 Hi there. Welcome to my online studio here on YouTube. My name is Sandy Olnach. I'm an artist and I work in a lot of different mediums, and I make projects from very small and mailable things to large and frameables and everything in between. Today I want to talk about a specific art supply, and it's one that I've had in my collection here in my studio for quite some time. Years ago, Daniel Smith had a retail store in Seattle, and every once in a while, I would go and pick up one of these watercolor sticks until I had the whole collection that they had on the shelf, and I kept thinking I should really do a video with these because there's some really cool things about them, and then I never did it. Well, I went to look online and see if they had added maybe a few more colors since I had done those original purchases, and they added quite a few colors. They are now up to 62 colors at the time of this filming, and the kind people at Daniel Smith did actually fill out my collection for me, so I got a nice big box in the mail. Thank you to them for doing that so that I could swatch out all the colors. You can see what's available in watercolor sticks. So in this video, we're going to start off just talking about what watercolor sticks are and how you use them, like what do you do with them because it's paint in a stick. I'm going to be talking about that plus swatching those colors, as I said, and then I'm going to do this painting for you, showing you some techniques that I have discovered work wonderfully with these watercolor sticks. And throughout the video, I'll kind of be throwing in a few of my opinions on what you might think about using these for. I wouldn't necessarily say these are going to be the perfect thing for everybody to switch to. So hang on to your wallets, but you might find some use for a few colors. And let's get started talking about all of that. Let's begin by agreeing that I'm only going to be talking about Daniel Smith watercolor sticks here in this video. I don't have all these other brands of watercolors in stick format like gelatoes and crayons and all different kinds of names people give them, but they're all roughly the same ish. These Daniel Smith are ones that I'm going to be talking about though, since I have them here in the studio. The size of a stick compared to a 15 milliliter tube looks very different, but the tube is 15 milliliters. The stick is 12 milliliters, but it's compressed because it doesn't have all the air and moisture fluffing it up so that it's movable in the tube. So you're actually getting the same amount of pigment approximately in a stick, which is several dollars cheaper than you're getting in a tube. For storage, I'm using an old iPad box and an old USB cord box, because, you know, that's what I had that would fit these so they'd lay out and I could see the colors. And they also make these wonderful cases though, and I recommend them highly. They come in fives. You could break them apart into individual ones, but you can leave them in the fives, whatever works for you, because then you can take the labels off or use enough of them that you're just saving a small chunk and label the case itself. Just put a piece of tape on it with what color it is, that sort of thing. Now, I have found what I think are eight ways to apply watercolor sticks. There's a ninth later on in the video in the butterfly section, so stay tuned for that. But the first obvious one is drawing directly on the paper. When you think of having a stick in your hand, you're like, I should draw with that. Well, some of the colors melt out, some don't. And depending on the paper, I'm using rough paper here just to really push it to its limit. You can see it doesn't melt out completely, but wouldn't that be lovely for a bark texture? So put that in your brain next time you need to draw a tree. You can touch the brush to the stick directly. Use a lot of water and you get a lighter color. Use less water. You get a darker color. You don't even have to put it in a palette. Just work straight from the stick. But you can make a wet puddle. Just put some water into a dish or onto your palette. And if you don't feel like putting water into the palette, just dip the stick into the water jar. It'll do the same thing. You just need to have some water to mix that pigment out. If you use a lot of water and just a little bit of pigment, you'll get a light color. But then you can continue mixing more color by just putting the stick in and adding more color to it. If you're making a large painting and you need a giant wash of a sky color, this is a great way to mix it because you can just mix a vast amount really quickly using a watercolor stick. So this pigment is much thicker and you'll be able to see the difference when you paint it that you get a darker color if you use more pigment in the mix. You can also throw in another color. So I'm going to take a Hansa Yellow medium, throw some of that in there to turn this into a warmer kind of brown. So you can mix with these as well. You can mix the two puddles side by side and then mix it with your brush, or you just dip the whole thing in here like this. I'll show you in a minute how you can clean that off really easily. But you can see that's a much yellower kind of color. And now you can add a dark color. You can add a dark version of the same color. You can add a compliment or here I'm adding black. And I'm adding a granulated black. And the granulated black is going to allow this brown then to be granulated and be darker. Lots of fun things you can do with it. So another thing that a lot of people will do with these is to palletize. I'm making up that word if it's not already a word. It palletize a stick. And what that means is you're going to put a chunk of the stick into either a pan or a palette or whatever it is that you like to watercolor out of. So I'm peeling off the label from one section and I'm just going to cut off a chunk of it using an X-Actu knife and Bada Boom Bada Bing. I'm going to put it into a half pan with a drop of water in the bottom just so that will stick to the bottom and if the pan comes up it won't knock out of there because once it dries it should stick in there a little bit easier. And you just paint with it as if you had squeezed the paint out of a tube. You can also cut shavings. Just cut off little tiny chunks in order to mix a well of whatever kind of color that you're looking for. You can you know cut off chunks of a couple colors and put them in there and mix them together. Very easy to do and then you're not squeezing things out. You're not trying to go back and forth with your brush to pick up pigment out of your your wells. You can also sharpen the stick to draw with and I'm doing it right over top of that puddle so that I can use all of that paint and just you know put it in there. I'm going to add some water to it and let it sit there and you'll see later how it just has turned into a full-on puddle of paint once it's once it's kind of all wet. Now drawing on top of my wet paint here