 It is Monday morning, 18th, my anniversary. 29 years married, 36 years together, woohoo. Anyway, we are here with a video for my creative year, which is unplanned. So I have this piece of canvas that I am gonna experiment with watercoloring on, which I will explain in a different video, which is gonna be on YouTube to the public. And when that link is available, I will put it in the Facebook group for you all over my creative year. If for some reason you found this video on YouTube, my creative year is a Facebook art and inspiration group, and I will link it in the video description, and you can check it out and request to join. Anyway, before I paint on the canvas and try doing that, which I'm not even sure it's gonna work, I thought, let me try the composition I have in mind on, let me sort of do a warmup in my watercolor journal, which is kind of what it's for anyway. And then I thought, hey, why don't I do it the warmup for my creative year? And why don't I use the primary colors? Cause this month is all about color mixing, right? So that's what we're gonna do. I have the Emgram gouache set. Gouache is an opaque. Well, this gouache is an opaque water soluble paint. Not all gouache is created equal. Their whole vine does make an acrylic gouache, which is not water soluble. Once it's dry, it's dry, and that's it. These are water soluble. And this set is great because it's primary colors and then black and white. So that's perfect. So I have my paints here and I've already put some water in them to reconstitute them cause they were dry in the pan. And we're gonna do some color mixing and playing. I have a few sizes of round and one flat brush. And I need a rag. See if I can reach it. Okay, I've got a rag. And I've got my dryer. So first thing we're gonna do is get a clean flat brush. And I want to get part of my page wet. Oh, there was some paint on that brush. Oh, it's all right. Okay, and then while that soaks in a little bit, I'm gonna grab the blue. Whoops, rinse off my brush. Grab a little bit of the black, gray down the blue a little bit, and then a little bit of the white. All right, I live in the Pacific Northwest, so more often than not, the sky is some sort of gray blue color. So we're gonna put some of that on the paper where it's wet. And if it's not sort of blooming enough, which is what I call this here, no idea if that's a correct term or not. I have no idea. And I'll add some more water. And if I'm getting too much bloom in some places, because I do sort of want a mottled background, then I can use my rag or a sponge or a piece of a Mr. Clean Magic eraser and sort of lift some of it. Sorry about the squeaky table legs, something like that. Then I'm gonna make something that's more turquoise colored. So we're gonna grab some more blue, a little bit of yellow, too much yellow, that's too green. Let's grab some more blue. Leaving a space between that color we just put and this new color. I'm gonna do this with a line. Right here, we got too close. So we're gonna just dry that a little bit with my rag. Okay, now we're gonna get out the heat gun and get that a dry. Okay, now I'm going to take some of the yellow and I'm gonna take some of the white, lighten that up again a little bit, make it more of a pastel yellow. And then I'm gonna take that same color and add just a little bit of the red to it, make it sort of a salmony color and then just go in with some water. I wanna necessarily blend everything but I wanna maybe blend a little bit of it. I want some more yellow. So let's make another separate pile of yellow. I'm gonna switch now to a round, one of the round brushes. I think I'm gonna use this one. This is a round number four. And I'm gonna go in to the white gouache in a few places, using the white to sort of blend and obscure some of the lines and colors that I don't want on there. Okay, we'll dry it again. Okay, sticking to the round brush for now, we're gonna take some more of our sky color. We're gonna add a little bit more blue to it, a little bit more black. And we're gonna take some of it and like bring it like over here. And I'm gonna add a little bit of red to it to make this purpley color. Okay, so let's start off with the blue. I'm gonna make some parts a little darker. We get these beautiful stormy blue. And purple and orange skies up here in the Pacific Northwest. And I'm just trying to capture some of that. I'm gonna grab some of that purple that we made, grab some more blue. And I'm just, I'm layering the colors. Now with a gouache, it takes a lot of water to make the gouache as transparent as your traditional water colors. They're more opaque, which means if you make a mistake, you don't necessarily have to live with it. You can cover it up pretty easy, in my opinion. Okay, that's pretty good. I'm gonna take some more of that water color that we made, some of that and darken up a few spots of our little lake suggested area. Add a little bit more blue to that bring in some of that darker color. One thing you'll notice when I'm doing this is I'm adding darker color to the parts that are already dark and lighter color or white to the parts that are already lighter or white. I'm kind of going with what happened that first go around with the paint. I like that, let's dry that. Okay, I'm gonna take a brush, I think, and our watercolor that we mixed, our teal-y color and some white. I'm gonna start out there anyways. I'm gonna take this piece, this is a piece of watercolor paper. I'm just making some suggestions of shapes, land and what will eventually be some trees. I'm using the colors that are already on the palette. Okay, I'm gonna take that flat brush I had earlier. Gonna just dab, dab, dab, dab. Any one of your