 Hello, artistic friends, and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins bringing you some watercolor tutorials. We are still celebrating this month, the theme called New Life. So I hope you will relax and enjoy this presentation of four, yes, four watercolor tutorials. I'll be providing commentary, but I also want you to just relax and enjoy as I add some music to be able to get through all of these. Many of you know that I focus heavily on this channel with the medium of soft pastels, but I happen to love watercolor and other mediums as well. And I hope you'll take a moment quickly to like this video, subscribe to this channel, and be sure to hit that little bell icon. It makes sure that you don't miss anything and you get notified of future videos. Now this video is brought to you because of the support from my precious patrons. It's $5 a month to support this channel and because of that support, I'm able to continue these videos to bring to people all over the world who often don't have any other means to learn art. Now let's dive right in. I'm using a large arches is the company watercolor block. I'll be talking a little bit more about what a block is. It's really pages of watercolor paper glued together. And I like to do series often of painting. So I like to section off and do multiple paintings of the same medium or the same theme. Now I'm going to show you the sizes here. Each size is basically four inches by five inches. What I did is I came in about a quarter inch from the edge. You can see over there on the left. Then I came, my tape is an inch. And then I went five inches and then another piece of tape after the five inches. Another five inches, another piece of tape and you get the idea. And then when I turned it vertically, I did the same thing. I went a quarter inch in with the masking tape and then I came from the masking tape over five inches and my tape is four and one inch and then another five inches and the tape. So now I have six equal divisions. Now you certainly don't need to use arches watercolor paper for this. You can use whatever you have. And by the way, I do have a product review video in my Amazon shop about this arches watercolor block. And I'll include a link for that in the description and probably up here as a card. This is my Mastersons Aqua Pro watercolor palette. I love it. It's really, I got this when I got more serious about watercolor painting. If you just have a little palette of watercolors, you can use that. I like to arrange my colors, pardon me for reaching over there, like the color wheel. But what I did is I took one of the pieces of the arches paper. It happened to be just coincidentally about the same size as my palette and I made me a little palette color guide. I love making color guides mostly because watercolor looks a lot different dry than it does wet. So you keep this handy and next to you and it helps you to choose colors more accurately. I also like to make little color notes of my color mixtures. For example, I know if I mix a quinacridone red with a red iron oxide to get a nice terracotta color. I used my Micron marker, oh I forgot, I didn't write the names down. For these two colors I had recently added. One was called, what was this one called, Sap Green I believe, oh no, Cascade Green. And the other one I believe was called Indigo. And I also write down the manufacturer for each of these. And it's just a great resource if I run out of a color and I want to buy that color again. So I highly encourage that. And all of the reference images for these paintings can be found on unsplash.com. I've been loving this site, oh I did do that peacock feather for a pastel painting. I love this site because you've got some really professional photographers giving their photographs copyright free. So what I like to do is make little albums. You can create your own collections so that when you're ready to paint you've pre-saved a lot of nice images. And it doesn't steal your creative energy when you've got to sit down and find something to paint. So I have one album, you can see a big album, I think it's just called Flowers. I'll include the link in the description of this video so you'll be able to access all of the photos that I'm using. Now the first one that I'm doing in this particular video is of these beautiful hydrangeas. They were kind of pinkish in color and I was fascinated by the light. Look at that, you've got cool on the left side and warm on the right. My setup is, of course, my palette I showed you before. I like to use two containers of water. One I rinse out the majority of the watercolor and the other one for a final rinse. I, of course, I like to have an experience. I talk about that all the time. I usually like to light a candle. I can't play the music I listen to. I usually listen to some praise and worship music. I'm telling you, I am celebrating while I'm painting. If you guys could be a fly on the wall, you'd laugh at me. Oh praise in the Lord while I paint. Now I love to have a cup of coffee. You know, it's called Monet Café, right? So let's get started with the first one I chose was the hydrangeas. I did a little sketch and I made a