 My name is Sandy. Welcome to video number two in the Getting Started with Watercolor powders series. This one I'm going to show you how to do a painting of an actual image, some flowers, instead of just doing a sprinkled background, which is what I see a lot of people using these powders for. It can do a lot more than we think it can and this will give you a hint of the direction that I want to take this product. So let's get started. First I'm going to use the brush oh and I'm going to go back and forth between the two of these because there's a few steps to making this little process work that I've been playing around with because I saw these powders fan out from center points when I was playing with them and I thought ooh I could make flowers with them. So I'm shaking on some color. Now you're going to see in video number three how I created these to be shakers but basically just think about poking a hole in it and then shaking color out. If you open the brush oh bottles then you're going to get powder everywhere. You really want to be very careful in how you use these because think of it as baby powder it's super fine and if you get a little bit out out somewhere it's going to be all over the place. So you're going to be constantly washing your brush constantly wiping your surface. You want to not wear anything that you could get a mess on and whatever work surface you're going to be on make it make it something you can clean very well. So I'm using a craft assistant from Ellen Hudson it's basically a 12 by 12 piece of metal that washes up really well. I wipe it down and then wipe it down again with some Purell and that seems to get it really super clean so I don't contaminate colors. So I've spread out my my my watercolor in petal form using an aqua brush and now I'm adding centers to the flowers by just dropping some dark brown in the centers of my flowers and you can move make it move a little bit more as you see what it does. I tend to wait for things and see what it's going to do next. Do I need to dab off a little color and stop it from moving? Is something puddling somewhere or do I need to add a little bit of water to get it to move? I'm going to be adding another layer of water across the whole middle of this although I probably by the time I'm all done I think I should have just left well enough alone and left my flowers just like this because they are very beautiful this way too. But I'm just kind of stopping some of it for the moment so that it doesn't bleed too much and then I set it aside. So now I'm going to do the same thing with colorburst. These bottles are shaker bottles but they have a little nib you can squeeze color out of it and sometimes you get a big blob like I did there on that right hand corner but then other times I was fighting it shaking and shaking and nothing was coming out there is color left in there but I think sometimes there's just a crystal that gets in the way and clogs that so just shaking it a little bit will sometimes break that down a little and then I wanted to add some red to it as well and do red and orange flowers so I'm trying to see if I can achieve the same look with both and find out what makes these two products different from each other if anything and how they work on the paper. This is Kansan XL watercolor paper so it's an inexpensive student grade paper so in case you want to know what that is it they do work a little differently on other papers so you'll have to test out whatever you're using at home. So again I'm taking my water brush and I'm just dragging color out to make petal shapes and don't worry if it doesn't look like flowers right now it's going to change as we add more to it but I'm trying to just get it to start moving as a flower get those petals to start fanning out a little bit and as you create little channels by making those little brush strokes you can actually start getting the color to move out in those directions. You want to make sure you clean off your water brush I didn't do it here because I was going to be using the same colors if you switch back and forth between any colors make sure you rinse your brushes out really good wipe off your your water brushes on paper towels because these colors will contaminate each other very quickly. Now for the centers of these since I didn't have a brown I know that the complementary color for red is green so I added green for the centers of the flowers on these and it doesn't come out looking green because it's mixing really well with the red in this particular instance so use your complementary colors when you're trying to make a brown that seemed to work pretty well from what I could tell in my experiments thus far but stay tuned as I said I'm going to have more videos doing more painting with with both the brush oh and the color burst just to see where I can push this medium and where I can take it now as I started working on this I started noticing some of the colors were pooling together and they were kind of congealing so I wanted to add more so that I could have more of it start to flow and try to match this a little bit so we're back to the brush oh one so I'm going to shake on some spots of yellow because I wanted to make little yellow flowers now in the center so you can tell that my my orange and my red became more of red more of yellow flowers I guess orange yellow flowers than they were red flowers the color burst tended to stay very red so it it's just a difference in how the colors go on these brush oh tend to be much softer and they so they're a little more realistic colors but they also hold detail better they don't they don't tend to run away as much I think as the color burst but you'll see that as we move on with this painting as well and the difference between the two of them so I wanted to add some you know kind of fussy little little flower petals my goodness I'm doing this voiceover late at night I can't remember the word pedals goodness gracious but I'm adding just a little light spritz of water