didn't do a whole lot but if you draw on top of dry paper you'll get a little more effect but you can draw a bark. You can do very tiny tree branches, anything that needs kind of a dry brush look you could use that for. Now here's where you can clean off your messy sticks. If you've done what I did mixing that yellow into the brown you'll end up with kind of a dirty stick and if you need some pure bright yellow that's not really going to work well dip your stick sorry it's off camera there dip your stick into the water and then use a baby wipe or a damp paper towel and by the boom it's all clean all over again as if it just came out of the store. Now here's a bonus tip when you're working with a tube you're maybe not getting all of the paint out of it when you finish because there's just like a bunch that sticks in that little top section up there and you don't have that problem at all with sticks you use the entire thing because there's no little place for it to be hidden but if you've got a tube that you want to get all the paint out of then squeeze it out as best you can and then open it up a little bit and in one of the like places in between the top and the bottom just hack it in half and then you can squeeze out all the paint from the bottom side and then squeeze out all the paint from the top side and I'm going to go use a palette knife to scoop this into my regular watercolor palette so that I'll be able to use that later and of course you could squeeze it into your palette but I didn't want all of that on screen at the same time so I did that separately. Now let's talk about the colors that are available in sticks these 62 colors are part of the Daniel Smith collection so if you have a handset yellow light that you want to get and you've been using the tube form for it for all of your painting career and then you want to switch to the stick form because they are less expensive well that's easy to do because the color is going to be identical. Daniel Smith is really good at matching over the years over the decades so that the color is always going to be the same you're not going to get any variation so if you decide to make the switch on any of your colors you certainly can do that without really getting yourself in any kind of trouble in terms of color matching. This kind of ridiculous useless chart is one that I made because I just wanted to swatch all the colors it just seems like it would be pretty and I do have this one all labeled over on my blog if you want to see it but frankly if you're going to go shopping for colors you're probably better off going to whatever your favorite retailer is my favorite art supply retailer is Blick Art Supplies because they have all the things and I have a link to the whole page where you can see all the colors and in like their shop so if you're looking for like you know phthalo blue and you you want that particular color you can find out if they have it but you could also dig through the chart on my website which I'm just going to tell you it's kind of useless it's very pretty it's just useless in terms of trying to search for colors for shopping from so there's that art doesn't always make sense you know just because I make a chart doesn't mean it's going to be a helpful one but you know it was kind of fun and it's pretty I don't know what I'm going to do with it if I'm going to hang it on my wall or quite what I'm going to do but I'm still trying to decide if I'm going to put a background behind it because on my blog it's just going to have these colors and labeled and white background on it but maybe you can weigh in if there's something you think I should do with it too I don't know make it more useful all right let's get on to something that's actually going to be more useful and talk about using watercolor sticks in context of an actual piece of art because that's what I find is the best way to test a product and see how it works see what kinds of techniques that we need to learn and how it actually functions in real life I rolled a kneaded eraser across the surface of my paper to lift off some of that excess graphite so I don't drag that around on my painting and then I'm messing with the paints in here that puddle of burnt sienna is the one that I had started earlier it's all melted out now mixed it with some hansay yellow medium so that I could get a warmer kind of brown but I wanted even warmer so instead of worrying about mixing it in the palette I'm just mixing it on the paper going straight from the stick itself and that's one of the great things I love about working with these I have been working with them for a couple weeks now as I've been painting more butterflies that you'll see in a few minutes is just being able to grab some quick color not have to palette it not have to worry about that I can just grab a little bit off of the stick itself and here I'm using water to soften out all that color you can draw directly into wet paint as well and get something that has a softer look to it like this but it's going to fuzz out a little bit around the edges unlike what it did when it was on dry paper so that's another way to apply that's number nine for application of this product onto the paper now the properties of the watercolor when you start painting with them are the very same that if you just use tube colors if it's a color that lifts then these sticks lift it is the same formulation so anything you're used to you're going to get more of now I wanted to do something a little bit loose and splashy because when you think of a stick you might think it should be linear and graphic and there should be lines on it now let's see if I can make something splashy and crazy but literally just mixing paint so why not use some of that paint and techniques you know about how to make something splashy and do that so don't think of limiting yourself to what you might in your brain say that a stick should be able to do you can do anything with them just mix the paint like you normally would and you're good to go to create whatever techniques that you want so lifting off some of that color from the butterfly so it doesn't interfere too much with that but get that all dried up I can start putting in the black details onto the butterfly itself now one of the things you might consider is some specialty colors that you might not keep in your main palette but would be great to have in a stick format and what I'm using here is two blacks I would never have two blacks in my palette I only have 18 colors why spend two of them on black but I have lunar black in this in the small palette in that small well and that one is granulating and in the large one is lamp black and that one does not granulate it's not quite it's not an ink but it looks more like an ink color it's very solid black in that kind of a way as long as you mix it thickly but I'm using the granulating one right at the edge because this butterfly has an edge where the black turns into that brownish goldish color and then into white and I wanted that little bit of granulation