little traceable design that if you're a patron of mine, I just superimposed it there, you will get this traceable. And you know, sometimes it's a quick and easy way to get started. I always love freehand sketching things, but that's just for your convenience. And because I did the sketch in charcoal, I used a kneaded eraser just to knock a little bit of it off. I didn't want it to contaminate the watercolor. Sometimes I like to print out the image. I use it often from my iPad, but I did put it in Photoshop. I felt like it was cut off a little too much on the left side. So I did some work in Photoshop to make the composition a little better. And now after rewatching this footage, I realized I did use my watercolor palette I showed you before, but I decided to actually use some of the paint directly from the tube instead of it was from the tube where I put it all around the palette. It had just dried. And I do believe that when you work from wet paint, it is a little more bright and it flows a little better, but you certainly don't have to. I work from dry paint all the time. So I'm just showing you my little collection of paints. And I'm actually going to try in this to show you some of the colors that I've used. And a lot of that is just you playing and trial and error and learning how to mix colors. And these are the colors you can see. I have a combination of Kotman, Da Vinci and also Kotman's made by Windsor Newton. And also Daniel Smith. I recently got that Indigo colors really pretty. And the colors that I used here, this is Permanent Rose. It's a Windsor Newton color. It makes a really lovely pink. And this is Cobalt Blue. This is a Da Vinci color. Next is Sap Green, also Da Vinci, I believe. This is Prussian Blue. I love Prussian Blue. And this is Magnes Blue. And this one is a Cadmium Yellow. And once again, that Indigo color, it makes a really nice dark. Now I'm going to show you a little trick here. You don't want to put the cap back on. A lot of times the tube paint, I'm sorry, it's blurry. It kind of comes out, but if you squeeze it the opposite way. You see I'm squeezing the tube. You squeeze it the opposite way of how you normally squeeze it. It sucks it right back into the tube. And then you can put the cap on and not worrying about all the paint getting around your cap. Now I'm mixing up a really lovely purple and magenta kind of color together. Mixing the Permanent Rose and I believe the Cobalt Blue. But notice on my palette how I mixed up two little sections of that. I like to let my colors kind of mix on the palette. And I like to mix a few colors so I can just dab it in. Like you're gonna see me do right here. Just dabbing in, that has a little more pink to it. Dabbing it in there. And it's okay if it runs in those little channels where the other colors are. That's part of the beauty of watercolor painting. And because there are actually four watercolor tutorials in this one video, I am going to give my commentary and my instruction at the beginning of each video. Speeding them up more as they progress. This one will be, it's just barely sped up. But I wanted to mention here, notice how I just added that yellow. What I was fascinated by with the reference image, I'm not sticking it up here because I want you to be able to see my colors. I was fascinated with that light that was shining through. I decided to make the hydrangea a little bit more purple. And now notice how I'm adding some of that blue. I think I mixed Prussian Blue and some of that Permanent Rose together. Maybe, maybe just a little. But see how I'm just dabbing in a little bit of that yellow. And I've learned over the years with watercolor, as opposed to pastel or acrylic or oil, to keep the first layer light, not to give too much paint to water ratio. Let it be a little bit fluid. And the reason for this is you don't want to lose that beautiful luminosity of the paper and you could always darken it. You can't really go back and go light again. There are tricks, but they're never as successful as keeping it light to begin with. I'll talk about some of those tricks as I paint. And I'm also right now just kind of zoning out and thinking of shapes, big shapes. Now that is similar to pastel painting or almost any other painting. I like to get my basic big shapes in first. And that's gonna keep a much more painterly look. The other thing I'm looking at is values. I would say that's really, here's the order. Shapes, values, and color. And I almost zone out on what the elements are, if I start thinking, oh, this is a leaf. My brain start my trying to paint a leaf the way I see it rather than what's actually in the image. Often it looks different than what we interpret. So it might sound funny to kind of zone out a little bit, but just focus on the big shapes and the values and don't get too fussy with it. Don't overwork it. Sometimes, all right, when I was a beginner artist, I would second guess myself and doubt some things and I'd fiddle with it. I'll go, well, that doesn't look just right. And I'd keep fiddling and fussing and fiddling and fussing until I turned things kind of muddy and it lost its fresh quality. So just try to keep those