 Hello there, it's Sandy Allnok, and I have a really special project today. I don't have all of the tutorial for you or anything, and I don't even know how to explain it because it's the first time I've tried anything this epic for my niece's wedding, but this was my gift for her and I thought you'd like to see a few snippets of how I created it. My niece and her fiancee love the Redwoods. They are just your total wonderful hippie kids and they have this beautiful photograph that they took for their engagement pictures. They went out to the Redwoods and I just wanted to paint them and I wanted to see if I could do it. I don't usually do people. People are not my thing, although after this I'm kind of thinking I'd like to practice more. These were kind of overworked in the faces because I didn't know what I was doing. So I did a lot of layering and they came out a little bit muddy, but I was still happy with it because it looked like them and that is not usually something I'm able to do. I did practice just the faces first and you can see what's under my hand was one of the first practices and I just painted big black marks over it because, oh my gosh, I don't know how to mix skin tones. Please don't ask me what these skin tones were. I layered like, I don't know, 20 times. They would be too pink and then they would be too yellow. And after I got the whole background in, I had to go back and rework the faces again because they had just become very pink compared to all that green. So yeah, it was crazy and I will try to be doing some more study so I can teach you a bit about portraiture. But for the time being, I was just pleased that I got this to work and I got it to come out at all because it's not my shtick. By the time this video was going live, they are already married, hopefully for a good week by this date and I am hoping that it was a beautiful wedding. I'm sure it was and I'm sure that, you know, seeing all the family was great. You know, I wish I had stories, but I don't because I am recording this a couple weeks before I have left because I had to get this framed as well. And it's a large painting. It's half a sheet, which is not even a size I normally paint. I just, I'm not a person who paints this big, but it felt like the redwoods were so epic. I couldn't do a small painting. It was going to have to be a big one. And for their portrait for their wedding, I thought that would be kind of nice. I don't know if they're going to, you know, say, hey, we now want a portrait from like the actual ceremony, like in the dress and in the tux. And I, you know, we'll see. I hope they don't ask because this was really hard. But, you know, if they ask, I will probably entertain it because I love them and very proud of them and the excited for the life they've made for themselves. I just am so thrilled, so, so thrilled. My first niece to get married to have two nieces. So Julie here's looking at you kid. So I don't know if she's even going to watch this, but nonetheless, I will not pressure her because I did not get married either. That's okay to get live your life the way you see fit. So here I'm using masking fluid. Finally got the people done and I didn't feel much of it as you can tell. I have a little bit more I'll share on social media because I was so fretting over the painting of like that shirt was crazy. And the faces obviously her jacket with all kinds of things hanging off of it was nuts. Like it was beautiful. It was gorgeous in the picture, but boy was it was just a really challenging thing. But I, I like a good challenge. So this was that for sure. The masking fluid I decided to use because I didn't know how I was going to handle this big of a background. It's very difficult to do that and not end up with having edges dry before you're ready to go before you're, you know, moving on to the next section. So I decided to start at the top. And move my way down at the bottom actually turned upside down and my table is at an angle about a, I guess, 3540% grade. So that this would carry the paint downward on the paper. And I was looking for a way to kind of just do this whole strip and then start the next strip but keep the edges wet. And I also wanted to drop wet color into the color that's already here. So I had to constantly watch the edge. So I was watching that bottom of the lightest green section and making sure that that never dried. And then once I got it all the way down, I had to make sure that the left edge never dried. Because as soon as you get that, then I'm going to have a big streak right through the painting. And my whole vision for it was just to have this very soft bokeh background with some leaves in the foreground. And I just wanted it to be very simple because they're very complex. Their outfits are complex and all the hair and the faces and everything. And I wanted them to be the thing that was important. I didn't want you to get lost in the background by having a lot of other stuff in it. The photograph had tree trunks and trees laying down and just all kinds of details in there, very fuzzy. And I was debating whether to even try doing some of that. But I opted for just like throwing greens in like we'll just have a bunch of different greens. I'll paint some of these areas that are masked off. I'll repaint those after I get this part done and have a whole bunch of different greens and that's as good as it gets. So I had to make some compromises in the way I approach this. So here I got down to the bottom or actually the top and was just going to keep an eyeball on that whole left edge that left edge could not dry. If it dried, I'd be in trouble. So I also had a spray bottle handy just in case I saw anything starting to dry starting to form an edge so that nothing would would farm that hard edge in the middle of this. That would be nothing more tragic than getting this far in a painting and not being able to like stop some giant edge that would show up in the middle of the painting. That would be