 Hi guys! We're going to do another watercolor video. Only I forgot to grab a brush. Oops. Hang on. I've got said brushes. And as per usual, I've got like five projects going on at once. So I just quickly move things around on the table. I'm going to plug my mic battery in to my pants because it's got a clip on it. And I need it to stay out of the way. Okay. That should work. All right. So we're going to do another drippy heart. And I am still cleaning my table. I'm going to try a slightly different technique for you all after I raise my chair. You know, today's just been nothing but like technical difficulties. I probably should cut some of this out of the video, but I think I'm going to just leave it in. You know, it's reality. All right. So I want to do another drippy heart. And this is the same printout that we've been using. I did do one off camera. And I wanted to try a different way of marking our picture. Something that didn't require, again, us going out and buying transfer paper, which they do make. But first of all, I have some and I don't know where I put it. But I'm sure it's not something that you all have around laying around. And you know, the point is to try to do this without spending any extra money. So that's why the back of it is stained. I'll include a picture here of that other heart somewhere. And the idea behind it was to do something that was more woodland inspired in color. I do think it still came out kind of rainbow-ish, but the colors are more muted and less bright than the other one. So I don't know that it was completely successful. But that being said, I do like the way it turned out. It just didn't turn out the way I thought it was going to. This time, we're going to use this particular watercolor palette. And this is filled with all of the different paints I have that are graphite paints. So they're water, all water soluble graphite, different brands, and different colors of graphite, actually. These little pans are different shades of gray, including a sepia gray, a yellow gray, a red gray and a blue gray. This big one is just a dark gray color. And then these two squares, this one is an ochre color, and this one is a dark brown gray. They're all graphite paints. So they're muted and kind of grayish in tone. So that's going to be really fun. I'm going to try to leave... I think it goes that way. I'm trying to leave these here. So remember which ones are which. This one is just, like I said, this is just a gray. So the way to mark this, another way to mark it rather than poking a million holes, would be to use something water soluble on the back that you could rub across here and then flip it over and then trace your lines. So that's what I did. I used chalk pastels. Now the nice thing about using the chalk pastels is they're not going to... They're in no way shape or form permanent unless you spray them and make them permanent with a clear coat. So they're definitely going to absorb into the paint and they're going to virtually disappear. So one of the things you're going to want to do is pick a color that sort of goes with the colors in the painting that you want to have so that it's less obvious. I could use black. I do have charcoal here but I also have a gray chalk pastel. So I think I'm going to use the gray and literally I'm just going to do this. And this color gray is nice because it's not quite as dark as the charcoal by any means or as dark as, say, a regular pencil. So now I'm going to need something to write with. You can just use the big pen. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. I'm going to turn this over. Oops, it's fine. And then I'm going to trace all around my shape and I'm going to hold it down periodically and look. Yeah, it's transferring just fine. And I'm going to trace the important parts of my shape. The main focal points. Again, I want this to be at least a little bit suggestive. So, you know, like with the other ones, I'm not going to trace every single little detail. I just want to get, I want to get the shape down though because it is an anatomical human heart. So that means, you know, when it, when I'm done, it should sort of resemble that rather than just a big painting blob. And the idea behind doing these traced shapes was that, you know, I wanted all the hearts to be in different color ways with different themes, but I wanted them to all be approximately the same size. That was the original thought behind doing this whole project. Whether or not I'm going to be successful. Yeah, I ain't got no idea. That was bad English. So just trace all around. You don't have to, again, you don't have to do it, you know, super accurate. You just want to give yourself some guidelines. And you'll end up with that. Put that aside. Can you all see that? So I just have guidelines. That works. All right. Now, make sure my baby wipes are handy. So anywhere where I got too much chalk pastel, I'm going to just lightly take it with a baby wipe and take it away. It won't take all of it away, but it will take some of it, most of it away. Because this is a light color, and I do recommend you use light colors. You can be fairly successful with getting it away, but it is going to be the finished product will be splattery. So it doesn't matter if there's a little bit on there. You can just organize a drip to be there. I'm going to start with a bigger round brush. First thing I need to do is I need to get my paints wet. So hang on. Think about the graphites in even these ones that came out of a tube and they were intended to be a watercolor graphite or water soluble graphite. They're not super easy to rewet. So either use them straight out of the tube would be my recommendation for the tube ones. And I'll include a link of what brand they are in the description below. I don't remember off the top of my head right now. But either use them straight out of the tube or just put like I did put. I have some water color. This is watercolor water, see. And it has oxalic liquid in it. So it helps. It aids in the rewetting of your watercolor paints. And I especially started using it because of the graphite paints. Also, though, some brands like Daniel Smith, which I love, are not always super great about rewetting quickly. So you just put some water in there, let it soak in