things in mind. Another thing to keep in mind is with watercolor, just embrace the spontaneity, because that's part of the beauty of watercolor, actually, is let the water and the paint just have some fun together. Now here, I'm making a neutral. What you do is you take two complementary colors that's opposite on the color wheel. In this case, it was kind of a red and a green and then I added blue. I'm now just making a dark. So you see how I made a neutral color, but really just two complements. And then you can add another color like I did to get kind of quite that color you're looking for. And now I'm adding a little bit of that. I believe it's a little bit of the Magnes blue, which has a little bit of a teal color to it. And I'm just dabbing some in to suggest the sky, just filling in the spaces at this point and then later I'll go back and kind of define things and develop my focal point. One of the reasons you wanna keep everything loose to begin with is you wanna have kind of a out-of-focus palette until you come in and define where that focal point is. And that'll be the area that gets more color, more contrast and more definition. Here, I just made another dark. I might have used some of that. I think I did put indigo down on my palette. I never like using straight black. And the reason for that is it looks very flat. And I've seen artists who use black and it looks fine, but I like things to be a little bit more alive with color. So same thing, I'm just getting in these values. I know the left side of this hydrangea was more in shadow. The right side was in sun. And now I'm just suggesting some of the, oh, and I felt like it was a little too dark. And so I just blotted it off of the paper towel and I also kind of like how it gave it some texture. I'll go back and add some dark leaves to that later. But now I'm just suggesting these other hydrangea flowers that are far away. They don't need much detail. They're just a little suggestion. That's all the brain needs to figure something out. I'm working in a little bit more of this. I also hinted or saw a little hint of like almost some yellowy golds, orangey kind of colors in the background. You'll see me add layer later. Now, what am I doing here? Why have I made this color a little bit more? I believe of that. Did I add sap green to my palette? Yeah, I think it was sap green and a little bit of maybe the magnice blue. Why would I add the blue to that? To cool it off. What I'm doing now is I'm giving some of the shadows that are in some of these leaves. And things, as I always say in my videos, it's become my little saying. How do colors behave in shadow? The same way you do. They cool off. If you get in the shade, you're gonna cool off. And by cooling off, I mean you lean more towards the blue, towards the cooler end of the color wheel. So that's why I added a little blue to the green. Now I know that I've already got my light colors down and I can go in and start developing some of the darker purples. And I'm still just looking at my reference image. Again, I did not put it up in this particular watercolor painting because I wanted you to be able to see my palette. You can pull it up on Splash and look at it while I paint or print it out. And now you can see how I'm layering over that initial darker neutral tone that I put down by just suggesting some leaves. And I'm gradually getting darker as they get further down into the shadows. They look a little segmented right now, but I do some things to soften those edges. And by the way, I wanna take a quick little personal moment here to say thank you to so many of you who leave comments that bless my socks off. I can't share enough how much your gratefulness helps me, encourages me to keep this up. And I'll share with you that creating these videos is a lot of work. And I think probably most of you know that. I have a lot of people who say, oh, I wanna start doing that. I want a YouTube channel. And I've often thought about making a video just behind the scenes, some of the things that it takes to do kind of the market things and how to get your, a lot of likes and a lot of follows and build an audience and all of those kind of things. But I will say if you're considering this journey to do something similar, you better like computers and you better be a little techie if you're going to pursue this type of route. Now you don't have to be if you're just gonna paint and share your paintings, and you can hire somebody to do all of those things. But I'm a one girl show here. So, and I do happen to like the technical aspects of things. I majored in computer design or graphic design. And I started out majoring in computers. I'm just computer languages. And I started out learning, I think it was called Cobalt, Cobalt back then. And I really liked it. I love problem solving and things like that. But it didn't have quite the artistic leaning that my heart and soul desired. So graphic design was a perfect fit. It was art and design and computer design. So that's why I love that. So I will say that has been a big help. I love figuring things out on the computer and I do love videography. I love filming. I love creating the