the resilience of the paint and less likely to make it crack and it will also allow you to reconstitute the paint once it's dry and it's pan. Then a drop or two of glycerin will add some vibrancy to your paint and add a little bit more to the resilience of the paint also. I got the glycerin and the honey at the grocery store. I have some little half pans for watercolor and these I got off Amazon and you can Google search half pans or whole pans. Whole pans would be basically the size of two of these together. If you're mixing your paints today in the quantity that I was mixing them in, you can see that I have two or three of each color, so the quantities that I was mixing would make a whole pan and then a little tiny bit of a half pan if you've got the bigger pans. I got half pans and so I didn't want to waste any paint and I don't want to have to make paint again for a while because I get all this stuff out when I do it. Now I'm going to have all my colors that I want. Little half pans, you'll need those. If you do half pans, maybe at least two per color. If you do whole pans, then one per color. I found these adorable watercolor tins on Amazon. That's super fun if you get a tin that has blank pans in them. Then when you're done, it's really beautiful to close up your handmade paint. Also, to make the paint, have a piece of glass, a glass muller, and a palette knife. I have a little stick that I was using to stir up my Gum Arabic in the water and that's the supplies that I was using today. The muller and the glass piece I got from the Natural Earth Paint company also and it's really nice because you mix up your paint with the Gum Arabic, honey, and glycerin. Then the muller is what really binds all that together really smoothly and makes sure that every particle is wet with the different things you've mixed it with. Then when you scrape your paint off the glass, you end up with beautiful mixed professional grade type watercolor paint that's nice and saturated with color, so you're more than likely cannot get away with not having the glass and the muller because that's what really makes the paint smooth and beautiful. I was just playing in my art journal after we had mixed everything, testing out our different colors and stuff. After you're done mixing your paints, you might want to get into your art journal and just practice and see what you can get. Because I was doing some little test wipes and then some little abstract pieces after the fact, so a little bit of watercolor paper handy to test out what you've done would be fantastic. That is our supplies that we're going to be working with today. The main thing is I want to get you into seeing how much fun making your own paint is, and if you make enough of it, you won't have to make it super often. Then when this dries, you can keep on using it over and over. You can make custom colors. You can mix two pigments together, which I don't really talk about in class, but it is a suggestion that I have out there. If you want to make your own custom colors, this will be the time to do it and then get it all mixed up and put in your pan, how exciting would that be? This is pretty fun. I'm exploring different types of pigment and paint mixing myself and I really like doing it. It's easy. It's a little messy. I made all these in one morning, so it's not like it even takes a long time to do. The longest thing was just cleaning off my piece of glass in-between colors. I hope you're going to love trying out these techniques and I will see you in class. 3. Safety tips: [MUSIC] I wanted to talk about safety really quickly with you. We're dealing with powdered pigment and pieces of glass, and it's really best to keep safety in mind. When you're mixing the pigments, you don't want to breathe any of these in. No matter if it says they're toxic or not, you don't want to breathe the dust of these colored pigments in. You do want to wear a mask, a dust mask. These I got at the paint store. They're N95 masks that painters use to keep dust and particles when they're sanding sheet, rock and stuff. That's perfect. A mask like that it's going to block virtually all the particles from a colored pigment like this, and that's exactly what you want it to do. You don't want to be breathing any of these. You also want to make a practice of wearing gloves when you're working with pigments. I didn't do it during the videos of this class. Shame on me. [LAUGHTER] But pigments, especially if you get like the cadmiums and stuff like that, they are toxic. If you're working with particularly toxic pigment, make sure you're wearing gloves because you don't want them getting up under your nails and just stuck in the crevices of your fingers or any sores that maybe you've got on your finger. Wear some gloves. If you're working with the non-toxic materials, it's just a wise practice to continue wearing gloves every time you work with pigment. Then with the glass, if you ordered the glass and muller set like I did, where you have the piece of glass and the glass muller or that come together as a set, you just have to be careful because it is a piece of glass, there are edges on it, they're not super sharp. But I have noticed as I put this in and out of my sink or something to wash it, there are pieces that flake off and they could become sharp and you just want to be mindful. If you drop it, it might break. It's not a non breakable item. Working with glass, be careful that it could have some sharp spots on it. Working with the pigment, be careful and wear your mask and your gloves just as a safety practice. I hope you enjoy this class. Let's get started. [MUSIC] 4. Making Gum Arabic Solution: Let's make some Gum Arabic and I'll show you how easy this is to make. I'm going to make a tablespoons worth of the powder. One tablespoon of powder, four tablespoons of warm distilled water, and that's how we make the Gum Arabic. I'm just using an old pickle jars to store it in. Whatever I use today, that's great, and then if I need to save the rest of the liquid in there for say, tomorrow or a little bit later, I can put this in the refrigerator and save it. It doesn't save forever, but it saves long enough for you to get back to it or you decide if you're going to use anymore not. I'm going to do one tablespoon of the powder in there, and if you're wondering how far this goes, I made this much watercolor with the other jar that I had, and I thought how to watercolor 1, 2-30 half pans. I've got the powder in there. I want four tablespoons of the distilled water and I did have to get that from the grocery store. Let's get it as good as I can because my water out of the tap is not distilled. I'm going to add just a tiny bit because I wasn't adding full tablespoons the way that was coming out. Then I just take a coffee stirrer. This is a wooden coffee stirrer. I just mix that up until it's completely incorporated. It'll take you a minute or so to do that. If you're using warm water, it incorporates better, which is why you want to just heat that up a little bit. Then once you've got that mixed and you're ready to go and make some paint. Don't take too long, but you do want to make sure that you get everything incorporated and there's nothing on your stick when you pull your stick back out. You could use a spoon or whatever. But this is a coffee stirrer that I keep here in my art studio rather than going down to the kitchen to get something. I just want to make sure you get everything worked out of it. Then once you've got that nice and completely mixed and ready to go, I just go ahead and put my lid on it and save it till I'm ready to do what I want to do with it and then I use it to mix paint. Tablespoon of that to a tablespoon of pigment and a little honey and a little glycerin and you're set. That's how you make your Gum Arabic. I got this Gum Arabic from natural earth paints, which is the natural earthpaint.com. This is a natural paint binder, but you do add the honey and maybe the glycerin to it to make the paint a little more vibrant and to make it a little more flexible because that Gum Arabic is very brittle. If you use only that and put your paints in your little paint pens and they dry, they'll crack and they won't reconstitute as easy with water, the honey lets them reconstitute into usable paint again, when you add water to it. There we go. Make sure you've got it all mixed, nice and good. You can put your lid on it and you're ready to go. If you're not going to use that right away, go put that in the refrigerator and it'd be good for when you are ready. They don't separate once they're all mixed up and it will make about 30 half pans of paint. I have discovered using them at the ratio that I was using it. If you want to use it and have different colors in all 30 pans, try a half a teaspoon of the Gum Arabic and a half a teaspoon of the pigment. If you go any less than that, I'm afraid you might have pigment everywhere and not enough to pick up, but you can certainly just experiment and play there. That's mixing our Gum Arabic for water color paint. 