Watercolor Mixing, Finding Your Color Identity

1. Trailer: Hi everyone. Welcome to color mixing with water colors. I have taught many classes both in person and online on many subjects. In past classes, we have gone through the basics of watercolor, how to create textured patterns to help your paintings be more interesting. How to mix your watercolors with different supplies, and even how to paint complex pieces of jewelry. But for this class, we are going back to basics, and we're going to take a close look at how to use color. I know how exciting a blank piece of paper can be. Many times we just end up using every single color in our palette. I love rainbows too, but sometimes less is more, and choosing certain colors help give your work personality, meaning, and intention. I've developed a series of activities that will help you discover your own personal palette. Color is such a huge part of an artist's style and personality. I really think this class will help you develop the skills you need to find your very own. We will go through the basics of color mixing, the color wheel, complimentary colors, warm and cool tones. You will practice painting different color combinations with certain themes in mind, and lastly, create your very own abstract painting focusing on intuitive color mixing. Join this Skillshare class and discover the power of color with me. 2. Supplies: For this class, you will need watercolor paper. I like to use this brand. It's not too expensive and the quality is really good. This is a Winsor and Newton. It's a Cotman watercolor paper, and it has a nice spiral here, which will let us use different sheets at the same time. Like we can work on several projects at the same time. That's why I like to use this paper for activity classes like this. But if you have any brand of water paper, that's perfectly fine. This class is more about how to use colors, so we're not necessarily going to get too fancy with our paper. This is more of like a worksheet class. You're going to need some watercolors. You can use whatever you have at home. I have these pan sets. This is a Shinigami brand. There's a bunch of different types of watercolor and you can also use tube set or tubes if you have them, or you can use liquid watercolors. It's also important to say that you can mix and match. For example, in this area here, which is where I do all my color mixing, I don't necessarily only use these pan sets, but I mix everything together so I can have some like really cool and it's interesting colors. But don't limit yourself. If you don't have like too much variety and paints, use whatever you have, you'll totally be able to make it work. Just make sure you have the three primary colors, which is going to be some red, or a hot pink maybe might work for you too, and yellow and blue. You can basically make every single color out of those three. You're going to need some water, which I have here, some clean water, a paintbrush. Usually, if you've taken my other classes, you see that I use a lot of different types of paint brushes. For this class, we can do fine with just one paint brush. I have this regular. It's like a fiber brush;. Just a medium sized, but you can use a round brush. Really, any brush is fine for this specific class. I like to use some kitchen paper here. You can use a cloth or a rag. This is to wipe off color that's left over on our brushes. You're going to need some clean space to mix your paint. If you see here, my pan set, this is where I do most of my mixing and I like to keep it this way so you guys can see how a pen set usually would look by an artist that uses their paints often. I'd like to keep it like this because I feel like more organic colors come from all of these different little sections that I have here. I'm going do most of my mixing for this specific class on these two. If you can find a ceramic dish, it's like awesome. These are actually plastic. They're just like practice stuff I have here, but ceramic is really the best. Any palette will work for this class. That's basically it. You don't really need that much for this class. You can also use a pencil. I have a pencil here, which we're going to use for a couple of other activities, but this is basically it. Paper, paints, water, palettes, and a paintbrush, and you're set to go. 3. Basic Color Theory: We're ready for our very first lesson on color theory. This class is going to be a lot about how to find your personal color palette. I really don't want to get extremely technical on you and I feel it's really fun to understand how color works and how the composition is made up, and the basic stuff that we learn at school and all that, that's really fun that's awesome. I even have a color wheel here for you guys today. Just to let you know, we're going to focus more on filing out color and I do want to explain these basics to you before we get into finding our personal color palette though. Here I have a little chart that I made for you. It's just like basic color theory, and we're going to go through the color wheel right now. You guys, probably, if you went to school for graphic designers, something you've maybe done something similar to this, but watercolor can be a little bit different. I'm just going to do a few exercises here for you, so you guys can see just the basics of how to mix. First of all, I have a little color wheel for you here, it's just a small version and I'm just going to keep it handy here to come back to it and refer once in a while. You guys have probably seen this a bunch, it basically looks like a rainbow, which is really fun, and I'm just going to have this here handy if we ever need to use it. Basic color theory. When we do our mixing, if you had red, blue, or yellow you could basically make every single color that's in, let's say, this palette. All you really would need is three colors and you can mix them so much that they would end up just being a huge rainbow of every single color that exists. That's really important to know, sometimes people get caught up on, I don't have the right tones and whatever. I really would like to let people know that you can end up having a huge variety of colors. You don't need the fanciest pallets or anything to have them. You just need to know how to mix your colors correctly. I want to start out with this white, I tried to clean it the best I could. It's just a blank palette here, and we're going to start mixing. I'm going to do two versions of this, so you can also see the difference between using original, traditional red, blue, and yellow and a bit more modern take on this. We're going to start out right now using my paint sets here. I have this one here, and I have my chunky ones here too, but they're basically the same. It's just a regular watercolor paint set. You're going to want to get some of your red, I'm trying to see which red I think is the purest. Try not to choose a red that looks too orangey or too pinky. I'm telling you, I'm not going to get extremely technical with you here, I'm just going to do it in a more casual way. I have some red here. All I'm doing is just laddering up my paint set here and getting some into my palette. If you guys have more questions on transparencies and this kind of stuff and mixing with water, you can go back to the beginner classes. Right now we're just doing a little midtone of water and paint. I have some nice paint prepared here, then I'm going to grab some blue. Just quick tip, try not to grab a ultramarine blue, it needs to be a pretty basic pure blue, like that. If your blue is too dark, this exercise really won't work that well. That's a nice red, a nice blue, and some yellow. Just going to grab some of this yellow here. There we go. I'm using some nice clean water here to get the colors as pure as possible. There we go. I can just leave my paint set to the side for a bit. We're just going to start painting. What we're going to do right now is fill in this little chart. Just trying to get my brush pretty clean so that we can get some nice pure colors. Before I start, you can see here, try to make your original three colors look something like this. Try to get the purest yellow, the purest blue, and the purest red that you can. Here we go. We're going to just start filling this out. Here I have that our first one is going to be our primary color here, which is going to be this first red. Then I'm going to have a second primary down here, so three, four. I have this setup really geometric here, but you can just basically draw out a triangle, and this will work fine too. We have our pure blue over here. I'm just counting one, two, three, four. As I said, I have it laid out pretty fancy here, but it's perfectly fine if you just do a little triangle with your primary colors. Now we're going to start filling in secondary colors. Secondary colors are made by combining each two and two of your primary colors. For example, if we do yellow with red, we're going to get, trying to make it half and half. I'm going to do a lot of cleaning my brush here because I don't want to contaminate the other colors. I'm going to grab some of this yellow and mix it here. This needs a little bit more red. There we go. This is our secondary color. This is going to be a really nice, vibrant orange. We're going to place it here. Our next secondary color is going to be a green. We're just going to grab some of this yellow, just dab it on here. Again, cleaning my brush, really thoroughly, grabbing some blue and mixing it in here. I feel like I needed a little bit more paint there. So I'm going to go back and get some more yellow here, just a little bit more blue. Here, we have a nice green. Our second secondary color is this green here. Our last secondary color is going to be a nice violet. Mixing red, go. Cleaning this brush real nice, and a little bit of blue. Here, for the secondary colors, I tried to get a really equal mix of each primary color. As you can see now from these three colors now I have six colors. We can keep mixing and mixing and mixing until we eventually get almost every single color. What we're going to do now is tertiary colors. Here we go. We do this by combining our secondary colors with a little bit more of the primary color that's right next to it. For example, if we have this orange, we're going to grab some of this orange and just put a little bit more red into it. I'm going to have to make some more. There we go. What we have here is a red orange. That's going to be right in between our primary and secondary color. Same thing. If we add more yellow to this tone of orange, we're going to get a yellow orange. Which is like for example, if you take a close look here at my large slinky set, you can see there's a few different shades of yellow. What we're going to be basically creating right now is this shade of yellow, which is more of a orange yellow. Just to let you know that a lot of the colors that you already have in your paint set you could easily make. Here we go, and you can make your own. I'm just going to grab some more yellow and add it here. I think it's still needs a little bit more. I need to grab some more original yellow. Here we go. Here we have a beautiful, beautiful orange, yellow. Then when we mix our primary yellow with our secondary green, just add a little bit more yellow to our green. We're going to get a really cool, almost lemony green. I'm going create a little bit more green here. I'm running out of my primary. If you see that I run out of my primaries, I'm just basically adding a little bit more. No, wait, where are we? If we add a little bit more blue to our green, we're going to get a really nice turquoise. We're going get a really nice turquoise, greenish blue. Then we want to get a tone between our blue and violet. I have some violet here. I'm just going to add a little bit more blue to that tone that we made a while back. I feel it's still a little bit to blue so I can still go back and add just a tiny bit of red. Here we go. Usually for this tone, you'll get a really nicely darker blue, which is really pretty. Then, we need to get a color between our red and our violet. I'm going to grab more red and just add it to our mix. Blue is a pretty powerful color. Sometimes it takes a little bit more red to get this tone. Here we go. We have this really pretty shade of violet, red. This is color theory 101. This is just really basically primary colors, secondary colors, and tertiary colors. For example, if you would keep going and going and going and try to get colors between all of these, you would keep getting more interesting colors. There are still a million different shades of green that you can get by mixing greens and yellows. I'm hoping you get the point here that all we really need as our primary colors. Then we can just like keep on working with our paints and gets super interesting tones out of that. What I want to show you now is what I did here was use basic red, yellow, and blue. But for example, if you have, for example, Dr. Ph. Martin's paints, which are these here. These colors are more simple, are more similar to the colors that we have in a printer. Here we go. This is more similar to a magenta for example, instead of a red. What I'm going to do is do another