blues, dab, dab, dab. You can do the dab down here too where you got lines reflected in the water but just instead of dabbing with paint, dab with water. So it's just kind of obscuring it. They're there but they're not as obvious. Okay, again with the drying. Take some more of our blue and some of our black. This time go a little bit to the dark side. Not super dark yet but a little bit dark. You don't have to go on top of the lines you just made and you can do it again with the paper if you want or you can do it with your brush. You want the first set of lines to sort of look like they're farther in the background. The darker ones to look like they're closer to the viewer. Brush again and do the dab, dab, dab, dab. Whatever's above the water is usually reflected in the water. So don't forget about your reflections. They can be suggestive reflections but they should be there. Okay, and then we're gonna take that blue, we're gonna add some more black. Okay, that's a good color. Before we do anything, I wanna dry this. Before anyone asks, the reason I do so much of drying is so that I can control where the water goes and where the paint goes. So anyway, I'm gonna switch to a smaller round brush. This is a round number two. I also have a round number one but we're gonna try the number two. I think that one's gonna do very well for me and we're gonna make some more trees. More trees. I'm barely touching the brush to the paper. I'm just, well, except for that time. I'm just using the very tip of it to create a line and then while those are kind of drying off just a little bit, I'm going to darken some parts of. We're gonna take our brush and just a little bit of paint and barely touching it to the paper and just dabbing again, just with dabbing with the point of the brush. We'll do the same thing on the other side of the lake. Again, don't forget the reflections and dabbing and just layering your colors on top of one another. Now you could do this with watercolor paint. It's fun to do with watercolor. I just happen to have this gouache set and I haven't played with it nearly enough. The watercolors will stay a bit more transparent than the gouache will. The effect is still really good. Okay, I like that. What are we gonna do again? Yeah, that's right. We're gonna dry it. Okay, now if you take all of your colors together, your yellow, your red, your blue, your black, your black just to make it darker but your yellow, red, blue, you're gonna get some sort of brownish gray depending on how much of each color you have in there. So I added a bunch more red, so that's gonna turn it very red. Then I'm gonna add some yellow, which will make it orange. I'm actually gonna mix this with the big brush. It's a little easier with the big brush. Then I'm gonna mix it with some of the blue and it's gonna turn this gray-brown color, which I could use and that would work for what I wanna do. It's not quite dark enough and I could also go in with a straight black but I want something that's a little more visually interesting than just plain black. Something dark, but that's not just plain black. So we're gonna make that super dark gray-brown with all the colors and then we're gonna add a bunch of black to it and we're gonna get something that's a little more interesting, sort of a dark brownish gray. Now I'd reframe probably from putting any of the white in here, although I'm using what's on the palette and there's white on here, but you might find that you like it better if you don't have the white in there. Okay, we're gonna go with that same number two brush. Do what we did before, barely. Again, barely touching the paper and then dabbing and just keep making darker colors and different shades of different colors and adding more suggested land and trees to either side of your lake scene until you're happy with what happened and with the outcome. You could even add a couple of little sort of birds. Put down a little color, put down a little water, blend it out, see what you think. Make some more marks, work in one little section and then while that's drying, bounce around to another section. Start with light colors and work your way darker. With a watercolor, it's easier to make it darker. It's almost impossible to make it lighter without starting over. Okay, I like the way that looks. We're gonna dry it, I'll be right back. Okay, one more thing you can do is take a white gel pen and you can create some highlights in your painting with your white gel pen. If I can get mine to work anyways. Mine doesn't wanna work, of course it doesn't wanna work because I'm on camera. Let's try a different pen. Let's try a white paint pen, shall we? Follow those lines and shapes that are already in the, what were the puddles of paint in your painting, where the edges of the different colors were and where they puddled and blended and just add some white marks like they were light hitting the water or waves. You can, of course, add some highlights to the trees. Not too many, just suggestions. Don't get too wound up in trying to do something super realistic, you're just gonna get frustrated. Just be suggestive, suggestive is good. See, like that, that's a pretty good painting. So I want you to take what you've learned by practicing and playing with your supplies this month and mixing colors. And just if you have a basic set of just primary colors, what you can create. And I would love to see you share in the group, pictures of the paintings that you created and the different colors that you came up with. Don't forget to like, share and subscribe. Oh, I'll not share. Don't forget to like the videos of the other teachers and the other artwork of the other members in the group. Don't forget to support the