5. Mixing & Saving your paints: Today I'm making some paint and I thought I would show you how I did that. I'm making watercolor paint and I've got a little tin over here of colors that I've already got started today. I got this fun little tin off Amazon and it came with 40 little half pans. This is a half pan for watercolor. You can also get little tins with full pans and the full pans would be double the size obviously. What I like about making your own paint is it's fun to experiment and tell people later, I made my own paint. But what I also like is then you have the opportunity to work with non-toxic materials and that's really a bonus when you're painting and doing things in your studio and you want to keep things a little more non-toxic. What I like about natural earth paint is they are natural and nontoxic. I like this watercolor, because I like doing watercolors anyway and I have lots of little pans from my favorite Daniel Smith and Cinnnillea. These little tins that we're making are about the same size, so as far as how long these will last, I can judge based on how long these watercolors have last, how long I might get out of some that I make, and they last a long time. We're using gum arabic powder as our binder. I've mixed up our gum arabic solution and I have that ready. I'm going to be making this color. What I like about these tins is they've got a pretty little top on them and then I can say here's my handmade palette, but they come with little magnets for the bottom of our pans. I like that because then I'll just stick in my paint palette here without a problem. I'm going to go ahead and write on the side of my little half pan what color I'm doing here. This is orange ocher. [LAUGHTER] Then I won't have to wonder later what that color was. You can order a little starter kit from Natural Paint. It's naturalpaint.com. Or you can be real careful that you don't have a hole in your bag. One of these had a hole in the bag and I went to shut it and pigment went everywhere. I was like oops. I know that I'm going to do a teaspoon of pigment to a teaspoon of gum arabic solution and I'm going to add a little bit of glycerin, which I got from the grocery store, and a little bit of honey, which I got from the grocery store. We add the glycerin and the honey to our solution to make it a bit more flexible and it adds some vibrancy to the color, the glycerin does. The honey makes it more flexible because gum arabic comes from a tree and it's really brittle. If you make your little watercolor pans and they crack later, then you know the next time you make paint to add a little more glycerin to that solution. I'm just adding a drop. If you add a drop, then next time, add a couple drops. The honey lets it stay flexible and reactivate when you add water to it. I'm going to add my one drop of glycerin. If I'm making a bigger quantity, then I can adjust those quantities appropriately. Then as far as honey goes, I want a nice sized dollop about the size of the edge of my palette knife or maybe just a tiny bit more. We'll put that in there and that we will mix when we start mixing. Then I'm going to do a teaspoon of gum arabic and I only have one teaspoon measure thing in this set, so using the half teaspoon, so I added two of those. But start off with one to one ratio, one teaspoon of powder to one teaspoon of gum arabic and adjust from there and you'll get a feel. You want these to be not super liquidy but not stiff. After you make a couple, you can get an idea for the consistency that you want. A few of these, the pigment themselves have a different viscosity and you may need to add a little bit more gum arabic to your solution if it's way too thick or a little more pigment to your solution if it's way too thin. That's about what I'm looking for I think. Just get it all mixed up. Now, these powders that we're using from Natural Earth Paint that I'm using are so finely ground that you could stop right there, but I don't usually do that because all the pigments are different. I'm trying to get it off the bottom of my palette knife too. All the pigments are different. I don't want it to be inconsistent. This is a glass palette that we're working on with a palette knife. I go ahead and use my glass muller. What this does is make sure that every single particle is coded and your mixture is now smooth and you can hear it grinding on the glass, on this one in particular. Let me hold my microphone closer to it. That sound is the dirt particles basically being ground and smoothed out with the muller. You can't have super thick particles making paint like this. If you're making your own paint by going out and foraging rocks, you're going to have to really grind those down, pulverize them to the point that they're really fine powder. Usually, you do that in one of these motors and tenon pedestal things. You would just grind and grind until it's a really fine powder. Just depending on what rock you're doing, it maybe soft or it may be hard, may take you longer. Some you may not be able to pulverize, but it's fun to experiment if you want to go out and forage your own rocks in your yard and try. I like buying powders from people that have already done that. Now I'm basically just gathering up the pigment and putting it into my pan. But forging for pigments is pretty cool if you're wanting to explore it and further. I am for this purpose using pigments that are already have gotten from a source. After making several of these, I know that one teaspoon to one teaspoon mixture that I did with the pigment to the gum arabic, depending on the color, will give me two to three-half pans, is how much paint I'm expecting out of this. If you want it all to be in one pan, you can get the full pans rather than the half pans, or you can mix a smaller quantity. But it dries a little bit on the palette if you're not working fast enough and I'm afraid if I mixed two smaller quantity, I won't have enough to fill a pan. I figured I'd rather just make two pans now and then I will have enough paint for quite a while and I won't have to do this again. Then I'm just going to set these in my little paint palette and clean off the side of that, then I'm just letting these dry overnight and then we'll be able to use these. I'm going to wash these off if I'm using these natural pigments. I wash these off in the sink because I'm using stuff that's not toxic. If I'm using pigment that's toxic, then I might go rinse these outside in my bucket of some rocks. I usually put together a bucket with some sand and maybe some rocks and I will dump paint water into that bucket. You have a hole in the bucket, two at the bottom, and it filters out the pigment from the water and lets the water seep out, and leaves the pigment in the bucket. Then when your solution's so filthy that it won't filter anymore, then you can throw that out because it'll all be dry. Just depending on what kind of paint and pigments you're using because you can get paints from the paint store. Gamblin makes pigment. You can get paint from artists that package up different paints to sell if they've been out forging. I've come across some wonderful Japanese pigments at an art store that I want to mix and make some of my own watercolors out of. You just got to be creative and looking. You can buy handmade watercolor paints. If you're making some of your own handmade watercolor paints, you can sell them on places like Etsy, super fun. I'm going to go wash these off, then I might mix up one more color and do that with you. I'll be right back. I've got everything cleaned off and this is natural earth paint also, but it's a small quantity I'd gotten from an artist. This is indigo, and this is a different color than some of the ones that I got in a fun little starter kit. I'm just measuring out my one teaspoon of powder. That was a little bit extra. We'll take it. If you get these little vials that are like two inches big, looks like it holds about three teaspoons of powder. Just put a little, dip in there. We're going to add one drop of glycerin, which I get from the grocery store. We're going to put in, and that adds to the vibrancy and the longevity of the paint. I'm going to add a nice dollop of honey, which adds to the flexibility of the paint and makes it so that it is less likely to crack on your overhear in the palettes. I just got to turn it bit more and letting you rewet the paint when you come back and you want to dry. That let's you rewet it. This is my gum arabic solution. Again, I'm just going to go ahead and put one teaspoon of the gum arabic in here. The gum arabic that I show you on the video how to mix these, that solution goes pretty far. I mean, in just the one container that I've mixed, I've mixed all of this paint plus this paint, plus we still have a couple more colors that we can mix. It does go further than you think. Don't mix up giant quantities of paint. You want to mix up what you can use and then always mix a little more if you need it, but you don't want to mix as much as you possibly can right up front because you might just waste it. What's nice about the gum arabic