color wheel using these tones, so you guys can see the difference that we get if we use just a different brand and also different tones. Just because I want you to know that yours doesn't have to look exactly like mine. It all really depends on what colors you have. Instead of red, I'm going to do this magenta tone a little bit. It's more like a hot pink. Some people say like these are the real primaries. You'll see how different the colors look. It's pretty impressive. Then this is an ice blue here. Here we go. If you guys have not used Dr. Ph. Martin's and have questions, you guys can check out my watercolor brands class. I talk a whole lot about them. I'm just making sure this is really clean here. Here we go. Now, we have our pure magenta, our pure blue, and our pure yellow. This is, I think daffodil yellow is a really nice pure yellow in Dr. Ph. Martin's, I use also an ice blue here, and this moss rose is really fun too. We're going to do the exact same thing here, but just using different tones. I just finished filling out this second little color wheel here. The reason I wanted to do two is because color can vary a lot depending on what type of watercolor you use and also what brand and tones. Usually when you use a pan set like the ones that I have here, your reds are going to be a little bit, I wouldn't say dull but you won't get this super hot pink that we do in, for example, a Dr. Ph. Martin's. They're both perfectly fine but if you notice, using our liquid watercolors, we got super bright colors. When we use our pan sets here they get a little bit more subtle. It really depends on what you prefer. But I personally, as you'll see when I work through this class, I mix everything that I have together. It's just a method that I think is really fun in getting new tones and new colors. The thing that I wanted to talk about before moving on to our next lesson is that within the color wheel, we have a few things going on. One of them is temperature. From this point to this side, we have warm tones right over here. From this point down to this point we have cooler tones. A red will always try to be a warmer tone and a yellow is always a warm tone. Blue is always, it's usually more of a cool tone. Pink can go into the cooler tones too. For example, let's say we have a violet here. This violet here it's closer to a red or a pink. It's going to be a warmer hue of violet. This violet is going to be a cooler violet. Some other colors can switch from side to side, but your yellow will always be warm and you're blue will pretty much always be cool. Another thing that's really important to note here, which I'm going to talk about in the next video is complimentary colors. You can see it here in our color wheel, the color that's right opposed to your, for example here red and green, those are complementary colors. You can see it here as well. For example, orange is a complimentary color to blue. What complimentary colors means is that they're the complete opposite that's basically what it means. There is no blue within an orange and there is no red within a green. Throughout the years, people have used complimentary colors in a lot of different ways. I'm going to talk about it a bit more in the next video but it's important to know. Complementaries also means that they're opposites. They can also complement each other when we're doing different types of artwork. Even in graphic design, it's used a whole lot. It's just basic color theory. A lot of the most famous logos you've ever seen are blue and orange. There's a reason for that. Each color brings out the most in the other. When you put them together, they really pop. Another thing is we have analogous colors too which are these color harmonies that we create for example, having all the different greens taking us to a yellow. When we mix these colors together, we create harmony. For example, taking a blue all the way to a pink or a red. If we paint a painting with these kinds of colors we'll create harmony as well. Those are a fail safe combinations. We'll also talk about that a bit more later on. But I just wanted to explain the super basics of color theory. We have primary colors, we have secondary colors, we have tertiary colors and then we have complimentary, analogous and we create harmony. We also have warm colors and cool colors. If we were using acrylics and we would add more white paint to our red, we would get different shades of pink. But remember, if you guys haven't taken, for example my watercolor for beginners class, we do a lot of transparency work. In this case, if we want to get some pinks out of our red, we would just add more and more water to get a more translucent wash. That way we could create different tones within just one color. That's basically it for this very first lesson. I will upload a picture of a color wheel just like this if you guys want to see it for reference. This is actually really fun activity to do. Your final project is going to be to create an abstract painting at the end of this class. But I always encourage my students to do all the exercises that I'm doing because I love to see how you figured it out and if you have any trouble creating your color wheel, why that was? Some people for example, have a hard time mixing blues and reds. Your purple can turn out a little bit muddy but I can help you out along the way. Just upload wherever you guys want to create here. I love taking a look at all the stuff that you guys do. This concludes our basic color theory first color wheel explanation. In this next video we are going to go onto complimentary colors. Now we're moving on to complimentary colors. As I explained in our first video, complementaries are the exact opposite. When we use complimentary colors, there is actually an ultimate goal to it. That means we're going to try to get our colors to be a bit more dirty. It makes them desaturated. A lot of people like using super bright colors but sometimes we don't want that. Sometimes we want colors that are a bit, I guess the word would be dirty. We can dirty up our colors. I'm just trying to create a super basic green here. I'm going to show you guys how complimentary colors work and what happens when we start mixing them. I'm just going to grab some of this red here and here we go. We have a little bit of some pure green here, right here in this guy, and then here we have some pure red. What I want to do here is to show you what happens when we start taking our red towards our green, and our green towards our red. We're going to get some really interesting things going on here. If we move this around here. You can see that for example, as our red gets closer to our green, it's going to turn into the side like brick red. I'm going to show you how to do that right now. Our first complimentary colors that we're going to use is red and green. I'm just going to start out with some pure green right here. Just a little bar green, and we have this little puddle of pure green, and we're just going to start adding some red to it little by little. As you can see already, our green is starting to transform a whole lot, we're just going to keep adding red to it. Now we're starting to get these really rich shades of brown. This screen that I used here, I think it was a little bit towards the yellow side, so our brown's look a little bit orange too. But what I basically want to show you is how to create browns. That's basically what the complimentary activity is for. You can see as we start to lose our greens by adding reds, we start getting these richer and richer browns. Just going to add a little bit of this brown to our red now, until we start to get this brick red. Now I'm adding some more red to the mix, and it eventually takes us back to red. This is a really interesting activity. A lot of people, when they paint shadows, they like to use complimentary colors with this too. For example, if you were trying to paint a jungle scene and you have leaves in there, where you have a shadow part it's really cool to add a little bit of red into there, because you don't want to just add some black paint in there. I'm telling you this complimentary colored trick really helps out when you want to get like your colors to pop. It's a really good activity to do, and I highly recommend using complimentary colors in your paintings, will also go a bit deeper into that as we keep talking about color mixing. Our second complimentary colors are going to be yellow and violet. You can tell here that violet is a complete opposite of yellow. Again, I told you that in the first video, but basically, what complimentary means is that there is absolutely no yellow in a violet and there is no violet in a yellow. They are complete opposites and when we start to mix them, some interesting stuff starts to happen. I'm going to just pour some, really nice yellow here. Try to get some pure yellow. Now for our second complimentary colors demonstration, we're going to take a yellow to a violet. Right now, I just created this pure yellow and this pure violet, just to have the colors already mixed. I'm going to start with painting some yellow here. Again, just the same as we did with green and red, we're going to do with yellow and violet. I have some yellow here, and I'm going to start adding some violet into the yellow puddle, very softly. If you guys have done my other classes, this is similar to what we did with the transparencies or the gradients, where we start adding slowly. Just a little reminder for anyone that has taken the other classes, this is just adding little by little. You can see here how I just took a little bit of violet and already I have this mustard yellow, and you start to get these like more interesting tones. This is what it looks like when we take yellow to violet, you get all these interesting range of tones within your color mixing. You can see that our red and greens are starting to dry. I just wanted to show you that, for example, with a pen set, you have a lot of different browns here. These browns can actually be recreated by mixing your reds and greens. I mean, your eye will start to notice this stuff with time as you practice watercolor mixing. But for example, I can see that this brown looks a lot more like this brown than it does these browns. So this is a warmer, reddish brown, and you could actually get that by doing something like this here. Having a nice rich red and adding a little bit of green, you could actually recreate this tone right here. That's just a little tip on how we get these different browns and different shades of darker tones that are a little bit more like earthy. For example, this green here would actually be something like this. That means that it was like a pure green and it has just a little bit of red pigment in it to get this dirtier tone of green. Just a little observation there. Now we're going to start doing our last complimentary color exercise, which is going to be blue to orange. I'm actually going to create some fresh blue and orange here. I'm just going to take a moment and wipe off what I already have here, and we can begin doing our blue and orange. Now for our final complimentary activity, we are going to do blue to orange. I was just mixing in a nice pure orange here and some blue. I encourage you guys to do this exercise. It's really interesting to see how you can start to get your colors to be a bit more organic, a little. It's fun to create your own, instead of just grabbing directly from your pants or whatever you have. It's really cool to be like, "I made these different browns", and I swear it'll look way more interesting if you make your own colors. We're going to start here with just some orange. Again, remember complimentary colors mean they are the opposite of each other, and they also complement each other, which means that one will make the other one pop. Here we go. I'm going to start adding a little bit of blue slowly to our little orange puddle here. We'll start to get these interesting browns. So we just finished our orange to blue. Now that I look at it here, it looks a little bit more orange-yellow than I wanted it to. When this happens, since it has a little bit more yellow in it than it does read, our browns are actually going to turn a little bit greener. So you can see it right here, since yellow and blue turn into green. You can see how powerful the combination between yellow and blue is, that it actually peaks out some really cool greens here. I really wanted to do this complimentary activity. We'll talk more about it later on within the next videos. Color is so much about like a feeling, and there's a certain something to it when you really create your own tones. Just like see the difference between, for example, all this range within here. They're all technically different browns, but they really do look totally just a whole other thing because they are made out of different tones. But they are still all these like muddy, earthy browns in here. This is a really interesting activity to do. I highly recommend you guys do this too. It would be great if you guys uploaded your charts of your complimentary colors. In the next video we're going to go onto temperature. 