Watercolor Mark-Making: Create a Beautiful Patterned Reference Library

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone, and welcome to watercolor Markmaking. Create beautiful patterned swatch sheets. I'm Denise Love, an artist who loves exploring texture, color, and creative play in the studio, and I'm excited that you're here. In this class, we're going to explore mark-making by creating beautiful patterned swatch sheets for our own reference library. This is one of my favorite creative exercises because it's simple, relaxing, and a wonderful way to experiment with color, texture and pattern without the pressure of creating a finished piece of art. By the end of class, you'll have a colorful sheet filled with unique patterns that you can hang in your studio, keep as a creative reference, or use as inspiration for future artwork. This class is perfect for beginners as well as experienced artists who are looking for a relaxing way to have warm up exercises or a playful way to explore mark-making. So grab your watercolor paints, some paper, a pen, and let's get started. 2. Class Project: Your class project, you'll create your own watercolor mark-making swatch sheet. Start by drawing a simple grid on watercolor paper and filling each square with loose watercolor washes. Once the paint is completely dry, explore different marks and patterns using a gel pen, a fine liner, or a metallic pen. Try repeating lines, dots, shapes or organic marks to see how they interact with the watercolor textures underneath. Your finished sheet will become a beautiful collection of many patterns and a creative reference for you to keep in your studio for future inspiration. When you're done, share a photo of your swatch sheet in the project gallery. I'd love to see the colors and the marks you explored. 3. Supplies: Let's talk about the supplies that we'll be using in class today. This project is all about using whatever you have on hand. It's not about getting anything new or playing with things that maybe you don't already have. I want you to get out everything that you already have. Pick out some type of base material. I'm using watercolor. I will be using the Holbein granulating watercolors because I like them and I have a little set of all the colors of theirs that I have put into a little wood case that I had gotten off Amazon and I've tagged these in my favorites list, but these sell out, and so I don't think they're available anymore. You don't have to have anything like that. I just happened to have mine put into little pans so that I can use them a lot easier. I'm using the whole bin granulating colors. This would work well with any type of watercolors you have the Kurataki, the Daniel Smith. Any brand at all doesn't matter. That's not the point of this class. The point of this class is more of looking at colors and textures and mark-making. In addition to a base, whatever it is you choose to use, I'm going to be using watercolor paper, and I'll be using sheets of the Lao hong Academy paper in the 12.2 inch by 8.3 inch size, just because I like working with cotton papers, it's my backup favorite brand, I'm usually using the HonamulePaper. Um, so I would recommend you do this project on whatever paper that you'd like. If you've got a student grade paper, that's fine too. I generally like to do things like this on the paper that I prefer using just so I can see exactly how the materials are going to work on those papers, but the Bohong my budget friendly cotton paper and the honomule is my step up cotton watercolor paper. So I'm using the Bohong for this project. And I'm going to be doing several different sheets. Some of these are some examples of ones that I've already done. For myself. I thought this would be a super fun project for all of us. But what I would like to do is pick maybe three colors and do the three colors on the sheet, which is what I've done with these. But you can do this in any way. You could do, an entire set of swatches of all your colors. One box could be a different color on every single one of these. You could do mixes where you mix in two or three colors in every single square. You can just really get as creative as you want to be because these end up really pretty when they're done, and you hang them on your wall in front of where you're working for inspiration and mark-making inspiration when you get stuck in a piece. I really love having references to look up and be like, oh, I should use this or that because otherwise, I tend to get into a rut and use the same two marks and I want to get past that and have something pretty hanging in my art room as we're going. So paint brush wise, I'm going to be using my three quarter inch Princeton Neptune square wash. You can use whatever paint brush you want. All you're doing is laying paint down and letting it dry before we mark make. Um I'm going to be using mostly when I get to the actual mark-making reference sheets. I think I'm going to be using white because it shows up the best, and if it's hanging up in front of me and I'm referencing it, I can really get a look of what I have going on. But I did do one in silver, and I did do one in gold because in the end, those are some colors that I actually like using in my work. But as a reference guide where I can actually see what the marks are, the white shows up the best. My favorite whites are and gold and silver for this exercise is the pandaflyGelpins gel pens. These tend to draw on just about everything I've tried to draw on. I also have the NIB Cigna, white gold, silver, and they are hit or miss, but that's another option. Then for black, you could use any fine line pen that you have if you want to do black. That's some options. I also want to turn this into maybe one sheet with different options and then a couple sheets of just mark-making ideas personally. With the different options, I want you to gather anything that you happen to have, whether that be Neo Color two crayons or a favorite pencil that you like to use. These are my Faber Castle black edition pencils, which are very, very bold. And that is my favorite set of pencils now to use with my mark-making. I also like a bold pencil like a black wing or my 14 B Faber Castle pit graphite mate pencil. I also like, other things to mark make like the king art gelsticks. I now have a whole collection of these colors because I've really enjoyed using those in my mark-making. I also like temper sticks by Shuttle art. Those are super fun to mark make and play. I may be getting out my Arty, acrylic markers as another option for mark-making. I also have Posca markers, and those could be a fun mark-making element. I want you to pull together everything that you happen to have that maybe you don't use as much or maybe you love it, it's your favorite thing to use ever. But anything that you've got that you think would be good for mark-making, paint marker, gel stick, temper stick, anything like that. I want you to go ahead and pull those out and they can be options on your reference sheets that we'll be making. That's about it. Paper, some watercolor and all your mark-making tools, and you'll basically have everything you need to make these. I also am going to be drawing a grid out to keep myself focused. You can do that with a ruler and just a pencil. I'm going to use my little T square because I was a drafter when I was in college years ago. And so I like T squares and they're convenient. And you can just kind of line them up and then draw, you know, that line down there without having to mark it and line it up with the ruler. I just got this at the Art store at the **** Blick. But you can use any kind of ruler that you've got, you can mark it off and draw your lines just as easily with a regular ruler, too, so we'll be using that in a pencil to make my grid. I'm kind of keeping it as simple as I can for myself. I want these to be lovely. But utilitarian and useful. I have discovered white shows up the best for me to be able to look up and see different fun marks. What I thought we would do in this class is paint several of these with different colors of paints and then use each sheet a little differently. We can use one or two for mark-making ideas. We could maybe use one with all the different other types of mark-making things that we like so that we can see how a temper stick would look versus a paint marker, and so it'll just be a really lovely set of reference sheets when we're finished, so let's get started. 