 You know what I'm saying? I think burgers sure taste good on a juicy and flaky grilled. You never guess they come from a microwave. What's a microwave? Hey everybody. We'll give people a minute to show up. I'm not late today. Yay! Alrighty. Okay. So I just wanted to show you guys this first. So this is going to be coming up on a... on YouTube. I'm filming it right now. This will be a watercolor in Mixmedia page. I forget this morning what exactly I call them. This is not a good memory morning for me. Just FYI. I have a series about doing watercolor with Mixmedia. And this will be a page there. This background already had this page. This is a small delusions journal. And the page already had wipe off paint on it. And then this morning I, again, still am working with the same couple of sunflower drawings. I did a quick pencil sketch with this large graphite crayon. And then I put some collaged, painty deli paper on where the vase is going to be. And then a couple random bits in the background. And the deli paper is just, again, that's something I always have hanging around. Hey Nancy! And I, again, used to put the excess paint on. And I just wiped my paint off on it through stencils or just off the brush. And this is a piece that I just had laying around. So I collaged it down. Then I covered the whole thing, both pages, with Daniel Smith's transparent watercolor ground. Think of this as clear gesso for watercolor. So I already filmed all of that part. And now it's got to cure for 24 to 48 hours. I think, sorry, 24 to 72 hours. You have to let it dry and cure. And then once you do, then you can watercolor over it. And the pages will take the watercolor very similarly to watercolor paper. Not exactly, but better than they would if you don't use the ground. Now you can use clear gesso, but it's not exactly the same. This is different. The transparent watercolor ground is better. So I'm going to let this dry for a couple of days, and then I'm going to come back and we're going to watercolor our sunflowers in over the painting background and the collage that we have on here. So that ought to be interesting. And I think I'm going to air the video for this while I'm gone in Alaska. So it'll be an interesting challenge for you all to try and see what you think. And it'll probably be a speed-up video. It probably won't have a lot of talking. I'll probably film an intro and or an ending and probably just an ending and explain some things. But we can talk about it when I get back if you guys have questions. And we're going to use this crayon again today. These are by Lira. They're graphite crayons. They come in different harnesses, just like your pencils. And this is a 2B. This morning, we're going to work again with the still life still. We're going to do it strictly with the crayon and some watercolor. Maybe some pen. I'm not exactly sure on that yet. Maybe a little bit of black pen. Maybe we'll take out our new favorite pen. Okay. The pilot varsity. Okay. So we're going to work with twinkling H2Os this morning. And because these really pop more and better if you pair them up with something that's not sparkly, we also have the Prima watercolors out. Twinkling H2Os are a sparkly watercolor. This is the color key for this palette. And I don't know if you're going to be able to see on camera because this is laminated. So the glare might be an issue. Hey, Lisa. Hey, Teresa. So twinkling H2Os are sparkly. Now I know that the company who makes twinkling H2Os, Leslie Onstad is having a lot of sales right now and she's got a new line of powdered pigments out. I guess they did a live broadcast last night. I didn't see it. So I would definitely check them out. If somebody has the link, maybe you could pop up the link in the discussion in the chat for everybody else. That would be great. These small ones are genuine twinkling H2Os. These larger ones are homemade. So I took Perlex powders, which is a powdered pigment, and I mixed it with Gum Arabic to make my own version of a twinkling H2O just because I wanted more colors because you all know I love color. But, you know, I at some point budget becomes an issue. So, you know, I don't have unlimited funds like many of you. And if twinkling H2Os aren't on sale, then I don't buy them. And honestly, with this palette now, I don't need any more colors. This is plenty. And this is on a Lazy Susan that I picked up at a plastics supplier that we have here in town called Tap Plastics. They are across a few states, but I don't know that they're nationwide and I don't know that they have lots of stores, but they do have a website. So it's Tap Plastics, TAP Plastics. And I got the acrylic top that's sitting on top of the Lazy Susan also at Tap Plastics. And then I just velcroed all my little pots down and labeled them. And so now I have this fun round watercolor palette. And I've shown this on camera before on recordings. I don't think I've showed it live. So it's a lot of fun. You do have to wet these a few minutes in advance of painting. So about 25 minutes or