 Hello, I'm Sandy Alnach and I'm an artist and I bit my subject. I wanted to paint one piece of chocolate this time. This is my second of my chocolate videos. Paint it in both gouache and watercolor and continue the conversation we started in the last video about how your art does not need to be perfect and tidy when your nose is right up on top of it. In that video, I did a whole box of chocolates and it's from a printed image so you can go and purchase the printed image and just color right on top of it. You can paint it with gouache, use markers, pencils, whatever you want. But I showed you how messy my coloring is until you pull back from it. And I want to talk a little bit more about that in this video by doing a single piece of chocolate. So let's get going on that. I began by biting my subject which, you know, I'm taking one for the team. Happy to take a bite of chocolate for you. This photo is on my blog if you'd like to download it and paint it up yourself. But I bit into it and then I let my teeth drag on it so that I would end up with that kind of drippy sort of look of caramel. Because this was not the gooey kind necessarily so I had to kind of pull. And then in Photoshop I added a black background because I love me some drama. And you can go get that photo for free if you would like to paint it up yourself. I'd love to see what you create if you do. So in gouache what I have been learning in my oil painting class is to try to start with the darks and work toward lights. I am a water colorist. I paint from lights to darks. It's just completely the opposite thinking. Here I decided to separate the caramel and the chocolate at least and not really worry about the dark value in the caramel yet. And for the chocolate portion I mixed a little tiny bit of white into the color that I used for the chocolate and made it a little bit lighter so I could start defining some of the drips that go across the chocolate. Just little by little. It's going to add a whole lot more later but this just at least gets those things set. And as gouache dries it dries differently. Some colors dry darker some colors dry lighter. So I moved on to start putting in some of the general shapes in the center in the caramel. Now when you're painting something like this or drawing or whatever it's a complicated shape and your brain tells you I need to make this look like caramel. But what you need to tell your brain and train your brain to start to think and to see is in shapes and values. When you see in shapes and values you start not worrying about whether or not it looks like caramel right now because otherwise you're going to be telling yourself I don't know how to paint caramel I don't know how to make it look drippy I don't know and you're going to get lost in that thought train and you need to just pick a shape whichever one you're going to paint next just pick one and look at what the value is and paint it. Now starting with your darks is good but here in the caramel I had started with that lighter yellow ochre type of color and value and then I started putting in some of the medium shape medium colored shapes medium darks and then I went in with the very darks the reason I did that was because I was trying to separate the caramel into zones so that I could look at just a smaller zone instead of focusing on the entire blob of caramel so there's a little hangover ledge at the top and then a hangover ledge at the bottom so just the way that the caramel separated in in the the bite that I took and then I could work on each of those sections individually and not have to really stress over trying to think through the entire thing at once I could think of about just a tiny portion of it at this point I realized I probably should have put my background in so that the drips could be painted over top of it I am terrible at painting a nice smooth background in light colors I can do it in darks but in lights I struggle with that so you'll see me mess with the shadows underneath here and there. Once I at least got this much established I now have that shelf at the top that has a couple sections to it that hang down then I took my yellow ochre color which is kind of the original color plus a tiny tiny bit of white to brighten it a little bit and started adding in all of the little textures that are hanging off that top shelf and then I started doing it at the bottom just working through one little section at a time not stressing about the entire thing and when you're doing a macro view of something like this this is a super important thing to train yourself to see because if you start thinking too much about the big picture you'll get lost in it so look little by little at tiny sections and say I'm gonna I'm gonna look at this shape and what is the shape of it and how thick is it how how does it relate to the shape that's already next to it and I started seeing things like the chocolate almost separating from the caramel in certain places really dark areas right next to the caramel where the caramel and the chocolate join almost as if there's a separation between them and just noticing those tiny things is what's going to make it look realistic as you start painting so here I am trying again with the background I was debating whether I was gonna make those little rivulets in the insert from the Valentine's chocolate box and I would try it I would let it dry and then it would dry terribly and then I would try it again yeah that's just how I work in gouache we're trying to do all that stuff I was enjoying the chocolate much more than I did the shadow background but while that dried I started brightening up the caramel so there's some areas where it's yellowish and almost orangey and depending on how the photograph is lit it can be all sorts of colors in there and at one point in here I actually pulled an orange into my browns to try to brighten them up because I was looking for both the value I wanted it to be the right mid-tone and I think of the mid-tones in terms of you know is it a 30% tint of whatever that original color would have been or is it like an 80% and that's that's how I kind of think through the values and as I start painting there's a lot of times I'll paint a few strokes of something that I thought I mixed properly and then it goes on the paper and I'm like oh that's too bright and then I go back and I mix in something darker so it's constantly going back and forth to my palette to figure out exactly what value I'm gonna need to paint that tiny section that that little bit and I don't get to a pure white until the very end if at all sometimes you don't even need a pure white sometimes just white with a little tiny hint of yellow in it is gonna be what you need now here's where the background made a big difference because you can see the color of the chocolate is bloodstone and the color of the background is an actual black one of the Jane's blacks and that's where it starts kind of making the difference between the two you see the separation and then I can go back and tidy up the outside edges of the chocolate against that black and then if I paint too much of that I can go back in and paint some black around it and I love that that you can constantly fuss around with gouache and you know make little changes to it I wanted to warm up the chocolate a little bit instead of being such a cold color so I added a little bit more to it and it's just a process little by little of changing things up so that it starts getting the roundness that I'm looking for and it always wait for it to dry before I make any final decisions on what to change next so so there's the gouache version which from a distance looks great from close up just looks very messy but let's take a look now at a watercolor version of this and how to approach it in the opposite way of thinking so I began by putting some color into the caramel some yellow ochre