4. Temperature: We're ready to talk a little bit about temperature. We're actually going do a really cool activity after this, but I really wanted to just go over the basics of temperature and which colors go on which side. I have here a little chart that I made out, we have warmer colors here, we're going do cool colors here. This is not officially part of color theory, but I like to add a little area for neutral colors. For me, neutral colors go within the gray and beige colors. I like to use those two when I think of colors. Again, these little charts that I create here, you can just watch them or if you really want to like go for it and do the activities with me, that would be awesome. The more practice you get with color, the better. It's like really about feeling everything and getting your hands dirty with all these different colors. Right now what I'm going to do is I'm not going to really be like super precise with my color palette like I was in the beginning exercises. Now I'm just going to start to like fill out color more, and I have my patent set here with all my palettes that I usually work with. This is what my paints always look like. The way I like to mix paint is, I think most watercolor artists do, it's not like paying too much attention, but feeling out which color goes with which and where you should place them. For example here, now that we're starting out with warm colors, I noticed that this area here I usually do use for warm colors. If you can tell this area here, I use for more cool colors and I have some greens in here. You do separate the colors you use by area. For example, here I have some warmer violets and I mean, here I have some cooler greens, so you can start to see how temperatures are really important when we color mix, because that's the way we separate our tones. We're going to have fun here, I'm going start dabbing some paint of every single tone of warm colors that I see here within my palette. I'm going to start with grabbing some yellow here, which is like the ultimate warm. I'm going to start moving around here and getting, we have some ochres too. This part of the activity is really more about like feeling the color and just trying to experiment and test them out. I have some reds here. We can use some of the orange that we made a while back for a color wheel, that goes perfectly here. The fun thing about watercolors is just like grabbing your color palette and just mixing, not really worrying too much about. For example, when we use acrylics, we try to get like a pure color and work with that one and with watercolors, it's really about like this flow that we create. I do want to get you guys into this space where you feel really comfortable mixing your color and aren't afraid to just go for it and just like do new creations. I have this really cool orange green like here. Also, it's important to keep in mind that some of our greens are actually warm in the warm family too. I'm going create a fun warm green here, so you guys can see what I mean. There we go. This is actually just green with some extra yellow in it. We can go even a little bit greener and it would still be warm, just like we have here. I would not add more blue to this because if we start adding more blue, it might go into the cool section, so just a little tip there. Within our color mixing, we can also add a little bit more water and that will give us a lighter tone of lime green. Yeah, that's as far as I would go with greens. Everything else is going to be about adding more and more yellow. I have this ocher that I really love and this ocher is definitely a warm hue. Ocher is basically like a brownish, yellow and so cool for earthy tones, we're going to talk about how to create different tones based on certain themes later on because you'll notice I say, or at the tones a lot and especially when we work with warm colors like this. I'm just going to keep observing everything that I have here on my color palette, there's some really nice. You can tell it like this green and red they're actually complimentary if you remember but they are still both within the warm range here. Also don't forget that we also have warm violets, so that's important too. You see this is a little warmer violet here and it can even go for a little bit more violet in here just like that and it's still going to be warm. If we were to add some, see that's as far as I would go with a violet family in the warm side, if we were to add more blue to it, it would turn into a cool hue, a cool tone. Just playing around here. I think color mixing should be fun for me. Color is one of my favorite things ever when I paint. I do actually think a lot about these things when I pick paints, like what feeling do I want to give my painting and color has so much to do with it. Also, if you've taken my past class when we actually do like larger projects, I talk a lot about intention. For example, you can have let's say a painting them of rock or something like that, something very generic and if you add cooler tones to it, it's going to be or maybe it's like under the sea theme, so like just start to think of what warm and cool tones of remind you of, and that's a really fun activity that we're going to do next but right now I'm going do my cool tones here. I can see already here that in my palette I have a bunch of cool tones already that were dried up from past projects. I'm just going to start wetting my brushing here and see what comes up. I have this, I can see this cool turquoise starts to come up first. This is actually in the green family, but it has a bunch of blue in it so it can fit in perfectly here. In the same way that your warm colors can go towards greens and violets, your cool tones can also go towards green and violets but they're going to be way different. I'm going do a little bit of cool greens here so you can see what that looks like. You see this green here is way different than this green that we have up here but they are both technically greens, they just have more of one side than they do the other. For example, these greens remind me a lot of the ocean and these greens remind me a lot of citrus or maybe grass turquoise. Turquoise is a really good example of a very cool green, I love using this color in my paints. I think we can even go a little bit. You see that's probably as cool as I would go if we want to get some cool greens. If we add more yellow to that, it would turn into a warmer hue and we're not looking for that at this moment. Also remember you can get your violet to be a little bit cooler too. I'm using a variety of violets here. As you can tell, this violet it looks way different than this violet that we have here when we did our warm hues, warm temp. I just filled out some of my favorite cool tones here. As you can see, there's a super wide variety of cool tones that you can use, everything from like super deep ultramarine blue to some nice very soft greenish blues. I'm going talk a lot about like fillings during this class and stuff because I really think that color has so much to do with it. If you look at this side here and this side here, you can already start to fill something different, and that's exactly what we're going to do in our next activity. Before moving on to that though, I want to save a little spot for neutrals. This is not officially part of basic color theory that you would necessarily learn in school or anything, but I really like to add it there because I feel when I'm painting and I add a little bit of gray or certain tones of brown and stuff into my paintings, I feel it doesn't really change the temperature over all that much, but they're nice colors to have as compliments for our general paintings. I'm just going do a little area here for neutrals, and you can do that too along with me if you want to. I just think it's something that has a little bit of warm and cool in it, but is more going towards browns and blacks. Some people actually don't even like using black watercolor in their work but I do. I think that if you mix all your colors together, you might get a nice black, but I like using black watercolor as is or even black ink. I'm going to do that here, just work with some basic neutrals here. I just went through a couple of neutral colors. I do know, I see that within these colors like certain browns, for example, this ocher can be a little bit warmer or this sepia can be a little bit cooler, like I do notice that, I do see it. But for me, these colors I like to call them neutral just because I feel like you can combine any of these with all this other range and it won't really change like the temperature of our painting. I think that this is a cool color scheme in general just like using some neutral colors, and I think that's a lot of fun. If you guys are deciding to do everything along with me, I would definitely do this little temperature chart because our next activity is going to be doing an actual painting using different temperatures so you can see how the entire thing just changes so much depending on what colors we use. I'm hoping you got this down. It really does look different when you look at them all together in little separate areas. We are ready to start our next activity. 5. Warm & Cool Activity: Okay, class. This is our warm and cool activity. This is actually an activity that I really want you guys to do. It's super fun. I think the first time I did this was because a college professor had us do this in our color theory class, and ever since I've really loved just this exercise in general, because it really helps us see how important color is. The basic thing that we're going to do here is just try to have two drawings that are either exactly the same or very similar. I just drew out two drawings, it's a mountain and flowers, and greens and two circles up here. If you want to be super precise, you can actually trace the same drawing twice, or you can just double it and do it side to side. What we're really going to do here is just paint the exact same drawing, but using different tones. On our left side here we're going to do warm tones and on our right side here we're going to do cool tones. If you can see my color palette here, the way I usually work is that, I already have my warm tones separate here and then my cool tones on another side here, and I have some greens here that can go either way. I actually have some Violet's up here that I can also mix into my warms and cools. This is the way that we would usually work with watercolors. You don't really just only use one color. We really tried to mix everything together. We really tried to mix everything together here and get some really interesting colors. Basically just go back to remembering that we have are yellow, orange, red and warm violet and warm green to our warm colors. Then our cool colors are going to be the cool violet, the cool green, and a lot of blue. I am actually going to work at this for a while and you guys can see how I do it. For sure do this activity. I do really want you guys to upload yours and when I'm done painting, I'm actually going to talk a little bit about how each color made us feel. If you guys need help painting with watercolors in general, definitely go back to the beginner class. Especially in the monochrome activity that we did back then. You'll really know how to use transparencies and all those stuff. But right now this class is really focusing on color. That is what I am going to focus on today. Just check out what I'm doing while we keep rolling the camera and then we're going to talk a little bit later. I'm going to just start painting and you guys check it out. Right, I just finished painting my two little landscapes here, and on our left side we have warm tones and on our right side we have cool tones. What I really wanted to do with this activity was show you guys how the exact same drawing, the exact same image can look totally different when we use warm or cool tones. Not only does it visually look different, but there's a lot of feelings attached to color. Just right off the bat, really quickly, one thing that I noticed when I was painting was, for example, we have two circles here, and when I did warm tones I felt more like painting it into a Sun. It felt like it was hot, it was daytime and then here I felt like adding a little moon-shape in there. It's just a super simple variation. I could even, I don't know, maybe add a few little stars here. I think, just immediately, the first thing I think is warm is day time and cool is more a night time afternoon. A few things I do want to go over is this activity, what I want you guys to do is, just write down how do you feel while you were painting the warm side and while you were painting the cool side. For example, yellow makes me think of sunshine. I'm going to write down here, sunshine. Orange makes me feel a fire, heat. Red also makes me think of passion, while these cooler tones make me think of something that is calmer, relaxed. I also feel like this is, actually talking about temperature, this is hot and here it's actually cold. When you look at this painting, you go into this little world here and you can feel it's super earthy and warm, and you can actually just feel in a different place than you do here. When I look at this side, it