 Hi guys, how are you today? If you're new to my YouTube channel and watching this video, then let me introduce myself. My name is Gina Arons. I am a local to San Jose, California mixed media artist and watercolorist. I've been doing mixed media art and watercoloring for a number of years now and been on YouTube since 2012. Actually, I'm about to hit my five-year anniversary with that this June. I do lots of travel art, which is why you're all here. I do lots of travel art and I go everywhere with this little brown case. This little brown case is my travel art case, my actual one, and if you were at the class at direct travel recently, then you saw this case live and in person. It's a little vintage cosmetic case. It's about 14 by 5 by 9. It's about 9 inches. Because it's a vintage case and I do take it everywhere, I do have this belly band that I made to go on it with these two clips. This is actually the luggage tag that hangs on it, not that I ever check it, but it just looks cute. I have this on here because it sometimes does get really full by the end of the trip and I just want to make sure that the old vintage clips are not going to bust open and have everything spill everywhere. The size of this case is perfect for sitting underneath your seat on the plane in front of you. You don't have to put it in the overhead bin and it fits everything that you need if you're going to travel with art supplies and creative things. I can even fit my Kindle in here and things like that. Then I just take a little handbag or a small backpack for other personal items that I don't want to check. I have traveled quite a bit with art supplies within the U.S. and cruises and planes and I've never had a problem with anything in this case. As far as security is concerned, that being said, I do take out anything that I think might be an issue like scissors and check them if I'm bringing them. Be aware of security requirements when you're packing your travel art case if you are. I'm going to open it for you now. This is the inside of the case. I don't always bring everything that's currently in here, but I do sometimes. This is a little paper trimmer. It depends on what I'm working on. If I'm working on the type of a journal where I'm documenting my year, this is the current one that I'm using for this year where I'm really saving like plane tickets and postcards. These are fortune cookie fortunes. If you're on a trip, maybe the ship's photographer took your picture and you would want to put it in here. This is more about saving all those little bits and pieces of your travels and not actually doing too much art. If you're doing this kind of art, then you're going to want a little bit different supplies than if you're just doing art art. My case is usually packed for both. Yes, I can get this in this suitcase when I'm traveling with it. I don't always bring the paper trimmer, but I generally bring everything else that's in here. This is a travel water cup. This is not a must-have, but if you have one you can use. I've used the plastic cup in the state room or hotel room and that works just fine. I just happen to have this. A little tiny pot of something called Extra Heavy Gel Medium. This is a golden. I use this as a glue when I want to glue down heavy objects into this journal like smashed pennies and things like that. I have two of these little cases. They don't always come with me. They're both for water coloring. This is the generally the one that comes with me and the one that we've talked about in class if you're watching this video. I have to put that away. I forgot that was in there. This is my travel watercolor journal. So these two at minimum come with me. I can fit my iPad and Kindle and things in here if that's all I want to bring with me. If I want to work on this one too while I'm gone then I bring these other two cases in this journal. So while I'm gone I always spend time in the mornings doing watercolors with Mike Morning Coffee before we get out to go do anything. Any tours or excursions or meeting up with friends or family. I do these little watercolors and they're just simple quick easy watercolors. Nothing super complicated and I always put a little bit of journaling on them. These are some that I did on the cruise. This one that I did on the cruise while we were on our cruise to Alaska. This is one I did while we were in Lake Tahoe kayaking. And I've taken this out with me on trails and at coffee shops and most of the time I work at it on it in the hotel room after we've done all of our fun stuff so that I'm not taking away from friends and family on the vacation. At the same time I'm spending a little bit of a alone time early in the morning or late at night before bed and just working on a little something creative. And sometimes you know I'm working on this and the husband's across the table and he's working on something else. You know there's nothing wrong with that so yeah. So this is we're going to work on a little travel art. This is the case I bring. I never bring a ton of materials with me. We've talked about this in class. This is probably more than the average person needs but this is you know that you can get a lot done with what's in here. A couple of black pens. One that's water soluble. One that's not and I'll always have a white pen. I always have some kind of a straight edge and something with a point to scrape with. A couple of small little clips to hold my journal open while I'm working. A spray water bottle to get my paints because we're talking about watercolor so to get my paints re-wet. This little needleless syringe is for filling up these water brushes. I carry these kind of brushes generally with me and this bottom part holds water and then you just screw on the top brush part. And these travel really well and I've taken them everywhere they don't leak. Some small short pens and pencils and a crayon to do different techniques with and do my basic sketches with. And this is one I just picked up. This is probably way too many. Inside here is my actual travel watercolors that I take with me. And then on the other side which I'll show you in a minute. On the other side I have just a few bonus pieces. I have some paper tallying and wax paper that I always carry with me that helps protect the other paintings when you're working on a new one. I have a little bit of plastic wrap which I'm going to show you what you can do with that today. I'm not sure if we're going to work with that in class or not but I'm going to show you what to do with that. A little bit of salt and an eraser in case I want to erase some of my pencil lines. Now I probably bring more colors than the average person would bring but this is a small 12 half pan watercolor tin. It's a generic tin. Now I've taken the insert out that only holds 12 colors so that I could squeeze more colors in. And these are the colors that I generally carry with me and I get a lot of paintings done with just these colors. They work great. There is a little small travel brush in here. If I need