to happen but I didn't want to have to fight that granulation in the dark areas of the butterfly so I can use both of them together by just having a stick around now you could certainly palette the lunar black if you want to have it around but then you got to have several palettes out on your desk and sometimes it's easier to adjust if you know you need that particular whatever the granulating color is or if you are going to need some white and you don't want to have white in your palette because white gets really messy and dirty then you could have a stick of the white and that's always going to stay clean or at least it's easy to clean with the technique that I showed you to just dip it in water and wipe it off so there's lots of reasons where you might want to have a color that's not in your normal palette that would be helpful to have for particular paintings but there it's just not something you need all the time and that's probably what I'm going to use my sticks mostly for in addition to sketching because with sketching you just take a handful of the sticks and whatever kind of colors you think you're going to sketch with that day and rubber band them together and then you have a palette just paint from the tips of each one of those sticks and you're good to go so that might be another way I'll be using them hard to say if I'll find more uses for them but they are a pretty handy little product for sure especially since they are less expensive than a tube because we're always looking for ways to save on our art supplies aren't we and this is one way to do that there was somebody that I saw on I think a YouTube video where they said if you're somebody who ends up like splooging your watercolor all over the place when you have tubes and I have not had that problem but if you are a splooger these are tidier because you just cut a chunk and throw it into your palette and you're you're good to go you can just start painting straight from that you also don't have to wait for it to dry before you start painting because if you've squeezed paint out into a well you know that it kind of needs to sit there for a while or else when you dip your brush into it you'll get a giant blob of paint on it so that's just a few pluses that sticks have over their friends the tubes let me give you a little detail about the leopard lacewing butterfly this one is got a scientific name that is I don't even know if I can pronounce this Cytosia cyani and the male has blue on the back which might be where the cyani comes from but this is the female she's got brown upper wings and kind of leopard looking stripes and spots and things on her the average wingspan of this butterfly is about 84 millimeters and they fly 12 miles an hour they live in India China and Indochina in a variety of habitats and they like to suck on the nectar from a variety of flowers like lantana and pentas and they only live for 16 days now in all of my butterfly research I found that there are some butterflies that live for like four days and there's some that live for like nine months it's kind of insane the differences between all the butterflies but there you go this butterfly also has multiple generations every year so it can be found in flight year round in those locations so keep an eye out for the leopard lacewing if you ever go to Indochina or China or India because that would be a beautiful butterfly to see in real life now as I've been working through this butterfly I've been going back and forth between sometimes using the pan that I've already mixed all that color in so that I can get something thinner or working directly from the sticks or from a really thick mixture so I can get stronger color so you can play around with both as you're doing your paintings and here I've also been using several brushes I used a number eight round a number four round a number two round and then this one is a zero so very very tiny brush to get all these little details the butterfly has very strong at least in the photo that I was working from had very very strong burnt sienna eyes and then had this really interesting pattern on the back of the head that goes down the body etc and I used those those little blobs that I had drawn into the wet paint as the underpainting for the rest of the body so just doing that little bit of scribble gave me a really interesting texture to work work from as I work my way down the body but I'm just going back and forth between the two sticks so I can get nice rich color in there and not end up having something that's really weak in the middle of the body because the upper portion of the head and the back of the the top part of the back is very strong in color just kind of playing around with putting that detail in there with this very very fine brush I don't usually do things that are this detailed but it made me happier to do the like crazy wild background thing so I'd have some of my looser aspects of my normal painting along with this nice tight rendering of a butterfly but the butterflies that I have been painting have also been nice and tight like this so I'll show you those in just a second and they're also created using the watercolor sticks so adding my veins in here with that very fine brush and using the mixture of paint because I want something very wet so that if I have to lift any of that color I can do so if you're using really solid paint it's difficult to get that to lift up as I said this is one of many butterflies that I've been doing of late I just had so much fun painting them and I decided to turn a couple of them into a class because I think you might enjoy doing some butterflies as well so this one is just to wet your whistle for the kind of thing that you might be learning in class we'll be doing large ones like this they're going to be on 9 by 12 paper there's three butterflies in the class and they're just gorgeous so the first one we'll do is going to be the eastern swallowtail and this is the girl the girl has the color in the swallowtail family or at least in the this particular swallowtail and this one is an orange tip and only the boys have the orange the girls are all white with the the dark tips on them and they have two spots on them so the boy is the one that will be painting for this one along with the flower and then we've got the common blue butterfly and we'll be painting the underside of it because it's much more interesting than the top side of the wings because those are just kind of a plain blue and then we'll be doing some flowers along with a couple of them so if you're interested in the class please do see the link in the doobly-doo because it would be awfully fun to paint some butterflies with you thank you so much for joining me for this video I hope you learned something if you did click the like button because that really helps the channel out because it tells YouTube that other people should see it and if you're interested in that class as I said links in the doobly-doo and I will see you guys again next time take care and happy world watercolor month