Watercolor Trees: Let's Paint a Forest Together. . . Join me!

1. Class Introduction: Have you been telling yourself that you've been wanting to paint more trees and that you want to practice and you want to get better. Well, you've made it. Here is where we are going to take color. We're gonna play with color. We're gonna play with so many different brushes. And we are going to test out our tree skills. We're going to try different ways and different things, And we can use Annie paints, and we're going to just practice, practice, practice. I'm hoping to show you the way I do trees and maybe that will inspire you to do your trees your way and you'll adapt to a new way that works for you. The idea of this tutorial is demonstration is that you get a way to embrace the way that you want to paint your trees the way that you want them to look. And that you'll come up with in a way of your own that works for you within your skills and your level. So join me and let's paint a forest of our own. 2. Class Description: Hello and welcome. Let's talk about what we're going to do today. We are going to paint trees. We are going to play with skies. And we're going to put our trees. And we're going to play with heights. And we're going to play with shapes and widths and brushes. And we're going to play with ways to bring them forward and backward. We are going to also just strictly practice trees. We're going to play with skies more, lots of skies. We're going to play with misty and total value and see what that does and what that doesn't do for us and what it can do for us. We're going to play with a lot of wet on wet and see how that can work for us. Again, we're going to suggest these trees, right? These are not perfect trees. You do not have to be perfect at trees to take this class. This is why you're taking this class, so you can get lots and lots of practice. Then we're going to paint a gradient filling tree, lighter trees in the back. And we're going to bring the colors forward and we're going to see how that plays. And we're just going to have fun. Most importantly, we are going to have fun. We're going to stay curious, explore. And you can go off the path if you need to. You don't have to stay on the path that I'm setting for us. You can go on your own. You can take little bits from here and there and merge them together and do what works for you. 3. Materials & Supplies: Let's talk supplies. What I like to use. I buy arch paper in bigger sheets. Big big sheets, I just cut them down. Your most important piece or tool in this practice will be your paper. Paper is most important. You're going to want 100% cotton, 140 pound, 300 GSM paper. The most important 100% cotton will make a huge difference in your experience and in your painting journey brushes. There are a lot of different brushes. We can, we can use flat brushes, we can use round brushes, we can use script liners. And you're not going to need all these today. That one doesn't go in there. There's a rigor we can use. We can use a we can use a mop brush and we can use another round. You can, if it works for you, try a smaller brush. You can try all the brushes. That's what I want you to do. Explore. I find a flat brush handy for wedding paper. Not necessary. Also a water bottle. Not necessary, but handy. Do like to use a hockey brush. This one's still dirty from this morning's practice, but I do like to use that. Holbein tape is my favorite tape, highly recommended. I do use a plexiglass to take my pieces down. All these supplies will be listed in the resource section and you can find a whole list there, more extensive list and also paints. I'm a sucker for handmade paints. This is one of my handmade paint sets and I'll be using handmade paints. I love handmade paints. There I go to between get lots of colors. You can mixture colors. You can have convenience colors. It's all up to you what you prefer. You can stick with primaries and just use those and you'll do just. 4. Tree Demo & Practice: Let's go ahead and talk about painting trees. This is a piece of handmade paper, it's 150 grams for tree practice. You can use whatever you like, whatever you're most comfortable with, whatever you're familiar with. This is a newer to me paper and I usually wouldn't recommend painting something that you want to be comfortable with on paper that you are not comfortable with going out on a limb here on a limb while we're painting trees. So let's see what we can do. This exercise is just going to be us practicing our trees over and over me. Maybe going through the steps that I take. I do tend to paint my trees pretty fast. My apologies in advance. I'm mixing up some paint right now. I'm just grabbing some green and some neutral tint which is closest to a black only so that you can see what I'm actually painting really well. We'll probably zoom in a bit. But we're going to talk about brushes first. Well, I'm going to stop mixing. I'm going to try a rigger today. I'm going to maybe try a mop. I'm going to try a round, a smaller round size four. I'm going to go ahead and try a caligraphy brush, a new inexpensive dollar store tree style brush, to show that you can get stuff done even with inexpensive brushes. Really your most important thing is almost always paper. Paper is very important. We are going to use any paint. This doesn't matter for this practice. Again, I'm only using dark so that you can see. Let's see, I have a liner, I have a round. Trying to think of what other brush that you might have that you could try. You can use a dagger if you had that. But let's go ahead and start with my very thin rigger brush. This is a size, this is plan of Bright's rigger. I don't remember what size it is. She only has one. I think it's a size zero or one. What I do with my line down, thin, light line, then I start at the top and I start making a small marks on each side of that line. I just made very small and they get bigger as they go down. And I'm just varying them. I'm not trying to be s specific, I'm not trying to be exact. I'm not trying to make it look like anything in particular. I'm just going to go back and forth. My paint might be a little too watery, but that's okay. This is just practice. We're just going to make trees, all different trees. You can go back and drop more paint in there and darken up some areas if you'd like. Again, I did use pretty dark already. We're just going for the triangle shape, the very basic. I'm not saying it's very easy for me, this wasn't easy for some people. I see that they can do it very fast. You can use less marks like this go for a skin tree, right? You can leave more ****** in between so that you have more light shining through. Trees are not the same, right? They're never ever the same. Nature is imperfect as well. So we can be two, you can go back in, drop some more color drop some more like maybe if you have too many empty spots in the middle or you can leave empty. You do always want to vary the heights of the trees and you can put them closer together, farther apart. You don't want to do anything that is too uniform. That's when it starts to get a little, trying to be picture perfect. You don't want that. It's okay if they touch. It's okay if they run into each other. It's okay if they're too close. It's okay no matter what. Right. You can squeeze one in right in here if you want to stick a little one in there. Again, it's suggesting trees so they don't have to look exactly like what you think a tree looks like. Okay. Line down side to side real fast, real loose. Okay. This paper is very textured. I do skip a lot how the brush, it's okay for crooked like that. Trees can be crooked. Okay? Let's, let's try back and forth. Maybe that will be different method. Let's go like this. Just going back and forth more trying different ways to see what works for you Is key here. The way I do it might not work for you. You're going to want to try a lot of different things, different methods, different ways. Basically, on that one I did loosely zigzag lo zigzag down this line. I made my line start of the top, very tiny, zigzag back and forth, back and forth, right back and forth, back and forth. I finally just went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And there you go. You can do a tree like that if you like. If that works better for you, try it that way, then as you evolve and get more comfortable, then you can do these more loose side to side. I don't personally love as much. I think they can have a cute place. I think they could look really cute on a holiday card or something. Wintry thing. Wintry fun. I think they definitely have a time and place, but for the most stuff I do, I like these more loose abstract, free flowing trees. It's just literally bouncing side to side. I'm not going equal to side, right? I'm slowly. When I'm doing, I do my line right and I go one side, I go a little bit lower for the next mark. I go to the next side, a little bit lower. And each side, I don't do it. I'm not doing it side by side by side. I'm doing it this way, if that makes sense, right? At varying angles, they're not side by side and they're not even and nothing is uniform. Don't try to make it that way. Just try going fast, see if it works for you, then try going slower and see if that works for you. If you're the person that just is like, nope, don't like these loose kind. I need to be more precise. I need to make each branch do that. Works. Do what works for you. What you are comfortable with. You're just going to want to keep going with these rows. So far we have ready 123-456-7899 tree in about, what is that, 7 minutes. So let's switch brushes. Let's try this calligraphy brush. This is a very inexpensive copy brush. And I'm just going to load up the paint again and we'll do the next row. Same thing, I'm going to make my line, I'm going to go back and forth. This brush has a finer tip if you can see. Let's zoom in a bit for you. You can see that I'm getting more detail, right? More variances in actually in the actual tree Back here we're getting more blobs. Paint also might be a little thicker. You can play with those different things. You can play with the water level in your paint. You can use less water. You can use more water. You can use a bigger brush. You can try a smaller brush. You can try all these things and see what works for you. Because I say this works for me doesn't mean that's what will work for you and what you'll be most comfortable with and what will flow the best for you, right? Maybe you'll do this way and it just feels super awkward. But it works okay, but it feels super awkward. Maybe you can incorporate your way and another way together and it ends up being the way your new way. Right? I just like to stress that just trying things your own things, different ways, you know, is really the key here. It's not doing exactly what I tell you because I don't know. It just doesn't work for everybody. I painted so many trees and followed so many tutorials and tried so many different ways, and I just, I was really, really struggling. And I reached out to my mentor and I said this before, reached out to her and said, what am I doing? What am I doing wrong? Or how do I do these? How do I paint trees? And she said, you just have to keep painting them over and over and over and over and over. Here I am. Let's try this silver brush round and again, side to side. You'll kind of tell what brush needs a little more water on it and what brush does not. This brush has a round or belly, so I did end up having to add a little more water to it. Let's do a toll ski one. This brush definitely holds water differently, especially on this paper. This paper is a little bit different and there you go. Just just play with the different brushes and see what feels right, feels what works for you. Okay, we're now taking a very pointy mop. Again, you may have to adjust your paint and water levels when you switch brushes. Not everything picks up the amount of paint and plays on the paper the same way. You'll just have to play what really works for you. I know I say that a lot, but I can't stress it enough. And you could literally just go side to side, blo, blo, all right? And then go back in and drop in some darker colors if you want. And you can always go back in and give yourself a few little finer details of the tree. Again, when you get a whole forest of these, nobody's going to be picking apart each tree. Say