4. Where to Find Inspiration: Let's talk about where you can get inspiration for different marks for your mark-making catalog. One of the easiest places to look is on Pintst. I call these doodle inspirations because you can find lots of black and white doodle pages that people have put out there, you can just look up Doodles, Doodle inspiration, anything like that. Then you could use some of these as your inspiration for some of your squares. That's one place. It's free. There's tons and tons and tons of them on Pinterest. And once you find one, a looking up doodle inspiration, for instance, then you could click on that and then down below that, you'll have more inspiration come up underneath it that are similar. That is one place to look that's free and easy to be inspired by. Another place that I like to look for inspiration is doing master studies, and I've done two big master studies in the past several years that I have classes on, and that's Gustav Clemt and Kandinsky. I love love Clemt as inspiration for mark-making because his paintings, I can open this, his paintings, have the most mark-making that you've ever seen. It's amazing, just looking into the portrait of Adele Backbauer I picked little pieces out of the bigger piece to do the master study on, but it makes you look in different sections at all the different marks. And if you only had one painting, pull from, this would be an amazing example right here because you've got little tiny squares on squares, you've got the lovely scrolls, you've got circles within circles. You've got different colored square on squares and then some dots. You've got the lovely textured background. You've got this whole center section that has lines and triangles and eyes, and it's just amazing as you look around this painting, all the inspiration um, that we can find. And this little shape here that's like a coffee bean kind of shape in a square. I mean, it's amazing. That painting is one of my favorite. This one, lots of lovely inspiration going on here in the dress and paint some inspiration back here. This is the tree of life that's got a lot of texture and inspiration in it. This one is the kiss. Again, the other one that is super fantastic for just looking around at the different mark-making. In here, you've got these lovely elongated rectangles, little triangles, little circles on circles, little fun squiggly lines in here, lots of good interest and different things to kind of study and look at and admire in his paintings. Here's a closer up of that. You can really see a lot of these details and these lovely lines. And so that's one place that I have gone to get inspiration and mark-making pages that I have saved from doing these master studies. Here's a piece that I did inspired by different marks in the paintings that I've discovered. And so this lovely little oval chain is a really fun look. I like the little coffee bean with the dots. I've got the little circle on circles in here, so a lot of good inspiration to be had from there. I've also taken mark-making and just drew out a little square grid kind of like we did on our colored squares and just marked with a black pen the different marks that I saw within each painting. And then I kind of marked off what painting that was that I was looking at and what marks I got out of that were inspiring. And so that's one way that you can do a mark-making sheet. Another way is I have just thought up lots of different mark-making and drew it off on a piece of paper and then taking a paper cut and then cut each of these little fun shapes out. This one I did several years ago in the Rolling Stones class, so you can get that PDF out of that class if you want that mark-making sheet. But it's another thing that you can just look around. This is more like looking at the Pintras doodles and being inspired and saying, Okay, let me create each of these in a square. And so that has been super fun. Then in the Kandinsky, um, you know, he's got a lot of different paintings that he is famous for. And I was very inspired by this one here, which is his black and white piece of different marks. Studying the different things that painters old masters have done, and it's not a perfect replica of his 30 squares piece, but it's very interesting to then look over here and then recreate something similar. It doesn't have to be exact. It's just an exercise in observation and mark-making, and then you could add some of your favorite aspects of those marks to your mark-making sheets. So yeah. I like old Masters. You can take from the mark-making that I do if you see things that you find interesting because I like mark-making in all my art. Some of my favorite pieces have been the squares and concentric circles that I did that I was inspired to create from Kandinsky's concentric circles, which were much more plain. So it's kind of fun to take an old Masters inspiration and make it your own and turn it into something interesting with dots and lines and shapes. And just wanted to give you some ideas there. Look on Pintrs for doodle sheets. Out Old Masters paintings or any artists that you admire and then maybe use some of those marks in our mark-making sheets. Little inspiration there for your sheets. Alright. I'll see you back in class. 5. Prepping Our Paper: Before I do anything else, I'm going to go ahead and draw my grid and make it where I can get started painting our grids. So this is eight by 12 ish. And so I'm roughly making my grids, two by two, give or take a little bit. It's not even eight by 12, so I'm just going to get close. It's not about being exact for me. It's about getting close and it being lovely when I'm done. You could do this in 1 million different ways. You could grid it off like I'm doing. You could use a stencil. If you've got a stencil with shapes that you like, you could do ovals and all over the page and do mark-making on top of the ovals. It's really about getting creative. But what I like about having a set format, you pick whatever it is that you like to do, and then that's the format going forward for this particular project. What I like about that is then they're really cool and they make a collection and then you can frame them and hang them or you can just tape them up or whatever your preferred method of something like that is. Yeah, I like having just some fun with the art and swatch sheets and things really traditional traditionally haven't been something that I've enjoyed doing. I think I was always just in too much of a hurry to slow down and enjoy the process. And the older I get, the more things like this bring me some joy and make it much easier for me to then visually see like, Oh, hey, I got to I forget what I like or Oh, hey, I love this mark, and I can look up and reference it and oh I love these colors, and now I have them on swatches, whereas before I would just kind of wing it and I don't know. Now I appreciate stuff like this. So I've got the holebns I enjoy doing stuff like this now. Like now I'm like, I want a whole reference library around, and I want to have, ideas and things that I'm inspired by. Alright, so I'm going to wet these down. These are just squirted in there and they dried and now I wet them down to use them. I'm thinking that I want to do three colors and so I could do one, two, three, one, two, three, and then stagger them. Let's do the first one together. This is our paper prep and our colors. What I want you to do I got the big brush, the three quarter inch square wash that I'll be using, you can use a round brush too, a regular Princeton Neptune round brush would be a nice choice for something like this. I think I'm going to do it in color ways because I really enjoyed the other ones with three color picks. And so I'm feeling like maybe I like this 501 and I like this 511 and this 505. I like these greens and blues in here. I love this kind of deep blue and this purply tone. So there's tons of options. And what you could do in something like this is you could pull out your color wheel. You could use this as an opportunity to do some of the just standard color ways that make for interesting color combinations. You have complimentary, split complimentary and triad that would work perfect for something like this. You could also use this as an opportunity to mix colors and you could pick, two colors that are complimentary and you could start with one color here and the other color here and fill all the blocks in with mixes of those colors. Actually, now that I've thought of that, how cool does that sound. Oh my gosh. And so your complimentary colors could be blue and orange. They could be yellow and purple. They could be green and red, or you could even pick some analogous colors which are