a tiny teeny tiny little brush, where are we? There we are. To do you know grass or eyelashes or something with if I'm doing a face. Let me get that wet. Some of the bristles are splayed. So we're going to put that back in there and I just ensure that it stays shut with a rubber band. So to do travel watercoloring you don't need much more than that. If you're going to take one of these other journals and you're going to do more of gluing in your tickets and pictures and things like that then you're going to want something that's going to carry glue and tape and that sort of thing. And just keep it in mind that you know don't bring so many supplies with you that you're spending more time doing art than enjoying your vacation because that's you know not what you should be doing. This one I could live without this one. This one because my watercolor kit remember has pens and pencils in it. This one has a stapler, some glue, some tape, my reading glasses which I need and an extra little bottle of glue regular like Elmer's glue. Now I would recommend that you take any of these little bottles like that this that you have put them in a Ziploc bag and then put it back in here, seal it shut, put it back in here and then pack your kit in case you don't want things to explode because of pressure like on an airplane. Now the reason I don't take acrylic paints is because of things exploding. Ask me how I know that you don't really want to know it's not pretty. So so I take watercolor. Watercolor is easier and safer to travel with and you have to put less things in Ziploc bags and not worry about them exploding. So that's what I bring with me. I'm going to repack this little suitcase. Now we're going to work on a couple of little samples. We got some fun inspiration photos from the people over at Paul Gauguin Cruises and direct travel and I have an idea for an additional one of the photos that I wasn't sure what I was going to do with but I just got an idea so we're going to work on that and I'll be right back. Okay these are some of the inspiration photos they sent me to work with. This one I've already done a bigger sample painting of. We're going to do another little one so I can show you a different technique. We're going to talk about both of them in class but here's the bigger one that if you are watching this you've already seen. Now there is a speed through clip of video at the end of this where you see me working on this and see what I exactly what I'm talking about when I created this if you're not quite getting it. So stay to the end of the video and you'll see that clip. They also sent me this one and this one. So I have an idea and I printed out extra photos and so I have an idea of something that we're going to do. We're going to do this one first and I'm going to show you a couple of different ways that you could do this photo. When you're working on these we're not trying to copy every single detail about the inspiration scene or photo. We're trying to just capture the feeling and essence of it. You know if you want an exact copy that's you know that's why we have cameras. That's not why we paint at least that's not why I paint. I'm more of an expressive impressionist painter than I am a realist painter. That being said I do take a photo of everything like while I'm out on my tours and then like I said usually in the mornings before I'm having my while I'm having my coffee before everybody else is awake I'm sitting at the table or at the desk and I am going through the previous day's photos and picking one to make a little painting of in my journal. It was really fun on the cruise because I got to we had a state room with a balcony and I got to sit out on the balcony with my coffee and paint out there. That was really fun so if you have a chance to book your cruise and you can get a room with a balcony I would definitely recommend that. Alright so we're going to work on this one. I'm going to look at work on a smaller pad of paper because this is the kind about the size that I actually take with me on vacation. It's not too big and it's easy to work on and get through and not be intimidated by doing a big giant one. So I'm going to move this up here. Hopefully we can get all that in camera. There we go. And we're going to just use a number two pencil. I'm going to go ahead and get my paints wet. I'm going to use a simple set of paints because probably the colors you guys have are limited and you shouldn't travel with a big giant set of paints. That being said I'm a water color so I have palettes like this but I will tell you I never travel with them often. Generally I have a small set like this one. This is a small pocket set by Van Gogh and there's a number of different ones out there on the market. This is a nice one and I may actually bring this one to class so that you all can look at it and we're going to get it wet. I'm going to use this spray bottle of water. Now I've done a sample of my colors on a plain white piece of watercolor paper so that I know what they look like. So I do recommend if you're setting up a palette for home or travel use that you do this so you have an idea quickly of what the colors are going to look like. I'm going to get my brush wet. This is just a plain round brush. This is a royal watercolor brush number 16 round. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to take a number two pencil and we're going to do our sketch. Now you could do this if you don't like the pencil lines to show when you're done and you're worried about that. You could instead of a number two pencil put in your case a water soluble pencil and then as you're painting the color from the pencil is going to dissolve into the paint. I kind of like the sketchy lines so we're going to do that. So I'm just if you look at the inspiration photo these are just triangles and rectangles and don't think of them so much as you know huts. So don't focus on all these little teeny tiny details just focus on the basic shapes and really we don't want to sketch the whole thing we just want to get our huts in here. So I'm going to look at the photo and I'm going to just eyeball it but you could layer if you if you're working from say you picked up a brochure at the um cosier counter of an excursion that you went on and you there's a photo in there that you want to try to paint and add to your journal. You could take that photo rub a bunch of number two pencil on the back of it lay it on top of your journal and then and then and then trace over the shapes and that will act like carbon paper. But I encourage you to just you know try try drawing it doesn't have to be exact remember we're just giving the impression of right my proportions aren't even always um right but I'm not worried about that because I really just want to get like I said the impression of that that scene and you can see that I'm doing lots of lots of little sketchy lines I'm not you know and I'm not going to erase any of them okay just just like that we're not going to do any more sketching than