if that one's Walkie, people are just going to see the general forest. They're not going to look at each tree like, wow, that doesn't look like a tree. We're just going to do row and row and row and row. Just fill a page with trees. I have so many pages filled with trees. You can try a flat brush if you wanted to. You could try a dagger. You could try a oval, cat's tongue, oval was different. Brushes have different names, right? You can try a script liner just like the dagger. You can try a small round. Two, the list goes on, right? You can try many, many brushes, but I want you to just keep trying them all and see what works for you. Thanks for joining me in plant and painting our own little, very own forest. And I'll see you in the next cuss. 5. Project 1: Misty Forest: So in this lesson, I thought we'd paint just a lot of trees and get some warm up, some memory, muscle memory. So I'm going to first tape off the paper. I'm going to tape it on this plexi glass. I like to be able to move my paper around. I like to have the protection on my table. I'm going to soak the entire paper. I like to use a spray bottle to kind of do a pre wet. And then I use the brush to just kind of make sure it's an even coat. I love paper cloth towels, by the way. I use paper too and I tend to re use it until it's like dead. And so the cloth I really like, I'm using a mop brush here and I'm just loosely getting a background color on. I'm not doing anything in particular here. You could use any color. You can use a warmer color. A cooler color, whatever you wanted. Really, I just went with this kind of light to blue to give myself something other than a white background, maybe, so that it could kind of look like a mist coming through. And I'm going to start trees. So I want you to play around with different brushes. I don't want you to just reach for either the same brush or a brush that maybe you're not comfortable with, or just try every brush, so I'm going to use this Tintoretto one and they really love these brushes. These are awesome brushes. They have amazing tip to them, but it might not work for you. And I do want to stress that. That's why I keep saying to use all the different kind of brushes. And I think that that's where you discover what works for you in making trees and painting trees and not only that, but just doing them over and over and over. I mean, just in this one picture, you'll see how many trees we end up with. Quite a few. I'm just going to blur the bottom a little bit with some wet water. Wet water, some water. And just to kind of loosen everything up a little bit, I don't want anything to be too tight. These trees are suggestive, they're not perfect. They're not going to look like the ones you see exactly in the forest. They're loose. You know, I'm making a straight line and I'm just going side to side with my paint brush along each side really quickly. The less I think about it, the better my trees happen to be. If you do trees and you have to go slow meticulously to make them work, Do that, do what works for you. Just because I do mine fast and quick, like this, doesn't mean that it's going to work for you. It might, and that's awesome if it does, but if it doesn't, that's okay too. Do what works for you. And if I'm going too fast or too slow, you can speed me up or slow me down, you can fast forward, you can pause me right. So tailored to you make it work for you. And, you know, if you're, you only want to do like a few trees, do a few trees. But if you want to practice and really get more comfortable, I highly suggest keep going with these trees like I am, just keep doing them and doing them and doing them. I once asked a person I considered kind of a mentor how to do trees 'cause I couldn't do a tree for the life of me. And she said, Amber, I painted thousands. I was like, oh, and so I'm well past my thousands now and I'm much more comfortable. Is it perfect? No. Do they turn out great every time? No. Do I have the magic brush that makes perfect trees every time I do not. I do vary my brushes. I switch them up. I'll use a rigger, I'll use a round, I'll use a pointed round, I will use a liner. Sometimes you'll see me using all different brushes and maybe that helps me stay loose and helps me keep them different, right, rather than the same. And you don't want them all the same height, so make sure you're varying those heights. Higher, lower, shorter, fatter, skinnier, less branches, more branches, darker, dropping some darker colors. You'll see me going back here right now and kind of just dropping a little bit more color in places. And you know, you do want these ones, we're doing this first layer. We do want them fairly lighter, right? We don't want to go too dark with our tonal values quite yet. We're going to do some more layers. And so we just want to keep, you know, slowly, slowly, kind of dropping in a little bit of more color here and there. In a minute here, you're going to see me kind of loosen up that harsh edge, that hard edge I have here right here below on the on the left hand side. So I'm going to take my brush, I'm going to wet it. Not too wet though. I'm gonna dry some water off up right there. I'm going to kind of smear that to loosen it up so I don't have such a harsh edge. I think harsh edges can be really cool in some instances instances and this one we're not going to do that. We're going to blend it and I'm going to take a dry flat brush. Actually, that brush is not dry, that brush is wet. I do like to use a dry one, but I'm using it wet right now and just kind of blurring it all and kind of feathering it out. A dry brush would work better. It wouldn't be taking away what I did. So I did let that layer dry. I used a heat tool, which I love if you don't have one, you can eat a hair dryer. Or if not, you can just wait probably about 10:15 minutes until you can feel your paper is completely dry, not cool the touch you want it to be dry, and anything cool means it's still damp. And if it's damp, your trees will bleed and you don't want that right now. So now I'm taking a darker color of the same color. So we're just darkening the value of it. Which just means I'm using less water, more pigment. And I'm just going to keep, I'm counting the trees to make a point of how many trees. I really do paint in a day, in a session, in one piece even so really repetition is what is working for us here. We're just doing it over and over. We're practicing again. You can switch brushes throughout this one practice. This one piece can just be a completely, completely practiced piece. You can grab your rigor and just, do you know, one row of rigors. You can do one row of rounds and that's okay. Again, nature's not perfect. Trees are not perfect. You're going to have all sorts of different shapes and sizes. And so I really want to emphasize that none of this has to be perfect. And it's just paper. We can grab another piece of paper and we can dry in. So there I go, blurring out the bottom again. We do have a harsh line there. See how the land has created one and that's okay. You can blur that out if you prefer or you can leave it. I think I'm going to leave it for a little while. I'm going to fill up this little area up here with some more trees and you don't have to follow my route if you like. That white space that kind of looks like fog which, or fog or miss which I think it actually does now. I kind of wish I didn't cover it up, but you don't have to. And you can learn from me saying that I maybe wouldn't do that next time and maybe you would. I don't know. Maybe you would stop with where it was now and just add some trees in the foreground and call it done. You don't have to do what I'm doing. You don't have to use the colors I'm using. You can use any colors you want. You can make a pink magical forest. You can have a green forest. You can have a purple forest. Do whatever makes you happy. And again, it's just paper. So you can do it again and again if you want or never again if you don't want to. Right. It's all about you and it really is about what works for you and what helps you and what's good for you. If this practice you're like, I'm not sure about this one. Skip to the next one', try the next one. You know we're fast forward and see if it's something you even want to get to. A lot of people will recommend watching the video first all the way through. I'm not a huge element. I don't have a lot of time, so I often will not do that. I'll just dive right in and go for it. So do what works for you if you have a lot of time. I think it's awesome to be able to watch the video beforehand. But I do like to watch it during my paint time. I pause, sometimes I'll rewind often. I do a lot of skillshare classes myself, so I'm pretty well versed in what works for me with tutorials. I've been doing a tutorial day since last Fall, and so I feel like tutorials are something that you really need to make work for you and learn what works for you. And be okay with where you are and what skill level you're at. And be able to adapt to the tutorial and what you are capable of doing instead of focusing on, well, I can't do that. Do it your way then, right? Do it the way that you are comfortable with. Skip things if you don't like them, right? If you're like don't like that, just skip it. Do something else. Do what you can do or do what you're comfortable with and make it yours, right? So now I'm going to add just some big old trees and you'll be able to see how I do these details a little closer. It really is me just blobbing my brush back and forth. But this Tintoretto, it really does help the job. The tip on this brush is so fine that I can just bounce back and forth like this and end up with these perfect little like branch like lines. If there is a magical brush, this one is pretty darn close, especially for these larger trees. Just it really does handle a lot of paint and water and so I'm just going to give this tree a friend. I do tend to work in odds. I think, you know, there's some sort of, I think there's some sort of design rule. I did go to design school and there was some sort of rule of odds or three or something, right? Never just have two of something. So I think I took that a step further and was just like, well then we're just going to do, you know, three of everything or odds of everything. Here's my little family of three, but you know, I'm not going to stop there. So we'll end up adding some more trees. But I do love how these ones got even darker, right? So less water, more pigment. And if you're not getting enough darker in your tone, you can always add a touch of neutral tint. You can add a to just a touch of anything that will bring your color darker. You could add black if you really wanted to. My black is neutral tint. So I'll see. There you go. I had absent a little more trees here, these key trees can either be peaking up or they can just be smaller. And I don't know, you just can get so much practice in and it's kind of endless for me. You just keep going and you know it, just every little brush stroke, I feel like I learn. And it feels like it helps me to retain and to be able to do this without thinking. I feel like when I was practicing trees, sometimes in the beginning I was overthinking it all. I was trying too hard to do these perfect steps and perfect strokes that everybody else was doing. That I just don't work that way. Right? I like the chaos and the kind of abstractness of the way that I've kind of adapted to painting. I don't know if I could say it's a skill or anything. I could just say that I really have adapted what I can do, what I'm capable of doing, into a way that works for me. And I think that's the key, right? Not everybody's gonna paint the same. We don't want that. That's not very fun. We want everybody to have their own way and their own unique style so that we can recognize that, right? Isn't that the best thing to be like, hey, I knew that piece was yours before before I even saw that it was yours. That's like one of the best compliments I've ever got. I was like, oh really? You can like I knew it was like I know it. Okay. That's it, That's it. I found my style, I found my way. And it's really exciting when you finally get that. So that's why I'm so adamant about not necessarily always just recreating what I show you. I want you to find you and if that's recreating mine in the beginning or anybody else's in the beginning, that's