there and let it absorb and you're good to go. I'm going to start with a larger round brush. This is round number 12 Princeton Select. And we are going to start with I think this ochre color. As I've said before, I'll say it again. You start with the lighter colors. I should have got a mixing palette. Holy cow. I'm just like, oh, for nothing over here. Hang on. We'll grab a plastic one because it has spaces in it. I'm just, you know, I'm having a day where I'm having all kinds of technical difficulties and I don't know. It's just been one of those kind of days. All right. So we're going to start with the ochre. I like to have someplace besides the paint itself to dab my brush. We are going to refer back to the picture as always. The darker gray spots will be our shadows. Lighter, lighter, wider spots will be our highlights. You always start with the if you can with your lighter colors. The other thing about the water soluble graphite as you're noticing it doesn't spread and blend the way regular watercolor does generally. Let's go with a sepia, which hopefully should be that one. Yeah. So they're a little more challenging to work with and blend with because they don't want to move the way regular water color does. I'm not sure why that is. I'm not a chemist. I also didn't plan this well enough to have a bowl of dirty water and a bowl of clean water because you know, I'm just not on my game today. I don't know what the deal is. It's not Monday. So I don't know. And I also forgot to turn off the audio on the desktop. Because you know, that's the thing. So at some point with every painting, it looks very poopy. Technical word. I'm kidding, people. I'm kidding. You know, it just you're really like, Oh, God, really? Just keep working it and keep going. Okay, let's try the blue gray, which is a really pretty shade of blue gray graphite. The blue is one of your cooler colors. So you can add it to the shadows. Excuse me. So I'm just constantly you can't see my head. But I'm constantly looking back at the reference picture for where the shadows are on the photo or the print out. It's not really a photo. It's a drawing where I can add my shadows on my painting. And I of course, as you can see, I'm switching up the colors. So one thing about doing that and switching up the colors, something that makes it easier is to print the picture in black and white. I just finished a painting recently. I'll try to include a picture here. I'm calling it moody sunset. The original inspiration photos, which I also will include, were in color. So I had a lot of trouble working on the painting, and getting it to express the mood that I wanted because the color kept distracting me. And then when I realized that was what the problem was, then I had a bit of an easier time. So something that I forgot about. And I hope you don't is print your inspiration photos. We go ahead and print the color one, but maybe also print one in black and white. You might find that that helps you. I also usually abstract my photos with a app. I didn't in this case of the heart. But I do usually do that. It's starting to come together. I'm going to switch to the red graphite, which generally just I mean, it just has a slight reddish tone. You'll see in just a second. Try to put in some of our shapes or suggest some of our shapes. The timing you hear in the background is the clock downstairs. So sorry if that's distracting. It's also raining outside. I do live in the Pacific Northwest, so it rains a lot. So like with any other water soluble paint, put the water where you want the paint to go. If you don't want the paint to go out here, then don't put water there. That's a basic painting with watercolor 101. Always have a like a soft rag nearby so paint starts to puddle in a place where you're not sure you want it to go. Mr. Clean Magic Eraser works well too. And once the paint starts to stain, you can go back in with just water and sometimes move it around a little bit. I did say earlier this graphite paint doesn't always want to blend out. So that makes it a bit challenging, but you can do it. It just it's like I said, it's a little more challenging. Okay, so now I want to go back in with some of the yellow, the ochre color. I'm using my damp brush to pick up some excess paint. You can do that also. That works pretty well. Sometimes I'm going to go back and add some more of the blue. I want to say the tube paints I put in here were a brand I think it was called 12 Shades of Gray or something. Again, I'll find it and I'll put it in the link below. I do think I either got them on Dick Blicker or Amazon. Grab some of that red, a little bit more yellow. So we're at the point now where I want to start making things drip. So literally, I just put some water, give it a shake. And you notice I'm hesitating going into the dark, the ones I know are super dark, until I'm going to do that at the end. Okay, I'm going to go in to the dark brown. It's called dark brown. It's really dark to add some water, like with any other water soluble paint. You want to just use a little bit and add water to make it lighter. You can't see it, but that just turned my watercolor water very dark. Now you can see that that already now that suddenly I didn't do too much. Suddenly that made it really pop because it's a dark color. And the light colors are all well and good, but the dark ones are going to make your painting pop along with the bright ones. Now one of the ones that I want to do is I want to do one of these hearts. And I may do it in conjunction with something like the graphite palette with my neon palette. I do have a neon palette. That would be fun. Right now I'm working wet on wet. I've got my rag in my hand. So if I get too much somewhere, I can just do that. You can come back in with some water and blend things out a bit. Trying to see where I want to put the next thing here. I'm also not passing my brush down to the paper very hard. I'm using a very light touch. You don't need to dig holes to China. That really brought out some detail in the painting or suggested detail. I love it. Okay, so now I'm going to start going into the grays. I have this color, which to be honest, I forgot what it excuse me, I forgot how dark it is. So let's just do this over here. That's pretty dark. And this is