so ago, I started spraying water in them. And then you let them sit, spray them again. And you want to do that a couple of times, especially with the homemade one, because they do not re-wet as easily as other watercolor paints. I'm going to actually clip the color key up above me. So it's out of the way of the camera, but I can see it. Good morning, the photographer lady. Yay. Good morning. So we're going to work on our Sunflower Still Life this morning in a watercolor version. I've done three versions so far this week. I did the acrylic version for Monday with DecoArt. I did a sort of a mixed media version for a lesson I was working on for Wunderlust. And so if you don't know what Wunderlust is, go to everythingart.ning.com. And it's an online course. They have different lessons every week. So I did more of a mixed media one for them for Week 4. Now only it was like a collage, pencil, and acrylic. This time we're going to do collage. I'm not collage. This time we're going to do pencil and pen and watercolor. Oh, thank you, Teresa. That's a good question, Nancy. So we're going to do a couple of test swatches here before we get started. I don't find a lot of difference except that they don't re-wet the same. Hey, Audrey, how are you? And Wendy, hello, everybody. Okay, so first let's make a little bit of room for ourselves here. I do have a couple of test pieces of paper. But, you know, my table is only so big. I need a studio with a bigger table. All right, so here we have these pieces of paper. We're going to zoom in just a little bit. I grabbed this one because I was doing some pen tests on it, and I just thought we would, you know, finish filling it up. So I'm just going to, I got a bunch of brushes out here. We'll just grab one. And, okay. So here is, this is poppy red. This is a twinkling H2O. It's very red red, right? It's a beautiful color. I don't have anything that's the exact same color in the homemade because I did that on purpose, but this one is red russet. And what I find with the Perlex powders is that they're a little more opaque. But if you water, you have to water them down a little more than you do with the twinks. But as far as shine and sparkle is concerned, they're about the same. Now they don't come in the exact same colors. If you are, and I already had a bunch of Perlex powders, they're both very saturated. But like I said, the homemade ones are a little bit more opaque. Even you have to water them down a lot. Let's do a few more colors. Hang this up somewhere. Okay, so here's a Mediterranean. It's the name of the color, and this is a twink. And then this is turquoise. This is a homemade. It doesn't quite have enough water in it, to be honest. Hey, Jerry. Oh, cool. We haven't had any trolls in a while, but if you guys see any, let's boot them off. Gum Arabic and Perlex is a pigment powder. Yeah, it has mica in it. So those are two similar blues. This top one, again, is twinkling H2O. This bottom one is Perlex powder. And this is turquoise. This is Mediterranean. And then let's do one more. This is a homemade one, and this is brilliant yellow. Now I will say that the Perlex powder ones can be a bit more on the grainy side. What do they call that in proper watercolor terms? Granulated? I don't mind that, because I like granulation, and I like the puddles and splatters in watercolor. I like messy watercolor. So for me, having it have some granulation is not a problem. Some people, it might drive you crazy. So this one says Mandarin citrine. This is a twink. It's not the exact same color, but you'll get the idea. So I don't know if you can see, especially with the blues, you can see that they're a little more granulated than the yellows. You can see it better in the blue, probably because it's darker. You can see more like dark spots, like pits, like sand in the paint. That's because it's homemade. And I probably didn't mix it well enough. If you mix it better than I did, you probably can get it a lot smoother. You know, I'm the lazy crafter. There's a reason that it looks like that. So now let's move things. Again, they both look wonderful. And if you already have a few twinks, and you would like to get more colors, but you can't afford to go buy a lot more twinkling H2Os, then I suggest you look and see if you've got some pigment powders. Experiment with making some of your own and expanding your color range by mixing them up with some gum Arabic. Because that's what I did. I'm just rearranging my table. So this is just a homemade. It's a homemade palette. Yeah, so I would think about it. You know, for me, I had the Perlex powders, and I may even have a few perfect pearls around here somewhere. And I wasn't using them at all. So I figured, you know, if I mixed them with the gum Arabic and I turned them into a watercolor, then I would be more likely to use them more than the way they were sitting in their little pots in a drawer. So I just un-potted them all. And the ones that I decided not to use, I actually got rid of. I didn't keep them. So I've got my pictures