videos. So that kind of works as a plus. So it will, if this is your aspiration, it will help. If you like those things or either you just have the ability to hire it done. So, but back to my original point, I wanna thank you guys for encouraging me because this is a lot of work. For example, the painting part doesn't take nearly as long as the video part. And I'll, this video here now, I'm doing four watercolor paintings in one in this video. But this video will have taken me about two days to finally get together. So not to eight hour days, but kind of popping in and out on it. I would say probably a total of eight hours at least. So they definitely are a lot of work. So my point is you guys continue to encourage me. And because of the Patreon support, I can keep this up. It has become my full-time job. And so I'm grateful that, and I'm not complaining about it being a lot of work. I love it because these are the things that I love to do. I don't think I could do whatever the Lord called me to do or if it was my position in life to go in and work a job and drive somewhere other than working from my home studio. Hey, I do it. I know a lot of you guys are in those positions where you're doing a job. It's not your favorite job, but hey, and you know what? The Lord uses us wherever we are. And sometimes, you know, that's where he wants you to be at that moment. Might be for you to witness to somebody or share your light to somebody. But again, thank you for the encouragement, for the following, for the support, and everything. I actually read some of your comments to my husband. I'll be like, come here, honey, I gotta read you this one. And there's some of you who literally, like I say, don't have any way to learn. You're in a country where you don't have any resources. You're in a position financially where you can't take any courses. And I happen to love teaching, too. I homeschooled my oldest son. And I really, really love teaching. So there you go. There's my personal note to this. And y'all just keep it up and bless your hearts for allowing me through your support and your following to keep doing this. Okay, here is this final painting. I did jabber on. I added more detail. And I wanted to keep the light in that one. Now I didn't show this at the beginning, but I'm using Princeton Art and Brush Company. This is a 4050R, that means round, size 16. I think I also have a 12. And I think the 12 is most likely what I used. No, that's a 10. Most likely what I used for the hydrangea painting. And the stems and the little thin areas you saw is this liner brush. And for this one, I'm using a spritzer bottle. No, this is not Victoria's Secret, whatever fragrance that is. It's just water. And I'm spraying water down. I saw another artist do this and I thought, you know me, I gotta try. So I thought the splatters are so impressionistic and neat. And this particular reference photo, let me pull it up real quickly. It had that particular background effect to where it almost looks like little globes, circular globes in the background. I can't remember, there's a term for that. And once again, you guys will come to my rescue. Thank you so much, by the way, the last video on the most expensive pastels in the world. I could not, I didn't know how to pronounce the French word Henri Rocher. Now somebody let me know if I'm saying it right. I said Henry Roche. So somebody let me know about this particular term for this particular lighting effect that's going on in this photograph, which is really cool. Let me talk about this. And I'm gonna show you a neat little trick I did to get that. I'm mixing up some cooler greens and blues. And that's because I'm going to lay down, notice how much water I'm adding to this too. And that's so that I can do my little splatter technique. So I've got my spritzer bottle. I've spritzed some water and I'm just splattering some of this kind of a teal green color. Sorry for my easel shaking. I'm really giving it some taps here on my finger. And what's gonna happen is the water is going to allow the water color that I'm splattering to start just flowing, ebbing and flowing. Now I have a decent amount of water-to-paint ratio here on my brush and notice how I'm holding the brush. I wanted to mention that earlier. Unless I'm just to have to get the point and get something specifically smaller, I like to paint using the side of my brush as much as possible and holding my brush, not like a pencil, but with a more painterly style. Now sometimes you do kind of have to cinch up on something to keep some control. But for the most part, it's a more artistic method of holding your paintbrush. So I'm just emulating the reference photo with some of the energy. It felt like everything was sweeping up to that right top corner. And I'm keeping some of those little splatters, allowing some of the light to show through. And I'm also trying to keep the center area a little bit blank. You see how I wiped it off with paper towel to be able to get some of these pink flowers. Now these were more buried and they're not the focal point, the ones on the perimeter. So I wanna keep them really soft and subdued. Hence a large water to paint