 Oh, hello there. It's Sandy Allnock and I am going to talk about combating watercolor exhaustion today. Yes, watercolor exhaustion is a thing. I have dealt with it for years and I recently had a revelation as to why that is, and it really did surprise me to a great extent. Fair warning, I am not going to talk about whatever it is that I'm painting on screen right now because I don't know at the time I'm doing this voiceover what is going to be visually passing by except that it's going to be one of the rejects that is not in the new rocks and ripples class because I have a number of those that got kicked out not because they were not good paintings but they got kicked out because I couldn't figure out how to explain them to anybody and I knew that it was going to cause someone watercolor exhaustion. Now what is watercolor exhaustion? It's when you start to paint and you come out of it instead of being energized you come out exhausted and wiped and maybe even not all that sure you want to paint again for quite some time and often that will happen to people in middle of a painting and that is a terrible place for that to happen. For me I have suffered from it in very specific instances that I will explain to you and I didn't realize the commonality in the moments that I have experienced this before until just in the last couple weeks. I take a lot of watercolor workshops lots of teachers from all over the world come through my city near me and I go take their classes I drop my $500 to $800 on the table and I sit there for three or four days studying under them and watching they do two demos a day usually and then we have a couple hours to paint in between and I go into it with them and vigor and excitement and I can't wait I'm gonna paint something epic because I'm gonna have the help of this person and it's gonna be great and I pick a painting subject that is so far beyond what I can do that I end up in mental breakdown not in tears necessarily but I find myself working so hard in those classes because I've chosen a subject most of the time that suits what the teacher type the types of things the teacher paints when I go to take classes from Tom Schaller I pick something architectural when I go to take a class with Bjorn Bernstrom I go for an epic landscape different kinds of people different kinds of things but I usually pick something that's far beyond my ability in my head telling myself it's because I'm gonna have help and it doesn't matter if I have someone there holding my hand for every brush strokes I am not going to still be able to do that because when you're trying something that is ridiculously far beyond what you can do you end up having to think about water management pigments what colors you're using oh my gosh what happened to that color why did it do that thing how do I get this texture what am I gonna do when the trees meet the grass I can't get the barn to look right it looks crooked something's wrong here there's just so many things that you end up thinking about when you've bitten off more than you can chew and it doesn't mean you need to always just paint a turtle and that's it because that's the only thing you can paint what it means is when you put together too many elements in a painting that you don't know how to individually handle it's really hard to put them together when you're doing them all at once because when you're doing a wash you need to think about how that sky wash is going to meet with the trees what's going to happen when they join what's going to happen when the trees meet the flower meadow at the bottom and how are you going to handle the flower meadow do you know how to paint a flower meadow I can't tell you how many times I've started a painting with a flower meadow in it and I don't know how to paint a flower meadow and I went into meltdown because I couldn't get it to work and I just tossed painting after painting because I never took the time to focus on that one thing that I didn't know how to do I tried to focus on it while doing everything else around it I had a similar experience when preparing for this rocks and ripples class my original thought crazy me was that I wanted to teach people how to do like a stream with rocks in it I wanted to teach them how to do a waterfall I wanted to also address ocean waves I thought that would be really fun and just do it all in one class well these lessons in the foundation series are five lessons five paintings because if I start doing a class like that with everything in it I'm going to be charging you $500 for that many lessons you don't want to pay that so I had to go back to basics and once I did that and I decided I was going to break the whole water thing down into several classes as we're going to start with rocks rocks and ripples and we're going to talk about how water moves around the rocks and we're going to talk about the textures on rocks and how to get texture and what kinds of colors you can use with these things and how to mix neutral colors because you're using a lot of neutrals when you're doing rocks and just lots of things like that in order to learn how to handle one particular subject because then if you've taken my trees classes and you've taken my rocks and ripples class then you might be able to handle doing a scene that has trees around a stream that has rocks and ripples but there's lots of different elements of landscapes and that's where my whole idea came from originally to do this rather large series on each element the foundations of landscapes so that by the time I get to starting to teach level five classes and start to talk about how to bring the whole painting together then I can focus on things like how does the sky join the trees what does that transition look like what does it look like when the trees turn into that field and those sorts of things and if you're putting a cabin into the scene you can take the drawing class so you can learn how to make the cabin look realistic instead of staring at your painting and going my cabin ruined the whole thing because my cabin's crooked I want to give people the skills to be able to build their own paintings their own images their own scenes by giving them all the pieces that they need in order to get there but when you're trying to do all of that at once and you're just overwhelmed with it it can be discouraging from painting at all lots of those times when I came home from classes and was in just total mental freak out mode I ended up sitting on the couch and not doing anything for days because I just told myself I'm just tired and I don't want to paint anymore and I would move on to something totally different instead of being enthused and inspired by what I just learned I was instead overwhelmed and I don't want people to feel overwhelmed I want you to be excited about your next painting what are you going to do next and giving you lots of different ways to think through all of that is what I want to do in the level five classes how do you plan for what your whole structure of your painting is going to be how do you look at a scene in front of you and decide which elements you're going to eliminate and which ones you're not are you going to decide to move a tree from here to over there and why and talk about composition more those kinds of ideas are the ones I want to get to but I can't talk about those at the same time as I'm trying to teach how to paint a rock so I don't want to end up distracted by all those small details when we get to the bigger classes and be able to kind of turn the page on the basics when we get to level five and be able to really soar in watercoloring and getting more people to be able to paint their heart in watercolor rather than just like oh my gosh I've got to I've got to figure out how to do all of this at once and I don't know where to begin I want to be able to be that helper for you as you start moving through your watercolor journey and even if you're not at that point yet just know that that will be awaiting you when you are ready to start doing more with your watercolors if you want to start becoming more of a painter rather than a little hobbyist which is not a bad thing to be but if you want to change how you do things and how you approach things then I want to be positioned to be a help to you and if I can keep all of us from being exhausted by watercolor including myself I think that would be a really good start to the whole thing so a little bit more on the foundation's classes in general you don't have to take one in order to take another unless it's a two-parter so for instance the watercolor trees class there's a watercolor trees one and a watercolor trees two and I recommend taking one before you take two and with the water classes I would recommend that you take the this one first and then if there's others take the others because they'll all be building on the foundation of what was taught in the earlier one but if you don't want to paint trees you can jump right into water and there's not anything that you have to have from the trees glass in order to learn how to paint the water so I want to break those up so their modules that people can decide what they want to learn and what they want help with because there might be painters out there who are fabulous at one thing and they just need help in a particular area and this gives them the option to kind of choose their own adventure that kind of a thing before I end this video I thought I'd show you a little bit of me trying to hold up my stack of paintings that I went through as I tried to develop this class you can see just how much I did paint quite a lot and also pictures of the kinds of things you're going to be learning in the class itself if you want to know what kinds of images I finally did decide to teach there's also a preview video over there for you a free pre-class video on mixing neutrals and yeah that's about it for me I will put a link in the doomly-do to the class and I will see you again very soon take care guys bye