fine too. I mean, we've all been there. I've done that. We all do it. And that's okay. It's part of how we learn. So I do have those three trees floating. I was just going to say those are super floating. So I'm going to try to, you know, use some water and loosen that up a little bit so it doesn't look like they're just floating an island. And I wouldn't say I do the best job of stopping that. They're still pretty floating. But that's okay. It is what it is. It's all practice. It's even practice for me even doing these demos and showing you what I like to do and how I like to do it. It's all practice for me too. It's not perfection. I don't have this end goal of, you know, looking at a piece going. It needs to be perfect. It just, it just, that's not my goal. My goal is to share with you and kind of just really just share the joy of the magic and the magic of watercolor and what it can do and how it can help us and how it can be there for us. And it gives us just an outlet that not anything else does. So everything other craft I do is very exact, right? You have a recipe for baking, you have a pattern for sewing pattern, for embroidery pattern, or, you know, all these set of rules and specific outcomes for every other craft. But watercolor, it's different every single time. And there's just so much magic in that for me. I can't remember if I counted the trees in this, but there's quite a few, so I highly recommend you add as many as you want, as few as you want. You can add different colors if you want. You can make each layer of these different colors if you wanted to. There are no rules. Just because I stuck with one color and change the tonal values, doesn't mean you have to make that dark row pink, the next row purple, the next row indigo. You know what I mean? It doesn't matter. Just have fun with it and do what makes you happy. I know I say the same things over and over, but I feel really strongly about those kind of things. And I hope that, you know, that you realize that it's okay. It's okay to not be perfect. It's okay to try five or six times. I, it's so funny when people tell me I tried this and it didn't work. I said how many times did you try it? And they're like, we, you know, once I'm like, no, you might need to try this seven or eight times. I'm not saying this one. 6. Project 2: Part 1 Gradient Trees: Hello. First things first, let's go ahead and take down our 100% cotton paper. Let's do right on the wet. We'll get a nice background going first, and then we'll dry that, and then we'll come back and we'll add some trees. I mean, I get some yellow on there. Yellow, och? I'm just going to bring it all the way up and all the way down my side there. Let's decide what color comes next. Let's do a slightly orange color. This is a rustic pumpkin orange. We're just going to start blending it in with our ochre. Maybe you want to grab our ochre? Again, I'm not one, not that I don't love perfect radians. I do, but I'm not one to necessarily encourage that I like the flaw. I don't know, I won't call them flaws, but I like the differences in texture. I like the different sweeper intensities and tones. I like that. That's something I enjoy. I know it's not for everybody. I know some people probably real love that perfect gradient. That's great. If that's what you want to do today, awesome, go for it. I'm going to let the textures happen and I'm going to be okay with that. I'm going to let the sweeps happen. I bring a little red down in there, That's okay if I bring a little orange too far into the yellow. If I want to go back in the grab some more ochre, I'll do that too. If the red mixes down there. I'm okay with that as well. What I do want to bring in is maybe pinkish purple and we're just going to sweep that through. Maybe we'll grab some more. You do want to be careful not bring too much water. I often will roll my belly of my brush to get the excess water out of the brush. I'm not introducing a ton more water onto my paper, especially if it's starting to dry, which is not yet, but soon enough it will, that could be not fun later introducing too much water to some fun shapes. Again, if you don't mind those, it's all fine. I don't particularly mind them. A ton. For me, it's okay. These larger sweeps I'm good with up top. Right. These are good. You want to get your sweeps up high, You can get them bigger. Okay. But as our sweeps of clouds come down towards the horizon, we want to thin them out a little bit. That might mean switching brushes. I'm going to go from my mop brush to a smaller mop. I'm going to add my water. I'm going to dry off my brush a little bit. And I'm going to use this part of my brush just to sweep a little bit. I'm going to grab my yellow ocher again and maybe a little lighter yellow, little lemonis yellow. I'm just going to fill in this bottom area with a little more yellow. I think our tree line will be down there that we can have them peeking through the yellow. Got lots more tree practice. Let's go ahead and I happen to have some leftover purple here. We'll just bring in some swoopy, some darker clouds haven't decided if I was going to make them just straight across or if we were to do what you feel in the moment. Sometimes I'll swoop and sometimes I'll just make lines and be okay with it. And sometimes I'll decide that I don't like any of it and we'll start again or we won't even start again. We'll kind of brush it up. I can take my hockey brush and I can just sweep it. Okay. So maybe it's more of a high deserty looking sunset. And if you don't like that, that's okay too. We can do something else. We don't have to keep it that way. Let's give ourselves a moment to think about it. Oh, and see, I dropped water in there and that's okay. We'll pick our hockey brush back up and we'll just try to sweep it out of the way. If it doesn't, that's also okay. It's just practice, right? It's just paper. It's just practice. And that's what this is all about. It's testing your limits and finding out how to fix things. If you do make a mistake, right, or if you er, or if you do something you didn't want to do, Something surprised you or something unexpected happened. Those are all okay. This sky is going to be really light. I can tell it's going to dry a lot lighter if we wanted to take some more. Red. And we can do that. If we wanted to drop some more purple in there, we can do that too. That red and purple will really darken up that area. You may or may not want that. Okay? That's okay. Whatever you like. Okay. We can look at it again. Sometimes tilting it will give you a different perspective. Maybe you want to hold it. Sometimes I'd like to do that. I introduced more water. Now we're going to, whenever you introduce water, it pushes the pigment, right? So you end up with this bloom or this bare space, space where the water pushed away the pigment. And so it cleared the paper away for you, so to speak. Clear the paint from the paper. See, now I have a big mess there. And we can just sweep this all like this. We can leave this like, you could turn this around. It could be an ocean scape. It could be a seascape. It could be a red sea, right? With the sun beating down, you could clear out a little sunspot right here. But for now, now it looks wrong. I turn it this way, that's okay. Now we're let's just dry this and see what happens if we don't like it. After it dries, we can always re wet everything and add another layer. That's okay too. Sometimes it's good to dry it, see where you are evaluate and then just do another layer at all. And start again, that's 100% acceptable. 100% encouraged. While I was drying that I came up with an idea. I'm going to grab my rigger brush. I'm going to leave it as is. I'm going to start with some orange, yellow color. I like the uncertainty of the paint each time I like that it can be different. I started with a lighter, lighter, slightly lighter warmer Okra up top. And I'm just going to bring this color and these big trees down all the way to the bottom. For now, I probably should do a few in the background. I probably don't need to do all the way to the bottom. I'm not really sure what I'm doing yet. Actually, like I said, as I was drawing, I was thinking I want to do gradient trees. I think it'd be fun to do the orange, yellow ones and then maybe pick up a brighter or darker orange. And then go for the pink ones and the purple ones and layer them on top of each other. I thought that would be fun. That's what I'm doing. Again, I know it's funny that you're taking a class from somebody that doesn't know what they're doing. That's exploring and being curious as they go. And I think that that sometimes gets lost. I've taken a lot of tutorials, many tutorials here on skill share I've been taking on a day at least since last Fall. So it's about nine months of tutorials every single day, Sometimes 123 or four, but at least one. No matter what, I've taken a tutorial every day, I feel that sometimes tutorials can get very stuck in their ways. This is it, this is the way, not that they don't encourage you to do what you want, but I feel that sometimes, um, I don't know, we're not all experts. I guess that's what I want to say. We're not all experts. Do what feels right. Do what feels good to you. Explore when it feels right. Right. If something feels wrong, you're like, I don't know how to do this way, I don't like it, or I don't care for this, Do it your way. Absolutely 100% do it your way doesn't have to be done the way you see it. Just because the territorial says to or just because they're doing it that way. Right. We're not all experts, some of us are just very passionate watercolor hobbyist artists. Right. Some of us want to share our passion and our love with you and just encourage and be able to inspire, hopefully you and I guess that's also what I want to say. Again, the trees, these are pretty walk as I'm talking, I feel like they're getting walker. That's okay too. This is just an exploration. It's seeing where it takes us and if we like the result, that's okay too, right? It's okay if we don't like what we make, it is just paper. I don't know if feeling this was the whole idea or a good idea of leaving. If I should blur the ground. I'm not going to, I'm just going to dry this as is again. See where that takes us. See where we end up in the end. Let's just go for it. If we don't like it, we can just go over it again. I'm not sure. I wanted it to be too dark, so this is going to be good. It's going to dry lighter, right? But at a little bit more red, maybe a little more purple, I think this will be good. Drop that in there to mix it up a little bit. Trees aren't perfect. If you change your color and decide that, love that color, it's okay if you change mid tree. You can always go back in and drop some more up there. I'll do that often. Just drop some more color in there. Because trees aren't always the same color. They're different colors, they have variances. And there are different hues and tones and different all over your trees do not need to be perfect. They need to be practiced a lot. And that's what, this is, just a lot of tree practice. Wholesome, good, fun tree practice. All right. Try to keep those tips. Different heights, different widths, different everything. So that more textures and more things in your, you can even take that dark color that you already, that already mixed up. I'm just going to drop a little tiny bit of that in just a few of these right in the middle, because in the middle of the tree seems to be a little bit darker. So I just wanted to drop that in there. All right? I try to keep my tips up here as pointy as I can. Thinner at the top. Just adding layers of trees, maybe a little more dark. That one seems to blend right in. That's okay too. It doesn't you don't want to stick out like a sore thumb. Right. Blending is good. And layering those so they don't look like they're just stacked on top of each other. Which at the moment they are. Sometimes I get sad because I'm like, oh, really good, like looking tree, I have to cover it up. But I try to get over that and I try to just think about all the practice I'm getting. I am right, I still need practice. I've painted thousands of trees and I'm still happy to practice on 100% daily practice. All right, let's get a little small one here. Let's see, we did 123 456-789-1011 in our first layer, right? 