ratio, just letting them flow. And again, just shapes, colors and values. That's all I'm focusing on at this point. And I will say that one of the biggest or most common suggestions I give, oh well let me go to my trick here, I gotta remember. I took a Q-tip and I took water. And you see how I was just kind of dabbing in little circular motions. You see how it gave that little effect? I might do more of that later. I'm sorry, I missed some footage, but I'm now working on the focal point. Back to my point before. One of the most common suggestions I give when somebody asked for some suggestions on their painting, a little critique, you might wanna call it, is to not have everything the focal point, determine what it is and let that be the star of the show. Now you saw in my little dish there that I had a really bright pink, that was acrylic ink. And I decided to use that again for focal point strategy to give the brightness to the, they look like snap dragons. I think these are snap dragons. I put a little bit just to suggest, notice how I don't give too much towards the edges. Once again, another focal point strategy. Now I'm making a nice green that was Prussian blue and sap green. And back to my color chart that I have for my watercolors, that's another great reason to make these. When I find a neat color combo, hey, I can put it right there on my chart. I don't have to try to remember it or know it from memory. And it's a really helpful tool. Now, why am I making this a bit more green? Notice how I've leaned a little warmer on the color wheel. It's because these are the flowers that are not quite as buried or the leaves and they are getting more sunlight. And I keep a paper towel in my hand. Sometimes I'll just dab something to soften it up. The background was incredibly soft for this and the flowers in the center reaching up diagonally actually were the star of the show. And I'm continuing to add just little subtle suggestions of color, keeping it very loose and adding the warmth. There was some warmth of sunshine coming through the back. And again, a light ratio of paint to a heavier ratio of water. Now, this is my liner brush that I used to make those stems on the hydrangea, some of the leaves, and keeping this very loose, energetic and painterly. You don't want thick lines and you don't want stiff lines. I'm always working on having more gestural lines. I added a little warmth to one side of the stem, just a little bit more yellow in my paint and ratio to water. And suggesting a few more of these little snap dragons. And I love the soft moody effect of this. By the way, all of these are available in my Etsy shop with the exception of this one. Someone bought this one last week. So if you would like to get one of these, check out my Etsy shop. By the way, on that note, I'm so busy making videos, painting and hanging out with my patrons on my Patreon page, giving them extra content, doing all the marketing of this business that I have a hard time getting my work into my Etsy shop. So I have a whole big old load of paintings that I've gotten photographed and ready to go in. So I'll make an announcement when I get those in. Some of them are paintings from older videos that I just haven't had time to upload. So here's the final. It was a lot of fun. Now let's move on to the next one. Well, I just had to do some sunflowers. Once again, this is from unsplash.com and I am using a charcoal pencil here. I'm gonna show you a little bit of the technique of if you decide to use a traceable, if you're a patron of mine. I think I'm gonna put these traceables available on my coffee shop. I'll make them available for like a dollar or two if you would like them. This isn't hard though. These images are so easy. You can certainly draw them yourself. But what I do is you can take the traceable. Now look at, this is what I call my burnishing tool. It comes with another product. My dog has chewed it up, but you could use a credit card or whatever. You do a little tracing of charcoal on one side. You flip it over and when you lift it up, you've got a light little image. And it's a quick and easy way to do this if you're just doing it for fun. But again, I prefer freehand, but sometimes I like to give you guys a little fun technique to go ahead and get started with your painting. And once again, I'm using the same colors that I've already squeezed out of the tubes before. I named them earlier. So it's the same colors. Look how many is that? