 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnock and you might remember that I did this drawing in color pencil earlier this year and I wanted to do it in watercolor. There's also these little guys that I made a video of and I'm going to link both of those in the doobly-do if you need more snowman videos but today we're going to do four brushes and a toothbrush to make this awesome little snowman. I'll talk about my process as well as some brushes you might need and might not need. I wanted to talk watercolor brushes but also some colors and other things in this video. So let's begin with some color mixing. These two are complements, well technically orange and blue are complements but this transparent red oxide is a variation on an orange like a dark orange and it works well with cobalt blue to make the perfect snowy gray. In wintertime I do a lot of snow paintings and this is the color combination that I use the most because I can vary it. I can put a little more blue in it if I want to push it bluer. If I want to keep it duller I'll leave a little more of that brown color in it. Instead of transparent red oxide you could also use burnt sienna and get the same kind of a thing but I'm going to use that for my basic snow color and depending on how wet you get it and how much water you put in you can get a really pale color or you can get a somewhat pale color. I'm going to use this color and then dab some off and part of that is so that you can see what I'm doing because if I painted it in the actual pale color that I was really going for you wouldn't be able to see much of anything and since I like to teach here on YouTube I thought it would be helpful for you to be able to see something and see how much of that color I'm putting on and that sort of thing so put the color on and dab it off and the fact that it's wet means that you can then go back into some of those areas and add a shadow underneath the hat, a shadow under the nose, a shadow where all of those stones are going to be pushed into the snow for the eyes and the mouth. That sort of thing so you'll get a little bit of dimension that way and then I'll do the same thing on the body of the snowman. I'm doing this on Arches cold press paper and this is the bright white I believe. There are other papers like natural white or the names of some of them in a whole bunch of different brands and if you're looking for something that's going to be white white then look for any kind of a name of the color called bright white because that's usually a much whiter color which works better for snow paintings. So here I'm doing the same thing, lift it off color but I left all that moisture there so I could then drop in shadows under the scarf and then I'll reinforce some shadows up above. I'm using a number eight brush by Da Vinci one of their maestro line and I'm going to get to the other brushes that I was talking about in a few minutes but this is just putting that base color in underneath of everything so I can get these colors all over the page first. I'm putting some scrubby marks down in the snow because when you're building a snowman you leave all kinds of footprints and things and then for the background color I decided to indulge myself and use a color that I don't use all that often because it's a staining color it's phthalo blue turquoise and I knew I wasn't going to need to do any lifting so I could actually get away with doing this and not have to worry about what if I need to lift up some color to add something to it and this is a nice bright happy kind of turquoise blue color. I'm painting carefully around the snowman doing a little negative painting and then I'm going to add water and then some more color but I'm not really worried about trying to get anything perfect out here. I'm going to paint trees in front of this so it's just basically a color to put in there that I can paint on top of as I move forward with the painting. So now wipe off the excess so I can keep an eye on that clean outline around my painting. I know exactly where I'm working. Now I've got it all dried so let's start with those bare branches and this is the fancy brush that I'm going to recommend you don't need if you're painting small things. I've used this brush before and I've gotten into it with some YouTube folks who commented about how angry they were that this brush was so expensive because it looks so perfect and won't it make them a better painter and no there is no brush that will make you a better painter. There are brushes that will make your life easier and if you want to pay the money they will make your life easier but this is a brush by DaVinci there's a couple companies that make brushes like this but I like the DaVinci ones I've tried some of the others and they don't like them as much but it has a wide belly on it as you can see and then a long needle so the belly holds moisture it holds all the pigment in the water and it feeds it down through that needle so you can make really long lines and not have to keep reducing the brush and if you're painting telephone wires or long branches on a large painting that's super important and for me when I go out and do plein air I really would like a brush that holds more moisture in it so I don't have to keep going back to the the palette over and over and over again so there's there's that about it it also has this floppy needle on it and the floppy needle keeps me looser and it keeps me doing better calligraphy marks meaning kind of the little marks that dance around on the page but these two little brushes and even just one of them will do the job pretty much just fine when you're doing a smaller painting and one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this today is I have a new class out doing watercolor paintings that are this size or bookmark size that are winter scenes and in winter scenes you're going to be doing a whole lot of trees and branches and that kind of thing so I didn't want anybody in the class to feel like I got to go get that fancy brush so in the class I also don't use the fancy brush but I wanted to show you the comparison of them with this brush it's a silver brush round number two and it's not expensive and it makes pretty much the same size line I can get kind of the same size line the one adjustment well two adjustments that I make one is that I have to keep