colors that are side by side. This could be a really great color mixing kind of project in addition to being mark-making, in addition to being a reference guide. I mean, you can just make this into so many things in the one project. And I like doing color mixing. I have tons and tons of videos and stuff where I've done two colors in black and white. This could be a two color and a black and white project. I mean, you could just go wild with something like this. Thinking, what if we do this 512, 541? Maybe this 511, we could just go crazy or we could just pick some pinks. Let's do pinks and oranges for this first one. Let's just pick some out and paint. My goal here is, I like the granulating colors because they granulate, they separate, they turn into different color ways. You see things in them that a regular watercolor doesn't really display because a regular watercolor might just have one pigment or they're mixed in a way that they don't separate. So I love granulating colors. I like my watercolors to do tricks. It just makes me happy. My goal here is not to be perfect. I like the irregular edges, which is why I gritted it off so they're within a border, but they're not perfect within that border. I think it adds some interest to have that bit of perfection and I like that. Don't get perfectionist with this. This is about having some fun, making something interesting without getting hung up in perfectionism. For me. If you need perfect, then I guess you could go for it. But I think it's so much more interesting if you just play. I'm angling it so that they are offset from each other. But I've got one, two, three, we're going to do three colors, let's come over here, three over. This way, all our colors are offset and evenly spread out. Look how pretty this pink is. This is that number five oh one in the holbin granulating watercolors. And it is lovely. I've been really making it a goal to pull out all the different art supplies and play with all the things that I have, but don't necessarily remember or maybe they were precious and I just have saved them. Let's come back over here and do this one right here. But yeah, this is the time to pull everything out. This is how you figure out how they work, what they do, if you like it, if you don't like it. I think we got it. We've got diagonals. Let's pick color number two, which is going to be whatever five oh two is right next to it. I don't know that I love that, but we're going to do it anyway. We're just going for it. This is really the way that you learn. What do you like? What do you not like? Why do you not like it? Evaluate and see what is this doing? Then you can make informed decisions going forward because you've played and experimented with your supplies. I'm going to continue making these all the way down. All right. You've got that second color laid down. I'm going to go with an orange this time, I think. Now you're ready for the third color, whatever color that is that you've picked out. I think blues and greens are pretty. I like the pinks, reds and oranges together. I like there to be a variety. In my color ways but complimentary side by side, so more the analogous. That's what I was trying to think of. My mind was moving different than my mouth. But yeah, I like the differences and I like to play. I just want to see what do these different colors do? If you pick one set of whatever your favorite watercolor of the moment happens to be. Pick that one set and just do all of these with that favorite watercolor of the moment. Or if you've got a new watercolor that you've not really done that much with, this is the perfect exercise to play and experiment and explore it. There we go. And once you've got your color down, now we're going to have to let this dry before we can do anything else with it. So you want to go ahead, pick your three colors. That's what my choice has been. You decide what you want to do if you want to do the three colors or pick your color wheel and maybe do opposites or three colors that are complementing and play that way, if you want to pick a new supply and use this as the way swatch out all the colors in that collection, because we could have done all the different colors like that just depends on how you want to work this project. I'm doing the three colors myself. We're going to let these dry. I want you to do several sheets and all of them be slightly different to play and explore. If you want to do them all the same, you certainly can. I'm going to do all mine different because I want them to be something colorful and fun and bright and all a little bit different. Then we will come back once you've got several pages painted, and we will do some exploring. 6. Removing Watercolor Paper From A Block: Once you have several of these done and I've done several, I've just picked out colors that I thought, let's try those. Sometimes I go for deliberately funky colors together just to be like, oh, what an interesting color combination. I didn't know I'd like that. I've done four. I want you to do four. One's going to be where we are mark-making with whatever mark-making tools that we have just as a reference and a reminder that, Hey, you have this or you have that. Then one could be mark makes on top of this with more watercolor, watercolor on watercolor or gouache gouache or something like that. Then or that could just be mark-making. Then we've got a couple for mark-making. I don't usually work on a block because I don't like the height difference from the table to the paper. That's my own little quirk. But I did for these because I didn't want to tape an edge off. I needed the paper to stay fairly flat as I was working. And so I left it on the block, and I thought I would show you how easy it is to get these off the block if you've got this little watercolor tool. So this is a watercolor block tool. And I've tried using a spoon. I've tried using an old knife and I've tried using my sharp knife knife, like, you know, the exacto knife things. And I cut the paper. And so I've never liked working on a block and then trying to cut the piece off the block because I'm always going to ruin the paper somehow and get very discouraged with that. But I do like having this little green leaf tool, which I have linked on my favorites page, which I have that page in your supply PDF so that if you are frustrated with trying to get watercolor off a block, this tool is amazing. I love it. It does come free with some Bao hong papers, but I have never gotten one. I got that off of Amazon. Then once you use whatever it is that you're going to use, then you can flip the page over and go ahead and mark what those colors were. I say that because you might come back and be like, oh, I love this. What color was that? Or if you've done some other watercolors, these watercolors were my Mash's watercolors, which are handmade watercolors off of an Etsy shop, and these watercolors are my whole buying watercolors. I might later look at it thinking, what's that? I can't remember. If you write, say, on the backside of it, you'll remember what the watercolor was and what the colors were. For this last one, I went 511 because I'm like, Wow, that's a crazy color. Then I went with 505 and I was like, What little oddball could I put in there? How about five oh three? I actually on all of these did all different colors. I tried not to repeat the colors just so that I'd have a fun little record of the different colors and what they could do. And at this point also, you could erase your pencil line if you want. I like the high polymer soft erasers to do stuff like that because they don't leave a bunch of pencil dust. They're a cleaner type of eraser and they work really well. You could erase those if you want. I'm not going to do that because I actually like the grid lines in it and I like the imperfection of every square. Within that imperfection, you have a framework of perfection. I think that's what makes something like this so interesting. The fact that individual pieces are very imperfect, but as an entire large piece, it's very interesting because of those imperfections. And so I want you to lean into that. Don't try to get perfect squares in the perfect square. Get wonky squares within those frame lines and just see what you get when you're done. So now that we have all of our watercolor pages ready, we're going to do some mark-making, so I will see you in the next video. 