right here that you can kind of see on camera. Yeah, you guys, you all want to come to my studio. It's not that big. It's only 10 by 10. I've got my morning cup of tea. I have two other big giant round palettes too. All right, so let's zoom back out just a little bit so you can see the whole journal. There we go. I do have friends that come by and visit with me. We'll squeeze in. All right. So now we're going to first do our drawing. I'm going to cover up my other paintings here so we don't hopefully get them all icky. Paint where I don't want it. All right. So first I'm going to just draw the shapes that we see. Not what we think we see, what we actually see. Okay. I'm way better about letting people in my space because it used to be really hard for me to let anybody into my space. I would have like an anxiety attack before they even got here. Now it's not a big deal, but it used to be a big deal. So I'm just using my graphite crayon to sketch in my shapes. So I do have schminks and I, there is a solution to that. So with any of those palettes, I'll add to that in a minute. So with Audria, with any of those palettes, you can fit one more pan in that row than they say you can. All right. I'm going to show you with this one because it's easier to get to than the old one. Okay. Then the other one. So you can fit one more pan. These are really tight. So you have two ways of fixing the pans in this, in this bit. You can just take this out and glue them in here or put magnets on the back of the little pans and put them in here. Or you can bend this down a little bit so they fit in there tighter. But you can also push these all down and you can get one more pan in here. Like instead of this half pan, I could get a full pan in here. My 48-pan schmick palette has 52 pans in it. And if you put that extra pan in there and you squeeze these down tight, it doesn't shift around. And then you're fine. Yeah. It's a really, when you have anxiety disorder, for some people, it's one of those things that's kind of a trigger. And I got over it, I wouldn't say got over it. I'm better about it because I had, so sort of like when you have a person who has a phobia to get over the phobia or get them to be more okay with the phobia, you expose them to that thing they're afraid of, that's what I did. So I had people I trusted come over and spend time in my space, people who were very respectful about my space, and who, who, is anyone else frozen? Oh no, okay, it's just me. So people who were respectful about my space, who I trusted, come into my space and spend time in here with me and art with me. And having them come do that first helped me get over having other people in my space. I still have to have people be respectful of my things, and if they're not, then that's a big problem for me. But I think that would be a problem for anybody. But having somebody, you know, doing it small, one at a time, people that you trust, somebody that you respect, then I think it makes it easier. You still, there will still be people that you can't have in your space. I'm just catching up on the comments. But for me, that helps. And I also kind of vet people. And I don't let everyone into my space because it is kind of a sacred space, and it's really hard to let just anybody in. If I was going to do that, I would have to have a separate like public studio and have people in there and then my private, you know, place at my house. And that is a dream of mine to have that someday. That would be fabulous. Okay, let's finish drawing. Because, you know, I'm getting caught up in the comments. I'm forgetting to draw anything. We can't play sunflowers if we don't have a drawing. And just like with, you know, when I'm drawing with pencil, I'm doing kind of loose sketchy pencil lines. I'm not planning on erasing these because I'm going to let them help me suggest my shape in the finished drawing. And this is sort of a field notebook type of, no, you're not odd at all. I even have a sacred little space by the door with some things on it. If you've seen one of my studio tours when I moved into the house from the garage, then you've seen it. But yeah, I don't let just anybody in. They have to, you know, be somebody that I trust, that I know is not going to abuse the privilege. So again, I'm just doing a quick sketch with my graphite crayon. There we go. All right. I'm going to take the pilot varsity pen. Now, there's a big thing going on with, you know, every year or so, somebody, there's a big thing about archival inks and paints, which ones are, you know, light fast, which ones aren't, which ones are archival, which ones aren't. Yeah, you know, a couple of you guys want me to photograph all of my watercolor palettes. I haven't done it yet. There's two reasons for that. They're very personal to me. I love watercolor, as you all know, but also I'm kind of afraid my husband's going to see how much I have. And although I haven't paid for all of it, some of it has been gifted to me. Yeah. I think it might, you know, I've already had