that so see that and it's not perfect but it's good it's going to give me the impression that I want all right so now I'm going to come in with my brush and I actually you need a rag or a napkin and that's not something I generally carry with me because I just pick up napkins from the coffee shop um and things like that and I usually um have a collection of them back in the state room or hotel room um that I've collected on the travel and I use those um I don't use the hotel towels that would be a big no no um you could carry your own rag with you if you so choose but using their um coffee shop napkins is fine all right so first we're going to start with the sky and the first thing I'm actually going to do is I'm going to just get this wet across the top here with just water then I'm going to take my ultramarine um deep color which is a more of a true blue and I'm going to add some water to it so that um it's lighter that's the way you one of the ways to lighten watercolor paint is to add more water to it the less water the darker the pigment is going to be and I'm going to just put it up here and you'll see how it immediately starts to go where the water is it starts to just blend down where the water is at that's what we want and you always want to start lighter and work your way darker with water color because you can't take it back um you can however do that put some water there and do this and you'll be able to lift some of the color up you may not get all of it but you'll be able to lift some of it especially if you do it right away so now I'm just taking just water and I'm going to pull the little bit of color down around my little huts I'm going to try to leave some white space or light space um because there's some clouds in the sky here so we are going to try to leave that light or white space um and I'll show you a couple different ways I'm actually not great at leaving white space um I get carried away with the painting and then forget to do that um but I'll show you some I'll show you a trick okay so I'm just going to pull some of that color down and then I'm going to take my napkin or rag and I'm going to go in while the paint is wet and I'm going to lift up some of that color and that's going to leave me some lighter lighter shapes in the sky now the sky when you're painting skies the sky is usually darker the farther away from the earth it is in this picture it's um it is a little bit darker but it's all pretty pretty much the same color but this is just the first layer and you can you know interpret your painting however you wish I'm going to add a little bit more color down here and I'm not going to get too far before I rinse my brush off and then get in here with just water so you might want to pause here and work on your sky but try to do it too quickly try to do it quickly and don't think about it too much that's what I intended to say remember whatever you do that you can go back in here with your brush get some just plain water on there and lift now some of your water colors depending on the paint brand that you got and the quality will stain the paper immediately you notice this isn't white it is more of a light blue now that's fine you can always go back in here when you get home with some white paint white acrylic paint and put some white in there if you so choose all right so work on your sky a little bit it should look about like that let it dry you might want to pause here and then come right back okay now we are going to add some light and shade to start adding light and shade to our painting and as you'll notice from the inspiration photo to this inspiration painting you don't I don't stick to the natural colors that are in the photo generally speaking you can of course but it's more fun not to the idea is to get the feeling of being in the tropics and who wouldn't want to be some place like French Polynesia or somewhere else Bali I know has these little huts out on the ocean and just thinking about the peaceful ocean scene and being out on the water in the sun and the warmth so one of the ways you convey warmth and sunlight and brightness in a painting is with using warm colors yellow being one of them so we're going to start with as a yellow medium which is a warm yellow and again I'm going to add some water to it so it's lighter because you want to do go start light and work your way darker try not to get your blue into it too much because you'll get green now and speaking of that if your sky is wet you want to leave a little bit of paper space between where the yellow goes and the blue is you probably don't want a lot of green in your sky and the yellow will do that it will convey and green it will make your sky green so I'm looking at the picture and I'm looking at where the sunlight is hitting the little huts and I am putting some yellow there and I'm being very suggestive about my marks I'm not you know sitting and painting every little line and no I'm not doing that I'm just going in now with some water plain water and I'm going to tilt my paper I'm going to let that yellow run down to where that water is going to be you may even do this tap it and we get some drips going right we already have something that looks interesting okay now we're going to go in with some orange now in a basic palette you won't have orange and that's okay you may have it in class you may not we're going to take our azo yellow medium and we're going to take some of our permanent red light which is our it's more of an orangey red we have like a blue red and an orangey red in this palette and we're going to make orange you remember your lessons from kindergarten yellow and red make orange right and that red is really strong so that was a lot of red so I'm just adding more yellow there we go so now I'm going to go in and again I'm going to start out in this hut and you'll see how that orange is just blooming into the yellow paint and that's fine I'm going to sort of put it where the shadow the darker brighter spots are and just like anything else if you really quickly think wow that's a lot of orange I didn't want that much orange there get in there with your rag or your napkin you won't probably get it all up but that's okay make it drip some more I'm going to go back um to this corner up here I'm going to take out some of that orange that ended up there and that actually should be blue we're going to put some blue there there we go all right now we're going to start to work on the ocean a little bit and we're going to let all that kind of dry now you can if you're home or if you're in a place maybe you're working in your hotel room or your state room if you have a hairdryer with you and you don't want to wait for this to dry before you move on to doing some more painting you can try using your hairdryer on a low um um a hot setting but low blowing you know you know so you're not blowing a lot of air at your painting but it's hot if your hairdryer will do that um at home when I'm home in the craft room I use my heat embossing tool I'm not super great