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven colors. So even though I have this big palette with all these colors around, it's just cause we love color, right? We gotta get new colors. You don't need that many colors. You can mix from the colors I've laid down here. That is the cobalt blue. You can just, oh, that might be the magnase blue. You can mix all kinds of colors from this. And the magnase blue, like I said, is a little bit more teal in color. And I just really, really love it. So what I'm doing is I'm painting negatively right here, just getting in the sky, working in between the spaces. I also did with the charcoal pencil, I use charcoal pencil if you're gonna do a little technique like this. Again, I'm sharing this for you guys to make it a little easier. I knock off the charcoal with a kneaded eraser just so I don't have charcoal, dark charcoal all over. Now I just mixed up a little purple. How do you do that with a little red added to your blue? And there you go, you've got a purple. And now I'm gonna add a little yellow to the sunflowers. Also too, notice how I've switched. Oh, I'm doing a wet on wet here. This is just water. I want this to be very light. The tips of this sunflower were super light. And so notice how I'm just dabbing that color in. The water's already wet. I mean, the paper's already wet with the water. It's gonna act as a channel. And it's gonna still keep that light of the paper showing through. But what I was gonna say is, notice how I've changed my palette to a white plate. Yes, this is a white plate. I think I'm just gonna keep it in my studio. It makes a perfect little palette. And it was smaller than my big old Masterson's Aqua Pro palette, whatever it's called. Now I'm just suggesting some of the other sunflowers. Very light, adding a little. Oh, I did add another color. That is Quinacridone Gold. I love this color. There's something so luminous about this color. It's very translucent. And so typically with sunflowers in the sunshine, you're gonna get your warmer colors, sometimes coming in around that large seed head in the middle. And see how the paper's still wet? So it's allowing those that Quinacridone Gold just to blend so beautifully with the cadmium yellow that I had put down before. And so I'm just working the hole. And again, I apologize for speeding some of these up. I think I'm gonna have to speed the last one up a lot and just add some music. Maybe a little commentary because this video's gonna be like an hour long. Okay, so I mixed in, what did I mix in there? Trying to make me a nice, kind of an orangey, but a dark. And so I think I grabbed some Payne's Gray. Okay, so I did add a few other colors. You can make your own dark. By basically mixing together blue, red, and green. Now it's gonna vary based on which type of blue, red, or green that is, but it makes a pretty good dark. And see how I have two little puddles of color? Often I like to mix up my color and just so I can keep painting and while the paper's wet. Now I added a little bit more of a purple. I find that sunflowers, it's really pretty if you add a little bit of purple to the shadows and a little bit to the seed head. So I'm just doing the same thing, keeping in mind that these sunflowers that are in the field are not the star of the show. It's that big sunflower, obviously. That's another focal point strategy, is size. A focal point is something that you naturally go to. You're gonna go, your eyes are gonna go to something that's bigger in the scene versus something that's smaller. Something that's more colorful, something that's more detailed and often too based sometimes where it is in the composition. So now I'm just using my brush. I'm kind of angling it and making that main stem to the flower and some of the leaves coming out of the flower. Still a pretty decent water to paint ratio. I don't want my paint too thick and it causes it to look flat and lifeless if you have too much paint too soon. And I didn't, some areas in this, I don't take my time on getting all of the leaves in exactly the right places. And I was really just kind of enjoying this moment. And I've found over the years, I do practice what I preach. I say all the time, the joy is in the process. The act of creation is a lot of the success. Did you enjoy it? Was it a moment for you? It's not just about the final result. And so sometimes I might embrace that too much. And I'm just having fun. Like I said, I'm listening to my praise and worship music. Half the time I'm singing and talking to the Lord. And so embrace the moment. You can always paint another painting, you know? And you're learning with everyone, even with mistakes. Now I took a little bit of the teal color. I mixed up me up a teal and made that for a distant either tree line or other hills in the background. And I'm also going ahead and adding a little more dark to these centers. Notice how they're not gonna be as dark as they get to the edge of the painting. Giving a little more dark to that stem on the shadowy part. And the darkest dark is obviously going to be the center of that main sunflower. You're gonna see me really darken that up. Now I've got me a cooler green that's going a little darker, that's going in the shadows, under the leaves in the leaves where they're kind of curled up. And now adding a little more dark and a little warmth and a little cool. See how I've mixed on the palette there? One's a little more brownish dark and one's a little more purpley dark. Now I'm gonna start adding in some of that warmth. And what's happening is the sunflower petals, as they reach out, the ones on the end, they're the tips, they're gonna be the lightest and the brightest the sun is shining through them. As it comes down closer to the center, they're getting packed together. So it's gonna be a little bit of a darker value and a little bit more warmth