some people trolls on social media and YouTube accuse me of being, you know, really wealthy and having all this money to spend and all this other blah, blah, blah, which is none of it's true. When I work, I work for art supplies. And so I am the kind of person I'm bad at saving. There's a reason my husband's in charge of the bills. I use all of my money for art supplies. So I have art supplies. But anyway, so I haven't filmed it for that. You know, and I got distracted here. So I have, that's a trust issue for me kind of. I have, I have big trust issues. I'm right there with you. Right. So I will maybe film a photograph at some day. I do think I'm going to have my daughter take some photos and like, we're going to probably use them as stock photos. I do have quite a few pallets, different kinds of pallets. I think it would be fun to lay them out in a proper studio setting and photograph them a few different ways. I just have to catch her when she's not busy, because right now, like, she's crazy busy. And if you don't know, my daughter's a photographer. And she's a professional photographer and she works in advertising and social media. You'd think I'd be better at it. All right. So anyway, back to the pen. There's a big thing about pens and ink and paint. Are they light fast? Are they not? Are they archival? Are they not? Lots of your ink pens, like office supply ink pens, they're not archival. They're not light fast. And the pilot varsity is one of them, unfortunately. I do love the pen. I'm not going to stop using it. When I, it does come empty. I'm going to refill it with Windsor Newton calligraphy ink, which is archival and is light fast. I'm filming a video on this right now. I swatched a whole bunch of black pens and markers that I had in my studio, different ones I used for different things. And I have the little swatches sitting in my dashboard right now. And unfortunately today is a cloudy day. Yeah, right? So I'm going to leave them sit in my car for a couple days and then we'll film it. We'll see what happens. I'm going to film it for YouTube. And what I can tell you is if you have pens that you like to use, you know they're not archival. You know they're not light safe or you're not sure. You've created something that you really like with them. Scan it, photograph it. Keep it out of the sun. I have pieces that I'm going to show in the video that were done by my aunts, both of whom are or were artists. One of them is passed away now. And one of them obviously used archival ink and one of them didn't. And I'll answer that in a minute, Jerry. And they're pretty faded. I do also have some of my first art journals that I did all the lettering, the quotes and the journaling with Sharpie. Now it's been out of the sun, closed up on a bookshelf. And it's fine. So you just, you know, you want to know if you've used something you're not sure about you need to keep it out of the sun. If you're going to frame it and hang it on the wall don't hang it anywhere where it's going to get you know light from the window. Make sure the glass is UV glass. You know, take some precautions. But the biggest precaution I would say is to scan it. You know, this is a 21st century scan it. Jerry, this is called a pilot varsity disposable fountain pen. It is a fabulous pen. I love it so much. And I love the way it writes. It doesn't get clogged up, Jerry. You know, I had the problems with the old one. I ended up returning it because it clogged all the damn time. And there is a YouTube, I'm sorry. There is a blog post that I posted in the Facebook group where you can, that shows how you can refill this. Although it's not intended to be refilled. So I'm going to be doing that. And I'm going to be taking one of mine when it's empty and making it brown and putting some brown calligraphy ink in it. And the calligraphy ink is not waterproof. So it should react the same way this does. Yes, staples should have it. I, you can also of course get them at Amazon or JetPens, but staples should have it. Alrighty, should we get started now? It's only like a little bit late. Let's see. I want to start with how about autumn butternut. This is a twink. This is a filbert brush that I'm using. This is a Grumbacher Academy brush. It's a number four filbert. In case anybody wants to know. And I think I got it at Tuesday morning because I needed some watercolor brushes, some filberts for my watercolor. I like Staedtler pens, but there's a few of them that I have that either run out of ink really quickly or they get clogged really easily. Like talk about pens that get clogged easily. This is a homemade journal made with Fabriano watercolor paper and maybe some like generic paper. I don't remember. This is actually a journal I made as a demo for you to me. Cedarwood. Which one is Cedarwood? Oh, here. Okay. So we're going to do Cedarwood, at least a little bit of Cedarwood here in our Sunflower Sunners. Isn't that a pretty brown? Yeah, cold press. Cold press is my preference. I like the texture in the cold press paper. We're