terrible. But the masking fluid helped a lot to just keep all of this green away from their faces. Now this is not my normal style using masking fluid like this to, you know, kind of get a background in here. Because normally I paint right through whatever the thing is, and I would like to and one of the reasons I don't do portraits is that I would like to be able to do that. That's kind of my style. I want to be able to do that with portraits and right now I don't know how to do that. I just was clueless. So I had to settle for doing this thing where they look a little bit like stickers on this green background. And, you know, hopefully they won't feel that way. I felt a little bit that way myself just because I had this really crisp edge around them. And I did do a lot of little detail work trying to clean some of that up to make their hair kind of a few few strands of it moving out into the green so that it didn't look like it was just like a big old cut out sticker. But for the bokeh I used baby wipes to pull out the dots while it was wet. You have to do that while it's wet and of course this is so soaking wet from trying to move it across the paper. It was easy to do. And some of them didn't come out particularly great. Some of them came out of the lumpy because my water was real uneven by the time I got all this painting done. So after it was completely dry, I went in with a baby wipe and just started going over some of those bokeh dots that didn't form very nicely. It kind of looked a little wonky and that worked really nicely. Now I suppose you could probably do that without going through the step of lifting them while the paint is still wet. But one of the things I noticed that this did do was my baby wipe was moving color into those areas. So once I started removing all that, I didn't get multicolors of green like I did when I lifted it out of the green paint in the first place while it was wet. So I think that's still the better way to go. Now for all these areas that I had all the masking fluid on, like I said, I didn't like all those kind of areas that looked like white stickers. So down here in the bottom I wanted all these ferns to just kind of disappear. I wanted them to be very soft and have a few hard edges in them, but I didn't want bright white highlights because I wanted the white to be on the two people. And I wanted everything else to kind of fade into the background. So I painted right over top of it all and while it was wet just dropped in more color. But the masking fluid had given me a few hard edges underneath and it created those light spaces. Now I suppose I could have done that just by painting through it, but I didn't know what I was doing at the time. So I just I marked off some areas, but I think it actually did really help to create a section that looks kind of like little fussy greens at the bottom. And then at the top edge of the fernery, and if that's a word or not, but the fern area, I just painted a few strands and few fronds, I guess they are of ferns coming up from the top. And then once I dried it, I can go back in and had just a few hard edges, not very many, but a couple here and there. I didn't want anything to really compete with the bright and groom because they were the most important things. Everything else had to start going away. And that included the leaves because the leaves were also white since I had masked them out. So I painted them with a pale yellow green and then dried all that. And then I was able to put in dark green for one side of them and I kept them very graphical rather than trying to make them realistic. And if you've taken my branching out class, it's a watercolor class where we do a lot of leaf work. And you'll recognize some of this, except this is how you would do it when you've got a background, as opposed to in the class where we just painted different kinds of leaves as foreground elements. But this is kind of combining it so that all of those white areas that I had left with the masking fluid turned into positive leaves painted with this negative background behind it. So it's just a combination of a lot of different techniques to create this. I wanted to soften these leaves somewhat. I didn't want it to look like, you know, we had everything in the front and then this really soft background and nothing in between. So I used a very transparent kind of washed out sort of green to paint just some, not a ton, but some more leafy, small type of branches in behind these other ones that are in the foreground. That gave a little bit more fussy detail, but making the color so soft and transparent, it kind of disappears in there and doesn't fight with the main subject, which is the two people. But it adds that kind of detail anyway, something interesting to look at. And then of course the last thing, since they are the Redwoods kids, they live in that area, I decided I would have a few branches, and there were just a couple sticking into the picture that they had taken for their engagement. And then I decided to add some of those Redwood branches sticking into the picture I added more than were there, and just painted the yellow green into the white areas so I didn't have any white again, and painted a dark heavy green at the bottom of it. And then I kept kind of taking turns dropping water into it, pulling some of that green over top of the white so that, or that yellow green just so it didn't look like it was snowing out there, I had to break it up enough to not have that effect. But here's the finish it's really hard to photograph and to film because it's so huge. So you can see it's kind of leaning on my desk. I did have all those little dots so it's like a little magical forest that the masking fluid allowed me to have so I was pretty thrilled with this. And hopefully you learned something, even if it was to not paint anything half sheet large because it's hard. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. I will see you guys again next week.