 Hello, I'm Sandy Allnock. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'll be testing out some Windsor & Newton rough watercolor paper and painting a philodendron giving you some tips on negative painting. The Windsor & Newton paper that I'm using today has a watermark in it, and it's a lovely watermark because there is no real indentation into the paper. Even the arches has a little bit of a dip to it. They're embossed more. This one you just have to hold up to the light to see it. The texture of the paper is wonderful, and the fact that this is more expensive than a sheet of arches probably tells you a lot about how good the paper is. Yeah, when you pay for art supplies, if you pay more money for it, you're in general going to get something better. So just buy as good a thing as you can and don't try to get cheap on it because it will make a difference in your art. So for the split leaf philodendron, I'm not sure how many times I can say that in this video, the philodendron was a request by a viewer. I asked you in the previous video to let me know what kinds of green plants you might like to see in some of the other tests that I'll be doing. Because I wanted to do something that would be a very straight-up basic test where I'm doing mostly apples to apples, but I don't want to paint the same thing on every single paper. But if I were to do a plant with a white background and some beautiful leaves on it, it'll give me a chance to play with the greens because I have a couple greens, some blues, some yellows in my palette, and other colors that I might be bringing in in future tests. And I have like at least 10 papers to test. So this is going to be a bit of a series over time. And each one, I will link to all the others in the doobly-doo, and I'll also give you a heads up about a place where you can find all of them gathered as well as the sketches. So let's get to this one. I sketched out a split leaf philodendron based on a bunch of different photos. I was not really worried about making it look like a particular one, but I wanted to have some really interesting shapes, some open areas in between. And I used Hansa Yellow Light with some green gold for the base of this. It's much too yellow for what this plant's going to be. But as I start adding some greens on top of it, then the yellows act as those bright highlights. And it also flavors all the greens that I paint on top of it with a little more yellow. And I don't have to keep adding yellow to the greens in order to get that flavor of color. There's of course, many ways you can paint a leaf. You don't have to do an undercoat of something. But for me, it helps to just get rid of the white of the paper in the areas where I'm going to have color. The second color that I'm using is taking that same green gold and Hansa Yellow Light mix. And I just started putting in a little bit of some sap green in it. And then I have a separate puddle of just sap green that's a little bit thicker so I can get some darker areas with the thicker paint. And with the thinner paint, I can paint the larger areas and some negative painting works great here to create some lines for the leaves, that sort of thing. But what I'm looking for is leaves that get pushed back into the depth of the painting in the depth of the plant. And that leaf that I'm painting right now is behind the leaf that's in front of it. So I'm stopping the painting at the edge. That's negative painting. Now, there's other ways that you can do negative painting. We'll be doing a lot of that in this one, but that's a really basic one, is to just make a shape that's behind another one darker than the shape that's in front of it or make it lighter than the shape that's in front of it, depending on the lighting situation. But I'm going to use each leaf to differentiate the leaves that are in front of it, next to it, behind it, et cetera. And in some places, I'll use it to create veins. Negative painting is something that I know scares a lot of people. And it's, you know, nerve wracking to think, how do I paint the thing that's not there? Because that's really what you're doing. You're painting around the object. You're not painting the object itself. And once you practice it enough, don't don't let yourself get away with saying, I can't do it. It's too hard. Just practice it because it's going to really make a difference in all of your painting. But if you can start with something like a plant, you've got lots of layers of depth going into the plant. So you might as well give it a try. And with each one of these leaves, I'm creating a shape that's underneath. So if I'm picturing a leaf having a shadow under it, then I can drop that darker color underneath and I can still add more darks as I go to making the second puddle of paint even thicker with the sap green or mixing something else with it. And I will be adding some paint's blue gray to it. To darken it a little further because you can see there's one spot that has one really dark corner of a leaf and it really stands out because any time you've got darkest darks next to your lightest lights like your whites, that's where your contrast is. That's where your eye goes. That's where your focal point ends up being. So you don't want those high contrast places in absolutely every square into the painting or it's going to also look flat. You want some where you're going to have some medium tones next to the lights and some where you'll have dark tones and some where the very lightest edges of the yellow color is the part that sits right next to the white because that's what's going to give the whole plant that sense of depth. One of the things that I do a lot when I want a color is layers because I am never seemingly capable of getting everything as dark as I need it to be early in the painting. And most of that is probably something you'll identify with. Most of that is because I don't know how dark I want to get and I get a little nervous about diving in with too much color too early and adding continuous layers to it helps to be able to build that up slowly rather than making that decision and feeling like you're jumping off of a cliff in order to get to that really rich, deep color. And with this paper, I found layering worked beautifully. I didn't have any trouble with lifting up all the color underneath when you've got a good quality cotton artist grade paper. That's what you should find. If you are working with a student grade paper, if you're trying to do something like this on, say, Canson, Canson XL or Montfall or, you know, just some of those papers that are a little slicker on the surface, you're going to end up lifting color from underneath. And not just adding color to what's already there. It's one of the reasons I'm often harping on people about not using the cheap papers to practice with. Because if you were using a cheap paper to practice this painting and all the color was lifting up and you'd have to adapt your technique by making the pigment even thicker so it will stay put. Then you're teaching your hand and your brain to do that. You're not teaching it how to layer the way that you're going to eventually on the good paper. And even if you feel like, well, I'm just not good enough to be worth doing something on good paper, I