getting some secondary colors, of course, because the pilot varsity pen is mixing with the paint. But I love that. It's one of my favorite things about that pen. But y'all knew that. We'll accept Jerry. I have a few classes on you to me. It's not my favorite place to put classes because just getting them on there is a pain in the neck. But there is a journal making class now. It was filmed around the time I had shoulder surgery and was just learning better filming habits. It's not the best filmed. I should just say that. It's not the best film class. But I got the point across, and you learned how to make some cool journals, including this one. It's a hardcover journal, and it has the binding is all hidden. That's just one color. And look at that texture I got in that flower center with just the one color. And I did take out those Prima paints, but now I'm thinking I might not even want to use them. And the nice thing about these twinks is they're going to be sparkly when they're dry. They have a sheen to them. The autumn butternut. Isn't that a beautiful color? Now, if you don't want your colors to mix, then you need to leave a white space in between. You can also just let things dry and then go in, and it'll still probably mix a little bit, but it won't mix too much. Playing with your paints so that you know what properties they have is always a good idea. I haven't added any more colors to those. Look how pretty they look. We'll let that dry a little bit. I made this one in a couple of hours. I don't think it took more. The hardest part is the sewing. And it's not hard. It's just time consuming. You spend more time getting the cover to dry, because I did the front and back cover piece, and then let it dry overnight. And then I came back and did the rest of the journal. That's the longest thing, is letting everything dry before you actually paint it. Don't check it out. Try it. Once you try it, you're going to like it. Believe me. Now, we're going to start on the vase. I'm going to start with the lightest color. I'm going to use... This is called duo green yellow, and it's an iridescent color. This is one of the homemade ones. Isn't it a pretty color? And it's mixing C right there. It's mixing with a little bit of the ink. And we're getting this secondary color, which just is so cool. Now, when you're painting paintings, and again, you've used things on it that you don't know are archival. You're not sure if they're light safe. You want to preserve them for posterity and scan them. If they're too big for the scan or photograph them. That's just one color. That's just a matter of... Yeah, it is. And this is just a matter of leaving and spreading some out with water. So the other thing you can do, besides what Teresa said, is you can take some of those watercolors and pop them out of their pans, crush them up, mix them with some gum Arabic, and put them back in the pan and see if that helps. A lot of times, it's a matter of not having the right binder and or if they don't have enough mica, you could take the color, the pigment. You can get mica, just plain mica in no color, or you can get colored mica. Add it to the watercolor pigment, crush everything up, mix it together, and then add some gum Arabic and kind of make your own homemade concoction. And that would be great. But like I said, twinks are on sale. So you can also, the frugal crafter, she mixed powdered mica eyeshadows with gum Arabic. This is blue citron. Yeah, blue citron. I can't read my own handwriting. I think that says blue citron. Yeah. Oh, blue zircon. See, I don't have my reading glasses on. All right. Back to painting. So I'm going to try to leave a white space right here between the vase and the background. I don't know, Jerry, can you get the name, the website address for everybody for twinkling H2O's and see if you can post it? Or Lisa or Teresa or somebody? They changed websites last year, and I don't know the name of the new web, the address of the new website. Okay. So we're going to go successively with darker blues. This is meridian. Now also too, if you're going to do one of these paintings and you don't want to do it in the same colors as in the photograph, print the photograph in black and white. So that you get the color value on the tones without being distracted by the color of the original item. There we go. So I'm just suggesting a water line. Everything is wet. So this is going to blend and blur. It's not going to stay a straight line, but I'm okay with that. Now I do think that's a little bit too much. So we're going to lift a little bit. There we go. Okay. We're going to let that dry. Oh, maybe in Jerry's and admin. So let's go back to our flowers. Let's try. Let's start working on the pedals. So we're going to start with a brilliant yellow. I'm going to put over here. And you notice this is the first time that I got my palette out. So you don't really... The nice thing about these round palettes is you can just paint right out of them because the wells are big. So again, this is going to blend