too if you do have some leftover and you want to come back and make paint later. You can refrigerate that and it will stay good in the refrigerator for a while. I don't want to mix my whole packet of gum arabic powder because I know that I'm not making that much paint, and after I make all the colors that I currently have, I may not pull this out again until I get new pigments or I've used up something here on my palette. Some of these mix-up are super-fast and some of them take a little bit longer to really get that liquid to incorporate. This powder again is so fine that you might decide, "I'm going to leave it at that.'' I'm going to go ahead with my mealer. Basically, you're taken this in circles like a figure eight or some circles to grind that pigment in that liquid all in together. It really incorporates it, makes it a lot smoother. The longer you do this, you don't want to too long. You want to be pretty quick about it, but the longer you do this, the more smooth your paint gets. This indigo though, is going to be a little grainy or pink than some of these others, very interesting to see how these pigments react. This is a granier pigment. I mean, it's still ground up really fine. It's not like it's ground up any less than the others. It's definitely a granier pigment than some of these others. It'd be interesting when we paint to see how that graininess is different than say a smoother one that we did. This is indigo. Needed to write on these before I mixed it, but that's okay. Let's pull all this in. This is a pretty color though. It's almost like that pretty paints gray. It's real similar to that or maybe like the darkest blue jeans that you own. I'm going ahead and put more magnet on the bottom of two of these, because I know I'm going to get at least two pans, possibly another half a pan. Take my little Sharpie, that was indigo and write that right on the side. You want to do that before you put the paint it in or you'll have to wait till tomorrow to do it. Then I'm just going to scoop paint into my little vat, trying to be careful not to get it all over the place, but I'm not being very successful on this one. Getting it all over the outside. [LAUGHTER] Which I don't want to do that. I want it to be a little cleaner on the outside. Let me just dry, but I'd rather not have paint all over the place. I got a little paper towel. They are just to get up the extra on my fingers. Then you don't want to let this sit too long on this glass palettes, so definitely don't walk away from it. Then we're going to set that in there, let it dry and I have another little mat ready. Again, these make at least two vats with this quantity. Then just depending on how fast you use a watercolor as to how long that's going to last you but they're going to last forever. Clean off the sides of that. I don't want to waste this, I do have more paint here. I'll probably have another half of that. Another whole vat. This one made three. It does make 2-3 just depending on the pigment, what you end up getting out of these. Then set that right there, ready to clean everything off. I hope you enjoy it giving this a try. Experimenting with making some of your own paints because I'm going to have some fun trying these out tomorrow when I let these dry a little bit and seeing what I can get painting with them. I'll see you back in class. 6. Saving your wet paint in containers: [MUSIC] Got an idea for you and I just want to show it to you. If you're mixing your watercolor paints and you need them to stay wet for any reason, you can put the wet watercolor into a paint pot instead of into the little pot where they dry. This will allow them to stay wet quite a bit longer because they close and seal and then you don't have air getting into them. If you like working with the wet watercolor and you need the watercolor to stay wet, this is the easiest way to do that. Now, the only drawback to keeping the watercolor wet that I can see is that it could eventually mold. This is only going to keep it probably for several weeks. But if you get to the point where your watercolor formula is molding, then when you're mixing your paints up, you can add a drop or two of clove oil to your watercolor mixture and that will help prevent the mold. Just a little fun thing to think about if you want to try little paint pots instead of the little half pans that we were creating. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 7. Abstract test paintings: [MUSIC] I've mixed up more paints and these are not all completely dry, there's still some wet, but I can't wait to dig into them. I need some more little paint pen so that I can continue making some of these colors. I just want to play a little bit and see what these look like on my pad. This is my art journal but maybe dipping it straight down in and dipping it in some water. I just want to see what some of these colors look like. I'm basically the prettiest artist palette I've ever found. [LAUGHTER] I got that from an artist on Etsy that has started making paint palettes. These are the Japanese pigments. This orange is some of the earth pigments. This turquoise is one of the earth pigments. Just giving them each a little world to see what is this color going to do. What does it look like? How thicker transparent is it? This is a Japanese pigment, will look at that. What color does it really make when we come out here and use a few of these? That's pretty. What I want to do to play with these is maybe do a couple of little abstract paintings here in my sketchbook [LAUGHTER], and just see what are we going to get. I'll see now that color isn't nearly as saturated as I thought it would be. That's very interesting. Because it looks all dark and deep. I love that yellow ocher. I actually do love these two right here. Those are such pretty colors. I got one or two more in here. Let's just see real quick what they, that's a green, that's like an emerald green, that's a Japanese pigment. Get out and experiment with different pigments. Try these earth pigments. This is an earth pigment. Go out into your yard and find a few. Order pigments off of Etsy or eBay or online art stores or look and see what you've got in your local art store, there's pigments there too. Look how pretty all these are. That's a really fun experiment to come in here and paint in your book and just see what you can get. Maybe what I will do is set those to the side, let them dry and maybe play in my art journal for a moment. I'm going to do a couple of little abstracts and just play and see what we can get. Because I've got those little abstract classes that are so fun. This can be one of those samplers like an abstract, like a little sampler that I'll talk about in that abstract samplers class because I want to see how these play together. I'm just painting some color, not being super specific, but I just want to lay some pigment down. Then I want to let that dry. I don't necessarily want them to all blend in together. They are doing a little blending, but not as much as some of my other watercolors have done. These dry a little quicker, it almost seems like. It's got a really nice texture to the paint itself. Look how pretty that is. I want to put in a few green droplets. Let's see if we can get this too do some color splatter. That's so pretty. My goodness, I'll go in with my mechanical pencil and do some little mark-making. [NOISE] Look how pretty that is. You could wait till it's dry, do mark-making. But sometimes I like to go ahead and just start playing and see if I move any paint around. Especially when you're doing big lines, can we move any paint around a little bit? Maybe a little scribble over here. Look how pretty that is. This is the way I like to test colors doing these little abstracts because they're so fast and they're so easy, doesn't take long to dry. Let's do one in our other. Now that those are pretty dry, I don't mind if they get on the back of that page, but [LAUGHTER] new favorite, I love the blue and green. [LAUGHTER] Let's see. Should we? Let's do. That's a bright Kelly green almost. Let's see. Let's try this. What color is that? That's the deep one. This is the indigo. That is an indigo, was very grainy, I remember that when we were mixing that. Let's just try. See, that one is so grainy. It's very interesting, look how grainy that is. That green, I do like that because sometimes I sprinkle pigment onto stuff and think adding extra texture and stuff. I like it for the texture in something like this. I don't like it if I needed some smooth blue, it's almost too grainy, and I should have probably put it in my mortise and pedestal thing. That's what that's called, mortise thing and I'm actually grounded up more than it already was, when I realized how grainy it was when we were using it. Let's mix it in. Let's see what this crazy. This is another earth pigment and it's a bright green almost. But let's go ahead and work some of that in. Let's just try it out. I love doing the color samplers for color tests and stuff like this. That picked up a little bit of the green in the blue, picked