about waiting for things to dry in fact speaking of that I think um no we're going to just let it go we're going to wing it all right so now I'm going to start on the water and you'll notice the water it is some places it's much more turquoise green than the sky you'll also notice if you look at your inspiration photo that there's little funky reflections of the huts and the huts pillar supports in the water up at the top at least so that's you know if you have this yellow drip it's going to create some of those illusions of some of those reflections in the water here like I did in this painting all right so we're going to take our I'm going to actually clean so we had some of the blue going to the yellow so let's actually clean that up with a rag so I'm going to take this other this blue is called cerulean blue it's not a pretty blue and I'm going to take some of that and I'm going to add one of the greens to a little bit of the green to it this is Viridian green it's a blue green and I'm going to just make this really pretty blue which is already pretty more turquoise by adding a little bit of green to it and look at this color that you get right so now we're going to take this color and you'll notice that this line here where the water is meeting the huts that's a very pretty straight line right so we're going to take the tip of our brush and try to replicate some of that line we may not get it perfect I think I made that hut too small but that's okay and we're going to take our brush and we're going to put some water down here on the lower part of the line and we're going to we're going to let it drip all right that was the husband did you hear him in the background telling me he's going to go take the car for a spin he just did some repairs on it so we're going to just let that drip and this is how I did the big painting and I just let it drip and I worked with the drips to create this texture-y suggestion of texture in the water and you could just leave it at that and do this this is great and I love the look of this cerulean blue mixed with this veridian green it's just fabulous don't worry too much right now if you get some of this blooming up here into your little huts you can of course take the edge of your napkin and your finger and try to blot some of that up if it's really bothering you I'm going to take some more of our paint and I'm going to go into some of the spots and just darken it up just a little bit okay now we're going to take some of our cerulean blue straight without anything mixed in it and this in this particular brand is a very kind of bright opaque color so I'm definitely adding water to it and I'm definitely I'm going to add just a little bit of it and at a time and not put try not to put too much so I'm going to you have this like second horizon line in the water that's more blue or I think where the sky is reflecting in the water and yeah so suggest that here and again we're going to try to for the moment keep our colors light and we are going to work our way darker I'm going to go back to our cerulean that's mixed with the green because you have this down here right water color is really all about controlling the water and the paint is going to go where you put the water it's not going to easily go into this dry paper it's going to try to follow the easier road and go where the water is okay so we're going to let that dry for a minute because that's going to be our base these are all of our base layers right so now we're going to go up to our sky and again with some of the cerulean blue this is this is dry up here now and I'm basically going to do something similar to what I did already but we're going to add some of this cerulean blue because the sky in the inspiration photo is very much the same color as the water here or at least very similar so we're going to put a light wash of this other blue this more turquoisey blue into the sky and this is this is how I did the big painting generally when I do videos like this I split it up into two or three videos for you guys are going to just leave it all in one and I am going to pause during certain parts so that you all can just stop there or keep going you can work on your painting you can pause so remember you're not trying to duplicate the photo we're just giving a suggestion of right and if all of my skies look a little bit stormy for some reason I like a stormy sky and I actually love to see you know a stormy ocean I don't like to be on a ship when it's storming I do get seasick but I love the way it looks now I'm keeping a little space or trying to between the ocean and what I'm putting in the sky I don't want the two to blend too much into each other so work on that and try to get your painting to look like that you can pause here and work on your sky and your ocean get the space layer down you probably want to let them dry a little bit before we move forward all right we'll be right back so now if you've done that and you've let it dry or if it's kind of dry but not completely dry we're going to let our sky and ocean dry a little bit and we're going to work on our huts so now we are going to start adding cooler colors shadow colors to our huts to suggest more of their shapes I do need my scratch a scratchy tool okay you're gonna need something with a sharp edge and I do recommend that you put something in your kit this is an old insurance card it could be an old gift card that you've just cut in half that has that kind of a pointy edge on it that's not only great for laying on your piece and then painting to get a straight line but scratching in the paint I'm going to show you what I mean here so we're going to start out with I think purple and I actually might need another plate I'm going to get a fresh plate because I don't want to get too much purple on that one so we're going to mix purple so if you remember from school blue and red make purple right so whatever blue and red that you have you can make purple with I'm going to take this other red that I have which is called matter lake deep which is already in my opinion sort of on the blue side and then I'm going to put a little bit of blue in it I'm going to use the ultra marine that we started with and you get this purple okay and it's pretty watery so it's going to be pretty light and transparent which is fine I'm going to look at my photo and I'm going to look and see where all of these shadows are on the little huts so underneath the roof line there's actually a window here and I'm going to actually let that sit for just a second there's a little window here this part's in shadow there is a walkway between the huts that you can kind of see while the paint is wet I'm going to take my pointy edge and you see you get these lines in the paint that are very suggestive and interesting and that's kind of the point without doing too much all right I'm going to come back with just some water in areas where I want it to be more blended and less of a straight line the pigment is going to settle in those scratch marks I just