with the ink pen where I hit it with ink pen. I'm okay with that. Gives us an interesting look to our flowers. We want this to be an artistic expression of our still life, not an exact copy. And I'm okay with that too. That just hit the brown. I'm trying not to bust out the heat gun, which is easier said than done. Yeah. I know Leslie Onstad, she had... I saw something posted to one of the groups. I don't remember which group that she's in. It might be Studio ABC where she had a live broadcast last night with some new pigments that they have that they just came out with. I don't know anything about them. That's all I know about them. Yeah, it does. I don't like to always use the heat gun. I mean, I'm an inpatient crafter, so I do use it, but there is something to be said for letting the paint just dry on its own. And I'm not dipping my pen too much. I'm trying not to into the well of this paint because I want to keep it light and I want to work my way darker on these petals. I did buy mine in sets when I bought them. I knew I wanted the set, of course, with the teals and that in it. I was taking a class from somebody, an Australian artist, and it wasn't Jane Davenport. And she's an artist for color art. I don't remember her name right now. I'm having a memory day. But anyway, we were... That was how I first found out about twinkling H2Os. So I went to go order some and I wanted to get, of course, the set with the turquoise in it. And then they had, you know, there's a few different colors of turquoise, and then I had to have them all. No, I don't... You know what? I was going to say I don't remember, but hang on. That's a lie. That's a big fat giant lie. Because I have back-ups. Of course I have back-ups. Carnival is one of the ones. And carnival is the one. That's where I got my spray bottle. Because see, the spray bottle's empty. Not in there. That's the spray bottle that I use. Dion Dior. That's it, Audrey. The other one I have is Summer Fun. You're welcome. Dion Dior. That's it. Love her and her art. Okay, we're going to work our way darker. This is the Mandarin Citrine. And using our photo for inspiration, I'm going to put this color in the areas of the petals that are darker. And I'm going to just dab it in, and I'm going to let it bleed. There's some things like the Twinkly H2O's that I keep back-ups in. It's not going to go bad. I love them. I'll never probably have to buy any more in my lifetime, but I love them. Now, if I had a bigger studio space, I would probably have more of these because I love them. Now, we'll do it over here to this flower. And you notice I'm just dabbing it on and making marks. And where the paint is wet, it's going to bleed with the other paints. And that's okay. It's not going to in all of it. The marks are helping me suggest the shapes that I want. Something interesting. It's not always about perfect blending or you guys know I don't paint that way anyway. I like the whole suggestive thing. I like things to look like I painted them in a hurry, even when I didn't. Oh, that's my clock in the other room. And you probably hear the house fan and I think the laundry. My daughter turned the washing machine on before she left. So, there's lots of background noise around here today. And for once the dog is quiet, so it's not the dog. Yeah, it's just my clock. We have this big clock that plays music, you know, chimes on the hour. Take that back. Chimes every 15 minutes. It was a wedding present from my in-laws like a million years ago. So, I'm not doing any fancy paint strokes. I'm literally just dabbing the paint on and I'm using different shades of yellow. I have a tendency to make my... Yeah, well, let's just not talk about the voices in my head. I have a tendency to make my... Sunflower is very orange. But you do want to add a little orange. Just be careful. I'm trying to work quickly while the yellows are still wet. This is an orange peel, by the way. Now, when we did the Still Life on Monday, we used the DecoArt paints. I didn't use anything fancy. These are not even the Twinkly H2O's. You know, yes, you have to mail order them. Sometimes you see them at Hobby Lobby or something, but never in a lot of colors. But they're not necessarily artist grade paints. They're not fancy and they're not expensive. There you go. See, I'm frequently up early because I can't sleep. So, I sympathize, Beth. Welcome, though. We're painting the sunflowers today with the Twinkly H2O's. So, when you're working with watercolor, if you don't want to use a heat gun to dry things and you want to just let it dry naturally, bouncing around the painting and leaving white space in between is really the way to go. So, like, I'll work on the petals and then we're going to leave that. Hey, welcome! So, I have this rose gold, which is like a pink or orange. And this, again, is a... This is a Twinkly H2O. It's a little darker. Again, just dabbing it on, letting it flow where it may... Not worrying about it too much. Yeah, they're not expensive. They're fun paints to have. And you can