does actually make me even feel a little bit sad, maybe. Here I feel happy. All these little subtle differences and just a quick note on color before I keep writing down these feelings, see I do have similar ideas here where the plants are green, but look how they are all like a warm green and here we have a cool green. I did use a little bit of browns in here, but I did use an okra and here I used a cooler brown. There's actually a little bit of violet in each of them, but each of them going towards a different direction. Right now I'm just going to write down a few other characteristics that I think make me feel when I see warm or cool, and I'll just quickly go over them when I'm done. I really want you guys to do this activity and especially write down what makes you feel the difference. I feel like cool tones make you feel distance too. I'm just going to keep writing stuff and I'll be back with you in a second. Okay, I just wrote down a couple of extra things. I wrote down cozy. I wrote down daytime, joy, fun, energy. Here I wrote down stuff like serious, night, twilight, spiritual. If your background is in graphic design like mine is, you'll know that warm and cool tones have a lot to do with, for example, how we sell stuff or whatever. It really does affect the whole feeling of a painting. When we're doing art, we're not necessarily thinking of how do we want to sell this or whatever, but we do want to think of a feeling and what we want to represent in our art. I think this is a really cool exercise to really see how we have one painting here and then something totally different when we look at the other side. Please do this with whatever drawing you guys have. This is just a simple style that I do. It's just a little bit to do with nature, but you guys can even do a portrait or whatever your style is, you can do it in warm and cool tones, and please write down how you felt and what you see a differences. For example, just a quick thing that I can think of now, is that if I would've painted crystals, maybe even if it's a blue crystal, like it's a sapphire. If it's orange crystal, it's a citrine. Even in every single element, color has so much to do with it, and just make sure that you separate it into warm and cool tones, and just show me your results. Tell me or write down how it made you feel, directly on the paper is perfectly fine. This concludes our lesson on temperature. Now we're going to go onto a little bit more color mixing and harmonies. [ 6. Color Schemes & Harmony: Okay. By this point we've already gone through our basic color wheel, and we talked a little bit about complimentary colors and we did a really nice exercise on temperature. Now we're going to go into something called color schemes and harmony. We're going to do three really simple activities here. First, we're going to work with monochrome, which is just basically getting different tones and value out of just one color, and then we're going to do a little bit extra light complimentary colors, and we're going to do a little exercise on analog colors. I'm going to keep the color wheel handy if we ever need it. But we're going to start with our very first activity which is, if you guys took my beginner class you guys will know this really well. It's just the monochrome activity, it's monochromatic. Basically what this is, is just using one color and this is where our transparencies activity that we did in the beginner class comes in. With watercolors, we get different tones and values with one color by using less or more water. In this case, just a super, super easy activity here. I'm going to start out with a pretty concentrated paint, I'm just going to do some little hearts cause I'm tired of doing little circles so I'm just playing around here. You can see that by adding more water we have the same pigment, it's just one color but we get different tones and values out of that one color. If you guys want to know more about transparencies, we do have a whole class just all about that. Here we go and this class is really just about color, so make sure you know the basics about watercolor before enrolling here just so this is a little bit easier for you. They're super basic activity here. All we did was have one color and then we have different tones and values using that same color by adding water. Which at the same time would be called transparencies, if you are more interested in watercolor as a medium. Then here, we're going to do a little activity on complimentary colors and before I get started on that one I actually was looking around this particular book here, and I wanted to show you how I have a few paintings that I've recently done here. For example, his one here it's just a bouquet it's wrapped in craft paper. But notice how we really do use complimentary colors a lot in art, and sometimes you don't even realize you do it but when you look for all complimentary tones and you want one color to pop more. For example, here most of the flowers are these violet tones and so are these berries here so I used yellows for these little guys here. If you remember, here you go, so yellow and violet these two are opposites so that means that they compliment each other. Whenever you have something that is purple, if you have some yellow next to it it'll really make it pop. Same with here, like the pinks which are towards reds with the greens, so pink and green that's why it's such a fine combination too, you can see here, when the tint gets a little bit desaturated it goes to this minty green. Those two are complimentaries as well. Just some fun little way to see it actually playing out in real life, like in real artwork or like a real piece that someone thought out and decided to choose colors based on the color wheel rules. Having one more back here, it's pretty similar in that, here we go. So I painted these little bugs here and decided that I wanted to go heavy on greens, but had a few little bugs in there and I wanted to do red or hot pink in them. Basically, the only extra color I used that wasn't within the greens was just a little bit of indigo but mostly this hot pink to do some contrast with the green. I saw this right now and I thought it would be really interesting to show you guys how someone would actually use this in real life when painting a specific piece of art. I'm going to go back here and we're actually going to just do a little bit of harmony with complimentaries. I like that combination like pinks and greens. For example, let's say we're going to paint a few, I'm thinking of doing some little strawberries here. If you take a look in nature you'll see a lot of complimentary colors acting out. Here we go here, and I actually have some bright colors in here. I'm just grabbing a little bit of green and I'm going to do a little stem on each one. I'm grabbing just in separate green. I'm just really playing around right now and having fun while trying to really do my activities with these rules we just figured out. Once these little areas can dry, I can go back and do some fun little seeds on them, and decorate a bit. But as you can see, this is another type of color harmony, so I'm going to just block this here for a second, so you can see how green and red actually go really well together. It's actually a combination that we use a lot. Because it does exist in nature, even if you think of these are strawberries, but you can think of anything like apples, and tomatoes, a lot of vegetables have green and red in them. That's another type of harmony which is also like what I just showed you here in my art work. This is a harmony with complimentary colors. Another type of harmony is one that I see a lot in a lot of people's work online, and it has to do with combining colors that are close to each other on the color wheel. In this case, let's say we'll choose, let's say we can do this harmony here. It's going from an orange, yellow to yellow, green yellow, green and then a turquoise. If you stick to the colors that are close to each other on the color wheel, you'll get 100 percent analog harmony. It also works the same if you go to this side and you get a turquoise to the blues and violets. If you only use these colors, you'll get a really nice harmony as well. Let's just try it out here, I'm going to use a little bit of, try to think if I wanted to do the greens, yeah the greens are fun. We'll just use a little bit of turquoise here and I'm just going to do a little abstract to painting here. Hiding a little bit of the orange yellow that we saw. You'll see this type of color combination a lot in, for example, fabric design and, and that stuff. [MUSIC] This is how you get an analog harmony. If you just concentrate on this area here, you can see that no matter what, these colors are going to combine, they're going to really go well together. I am just going do a little cute finishing thing here where I have some white ink and I thought these would be really cute strawberries. Again, just to see how important color really is, if I would've done, let's say purple blobs with a little green stem, it could have been a grape or like any other fruit, but again, I use the red and the green, so it reminded me of strawberries. Something that I want to really point out before moving forward because in our next activity, we're going to actually do some intuitive color mixing. Something that I really want you guys to notice here is that, the most important part about creating like color schemes and just like starting to develop your personal color palette, is actually excluding certain colors, limiting yourself to using just a few tones to get a really cool color harmony. For example, here we have a few warms and a few of few cools. We're not necessarily thinking about temperature here, but if you notice in this area there's no purple, there's no red in here. We're eliminating those to get this certain harmony. I know it's really easy to want to use every single color that you have in your palette. But the most important part here is for you guys to really concentrate on which colors am I going to use and which ones am I definitely not going to use. This is just a really simple way to explain how color schemes and harmony start to come alive. Again just going over it really quickly, this is monochrome, where we use one color and we get different tones and values out of using it. In watercolors its transparency, but it basically means it's lighter or it's more saturated. Complementaries, if you guys remember our class just on complementaries, violet goes to yellow, orange goes to blue, and red goes to green. Harmony is just basically staying on just one side of the color wheel, just on one area and excluding the other. This is really cool activity to do as well. I do encourage you guys to do as much as you want out of this. There is actually a final project, but these little warm-up activities are great for practice. Really feel free to upload yours and I'd really love to see what you guys create, just doing the simple activities. Now onto intuitive color mixing. Now we're going to begin to talk a little bit about intuitive color mixing. We're about halfway through the class now. I just wanted to go over what we've seen before starting this next exercise, which is really where you guys are going to let go of more of the technical stuff, and start to really feel the color and just notice a little bit of what you've learned, but I really do want you guys to actually pay attention to the intuitive part. So not be like two set on rules. We just started out doing some basic color theory here. We did a few color wheels using pencil watercolors and liquid watercolors, just to show you what a different tone can give you a different range. If we look at our color wheel, we have different styles of harmony. We can have harmony here and analog combinations, which are the colors that are close to each other on the color wheel. Complimentary colors here, which are actually opposites. Red is opposite to green, yellow is opposite to violet, and blue is opposite to orange. When we mix these together, we get all these interesting browns. The reason that I want to go over this is because in this exercise that we're going to do now, we're actually going to be paying attention to all of these things we've learned and just try to apply it, but in a very loose fun way. We also did a little activity here with temperature. We just separated warm and cool tones and I like to add a little neutral area here. A bunch of grays and browns and just washy blacks. This is going to be a big part of your color mixing as well. You'll see later on as we start to go more into these activities. Then this was the warm and cool segment of the class. This activity was specifically, to show you how the exact same image can differ so much depending on what tones and colors you use. This will apply to anything. If your color palette is more earthy and has ochres and browns, and if you have a different color palette that maybe has a bunch of greens and just bright blues, you could even have a painting be set in a certain time of year. Let's say the ochres and browns would be in the fall, and a super bright colors would be something like in the springtime. Just keep that in