up some of those little pigment pieces. Sounds very interesting. Even though I was doing like little color samples like this and test out my colors, I do like to then just create a little piece of art out of it, [LAUGHTER] so when I start flipping through my book, I see pretty little abstracts with color tests that I did. I just love that. See. It's still pretty, it's very grainy. I probably should have worked some of that pigment in better, but an excellent test of that. Let's see if this other one is dry and test out some other colors. Just going to pick up a little bit of water that I saw. Look how pretty that still is. The finer the pigment, the finer that watercolor really ends up being. I'm just going to put that over there gently. Let's see what we got here with these oranges. This is a natural earth pigment color, look at that. See now that one was ground up nice and fine. The indigo that I used was a color I got from an artist and it was a natural earth pigment. But I really think I did not mix it long enough, so get all that pigment mixed in. That's an excellent way to test that and figure it out, is to come back and then play in your art journal and test your colors out because you don't want to start painting a piece that really matters and discover after the fact that it wasn't quite what you were hoping. I like this ocher and that orange were fantastic. Super fun, look with that. That color is due and right here it's a little bit of extra wet. Look what that's making, super pretty. That's fun and I could come back with some speckle, kept pretty that one. That's still going to be. I'm just a blue and green person. Let's just do one more. I'll be real gentle here. Opening this, because there's still some colors over here. Let's see what we got. I don't remember if I dipped into this color or not. That's like burnt umber. Let's do the burnt umber, and this color that's more orange. That might be like a raw sienna. Only see what I wrote on the side. That's why I write on the side of these. [LAUGHTER] That is orange ocher. I like orange ocher. I like yellow ocher too. I like anything in the ocher families. Those mixed up really pretty too. Love that. Real pretty. I might come back. We could do some little orange splatter. Then look at that. Such pretty colors. That was super fun, experimenting and playing in our brand new watercolors that we just created. I hope that you'll have some fun creating some of your own colors, whether that be the natural earth colors or some pigment you got from the art store or some pigment you found online because you can look on Etsy and find all yummy paint pigments available. Then just see what you can come up with. This is super fun. Then once you make some colors, test them out in your little art journal and see how they're going to work for you, what the opacity is, if you're really going to love the colors, do some little color swatching like I did. I did color swatching a couple of times. I did it in this book. Then I was playing and I came over here, and then I did it in this book too. Just color swatching and playing in the different colors that I created today. I've got quite a few more colors that I'm looking forward to making when I get some more little paint pens, but I can't tell you how satisfying it is to create some colors and then create a little bit of art from the colors that you just created with your own two hands. Seriously, how much fun is that? I hope you enjoy playing and making your own paints and I will see you back in class. [MUSIC] 8. Grinding pigment: I'm mixing up one of these Japanese pigments that I had gotten. This pigment is really not completely finished. Like you can see great big pieces in there. I thought I would just show you how I use my little mortise and pedestal here just to grind that down to a much finer powder before I try mixing it into a watercolor. This is pretty soft pigment to this is not like a rock. With a rock you would really be down in there really heavy and good. But I'm just trying to make this much more fine. The fun thing about pigments that come with different sizes like this, you can make your own thickness, your own preference of how fine you want that pigment. That's pretty fine there. I'm just going to take a soft paintbrush and use that to get some of this pigment off of here and see how fine do we have it. I didn't put quite a teaspoon in here so I might add tiny bit more pigment because I feel like when I get this out of here, a lot of the pigment's going to be stuck to the container until I wash it out because this has got rough surfaces on it. The pigment does get down into those rough surfaces. It's rough surfaces that let you grind on it like this. Let's just see what we've got here. I might need a rougher brush. I'm using a brush that's pretty soft. But I bet if I use a different brush here, I can get those out of those grooves a bit better. Let's just go with a nice stiff brush. You can see I have pigment flying in the air here so I do have a dust mask on. If you're working with loose pigments like this and you're going to be grinding on them and working with them they'll be flying in the air in any way, put a mask on. You can see I'm just working that pigment out of some of these grooves. I'm going to work that right onto my little palette here. Then we'll call that roughly a teaspoon of powder when we're done because I measured it out pretty good. I did add one more piece of pigment there while we were filming, but I measured it out and it was roughly a teaspoon. I'm still just working that pigment out of my marble bowl here because I don't want to leave all that pigment behind on there and I don't want to have to clean it out because I dropped my bowl. The bowl's heavy. Just see, I'm working that back out of the crevasses and grooves as much as I can. You don't want to waste your pigment. A whole lot gets stuck in there, look at all that. Then you'll finally get to the point where you're like, oh, okay, I think I got most of it now. You don't want to leave all your little pigment behind so don't leave it all in there. Keep working until you feel like you've gotten most of it. That's pretty. I'm pretty **** good. Now I'm going to come in and we're going to make this color. It may have made little more than a teaspoon now that we're looking at it. I might see, here's a teaspoon and then all of this, I might put back in the container and save so I don't have to waste all this powder. I like having this powder for later. Look how much that made. Even though I measured out a teaspoon of pigment, the powder really has air and stuff in it too. It did go a lot further than what I had measured out and I don't want to waste it. If you end up with a lot of extra pigment and you don't want to waste it. I get these fun little glass jars off of Amazon and I can just save my extra pigment in there. Now I'm ready with my teaspoon of pigment, my drop of glycerin, going to mix this the same way. A dollop of honey that's about the size of honey drop that I would get off of the end of my little palette knife. Then I want to go back to my Gum Arabic and I'm going to have to make some more of this pretty soon. A teaspoon of Gum Arabic to a teaspoon of my powder. Then if it's too thin, I can always add more powder and if it's too thick, I can always add more Gum Arabic. Look at how yummy this color is. Oh, my goodness. It is very liquidy so I might just come back in and add some more powder from my little tube I just made. You do want it liquidy but not super, super, super runny, runny. This is still pretty runny though. The more pigment that you add, the more, sorry, I was thinking there. Let me get my glass muller, but the more saturated it'll be, more pigment you've got in there. This is like a dream, doing it with the muller compared to some of the pigments. It's just so yummy and smooth here. Now we're ready to put this yummy moss green. This doesn't have a color on the side, I'm sure it does, and if it does, it's in Japanese so I'm not sure what it says. But there is a number on here, 54, that I could put on the side of my vat and then I would know Japanese 54 would tell me which pigment I used. I might just write J54 on there and I'll know where I got that color when I want to make some more. Could've had more pigment in that it is still very liquidy, but I think that's going to make a really nice watercolor. This is right up my alley color-wise like for reals. Look how pretty that is. Oh, my goodness. There's a darker green. I like the dark greens, pinks, and light green altogether in some of my stuff. I like indigo, so I might experiment with those colors tomorrow and when I get to try these out paint-wise. Look, how beautiful. Then there's still enough pigment on here. I don't want to waste it, but it looks like that's going to make about two vats and then I could start a third vat just at the very bottom and use that third vat first and get rid of it so that we didn't waste any. Because if you get some of these, I want to call them exotic pigments because they're not local to me, they're harder to get. They come from overseas. I got this from an art shop in London. You don't want to waste one tiny bit of it. It's not like something you could get at the local art store and you don't mind if you waste some. Yummy. That was super fun. Hope you liked seeing just a little bit of how we would use our little pedestal there to grind up some pigment and using a brush to then scrape the pigment out of there. I do like the stiffer brush to do that because this is got a lot of texture to it. Then I will go wash these off and keep on making some paint. 