create some really fun effects. Like, when I'm painting, like, watercolor seascapes, I love to use the Twinks, like, on the seafoam. And maybe a little bit in the ocean. It gives it a little bit of a sparkle. That's a lot of fun. If I'm doing a seascape in acrylics, I use the same idea, but I do it with glitter glue. That's pretty cool. I like that. All right. Let's do something with the leaves. Let's start with lemongrass, which is this yellow-green. So, I'm not going to get too far with the pigment before I come in with some water. Again, the pen I used for some of the drawing is not waterproof. It's water-soluble. But I know that, and I'm going to use that to my advantage to help it. It's going to mix with some of the paint, and I'll get these secondary colors that are fabulous. Yep. Daniel Smith makes some fabulous interference colors. I have a few of them. But I didn't, purposefully didn't buy too many of them because I already own the Twinkling H2Os. Now, all of you out there who are thinking, I can't do that, I've never taken a proper watercolor class to this day. Yes, I've done a few lessons out of Jean Haynes' books. I own all of her books to date, and I have that new one coming out that's coming out on pre-order. But I have yet to take a proper watercolor course. The Lifebook lesson with Dion Dior was as close as I ever got. I started out just playing and doing doodles. Yep. Practice makes progress. You're right. There's a couple of other watercolor artists that are great. Jean Haynes, of course, is one. Janet Rogers and her husband, Steve. I have their DVDs. I haven't watched them yet. You can make your own homemade Twinkling H2Os, Beth, or a Twinkling H2O type of paint. You have the Daniel Smith interference paint, so you can mix that with some of your colors to get even more colors. But also, you can mix any colored mica powders with gum Arabic. We were discussing that. I'm looking at the painting on the camera just to get a different view. All right. Let's look good. Let's go for Plum Crazy. Plum Crazy. Purple, purple, purple. I'm going to put some of it in our sunflower center. The Frugal Crafter, Beth, had some really good videos on she even mixed some, like, eyeshadows with gum Arabic. You can just put them in any little pots. Yeah. This is homemade. I got a turntable and a round piece of plastic from a store we have in the States that sells all things made out of plastic. And I just put them together. You could get a turntable from your kitchen store or if you have a store that just sells plastic stuff. We have one here in the States called TAP Plastics. That's all they sell is stuff made out of plastic and acrylic. And they had the round plastic, and then they had the turntables. You might also find them if you have a retail supplier, like retail fixture supplier, where they sell, like, countertop pamphlet holders and stuff like that, they might have something similar. No. They're on top. They're Velcro to the top. See? They're just sitting on the top. I should glue them down. When I first did the palette, I thought that I might want to change it at some point and I never have. I should just glue the pots down. But this way, if I run out of one, it's easier to change it, which is why I think I never have. Yeah, the center is empty. And usually that's where this sits, right here. Yeah, when I first started watercoloring, I did the same thing. I was using drawing paper. And I loved the medium and I loved, you know, the kind of the element of not knowing exactly what the paint was going to do, depending on where you put the water. But I had a lot of problems with the paper pilling and that kind of thing. I thought it was me doing something wrong and it wasn't. It was that I was not using good paper. I try. I don't know if that's always a good thing that I'm full of ideas, but I try. This is a different color purple. What is this? Misty lavender. Okay, let's see. I'm really wanting a dark. See, this is why I got the primas out because I'm really wanting a dark color. So this is, of course, the Prima palette. And let's see. I'm going to try this one, which is a pain's great type of color. And to really get the twinkling H2Os to pop, if you pair them up with something that's matte, they pop the sparkle jumps out more. Becky, well, at least you did. You're here before the end. I'm still, I'm still playing. So you're well before the end. I'm just, I've been playing with twinkling H2Os and now I'm pulling in some Prima watercolors so that the sparkly ones will really pop if you pair them up with something that's matte. Yeah, I keep getting distracted by, and you guys aren't the only ones. My husband just texted me and it showed up on the iPad because, you know, the last couple times this week he's texted me. It has been while I'm live broadcasting. Love the guy dearly, but, you know, this is a dark blue from the Prima palette. It's like a Prussian blue. We're going to use it to add some shadows here. He's still texting me. It's not like I should be surprised that I'm live