 Hi guys! We're here with another video, big surprise. This paper is a little bit dirty but it's a little bit of schmutz but you know what I think we're going to use it anyways. I am going to take some blue painter's tape and I'm going to tape off a square-ish thing in about the middle of this paper. I don't always do it this way when I water color but I do occasionally and it just gives you a nice clean border. I tend to be a little messy with all of my painting no matter the medium so this just helps me sort of state sort of contained. We are here today with a video of Club Hop with some friends of mine here on YouTube. The links for all of their videos will be in the description below. The list of participants is not limited to but does include Peg Robinson, Vicki Brown of Messy Table Studios, Cindy Utter, Leslie McGrath of Leslie's Creative Studio. At the moment those are the ones I can think of. There may be more I'm not sure. We're calling it Pick Your Passion and it's a collaborative hop. We're all doing something different depending on what our passion is in art and life and for me of course the beginning of my creative artistic mix media painterly journey was watercolor and it always has been a passion of mine. I love watercolor paints. If you made me give up 90% of my art supplies tomorrow and only keep one thing I'd keep the watercolor. How's that? I just love my watercolor paints. That's a little bit crooked so let's fix that while we're chatting. So yeah I absolutely love my watercolor paints. Today we are going to do a little watercolor painting from a picture I took on one of the evening walks with my husband. I always have my cell phone with me. I always take pictures when we're out walking. He frequently is telling everybody else if there's other people in our party to hang on. He's sort of my keeper and handler. I called him that once before. People thought it was funny but it's actually kind of true. I do have jingle bells on my handbag and it drives a lot of people crazy. He actually kind of likes it because he knows exactly where I'm at so anyway. So we are going to do this watercolor painting. I'm going to speed forward through most of the process or we would be here for God knows how long. I will be putting a full speaking tutorial up over on my Patreon so if you want to see the full speaking one and you want full a full tutorial it will be over here. I do think here on YouTube although the video is going to be fairly short I think you're going to get enough instruction that you can go forward in and play an experiment on your own. This is the picture that I want to play with for the painting. Isn't that a beautiful flower? Again I was taken with my cell phone. It's what I use. Nothing fancy. I have a smartphone and I it has a good camera and so that's what I use and before anybody asks I have an iPhone. It's not the latest one. I think it's iPhone 7 with a cracked screen fun fact but I take all my pictures with it and I will be updating this photo along with adding a few other new ones to my website. I have an inspiration photo page on my website. The photos are free for you all to use. There's no copyright or anything on them and they're all pictures I've personally taken so if you want to create some art inspired by this photo go over there and you can get it from there. I'll link it in the description below with everybody else's video links. So I'm going to take this photo and I am going to take one of my colored pencils. I have these new ones which are really fun and these are colored mechanical pencils with colored lead and I like not only playing with these but these are great for my travel kit which is what I got them for because I don't have to bring a pencil sharpener. I love that. So anyway I'm going to pick one of these colors. Now these aren't water soluble. These are plain old colored pencils and so the mark the pencil leaves behind is going to stay. So I could go with a light highlight color or I could go with a dark shadow color. I do think I'm going to go with a dark shadow color and I think I'm going to pick purple which is probably not the one anyone expected and I'm going to go ahead and sketch out a basic shape for my flower first then we're going to get to painting so I'm going to speed forward through my process and I'll pop back in when I think there's something relevant that you all need to know about. I will be right back for you guys in the quick version here. Once you get your colored pencil drawing on of your piece that you're creating then I want you to just use some colors inspired by your inspiration photo of washes in the background. We're really going to focus on painting the flower the primary focal point and we're not going to spend tons of time on painting the background we want to hint at and suggest the background so I want you to do some washes in in this case like a blue grays and greens of colors in the background and then we're going to dry that and then move on to the foreground the flower in between colors I'm drawing them it will eliminate too much mixing of colors and too much muddiness so I do have my heat gun here plugged in next to me and we're going to do that and I'll be right back. Okay so I've started my flower by adding my lighter colors in first this flower particular painting I don't always do this but with this particular painting I while I want my colors to lay on top of each other that makes it interesting for me watercolor painting I don't necessarily want them to blend a lot so I am going to dry each color in between putting on the next color so I'm going to dry my yellow colors I put all the yellow where I thought the highlights of the flower are I'm going to dry it and then we're going to go in with progressively darker colors and see where we get okay so we have a good basic shape for our painting you definitely could stop here I'm not going to I added in all of my colors and shapes for the basic idea and shape of the flower now it's time to go in and add some of these striking shadows that are in this flower center and on the petals okay I want to add some darker pops and some lighter pops which if I'm careful I should be able to do with the watercolor paint without resorting to gel pencil I have no problem with that but we're going to try it the way I'm thinking first and so here we go let's give it a try if you could create something you truly love whether you end up selling it or not it's always a good idea to take a picture of it if you have a scanner scan it but there's a quick way to do an interesting watercolor painting experimenting and playing with the medium I love you don't have to have expensive expensive tools and materials use what you have I will say get a decent paint brush I love the Princeton select brushes because number one they're a really good paint brush and number two they're not expensive Princeton Neptune are good too those are the two brands that I I have the most of they're all Princeton brushes for the most part I have either the Neptune or so the select I do think this one this teeny round one is something else but the price tag is over the barcode and I can't read it it starts EL it looks like that's wrong my reading glasses on but Princeton brushes they're a good brush and you know often they go on sale at your local art supply store so check them out I love them because the bristles never never fall out how frustrating is it to work be working on any painting project or glue project for that matter and be using a brush and have the bristles fall out and then have to pick them out I hate that I almost never have that with a Princeton brush I have some expensive brushes I never use them so that's it that's my tip for the day so use what you have koi watercolors work or another inexpensive brand get a decent brush and play go to my website and look at the photos over there and see what inspires you to create a piece of art don't forget to show some love to the other channels in the collab there's a lot of them in the description below they all are bringing a new and unique spin on pick your passion I hope you found something interesting and useful here whether you're watching the short version or the long version don't forget to like share and subscribe and if you're watching this on YouTube and check my link tree list of links for all the places you can follow me on social media or support the free content here on YouTube or over in the Facebook art groups and the most important thing of course is to go out and have a great day and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later