7. Paint on Paint Marks: Now we've got our grids painted. I want you to take this moment to now experiment with the different grids. I'm just going to flatten this out some. We could go ahead and tape it down a little bit if we wanted to keep it in place until we're done with it. We could do that. I've got a hardboard artist panel, which I like to tape stuff too. I don't really want to tape it so much that I'm in the way of mark-making. I might just tape it a tiny bit just to keep it in place. My favorite tape now is this Holbein artist tape. It's kind of like a like a washy tape in the thickness, but man it peels really nicely off of the different papers I like to use. I'm going to use that tape. Then I want you to get some different brushes. You could have a round brush. You have this is my Princeton Neptune number ten. You could have square brush like this half inch square wash. You could even have little tiny brushes like this number two round. What I want you to do now is to play and mark bake with the watercolor on what you've already done. I'm working dry on dry and you certainly could do wet on wet. But the goal here is to mark make with the supply that we've used on these sheets, and so we can do lines and we can do dots and we can do dashes. We can mix colors, we can mix mark-making things. We can do all kinds of interesting things, but I want you to do some of those on here in the spirit of discovery, like, Oh, I should incorporate some of these fun things in my work. I'm just going to randomly pick some of these and then do different marks as an idea generator and a reminder that you don't need anything more than just the paint you're using if you don't want to have any other mark-making tools that you're using. Another thing too that we could do is we could just take clean water. I've got some clean water and some dirty water. This is my number ten brush, but what we can do here is just test out will these reactivate if I get water on them, and some of them won't and some of them will depending on the brand. Of whatever you're using. That's another little fun thing that you can do. This is a perfect time too to experiment with different colors on here, what will the different colors do? They don't have to match. They can be something weird and crazy, which really leads me a lot of times to interesting discoveries and things that I'm like, didn't expect that kind of thing. I want you to do as many of these as you can think of as you reference, as different ideas. I don't know that that's really even reactivating hardly any. Once I decide it's not going to reactivate, I could go back and do something different there. Use all your different brushes to get different marks. I can get a different mark with this brush, this big round brush that I'm going to get with the square brush. I might even get some of the square brush it's about how interesting can we get with our mark-making. And do you have any brushes that might make interesting marks? Now is a good time to experiment with other mark-making tools that aren't a brush. Maybe you go outside and grab some twigs and maybe you mark make with some twigs. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff that you could do to mark make. This is just painting a color on the color. Just for fun. I want you to do as many of these as you can think of, so I'm gonna continue filling this sheet with just random other colors that I've got here. I do have some funky paint brushes too that I never used, but I've got them. It's a whole little set of these royal and ang nickel shaped stuff. I don't even remember where these came from, but there's a whole little collection of different shaped brush. This is FX elements, creative mark brushes. This one's a black and gold by somebody. Yeah, so look for some of the brushes too that you know, aren't normal brushes. That's an FX, ex and see what do you got that maybe you've never used. I got all of these lovely funky things. I don't even remember where they came from. So you can maybe Google FX. F as in Frank. X X, FX brush. We could even try out funky brushes, a fan brush. Oh my gosh, everybody needs a fan brush. Let me get a fan brush down here. I love fan brushes because of just the fun things that you can do with it. Maybe you can dip those in. Maybe we can do a drag. Maybe we could even do fun little marks like that. Let's see what this funky brush does. Fun line brush, that's fun. You don't have to have these funky brushes because you could certainly get lines out of just that round brush. It's just interesting to see what's out there and what does it do? That's different. If you want to remember what those were, you could take a pencil and notate at the bottom of each square what you did. I'm not going to do that because I'm filming it, and that would give me a pretty good indication what I did if I came back and watch that. But this more for me is just a reminder of all the different things that you could be doing on your pieces for interest. If you see any color combos you like, that's interesting also. You got to be careful with this, but you could do some splatter. So to do some splatter, a nice wet brush. You could shield these a little bit, but a nice wet brush, plenty of pigment on it, and then I just like to tap and that would give me some fun splatter. Then you could use different brushes to see different widths and lengths and shapes. Another shape is my half inch oval wash that I really like, grab whatever you've got on hand and see what can you do with those. You just see how many can you make. So I want you to fill up your first sheet with different watercolor things and different colors and shapes and just see, like, what can I create? So let me finish this sheet out with whatever else I can think of as I'm going. And then we'll move on to the next sheet. All right. I think I've got all in there. Now we've got dots. We've got some lines. We've got some shapes. We've got some brush marks where we splatted the brush down with like this one and these brush shapes. We've got some interesting brush things that we tried. I don't know if those are my favorite. Another little fun like bird shape or like arrow shape. A little rainbow shape that I like a lot. Now we have a full sheet of just random mark on mark with your same product that you painted with. I used to gouache, you can do on top of gouache, watercolor on top of watercolor. You could do gouache on top of watercolor, you can do acrylic paint on top of watercolor. I just want you to thinking outside the box and not every mark-making tool has to be a pen or a paint marker. It can be the actual paint that you're painting with, let everything dry, come back on top and mark make and just see what you can think of and create. That's the first mark-making sheet that I'd like you to experiment with and just see what can you create with just your paint and some paint brushes. All right, so I'll see you back in class. 8. Sampling Your Mark Making Tools: This video, I want this project, I want you to take all the different mark-making items that you have and make a mark-making reference sheet of the different items that you have. For instance, I've got the Neo color two crayons that I really like to use in different pieces. This is a good mark-making item that I use in a lot of my work, so I can go ahead and just add some marks onto one of the squares as a reminder of, hey, the neocolorT crayons is one of your favorites elements to add. Then what you can do once you've used that element is notate what that is. For instance, this is the No Color two crayon. I could take a black pen like a fine line pen and write on here. Let's see if this is even going to work. And I could write what that is. So I want you to look at all your elements that you've got. Another favorite mark-making tool for me is my KuratakiGld Mica Inc that I use a pipe it and put the ink into the fine line bottle, and then I use the bottle as my mark-making tool. I have this in gold and silver. Kurataki makes that in gold and silver. And then I like to get it started and that'll get any air bubbles out and such. When you're using this for the maximum control, you want to be basically almost parallel to the paper so that when you're like this, it's not squeezing out a whole bunch of ink. You're like this and it's giving you a lot more control. What I like to do with this is I like to do lines. You can get creative and think about what kind of lines that you like, but I'm just giving myself the reminder that, yeah, I like using this with dots and lines so that is my kerataki gold black ink in a fine line box. I can do the silver one same way. You do have to shake them up to get that ink really back in there to get the color mixed up. I'm not thinking at the