9. Trouble shooting: I thought I would do a couple of follow-up videos looking at the paint the day after we made it, and then I will do this again in about a week and then just see what's going on, and troubleshoot a couple of things. When you're mixing the paint and stuff, when it starts to dry, the water evaporates out of the paint and it starts to shrink a little bit. You can see here, these are one day dry and there are several things that we've got going on. Troubleshooting-wise, if you have any that might cracks, that just means that we could have used a little more glycerin and kept that a little moisture as it was drying into a pan or into a cake. I could have used a couple more drops of glycerin there, maybe even a tad more honey. What's interesting about the different ways that paint dries, if you're going to make a habit of creating your own paint and stuff, you might take note of your favorite colors and how they reacted, and tweak your formulas for the next time that you create the paint. They all dry a little different. Like some of these are drying and really shrinking up pretty good. Some of these are drying and cracking a little. Those will want to add a little extra glycerin or honey to our next formula. One of these were too thick. This one was too thick and it cracked a little bit, so in that case, I should have added definitely a little more glycerin, but I should have added more of our Gum Arabic to begin with so that it wasn't so thick to start with. These are the natural earth pigment ones that seemed to crack a little. The natural ones may take a little more glycerin in there than the other pigments that I was using. You want to make notes as you're going. Another thing, this is about 24 hours after I made these, and these aren't completely dry. It's going to take different lengths of time for different baths of paint to dry, and they'll shrink at different amounts. It's just very interesting to see how those different amounts are. You might go ahead and start keeping a journal of the different colors. The paint that you used, the formula that you used, and make notes and how much did it shrink and just see what tweaks do you need to do next time or did you love it when you were painting? I was going to come back and paint with these today just to see at one day and one week in three weeks and on down the line how they held up as paints that we re-incorporate with water. Just a couple of different things to think of troubleshooting-wise, you know what's going to shrink, that's normal. If you've got cracks, then just tweak your formula a little bit. If it's too thick, add a little more Gum Arabic in the beginning. If it's too thin, we needed a little more pigment starting off in the beginning so that it would be thicker. All just things to troubleshoot. Then I recommend you keeping a paint journal with notes on how each of your formulas worked out in any tweaks that you might want to do the next time. Little troubleshooting in this video, and then in the next videos, I'll just play with the paint at different time intervals and see how they perform. I'll see you back in class. 10. 1 day after making paint test: [MUSIC] We're one day out from our paint. I think what I'm going to do, these are not all completely dry, but I do want to play and test at one day out, how the paint is holding up that we mixed and just re-incorporate some of these with a little bit of water. I think I'm just going to do another one of these really pretty blue-green abstracts just to play, and experiment, and test out our new paint, whether it's completely dry or not, and see what we get. The blue and the green are what I'm going for. They're not 100 percent dry, they are still slightly wet, so that's definitely going to take several days to completely dry in their little [inaudible] . But that's okay. It's interesting to note. But look at that. That's really pretty. If I go ahead, and I may not have laid the color the exact same way I did the first one, but I might go ahead and make a pretty abstract out of that just so that the next time I look in here, I enjoy the little pieces of art that I created. But just know that in the beginning, my pretty little art book abstracts were tests, and color samples, and looking at what the paint did and then I just want to make them into pretty little paintings to flip through later. Just think it's a little fun, additional thing to do. Pretty. One day after the paint is going, I really love that, so I think that one turned out really good. I'm going to grab my other book and experiment with one or two of these other, the earth paints. I love that one, turned out good. Because they have dried differently. Let's play with this one. Let's see what color that is. This is the earth paint. Did I not write? Here we go. Burnt sienna and it's got some cracks in it. It did dry, actually quite a bit faster and it shrink less than these Japanese pigments that I was playing with. There's still a good amount of pigment. It is a completely different look than the other pigment that I had there. Let's go ahead with this burnt umber. Some of it, it doesn't really matter if the paint cracks, but it's just better if it's a little more flexible because you're going to re-incorporate water on those when you use it, so it's not a huge deal. But for prettiness wise, let's use this yellow ocher. I know this is a combo that we used yesterday and it has a little crack in it. I could have used a little more of the glycerin in that a couple of drops probably. A lot of times when the watercolors dry, if you'll spray some water on your palette before you even start painting, like just take a little spray. One of these things [LAUGHTER] and mist the whole pallet. You'll get them activated before you start painting, so when you go to start painting, you'll pick up more pigment right off the bat. Let's just see what we've got going on here now that I've let this other one dry quite a bit. These are a little more water coloury to me. The earth pigment's like that's a lot less vibrant. These other paint pigments like if I'd used, say, even like this Gamblin or the yellow ocher, these pigments that are real concentrated, they seem to be a little more saturated to me than earth pigments. Earth pigments seem to be a little more desaturated and a little more natural. It fits in then those paints would be a little softer, a little abstract out of this so as it drys, we can look at how it finishes off. Now we're drier [LAUGHTER]. Look how pretty that came out. For the one day after experiment, it's very interesting to look at the way that our paint dried versus whatever natural pigment does versus paint pigment like from the art store or something. It's very interesting. The difference that those look like and seeing how much each pigment shrunk. I really like seeing those differences and just reincorporating them to see are we still getting the same color as we got yesterday when they were still wet and so far so good. Here's our one day after experiment to see what we've got. Then I'll come back in about a week and do it again and just see how different it turns out. [MUSIC] 11. 