made on the paper and I actually don't mind this bleeding I got into the sky I didn't get that in the first one because I let things dry more but actually don't mind that I kind of like the way it looks so we're going to leave it and that's you know what Bob Ross would call a happy accident all right I'm going to put a little bit here and I have these pencil lines here in the background I don't mind those for you you might really mind them and if you do then you probably want to erase the ones that you think are in the wrong place before you get started I don't really mind them doesn't bother me I'm also going to add a little bit of this purple pointy edge again now there are some piers that you can see so again use your straight edge and scratch some marks make some suggestive marks whatever is above the water would be reflected in the water so don't worry about things blending down into the water the way they are all right now we're going to take I think we're going to go with a red we're going to go with the matter lake and deep one of your reds more of a true red and I'm going to take the parts of the bright sunny bits that are have some interest to them maybe there's a little bit of a shadow it's still bright but the brightest color in my opinion that reflects sunlight and warmth is yellow and then going towards the cooler scale orange and red some and then some of the greens so we have our orange where the sun's really hitting it I mean our yellow and then we're getting a little shadow and then more shadow does that make sense hopefully that makes sense and again I'm using just a little bit of paint and then water if you get too much water in there go back in really quick with your rag and you can blot some or all of it up it's going to depend on the paint and the pigment some of them stain the paper very quickly and you can't really you won't get too much of it lifted so I like that but I want to make now a darker purple with less water in it so now we have a darker purple you can see it's not only more blue there's less water there I'm using just the very tip of my paint brush this is really wet so it's going to go in a lot of different directions not that that's a bad thing I am okay with working with that but I don't want to get too carried away and I'm just again we're just using the tip of the brush you don't want to push too hard you don't need to dig any holes to china with your paint brush and you're just having fun have your cup of coffee near you or your cup of tea turn up some music maybe a glass of wine if it's in the evening and just have some fun painting some of the scenes that you saw when you're out on your excursions or you know in one case when I was in Alaska I painted the view of lighthouses and icebergs I got from my balcony which was really fun now I don't mind this purple bleeding into the sky but now I'm getting too much so I'm going to get in there with some water and I'm going to lift some of that up so now we're going to let that dry a little bit work on your huts and start building your shadows and next we're going to be working on the water now you could keep going the way we're going with the water and working with the drips and the puddles and the patterns that you get with the watercolor which is how I did this one and you get something really pretty and interesting or you can do it the way we're going to do it and for that you're going to need a little piece of plastic wrap um you if you're don't have I have some in my kit I always carry it with me but if you don't have some I bet if you asked the waiter at the restaurant on the ship or at the hotel if they had a little piece of plastic wrap you probably could get one um you but like I said if you don't have any you can do it without but I'm going to show you how to do it with and um we'll be right back I'm going to go get some plastic wrap okay yeah wherever you are on your vacation um your restaurants hotels delis probably have plastic wrap around um anything that's thin and plasticky though will work for this so here's what we're going to do when I got my plastic wrap and we're going to set that aside for a minute I'm going to actually I take that back I'm going to actually cut a thin piece of it off there's my scissors kind of want it in two pieces so all righty so first we are going to do this work this is wet right here so first I'm going to do this bit down here so we're going to go back to our cerulean blue this blue over here we're going to put some more of it darken up that line that we had going on there bring it down I like to leave space at the bottom so I like scenes like this because I like to do some journaling or writing about where I was and what I was doing at the bottom of my page at the very least I write where I was the name of the place but you could write you know all kinds of things about where you were and what you were doing now I'm going to make some more of that where I mix this cerulean with a green that was too much green put some water in there now for this technique it's all about having a lot of water in there if while you're doing that your cerulean dries up you want to go back and add some more and get it wet it's really really really wet which is what you want and you're going to take your plastic wrap and I'm going to put it down here and I'm going to scrunch it up and I'm going to let that paint dry like that so you see all these marks that you're already getting when the paint dries and you lift that up those marks are going to stay and you're going to get something very reminiscent of this pattern that you have in the inspiration photo okay so while that's drying we're going to go back and work on our huts I want to do it a little bit on here too but there's some well maybe I can there's some purple there let's try it okay so we're going to add some of this greeny color the cerulean and the green up here and then some water I'm going to leave a little bit of a light space between the two sections because in the inspiration photo there's this line in the water that's really interesting right we're going to take the other piece of plastic and kind of stretch it this way so the wrinkles are kind of horizontal I'm going to just push it in to the wet water and leave it sit there yeah that works all right we're going to let that dry now sometimes I do this and it's like the last thing I do or I'm halfway through the painting I put the plastic wrap on there and I just let it dry I go out for my excursions for the day and in the evening I come back and then I finish the painting if you can also get interesting um effects if especially if you're doing beach scenes by doing things like dropping salt into the wet paint it really granulates the paint you get this interesting texture and it's really interesting to do when you're like doing a beach scene and you're and to do it in the sand right so we're going to go back to our huts here and I am going to use my ultramarine blue straight out of the pan with no extra water move my plastic wrap