going back to get more pigment and that's fine it's not that hard to do when you're working in the studio but I also adjust the amount of water in my pigment in order to get this to work so what I end up doing is using thinner paint so I'm using more water in the pigment and then dabbing some off because that gives it the appearance of being lighter and thinner when you look at it on the paper so just you know dabbing off a little bit with a baby wipe or a tissue or something will reduce the effect of that so even if your brush ends up getting like a big old chunky line so here I got like big old big old oops you know that happens don't sweat it but you can dab that off if you use thin enough pigment and then you can use a little brush like this and get pretty much the same kind of effects as that fancy brush when you're doing small paintings and then you can decide if you you know you're going to at some point change your mind and start doing big paintings then you can go buy a big expensive brush but for now you can just stick with the small one now I decided instead of using that number four that's off to the left that I would continue with the number two and use a little thicker pigment in order to make the base tree base of the trees like the trunks because I wanted to you know redraw some of those or repaint them right on top so that I could make them denser so that the ones at the top then start to look like they're lighter and thinner and that sort of thing so this brush did really well for all of those purposes so I will leave it to you what you choose to go get but just know that there's a lot of art supplies that are not as readily available now I'm sure it's supply chain stuff or whatnot but yeah silver brush number two works really well now for the rest of this painting I'm going to go a little quicker and give you a few tips of some of the things that I was trying along the way one thing one decision that I made was that I was going to stick with that yellow orange color for the snowman's outfit however one of the problems that I have with painting this way and and it's just because I had that other picture in my head that I stuck with the yellow normally I would choose to find a color that's darker than the background in order to paint the scarf and the hat why because when you're trying to kiss two colors together like where the blue and the yellow meat those those two are going to have to meet somewhere and when you kiss them if you don't kiss them exactly perfect you get a heavy line right where one crosses over the other and you can see both if you use a darker color on one of the other then that line disappears and it's not a big deal but these two are both light colors and so what I opted to do here was to leave a little bit of white around the outside edge for now on the hat the scarf has the belly of the snowman on the right hand side so not worried about that it's the hat that was kind of making me try to figure out how to handle this without getting that kissed edge and what I ended up doing was leaving the white and then after I got done right here when I was all finished then I painted a very pale yellow because if I had let the the red and the orange travel all the way up into that area the chances that I could get the red orange color on top of that blue were greater and once I got all that painting finished and then just let that yellow carry out into that I had a little less of that that that kissing issue around the outside edge it just makes me nuts when that happens I'm just yeah I'm weird that way so I got out the little baby brush that little number two to paint very tiny rocks even left highlights on the eyeballs and the mouth rocks and everything because I wanted it to look as much like the snowman in that other drawing as possible the other one was done in colored pencil which of course allows you to get more detail and it was also significantly larger than this so there's some sacrifices I had to make I couldn't get into quite all the texture that I wanted on the hat and the scarf but I'll add even a little bit more as we go and I you know adding a little bit of detail into the buttons trying to give them some roundness some shadow using some of the leftover brown color in my palette to shade things like why not if you're worried about trying to buy a dark red don't do that just brown so here I'm adding in a little bit more detail trying to add some fuzzy ish kind of texture some dry brush on top of all of this so that I can get a little bit of that that touchable texture that I had ended up with on the on the pencil drawing so that's basically my approach to translating from the color pencil drawing into watercolor trying to find ways to keep my favorite things about the snowman and I decided to add some magical snow to this so I've got a toothbrush an old toothbrush some white gouache from Windsor Newton and I find that wetting my finger works really well to get the paint to release from the brush and make this super fine type of snow on the page but I also realized this snowman kind of needed some something a little more whimsical and the fine snow worked nicely but I decided I would use a number four brush and I would add in some larger snowflakes just to make it a little bit more cutesy and playful which goes better with the snowman I think four brushes one toothbrush make for a seriously happy little snowman and by making it this far in this video you've actually completed part of the pre-class lesson in the new brand new winter watercolor bookmarks class and in that class you'll learn how to make a whole bunch of beautiful winter bookmarks we'll learn tons of techniques we'll do negative painting we'll do masking we'll do all kinds of beautiful backgrounds making all kinds of great trees you're going to love it click on the link in the doobly-doo to see a video preview of what's in the class then you can also click it within that link to another one with the free pre-class lesson so you can see all the supplies that you would need and you might even have all the supplies you just might you never know how's that for a great class I will see you guys again soon if you haven't subscribed why not smash that subscribe button and hit the bell so you never miss a single video and I will see you again soon go out there and create something every day take care bye-bye