1 week after making paint test: [MUSIC] In this video, I'm about a week after we made our original set. They have shrunk pretty good, but they are still super pigmented, and there are some pieces that are cracked, so I would definitely tweak that formula going forward. But I want to just test these out, let me just activate some of these and then we'll get to the water part. They'll paint on easily. But I want to still have more recipes available to me than just one, but I guess out of the two, if I were making a bunch of paints going forward, I'd probably use the alternative recipe first unless I was wanting some really highly pigmented paint with less filler. But I do like both ways. Oh, see, and it's just as yummy painting it on today as we were that first day. So pretty. Really, hardly any of these wouldn't work even if you tweaked up your paint recipe quite a bit and did some of your own measurements. I like playing with things and tweaking them and just seeing how we're going with the different things that we're doing. I do love this blue-green. Definitely a favorite color combination for me. Very pretty. Anyway, my point is, experiment with your paints and your recipes and just see what you're going to get. Let's use one of these earth pigments here. You know what? I don't think that's the earth pigment, that's that kind of terracotta color. This pretty greenish color. I think that's that one. Let's see. I can see on the side. Yeah, that's that one. Let's use one of these earth colors over here, maybe this green one because, just to show you, even though it's dry and cracked, once we moisten that back up, we'll still get pretty color out of it. It's going to be very light color because this one here was a very light color to begin with. Let's go in with, maybe this one down here. So you will get a good amount of color in there. We'll just let that water really saturate that and then see, do we get quite a bit more pigment saturation, letting that water sit in there. So that's real pretty too. Maybe we should try this indigo one because that's the one that really gave us a lot of issue. Oh, see now it regenerates quite nicely. So we've still got lots of color and pigment coming out of those as we reconstitute them with water. Still really nice collection here of paint colors. I do think I like my second recipe better where I've got a little bit heavier quantity of the gum arabic in there, more glycerin, and more honey. But I like this for just having less filler and saturation of color of that. All right, so this is one week after, just kind of playing. Set 1. I encourage you to make some paints with several different recipes and then experiment like where do, and then just seeing what do you end up liking? None of the paint is going to be bad and according to the Natural Earth paints website, if you're wondering, how long are these good for, they say indefinitely and so it really should act like any tube of watercolor that you have or a pan of watercolor that you have. You should, five years from now, be able to come back, re-add some water to it and it will soften back up so that you can paint with it. That's what I really like about watercolor. With acrylic paint, they dry pretty quick unless you get them into a container that's sealed really good and oil paints too, they're eventually going to dry until you get them into a tube of paint. But these, you're okay with them drying and you just add water and it makes it good again to start painting with and I really love that aspect about watercolor, especially ones that are highly pigmented and almost could go for any type of application with the vibrance of the color. I really love that. here we are week after with set 1. We'll come back and play with set 2 in a couple of days when we've got a week after that, so I will see you in class. [MUSIC] 12. 3 week after making paint test: [MUSIC] I've let our first collection sit for a couple of weeks now, and you can definitely tell which colors are going to shrink more than others. The natural earth pigments shrink a little less than a lot of the paint pigment ones that I used, which is very interesting to see how that works and I can see the ones that cracked, and so I know what to expect now. Just so you know if you get some of these looks in your paints, that is completely normal, that's what you're going to get with different pigments. You can tweak that recipe a little bit as you're going for a little more glycerin for the cracks to make them a little more flexible, maybe a little more honey. If it's a little harder to re-wet and reactivate that paint, we could add some more honey the next time. That's what's really going to make that good and flexible for us. I just reworded that with some water so that we could see that just activated right on up to beautiful, brilliant color. Lots of pigment. Right up to what we did that very first day. Look how pretty that is. Definitely happy with the color that we've got coming out of here. Let's try some of this ocher. See how pretty that is. Let's try some of this brownish, sienna color. Very pretty. Maybe we'll come back with some touches of. So pretty. You can see how pretty our color pigment is going to stay. I left it a couple of weeks for a reason just so that you can see that over time, these are going to reactivate quite easily with just water. This was the very first set we did. It was the very heavy, pigmented set, the set that I use less fillers in, and those are absolutely beautiful. I'm very happy with our three-week test. These are ones that I'm just going to keep on using until I use up, and then you can make another set once you've used these paints, but these are going to keep going for quite a while for the amount that I paint. It really depends on how much you paint as to how fast you're going to use your paints up. I hope you enjoyed seeing the different weekly tests for this first set, and then I'll have those for that second set too. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 13. Making Gum Arabic Alt Recipe: [MUSIC] Today I thought it would be fun to do an alternative recipe for mixing our paints. Our first set that we made it's been drying now for two days. It still with the colored pigment, especially maybe even just a tiny bit wet still and there's quite a bit of shrinkage. That's fine for what we've done because this is going to be super highly pigmented paint when I paint with it. Sometimes that's what I want, super high amount of pigment. If all of that had shrunk down while it was still wet, I could have put all that paint in one pan. So it's like one pan worth of paint. Depending on what pigment that I used from the natural Earth things, they shrunk little different rates, but they're super highly pigmented when we paint with them, which I really like. There is a reason why I've used that recipe before and I like it. Today, we're going to use a different recipe. This one comes from the Natural Paint website. They do a cup of hot water. It doesn't have to be distilled. They've used regular hot water. The reason why I use distilled in that first set is because it doesn't have all the fillers and the chlorine and the different chemicals that come in our water. It's got a lot less stuff in it. But the recipe on the natural Earth paint site uses hot water. I thought it'd be fun to experiment using their recipe, but maybe a smaller quantity. I'm going to be using just hot water. I'm going to do eight tablespoons of hot water in my little jar. Of course, I was talking the whole time I did that. I think that was three, but I'm not sure so let me do this, 1,2,3. We're going to do eight tablespoons because their recipe is a two-to-one mix, which means one part [NOISE] gum Arabic, two parts of water. They just wipe this off. Here's our gum Arabic. Right off the bat, because I used eight tablespoons of gum Arabic, I'm going to use four tablespoons of the powder. [NOISE]. That water was hot water. I had the hot water on coming out of the tap. Now you'll immediately notice that I did tablespoons and not teaspoons because this time I want to make a little bit larger quantity. I'm stirred up some, but we're also going to add a tablespoon of glycerin. I'm going to go ahead and just get that out and you can see way more than I did that first time. That first set was more of a super heavy pigmented yummy paint. This one's got way more filler and in my mind, I do believe it will shrink quite a bit less. Just fun to experiment with different recipes and then when we test the paint out, we can see if there's any differences and what recipe that we like better. I like trying out way more than just one way to do things. You can play with this recipe too. It also has a tablespoon of honey. I'm going to go ahead in our little mixture. You notice too that I mixed a lot of the stuff on the watercolor paint in the recipe on the natural Earth paint site. They mixed everything in beforehand, which I found fascinating. We're going to add about a tablespoon of honey. I thought we're just going to do that and mix it all up front. I might not get all the honey out of our spoon here, but we'll try. I like that it's all up front and we're not guessing each time. That's a nice. It's all mixed in and incorporated already. [NOISE] Then you just want to stir until it's all in already or you can't scrape any off the bottom anymore and it's completely mixed. The reason why I'm mixed, I might've started saying this and then forgot the reason why I'm mixed a little bit larger quantity is because I've got new paint tin that came with all my extra little paint pans. I want to be able to mix more colors maybe. I want to make this once and use it as much as I can. [NOISE] When I was telling you what the mixing of the paint itself, we're going to vary our gum Arabic depending on the pigment. You might use one teaspoon to one teaspoon pigment to gum Arabic. We might use one teaspoon of pigment to 1-2 teaspoons of the gum Arabic. Just because, especially with the Earth paints, they have a different viscosity than the powdered pigments that I have. They really needed that heavier solution of liquid, whereas the pigments needed that lighter solution of pigment. That's why we got that really heavy thick look in that little bit of cracking. But again, if you're looking for more pigment, highly saturated colors, that first recipe is a great one. We're all mixed up and this is the recipe that