perhaps. So, and sometimes it's cooler in there too. So pay attention to where the sun is and where there are shadowy areas that are a little more dense or not where the sun is, they're gonna be cooler like purples. And I add some purples to this as well. But where they're compact areas, dense areas I should say, that maybe the sun is shining through the back, they're gonna be a little bit warmer like this kind of orangey color. I think again that maybe the quinacridone nickel azo gold is the full name of the color. It's a big old name for this color. So just kind of having fun, playing around, adding a little bit of it to some of the sunflower centers, but they're gonna be still not the star of the show. Now, what did I do here? I'm trying to lighten up. A lot of times the sky is lighter in the at the horizon line. This particular color didn't pull up as well. Some colors you can literally rewet the paper and use a paper towel and just blot it. But this Magnes blue obviously is one of those colors that doesn't pull up quite as well. But it's okay. I give some more color to the upper sky later. Now I'm adding some of those greens that are a little bit cooler. It has a little more blue to the green ratio and putting those to where the grasses would be deeper. And notice how suggestive this is, especially the background. Am I drawing individual leaves or painting individual leaves? No. I don't want the attention to get so detailed back there that it takes your eye away from the main focus. Now I'm mixing me up a purple. See once again, how you can mix so many colors. I'm grabbing a few other colors from my palette, but I would say basically I used those seven colors and maybe added two more. The quinacridone gold and maybe a little Payne's gray. So here's where I'm adding a little bit more of the shadowy purpley maybe color, a little bit more of the orangey colors in certain areas. And here's where I was probably just getting a little too sporadic with my strokes. They needed to be a little bit more concentrated on perhaps, but I ended up making it work. And by the way, with this particular painting, I ended up, I was just having fun. I wanted to keep going with it. I was really happy with it when I was finished with the watercolor, but there were some areas that I decided to add some gouache to. I thought, hey, let's play. So I didn't get the gouache footage. So when you see the final image, it's going to look a little different than the watercolor portion, but I happen to love gouache painting too. So like I said, I'm just an experimentation girl and sometimes I probably should just stop, but my goal is not always, oh, let the world see my fantastic painting. It's like, let's just enjoy art and let me share this journey with others and hopefully give some good tips along the way. Adding a little more warmth and this is also going to identify this flower as the focal point. It's getting more color, it's getting more attention, it's getting more detail. And so it's saying, hey, look at me. And so those are just some little strategies for that focal point. And now I'm adding a little bit of a brighter yellow. I'm trying not to bring this to the tips of the petals. Can you see now how I've worked light to dark? As I mentioned before, it's the opposite of a lot of other mediums such as pastel, oil and acrylic. You can work dark to light. It's an opaque medium. I mean, it's not totally opaque. It's more opaque than watercolor. So light to dark is the way to go. Now I kind of covered up one of my, I loved that one little petal that was flopped over the top and again, I was getting into the moment and didn't focus on being too detailed about that. So I just added some water, pulled it off a little bit with a paper towel. Now I'm adding a few more little, there was a little bit of dark underneath some of those areas. So I'm just dabbing it in, again, suggesting using a little bit of it on the base of the mountain in the background. And now I've got a little bit of that magnase blue. Oh, look at my plate. It's a mess. And I'm using the side of my brush again. It's a little bit more of a dry technique to keep some of the texture and to just suggest kind of negatively painting the clouds. Now this is gonna create more of a focal point. Again, is a little more dark on that stem and still working the whole. Notice how I, if I've got a color I've mixed up and I see that I can use it somewhere else, I go for it. It's the same that I do with pastels. I say that in my pastel demos too. Is that if I got a color in my hand, I'm like, well, why lay it down, pick it up again if I see an area that has that color. And also too, even if I don't definitely see that color in the reference image, I like to find a place I can put it because it makes your painting work together as a whole if you incorporate some of your colors throughout your painting. Still working a little bit. I wanted some of these sunflowers to have a little bit more of a tension. And here's where I said, okay, I added gouache. I used it for some more vibrant color and a little bit more detail. And here is the fourth and final painting once again from unsplash.com. Just some lovely