 Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Allnach. I'm an artist and today I am going to paint this, this mixed bouquet. It came from a dream and I'm gonna tell you a little bit about that crazy dream because it was wacky. It may not be my best painting ever, but I'm super excited that I learned something from a dream that I had about painting and that was pretty cool. I think I've had watercolor bouquets on the brain because I just finished up uploading all of the lessons for the watercolor bouquets one class and that one has simpler bouquets than this and they're smaller. They're half the size but you can learn how to paint those in the class and if you've pre-ordered then all of the lessons are there for you. But yeah, let's go talk about my crazy dreams and my crazy painting, okay? So this crazy dream that I had was a giant painting of a mixed bouquet and I tried to satisfy the dream by at least doing a drawing. Just a pencil drawing of a mixed bouquet. Like maybe that would be enough to get it out of my head, right? It was not enough. Most of the time when there's a dream that I have because I have a lot of these creative dreams. When I dream of a painting or a drawing or something, it'll keep coming back if I don't do it. I mean, it's just it doesn't disappear if it's something I'm supposed to paint. The pencil drawing proved to me that that was not enough so it was time to start painting and I kind of adapted from the dream. So in the dream it was a ginormous sheet of watercolor paper. Like I don't even, I don't think I've ever seen a sheet that big but they do make rolls of it so I know it's possible and it was on this huge contraption. So it was at an angle, very steep angle and I was painting from the top to the bottom just one base wash for the first wash and I started with the background color and every time I got to a blossom I would drop in another little color and it would bleed just the right amount just perfectly to give me all these soft edges. My whites stayed nice and white. Like everything worked out perfectly and I hope that that is me someday. I hope I was getting a premonition of the kind of painter I'll be someday because I would love to be able to paint that way. However, that is not me at this stage in my painting. It doesn't mean I won't learn how to do it. Doesn't mean I can't get something close to it. So what I decided to do was make a plan for what I can do within the scope of what I had in my dream because I knew that I could paint a background. I knew that I could paint the flowers. I've done some paintings where all the colors run into each other but it's usually something like trees in a landscape and if one tree bleeds into another that's just fine. A little more difficult when it comes to flowers and when they're all different colors in a mixed bouquet. In the watercolor bouquets class I teach how to do a single type of flower. I kept those much simpler because it's like crazy hard to get a pink flower and a purple flower and a yellow flower next to each other without making brown and until I know how to do that I'm not going to teach that in a class so I kept everything much simpler. Of course this one was going to have to have all these colors in it. So I started working kind of from the top to the bottom in the way I had in the dream and let a lot of these colors bleed into each other nicely. There were a few sections where I had a specific flower that I didn't want to turn brown, wanted to be extra careful so I painted around a couple different spots in the painting and let them sit there for a minute so that by the time I came to add the color next to them there would be some bleeding but it would be a little more controlled and all of this as I was working on it was a little nerve wracking because I had planned everything out. I did a bunch of sketches ahead. I had sketched some of the flower blossoms together to try to see how long I'd have to wait for that moment to happen when I could drop that right color in but it still was nerve wracking to have this whole painting all at once on a quarter sheet just start doing its thing because you know paint keeps moving and it's real easy to get overwhelmed by that but I would just highly recommend if you want to paint something that's beyond your capacity then find something that you can do that's within your capacity first just make your baby steps toward that. That's what I'm going to be doing here. I want to practice more bouquets because I want to get to the point where I can do that thing that was in my dream and right now that's just not something I know how to do and that's okay as an artist to admit to yourself that your skills are at one level you want them to be at another level and you're going to work toward that so the watercolor bouquets one class is much simpler than this but a lot of the techniques are going to be ones that will help you to get toward something a little bit on the fancier side with a whole bunch of flowers and I'm hoping at some point to be making watercolor bouquets too and do mixed bouquets but I'm definitely going to recommend that you do the number one class before you take the number two because it's just a process of learning how to paint flowers so that they look like flowers this is also much looser than the style that I was trying for in the watercolor bouquets class which you can you know adapt the style of anything and make any of them looser or tighter as your own personal style dictates but I have had other wild dreams so I thought I'd tell you about another one that I had recently and I texted my art buddy right afterward when I woke up in the morning and she just cracked up so the dream was I had a class already apparently in which I showed people how to build a castle out of styrofoam and the castle of styrofoam had little all the little elements of the castle all the little cannons and the little parapets and everything was all made out of styrofoam and the little cannons even moved like they lifted up and down and that sort of thing had wheels they rolled but they didn't function they were just little styrofoam things and apparently had a class that taught people how to make this thing and I had in my dream this like brainstorm where I said oh my goodness I could teach people I could make a new version of this class teach people how to make these things but teach them how to make the cannons fire and make the little arrows that little people can hold I could make the arrows so they work so you could actually shoot somebody make them like weaponable things and it wasn't in the dream it wasn't just like I'm going to shoot a little pea across the room it was like shooting an actual little cannon ball that would like blow something up yeah I have weird dreams like that and I woke up like with that determination to redo that class with actionable weapons which is completely weird for me because I am a super pacifist kind of person like you remember the guy in high school who had his little six-pack abs that he was working on and he'd say punch me punch me it won't hurt see I'm tough like I couldn't even punch that guy even if I wanted to punch it I just couldn't because I can't hurt anybody so what was I dreaming about blowing things up I don't know so some of my dreams never see the light of day others turn into paintings and there have been a number of them I've done on this YouTube channel I should probably make a playlist out of them because there's crazy stuff that comes into my brain at one time or another and sometimes it has to become art so if you have something in your your nighttime hours that comes to you give yourself permission to just make something with it it may not be something that works it might not be something great but you might learn something from it and what I learned from this was that watercolor bouquets number one was going to be watercolor bouquets one and two because I hadn't even really thought of doing a second one with more complex watercolor bouquets until I had that dream so at some point I don't know how long it will take me to get better at doing this and to know what I'm doing I really can't tell you because I you know I don't know how fast it will be before I get to that point but I do hope that that's gonna be something that will yeah happen so that is about it for me in my painting I wanted to give you the heads up that the class is completely uploaded now I had in my last Saturday video talked about my internet troubles that I was having the internet troubles are resolved fortunately the cable company broke everything so that they could fix it I guess I'm not really sure but all the class lessons are now available for those who ordered during the presale and the class is on sale just not as much as it was because my classes are always on sale right when they launch and you're welcome to go check it all out there's a whole lesson on making sketches ahead of your painting itself and we talk about that quite a bit we do sketches before each of the paintings both in graphite and in watercolor so if that's something you want to learn it is part of that class and before I head out here I have scheduled the next couple events at art venture you can always check the calendar there to see what's coming up I've got the open studio set for a time when hopefully the Australian folks can join us so that is done specifically for you my Aussie friends and I've also scheduled a drawing Zoom so if you want to join in for that they're all free and I will see you guys later on don't forget if you would like to go check out the class there are three paintings awaiting you and I think you're going to enjoy them so take care have an excellent weekend I will see you guys next week that's all for now bye