we're going to be using for our alternative paint mixture. I'm going to see you in the next video and we'll make some paints. [MUSIC] 14. Mixing Paints Alternate Recipe: Hi, let's make some paint with our alternative gum arabic mixture. I like yellow ocher. I've got my teaspoon here. I don't mind that there's a little pigment left on the teaspoon from the other color. It's not going to transfer to this since I wiped most of it off. I did one teaspoon of yellow ocher and this is the natural earth paints, so it's the one that's a little grainier than the pigment. Then because my teaspoon has pigment on, and I'm going to use my half a teaspoon to spoon out color. I already know the yellow ocher was a little bit thicker, but let's just start off with one teaspoon of yellow ocher to one teaspoon of the pigment and see what we've got. One teaspoon of the gum arabic. When I'm thinking and I'm talking at the same time, sometimes it doesn't work. As I'm mixing this, I want it to be a little more liquidy, not so thick. I'm going to judge, after I get some of this color incorporated, is it liquidy enough or do I need to add another little bit of the gum arabic? I suspect now that we have a gum arabic mixture with a lot more filler in it with that gum arabic filler and the little more honey and a little more glycerin, I really do suspect that we'll have less shrinkage out of this set. We're going to experiment together. I like doing stuff like this. And when I do classes where I'm teaching stuff like this, I really like seeing different ways to do things and experimenting and it pushes me outside my own comfort zone. I've used that first recipe many times. I actually like how liquidity that is. We're going to go ahead with our glass muller and incorporate that in. You're just going around in circles and maybe a figure 8, and they get stuck somewhere, you know it's got some pigment it's sitting on. Let's go ahead and scrape some of this off of our muller, so we're not wasting that. Going to go ahead and scrape this paint up, put that in our little containers. I can't wait to come back and look at this tomorrow to see what shrinkage we got started, and to do our little test paintings one day after. You can do the test painting is wet. Though wet the same day like I initially did because I was too excited to start playing. But then we can see, what are these due on the day after? Again, I've got my sharpie. On this one, yellow ocher on the side. On the side over here, I'm going to call this number 2 because we're using that formula number 2. It will just start sliding in some of that paint right on in there. I'm still expecting some shrinkage, but I don't think it's going to shrink to the point that our first set did just because we have way more filler in this. That filler, I think is going to prevent quite a bit of that shrinking. When it's solid pigment, I expected the shrinking. But this is more filler in this little concoction. I think we'll have less shrinkage and we'll still have a beautiful paint to paint with. All right, so there is our yellow ocher. I could probably scrape this hard and get more out of it. Maybe a little another half of tin like we were doing on few of those other ones. But today, I think I'm going to stop at the two, wash off my paint palette and go make some more colors. I thought I'd mix one more color with you and then I'll go to mixing all of these myself. But this is that indigo and this is the one in that first set, was very grainy and did not soak in the way I had expected it to. I'm going to start this one off with this new solution. I may have to add some more gum arabic to it. This is an actual earth paint too, so it's not just the pigment from the art store. The pigment pieces are larger, so I might have taken them into my little mortar and pestle and grounded up a little bit. Well, let's just mix and see, it is harder to mix. I remember that the first time with that first set too, it just doesn't seem to want to incorporate in the liquid, quite like the other colors. It seems to be resisting. Even in the watery part, it's very grainy. Because these are natural earth pigments, they've actually gone and gotten pieces of rock and dirt and things like that and ground them up into fine pigment. This is just going to be a property of this natural earth stuff. I'm not sure if I'm going to add any more of this gum arabic to this or not because it does seem pretty nice and liquidy today. But a super-duper grainy, I can feel all that grain. Even with a thicker watercolor binder, we still might be super grainy. But I want to see, I just want to experiment. I love experimenting with the different elements and things in my classes, pushes me to do other things and to try other ways. See, super grainy, even when we're doing the muller on top of it. I can just see all the grain in there. This one may be super grainy even when we're done, but I'm going to work at a little more with the glass muller. The only reason why I'm showing you this because I want you to see something that's a little harder versus the real easy. Then just know that some of these little bumps in the road that you run into are natural. I keep on just adjusting your expectations and the way that you might make something in the pigment that you might choose to use based on what your experience was when you did this. Now this is so grainy that I think that's all I'm going to get out of this, unlike next time I might go ahead and try to squish it some more in my muller. This is so grainy I can see it probably even scratches the glass that we're rubbing it on. When I wash this glass, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see scratches. I can see a scratch right there. You can tell that whatever it was that they created this indigo from is just sharp, grainy, and it's going to be a grainy or watercolor. Now I'm going to write the color on the side of this. Put my number 2 over here. Let me get my second one. number 2. My handwriting was so sloppy on this one, I might not remember what that actually says. All right. This one in here. Tomorrow we'll just test these out and see what we got. I'm going to keep on mixing paint till I've got a full paint pen, and I'll see you back in class. 15. Abstract Test Paintings Alt Set: All right, so I've been mixing paints all morning and now I have a new little vat of colors to experiment with our alternative gum Arabic solution and some of these are the earth paints and some of these are the colored paint pigments that I have. It'd be really fun to see after one day how they compare to the other recipe as far as shrinkage. I've theorized that they're not going to have as much shrinkage. It should still shrink, but I'm thinking not as much because we've got that extra filler in there. But I want to see paint-wise, I just want to play today with them while they're still wet, just like I did that original set, and see how they compare and we'll just see what we've got. This is that yummy orange. It's a Japanese pigment, but it's a yummy orange like a cadmium orange if you're in the paint store looking at stuff. I like pink and orange and so I thought, let's just play here in the pink and orange for a second and do our little color sample test here with some final abstract work. That's fun. Then I've got this yummy darker red, which is also one of these Japanese pigments. It's this really vivid maroony pink color. You can play with like Gamblin pigments from the art store. Though you don't have to play with special pigments like I've got, but I've found them in an online art store and I got so excited and how pretty they were. That really makes me happy to be able to now mix them and use them and just play here for a second in our little art journal and see what they're going to do for us. Look how pretty that is. Let's take our little pencil and finish off our little abstract. Then I'll let this dry. Look how pretty those colors are. Those going to be real pretty when they dry. I like this paint mixture with it all mixed in and we didn't have to add the honey and glycerin after the fact. I really liked that. Let's play with this indigo because remember on that first set, the indigo was very grainy. Let's just see if this worked in a little better today. It's still actually very, very grainy. That might be a color that we never ever get to fully incorporate it looks like. That's a real light color. That one right there as well. They're all wet, but it's one of the earth tones and the darker green. Let's see if I can move some of these and tell you what this is. Terre verte. That is terre verte, which is one of those earth pigments, so it should, should dry different and act different than our paint pigment ones just from yesterday's experiments, I find that the natural ones here are not as vivid as these Japanese pigments. Look at that, that Japanese pigment is nice and saturated, which you could get that same saturation out of like the Gamblin, like this one that I have here is chromium oxide. Those pigment jars are gigantic. You don't need anything that large