 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok and recently I asked on my social media in my stories for people to give me some questions I could answer in a vlog. So I'm going to chat about stuff today while I do some painting so I hope you enjoy either the chatting or the painting or both. First, something that wasn't a question but I wanted to let you know about it since it came from one of the community. Sue, one of my patrons emailed to ask if she could donate to my World Watercolor Month fundraiser for the International Child Art Foundation. She doesn't do watercolor and that's what's generating funds for ICAF this month so I created a special product if you're in her situation. It's called For the Kids and it's 10 bucks so that other people could add to our community art donation. You can of course go make a contribution to ICAF on their website and get a receipt for your taxes but if you don't itemize and you want to help us reach the $1,000 goal set for this year then please feel free to click on the link in the doobly-do. Alright, let's get to the questions. Alexandra asked, do you remember your first art experience? And I guess I have a couple answers to this. I know that I was always drawing something when I was little coloring books and all kinds of things. I always had paper and pencil and crayons in my hand and when I was very young I remember drawing a ton of this little cartoon figure that I thought I invented. I don't know if I did, I still don't know but if you picture an upside down U with vertical lines at the opening which would now be at the bottom, big eyeballs on the body, legs and feet hanging out down below just big round feet and then arms with little mittens on them holding tennis rackets and school books and basketballs. I do this little character doing so many different things. It was just this little drawing, a little doodle and I don't think any of them survived. Mom saved all my Mother's Day and Father's Day cards and stuff in scrapbooks and a few of my drawings but apparently I had so many that they didn't all get saved and then she saved some of my older art from high school and college but the rest of my work went by the wayside. But all of that didn't necessarily include the feeling that I was an artist. I just like to doodle and draw and color. The first time that I felt like I could be one though was in high school when my teachers came to ask me if I'd like to paint a mural on a wall in the school. I had never painted anything huge and I don't even recall actually doing much acrylic either anyway but I do remember feeling very, very fancy that I got passes to get out of an awful lot of my classes so I could go down to the career development office to work on the mural and I have to confess a lot of that time I wasn't actually painting. I just got out of a lot of classes for months and that was kind of nice. It was a benefit of being an artist and I still don't recall really what was in that painting. There was a big, I think there was a lake, there was a big mountain on one side, maybe some trees. I don't know. I wish I'd taken pictures of it that I had saved. I'm sure I took pictures somewhere. All right, next question. Do you need to be able to draw in order to watercolor? You don't need to be able to draw for everything. If you're filling in a stamp, no, or if you're making a background and just spludging some color on, of course, no. Knowing some shading can help which is related to drawing but you can sometimes figure that out without doing real sketching. But then there are some subjects that you don't have to know how to actually draw anything in order to paint them. Like the wave that I painted in my previous video, not in today's but in the previous one, that one only requires a sense of light and shadow and some elegance in the lines but not really drawing per se. But for a lot of subjects, you will not have success in painting until you've worked on the underlying skills of drawing. Imagine something with me. If you're using someone else's drawing in a stamp or if someone came and sat down at your desk and drew a cabin on a mountain for you to paint and if they did that drawing well, you could probably do a fairly decent job of painting it because they've given you the good drawing. But if they got the perspective completely wrong on that cabin and if their trees were all wonky and looked very flat and weird, the no amount of effort on your part as just someone filling it in with paint is going to fix that if you don't even know what was wrong with their drawing. And if it's your sketching skills that are really bad, then you are that bad friend who's giving you a bad drawing and setting you up for failure instead of for success. But once you have the underlying elements right, that's not when perfect painting comes out but that's when technique work can actually begin. Learning to draw isn't the magic solution to everything but it's going to give your painting a good foundation and then you can start applying technique to it but you need to get the drawing right first. I've pulled in a comment from Susan Bee here on YouTube and this is not really a question but since it's related to the previous one, I thought I would address this a bit. She appreciates the way that I model, how to grow and improve even as an experienced artist. I'm one of the few talking about this and it was on one of my videos when I was doing sketches to prepare for doing a painting. I might be one of the few that does this because there's a lot of artists who suffer just like we all do from imposter syndrome because if we let people know that we're struggling to learn how to do something or trying to unlearn old bad habits or desperately trying to learn how to handle a medium then if we tell people about that we might be confirming what we think everybody else is already saying about us that we don't have a clue what we're doing. But in all honesty, most people are far too busy worrying about what other people are saying about them. They don't really care about what you're struggling with for the most part but I know a lot of developing artists appreciate hearing that others ahead of them on the journey have similar challenges so I do like to share those things because I hope it will help you to grow and take your next steps as an artist. There are some artists who I know talk about these things all the time and I do appreciate them admitting that they have some challenges they're trying to overcome and that makes me feel better at the stage I'm at as well. Marcia from Cozy Craft Room on Instagram posted something that wasn't really a question but I thought I'd mention that my watercolor style has actually developed from making mistakes. See I started adding deep rich darks to my paintings because I had mistakes in my underlying washes to recover from. But what I've learned is that I love contrast in my watercolor just like in every