same time I'm talking. But I do like the gold and I really like the silver. The silver does come off a little bit more like a brighter silvery white. Um And then I like that the fine line bottles have a little needle cap in the cap to keep the ink from freezing in the top of that. You can also use those inks with dip pens. I've got some favorite dip pens that I like, you can have a regular dip pen. You can have the Kakamori brass nib pen, any of those pens, if you like to do pen and ink stuff, do some of that on your page. I'm not going to do these on my page currently because it's been a while since I've done anything with the pen and ink. I could go ahead. Well, let's just do it. I'm going to use the gold Mica Ink in a while. Then I'll just go ahead and hopefully I'll get some good marks out of this. Let's just test it out on a little sheet there. What makes this pen work is using it on an angle rather than straight up and down and not having so much ink on it that it's dipping down the sides there, which I just shook that up, so I do have a lot of ink hanging out. But on the angle, you can't do it straight up and down. You got to let it grab the ink on the sides of this my ink is a little bit thick but still going to go for it. I can do lines and I can do marks. Um a lot of pen, people get really frustrated with pen and ink. So, you know, not something I do so much anymore just because so many people find it challenging and everybody complains. Oh, I can't get that like you're getting it, so I've kind of quit using them from all of people that just can't get the hang of it. But this was my solution to that for most applications was the fine line bottle. Now we can put a dip pen. Okay, I got extra line in there. Tip pen and ink. There's an extra line on there. Well, but it is a finer line and you can see the shine in the light there. It's a finer line than I usually get with the fine line bottle. On some applications, it's a more preferred look. It just depends on what you're looking for. Now, I also want to do I got these fine line pens, and it would be a really good exercise if you put them in order. Or just something similar. Then did a line of each of those so that you know what size each of the lines is. These are my Stedler fine liner pens. There's a 0.8. These you might want to do on the tip so that you really get the right size. This is 0.05 very fine. Because if you just do all of them on the side, you're not going to see that you are having different sizes there. 0.1, and this one's 0.5. Now you have a really nice visual of how fine or how heavy each of those sizes is, and then we could write down what this was. StudlerFne fine liners. And you could also do that with your different pins. I've got the pantafly pens. And then I've also got the UIL Cigno now I could go ahead and make myself a reference of the gold and the silver and the white for each of those. Got to get them started. Then I've got this Unibal Cignos Kind of wish they did each of these in a black also also. Usually with the white, I find that the pandafly are the most reliable in the mark-making. The gold and the silver do pretty good in both. I do like the gold better in the pantafly. Silver is about the same and I usually like the white better in the pantafly because it's more stable or more dependable, I'd like to say. Also, I've got a favorite mark-making tool is my Pit Mac graphite, 14 B. I also love my black wing. Which I'm going to call a 14 B because no matter what it says out there, it's almost identical, slight different shade of color, but it's almost identical to this 14 B that I love to use. So I like that the 14 B Pitt graphite one by favorite Castle is more black. I like that the Blackwing pencil just as bold, but it's more gray. This black really is a really matte black color versus the more graphite tone of the black wings. I like both of those for two different reasons and that's where those fall for me. I also love love. My favorite Castle black edition pencils. Because they are like a 14 B in color. They come, and this is the little box for those. I took them out of the box and put them in these pencil things because I couldn't see the colors from the tips and this was in the bottom. So I ordered these pencil holders, which I've linked these on my favorite page too in my Amazon shop, the ones that I ordered, but it doesn't really matter. These are just some pencil cases that you can put into a three ring binder if you want, but I like them because they're sturdy. I can have them sitting on my desk them over and I can see different colors. And what I love about them is they are bold. Let's just doesn't even matter the color. Let's just pick a color and see how lovely these are. You can see it's a bold yummy pencil, and it has become my number one favorite mark-making colored pencil out of all of the different choices. This one is now my favorite set. And that's after doing a ton of videos that have kind of gotten ahead on my different channels and playing with just that set and doing different fun abstracts. I also love the temper stick. This is shut shuttle art temper stick. I like these because they dry pretty much immediately. They're very fast drying. They're very pigmented. They're not archival. This is considered a children's paint, but I don't care. I love them. As long as you know what these different paints are for, are they archival or not? What are you using them for? You can make that choice on purpose. Now a nicer quality, more of an adult temper stick, I guess we could say, would be these King art gelsticks I love these. These are nice colors. They come in a set of 48 and they come in a set that's just the pastel colors. I got the pastel colors first, and then here's a metallic. This is the 48 set that I just showed you. This is the pastel set. I got the pastel set first and I loved them so much that I went ahead and got the other 48 set, and they are fantastic for mark-making. The difference though, it does look very similar to the temper stick, but this is a nicer quality. These are artists color rather than child grade. They have a little bit finer point and they don't dry immediately. These take 24 hours to cure. But on most pieces of art, I don't care. That's fine. If they've got a cure time. The fact is they do dry, which is a good thing. Another favorite mark-making thing for me are these aca, CFC Acrea pens. And they come in a variety of colors, and you shake them up. You my little test sheet there. And then you get them started, and they're a paint pen with a nice kind of fine point. Now what's nice about something like this, we're not trying to color swatch everything that we own. We're just trying to give ourselves a visual record of, look what that pen can do. What effect am I needing? A few lines, a few dots, size indicators, if you've got a set of fine liners, is good. That's more what I'm interested in with this mark-making guide that we're creating. As let me tell you, I do have the marabou art crayons, which is very similar to the king art crayons, and I have hardly used them. They're very bright primary colors compared to the other colors, they're just a tiny bit more primary in the shades. I've just decided that for my art, I like the king art ones better. But this is another brand that you could check out if you like the brighter, more primary colors. I'm not going to really I could put this on my thing though, because I have it. I could use it. And then we'll know that yes, that is another option that you've got. These are considered arc crayons. There we go. So we've marked that now. And I've started doing little swatch sheets for all my stuff like that, I never did before. I just didn't like doing that. But now I love stuff like this and showing up and creating them with you guys. Totally makes me put even a little more attention into what I'm creating. Like, I do a better job. Okay, so I've got these tulle art markers that are kind of fun. These are earth toned paint markers, kind of like your posca pen. Oh, I got Poska pins. Let's pull the paskas pens out first. Yeah. Because I use the poscas more. Okay, I don't like that super fine for what I'm doing. Here we go. All right. Then we got Tuuli art. I also have the arctic. I got to be real careful. Those are still kind of wet. Well spell that ARR rdixPaint. Paint pens, and my handwriting is like, it's like I'm a doctor. It's messy. It is what it is. With the posca pens, this is the perfect opportunity to see what sizes do you have and notate that. Looks like I've got three different sizes. And so this one is only got