 this watercolor book this month in my creative year I am really liking this and I'm really using it as sort of a watercolor encyclopedia it has and I'm showing you here a lot of stuff on masking fluid which I just feel like I don't know how to use very well I have a few different kinds I find them challenging so here I'm putting some masking fluid this one happens to be blue I think it might be Schminke I don't remember on some plain white watercolor paper or maybe it's Molotow it might be I don't know it doesn't matter there's lots of brands if you have some use it I have it I should be using it I'm sprinkling it sprinkling it here and then I need to let it dry you can see here some of the big large dots are gone I rubbed them off because they were too big because you can do that the masking fluid will preserve the white paper underneath so I'm going over it really quickly with a very light blueish-gray mixture and then I'm going to dry that the whole idea of masking fluid is that it preserves the paper and or color underneath it while you're painting and I want to learn more effectively how to do that in this little book that I reviewed seems to have loads of information about masking fluid so I'm hoping it helps I think it will so now I'm trying just a different way of sprinkling the masking fluid on the page it's dry I'm putting a little bit of the masking fluid on my mixing plate here and using an old eyebrow brush and a card to just kind of flick it on the page and it works actually fairly well and gives me sort of little dirt drops instead of big giant ones so then I need to wipe that off my plate I need to get it dry and then I'm going over it with another layer of paint this time in the shape of little pine trees and then drying that and then adding more masking fluid and I think you probably get the idea I'm going over each layer of paint with more masking fluid I'm creating this sort of snowy bluish whiteish Christmas tree thing each successive layer of trees is darker than the first and hopefully I get something that looks halfway decent although on I'm not trying for a perfect painting what I'm trying for is something that I'm learning about how to use masking fluid while doing and having it be a perfect great painting while doing that well those things don't always go together and I have to say this isn't the best painting I have ever created but I did learn a lot while making it and that was the point so now I'm making my bluish color a little darker a little bluer this is my Daniel Smith Smith palette so I'm using my ultramarine blue I'm using kyanite I'm using Payne's gray and I'm mixing them together to just see what happens and get different shades of bluish gray colors for my trees I'm just using a plain flat brush and yeah putting the color on in a tree shape there you go adding some sort of snowy ground shadows at the bottom trying to have each tree to be in a slightly different place than the one before it and each layer of trees being darker than the one before them drying them with my heat tool completely and having the paint very very dry before I put any more masking fluid I also have this masking fluid pen I'm not so sure I like it to be honest but I experiment with using it on one of the layers and just creating dots semi successfully I'm not sure I like the pen I think if I'm going to use masking fluid I like the loose masking fluid and not anything in a pen but that could be just be me because you know I don't really know what I'm doing this book has a lot of information about using masking fluid and successful ways to do that and loads of other watercolor techniques tools and supplies I can't say enough about this book it really is sort of like a watercolor encyclopedia for those of you who missed it it is called watercolor painting expert answers to the questions everyone artist asks by George James I believe I picked it up at Tuesday morning for $5 so here's another layer of darker trees and I believe I'm just about done I maybe have one more layer in me again I'm just doing this quickly I'm not really thinking about it I'm not really trying to have a perk of perfect painting I am learning a lot about what I do and don't like in math with masking fluid there are a few instances if you watch carefully where my watercolor paint wasn't as dry as I thought it was and when I hit that layer with a masking fluid the masking fluid started to go in places that I didn't want it to so I had to quickly wipe it off and dry it so I could rub the rest of it off without leaving your residue you do want to be really really careful that things are dry you also want to be careful when using a heat tool with masking fluid because it tends to not always react really well and it could bubble up and do some weird texturey things that aren't necessarily what you want I'm looking for my masking fluid eraser or my rubber cement eraser you can rub masking fluid off with your finger but this rubber cement eraser is really the easy way to get it off and you can see here that it did work and I have these bright white dots over you know where over in my trees it looks like there's snow falling and that was the idea so with all those layers of trees it did preserve the white paper in the background I'm going to highlight my piece with some pencil some white gel pen I am here grabbing some pencils off camera and I left the camera on and yeah so you get a fun picture of my dirty water there we go so I just went and quickly grabbed some blue colored pencils different ones they're probably Derwent and some of them may be a water soluble but I don't think they all are it doesn't matter I'm not going to get them wet and I'm just highlighting the shapes of the different trees with the different colors of colored pencil in successively darker shades just like with a watercolor paint I'm being intentionally sort of messy and random with it I'm not wanting it to be perfect by any stretch now for some white gel pen highlights to do some more suggesting of snow you will find here at the end that I do actually show a still image here for a few seconds at the end if you stay tuned and watch where I've added some glitter glue to the painting I think it just gives it a cute little touch mixed media touch or greeting card ish touch anyway I want you to think about finding a book like this at your library that has text neaks in it maybe that you're not great with and experimenting and playing using tools and supplies you already have and you don't have to buy the book go check it out at your library and see if they have it there that's it for today check out the description below for relevant links and I will talk to you soon bye bye