mind, the way we use color really affects the rest of our artwork. Obviously, we wrote down here how it made us feel, which is such a fun part. It's important to really lay it out before we even forget what we did and why we did it. Lastly, our last video was about just a quick exercise in color schemes and harmony. We first did monochrome and you guys did this in the watercolor for beginners class in a larger illustration, but I just did a quick little example here on how you can get different tones and values using just one color. In the case of water color, we get this by using more or less water with our actual paint. Then here we have a little complimentary exercise. I just did a little quick painting using two sets of our complementaries. Remember the complementaries again are opposite from each other. In this case, here we go, we had some red and the complimentary is green, which is the opposite. Again, yellow is to violet and orange is to blue. Then again, we did a little harmony exercise with analog colors. We're not really thinking in terms of warm and cool here, we're more thinking in terms of which side of the color wheel we're on. Just a few little activities here before we actually start doing our intuitive color mixing. I separated my paper here in two sections. You can do this as many times as you want, but I think two is at least good to start to get the hang of this. The trick here is to limit yourself to three tones to create harmony. You can do this using two or three tones. What I mean by tones I mean actual, like for example, your pan set, you can choose this brown, this red, and this green, and that's it. Just pick three actual colors in your pan set or your tubes, and then we're going to just basically start to fill color out. This is the way that I like to paint. I know when you open up your pan set, it's super exciting, and you just want to use everything in your pan set. But not everything is a rainbow. Not everything has to be every single color, and the way we really get this organic feel and personality in a piece of artwork is by really limiting ourselves to certain color tones. I'm actually going to start that now. You guys please do this exercise along with me. Here we go. Let's get ready to start our intuitive color mixing activity. Once again, you're going to limit yourself to three tones to create harmony. You can do this either with two or three tons. I'm just going to choose three in this occasion. I grab this clean little palette here so that you guys can really see that I'm not really using anything else except the three tones that I'm going to choose here. The first one I'm going to choose is, I really like this super deep blue, so I'm just going to lather up my little pan color here, and I'm going to add some, just to have some prepared here. If you guys have taken my other classes, you'll know by now that I don't only use my pan sets or only use tubes, I just like to mix different brands that I have together. I just think that that's a way more organic way of painting. But if you guys only have a pan set, you can totally do this just with your pan set or just with your liquids or whatever you guys have. But in this case, I grabbed a little bit of this blue that I really like from Schmincke, and I love Cotman, Winsor & Newton, Ochre. It's similar to this color, but I like Winsor & Newton's brand a little bit better for this specific color. I'm just going to grab a little bit of that. Just lay it here, and then I think this mauve tone is pretty cool too. I'm just going to use a little bit of this mauve tone that I have here. Three, pretty deep color is actually. If you notice, I didn't do this intentionally, but I actually did choose something similar, here we go, to our primary colors, which is some tone of red, some tone of blue, and some tone of like yellowy orange, which are these three. I didn't do that intentionally, but this is what I'm trying to explain here. Sometimes you choose stuff just intuitively, knowing that I wanted to have a little bit of contrast, but have these three colors be in the same family. What I mean by this is these are actually pretty deep tones. They're not super bright, and I'm actually going to get this pan set out of the way because we won't need it right now. We're just going to limit ourselves to these three tones. This is the way I would usually create an entire painting. I can't speak for other artists, but I get compliments on how I mix color and stuff. All I can say is what I think is the best way to do it, and for me, it's really about selecting certain tones and staying within that range. Sometimes if you just keep adding and adding color, everything looks like super bright and super rainbowy, and sometimes we want to get a certain feeling, and in this case it's going to be a little bit of deeper tones. Yeah, so these tones remind me of the 70s for some reason and that's cool too. You guys can start feeling out like what does this remind me of? What does this feel like? I don't want to get too feely with you, but that's really what it's all about color. There's a lot of theory to it, but really it's about feeling and just exploring why something makes you go to a certain place in your mind. What we're going to do here is we're going to do our best to get the most out of these three colors. I'm going to do a lot of mixing with the mauve, the blue, and the Ochre in different ways, and we're going to get a super, super dynamic little color swatch here, and you're going to really enjoy this activity. It's really fun and it's really great to start to get ideas on how we're going to use our paints. Right now, I'm just using each of them in an individual way to start to see how it'll look together. Remember, with watercolors, if you add water to your mix, you'll get a totally different tone. I'd like to do that a lot when I do little color pallets. Here I'm just grabbing a little bit of Ochre and sometimes I even like to touch the base of the other color to see how they start to mix together. I do a lot of art licensing and that means that I work with clients that use my watercolors for certain products, and a lot of times I have to send them little color boards before moving forward with one of my drawings that's going to eventually turn into a watercolor because these little color boards are almost like mood boards. They really start to show you what the whole painting is going to feel like and look like. That's a little tip there. Right here we have the three colors we're going to use. I'm just going to continue to mix all of these three together. I'm going to start out by just grabbing a little bit of Ochre and putting it here, and just some of the blue that I had left over here, and it's going to create this dirty greenish color. Here's a little trick. There is no way that these colors won't go together because they're all part of the same. Each one of the colors that's going to come out of here is going to have a little bit of their parents in them, if that makes any sense. I'm actually just going to keep on going here. I'm going to grab a little bit more Ochre and add it to this little mix that we had here, and we're going to get this dirtier Ochre tone. I'm going to add a little bit of the mauve to that little mix here. Then you can see how I'm going to start to get this entirely different color range using just these three tones. Well, these three colors that I have here. Then I want to get a really deep blue in here. We're just going to keep mixing and mixing. Sometimes you're going to have, like right now here I have in this little area, it's mostly muff, it's like 90 percent muff. But I'm just going to touch just slightly here with little bit of blue and see what cool tone I get here. You can see that it's still looks like this, but it's a little bit deeper because I added some of that blue in there. Then I'm just going to water down that same one here to have a little separate square. Again, as I told you, it's fun to sometimes grow a little bit of the other paint and just add it here to see also how they're all going to blend together. That's a cool thing with watercolors. You're usually going to be using them all in a very dynamic way. I also like to see what they look like when they start to mix together, something like this here. I usually do this with my little swatches as well. Just to see what they look like when they actually start mixing color to color. I'm just going to continue to fill these out right now and once we're done with this we'll talk a little bit and start with our next little swatch here. I just finished our first little experiment here with intuitive color mixing. I think that these little color swatches turn out so beautiful and it has to do a lot with the way we're mixing color, but also just because watercolors are beautiful medium in general. I mean, you can just see here how the color starts to mix and we get this like super interesting texture. That's one of the reasons why I absolutely love working with watercolor. If you noticed, I did a little bit of mixing within each swatch just like see what the colors are going to look like together. If you guys do this using just three colors, if you choose wisely, there's no way that these colors are not going to go well together. What I mean by that, is as I said before like these are the three parent colors here. It was the blue, the muff and this ocher. All of this is just like a huge range of tones that we can get using just three colors. We have like super interesting deeper purples here and we have dirty or like, grayish greens. Just like that here looks like an olive green. We have softer almost like pinks just by using super watery ocher with the muff. There's just so much we can get here and like a bunch of blues and different purples. If you guys have a project, I highly recommend doing before I start like a big illustration, sometimes I just sit with my little like sketch watercolor and like feel the colors first. This really helps you to start to just get a better understanding of what your final painting is going to be like. Our actual final project for this class is going to be an abstract painting using just color as your main subject matter. This is really good to start practicing for that. Now, I'm going to do another one just to have two here and for you guys to see how different two separate ones can look. I really like this when and actually it does look like pretty bright and fun, but also it looks like, I don't know, it does feel a little bit earthy because of the ocher. I always like me personally, I love having like these earthy tones within my work, but now I'm going to do something I think that's a bit brighter. I want to show you how like something similar can look totally different when you mix up the tones a little bit. I'm going to use this opera. It's a really cool like bright pink. This is from Holbein. I'm just going to switch around, here we go my little palette to have a new little workspace here. This opera pink is super fun because it's just very bright and happy. I really enjoy working with this color. Then we're going to do some lavender. This is a really fun tone as well. It's almost like a pastel watercolor. We're going to choose something to do, a little bit of contrast with these two. It's actually Payne's gray, so Payne's gray, it's almost a black but it's not really black. I just wanted to show you how you can have something very bright and pink and something like super soft and lavender have cool contrast with something very deep and dark and mysterious, which is Payne's gray. If you notice in this little color palette here, I intuitively chose not to add any form of yellow to it. I can start to imagine like what this is going to look like. I can start to know by having a little bit of color and knowledge that if I leave out yellow, I'm not going to get any form of green in here and I'm not going get any form of like orange and yellows. I'm going to probably have something that goes from this range here. It's going to be something a little bit cooler. We're going to have some cool pinks. I didn't want to do this little Payne gray here to have like a little contrast element. Sometimes you do want to stick within like two colors and then just have one pop in to have a little bit of contrast and keep it on the darker side. I'm going to do the same thing I did here. I'm going to start out with like parent colors, which are going to be here at the top. This bright pink is super fun. If you're watching this class just when it comes out, we did film a watercolor brand class at the same time, which will come out in a few months after this one. Wait for that to talk all about what kind of watercolors I like to use. If you're watching this years after we filmed this then you already have all the resources here on my skill share page. Just dropped a little bit of paint here. This is actually a really fun hot pink. [inaudible]. This little lavender color is super fun too. Here I have a super bright one with a little pastel tone. Again, I'm using one side a bit deeper and another one washed down with a bit of water. Then I'm going to grab some of the paint. Gray, which is almost black but not entirely. In