out of my way and working again on the shadows and putting a little bit of paint and then some water so your cool shades that suggest shadow and coolness would be blues greens purple your ones that suggest sunlight and warmth would be um red orange yellow now there to get that line I just barely touched my brush to the paper barely barely and while I'm working on this this is drying down here so that was a lot of paint and a lot of water so you can go back in there with a damp brush and lift some of that or you can get in there with your rag now to get a dark black brown grayish color you can mix all of your colors together on your palette all your primaries will make some sort of neutral um I happen to have a color that's always in my palette and I don't know that you're going to have it in class but it's called paints gray it's a dark blueish gray color it's not quite black um you don't always have this in your palette but that is why I carry a black water soluble pen or pencil with me generally but you'll see if you do have this color um why this would make your painting pop I'm going to add some of this here to our our just a little bit all right so we're going to let all of that dry it's really wet play with your houses if you have a dark color like paints gray or black you can definitely add it and use it to aid in your shadows on your little huts let the plastic wrap dry and once that's dry we're going to come back and we're going to finish our painting and we'll be right back okay so you definitely could do this part in the morning and you could you know set the plastic wrap in there um go have some more coffee and breakfast with a family come back peel it off it's it's kind of dry I haven't mentioned them I have no patience for anything because I don't um and peel this off and you get this interesting texture the longer you let it dry the more of the texturey bit that you get we got more of it down here than up here because the color is darker and it's very reminiscent of what we have up here it is slightly damp still because I'm no I have no patience and I'm so I'm going to do this just get up some of that wet there we go so the other thing you can do is you can dip get the paint wet and you could dip a dry rag in it a dry napkin scrunch it up and dip it in and you're going to get I accidentally stuck my arm actually in this one and you'll get something like this kind of a pattern a wrinkly pattern and that just suggests this interesting pattern that we have in the original photo we're not trying to duplicate it exactly we're just trying to get that feeling of inspiration of right my huts are still kind of slightly damp I'm going to take some water here and I'm going to make some of these things that are going down into the water less obvious I'm not trying to take them away I just don't want them to be quite so obvious we're going to take some of our cerulean blue firm up that line a little bit we're going to take some of that blue green color add a bit more of that some of it up here and putting the water where I want the paint to go I don't want the paint to go that way I want it to go down so that's where I'm putting the water if you just remember that with watercolor paint you'll be golden that's pretty good I actually like that I think I might like that better than the first time I did it all righty that's pretty cool you could leave it at that I'd be totally happy with that I'm not going to so I have another yellow here um called lemon yellow the as of yellows like you can tell especially by looking at the dried cake it's a little bit more orangey than this one so I'm going to take this lemon yellow this one's also more opaque than the other one and I'm going to just add a little bit more of it to some places where we kind of lost a little bit of our brightness in our little huts you could I'm a mixed media artist at heart so you definitely could do this by using a gel pen or something else that you have in your kit depending on what's actually in your kit I carry um highlighter crayons so sometimes I use those after the watercolor paint is dry a little too much water right on the walkway to suggest the walkway and railings I'm also going to take some of our shadow colors here and we have a inconsistency with the roof line over here I'll fix it really quick my lines are tad off that happens I'm going to take my pointy scratchy tool and I'm using just the colors uh some of the colors I have on my palette to just help me add another layer of brightness or shadow to certain shapes to refine them and make them more and or make them more interesting to have them help me suggest the shapes that I want although I'm pretty happy with the way this painting is turning out the orange is still a cool I mean a warm color that suggests sunlight but it's cooler than the yellow remember it in my opinion again these are all my opinions you may have other art teachers in your life that or yourself that you disagree with me I take no um I'm not offended by that I lost my train of thought there could you tell all right because I'm painting that's usually the sign that I'm having a lot of fun is I lose track of what I'm doing because I'm painting now as the orange yellow and this purple color blend if they do where I'm putting it now it's going to make a dark neutral color so that's definitely a way that you can make a dark neutral color to darken up your shadows if you don't have like a paint gray or a black in your palette mix especially purple and orange together and you'll get a dark neutral color that'll work for you and your shapes don't have to be perfect it's not about perfection it's about expressing um the feeling of the place that you've gone to visit that you're on vacation yep that's pretty cute I like it so I'm going to dry this really quick with a heat tool which is not something you're going to be able to do in class um or on vacation I don't carry one of these on vacation I would I would if I was on vacation just let it dry but we're going to actually dry it with a heat embossing tool don't hold it too close and you know turn it in circles over your work if you're at home doing this all right I'm going to do that and I'll be right back okay there we have it um sometimes with some paper as it dries it'll curl don't let that freak you out um that's normal um I'm going to take a black pen now the two black pens I always carry with me um are a pilot sharpie pen a fine point you can this is their stainless steel ones they have lots of different versions of the sharpie fine point pen but you want the fine point that has a little tiny tip on it um and this one is permanent it's waterproof so if you do any marks with this you can go over it with more paint it's not going to go anywhere um this is a pilot varsity disposable fountain pen this is not waterproof um but if you have this and a palette of colors that don't include black you can put some of this on there and then add water to it and use this as your black color and this is a dark black blue it