1234567 in this one. Let's do two more. I do stick in odd numbers. Let's like this one at lower. We'll bring it a bit forward. Come into the line of R. Okay, take a little bit dark. Since this one is closer, I'm going to add, this one's a little bit closer to. I'm going to add a little bit more dark in the center here. This one is a little bit closer as well. Those ones, they're a little bit further back, so I'm not going to add dark to them. Okay, 1234567. I did say a few more, didn't I? Okay. Let's throw a few more. Let's throw one in maybe here. Okay? And then we'll toss another one in, right here. Okay. And then we'll dry again. 7. Project 2: Part 2 Gradient Trees: There let me go a little more of a brown color. I think I'll stick with that. I did initially think I wanted to go purple, but sometimes I did think I wanted to go purple initially. But sometimes things just to work out a certain way and we're going to go with that. And again, just loosely painting our trees. Try not to do what I just did. I got a line in a line, right? A tree lined up with a treetop of a line. Probably not ideal for me. But again, it's just paper. And it's just practice. And that's okay. That's okay. You stick a little tree in here. These are all the same height and I should have gone a little shorter on one of these or taller on another one. We'll try to fix that by adding some more in between. You don't really want your trees the same height, right? A little too much paint on that brush though. Let's go right here. We'll just have a little tree there, and then we'll go here with a little tree again. Imperfections are welcome. Nothing's perfect in nature. We sure don't expect your trees to be perfect, nor do I expect mine to be perfect. They really aren't, okay? They're just illusions and suggestions of trees. We're just going to keep filling up a little bit here, keep filling, deal like trees get larger the closer they are to you, you know. This is just for fun. We're not going to be crazy about certain sizes and heights. I always say and see that when I lined up to I'm not big on like huge on the shadow. Must be exactly correct. I'd rather just have you have fun and explore versus getting all those little details perfect. You have plenty of times for those things in life, We all do, right? We have plenty of those things in life already. As it is 1234567 odd number. Let's start there. Let's just add some neutral tint to what we already have going on, which is basically my version of a black. I'll use neutral tint a lot. I love neutral tint. It is my black. If I were to use a black, now I've made, oh, look at what I did, exactly what I've said not to do. So let's go ahead and turn those into birds. This is going to be a big bird. There we go. All right. We've got a big bird out there. That's okay. We're just going to leave the two for now. Maybe wild more later. Maybe not. And that's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. Right. You can do what you like. Let's now, I can't decide if I want to do these bill trees. And I did not dry. So let me Did I dry? I did not dry. Right. No, I did not. Okay. Let me I'm just going to just one tree and then we're going to dry. See, it's much darker now and I'm not sure. I love it. It's okay and I can't say that enough. You don't have to love it. Okay. I'm gonna dry because I want to do some taller spindlier ones versus all these fetch Christmas tree looking ones. All right. Let's keep going with our, our trees here. Just bring a big old one in here. Okay. And then let's bring And some of them, yes, we'll absolutely 100% cover up whatever you've, whatever you've painted, created and that's okay right now, we're just after the practice them. Perfect. Even after painting, you know, all these all of a sudden, I just I don't like this one and that's okay. Happens. It's just going to say I'm not going to mess with it, I'm not going to keep messing with it because I will. Then I'll make it worse. Let's just keep going. The more I think about painting trees, the worse it gets. I don't know if you can somehow get out of your head while you're painting the trees. I think it's very helpful for me. Anyway, I think the more I think about the shape of what I'm trying to do, the worse it comes out right. The more blobby, less organic feeling, just the less there. Look at that. A giant, We'll just make this one super tall too. Super tall. Let's go even taller. Yeah, it turns out worse and worse. Honestly, at this point, I would like to scrap this one. But I'm not going to for the full on sake of saying that it's okay. Right. I tell you it's okay. So it has to be okay for me as well. It has to just make it okay. It's okay. Things don't work out the way you want them to all the time in life. We may as well just get used to it. Maybe this can help us embrace those harder times during our regular hours of life versus our free time of art where we're in our little bubble safe bubble. Not trying, but I am essentially getting rid of that yellow along the bottom. That wasn't necessarily my thought process in the beginning, but I'm preferring it gone. Now that I see it gone, things change. And that's okay too. You process your ideas, will, that's a thing my way. I am very intuitive. I don't plan what I paint for me. Doing these classes and making these demonstrations is quite challenging. Because I don't plan things. It's hard for me to plan out what we're going to learn. I try to just sit down and paint and see what happens. That's the way I prefer it. These, I try to treat the same way, but in some ways I have to plan a bit. It's new for me and I'm trying to adapt to that. Let's add one more little one right here so we can get rid of that yellow and cover that up. Sure, I could just go in and make a mountain a thing where it covers up all that yellow, but 123-45-6789 Okay. We've got an odd number, we've got an even number of birds, which I feel like we need to even that out. Probably need to add another bird. And I just keep them very simple. I just do the V shapes or the upside down V, and that's it. I always end up making a face. So I'm trying to be very mindful of where I'm placing this other one. I think I'm just going to do them off here. An upside down one? Yeah, that's it. I'm just going to keep them very light. That's all. Let's take the tape off and be done. I could dry again before I take the tape off, which is probably smarter. Let's go ahead and do that first. We could do what I'd like to do right before we do this is I'm going to take some of my darkest color. I will cover it so that I don't just use my hand like I often do and set a bad example for everybody. Let me show you how you should do it. Okay, I'm going to cover this just like this. I'm just going to splatter in a little bit of darks to break up the tree shape, tree shape, tree shape. You know, I feel like it's a little too much, right? So let's just, I don't know, let's just add some texture. And you don't have to do this part, you never have to do any of the steps that I tell you, right? These aren't necessary steps. These are more suggestions and encouragement. And those things, what I see this little corner over here and I feel like it needs just something a little dark right here. How about we put a little little baby friend right there? Okay, Make sure I'm very careful about my frame. I like to think about my frame. And then the contrast when you take this tape off. The contrast with this really dark tree right here is going to frame your picture, right? Same with this bottom line right here. Make sure I'm going to fill in any I see some little gaps there. You want to be careful filling in? I'm using the same color and hopefully it doesn't show. Sometimes it will, and you'd be like, oh, I should have done that. That's okay too. It's all practice. You're learning. I like to think about where my frame I like to keep these two Dirk Dirk, this this little shape dark right over here. I like to keep this whole area dark and I like to keep my bottom my border dark. The side borders I'm not as concerned about. I do like to keep these ones but up here I'm not as concerned but Okay. Let's dry. I do re use my tape. I grab it at the top. I follow it down to the end. I grab it at the end. Otherwise, it will twist and curl on itself really fast and you'll lose your nice tape. This tape, I can reuse it. I don't 567 times, it's such a great tape. I love it. So I clean it off after two. I'm grab it just at the end there and I put it on my table. I just tape it to the top of my table. It sits there and waits for me till next time. And then can wipe it clean with a wet towel or my paint brush. All right, here we are. I was a little bit of a longer one. My apologies. And my giant, maybe that's an owl. I think it's an owl. I'm going with the owl. Thank you for joining me and I'll see you next. Thank you for painting with me and I'll see you next time. 8. Project 3: PNW Rainforest: For this piece, I thought we would paint a really loose, suggestive, misty, green, a magical feeling forest. I have my 100% cotton paper. I'm going to tape it down to my board once again so I can move my board around a paint and flow nice and loose. I'm just going to press all sides down because I'm using a lot of water here on this piece. So you want to make sure your tape is really pressed down. I'm going to pre wet with base. Brayer do have a little bits of paint on there I'm going to try to wipe off in a minute here I'm using a actually I'm using a cotton cloth to wipe down my sides. I don't want too much water dripping off all the sides. I do want the paper pretty darn wet. But I, I'm going to work with my rock well and actually, Rock Pasha handmade paints versus commercial probably use a little bit of both. We'll see. So I'm just going to start getting lots of paint on the top. I do have my board elevated, which is also another reason I like using the board because you can elevate and I also will pick it up often. I'll twist and turn and raise and lower it and whatnot. So I'm just going to keep adding some more paint and then I'm going to spray a little more to get the paint flowing even more and the water moving and it all just flowing. I'm really just trying to get the paint to go from the top to the bottom, to move throughout the piece. To self granulate, if you will not self granulate. Self gradient make my own little gradient without really trying, right? I want the organic feel of the drips in the just kind of the flow versus, you know, we could go in and wash darker from lighter to bottom or whatnot. We could absolutely 100% do it that way. And if you are more comfortable doing it that way and that's what you prefer, you can 100% do it that way. When I make these tutorials, I just there are more suggestions, right? And now I'm splattering just to kind of to encourage that more about free flowing feel versus just the drips, right? So I'm just using any kind of way to get the paint on and to get it flowing and to get it moving. Lots of water, lots of paint. Lots of just playing around and you can do what works for you. Again, this is about you learning what works for you, what you enjoy. You might not be using 100% cotton paper and it might not work the same way. So you do with most of these, you really want to try to invest in 100% cotton paper bag or reshare. My favorite arch is a little more expensive. Baojun is super affordable. Both are worth it. And I rotate between the two and use them almost all the time. I have a few others I really like, but for the most part, these are my top two 100% cotton traditional style papers, right? Not handmade cotton but this traditional. So I'm going to dry that first layer and you can see I have, you know, water at the bottom, and I'm not really worried about that right now. After I dry it, I'm going to rewet it again. Again, lots and lots of water. I'm going to take a darker tone this time. I'm going to use a bit of an olive green from my rock. Well, and I'm just going to let that drip down. Lots of water, lots of pigment. You can also see here how when I sprayed, I didn't fully wet the paper. So you're going to see some harder and softer lines happening. And that's okay too. If you don't, if you decide you don't like those, take your brush and kind of just mess it up a little bit and loosen it up. But ideally, we're trying to get some shapes here. Happening, starting to happen, right? I'm trying to bring in some, maybe some