this case, this is going to be my accent tone. If I were to paint something larger, I'm probably thinking that I might choose two of these to be the main characters and one of them would be the accent color. I'll explain more about that later on. But for now, I'm just going to start doing exactly what I did with the other example, which is just mixing together what I have. As I imagined I'm going to get these super fun purples in here. This is mostly pink with just a little bit of the lavender in there. I'm going to put a little bit of a lighter wash just down here. I like to do little rectangles because I get to fill the whole space and really feel what it's going to look like. I'm just going to start with that here. Also Payne's gray is going to let us have a bunch of different shades of gray that we can work with. What happens if we get our lavender a little dirty here? You get a deeper blue which is really interesting too. Then what happens if to this mix that we have here we add a little bit of the pink? You can already see how dynamic this is getting. Remember I also like to do little mixes within each swatch sometimes just like I did here just to see how my colors are going to work together. A little bit of water here. I'm just going to continue to do this for a bit. Remember this exercise, I do want you guys to upload yours. It's really important to do this a few times and start to really just, you know, as everything else in watercolor it's about practice. You guys do this as much as you want because I'm telling you it really gives you the confidence to start doing some cool color mixing activities. I just finished my little second color swatch here in the intuitive color mixing activity. Just to remind you guys, you have to limit yourself to three tones. If you can do it in two that's great. I just wanted to show you the differences between these two little colors swatches I did. First of all, notice how different it looks when we have a form of yellow in here. We get a lot of greens. We get a lot of brick tones and stuff. Here I had a super bright pink, a lavender and some gray. It's really interesting to see how just by looking at the color you can imagine a totally different mood. A totally different painting. This reminds me more of unicorns or fantasy stuff. This reminds me personally more of minerals and earthy stuff. That's a big part of this class. Actually, our next activity is going to be all about creating your personal color palettes, thinking of certain themes. Right now we're just looking at the kind of color combinations we get by mixing just three colors. You can see here, as I expected, we were going to get more of colors on this range. Since we have no yellow there is absolutely no orange or no green in here. That happens when you eliminate one of the primary colors from the equation. If we have no form of yellow, you will get no green and no orange. Here, it's almost like a yellow orange. Which is this? Ocher. You can see that we do have these more greenish tones and we have some fun colors going towards the orange. We do get a larger range of that. If you keep a form of yellow out of it, you get something more like this. We have lavender and the hot pink and the gray. Which gray won't really a port a significant tone change. It'll just add accent color, which I think, since gray has no primary color in it. You guys need to do this at least two times. You'll see that it's super, super fun. If you guys took for example, my textures class, we did a texture swatches. This class is going to be a lot about color swatches. You'll start to discover, I already have a lot of practice in this and I already know what kind of colors I like to mix together. But you guys just experiment. Right now, even if it feels like a weird yellow with a weird blue or whatever, just go with it and maybe a super bright lemony yellow like this you might think won't go with those super dark indigo but it actually does. You can get some amazing dirty greens in there and stuff and just go with it. Choose three tones or two and get everything you can with these little color swatches. Now we're going to start with our next activity which is going to be similar to this but we're actually going to think of certain themes before we do our final project. 7. Personal Color Palette & Color Themes : I'm super excited about this lesson because it's called personal color palette, and this is the real goal that I want you guys to achieve in this class. We already talked a little bit about some technical stuff and the basic color in theory, but this is where I think it starts to get super, super interesting. For me color is a lot more about a feeling. It's important to know the basics, but you really start to have to feel your colors and colors can be categorized in so many different ways, times like eras, color can also take us back to maybe a geographical place in the world or it can even take us to even think about certain places. You guys will see what I mean as we move along, but what I'm going to do now is start doing our color swatches and you'll do it with me. What I want us to do is like separate your page or do entire pages, it doesn't really matter, but you have to think of a theme. I'm going to say it again, not everything is a rainbow. The actual point of this class is to really start to select and choose the colors wisely, and fill them out and not just do everything super bright and use everything in my palette. We really want to do a little selection here. The first color theme that I can think up of is a swamp, super swampy colors, so I'm going to write down swamp here, and you guys will see how fun this exercise really is because every time you do a little swatch, you're going to start to feel differently in general with what you're painting. I'm just going to start out by doing a little swamp here. I just wrote down swamp, that's it. What I'm going to do here is think of different colors that you can see when we think of a swamp, so a swamp is like a lagoon, the water is usually murky. It's not necessarily super crisp like a Caribbean Sea would be, it's more of darker greens and you can think of dirt mixed with water, a lot of brown and stuff. What I'm going to do is just use a couple of greens here. I have some leftover ocher that we used in the past video, and I think I'm going to use this emerald green too as one of my bases. You can also choose just three colors or if you start to feel like you need to add another color, you can go ahead and do that too. But just try to keep in mind that we're going to try to stay within the same world, our little universe we're creating. My case here it's going to be a swamp, I think a lot, like I said, dirty waters, a murky. What animals would live there? There would probably be maybe an alligator or insects, reptiles. I'm just going to start filling this out and I'm just going to use some really fun greens here. This is the individual Green and I think it's actually pretty bright. Actually, you can even use your complimentary skills here which is if I have this green and I want to get it to be a little bit darker or dirty, I'm going to add a little bit of that red that I had there and make it a really deep green. That's another little trick that you learned in the complimentary color exercise. If you add some red to your green, you're going to get these super dark. I think ocher is a great element for these type of tones too because it can give us these warmer browns because it has a little bit of yellow in it. I'm just going go there and I think this palette is going to be mostly greens and browns, so I'm just going to keep working on that. Remember I just have my little color mixing section here. It would really be out of character for me to right now pick up some bright pink, like it has nothing to do with a swamp, and that's what I want you to do now, just think of color concepts, color themes, and what colors would live there, and use the skills that you've learned in this class to create something. The ultimate goal is for me to look at that swatch and be like, yes, totally that looks like a swamp. Our first one is going to be swamp. I'm just going to keep painting here and then we'll go on to the next one, which we'll start to think of when I'm done with this one. I just finished my first little color theme here. Remember you're going to do personal color palettes inspired in certain themes. In this case, I chose ecosystem which is a swamp. I thought swamp was a good way to start out because it's a place and I wanted a feeling. Actually, if you guys need help, you can always go to Google and just write the word swamp, and if you notice, the colors that I chose actually have a lot to do with a swamp. It's a bunch of murky waters, dirty green, a little bit of vibrant greens in there because there is a lot of vegetation, a lot of browns, but usually in a swamp you won't see a lot of florals or even flowers in general. This is an interesting way to start filling out color. If you noticed, I did have the three bases here, but when we work with color in general, you have a palate that looks like this, your watercolors, you're not really necessarily cleaning them all the time, you'd like to keep your little mixes here and all the stuff that just stays here on my palette is very organic. It's the colors that I usually like using, and you can just pick up a little bit of where you left off. For example, here I had the ocher and I had some leftover green from yesterday here, so I just got it wet and then mix it in with the ocher that I was using here. That's really the best way to use your watercolors in general. Just be very organic about it, but do try to keep yourself within a certain feeling. Now for the next one, I started thinking of fruit and I was thinking of doing a watermelon themed one, which is a complimentary color one but I thought it would be fun to do a citrus one. Citrus would be in the analog section here, which has colors that range from orange to this green here, and I think I'm going to do that right now. I just felt like it and it seemed fun. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to name it vitamin C. These are fun for naming little color collections, I'm just gonna write down vitamin C here. I'm going to make sure my water is relatively clean because when we work with yellows, yellow stains really easily, so we do need pretty clear water. A lot of people ask me about cleaning their watercolor water and it does look dirty right now if you take a look at it, but it really isn't that dirty. I always make a point out of you don't have to wash it every single minute. I might wash it when I do two other ones of these to have some freshwater, but this is totally fine right now. Dropped a little bit here. My palette has this area of reds and oranges that I usually use, and I'm just going to start to pick up colors here. I'm doing all of this in real-time because I want you to see how it actually works. But I do notice that I have some browns and ochers mixed in here. I was about to come in and grab some color here, but I feel like a citrus color palette would not have any ocher in it, would not have these dirtier yellows or mustard colors. I'm actually going to go here to a clean area, and I'm going to start to choose some colors to add here, because I just thought that looked too dirty, and it'll be better if I have some clean, crisp like yellows. I'm just going to add a little bit of some of my yellows here and mix in greens as we go along. If you think of citrus, you can think of everything from tangerines to oranges to grape fruits, lemon and lime, and even like the leaves of the tree, that will all be an analog color combination, which is going to be fun too. These are pretty much the easiest ones to do because there's no way you can go wrong. They're all in the same color family. One more look here at our color palette, they're all really within this family here, which is what we're going to do right now. I'm just going to start doing this little swatch here, starting with some orange. Again, I stayed away from ocher this time because I really want to get some nice, vibrant, happy, juicy, different shades of yellows. The way I'm going to get a bunch of different oranges in here is just I'm going to pick up some of this red I have here, leave it on the side, and just integrate it into, for example, I have a little bit of red here with this orange, and this going to be like a grapefruit tone. I'm going to mix it in with this one here. It looks cool, but I think I'm going to stick more to yellow and oranges here. I think that looks a little bit too harsh. That's like more of a citrus-y color in my opinion. I'm just going to keep doing this. I do have this really nice yellow, which is like a lemon yellow. Remember, we're going to the actual concept, so when I think of vitamin C and citrus, I think of the whole tree as well. It does have this really vibrant green in there too. I can grab this green and grab a little bit of the yellow and start mixing that here and have just a bunch of different yellows as well. You guys probably noticed that I did little gradients in here. I like to do that sometimes too, just to see how they're all