 Morning class, this is from Wilkham Art School. I just want to show you a quick technique that I use when I'm blending with acrylics just to help you out, especially on skies or an area where you're trying to get a softer blend. This isn't fully blended, this is just halfway through the painting, but I'll just show you how I've got to some of these parts, especially with the blues. The technique I use is what's called a color string. This is where you pick an area of your painting, like a dark area, say this dark area of the mountain here or the dark area of the top, the darkest part of that kind of color range. So for example, if you've got this dark blue here or this dark area here of the greens, you can start to notice, especially in landscapes, how you get areas of color that are slightly lighter in tone all throughout the entire painting. So to make it quicker on yourself when you're mixing it, and especially with acrylic, so you keep them wet and you can get that nice smooth blend, you just pre-mix a color string, it can really help you. It's very simple. So to start with, you need your base tone. So this, as it is, which is the ultramarine blue and the thalo blue green, if we have a look at here, that's still a bit, you know, it's a bit too dark. So if we add a bit of white to it, so that can still go lighter than that. Okay, tonally that's not too bad. For this area here in the mounting, that's definitely got yellow in it, you know, it's definitely a lot greener than this. When we start to look at parts of the sky in this area here, I think it's a useful color and could be a good start of the string. Maybe not for this area, but definitely for the sky area and all these parts of the mounting down here and into the water. So in all you do, you kind of keep that as a base. So that's just with the white added. See that practically blends into that there. And here, yep, well that's not going to do it. It still needs to be lighter. So you'll keep the first tone you've mixed, then this one. Keep another part of that. So you can see how on this one, it starts to be closer to these lighter areas here. And I might do one more. Okay, which would match the water color pretty closely. I know it's got a bit of purple here, but this is just a base tone to get you started. And with these tones, you could create probably about 50% of this painting, really, from working this sky through to the lighter areas, through to the far mounting and the distance and also the sea in the foreground. Okay, this is just a very simple introduction to color strings. What I'll do next is start to show you how to construct the sky using these color strings very simply with acrylic paints. This is Wilkham from Wilkham Art School.