because, you know, I'm live every week. He doesn't pay attention to the schedule. So I'm going to pull in some of the Prima black and I'm going to mix it with the blue that's on here and add something that's more like a Payne's gray or a neutral tint. Yeah, everybody's messaging me or texting me this morning, which is pretty funny. It's always when I'm live, otherwise everything's silent. But, you know, it's always either when I'm live or when I'm recording. So there is a color in most of your artist grade paints called neutral tint, which is a very sheer transparent, dark, bluish gray, not unlike Payne's gray, but it's more transparent. And it's a good color to like darken areas, add shadows. It's good for adjusting the color in your reflections like in your water. Next to Payne gray, it's a favorite tint. There you go. We're almost done. So now I want to add a little bit of something matte to the puddles. And I think I'm going to go with something bright and I'm going to mix Prima's number three, which is very red, with their number 28, which is more of a terracotta color. Mix the two together and it will tone down the brightness of the red a little bit. And it will add some depth to the puddles without adding any more sparkle. And you can see how if you just work your way from lighter to darker and you keep working, keep working the colors, adding something dark, making sure you have your lights in there. And if you lose your lights and watercolor, we're mixed mini artists. Break out your gel pens. Let everything dry first, of course, because you don't want to go in over any painted surface with your pens. That's not dry. You're going to mess your pens up. Guess how I know that. But, you know, you can go in there afterwards with some pens. You can go in there with... I'm distracted. You can go in there with some pens. You can go in there with a little acrylic paint. The acrylic paint is very wet. It's going to probably reactivate the watercolor. I would say stick to the gel pens. But you could experiment and see what works for you. I hate waiting for stuff to dry. I have no patience for stuff, waiting for stuff to dry. That's pretty good. Yeah, if you just, you want to make sure you don't get it too wet. It may move a little bit, but if you don't get it too wet, you should be okay. So there we go. I think we're done. Twinkly H2O is a little bit of Prima watercolors. Now these pictures, as I said in Monday's broadcast, are on my website. That's true. So these pictures are on my website. There is a whole page of inspiration photos. If you want to download them, you're welcome to. You have my permission. Download them. Do paintings from them. Sell the paintings. Just sell the original photos. And yeah, have some fun with it. I'd love to see what you guys make. Thank you so much, Frankie and everybody. Have some fun. Play with your paint. Hey, Cindy, I think you're coming in at the end. Oh, you're welcome. Yeah, sorry. I'm sorry, Beth. Now you want to paint. I'm sorry. Well, I love playing with my watercolors. It's one of my favorite things. And I am going to later today work on this page where we're doing the, that's okay, where we're doing the watercolor over the mixed media background. And again, we are not later today, tomorrow. So if you're really liking playing with your watercolors and you want to do more of it with mixed media, think about, you know, doing your mixed media background and then cover it with clear gesso if that's what you have. But if you have a little money in the budget, order some, not this. Daniel Smith transparent watercolor ground and then cover that with it and then let it dry and then you can watercolor over it. The only trick to this is your watercolors for the most part a translucent paint. So you want to have your background not be too dark because your other ones, your watercolor is not going to show up, but it's good to experiment with it. If you have a gouache now, you could do the same thing with a gouache, which is more opaque. But play, experiment. Oh, you're welcome, everybody. All right, don't forget the most important thing. Y'all know what that is, right? Go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. All right. And yeah, just play. You can use clear gesso if that's all you have, but the transparent ground works better than the clear gesso does. Golden has an absorbent ground, but it's white. It's not transparent that I know of. They may have a transparent one, I'm not sure. See, that's it. All right, so play with your paints. Have some fun with it. I'm going to let things dry. I need to photograph some of the pages in here today so I can get some new postcards printed. This might be one of them. I don't know yet. All right, I will talk to you later. Everybody have a great day. You're welcome. Bye, guys. And don't forget if you're in the area, San Francisco Bay Area, you're coming for a visit. You're coming for summer vacation. Message me we'll meet for coffee or something, but you have to come to California. All right, bye, guys.