free content here on Facebook and the content over on YouTube. How you can, all the teachers here in my creative year have ways of support. And if you are unsure of what that way is, ask. Most of us have something in our video description. And even if they're not part of my creative year, maybe they're a favorite Facebook creative person you follow or they're a favorite creative YouTuber. They probably have a way to support them. So check out their video descriptions if there isn't anything in their ask. There probably is something, whether it's an Etsy shop or PayPal tip jar or something. Anyway, I hope you learned something new and I would love to see what you do. Don't forget to stay safe, stay home, stay creative and go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys. Okay, hey guys, this is for YouTube and I am, we're gonna be working on a slow stitch soon where I combine hopefully my love of watercolor with slow stitching. Now the piece that you're looking at is a practice piece that I actually filmed and put over in the Facebook group my creative year. It's not a video that's gonna be readily available here on YouTube. So if you want to see this video, you need to be part of my creative year and go over there and see the video over there. The link's in the video description. But anyway, I just did this one as a practice. I used this gouache set of paints. I'm gonna leave them out. I may still use them for what we're gonna do next. I don't know. These were gifted to me by a friend and they are really yummy. It's a basic set with red, yellow, blue, black and white, which is really all you need to get started. And I came up with all these colors. I didn't use anything else. So anyway, we're gonna move this journal out of the way. And this is what we're gonna do here for this video. So in order to try to combine my love of slow stitching and watercoloring, I thought, hmm, I wonder if I can watercolor on fabric. And I knew immediately we would have to do something to the fabric to prep it for watercolor. And so I have a watercolor ground. It's Daniel Smith. I'll link it in the description. I'll put a picture here that I took of the fabric right after I put the ground on it and the jar of ground. Watercolor ground is like a gesso that's made for the properties of water soluble paint. And I have it in white and I think I have gold somewhere, but I just use the white. Now, fun fact, I really don't like watercoloring on watercolor ground. I prefer watercolor paper, specifically cold press. I like the texture of cold press. Now, I will also tell you, I am not a watercolor paper perfectionist. I like inexpensive paper, Strathmore, Fabriano, this journal. I like working in this journal. I think this is a Strathmore. Oh, this is a Moleskine, Moleskine watercolor notebook. I'm not a huge, you know, I have arches and stuff like that and it's great paper, but I'm just as happy with a Pat a Strathmore watercolor paper. I prefer cold press to hot press because I like the texture of the paper. I'm not a huge fan of painting a watercolor ground. So we'll see how this goes, because yeah, I'm not too sure what's gonna happen. So we are gonna do a sort of Forest Lake inspired scene. I've got a number of inspiration photos I've taken laying around me that you can't see, but that's okay, you don't need to see them. I'm gonna start with my large flat brush and I'm gonna put the gouache up here. I'm going to grab, so I have the gouache palette. I have this one too. This is a Pacific Northwest collection of colors and the colors are a combination of M. Graham and Daniel Smith colors. And this one I'm gonna grab is an M. Graham color. And I think it's Anthaquidrone blue. I don't know. I'm pretty sure I'm mispronouncing that, fun fact. I'm gonna mix it with a little bit of this red gray color I have on my palette, which is a gouache, just to make the blue less bright and more gray. And then I'm gonna add some water to it to make it lighter. I'm gonna put it on here and then I'm gonna add some water. I would always recommend adding just a little, start with just a little bit and work lighter to darker. If you make it too dark, it's hard to take it back. And as I say that, I do think it's actually a little easier to take it back on the ground than it is on regular paper. Let's try. It's been a while since I worked on watercolor ground. Yeah, it's a little easier to take it back. So I'm gonna just dab some of that off because it's a little bit too much pigment for me for what I'm trying. Then we are going to make something that's more of a green turquoise color for the water part of this scene. And I am going to grab a little bit of the green that's in the Pacific Northwest palette, which is a sap green. And I'm gonna mix it with the blue, well, a couple of different things actually on the palette. Just mixing the blue and the green and some of this gray blue together until I get the color I want. Then leaving that hopefully a little bit of space between what I put on there already and this new color, not put too much. Because remember, these M. Grand paints are usually very, very well pigmented, which if you're trying to just do a light color, you wanna have that in mind because you wanna just put a little bit and then add some water, spread it out. What I will say is the paint is drying very fast on the ground, which could be good, could be bad, I don't know. I'm gonna grab some of the white gouache before that dries too much. Gonna just add some of that into the watercolor paint. It'll help diffuse some of the edges and some of the colors, make things a little bit more cloudy, misty. Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna give that a dry. I'll be right back.