branches, maybe some parts that look like trees. Starting to add more, a little color in there. A little more depth. A little more darker tone, right? So I'm using more paint, less water now and just focusing on getting some depth in there and some things to come forward and come back And just, you know, I'm soaking up the water, so there was a big puddle right there. I just decided that was a little too much. And so you're going to want to just play and see where it's going for you. If you're getting too much water, you're gonna soak it up. If you want to tilt your paper back the other way and let the water wash back over, that's also an option. There are so many things you can do here. You don't just need to follow what I'm doing. Do what it feels right in the moment. And if you don't know, that's okay too, do what I'm doing so it can go either way. If you're ready to explore on your own, do that. If you need a little more guidance, maybe follow along mostly. And here we go. I'm gonna flip it over and see what happens and see if perhaps that's the way I want it. And when I did first start this piece, I did think maybe that's what I would do. And I wasn't 100% sure. I was, you know, like probably 80% maybe 90% But I wanted to explore it that way without the, without the expectations of, you know, making it look exactly like a forester tree. So anyway, once you flip it over, you can start to define some ******, define some darker areas, and just start filling in some trees. I always start my trees with a line. And again, if that's not the way you do yours, do the way you're comfortable. If you're not sure, try the line and just balance your brush from side to side. You know, starting at the top, very thin, getting wider at the bottom. And I'm not making particular brush jokes, I'm just letting the brush do what it did. And so you'll see maybe I might jump ahead on a few of these. I don't miss too much. But occasionally I'll get a bad shot and maybe my heads in there. So that's why you'll see maybe some missing pieces. You're not missing anything major, Just a lot of just building up these trees just like I'm doing right here. Just a lot of lines back and forth, squiggles in there. Some darker, some lighter. Mostly darker. Now to build again, build upon whatever we already have as a base. Right. All that upside down work was our base. And now we're just kind of finalizing and adding in the layer after layer and trying to get darker and darker on those layers. And we're varying a lot. Right, nothing's. Exact, Nothing's the same, everything's different sizes. And I did dry again. I used my heat tool. I've been using my heat tool a lot, saves a ton of time for me. I'm using the olive green again and I'm going to try not to use too much water because I do want it to be pretty thick on these last few layers so that we get a lot more darkness here. You'll see my picture does look a little bit faded. Right. But that's okay. Because that allows us now to even go darker. Right. And so it's not a bad thing. I'm going to test my colors right here just to see if I mixed up what I like. So I have one color that I think that was my base color, that's just straight from the pan. And then this next color is the one that I mixed up. Actually, no, that's the olive green. So I just wanted to compare my shadow green on the right and my olive green on the left. So one's handmade one's tube. And I think I was just just reiterating which one was a little darker, so I mixed those two together. And then I might even throw in when I'm ready to do my darker one, I might even throw in a little neutral tint or indigo. And that's okay to do. This does appear to be a monochromatic piece, but you know there are no hard rules. You can add in colors if you need to. You can do what you want. You can switch up the greens. You can use eight different greens on here. You can use all blues. You can mix and match. You know, there are no rules. Just because I'm doing my green does not mean that you need to do yours green. Just because I'm using a pointed round brush doesn't mean you need to. You can use a dagger, a round a liner. You can use whatever you want, whatever you're comfortable with, whatever feels right to you in the moment, and if it's not working out for you, switch brushes, I do it all the time. You'll see, I think maybe it wasn't this one. But I think like I will often grab my rigger and just start painting with that one that I was my tree brush for a very long time and I'm trying to remind myself as well to use different brushes. So that's why I'm using this pointed round right now. It does make really great trees and I do love it. So I'm trying to kind of get acclimated with or not re, acclimated, but I'm trying to acclimate myself with this brush because I'm so used to using that rigor. So again, even you know me who's been painting trees, thousands of them, it's okay to mix it up. You don't want to get stuck in a rut where you have to use the same brush all the time. I think it's good to be able to use lots of brushes. So I've painted how many trees in this one little thing. So many trees. So again, I'm just mixing some more paint and see this. Okay? This is what I'm talking about. I wasn't crazy. That is my rigger brush. That is my plana bright rigger. And so I go in with a plena bright rigger which is like a thick script liner And I'm just going to get that, those big trees in. So see you can use just any kind of brush that you're comfortable with. And like I said, this is my tree brush. So I do feel quite comfortable usually with this brush. But again, I have my off days like look at the tree, it's pretty wonky And that's okay. You're just suggesting these trees. Nothing's like dead set in stone. Nobody's gonna say that does not look like a tree. When you have 50 of these trees on one page, they're gonna know the trees, right? You're not going to have to tell people that it's a tree, they're gonna know. And I switch back brushes and that's okay too, change at the moment, if that's what you need. Sometimes, sometimes when I'm doing these demos or tutorials or, you know, any kind of, any kind of presentation type thing, I will switch brushes without telling somebody. Because it's just what I do. It's so quick for me to just mix colors and do things intuitively. I don't really plan it out. None of this is ever planned, so these pictures are not planned out before. When I sit down, I kind of have an idea. Maybe that, okay, I wanted to do this piece upside down. That's kind of all I knew. I wanted to drip the colors down. That's kind of what I knew. I didn't know exactly what I was going to the painting. I knew I wanted to do trees, right? I knew this was a series on trees. So that's as far as I know. So you can be a planner or you cannot be a planner. You can fall somewhere in between. You can use reference photos. You can do whatever is easiest, whatever is most fun for you. What makes you curious? What you want to explore? There are no set hard fast rules or step by step that you have to follow to get you know, to a place where you want to be. If you enjoy just, you know, painting tutorials all day long, do that. If you prefer reference pictures, if you prefer, you know, emulating after other people, that's fine too. You'll eventually find your own style coming into your parts too, in your pieces. And so that's kind of how I evolved. It just kept doing things over and over and different styles and different tutorials and finally just kind of found my own way here. I'm just darkening up these front ones just to bring a little bit more, you know, because of course everything up close is going to be a bit darker. Not everything, but a lot. Most things are close are going to be darker and more clear. Right. As the farther you get back, what's the atmosphere gets lighter. So, and I probably even just using straight neutral tint here just to get some really dark ones in here. And again, this is just messy, fun, chaotic play and let it be that doesn't have to be these perfect trees all in align with the perfect miss and the perfect fog. Just have fun practice your trees and get them on there. Right. That's all we're trying to do. Just explore and trying and keep trying. Like I keep saying, it's just paper. Sometimes it'll take you one time and sometimes it'll take you at 78 or even 12. Some things just, you know, some of us just take a little bit longer. I am one of those people, it takes me longer to grasp things. All right. So I'm gonna dry that last layer. I'm going to pillow tape and that is it. We are done. We completed this. You can try this with all different colors. You can go back with more detail, less detail. You can do half the amount of trees. You can do different colors. There are so many different ways you can do this and explore with this and just have fun with it. And again, there are no rules. You could have kept it upside down if you like, just just try. And you know the worst case is you try again and you use a little bit more paper. But you explore, you have fun. And that's all I can ask for. So I'll see you next time. 9. Project 4: Moody Sunset Tree Line: Hello and welcome back. So I'm going to go ahead and jump right in and wet my paper. I'm going to make sure I do it horizontally and vertically so the water absorbs in ischial spot. I'm going to dive right in and use orange in the sky. This is going to be drop in colors. Just play with colors you like together. I don't know how many colors I use in this one. Probably probably going to end up using like three or four, maybe even more. I like to use a lot of colors and they want you to explore the colors that you like. They don't have to be the same brands. They don't have to be the same makers. They can use handmade commercial. You can use whatever you like. I do water them down quite a bit for this kind of thing. And again, I'm using oranges and reds and yellows. And I'm just dabbing them in. And I'm just going to let these colors work for me and see where they want to go. And then I'll go around and not really self rescue this one necessarily, but try to melt them and see what I can come up with. I'm just going to create some sort of sky that feels good, that feels right. And I'm going to keep working it until it does feel right. So I'm just going to keep dropping in these colors. And the colors I'm grabbing right now are pretty super granulating. So they have more than just one pigment color in each color that I'm using. So they're playing with each other. Right? And so I'm not just using say, three colors, because a lot of them have more than one pigment within that one color. So I'm really just playing with a lot of colors here. And will it turn muddy? It could Do I mind? No, I don't usually mind if it turns muddy. I feel like it's kind of when I get the most interesting things happening. And you can always save yourself if I did too much blue there, you can dab it up with a tissue. You can pick it up with a thirsty brush, which just means that you drink your brush off really well. Tap it dry a little bit on a cloth and then you just pick up the paint and you can pull that back out if you don't like that. You can mist it with a spray bottle. You can do what I'm doing there, just kind of washing it out or kind of loosening it up a little bit. You know, you saw how dark it was initially and it's already fading. And there I go, I use a spray bottle to kind of loosen everything up and you can tilt that board. That's why I paint on a board. So you can pick it up and move it from side to side, up and down, and see where the colors go in. Is really exploring what's in front of you, right? Being in the moment and just painting and just playing, just having fun and being curious in trying new things. I do periodically wipe down my sides of my paper like that. With my brush, you could use a tissue, but I find my brush works the best with tissue. I sometimes end up with a little pieces of fuzz in there. Now, I'm just going to drop some darker colors in. I have a lot of light going on and I wanted to darken it up a little bit. Just wanted to see where that would take me. My paper has been wet this whole time, that's why you're seeing a lot of looseness. If paper does start to dry, you can dry it all the way and then re wet the entire thing and jump right back in where you were. So no big deal. If your paper starts to dry, you'll get harsh