this and the white. This is 0.7 millimeter. Then this is the 0.9 to 1.3 millimeter. That's this one is the medium point. I think this comes in a bigger one also, but I don't think I have the bigger ones. This is the 1.8 to 2.5. Usually what I like to do mostly with this size, especially is dots. And with this size, you can get lovely tiny dots. Then with this size like a medium dot. You can see having a size reference of the different sizes that you have make it easier to be like, oh, I like that big dot or like that tiny dot. I like all of those. Then I've got the Artix markers. If I want this color, maybe I want. I want a color that's going to make him show up a little better. And you don't have to fill every square today. If you don't have enough different materials to fill up all of your squares, don't worry about it. The point is that for the most point, look at that. I didn't put the ti. Oh, I got them right there. I was about to say I missed the Toli art one, but I didn't ones are brush shaped and what I like about these I bought all these. Nobody gave me any of these, just so you know, I buy my art supplies. What I like about this one is the brush tip. It makes a lovely little pattern, but it also can make dots and lines. It's very versatile. I do like the Arctic acrylics markers. Again, all these are tagged in my online Amazon things so that you can find them. I link that in the supply PDF. This one is the tulle art and these are all the same size, they're called medium point. They're bullet point, but they're good for lines and dots and stuff too. Like, look how fun that is. The reason why you might pick one or the other is because of the colors. Tulle art are really lovely earth tones. What's most of what I have that I've got out on my counter that I use all the time. There's different fine liners. You could get the Pigma fine liners, whatever those fine liners that you have. If you've got anything else that I have not used, definitely pull those out and add them to your sheet as a reference guide of everything that you've got that could be a mark-making element that you'd want to remember or be able to look back and think, oh, I like that, and then you'd know which one to grab. This is an excellent reference of what mark-making tools and materials that you have, you don't have to fill them all up today. The next time you get a new mark-making something, if you've only got one or two, you come and add it to the sheets, so this is going to be a living library of the things that you've got, and then the ones that you can add to it. It's ready. Hope you enjoy making a little reference library of the different mark-making materials that you have. I'm sure I've got plenty more than I have forgotten, but this is a really nice start. Yeah, I can't wait to see what yours looks like and what different tools and mark-making elements that you've got. The next one we do some pattern and shapes on our squares. Have fun with that and I'll see you guys in the next video. 9. Creating Mark Making Reference Sheets: Now that we have got all of our squares ready, and we've already tested out different mark-making tools that we have and mark-making paint on paint. I want to do some mark-making reference sheets that you might consider doing on on your pieces. I've done several of these for myself and I did it with white pen. I use the panda fly pens on all these. I did it with gold pen and I did it with silver pen, and I was taking inspiration from everything that I love. I've taken inspiration from lemped here with the different wonky circles and I've taken some inspiration from Kandinsky with concentric circles, and I've mark-making with lines and dots and scribbles and this is a lemped design. But what I've noticed on these mark-making sheets is the gold and the silver are not as vivid as the white. So I would recommend for a reference sheet to maybe use the white and then just consider that you can use other colors after you see whatever Mark was inspired. I thought we would just fill up some mark-making sheets together just to give you some ideas of what you might do for yours. I'll take photos of all the sheets that I've done, and then you can use those as inspiration. You could also just do black and white inspiration mark-making sheets like I've done in the past, but these are so much more fun when they've got some color on them. I just love them. And the pantafly I'm just going to get it started so that we've got some nice fresh ink coming down. And then we will get started. So a few favorite things of mine are dots, lines, circles. So botanical stuff. I'm not really a botanical lover as far as the things that I might draw on my different things, but sometimes I will usually that'll be a simple flower or a leaf. This is a favorite mark of mine, which is an oval with a line through it, which is very leaf like, but it's an inspiration that I got out of the clempt paintings. I like to be reminded of that mark a lot of times because I forget it. I forget it exists. And then a lot of times too, I like a simple line. Usually when I'm doing a line on a piece of abstract art, I like the color to guide where that line starts and stops. If I've got a darker color with it's a nice obvious stop, then I will use that as my stop start point to make the lines even more interesting rather than fill the whole box with a line. I'm filling one color section with a line and that adds to the interest for me, something like that. That's a fun, easy mark-making thing. I also like just rows of lines. And those are very easy just to do a few of those all the way down. I'm also very partial to very heavy grid of lines, a real heavy mark of line with the temper stick, which I could just go ahead and grab one of those. Because it's a favorite of mine, I could just go ahead and say, Look at this great big fat line. You can go ahead too, if you want and make some mark-making on your mark-making sheet with one of your favorite tools if you want. That's a very favorite one of mine. Another favorite with the temper stick, I might as well just go ahead and add it on here. Great Big dots. That's my two favorite things to do with a temper stick. I like to work with stencils too, but this isn't about having any stencils or anything like that. I just want you to have maybe some art tools available pens and pencils and then maybe some good shape ideas that you could use with some of these art materials that you already have without having to buy a whole lot of paint and stencils and things like that, which I have. I've got plenty of videos and classes where I'm using those too. Fun little oval shape forest that's interesting. I like the elongated rectangles like we saw in the clemed painting. That has become a favorite element for me. It's just like long rectangles. You can mix and match some of your marks too. You could do rectangles and put some dots in there and you can embellish them even further. More than anything, I want you to have a reference library of at least getting started and then you can have a whole mark-making sheet of taking them up the next level with multiple colors. Maybe I do white lines and gold dots in something like this. But that would be a fun reference to have single color ideas, and then how do you take those to the next level? Maybe dual colors would be the way to go. Here I'm just making a grid, all the lines one way, all the lines the other way. Again, that could be a multi color thing. I could have black dots and gold dots in the middle of where those squares are created. That could be something to consider. If you upgrade your mark-making on another sheet. It's one color mark and then on the next sheet, maybe do two colors. How we can upgrade some of the same elements, but maybe with two. Which let me tell you, these are already dry and they are not getting on my hand and I did not smear them. That's why I like those temper sticks. The King art sticks would smear for another day or so. Even though they're not archival, I do love a little temper stick. I'm not making art to sell. I'm making art for my own enjoyment and play and I make it to show up and just experiment and stuff. So good circles, those are fun. I also like a wonky kind of almost flower like, but it's just a swirl circle. It's also a favorite kind of Gustav clempk swirl. That's where I got inspired by those. Yeah, I like it. I like it. At that. Then we also have the swirls that are really good Again, inspired by Clemt. I really took so much out of doing that master study. I mean, it's crazy how much pattern and gold he uses in his work that I