 Hey guys, welcome to the 30 Paintings in 30 Days project. If you choose to join me on the 30 Paintings in 30 Days journey, I hope that you do share and tag me and post like on social media and stuff, maybe film some videos, tag me in the description, something like that. I am kind of excited about the project. I do do daily drawing. I don't necessarily do daily painting, but making a daily practice out of something like this encourages you to get better at it. It encourages you to work it into your daily routine or weekly routine. It also is a way to use up supplies. So if that's your goal, maybe you don't want to do 30 paintings in 30 days, but you want to do 30 collages in 30 days. That works too. So let me know. Let's get to painting and I'll see you then. Okay, onto painting number 26. We're getting really close to the end. All right. I do have a large booklet of floral inspiration photos, but I also have a spiral bound notebook, like just a plain school notebook. I've shown this on camera before of just people and I have it open to actually an altered picture of myself because you know, masochist that way. If I'm going to screw up somebody's face, it's got to be mine, darn it. So we're going to try to do a picture of me and we'll see what happens. This is an altered, abstracted photo of my face and I used a photo editing app on my phone to screw up a picture of my face basically. So we're going to use that as inspiration. I'm going to use all these pinks that are on my palette dried up from the last photo and I'm going to use them and some water. Again, not a super huge fan of this paper because it just doesn't do what I really want it to. So it's always challenging. So one of the nice things about abstracting a photo before you paint from it is you're not tempted to try to copy the reality of the photo because you don't have any of that anymore. And in this particular photo, I changed all the colors up to be completely different than what they were and that helps even more. And I really am seeing pink and orange and yellow for my highlights and dark blues and some black and some kind of grayish bluish colors like Payne's gray for the shadows. And so that's what we're going to try to do just real quick. Again, these are study paintings. This isn't like intended to be, you know, some, you know, Rembrandt thing. I'm not Rembrandt, so I just like to play with paint. So I am putting now some yellow in some spots where I see it on the photo in the altered photo. Still again, like last time, I'm using the flat brush. I'm going to use the colors that are on my palette first. That's sort of my way of like cleaning up the palette. Or before I'm wiping the palette kind of using up what's there. In this picture, my hair was still dyed dark brown. So my hair is kind of dark in the photo and it made it darker when I altered the picture. My hair is gray now. So although my eyebrows are dark, like what the heck is with that? I don't know. It's very weird. Do you see the face starting to come? I do. Okay, now we're going to need to get some more color. So we're going to grab some of that Payne's gray color, which is my favorite color, as you all well know. I'm going to mix it with the purple just because that purple is on here. And again, we started out with the light colors, and then we're working away darker because it's easier to add color, dark colors than it is to try to take them away with watercolor paint. I'm going to switch to one of my round brushes, probably the little one. And we're going to grab some of this red that's on here. Just continuing to look at the shape, define shapes. I'm going to show you the picture at the end. You guys can tell me what you think. I'm going to go into ruby red. That's probably a little too much red. But remember what I said about this paper grabbing paint, like it grabs it really quickly. See, that's okay. We're going to go in with some Chinese white. Then we're going to actually take some of that ruby red, put it over here. I need to give myself a nostril hair. Okay, I want a bigger round brush. I'm going to grab some cadmium red light, which is a very orangey red, in my opinion. And I'm just constantly looking at the photo, which is off to my left, literally just dabbing colors in similar places that I see in the photo. Try not to get too far before I add water, rinsing my brush off in between colors, where all the shadows and highlights are and constantly refining where I'm putting my marks and where I'm putting my color. I'm going to grab some Payne's gray. I should say I'm going to grab some more Payne's gray. I'm going to grab some more lemon yellow, because I feel like in some spots we're losing some of the yellow. I'm going to take some of that cad red and mix it with some of this the orangey red, the cadmium red light, and mix it with the other red that's on here to make sort of our reddish orange color. I'm going to go in with some Chinese white and refine some shapes. I'm noticing that we need to put some here shapes. Now, when I'm doing this with acrylic painting, of course, I can layer colors on top of each other. But when you're doing this with watercolor, you can't really do that because it's transparent. You can do some more layering with gouache. Maybe you're working with some more opaque or gouache-type colors like the Jane Davenport along with your watercolors. Then you want to know which ones are more opaque than others. That's another reason to do these little painting studies so that you can figure that out. I'm going to take my teeny tiny round brush and some black, the ivory black. Now, you could do this part with a pen, of course, after you dry your painting. But I want to really suggest some shapes. Sometimes, despite what I've told you about shadow colors and highlight colors, for a particular painting, the best thing to do is to go into black and white. Just because you want to try doing your painting with other colors doesn't mean you can't use a black and white. Just explore the idea of doing something else before you just automatically think that you need to have black and white. I'm going to stop there because I like the way that looks. Let me give it a dry. Okay, I want to show you some one of the things I hate most about this paper besides it absorbing the paint so quickly and bleeding through. See how it buckled? Can you see that? So this paper just buckles a lot like crazy. And I do want to show you, this is the original photo that's been altered. So there you go. That was fun. Painting number 26, on to the next. How is that for today's painting? I hope you enjoyed the process and if you want instruction on the painting, you need to be over in Patreon. They are going to get the talking version here on YouTube. You're just going to get the speed food through version, sorry. If you'd like to support the free content here on Facebook or here on Facebook, holy cow. If you'd like to support the free content here on YouTube or over in the Facebook art groups, I certainly would appreciate that. You can of course join Patreon. We do have YouTube membership here for a small fee. And also I have an Etsy shop and I have PayPal tip jar and all that stuff. So check out the video description. Relevant links will also be down there. And yeah, don't forget the most important things. Stay healthy, stay safe, stay creative and go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. Do share your work with me. I would love to see what you're doing. That's it for now. See you later. Bye guys.