edges. Hard edges. Harsh edge if you don't like them. Yeah. Like I said, let it dry. If you don't mind them, go with it. I don't I don't really super mind them. I know they're slightly frown upon. So now I'm going to do what I was talking about earlier. I'm just gonna tilt my board. I'm going to just play that way and see what happens and let things kind of move. And I'm going to pick up the puddles on the bottom, of course, because those will go back in your painting. And again, that stuff doesn't really bother me very much, but I kind of got in the habit of doing it now. So turning it sideways, you'll also get some fun bleeds going that way and just seeing where the paint wants to go, what it wants to do. I'm really liking the glow at the top, so kind of happy with that and I don't know, it's kind of therapeutic for me for some reason to pick up the paint like that. I don't know why I do. I don't know why I do find it so therapeutic. But I do and what I was going to say is I do re use my tape, so that's why you'll see my tape and wonder how did she get it so dirty and why is it gray? I re use my tape hole bine tape really holds up really well. This is of course 100% cotton paper I'm using, Arch the brush I'm using is either, what is it, my plena or my tintoretto. I usually swap between the two. This looks like my plena. They're my two favorite brushes. If you get any two brushes, I would absolutely 100% recommend plena in the Tintoretto. I love them, I love the Tintoretto travels as well. Again, though, this isn't about rushing out to buy the stuff I have or I use, or that I say I love. I will only say things I love though, and also to say if I don't love them, but I want you to use what you have and you can absolutely 100% do this with what you have already. Speaking of things I have, I love that palette. It was one of my favorite newest pieces. I also love my little eggy palette, which is the one next to the one I call affectionately Buzzy. So we have Buzzy and Eggy. Again, I did drop in that orange at the top. Even though I said I love that glow, I felt like it would help add some depth. I usually do like to add darker colors around the edges, in the corners to bring your eye in or just give it more balance and more depth. And I don't know, I just play and it doesn't have to make sense to me. I know often people are like, oh, the shadows are light. It wouldn't do that, it wouldn't come from that direction. That's just not how I work. You're 100% absolutely welcome to do that if that's what works for you. Me, I just wanted to play with colors today. I wanted to show you that you could just play with colors and then we can see where that takes us with the trees. Eventually, I promise, finish up with this, but didn't want you to feel rushed. I could have sped through this and sped up the video, but I wanted to see it happen and I wanted to see that you could take the time to explore. And it doesn't have to feel rushed or be rushed. And I don't know. I just find it very relaxing and a lot of fun to watch the colors do their thing, like look at this beautiful purple. It's so pretty. This violet purple. Not purple, but violet color. It does have some purple in there because I put so many layers on there and I can't even count how many colors I have going on in there. But, you know, it's just paper. If I decided this was not going where I wanted to, what would I do? Probably just finish this up and, you know, maybe try another one, maybe not. Okay. So I do have those funny lines there, right? So what am I going to do with those? And obviously have huge drips, right, all over the place, getting so therapeutic to pull those up. So we have the magic of a board and you can use a piece of cardboard, you can use a cutting board. You find it, you know, a Thrift store or something you have around your house or the dollar store. I prefer Thrift store versus Dollar store, but that's just me. You can use what you have. I found this in my craft supplies. I didn't buying more because I wanted more of them. And the one that set I have, one of them is used for a de cutter, so it's pretty tore up. But this one was the top plate and so I end up using this. And so to fix those, there you go. It's about time, about time member. So I use my hockey brush and it's a dry brush. Do not get it wet. It's a very dry brush and I'm going very lightly, okay, everything's really wet. If I go too hard right now, it's just going to smear that paint. You started seeing it do that. The top right corner a little bit. You can see where I just kind of picked up the paint versus moved it, but I got rid of those streaks and now I probably want to think about adding. I can't remember if I add a little bit to the bottom there or if I just kind of leave it. See, I'm thinking, just like I am now, I'm debating on what to do but these brushes. A dry brush and you don't have to have the style brush either. You can use a Quill brush. You can use any brush you have. Okay? But I did pick up my rigor and this has been my go to tree brush for quite some time. Now it's up to you what you use. Again, these classes aren't going to be necessarily step by step of how to build a tree or how to draw a tree, or create a tree, or paint a tree. But I want you to get in here and practice. That's why we're doing so many so that you can find your way. Yes, I make the straight line. Yes, I go from side to side with blobs and very loose and very fast. And that's the way that works for me to get it done. But I want you in these classes to kind of explore the ways that work for you, right? I want you to figure out what works best for you, because my exact way may or may not work for you. And you just have to feel over and over, you know, hundreds and hundreds and maybe thousands of trees before I'm still working on my trees. I'm still perfecting it. I'm still, I'm still, you know, trying to find the perfect brush. Yes, I call this my tree brush, but I feel that I should be able to pick up most any of my brushes and be able to make a tree with it. So that's my goal. My own personal goal is to be able to use all my brushes for trees if I want to. Also, you might want to be careful. If you have a favorite brush and you decide to use it for trees, you might want to be slightly aware that you could potentially damage the pointy tip of your brush. Doing it over and over. I've ruined. Ruined. But okay, I've ruined a few brushes by doing these trees. And I paint so many that some of my pointed pulling a bright rounds are ruined. Because I paint a lot of trees. And so you want to be aware of your wear and tear, possible wear and tear of your brushes. So you could potentially, maybe I recently came across an artist who uses maybe like a Princeton, a cheaper Princeton. And she calls that her tree brush. I've tried that same brush for me and doesn't do the magic that it does for her. And that's okay, that's what I'm talking about. You kind of really have to find what works for you. And if you want to dedicate one of your nice brushes to trees and it works for you because it works for you, then you might want to just do that for a long time. My planas really did work really well for my trees and now I'm still using a plena. It's just the rigger. So it's more of a script liner brush and it's a thinner brush. For me, it does the trick. I'm working on about a little smaller than four x six paper, so it is small. And so I tend to use a smaller brush for my trees. And so for me that works, but I've also used a giant cats tongue. I have like I think it's a half inch cat tongue. I don't remember what size that is, but it's a large brush and it has such a fine tip that I can also make trees with it. So don't discount any brush because you think the size might be too big or, you know, try them all. Do like we did in the tree demo on that one page. And just fill page after page if that's something that appeals to you. If you really want to find your style of tree, it's kind of what you have to do. You know, that's what I did. I've done pages and pages of trees. Like I said, I'm still on that mission to find my perfect tree and I'm hoping to get there one day. I'm hoping to just be able to replicate, uh, you know, a tree line just of trees that I just absolutely love. And sometimes I love my trees and sometimes I don't. I still don't love them sometimes, and so I always say this, but when you have a whole tree line of trees, a whole line of trees, you're suggesting the trees, right? You're not so focused on the one, so if your one doesn't look great, like I don't love one of those right now, And you know once I fill this whole line up with trees, you're not going to be so focused on that one, okay? So when I'm doing these like forests, it's so much easier than right, painting a picture with one, you know, deciduous tree right in the middle. And it has to be the center of attention. So these, for me, are much more therapeutic because they can suggest a forest versus being the main focal point. And so I love doing these, just painting line after line and row after row, and just practicing them over and over and over. I usually will pick up a different brush and try those with different pictures. With one picture, I do think I tend to stay with the same brush unless I randomly decide to put a huge tree, like right in front, like in the foreground, Then I would probably pick up a different brush and try that brush, or maybe not. Sometimes I'll use the rigger for a giant tree and go with it. And that's okay too. Again, this is about finding the things that work for you and the ones that don't let it go. Right. Just because I'm doing it this way, I don't want you to get stuck in your head that you have to do it this way too. I want you to find your way. What works for you. Take things from other people, from me, from many others. Anything you see on Instagram, on you Tube here on Skill Share, wherever you see it, use it, take it, and make it work for you. I've done so many skillshare tutorials and I've learned so much just from doing those tutorials, but I've also learned so much that I don't care for that I don't like. Right. And if I don't like something in tutorial, I step back. I don't step back. But I like say to myself, okay, you know what, you can try it this way, get frustrated or you know, this isn't your style something you really love. Why don't you just do it the way you know how to do it that you're comfortable with? Since tutorials are all new to us, typically it's sometimes helpful to take that step back and use the tools that we do know and replace the ones maybe that we're not really understanding how to do with what we do know, and I think that can be really handy for me anyway. All right. I think I finally I'm about finished with these trees. I know it's a lot of trees. I did use a neutral tint here. I feel like I might have mixed it with something. But you can use any kind of dark. I don't want you to stuck on colors like I always say that too. I know, but usually usually neutral tint. You could use sepia, you could use indigo. You could use a paint's gray, you could use whatever you have and whatever you like and make it work for you. Right. Oh, I guess I decided to add more. I'm not quite done A, I, I mean adds some birds. Alright. So my birds are pretty darn simple. They're literally V shapes upside down, right side of little lopsided. I try to do less more, I try not to overdo it. I'm not an expert at these birds either. I still struggle. I don't get the formations right. The shapes aren't always right. Some are heavier than others and some are lighter than others. And so I just keep trying. Just like with trees, I try over and over. And that's all you can really do, right? You can do pages of these two over and over, and usually if I try to go darker, I mess them up. So just go with your gut and leave them how they are. And I think that's about it. We're gonna peel the tape off here and love our edges. I think I think they all came out pretty darn good. And once I see a leak, I'll throw that paper away. So there we are. Yeah. I love this one. This was kind of done on a whim and I love how loose and flowy that sky is and how free it was and just how much fun it was to explore. I really hope that you enjoy it too. And I hope that you find your own exploration and you enjoy it as much as I do. And I will see you in the next lesson. 