would suggest practicing anyway on good paper. If you buy it by the sheet, it's less expensive than buying pads and the sheets, you can just tear down into smaller pieces. This is an eighth of a sheet. So you fold it in half and tear it and then fold those halves in half and fold those halves in half and get a whole bunch of sheets of paper out of one giant sheet and then use them. Paint on both sides of them if it's good paper. If it's not good paper, you're going to have a different surface on one side than the other. So make sure that you do use a good side to the surface. If you have a side that's not as great as the other, then that you can use for swatching and that sort of thing. But anytime you're going to be practicing techniques that you want to teach yourself, you want to practice, do it on the right paper because you don't want to have habits that you develop as you're working on the cheap student grade paper. And then by the time you get to using the good stuff for a good painting, you're not practiced in the techniques that it's going to take to get to that stage. Well, as you can see, I'm getting darker with the colors and that's giving me a lot more richness, a lot more depth. Some of those leaves are mixed between, let's see, it's sap green with Payne's blue gray to make that really dark color. And I'm just using that to push things that are furthest back in the painting away from the viewer. And I'm looking for areas since I'm making this up out of my head, basically not using a photo reference for it. I'm just figuring out which areas that I want to push something all the way to the back. Or which leaf in the front might be curled enough that it's in shadow and my light is coming from the right hand side. So there's some of these leaves, this leaf here that I'm painting is in the front, but it's curled away from the light. And if I make one side much darker than the other, then I'm going to end up with a leaf that looks dimensional for that reason. I'm also darkening some of the stems that are inside the plant here, because each one of them is going to have a different level of depth. You can do some that are mid-tones, some that are light, some that are darks, and that's going to give you that richness of values that creates the dimension that you might be looking for in what you're painting. Remember in all of your paintings, don't put all the darks in one spot or all the lights in one spot. Spread them out, but not super evenly because Mother Nature doesn't do that either. There might be some areas like that left-hand side. I decided to make a whole chunk of it dark so that there's just an anchor there of darkness, but I'm not going to do that much of the dark in every single area. I'm also going to paint some leaves in between some of those opening spaces as well. I'll do more of that in a bit. Now this leaf I decided was going to be curled around so that top yellow edge is the part facing the light and then the rest of this underneath is going to be darker. I'm going to use the dark color to paint that and try to make this leaf look like it's curled over and shading itself from the light. And it's going to make even that front one start to look really dimensional because it's got that really big curl to it. Here I'm painting some leaves in between other leaves and wanted to have just some of those in there in between so that it doesn't look like there's you know a whole bunch of straight stems and then boom there's all the leaves because there are leaves growing from the base of the plant. They're starting smaller and then they will end up getting bigger as the plant grows but I want to have some openings there so I'm telling my mind in my brain to just paint a shape that looks leaf like but it only goes in certain areas so it looks like it's behind and intertwined with all of those stems. When you put together a sketch for a plant like this don't draw all of those little leaves in between everything. Draw your main leaves the big ones the ones that are out in front the ones that catch the light and then draw in some stems if you need to or else just paint them in and then when you get to kind of this stage you're doing the fussy stuff then you can go back in and paint a few leaves in between some of the shapes look for ones where maybe there's too much of the same color or there's no different angles you want to create a different angle or different shape in between some of the stems then add more in later don't feel like you need to draw them all in is in the sketch that I have made of this that I will talk about in just a minute I have not included those so that'll be up to you if you decide to paint this to go ahead and do that yourself and figure out where you want extra leaves to go in behind the plant and in that interior bottom area okay so let me tell you about the sketches I had four of you ask for sketches to be made available for purchase so that you can paint your own and when one person asked something I kind of think mm-hmm yeah whatever when two people ask like oh maybe I should put that on the to-do list and by the time for people ask I'm like okay okay okay I get it's a smart idea so what I have done was start a class and it's going to be a progressive class so it will grow over time right now there's only two lessons in it this one and the previous plant that I did on the fluid 100 paper and in the class which you'll get is the YouTube video so you're not getting extra video content but you will get that real-time video from YouTube you're going to get the supply list of course you're going to get the sketch and you're going to get more tips on that painting that I've written up so you'll get a little bit extra information even if there's no specific video content for that class and not putting extra video content in the class means that I could keep this class really really inexpensive it's just a few bucks and you can also get it for an extra 10% off because right now is World Watercolor Month and World Watercolor Month is the perfect time to have a sale so if you use the code WC 2023 then anything you buy in the watercolor category anything from traditional watercolor to watercolor minis to the Landscape Foundations stamped watercolor wash and ink anything has watercolor in it all of those classes you can use the code WC 2023 for 10% off including the green thumb class which is what I'm calling this class with all these sketches in it because I have no green thumb myself painting is my green thumb so I'm hoping this is something that you'll be interested in doing it's not expensive and once you get the class you won't have to purchase anything more when I release another one of these paper tests so the link to the green thumb watercolor sketches class is in the doobly-doo down below so you can go sign up for that it's just a couple bucks and over time you will eventually have I'm guessing 10 lessons maybe more if I have more papers to test out we'll see how that goes so I hope you're having a great day I hope you enjoyed this video learn something from it if you did click the like button make sure you're subscribed so you'll know when there's another one of these paper tests and I will see you again very soon over here on the YouTubes take care see you later