going to mix together. I might do that here too. Maybe I'm going to start with a little bit of green and see where it takes me while I add different shades of yellow. Wiping my brush off a bit. Again, if you guys want to learn more about just how to use your watercolors in general, I highly recommend going back to the beginner class, so you really know how to use your paints. In this case we're just doing a really simple gradient activity here where we're switching colors in a seamless way. Look how cool that looks. Analog color combinations are amazing when we want to do gradients like these because they mix so nicely. I think we can end it with some even more orangey. If you noticed, I had some yellow and just a little tiny drop of that red in there turned into a really cool orange. I really like how this starts to look. I think I'm going to go more and more towards different yellows. Just within the color wheel, what I want to do is take my yellows to different greens and take my yellows to different oranges on this side. That's what I'm going to do now and I will be back with you in a second to do our third color theme. This is my little color swatch I just did for vitamin C. When I painted this, I started to think a lot about citruses and tangerines. Something that's really interesting is that when you have a creative block, it's really fun to do these exercises too, because you can start to think up of stuff. For example, just while I was painting this and thinking of color and just feeling the color and getting into this vibe, I started to think it would be really cool to have a painting where it's a bunch of huge leaves and three big tangerines, you just start to develop ideas as you go along. Also, I like to do these exercises when I have creative blocks and just can't think of anything new to paint. Sometimes I just start to play around with color and something comes out of that. That's a really good tip too if you guys have trouble thinking up of stuff that you want to paint. For example, here, while I painted this vitamin C, these guys felt a little bit out of character. For example, in this case, maybe these were just like an accent to the rest of the color palette. I like to keep it more within the greens and yellows and playing around with a little bit of oranges. Again, I'm not trying to make you all take like the beginner class or anything, but there are a lot of basic terminology that we use there, where when we do our transparencies exercise, you try to get one color into different tones, which just means you add more or less water. That's going to help out a lot in your color palettes. For example, here, in this area here, I tried to use more water with the same light-colored tones I had here. As you can tell you get something totally different, like if I block out this part, then if I block out this part, but they all go together super, it's just right. Now I'm just trying to think this is such a fun activity that there's so much stuff I would like to paint when thinking of color themes. I thought a fun one to do now would be like jewel tones. This is not necessarily a place, for example, here I did some fruit, but I think jewel tones are really cool. I personally like to do a lot of crystals and that kind of stuff. I think about royalty and the Earth at the same time, which is like a contradiction, but that's what it is. I'm just going to start writing out jewel tones and we'll think of what to do in a second. I'm just going to get really creative with this jewel tones thing. Something that I do while I'm thinking of jewel tones, one of the first ones that comes to mind is purple. It's a very like royal color in general. A lot of minerals and rocks are usually in this deeper tones. I do think of this purple and it takes me to an amethyst. Or if I think of blue, takes me to a sapphire. I'm just going to try to fill out these colors right now. Also, something important is that when you think of jewel tones, it usually comes in combination with gold. I might add a little square of ocher just to have that combine naturally. I'm just going to start filling these out, I fill but I don't know why I just really have this urge to start off with purple. I'm just going do that now. Again, jewel tones are going to be more deep and rich. It makes me think of the Earth, but at the same time, it makes me think of royalty, and I think of a crown, and I think of ruby. Maybe like a super deep red I have here. I'm actually going to mix it in just right here with the one that I had, and just play around with these colors here. I'm just basically playing around with purples and reds right now. I think I'll probably add in sapphire blue, just really get it down like that. Just playing around. The fun thing about this activity is that it's just a lot of fun too to just explore and feel what your memory thinks of these certain concepts. I didn't necessarily google jewel tones right now. But you can totally do that and just see what comes up. Pinterest is also a cool source for that. But I just felt like going with it. I feel these deeper blues are pretty interesting, but this might be a little bit too deep. I want to go back and just grab some of that blue and mix it with something a little bit more vibrant to get a sapphire tone. I'm just trying this out right now. It does look a bit that is pretty but I feel like I'm missing something a little bit brighter. I'm just going to go back to my blue here and add some more. I feel like that looks a little bit better. Just try to work it out as we go. I also think of an emerald when I think of jewel tones. I'm going to do that here. This one was more of like a natural one. I really didn't think that much of it first. Now, see this one is still wet here, so I just grabbed a little bit of that and mixed it with the green to see what comes out. This is an interesting one. I wanted to do one that I just did very naturally, very filling it out. This is what's coming out. I naturally think of rubies, amethysts, sapphires. I'm going to go with that. Also, as I said, I might add just a little bit of ocher. Just doesn't accent though, I don't think I'm going to mix ocher with the rest of the colors, but I think this looks good here because usually when you think of jewel tones, you can think of there being some golden there. I think that's an interesting. I'm going to add one up here too, just to have a nice feeling to it. I'm just going to keep painting my jewel tones here. You guys tell me what you think. I think this is going to be a fun one. I just finished these jewel tones right here. I'm really happy with how it turns out because it does actually take me to a certain place, like I feel like I'm watching a medieval movie or something like that. But sometimes what happens is you look back. I'm looking at this whole thing and I think it all goes really well except for this blue here. I feel like this turned into a like a sky blue. I wanted a cooler blue, is what I was thinking of. I'm actually going to cover this one up. I think something like this. I just used this blue that I thought really looked more royal, and I'm going to add some of the purple that I've been using originally to get a deeper blue. That's another thing that I love about doing these real-time segments because it's a lot about a lot of people ask questions and sometimes my answer is just keep practicing to figure it out. This is what just happened to me. I added a color that I didn't really think go that well. You can always just, especially with the little practice drills like B0, it needed something more like this. That's totally fine. Now, I just, after fixing this color, I feel like that's good to go. I can definitely do a painting with all of this and have an awesome jewel tone concept. Right now, I was thinking, "Wow, it would be so fun to paint a big crown." If you guys did my jewelry class, that would be the same concept. The gold parts could be shimmery. Actually, I might do that after I do this class, painting a crown sounds like a lot of fun. By this time, we have a little block. You can see how very concept-oriented they are, a swamp, we have here, like vitamin C, which is super bright and fun and you think of summer and then jewel tones is a lot like deeper and richer. You think a little bit more of a cold winter. I'm even thinking of certain times of the year and seasons. It's really interesting to figure that out too. I think I'm going to do these two. There's a lot of stuff you can do. You can do stuff that reminds you of, for example, like Earth tones is one of my favorite. I might do that one, but I also really want to do nostalgic C, which is super. Blues can go into two different directions, they can be super happy and bright, like the vitamin C is but in blues, or you can go super deep and almost sad. I might actually do that nostalgic C here. Then I might finish with something like princess or something like that where we have more pinks and neutrals. Yeah, I'll actually post maybe more ideas. I did actually do a practice one of these before I filmed this class, so I might upload those too, so you can see like a large range of color themes that I thought about. But you guys can do similar to the ones that I have done, but what I really, really want from you guys is for you to think up of your very own color themes. You can obviously replicate this if you want, but try to think of new stuff. Like, for example, instead of vitamin C, think of watermelon, a different kind of fruit, or something like that. I think that's a fun idea. I'm actually going to start with my nostalgic C. Right now we're actually filling this right next to the ocean, but it's a really nice bright day here in Cancun. There's nothing deep or dark about it. The C here is super bright and turquoise, and has a bunch of bright colors, but now I'm thinking of a storm. I'm going to write nostalgic and just concentrate on writing before I do another typo. I'm about to start my nostalgic C. Don't pay attention to my little typo here. Again, when we think of water in the ocean, there's a lot of different places that can take us. One of them is, I'm thinking right now of being stranded in a storm or a super stormy ocean. Or also, it reminds me of solitude and being lonely. I don't usually paint that much sadness in my stuff, but sometimes it does come up. If it was really nice to just have an outlet and be able to represent it on paper, so here what I'm going to start to do is even though we have these turquoise tones maybe, it's cool to mix them up a little bit of paints, gray, just like that. If I were to paint a happy ocean, like a Caribbean Sea or something, I would have super bright tones, bright blues, similar to what this is, but in blues. But right now, I'm going to think of more of serious calm, not calm, calm would be the opposite, it would be a storm. Indigo is a really good tone for this. For example, you guys probably know that I'm in Cancun. The ocean is turquoise, and we have very white-colored sand, but I'm trying to think of what color would the sand be if we're thinking of nostalgic C, and I'm thinking of these brown. I might add a little bit of brown into here just for purposes of laying out the whole setting. I'm going to mix my brown with a little bit of blue. Notice how these are all different blues, but they do have a certain filling to them. I'm just going to play around with these colors, and then you guys can let me know what you think. I just finished my swatch for nostalgic sea. You can see that, it's still drying right now, but it's very deep, very dark. When you think of the ocean and something more far away and distant and the depth of the sea, color has a lot to do with that too. Maybe one thing is the one that's reminding you of the other. Maybe when we think of blue, we think of depth because it is the color of the ocean. But yeah, this is a great way to represent that. Right now I've done a bunch of different ones and I'm just trying to decide which is going to be my very last one. I'm going towards princess tones, just because we haven't done anything like super pink and girly. That's also a really good one to play around with, with more muted pinks and stuff. The only thing is that I am going to rinse my water here because it's already muddy and I use a bunch of deep dark colors here. Now, we're going to use a bunch of pastels. You definitely need some clean water if you're going to work with pastels. I will be back with you in a minute just after I change my water. There's so much you can do here with your personal color palettes. But I think the last one I'm going to choose is called princess. This is a really fun one because it has to do with a concept in general. I'm going to do a lot of pinks and playing around with more muted pinks and maybe a little bit of lavender in there. I'm just going to start to have fun with this one and I'll start talking about the colors along the way. As you can see, I have some freshwater here. Clear, nice clean water, and the reason I really wanted to change the water is because I'm going to do a little bit of pastels and a lot of light pinks. If I had used the same water I used for a nostalgic sea, it would get really dark and mess up my