10. Project 5: Stormy Ridge: Hello, welcome back. Here we are with 100% cotton paper. Again, you can use either side. I'm using arch and with arch you can use either side. I was going to say bow hung. Not always. I don't always love the other side. I'm just speeding this up through this part. I'm taping down my paper. I do reuse my tape. As you can see, I use it until it starts bleeding, so I'm spraying down my paper a little bit. Then I'm going to use my flat brush and I'm going to just brush that in a little bit and get it wet. So it stays wet for a while, right? So I did horizontally and vertically the water. And once I thought it was wet enough, I'm going to use some yellow. Use whatever colors you want. Whatever yellow you want. We are going to, I would recommend sticking to a yellow for this part. This is going to be kind of our glow, of our sky. And so I think yellow works really nicely for this glow, and I'm just kind of smearing it in and trying to make sure that it kind of blends and keeping it kind of in that area where I'm kind of showing you. And I don't want it to go too high, I don't want it to go too low. But you'll see it doesn't matter if it does, really. I'm just kind of setting myself up a little bit and I kind of like that dark streak. So there you go. Add some more, the yellow ochre. I love a yellow ochre. It's such a good color. I know rosen is pretty darn close, but I often reach for yellow ochre versus raw sienna. I try to use raw ciena because so many tutorials call for it. So I often will use what the tutorial will call for if I have it. But I just love yellow och re, so I'm getting it in there more heavy. And then I'm going to go ahead and kind of blend it out, if you will, and try not to lose too much of its vibrancy because I really do like it on that side. And I'm using a mop brush right now. I love my polar polina, bright mop brush. And as I go, I like to clean up my sides. And that just means putting the brush on there and picking up the excess paint and water. You can use a rag for this. You can use whatever you like. I prefer the brush. It doesn't leave little fuzzes from say, like a paper towel or something. And so that really works for me. I'm going to use a heat tool to dry that. You can wait 5 minutes or 8 minutes or whatever it takes. And I'm going to spray it again. I'm going to rewet it again. Now, why wouldn't I just put my next color on top? Well, because it's yellow and I don't want to lose that completely within. So here I am thinking about what color I want to use. I often do that, I'll pause and like, Hmm, Do I really want to use that one? I like to just go with my gut. So these classes are sometimes a little more challenging for me because it makes me think like pre plan, right? I don't prepare plan very often. I kind of paint intuitive intuitively and just go for it. And so I pick some gray. I'm not going to call out colors like I always say, right? Because I kind of want you to pick your own colors. I do throw in a little bit of gray, a little bit of purple. I want my sky to be moody. I want it to feel something. I want it to, you know, add some color. And so I'm going to keep layering and I'm going to keep adding color and I'm going to keep playing with it for me overworking and being kind of heavy handed and all these things. Maybe sometimes I know you're supposed to start off really light, but sometimes I go right in. I don't follow so many rules and sometimes that will fail me right. And sometimes I'll have to wash this whole thing off. Or sometimes I'll use my flat brush and just kind of smear it over a hockey brush. And I'll brush it lightly. I'm just trying to work in some clouds and the bigger ones a top, and then I'm getting them finer at the bottom. And maybe I'll switch some brushes around to see if I can get some more wispier clouds in there. And that's what I'm doing here. I switched to my silver brush size. I think that's a round size four. The numbers have long been rubbed off most of my brushes. If I use them a lot, he'll know if I use a brush a lot because there'll be no more numbers on it everywhere I rub them off. Now here SS looks a little sporadically, not like clouds, right? Sometimes I do this and then sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And it's okay if it doesn't. Right? Some things just don't work. And I'm not sure what I'm contemplating so long here, but I certainly was probably contemplating how to make those clouds look like clouds and not squiggly lines. And that's okay too. Sometimes it takes us longer than others and sometimes it comes right to us. Sometimes if our papers, you know, too wet, sometimes we have too much flow. Sometimes if our papers too dry, we get our harsh edges. And all these things are just things that you're going to learn as you do this more and more. You know, I practice every single day. I paint every single day. I do a tutorial or two or three every single day. So, you know, and I'm not perfect, so it takes a lot of time. And here I am with that brush I mentioned, it's a very dry brush, Extremely dry, no water, it's been dry. I don't use water on this brush ever, if that helps you. This is strictly my dry brushing brush and so it will never have water on it. And so I'm just using that to kind of brush out those crazy lines and, you know, will I leave it like this? No, but it does help kind of give me an idea of what I have to do next. Do I need to dry? Do I need to add more color? Do I need to, you know, try a different, a whole different approach? What do I need to do? So it gives me a minute and I did cover up some of my pretty yellow, but I mean, that is ultimately. What was going to happen anyway. So I'm going to now, you know, kind of add some more back in because I did take quite a bit away with that brushing. It's a give and take, right watercolor. It always seems to be a give and take. You add some, you take some, you add some more, and then you'll move some more, right? It's kind of this dance of getting it right, of trying to figure it out right, trying to figure out what works. And for me, that often means doing a lot of the same things over and over. I don't have all the answers. I don't have the perfect way to make a sky. I don't have the perfect way to make a cloud. I learn as I go. I make errors as I go. I redo things, I take them away. I'm not an expert. I am a very passionate person about watercolor and I think it's very accessible. I think that anyone can learn it. I think it takes a lot of practice and it's not one of those things. Like, you know, you have a pattern or a recipe and you're going to be great at it in, you know, ten tries, like sourdough bread. I bake, you know, ten loaves before I got a great one. And some people do it once and they get a great one. You know, it, it just is what it is. And, you know, it's different for everybody and that's okay. It's sometimes can be intimidating because some people are so good at so quickly even now. You know, sometimes I do wish maybe I was better at things or faster at learning them or, or could do things in a way that other people can and I can't, and that's okay. 'cause I found my way to do them. And I found what works for me. And I found what I'm passionate about and what makes me happy. And that's sharing all things, water color, right? I love love, love sharing and showing. And just kind of maybe making you more curious or inspiring you. And even if this piece doesn't inspire you, maybe it will inspire something else. Like oh, I like that color combination. You know what? Maybe I will try, you know, my other favorite piece might go to comfort piece in these two colors or something like that. You know, it doesn't have to be this exact piece. I want you to just feel inspired and, and ready maybe to pick up the brush more often or try different things. So anyway, I did add a little too much water there and you're going to see me mess this up a little bit, but that's okay. I feel like every time you mess something up, it just really gives you the chance to kind of correct yourself and, and learn from your own mistakes. And probably right now, I'm probably not realizing that I should probably put this down and dry it. Yes, I keep doing this, right? My paper is in that weird state. I can tell by looking at it now. I don't know why I didn't, you know, realize it before. But I need to put this down. I need to dry it. So hopefully, I realize that soon before I keep adding more paint to this. Why am I doing this? Here we go. Come on, come on E. Okay, so now we're going to the focus on our foreground, right? We've got our sky kind of oddly moody. Is it realistic? No. Is it kind of fun and funky? Sure. I'm kind of liking it now, you know. It's okay. It got to a point where I was like I was okay with it. So we're going to add this foreground and it can be any shape you like. See what I mean about the yellow? The yellow, It's just just your horizon. Just that hint, that peak, just that little bit of that glow, you know, when the storm kind of goes or comes or whatever it's doing it. You got that hint. So now we did that first layer and we're going to go ahead and dry that first layer or no, wait, I'm going to do my trees first because I want the trees to kind of bleed. You'll see do I am to call it the stem. I did the trunk. And then when you hit that line Right. It's going to make that that pretty bleed go on. Sorry. My I think my kid turn on the light there for a second. Real life, right? It is hard to keep all the imperfections out of these things, hence the voice overs. So I've tried many times to chat and paint as I go, but oh my gosh, life just gets in the way the air conditioner turns on. Right. The doorbell rings. You know, something beeps or something ticks or something hums. And so it's really quite hard to get it all perfect to do, you know, studio quality paint and chat the same time and also sometimes honestly they turn out a lot longer. I do love the candidness of, you know, painting and chatting as you go, but I think that also comes out in voiceovers because you're kind of slightly improvising and you're slightly kind of remembering what you're doing. And you know, it kind of inspires a different train of thought. So I appreciate both and I hope you do as well. Because I can't always do live time, you know, chats. I do love doing those in real time other times, but oftentimes on these kind of classes, they just can't be. So we're just going to keep adding trees. We're going to make them different sizes. Different shapes like always, right? We're adding short and tall, fat and tall and short and white. And we're going to do them quick and loose so that we're not too focused on what they look like. Right? We're just getting that general suggestive shape of the tree and making sure that we leave light too. We don't want to take too much light away, that lovely glow. We don't want to lose it by covering it up with a bunch of trees. So I decided to kind of group my trees. I usually like an odd number, Hopefully, I stuck with that, so I stay by my word here. These little pairings of twos are a little too much. So there we go. We got a third one going on, and I love the light behind them and I love the way the clouds are getting really small by the tops of the trees that really worked out. So things to consider are definitely the placements of your trees. So they're losing your good clouds, right? So if you had a cloud you're not a fan of, you can obviously cover that up. Which I love about watercolor, It's pretty darn forgiving, although at times it doesn't seem like it is it really, really can be, in my opinion, quite forgiving. So these pieces are really, I hope that you're really taking the opportunity to practice your trees and not be too hard on yourself and just kind of let them be, you know, little ones. Yeah, I love the little baby ones. I love always adding those and just just trying your hardest and Yeah, add the small ones where you don't want to take up too much of your sky space. I clearly do that here, right, and over to the left. I don't love the sky as much. So that's where I'm going to probably put a few more trees just to kind of, you know, cover that up since it's not my favorite area and not that it needs to be covered, but just fill in with more trees since this is the focus of the class, right? And so I usually would make those trees in the back, maybe lighter, right? I did go