 Hey guys, we are here with another Monday with DecoArt and we're gonna work on another painting. I'm gonna show you a couple different ways to prep your painting. So I want to work on one with a black background, but that might be a little intimidating I was thinking for some of you out there. So just stop. Don't turn the video off and don't give it a thumbs down because of course, you know, I've got some tips and tricks. Of course I do. So to start with whatever surface that you decide to use and it could be a piece of cardboard from some packaging. It could be chipboard. This is a canvas board from Michael's. This is artist loft brand and it actually had something else on it and I just sewed over it. So that's the other thing. Maybe you want to do this on a piece of artwork that you did that you don't like. So and you just want to start over. That's what Gesso is for. Well, one of the things it's for and DecoArt of course has this really great media line of paints and things and they have a Gesso and they have white and they have black and it's a little it's a bit thicker than what I'm used to working with but I actually like that because it covers really well. And I was pretty impressed with both the white and the black. You could do this on a journal page too and again if it has something on there and see this is still white because I just did the white not long ago. If it has something else on there that you don't, you know, like then just just sew over it and start with a clean slate. Now if you are new to the idea of painting and drawing, I recommend that you do white because the prep work is going to be a little bit easier. If you want a bit more of a challenge then black. Now both of these are old pieces of artwork that I have Gessoed over. This one was a painting. This one actually was a mixed media piece and you can tell because you can see some of the collages poking through. I'm OK with that. It did have some 3D objects on it. I use some hand sanitizer, which has alcohol in it and I just sprayed a bunch of it on there and let it soak for a couple minutes and then everything just popped right off. Except for some of the paper, but that's OK without damaging the canvas and then I just Gessoed over the whole thing and then Gessoed didn't cover perfectly. I'm OK with that. We're going to just let it go and we're going to work on top of it. All right, so first I'm going to show you how to prep something that's white because this process is a little easier than working on the black. So you don't know how to draw. You want to maybe give this a try. Never fear. There's a trick around that. So you need your surface. You're going to work on it now. If you're going to work on a board or a page, this process is a little easier. If you're going to work on a canvas like this, where it has, you know, this spot in the middle where you've got this like half inch gap between the canvas and the frame, the back of the frame. When you try to do this next step on it, this is going to flex. So what I recommend is you put a book under there, find a book or something hard so that when you press on it, the canvas doesn't flex because that's going to be important. In this case, I'm going to choose to work on a canvas board, which is what I would recommend. Some kind of board, a piece of chip board, a journal page or a piece of cardboard. If you're going to do it this way because it's a little easier. I'm going to need a piece of carbon paper, old fashioned carbon paper. Yes, you can still find it at some art supply stores and office supply stores. Sometimes they call it transfer paper. It's still carbon paper. It looks like this on the one side and then it's covered in black carbon or, you know, kind of like pencil, same kind of stuff in pencil lead on the other side. So put the dark side down, light side up, then go to my website. The link will be in the description below. It's www.ginabearans.com. I have a new page there full of inspiration photos. Print one of them. In this case, we have this photo that I took on a recent road trip to Sonora, California of St. Michael's Catholic Church in Livermore and I took it. I literally had my hand hanging out the window of the car snapping away with my cell phone. I got to stop doing that because one of these days I'm going to drop my phone and that's going to be so bad. Anyway, I took the picture and the original pictures on my website. But I took the picture and then when I was had a few free moments, okay, I was bored. I was bored. I used one of my apps in my iPhone and I altered the photo. This particular app is called Auto Painter and it has four different style of painterly effects it can give your photos. This one is the Van Gogh style and I liked it so much the way it turned out. I thought when I got home I thought we have got to do something with that. So we're going to. So print out your photo roughly the same size as the board that you're going to work on. This one's a little bit smaller but that's okay. We'll make it work. Lay it on top of your carbon paper and then we're going to just trace all of our shapes. So I'm going to just trace around all the important shapes that we have here on the picture and just take some time and just trace around all of them. It doesn't have to be a perfect tracing. You want to just give yourself a guide of where everything is going to go so that when you finish your painting it has some sort of resemblance or feeling from the original inspiration photo. One of the things I like about this particular photo is nothing is straight and even so it should make it a little easier. You kind of want to do no straight lines because there's no straight lines in this. All right so you're going to do something like that and when you're done you're going to get that on there. All right so I'm going to keep tracing and I'm going to fast forward. I'll be right back. There is our traced image on our white background and you definitely could get started with something like this. I will also show you though if you want to be a little more challenged let me show you how to do it on a black background. So here is our other canvas with the black background and you need a white pencil. This is just a white color pencil and an expensive brand. I need a book that fits inside the cavity of my painting. That one's a little bit too big. Let's try this one. Nope, you're that. That's okay. So like I said we need something we can press on. So with my inspiration photo right to the side I'm going to take my white pencil and I'm going to sketch the approximate location of the shapes that I see on the photo. Now of course you could do something similar this way but you're going to want something other than the black transfer paper. You could maybe go to the now if if you're a sewer and you have sewing transfer paper that comes in colors and one of the colors is white but I think it's a little hard to find and I actually don't have any. I don't do that much sewing anymore. You definitely could do the transfer process on here if you have white transfer paper. I don't so I'm going to use a pencil and I'm going to just sketch it. I'm going to start with these I think these were actually like foam wires or something. Now and this isn't about being things being in the exact same place as they are in the photo. This is about giving yourself a guide. Okay something to work with that's our tree. So then I'm going to come down here and I'm going to guesstimate about where this other tree would be. I'm just going to just draw a rough follow the lines around and you may not get it exactly right that's okay it's not about getting it exactly right. I want you to take some time in this first part of this what's going to be this video series and I want you to figure out how you want to prep your canvas. Don't be intimidated definitely if you want to just do some tracing and start on white if that's what you want to do do that there's nothing wrong with that and then join me next in part two we will start working on our painting and use what you have I'm going to be using deco art traditions artist acrylic paints in a variety of blues reds greens yellows and then some neutrals black white and a couple shades of brown all right. So have that ready for part two which will be coming up shortly and don't forget to go out and have a great day like share and subscribe comment if you need to or want to and if you have questions or concerns my contact information is in the description below and if you'd like to send me happy mail or a product to try or something like that my PO box is down there too don't forget to have a great day and do something nice for yourself you deserve it I'll see you later bye.