I don't remember the brand on that one either. I'll link I'll link these in the description. In case you want to try them. I'm going to start with the gray three, because I think it's the lighter of them. And I'm going to go into some a few places, highlight some of the veins with a super light touch. Now I did grab more than just the one brush. Just in case I was so inspired to use a different brush. But this particular round brush is one of my favorites. And I'm kind of not surprised that I just kind of want to hang on to it and not pick up anything else. I also have to tell you that I like I have lots of different water brushes of all kinds watercolor and acrylic. But I do prefer the Princeton select or Princeton Neptune brushes they are my some of my favorites. It's looking good. Now generally with water color, you can go darker, but you can't go lighter. But if you're like me and you're a mixed media artist, and you do something to your painting and make it too dark, or forget to leave white space, which I do a lot, just wait till it dries and go back in with a graphite pens, sorry, a gel pen, or something like that acrylic paint, and just give it a little touch up, that's fine. Or if you want to stick with watercolor, then get a watercolor wash, a white one, Chinese white or titanium white and going with that. I like that. I wanted I need to do something here, though, that's not quite right up there. First, I'm going to take some of that blue. I want to put it here. That's better. And then maybe that'll help here. Kind of a dead little bit. Let's take a teeny bit of this. Well, that's wet. There's just a line there that I want to try to make less obvious. Yeah, that's better. I'm thinking about leaving some of the white spaces here on the part. I sort of like them. I think as far as the painting is concerned, we're just about done. Now with the others, I did use some gel pen. And I don't think this one's going to be any different. I think we're going to use gel pen. We'll use white, but I think we'll use a different color. See how it looks up in the camera. It's pretty good. Okay, let me give it a dry and let's see where we're at. Okay, so remember I said earlier on technical difficulty, so I recorded this whole last segment with out my microphone turned on because you know, that's a thing. Anyway, after I got it all dry, I realized I wanted to add some splatters and drips to it. So I'm watering down some of the colors that I already used in the painting, the yellow ochre and the blue graphite. And I am going to just splatter them on the painting with my brush. And then I'm going to rinse my brush up as much as I can in my water because at this point it's really dirty. And I'm going to add some more water to the page and spread and drip some of those splatters I just put on there out on the page. I'm also going to blot some of them with my rag, which you'll see in just a minute. Along with drying it again, of course, with the heat gun. So I haven't found a great place to plug the heat gun into so I'm just working on an extension cord at this point in the art room. I'm still getting used to the new space, so that's going to be a thing. Anyway, you want to have it really well and dry before you mark with any pens. Sorry for my head being in the way. I was standing up instead of sitting down. I should know better by now. Anyway, you want to have it be good and dry. And so I'm constantly blotting it or lifting it and turning it to make sure nothing is shiny on the page. So it should be flat. These are not metallic paints. So they should be pretty flat. So once I have it dry, I have a brown gel pen and a white gel pen. Now I end up trying three white gel pens before I find one that's actually working and not dried up. You see that here. I love my uniball signals when they work, but they dry up fast or they get clogged up easy. They just drive me up the wall. The other one, the brown one is a PaperMate ink joy gel pen by contrast. They still have their issues but not nearly as often as the PaperMate signal. I mean the uniball signal. So I prefer the PaperMate ink joy. I'm just not sure they actually make one in white. And it might be the fact that the PaperMate, the uniball pen is white and might have something to do with the white gel. I don't know. Not a pen manufacturer. Maybe somebody out there can tell me. So anyway, I usually have three or four or more of the white gel pens around and for this reason. So I'm going to go over the painting with some gel pen and I'm going to highlight some of the high spots and I'm going to add marks to the low spots and emphasize the shape and the pattern just a little bit in the painting with the two pens, the brown for the darker and the white for the lighter, at least in theory. And I'm going to, of course, when I'm done, make sure that I sign the piece. It's always, always important that you sign your work, especially when it's loose like this and something that could possibly be framed or scanned for a reprint or something like that. You should mark, you should sign your paintings. I really love the way this one turned out and it was a joy to work with the graphite paints in this particular way. I can't wait to do some more work with them and to do more of these hearts. I have ideas for more of them. I want to do one with my neon paints and I think I will balance the neons out with maybe some of the graphites or maybe a paint's gray in another palette, but I do have a whole palette of just neon colored watercolor paints. So I can't wait to try one of these hearts that's neon themed. That's going to be fun and I think that'll be the next one. If you have any ideas for themed hearts that you would like to see me do, please let me know. At some point, these will be scanned and turned into stickers or some other kind of digital download for the Etsy store. So look for that and make sure to comment with any questions below or suggestions for more hearts or work that you would like to see on the YouTube channel. Don't forget to like, share and subscribe and above all, go out, have some fun, make some art, do what makes you happy and have a great day and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Boy, it's super cute. I love the way it turned out. That's it for now. Bye bye.