pretty dark, but I feel like for this piece we're going to drive with a heat tool. But with this piece, I feel like it's okay. Because we're kind of going for that more silhouette, feel, feel right. Even though the foreground is lighter, but nothing has to be realistic. Just have fun with it. Do what you like. And for me, I like the feel of that tree line being darker against that kind of paler sky, if you will. The moody clouds up top are dark, but the ones that midground area, horizon midground is kind of light. So I'm really enjoying the dark against that light sky. Okay. Bigger trees, we're closer foreground, so we're going to do bigger trees here. I'm still using my pulling, a bright rigor which use what you're comfortable with, use what you make good trees with what feels right to you. This tree isn't my typical tree and feels a little often. That's okay. Right. I'm just trying to see if I can make trees, make big trees, larger trees with this rigger brush. And it's good sometimes to force yourself to do something. And I'm going to be sad because I do have to see as like, don't want to color that yellow up. I really like that glow right there. But I want to add those trees because you know, the foreground, it, it, it makes everything else the darker. And I did go darker, obviously, right, with these foreground ones. Because I want that contrast. The contrast is what gives you the depth, right, and the feeling of everything kind of coming forward or going back and pushing it forward. Pulling it forward and pushing it back. And so I just keep adding a few more and again, I could speed these up for you, but I kind of feel when I do tutorials myself, sometimes it feels very rushed. Even though I know I can pause, right, I could pause. I'm struggling with this one. So I would love your feedback. By the way, if you want to give me feedback on this, if you, if you want to hear me chatter while we paint each tree. Or we can just speed this up and I can show you one tree and then you know, speed it up and show you how we end up with all the trees, especially with tutorials and demos like this that are very, very repetitive, right? These are very, very repetitive. So it's not like you're learning a whole heck of a lot in the, you know, 23 to a half of these videos with all these trees. It's very same thing over and over. But for me, when I was doing a lot of territorials, I felt that sometimes I would feel rushed or I would feel pressured and I wasn't keeping up. Even though I knew they were fast forward. Right. They were sped up and I knew that. But I would feel some sort of pressure and I didn't love that feeling. So that's where I'm torn is I kind of think I should leave it full time so that you can feel it in real time and that you're not rushed. And you can always speed up. Absolutely, speed up. If it's going too slow for you, you can either fast forward, you can speed up my time, right? You can go by 1.5 to two times the speed. You could also slow it down if I'm talking too fast for you, But I also don't want to drag it out so much so that you are just, oh my gosh, Amber, hurry up. Right. I want you to find it valuable and, you know, inspiring and something that you feel like you can do without being rushed. I'm an ad, some tiny little birds Just hints at birds, nothing major. Just the tiniest little hints just so that you see, maybe see that we got a little too heavy handed. I am so not good at my birds still, and I try not to make faces Often when I add three birds, I make a face, two winky eyes in the mouth. So there I go, adding a few, too many, which I often do if I add three. So my ideal I think now is two. I think my ideal is two. I'm not good at the flock, the formation, so the two is perfect. Do what you like, do what you're comfortable with, make them how you like them. This is moody, so I can get away with kind of just hiding them in here. I think. I feel like maybe you can't really see them anyway unless I point them out like I am. So maybe see I'm counting 'cause I like the odd number of the birds too. All right. It's tape peel time. Let's take, let's tape off and see if our tape is reusable. Yep. That piece we can reuse again. It didn't leak. We're all good. Yeah. Alright. I hope you enjoyed this one. I really enjoy this one. I love this kind of moody feel. I love the cloud. It was really fun. I liked the glow. So I hope you'd enjoyed it as well. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Bonus Project : Welcome back. Okay, so with this piece, I am recreating what I'd already done. So the piece you'll see in the initial picture that went along with the introduction to this class just a minute ago, Against the green background is the one to the left and the one I'm painting will be the new one. So I'm using 100% cotton rag paper for this. It's a handmade paper. I'm a mop style, this is a really what I'm using, my Polina bright brush and I am just getting some color on this very loosely. It's wet on dry. I'm just kind of making these super loose clouds for our background. I'm not going for anything particular, I'm just dropping in maybe two or three different colors. You don't have to have specific colors. I'm just using some blues, grays, and a touch of a brown actually. So I let that dry. And I used a heat tool actually. And now I picked up my rigor and I'm going to start on my trees. And I don't really have a true plan for this one. I just want once again to practice our trees and to kind of play around and play with shapes, and play with placement. And see, I'm trying to figure out where to draw them. I actually didn't let this paper dry all the way. I kind of meant to, and I didn't, so I kind of went with it here for a minute. I do dry it here in a second because I'm not liking how loose those tops of those trees are. I do tend to like my tips of my tops of my trees a little like this one right here on the right. I like them to be crisp, and so I often will go back in and crispen that up is not a word. And so again, I'm taking my brush and I'm going to get some water and just kind of loosen up those bottoms. And this is, again, a rag paper, so sometimes it takes a little more water to loosen it up Because this paper is so absorbent, it takes more water to kind of, you know, help loosen all that up and soak in and get back to the paint, get to the paint and do its thing. And so I just wanted to show you that you can use any paper often with these, you don't have to use 100% cotton with a quick sketch like this. But with the ones we did before, I do recommend using 100% cotton with a lot of those wet on wet techniques and a lot of those layers, if I were to layer about seven or eight on here, paper would not be liking it. It would not be appreciative. It would probably start to pill up a little bit and just start to be kind of unhappy in general. And so I'm just, I think I'm using super granulating schminky colors here, but it doesn't matter the color you use. You can use whatever you want. I do like the field though of this blue kind of monochromatic piece. And that's what inspired me in the first place, was my old piece was done on the same kind of paper but had a blue tint to it. So the blue tint with the blue monochromatic. I really like that feel actually. I'll make sure I leave. Oh, actually you know what, If you want that paper, just ask me the discussion part of this, of the scale share and I can go ahead and make sure I get that to you. I probably won't link supply exact supplies in my list. I tend not to do that because I don't want you to rush out and buy something or think that you have to have it. But I would like to, you know, let you know if you really wanted it or liked it. So anyway, I'm just continuing with the trees, we've done this whole time, right? I start I switch brushes for the trees here. I might use my Tintoretto brush here has a nice tip. I really like the tip on this brush. I'm a little hesitant to use it on all these trees because I don't want to ruin my brush or cause it to fray. And I do have a tendency to make a lot of trees, it's not just for this tutorial. I paint trees all the time, thousands upon thousands. And so I feel it does kind of wear tiny brushes. So, you know, I know I've warned you before and other of these classes, but I just want to make sure that you understand that it could add some wear on terror brushes. It's not going to ruin them quickly. It's not going to, you know, be something that you're going to notice overnight, but over time you would. And so I just want to keep going with these trees and see I'm trying all different kind of brushes. I'm spraying a little bit of water to kind of get things to go a little bit more loose. I'm not spraying a lot. Just enough so that we have some soft edges and we have some harsh edges and we have some bits of water there that can do some magic with unexpected magic with these paints, right? Like these little shrubs I'm adding at the bottom and different layers. Sometimes the water will just allow it to do something a little extra special that maybe just you and your paint brush can't do. And it just adds a little bit of unexpected out of control. Just not out of control but a little less controlled environment. And I think for me, that adds to my creative process, right? It just adds one more thing that I can do to help me along and help explore some different avenues when I'm painting instead of, you know, doing the same thing over and over and over. And I think that's another thing that helps me stay out of artist art ruts is trying so many different things and different tutorials and just different ways to do stuff. Instead of trying to do the same thing, which I often I do paint the same thing over and over. But trying all these different methods in different ways, I think really helps to prevent getting in that rut where I'm like over painting landscapes. So I hope, I really hope that one day I'm not over painting landscapes. I love them. They're my favorite things to do. I love painting trees and I love painting skies and, you know, suggestive, all these other things, you know, because I'm not a realistic painter, so I don't like to necessarily paint things that look exactly like they do in nature or in real life, or, you know, even in a, a book or whatnot. So here I am just crisping up these tops of these trees. I'm using a very pointy, fine tipped brush right now to just kind of crisp them up. I think this one happens to mean my silver silk brush, silk, silver silk, or Silver City 88. They do have nice tips on them and just some splatters and that's kind of kind of it on this one. I just wanted to keep it really kind of loose, really quick, kind of a nice little hurrah, You know, kind of like a wrap up. And just to loosen those last things up in case it was, you know, a little challenging to paint so many trees. But I hope you enjoyed it. I enjoyed painting it, so thank you for joining me. 12. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for painting with me. Thank you for painting tree after tree after tree. And I hope that you've perhaps maybe found a little bit of your style of tree, or at least now you can further along in your journey of trees. Today, I would love if you'd like to leave a review that really helps me work on these classes and what works and what doesn't work. Also, if you'd like to post your projects from this class on the Projects and Resources tab, that would be awesome. And I'll see you next time. Bye for now. 13. Final Thoughts & How to Upload Class Projects: Thank you so much for painting with me. Thank you for painting tree after tree after tree. And I hope that you've perhaps maybe found a little bit of your style of tree, or at least now you can further along in your journey of trees. So today I would love if you'd like to leave a review that really helps me work on these classes and what works and what doesn't work. Also, if you'd like to post your projects from this class, you're going to want to head to the Project and Resource tab that I put a little arrow to. And then you're going to click on the Submit button. You're going to upload your image, write a title and description. And once you're done, you're going to push publish. And that is it. And I can't wait to see your project. Give some feedback and encouragement and support. Thank you. Thank you so much for painting with me and I'll see you next time. Bye.