just went gog off for still, a couple of years later, having some fun with it, enjoying the marks and the inspiration that I got from studying his work. Okay, so how about some pretty lines that overlap? That's another fun element that I like to do. And then I like to come back and put some little dots on those lines, kind of like little pearls, almost. And I do that a lot with gold. It's kind of like putting a necklace there on the piece of art. It's just a fun little element. And we might do some vertical lines. Another fun mark-making. Then I always love a dot. I'm going to remind myself that dots are always a good choice. I might go ahead on these dots and pull out my Posca pen because you see me making pasca dots a ton in my work. I just want to remind myself that that dot is available in my reference library. I like this back and forth. Still connected on one side as we're going, that's a fun mark too. Just again, just looking to see how can I make it more interesting? It's like a long zigzaggy kind of mark there. Those are super fun. Get some close ups of some of that. I do find it works better, and I should have done this on the even darker one if the colors are vivid enough for you to see everything that we're doing. I like this arch shape. Kind of like an M that keeps on going shape. I like that a lot. I use that in some stuff. I just make sure that the point coming down lands on the curve of the one below it. That just keeps that shape going for me. So that's a fun mark that I like. It's also fun to just draw some lines out here and let them crisscross in different interesting ways and just see how many directions can we go with our lines and how many ways can we criss cross them. That's super fun. Another thing that I like is scribble, like a semic writing. It looks like writing, but you can't really tell what it says. But maybe with the piece that you're looking at and the writing that's on it, you can infer what that might say. I do like a little bit of scribble writing. If you're good with writing and you like writing itself, go for it. That's not my thing. My writing looks a little bit like a doctor's writing. You can't really read it anymore. I think it's because now we've spent so many years, you know, typing and using a computer that I'm just out of practice and I'm lazy with my hands in writing. And so I don't love to draw either. So you don't see a lot of drawing. I can draw. I can teach you all the drawing principles, but I don't enjoy it, so you don't see it out of me because I just don't like it. You got circle in a circle. I like texture and pattern and color and the older you get, the more you figure out, oh this is what I like and that's what you should lean into, lean into those things, you're like, I like this, but I don't like that because I had some drawing classes in college and man it was like a slog to get through them, even though the things that I created were lovely. When I was done, I had to make myself sit and create, whereas with abstracts and textures and pattern and color, I show up and I enjoy it. So you got figure out with art, what's the aspects that you really enjoy show up for that. That's what's going to get you to keep coming back to your table and enjoying it. I like that a lot. I also like little little hash mark, little lines like this. We did them similar up here, but they were larger and longer. Here we've got little tiny tick marks that just make up a lovely pattern all across a little area. Oh, look at that. Oh, good one, good one. Look at all these marks that we have just created. Super fun. Alright, so maybe squares. I did rectangles, but these are a little more square, and along the same line, we could do we could do. I've done something similar on a different one where we did, let's do that while we're squaring it up here. While we're in the square mode. We're going to make these a big enough grid both directions. This is another one out of the clempt paintings that I liked or an idea that I had. I don't even remember now. Did I see this exact pattern? I probably did. But if I didn't, then it was inspired by those paintings. Randomly fill in some of these squares. A few of these could hold some dots. Then I did that pattern here in the gold, and it's just so lovely. Lovely. Loveliness. Another thing that I really like to do is some big elongated ovals. Again, I'm not going for perfection on any of these. I like the wonkiness. I like lines that are kind of crooked, I don't care to have it perfect. I'm not looking for perfect. That's not the style of art that I end up creating. Look at that. We filled that whole sheet up. Oh, my goodness. What I want you to do is fill one up like that in one color. Then I want you to consider maybe filling one up in two colors. Maybe pull out the gold and the silver, possibly, and then work on a second sheet of different marks. And then this might be the chance to somehow make it a two color something. Whether that's a little dot around something or maybe an element in the middle of what you did, but maybe combine two or three different colors as part of that mark-making element and that is to remind yourself that it doesn't just have to be one color or one pattern or one design. It could be more complicated, but not hard, but more complex. Complex is a better word, not complicated, more complex, how can you take an idea and expand it into something that will have more interest and more elements in a way that maybe you never thought of before. When we do the grid and put the squares in, maybe the grid is in one color and it can be any color that you want. I just happen to have the gold and the white and the silver out for this exercise, but it could be something like that where you're combining two different elements in different colors. You could do those in the posca pens. That would be nice. Do it in the things that I'm doing it in. We could do those lovely lines that I like with the little pearls on it, but we can make the little pearls be a different color. So I could come back with maybe a gold to tone that as an element of interest doesn't have to be for any reason other than we're experimenting. That's fun. Another thing that will be fun is just some lovely little scribbles. Your whole page doesn't have to be two toned, but I do want you to have a couple of two toned elements in there, whether that be something with white gold and silver or something with a fine liner, so maybe black elements in there. These are just little squiggly scribble lines. That's a fun element as a background filler. Could be something behind other stuff, but add some interest in the the background field of that super fun. Oh, hash marks are fun. Kind of thinking different shapes and elements that maybe you could then be like, Oh, I love this or I did not like that kind of field. So just as many ones as you can think up is the goal or reference off of mine or off Pinterest or off old paintings or so many choices. Oh, you know what else is fun? Like three little dots together. And what I like most about this exercise is it's reminding me of things that I like, and I get into a little rut, and then I forget the different things that I've studied and I'm like, Oh, I wish I had some different marks in my little catalog that I just forget about, and this is the way to do it. This is the way to do it, lovely people. Let's see what else. Let's see. Are there any or Black and white ones that we like. I like these triangles. Now, I get a little confused drawing triangles because I try to go different directions, and then my mind doesn't connect all the angles correctly as I'm going. I think with triangles, do all the ones in one way first. If you want them, go in a different direction, come back and draw those next because trying to do them both at the same time totally mentally confusing. Just some fun there. Let's see what else do we got? I really love, this would be another good one to be two toned, great big boxes with the half circles in it. We could do great big boxes in white and half circles in gold. That could be one thing or half circles in silver and gold, something like that, and then come back with our little half circle in our line. Super fun. You could also do a ladder. Oh, I like a ladder look sometimes. Those are fun. Two lines and then lines connecting them. That's a fun mark on a lot of stuff. Like, that could be a leading line going through a piece all up through it. I do that a lot. I let color come in and where they gap, and there's another color, I do lines up that like a leading line kind of ladder there, super