reminds me very much of paint gray paint um so and I'm actually going to use this one I'm not going to add more water to it but I'm going to use this one just because I like this pen um but I'm going to like I did with the bigger one I'm going to just add some sketchy lines and I would also generally speaking um add um I would do the journaling with this one or write the place the name of the place that I had visited and it's not about straight lines it's about just suggestive sketchy lines so get that whole straight line thing out of your brain just something like that that's all I would do it makes a cute interesting little painting and you definitely have plenty of space down here to write the name of the location that you were on vacation um to journal about it and about the time that you had with your family you even could go so far as to put a little picture of um you and your partner whoever you were with on vacation down here at the bottom there's enough room to do that and to paste that in so I hope that gives you some ideas of one version of this that you can do I am going to do another one I'm going to clean up a little bit and we'll be right back for those of you who want to stop and try this this is a good pausing or stopping point and um I hope you have a lot of fun with it if you have any questions about this um please email me my email is in the description below along with my website address um and I'm very approachable and you can even go and find me on Facebook and friend me over there I'll try to remember to put the links to all of that in the description below you can also leave a comment here on the video and I'll answer it I do reply to the comments once a day so all right I'm going to set up for the next shot and we'll be right back okay for this next one we're actually going to work with this shot now at first I saw this and I went hmm and when I was trying to print out these inspiration photos I was trying to fiddle with what size to print them at and I accidentally printed these on index cards but I think it was a happy accident so I have an idea for this one so the first thing you want to do if you have a shot like this that you want to paint from is you're going to need for most of you who aren't comfortable with their drawing skills this is what I recommend that you find a little image of the ship that you're on if if you are on a cruise like one of the Paul Gauguin cruises that you find an image of the ship now you know they're going to it's going to be in one of the brochures probably at the concierge desk you could get a postcard or a sticker from the gift shop maybe before you've left for the cruise you've gotten some information from direct travel and there's a picture of the ship in it you might want to save a few of those images of the ship and just cut them out and put them in your travel kit before you leave because I'm going to recommend that you do that and we're going to use that so I'm going to sit here and I'm going to just fussy cut out that's what this is called fussy cut out little ship and I think for most of you who are looking at this and going okay I can't draw a stick figure this is going to be not only the painting for you to do to work on to try and have fun with but doing it this way and not being intimidated by the ship um and having to draw the ship is going to be the way to go I just cut this little ball thing off it was at the top of the ship I don't know what that is but we'll add it back in with a gel pen I'm doing this without my reading glasses on that's probably a bad idea it doesn't have to be perfect just roughly cut it out it should be sized um to a good size for your page so depending on what kind of size of page you're working on if you're just bringing a small journal with you on vacation then you probably don't want a ship that's any bigger than this one and this one is how big it's um like an eighth of an inch shy of three inches okay um it's about about two and three quarters inches would be probably about what we want now all those and although this picture is vertical I'm going to do it horizontal it's your painting you can do what you want remember that okay so we're going to put our ship aside out somewhere out of the way where hopefully it's not going to get wet and first we're going to work on the background this is a really pretty image I love the um image of this island surrounded by the sandbar and then the ocean it's just gorgeous so we're going to start with a cerulean blue and it's mixed over here a little bit with our yellow but I think that's going to be okay for what we're working with we're going to just put a light wash no pencil this time so I'm just looking at the picture and kind of where that sandbar is putting in some of this color this blue green color and then some water remember what I said we're going to um work with our water colors and work lighter and work our way darker right the paint is going to go where the water is so if you don't want it to go somewhere don't put water there now we're going to come in with um I'm going to take a little bit of our azo yellow and I'm going to mix it with a little bit of one of the um neutral shades in here this is yellow ochre just kind of make a sandy yellow color I'm going to put that in here and remember too what I said before we are trying to give the impression of the photo we're not trying to copy it exactly we're giving the impression of the photo of our vacation how much fun we had on the cruise or wherever it is that you want all right now we have a bunch of we have two really interesting greens here so I'm going to take this one is a sap green which is a yellowy green already and I'm going to just mix it into that color we mixed with the yellow ochre and the yellow now this foliage on the on the island is definitely something where you could take and put these greens on here and then sprinkle salt in it and let it dry go out for the day go on some excursions when you come back brush the salt off into a garbage can and you're going to have an interesting gran granulated texture and to gear foliage that you might really like I don't think we're going to do that here but you could do that and it would be really interesting and I want to encourage you all to experiment with that when I am on vacation if we go out somewhere like to a deli or something like that and they have little salt packets I usually do put some take an extra one and put it in my bag I'll let all of that dry a little bit and we're going to come in with some of the cerulean mixed with that little bit of the ultramarine here that's on our palette just so we can use that up I'm going to put some water in there we're working on being inspired by our photo and not copying it exactly right because we're doing something fun and creative inspired by our vacation whether you're doing it while you're on vacation or you're doing it when you get home either way I like to do some of these while I'm on vacation and then if I really like the piece or the scenery