unless you're really doing a lot of painting. I don't know why. I thought at the store it's the only size they had at the time and I'm like, I need some of that and I've had that for several years. That's real pretty. Let's just go ahead and do some mark-making on that. Look how pretty that is. I like the indigo for the graininess for like little abstracts like this because it really adds some extra interest into our piece. But I don't like the extra graininess if you're trying to do a really beautiful, smooth watercolor painting type technique. That's just going to depend on your pigment that you get. There's no way to know until you start mixing it which ones might have that extra super grain in it and which ones won't. So far, the only one I've come across that's really done that to me has been the indigo. Now I am going to let these dry overnight and then I will do the same test with these as I'm doing with the original set. Our day after painting, week after painting, three-week after whatever painting just to see the differences. These shrink a lot more than I think these are going to shrink. But we can see tomorrow if my hypothesis is correct or not. These are just going to be super pigmented and these are going to be highly pigmented but less binder in this, so we really should be even more pigment-wise than these where I've put extra binder in them. But I do like this formula and these are really beautiful. If I had to pick out of the two today, this formula where the glycerin and the honey are already mixed in was definitely a lot easier and that might be the way I go from here forward. Hope you enjoyed a look at a different formula today, and we will check these out tomorrow and see what we've got as they start to dry. 16. 1 day after making paint alt set: [MUSIC] Here we are back after our one day of making our paint, this is the next day. We did have a significantly less amount of shrinkage than we had on the first recipe that I showed you. I do like that we've got less shrinkage, we've also got less cracking. I do like the extra amount of glycerin in there, keeping the paint moist enough so that especially the earth pigments did not end up cracking up. I love how this recipe turns out. This is really nice to now try to experiment today, and we'll just activate these and then see what we've got. I'm going to go ahead today and just activate it with a little water [NOISE] on these just to get it started. Maybe we'll do another one in this red orange family. I just want to play and test out. They're not completely dry, so they're still super pigmented in there. I love that. The next test that we do with these, they should definitely be quite a bit drier. I want to be real careful while they're not completely dry from dipping another color down in there because then we'll have a different color. It'll actually change our colors. So when you're testing of wet, be careful not to dip some other color down in there like I just did with that orange and pink. But that's okay. Look at that, if we just drip some of this color in there. I love doing these little abstract color test just to see, what can I get? What are these going to do as we blend them? Look how pretty those are. Really pretty colors, nice and saturated. We'll put some on this one here. Let's just try out the yummy blue-green because we know I love that. Then we'll let this settle down to dry and do another little test with these next week or week after just to play and see where we're at. So pretty. That's really pretty too. I'm going to do a little mark making on these and make them abstracts because when you're then flipping through your art book, you're not just seeing little color samples, you're seeing all these little pieces of art and stuff that you created. I love flipping through and looking at little pieces of art in my art journal rather than just little color [inaudible] . But so far, this recipe is really nice and has minimal shrinkage compared to our first recipe, and that's because we've got way more filler in there with that gum arabic. I do like the way it looks in our pan. We had very minimal cracking. Here on one day after, and my hypothesis was correct. Now they're not completely dry, so there will be some more shrinkage in there, and if you're making these for like say for sale, like you want to make some for sale, usually what I'm thinking that you would have to do is make your pans and let those dry a couple of days and then make another batch of paint and fill them in and let those dry and let all that shrinkage occur to the point that by the third time you make some paint and maybe fill them in again, you should have a full [inaudible] of paint. I know with the Daniel Smith, the set that I bought off of eBay, that's how they filled all those pans. They used the little tubes of paint and they filled the pan and let it shrink down and fill the pan and let it shrink down and fill the pan, and then you had a full pan. Even with the commercially made watercolors, that is just how they work. They're going to shrink up when it dries out and some of those, the air and stuff evaporates out. Just a quality of the product. I'm going to let these continue to dry. We'll come back and do another paint test in about a week, and I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 17. 3 week after making paint alt set: [MUSIC] These I have been drawing for a couple of weeks now and they dry pretty evenly. Some of them have more shrinkage than others and I just have one or two that cracked a little bit and those were those natural pigments that do that. I will say too that some of these colors dry faster than others. If you have, say, two weeks out, a color that doesn't seem 100 percent dry. That's not a big deal, just continue to let it do its thing. You can still paint with it and let it live in its little container and just go with the flow because the honey and the glycerin, depending on what that pigment is, honey and glycerin might be keeping it a little tiny bit moist instead of drawing out of 100 percent. But it's fine, so I wouldn't even worry about it. Just going to do a little couple of week out. We're about two-and-a-half weeks out paint tests, so I'm just bringing some water on there to activate some of these colors. Just to show you that blue and that green was a real fine pigment. They did not completely dry compared to the natural pigments as fast. It doesn't even bother me, but I'm going to do another little blue-green abstract just to stay in the similar thing that we were already doing because I loved the blue-green anyway, it's my favorite. Some of these are definitely going to come out of my sketchbook, my little art journal here. They may get hung up [LAUGHTER] because I love them so much. Maybe if I use splatters. You can see, they just have as much color and saturation as it did when we first mixed it. How beautiful that is. Let's do one, let's let that one dry a bit and then I'll go back and do some mark-making like I love to do. But maybe we'll go back with some of the Earth pigments and take a look at those, so maybe the indigo. See that one is still going to be very grainy, even weeks out. But that's just the nature of that color of that pigment that whatever that rock is or whatever it is they used just stays a little grainy. But in the finished paintings that I had already done earlier, I still like that extra green in there, but if I was wanting something super smooth, then I know that that color is going to have green in it. See like this earlier one that we did look how beautiful that blue is. I don't even mind that there's little pigment color in there. Well, I don't know what I just did with that [LAUGHTER] little clip I had. Maybe I'll go back with the green on this one. Well, let's pick a different color, maybe this green. This is the one that's super light in opacity which pretty cool, I love that. We could come back a little heavier with more paint on there, but it's still going to be very translucent compared to some of these other ones. Maybe a tiny bit of yellow. Yeah, super fun. That's going to be real pretty when it dries. The natural Earth paints almost same or watercolor. The regular pigments like if we got some from the art store or wherever we got them, they seem more saturated and I love that difference about those. There is a reason to play with irregular paint pigments versus natural pigments. I love the differences. Then because it's my art book and I like to make color samples into pretty abstract. I'm just going to take my fun little mechanical pencil and do some mark-making and make it a little finished piece of art along with my color experiments. I hope you enjoy making some paints on your own. I do want you to play some little paint tests like I do the next day and a few weeks out just to see how they're going to re-wet and come back together for you as far as paint mixing goes and have some fun with this. I can't wait to see what paint you mix up and what you do with it. Come back and share with us in class, and I will see you next time. [MUSIC]