fun. Maybe we want some gold dots as a reminder. I do like a lot of gold. Oh, super bond. We have this as our gold and white sheet. And lovely gold lines, maybe. And then maybe at the top of those lines, we have maybe a little ball. That could be a fun alternative. Oh, super fun. It's like little candles, actually. So those kind of shine really pretty in the light, which I think is what I like about gold so much as the shiny bits. I also like that wonky little spiral in gold quite a bit. That's a good one. It's almost like a flower kind could be the top of a rose, and it's just interesting. I like it. Some people don't. It just depends on what grabs you as you're creating, but man, I sure do like those. So I want you to continue thinking and figuring and just what can you come up with? Maybe we've got some scribble lines. Oh, I do like scribble. Oh, some scribble. Maybe we got some scribble lines going different directions. Ooh, I love that. Um, Maybe we got some great big kind of petals kind of coming down. That's super fun. Could be like the side of a daisy. Kind think of it like that. Great big petals. I like that. Maybe we can do some little flowers. Just a circle with little petals around it, just as something fun and maybe some dots around those. I want you to fill two whole sheets of these. I want a sheet of just the white, something like that. I want a sheet of maybe some alternate colors together to give yourself a reminder of you don't have to stick with one thing. We can have two things going. And here we can have a road. We did the two lines, but instead of making a ladder, we made it a road and maybe some, you know, dots outside the road. That's kind of fun. Yeah, I like that. And then let's see what else can we do here? Could do some lovely larger dots. I like large dots. I like big dots and I cannot lie. With your paint colors, if I'm doing, how about these lines? If I'm doing something like blues and greens, you might do silver. If you're doing something like pinks and oranges and yellows, you might do golds. So thinking of warm versus cool as far as what's going to determine if I'm using silver, gold or copper. Copper is a good one. I don't use copper as much, but sometimes it comes out in my work. You know what I need is a good copper ink, and then we need to put the copper ink in a fine line bottle. Then it will come out all the time. How about this alternating lovely lines like this. Super fun. That's a nice little mark there. What else do I have that I haven't put on here yet? Ooh, how about some leafy? I did do some leafies out there. Let's see. Oh, how about some concentric circles. And then you could fill in those areas right there if you wanted to. I'm not going to, but you could. And we could do starburst. Let's pull out a black pen for a moment because this is our multi colored sheet. Then look at here, we could do a starburst coming out of our edge there. And we could tone that up. We could come back in with some little gold lines if we wanted, make it roads. It looks like roads. But just as a reminder of multi coolors not the same color, that might be an option. That might have been the perfect element that you're like, oh, I need that in my piece of whatever. You were like that. We could come back up here with some gold. How about that? Oh. Then it has a lovely little shine there. I like it. I like it. Good job. We could do something a little swirly back and forth. That's a fun element that we could add into something like a stripe abstract, that might be a good element in our stripes. Thinking like we could do black circles with gold centers. That might be fun. As a two tone something again, and then maybe even a few dots on the outside of that. How creative can you get with these different elements that we've got going on there? That's super fun. Let's see. Let's do one last something. How about some black something? You know what? We could do. I do like the different crisscrosses and we could do that in the black. Oh, you know what we could do we could fill that in too with some gold elements. Oh, look at that. Totally different than the crisscross lines that we did on the other one. So if you use something that's similar that you've used in another square somewhere, how can you make it just a little different? What can you do? What can you do to just make that slightly different? Here totally. Wow, how cool that is. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Good job. We filled up another one. Alright, so there we go. Now we have filled up two of these today with different marks and different elements. So I hope you have fun drawing out some of these. I want you to do two of them, one, white and one with, white and some other color or just something similar to that. Solid one color thing, and then throw in some two color elements to really kind of make your creativity and your mind start thinking of other directions you can go and I'll see you back in class. H 10. Recap Of Our Swatch Sheets: I wanted to just do a quick little recap of the different elements and why we're doing these. This is going to be our reference library for different marks and elements that we can use in our abstract art, and it's really nice to have them out in a way that you can then reference and look at and be inspired by when you're painting because let me tell you, you'll get into a rut doing the same dots or something because you're like, Oh, I can't think. I don't know what I want to use. I don't have any ideas in my mind, so the different elements that we explored today was paint on paint. Lovely. Look at all that. My favorite being these little circles that we drew. I really like these lines that we created. I like splatter. I like the dots that we did. Those are some of the favorites that I got off of this sheet. Then we tested all the different mark-making tools that we had, and you're going to have different ones than I have. So go ahead and draw all those out, notate sizes, notate what it is that you've used so that you can look up and be like, Oh, what is that? Let me go grab that or something like that. As add to your mark-making things. I want you to then fill in each of your circles, but it's an excellent reference library to remind you of what tools and pencils and pens that you have because trust me, once you put stuff away, you will forget that you have it. Then we went and did some mark-making with the different elements, and I wanted you to do some in one color and then come and add to that with two colors so that you now have a gigantic mark-making reference sheet that you could be like, Oh, I love these and I love this and I love, whatever else it is, and you can then incorporate those into your pieces. And then you could also do them as a black and white if you wanted to on Black and white squares. But I do find this way more inspiring, which is why I have gone this direction. These were inspired by the ones that I created for myself that I did with a gold pen, a white pen, and a silver pen. These are so pretty now that you could just tape these up on the wall in front of you. You could frame them and hang them as a series up on one of your art walls and then have a beautiful reference library of marks and ideas that you've created and tools that you have. You can even go one step further and do one sheet in one type of paint. This is my Mashs watercolors. This is my Holbein granulating watercolors. And if you've got other watercolors, you could do another watercolor on a different sheet, and if you've got some gouache, maybe one with that different kind of gouache. So each one of these could be a different type of paint with marks on top of it. So that would be a nice reference also of your different paints that you have. How pretty and colorful and lovely are these? Hope you have fun creating a reference library of your own. Please come back and share those in the project gallery, and I'll see you back in class. 11. Final Thoughts: You so much for taking this class with me. I hope the exercise helped you relax, experiment with watercolor, and discover how fun and expressive simple mark-making can be. These pattern swatch sheets are a wonderful way to warm up creatively, explore new color combinations, and build a personal library of marks that you can return to in future artwork. I'd love to see what you create, so please share your swatch sheet in the project gallery and feel free to include close up photos of your favorite patterns. Thank you again for painting with me, and I hope this inspires you to keep playing and experimenting in your creative practice.