sort of like little baby roses. I just thought this was so beautiful. I am once again using the same colors that I had on my palette earlier. Here you can see I'm mixing up a green. Notice how much water to paint ratio. Then I add a little blue to it to cool it off a little bit. So I've got two little puddles to work from. One that's a little warmer and one that's a little cooler. And that was just sap green and cobalt blue. I believe that's the two colors that I use. Oh, now I'm making one that's a little more green by adding what? Yellow, you see, I kept it on my brush and just I'm adding. I don't rinse my brush out in between. So now I've got these nice little puddles of color that I can start adding. Now I didn't do, sometimes I don't do wet on wet. Wet on wet is when you wet your paper first. And I do love that when you want to keep it really light and flowy, but if you add enough water to paint ratio more water, you almost kind of get a wet on wet technique. And you can still create a really soft background appearance. So it's kind of, you know, sometimes I do it that way, sometimes I don't. Now this one is a painting that I am going to speed up. I'm already at 38 minutes into this video. So I'm going to speed this one up. You might want to just watch to the song and notice how it's the same strategy with this one. This one did have a lot more little crevices and leaves and things. I still didn't want to get overly detailed. And I end up at the end of this one, the pot in the reference image was almost a little bit lavender colored, like a gray lavender. And so I created it that way at first and later I decided to make it a little bit more like a terracotta pot. So you'll see the final. Okay, see how I'm going back and forth between the greens and the blues and how I'm just letting the water do its thing. Embrace that, it's a lot of fun. All right, I'm going to speed this up to music. Enjoy. And again, if you haven't liked this video yet, go ahead and hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel. If you're a newcomer, we love newcomers here. And be sure to stay to the end because you're going to see me actually take the tape off. The masking tape works great for these divisions and cut them up into their own little individual cards. Like I said, I love doing series like this. And even if you don't have a large sheet of watercolor paper, you can do a series with individual sheets or whatever works for you. All right guys, here's some music. Enjoy and stay tuned for the reveal at the end. All right, I'm going to go ahead and share the final after a few little strokes here. Once again, trying to keep this video under an hour. So here's the final for this particular painting. Again, I added a little bit of warmth to the pot to make it kind of look like a terracotta pot. And now you're going to see me actually take off this page from the watercolor block. I wanted to show you how it's done because I had no idea when I first got a watercolor block. Now there's a break. The pages are literally glued together with that black part. And there's a little break at the top. And I get a palette knife to separate the first page. You could use a butter knife. Don't use anything sharp because it'll cut your paper, something blunt. You insert it into the edge and then you start working it around. Now, one of those paintings, I turned into a pastel painting. So I cut it out first so I wouldn't get pastel all over the place. That's another full tutorial, by the way. And then I continue to use my palette knife to work my way around the first page. Then you have it off. And so I just did a rough cut with scissors. And I apologize for the lighting. The colors look a little weird here because I did this right in front of my window and there was some bright light shining in. And so I do a little rough cut because I know I'm gonna trim it up with my paper cutter to have just about an eighth of an inch white border around each painting. And the masking tape works pretty good. You can see at the top of the hydrangea flower, a little bit of a bleed through did happen. So anyway, this is really fun for me. I love the reveal of those clean edges. And here they are cut with their little borders. And the neat thing is, when you've created a series like this, if you like them all, you've got these four little paintings, you could either frame together or individually or you could give them as gifts. These are great to ship to family members and friends. And they are certainly a lot of fun. So I hope you learned a lot in this action packed and watercolor painting pack tutorial. I certainly did. And I'm embracing the theme this month of new life. We are so blessed to have a creator who gives us so much beauty. This is the one before I added made the pot like a terracotta pot. And this is the pastel that I did. I turned a failed watercolor painting into a pastel painting. You can see that full tutorial as well. And I hope you guys enjoyed this. I pray that the Lord is blessing you and we can all celebrate the amazing beauty all around us that God has given us. Isn't it great to be an artist? All right guys, be blessed and happy painting.