other medium that I use. I love how having really good darks next to really bright whites gives depth and life to a piece. It draws attention to a particular area and rather than try to be all soft and pastel and romantic with my paints like some other people do I get to just do me. So sometimes recovering from mistakes can actually develop into your own style as well. Jill asked about the planning process what prep work do I do and I have to admit that sometimes the day of process is merely clearing off my drafting table and I just get to work. But even if I can leap into that finished project that morning I have also spent countless hours days sometimes weeks prepping. I have huge lists of things that I want to do and in my chill time with the pups I often will just sit there with my phone and do research. I look for the thing that I wanted to do to see if there are tutorials on the topic or pieces on people's websites that are what I'm trying to create. And if the answer is yes then nothing is covered. So I start looking at the rest of the things on the list and see if there's an idea somewhere else that I could add to this original idea to make it unique because I don't think it's worth the time to make a video on a topic if I don't have something new or different to say in that piece. It may not be better all the time but if there's a new technique I have or an idea that I can communicate then it gets thrown onto the calendar. And since I do weekly themes if it's a Monday style project one of my deep dives where I can teach beginners and intermediate something then I look for something advanced that'll pair well with with it for Friday's video. And if it's one of the Epic Friday projects then I start pondering what piece could make a good teachable video on Monday. So I have a pair for each subject for a week. And if I don't get a pair then I keep bumping that stuff out on the calendar list until I have a matching set. And once I have a matching set then I'll spend some time doing a lot of practice. It's just stuff that I throw into sketchbooks. I do daily sketching every day on all different kinds of things and often I pull from stuff that I'm going to be doing in the next couple weeks because I have a vague idea where I'm headed at the very least. And sometimes those ideas though are also seeds of a class because if I can see there are five really good ways to do variations and people could really learn something from it to apply to all kinds of other things it could be a mini class. If there's more than that then it might go on to the list for a bigger 10 lesson class. So a lot of these things get bumped from YouTube to a class or even from a class if the class doesn't work out then it gets bumped to a YouTube project. And if I'm doing what I know I should be doing I always would create a sketch first. And sometimes it's those daily sketches that I've done but sometimes it's just before I work on the project itself a small version in the same medium or a pencil or charcoal piece or whatever it might take to get to that finished art piece. I didn't do any sketches for today's painting but I'm not sure that that would have helped me much here because there is just a lot going on in this wave. Next up is a question about how I get everything done. And I have to say I have one answer for that Google Sheets. I used to have an Excel spreadsheet years ago with the next two months dates listed what project I was going to have on each of my video days what medium it would be and checking off if things were done yet if they were scheduled and if social posts were scheduled for all of that stuff. But Google Sheets changed the whole game since I can now mess around with stuff while in my phone in the grocery store. The aforementioned list is also in a tab in my my sheet so if I get an aha moment I can pop something onto the list to start working on sketches for for later. It's better if I toss everything into a sketch book though rather than just writing it down on a list but if I don't even write it out down on a list somewhere then I am likely to lose the idea entirely. You might have guessed that if I have spreadsheets then that means that I work ahead. Before 2022 I worked about four to six weeks ahead because I was always aligning with product releases and that kind of stuff but that got me so disengaged from what I'm feeling in the moment what I'm creating right then is like think about knowing that you're making a Christmas project in June that won't be posted until October is just asking for an excuse to see the therapist. Now I work maybe two weeks ahead if I'm lucky and the Peace Love and Art Challenge has put me way behind all my production schedule since I've been releasing new classes every two weeks that is gloriously going to be coming to an end at the finish of July so I'm going to be able to breathe again and I'm so excited. Kim asked what Giallo and Vienna are up to and they are just enjoying life except when there's fireworks. Vienna is definitely afraid of even the tiniest pop in the distance she just has a meltdown and on the 4th of July we had a horrendous time she'd already spent a couple weeks shivering and crying in the bathtub hiding in there but World War III is just too much for her. I tried asking the neighbors that day across the street to please consider please please consider taking their arsenal out to the countryside where dogs were not going to be 200 yards from the line of fire but they just left and they proceeded to move the location of their launch closer to my driveway in that part of the street. Well me and the dogs we spent that night huddled in the back of the SUV with movies on the iPad as loud as it would go which is not very loud but the double buffering of the car plus the garage helped with a little bit of sound muffling but boy was it hot in there so I'm glad that most of the fireworks have stopped now we just get a few bangs a day going on having people blown up all of their money yet but otherwise the pups are actually loving 2022 because I have committed to them we're going to do daily walks rain or shine and we used to go occasionally and then we'd go to do runs in the park but then I didn't get any exercise I would just stand there and they'd go run and I needed to get me some exercise so we've committed to just doing really long walks together every day and they love going out to visit all the squirrels and the rabbits around the neighborhood we have good time together so thank you all for these great questions for sticking around tell me what you think of the painting if you like this one and you need to have it then it'll be over in my shop there's going to be a link in the doobly-doo thank you so much hit that like button and make sure you subscribe if you have not yet already and I will see you again in the very near future because that's what I do around here I post more videos I'll see you guys later bye bye