and the way it turned out then I'll do it bigger on bigger paper and take more time with it when I get home taking the same color and putting it down here and some water this is they're very abstract shapes right you just want to suggest the shapes in the photo we're not looking to copying them exactly in this in this one more than the other one there's literally there's no drawing skills required for this one not that there's a whole lot for the other one either I have confidence in you guys I know you can do it I do want things to be a bit blendy so I'm going to put some water where I think the lines are not blendy enough I put some of this blue color up here and remember we're starting out by working our way darker right so now I'm going to take more ultramarine blue and mix it in here make it bluer less green we're working wet on wet we're putting this in while this is very wet so that things are bleeding and blooming and blending together just very quickly making marks and adding color so now we're going to take and we're going to take some of the same sap green I think and we're going to mix it with the blue that's on the palette we'll get a little bit darker green and I'm just tapping the brush and again something I didn't mention I'm using the same brush I did in the other painting the round one the royal watercolor brush round number 16 it's a kind of a medium sized um round watercolor brush and I'm just tapping in this slightly darker green color using up the green that's on my palette now I think we're going to take the blue from the other painting we're going to mix some of this darker viridian green into it that's a good color I always mix on something white so that I can see what the color is going look like or get some kind of an idea what the color is going to look like on white paper so I'm looking at where the darker spots of green are on the island where the shadows are and then adding dots of this paint there I'm going to take a little bit of one of my browns I have a burnt sienna here I'm actually going to mix it with a green and you get this sort of dirty brown green color again we're just I'm just tapping I'm trying to tap and not drag tap tap tap tap tap with just the tip of my brush this is all very wet so you don't need too much color it's going to just go everywhere if you get too much you can get your brush damp with clean water and then just do that and you can drag it and tap it and lift up some of that color you can also get interesting marks into your painting it's looking pretty good now this is just really easy there's no I mean you could leave it at that and that is really pretty interesting painting and then you could put your ship on and journal about your cruise I think we're going to take it a little bit further but I want to dry it I'm going to show it on camera this time so again normally I would say to you do this go have lunch and enjoy your day come back and finish it when you get back I'm because we're filming and I'm at home I'm not going to do that I'm going to use my heating boxing tool hold it too close to the paper and I'm lifting my paper up and and I'm just making sure what I'm doing is taking the shine off the paper the water off the paper and that's all I want to do so I just want to dry up all the loot the extra water now we can go back with our brush and I can take some more that green the Viridian green and by itself I think it's too bright for this painting but I'm going to mix it with other colors I have on my palette to sort of dull down the brightness a little bit like I did with the brown I have the paints gray which so I'm going to use that you could probably put some orange in it that would do the same thing you can practice with some colors have if you're not sure about your colors have a little scrap piece of paper handy next to you that you can you know mix up a couple colors and then you can just try it so I'm going to tap this other green in here and again we're tapping I'm doing I'm trying to do more tapping than I am dragging and leaving interesting marks marks that suggest the foliage and the landscape of the island I love the transparent nature of watercolor and the fact that you can layer a bunch of these colors and marks on top of each other and see all the previous ones in underneath that layer new layer of paint take some of them with some plain water and blend them out a little bit but not all of them so when I leave some of them I think some of the marks are interesting let's go back to our sand and let's take our plate I'm going to switch to a cleaner corner I'm going to take this is the yellow ochre I'm going to take a little bit of that just the very tip of our brush here then I'm going to rinse it off and get it damp and I'm going to blot it on my rag and I'm going to go underneath where I just dabbed in those lines of yellow ochre and put some water where I want the paint to go I want this line on the island to be fairly straight and I want it to blend out and be reflected in the water quick easy this is this is easier than the first one I love that okay so now we're going to take our little ship what do I do with my ship there it is and again easy easy easy so one thing that's always in my kit is a glue stick you don't have to use anything fancy elmer's will work in fact let's just use elmer's this is elmer's extreme there we go should do this on a scratch piece paper I would recommend doing this on a scratch piece of paper or something so you don't get glue everywhere just glue the back of your image your ship in this case position it in your painting now remember I cut off the I think satellite ball by accident which is right about here so we're going to take the white gel pen I'll stick it back in there suggest it to pull the image into your painting I'm going to take some of one of our watercolors let's see let's try for this blue that's over here okay something like that try that a little bit again in the original photo there's like waves or something coming off the back end of the ship so I'm going to suggest some lines yeah and there's plenty of room on there to do some journaling and write about where you're at in the world and on your vacation so there you go I hope that gave you some interesting ideas of what you can do on your vacation and do something creative with your art if you have any questions please let me know put something in the comments below or email me the link to direct travels facebook page if you would choose to book a travel trip with them on paul gogan cruises or any other vacation is in the description below you can go over to their facebook page and they will be happy to help you out a really great company great group of people and I'm not just saying that don't forget to like share and subscribe I am on youtube I do regular art tutorials here if you would like to follow me and the most important thing of course is go out and have a great day have a great vacation do some art do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later bye guys