color combinations, so I just grabbed some freshwater. The reason I just thought of princess right now was because I had this project for a pop-up greeting card. The company wanted to do a very unicorn inspired card. They were going to integrate my crystals with a unicorn. It was just a really fun project, and I did develop a few color swatches with this princess fantasy girly, pinky stuff. I know girls don't have to be necessarily all pink, but this is just a concept. I actually have a little bit of this hot pink which is going to be a cool base for this, but I'm also going to mix it in with a lot of water. Then I have this creamy color here, which is going to be cool for pastels. I have some leftover lavender. I'm just going to play around with this and maybe grab a couple of reds here and bring them down to pink. But I'm just going to start playing around with my swatch. The first thing I have is this hot pink. I'm going to try to get this pink to be different. This slinky has this awesome creamy tone to it. If you get a large pellet like this, I know Sena has it too. They're these creamy tones that I think are fun sometimes. You can get different tones and you would pastels than you would with just water. Those are fun. I'm going to show you what they look like. See it's like little peach tone. I'm thinking a lot of cute sea stuff and girly stuff. That's my inspiration for this specific color palette. See I have a little bit of this lavender that I'm mixing with the hot pink for the last video. I'm going to use a little bit of that too, and just play around adding more water and make it even lighter and more pastel. I'm not going to really use any yellow here. It's going to be more peachy, pinky princess, girly, sparkly inspiration. I'm basically just using pinks and peaches and lavenders, which is the unicorn tones. We're just going to keep going with this and we'll talk about the activity in general after I finish this little swatch. I just finished working out this little princess swatch. Again, little disclaimer. I know that not every princess who's pinks and peaches and stuff, but, I was definitely like this as a kid, super girly and stuff. It just really reminds me of my childhood and the toys that I'd had and the Easy Bake Oven and the Barbies and all of that. For me it's fun to remember this and work it out through color. I have a little bit of lavender is here. Again I got a bunch of these tones just using the same colors like we did in the past activity, where it was just using three colors to get all the tones. What I really used here was a bit of peach, lavender and that hot pink and I got all this worked in there. I'm really happy with the five color themes that I chose. You guys can do as many as you want. It's really important to do this activity because it's going to be the pre practice mode for our final project, which we're going to do next. Our final project is going to be creating an abstract painting. We're going to cover a whole page in different geometric shapes and stuff. But we're going to really concentrate on color. Color is going to be the main focus of your final project. This is a good practice round to choose what you guys want to do for your final project color theme. I'm looking at all of this and I'm into the princess stuff right now. I don't know, while this dries, I'm going to think about it a little bit. But I am a little bit into pinks at this moment. I don't know why. You can choose one of the ones that you did or make up a new personal color palette just for the final exercise. But the real thing behind this activity is for you guys to start to feel what you feel more comfortable with. Like, for example, I rarely use these tones in my work and I know that there are cool to develop, but I would usually go with something more in this range. A quick note. I want to say that this specific pallet was inspired in a student that I had in class and every other student just did all the warm-up activities and stuff using just every single tone and everything they could find on their palate, but she just used black and indigo and tuckle, she just stuck to these tones throughout the whole class. Everything she did looked so beautiful and I knew was immediately hers just because the colors that she had chosen. Something that's extremely important when we think of color is that we really associate it with an artist pretty quick. I think that when you really get to be a successful artist, it means that people can look at your work and immediately recognize it as yours, and I think color is a huge factor in that. That's why I really wanted to do this class because a lot of people come to me with, "I don't know what colors to use or I feel like everything just looks like the same." Doing these type of exercises really help you work out what you're naturally drawn to and what you think you do best, like how you combine colors a best. For me, it's a lot in this area here, I do like these tones, but I don't really go here that much unless I'm going to do outer space sky thing. But just do these exercises and you guys will start to really notice how you get caught up in a little world here and come up with some really pretty stuff. I'm just going to wait for this to dry and I'll be back with you to do our final project. 8. Final Project: Now we're about to enter our final project and I just wanted to talk a little bit about what we're going to do and the colors that I'm going to choose personally for my final project. I don't know, I started to do all of these little color mixing activities in the past video and it also brings me back to when we did our intuitive color mixing activity and I think today it might be because we're in the house where I grew up and this is where we're filming. But I'm feeling a little bit nostalgic about my childhood, and I feel like all these hot pinks and princess tones and in combination with these lavender the ones I did and I really like how it looks with this pink gray. I don't know, I'm feeling this today and I might do a little combination of the other princess one with this to do my final project. I'm really into this two, but I don't know something is pulling me towards this today. I think my final project is going to be inspired in these color tones and adding a little bit of peach like I did with the princess one. What we're going to do is you need a new piece of paper, blank piece of paper. The reason why I like spiral watercolor pads a lot is because we can work on a lot of different projects at the same time, so you can see the whole class is here. Now, this is a final page in my watercolor book, so I'm going to use it as my final project. I have a couple of brushes here, I've been using different brush than I usually, it's a round filbert brush like this. It's not a huge brush, but I usually use smaller just playing around brushes like this here and I'm going to use all of these today for this activity, I'm just going to have them all like candy, just like this. I'm going to use all of these different brushes today, it really depends on what style you have. But what your final project is, is creating abstract painting. I like to do abstract paintings once in awhile especially, I do them personally to work out color like what kind of color themes I'm thinking of. Basically, for me what I mean by an abstract painting is just doing a bunch of like geometric shapes on your paper. You don't have to do exactly the same style that I did, but the only thing that I do want you to do is to make color your main focus, so that's why I like to use an abstract painting for this specific project. Just because we're not really thinking of what form and what we're doing specifically, but making color be the star of your illustration or watercolor painting. Right now, as I said, I have a little bit of leftover pink here on my palette, I have some lavender here, and I have some indigo and pain gray that I used a while back. I'm also going to integrate this peachy tone that I thought was really cute, I'm just going to grab some of that fresh peach tone here and just add it to my palette. Basically, I'm going to limit myself to this area here, lavender or pink, pink gray and a little bit of peach, and I'm just going to see what happens when I start painting here. You're going to be very free, try not to sketch anything out, you just need to feel color. A little bit of watercolor basics here, when we use watercolor, we like to think in transparencies a lot. What I'm going to do here is I'm just going to start doing maybe some circles and just random shapes here, in a pretty watery washy way. You can do triangles, I'm just going to work very, very randomly and just instinctively around my paper and you can also start to combine, do a little bit of color mixing like that, so super simple at this point, all I have is a little blob, a little triangle here. I think I might actually do a little series of triangles down here. Again, there is no sketch here, I'm just feeling it out, just working with color and having fun. This class is really all about having fun and just developing how you feel about color. Today I really wanted to do something very pink and just reminded me of when I was a kid. I don't know what you guys were like, but I was like the queen of barbies and dolls and ponies and all that. I was born 1984, so for me like my little pony and that stuff was big, so I don't know, I just felt really cool to dive into that today. That is my source of inspiration for this abstract painting here and really all I'm doing is just a series of geometric shapes all around my paper. Right now I'm using just different transparencies and I'm going to be layering as we go along, but right now I'm going to do a first layer of just a little bit more watery washes, mixing it in a bit with some saturation, but I do want to do some details as I overlay. This is just my specific style right now for abstract painting, but an abstract painting can be anything. You could do just like big blocks of paint or you can do a bunch of circles all around. For me, this is really fun right now because it gives me a chance to explore the whole color scheme here on my paper and have a really fun looking illustration when we're done. I'm just going to keep painting for a bit in all, come back and talk to you after I've created a bit more here. I'd say it wasn't about an hour painting my little abstract painting here and I'm just going to do a little bit of final touches as we share some final thoughts here. Basically, what I just did was a painting where my color palette is the main star here, and again, I used just some lavender, some pinks, some peach and I like this pink gray as a little accent. You can see that this darker colors just for smaller details, that's how I wanted it to be. I really didn't do anything too fancy, I just had fun, I really do think about a strategy or anything. I did do a little bit of layering though, so you can see how my bottom layers here are already dry. I'm actually going in with my smaller brush and just doing some fun little detailing here. I just painted some of my favorite stuff, some stars, a few little crystals here and there, and actually I might do maybe like a smaller crystal up here. I'm just doing a little bit of fun layering here and just have a little abstract painting here. You guys can do whatever style you wish, for example, you could do a painting where maybe you just want to do a bunch of circles or lines, or fill the whole things with triangles and stars. But I feel like a geometric theme is fun because you don't really have to think about it that much and it gives us a chance to really make the watercolor that we're painting have the color scheme being your main focus here. I'm just going to do a couple little stars. I think these are really fun, you can really play around with this and sometimes I'll do a little abstract painting like this before doing a larger project just to get me in the mood for what I'm about to do, like a specific theme or something. I think I'm about done, you can always keep going with this stuff, but see I just might do a little bit of detailing here. Maybe a few little stars in here. I just try to fill it up, it's extreme doodling almost I would say and it's just a really fun activity. I might do a little star here. I want you to really have fun with your final project, mine is about done, I think I'm just going to let it dry and maybe if I see that something else is missing, I might add it later, but this is pretty much done. Well, for example, if you guys are into watercolor and do projects out of your watercolors, this is a really fun, for example, wrapping paper idea. You can do little different geometric shapes and scan this and turn it into repeat pattern, or there's just a bunch of fun stuff you can do with something like this. I think you guys are all set, I really feel that you take something away from this class and really just practice how to use color and use all the technical stuff that we learned, but also start to really feel your colors out. You have a bunch of activities that are great to work with. I hope you enjoyed this class, I really enjoyed painting with you guys and see you next time.