because I'm trying to see where these are going to go do I need to add centers to them do I just kind of thinking through that process of what am I doing to the flowers that were already there I think I added more water than I might have done because now everything is starting to get really soft but I ran a roll of paper towels real quickly over the top because I wanted to try to get everything to just stop and that worked pretty well to do that so I set it aside now we're back to the color burst and you can see the intensity of it but you can also see I've lost a whole lot of the detail that I had when I set this thing aside at first and that is something that the color burst does tend to do it doesn't hold that small detail it just keeps running and blending which is a beautiful look but it really depends on what you're looking for and again you can see that cloud of yellow coming off of as as I'm shaking it on there that doesn't seem to happen with the brush oh and I think I'm losing some color I think it's kind of going off into the ether as it poofs out of the bottle so I'm not sure that that's you know something that I'm just doing wrong in my technique in tapping it on there or not but I want to try not to overuse it and have all that color go off onto my my work surface instead of onto my painting so there's other ways that we can do this too you can apply the color with a brush and just put put some on a palette to be able to paint flowers on but I wanted to see what would happen if I shook them on this way so I'm adding little centers to some yellow flowers here so I can try to create a little similar look as I did with the brush oh piece and then adding a little bit more water to try to get things to move because I was getting too much of just the little dots of the powder all over the place so again I'm going to run through real quickly with the paper towel and it pulled up so much of my red flowers now so I've lost a lot of that color and it softened even more of the detail so I added a little bit more in terms of the the red powder but then I had to go back in and start painting petals back in this is one of those things you can just continue to work back and forth and try to recover detail and then add a little water and lose it and go back and forth a number of times until you get your painting to look right or until maybe it ends up being experiment be prepared to spend some time practicing these there's a whole lot of things you need to start getting a feel for when you're working on painting flowers like this and that is how much water how much pigment which colors are going to work best for you when do you put the water on when do you put the pigment on when do you need more color so be prepared to try out a lot of different things but save all those experiments I'll show you why in a minute here are the two finished cards and on the left is the brush show on the right is the color burst brush show is a little on the the duller side the colors are not as vibrant as the color burst so the color burst is really intense but the detail is held much better by the brush show than by the color burst in my opinion but it depends on what you like if you want that softer look then color burst is definitely for you I did find that the brush show is probably a better deal simply because it's twice the amount of powder in the same kind of containers and if you do some apples to apples comparisons you may find the cost to be a difference but if you're really into vibrant colors then you're totally going to want the color burst and I'm probably going to use both and I might continue to do more experiments with the two of them to see which one comes out on top in the long run because I like both for very different reasons here are two of my failed experiments I had places where these the flowers that I was trying just totally bled all over the place just made a total mess I was like what am I doing this is crazy but I found a nice dye from MFT that I absolutely loved and I just covered up the spots that I didn't like so if you have those quote-unquote failed experiments just use them as pattern paper and dye cut out of them put an image over them lots of things you can still do so practice a whole lot and you'll eventually get better at this now I wanted to show you one more thing the little thing I did with a sentiment on my two cards I wanted to show you how I did it and I had this yellow one that wasn't as perfect I liked it it's done with the brush oh and I wanted to show you how I did the embossing with it so I took the stamp set this is another one of the stamp sets from Ellen Hudson and all of the products for all of these cards are going to be listed in the blog post by the way just so you know in case you need any of this stuff and I just put some clear embossing powder over the whole thing now the paint is really dry the whole thing is completely dried it had been done the day before so there was no chance of any of that powder sticking elsewhere so I just put the embossing powder over top of the whole thing and heated it up and you can see it's starting to melt I love the the melting of embossing powder it just so beautiful and this actually then made the sentiment glossy as well as that heart now while it was still hot I added more embossing powder onto it and then heated it up again and you can keep doing that over and over until you the you start getting a little more of a I guess a good texture on your embossing because if you try embossing on watercolor paper you may find that you get a little bit of a lumpy look just because that's the way watercolor paper is so I just did it a few times over and ended up getting a really beautiful glossy heart on top if you enjoyed this video please click the like button down below it does my heart seem good when you do that if you'd like to watch one of the other videos in this series please click one of those right here and check it out I will see you guys later have a wonderful day