and dropped in some Indian yellow and a little more yellow ochre so I'd have that glow at the end at the tips and then mixed up a brown with transparent red oxide and French ultramarine to start to paint the rest of the chocolate now what I wanted to do was join the chocolate and the background a lot of times I see people painting and they're like yeah I'm just gonna paint this part of the the subject matter here and then I'm gonna add the background and they don't really consider how it's going to join to it I wanted to have no white at the top of the chocolate and the way to do that is to join the background right now and you'll see how this turns into a black background later but for the moment I just wanted to get rid of that white up at the top and establish that background so that the chocolate and the background at least exist in the same universe because otherwise we're gonna end up with a hard line around the outside edge when we try to join the chocolate color and the black color later on in the painting so I've added in the shadows underneath as well so I can have a very light shadow on the table dried it completely and I always make sure I feel it to make sure there's no warping left there's any warping that usually means there's still some water in the paper even if you don't feel wetness and then I started painting in my chocolate now I'm gonna be painting a couple layers of this there are people who can choose the right exact right brown in the first pass and be satisfied with that I am not that person because I'm always adjusting things but that does mean I have to be more careful so that when I paint over top of it that I don't get a double edge for each of my shapes so it's worth trying to learn how to do that on the first try rather than on the third and fourth try like I do so just kept mixing up various types of browns as I went using the same colors that are already in my painting because I didn't want to add anything new and I've just looked at the photograph to get those same dark shapes establishing that top shelf and bottom shelf with their dark areas in them and I'm a little looser with it of course here than I am with the gouache because it's a little less controllable when you're talking about watercolor but I also love the fact that all these colors are just mixing together and blending and kind of looking drippy just because they are watercolor and that gives the the interior of the caramel just kind of a little exciting feel to it because it's got all this mixing of colors but now I can switch to a smaller brush and then also to thicker paint and that's going to start establishing some of the real darks in the chocolate itself and I I do the first pass as much as I can with a bigger brush because the bigger brush you use the looser your painting is going to be and I like a looser touch to my painting I like it when the detail doesn't come in till later and then I can control exactly where it is rather than ending up painting everything with a tiny brush which just makes everything look like it's been labored over and as soon as I get to large areas I switch back to my larger brush so establishing these really nice darks as I go using the brown and then dropping in where needed some pains blue gray that is one color that I added in I could have mixed a dark you know dark grayish black color using the transparent red oxide and the French ultramarine but decided for the sake of speed because I wanted to keep this painting moving while it was still wet then I would use pains blue gray and that's one of the things that I often will do is just that's why I have pains blue gray in my palette is when I try to work quickly and I just need a quick dark that one works and I I find that blacks tend to feel really dark and black and they feel a little bit dead in my painting so working through adding more darks into the rest of the caramel section so that I can start pulling pulling together the fact that this is stuck into the chocolate that it's on the inside so it has to have some areas that are as dark but again I'm looking at the shapes in this one since I've already painted it in gouache and I also had already sketched it in pencil before I even started any of this I'm very familiar now with these shapes and the gouache really helped me to solidify what a lot of this looks like in my brain so by the time I got to the watercolor then it was much easier to work on now sometimes I do a watercolor sketch before I go to gouache because gouache takes me longer than watercolor will but in this particular case I knew I could get really lost in trying to do something crazy with this watercolor version if I didn't do the gouache first so I needed kind of a slower study the black color I'm using here is a mixture of again the same colors I used in the chocolate using the French ultramarine blue with the transparent red oxide and I painted it around negative painting around the top of the chocolate so that I can end up with that edge being a hard white edge but on the right side where I want that dark part of the chocolate to be part of the background to disappear into it I painted that right over top of the chocolate and that allowed me to join those two pieces you see how that worked out to have that initial painting in the first place so that it starts to just pull it all together and things don't end up looking like a sticker because some edges can disappear into the background this way now I'm going back in with a little bit of a brighter color with more of the brown in it rather than just the brown with the blue so I could get a better color for the chocolate and using my smaller brush I can start adding in small details small leaving small highlights while I darken other areas and put all those finishing touches into the painting so I've added in a reaffirmation of the shadow shapes and stuff that are underneath of the chocolate and then we get off to my favorite part which is always pulling off the tape just getting those nice white edges makes me happy it makes me feel like the painting is done and so this one that I compared to my gouache painting and you can see they both look very realistic the backgrounds are different because watercolor just does a washier type of background instead of a solid one they both have different levels of detail on the inside of the caramel but they both look realistic the average person is never going to look at your artwork and put their nose right up to the piece of paper and say wow look at that blend that you didn't blend well no one's going to do that it's only you doing it so step back from your artwork I talked about that in my previous video as well that one's a little more beginner friendly so please do check that out there's a link in the doobly-doo and be encouraged that whether you paint whether you use alcohol markers whether you use gullard pencils whatever you do give yourself grace to let perfection go because perfection is not needed later on this morning in just a couple hours I'm going to be hosting an edgy zoom educational zoom call I'm doing one of these a month and this month we're going to talk about pencil and graphite give you some tips some tricks just little fun things for those who like to draw pick up the link over in the events tab at art venture and link to art venture is down below in the doobly-doo next up quick heads up for those at patreon who are in the $10 and up levels this month's watercolor video is going to be peonies a beautiful bouquet of flowers so check that out in a couple hours that's going to be on patreon if you'd like to join the patrons link in the guess where doobly-doo down below the video finally a little peek at what is coming in my next video is a little tiny box of treats that I got from a new partner that I am going to be working with this year I'm very excited to open this up and see what's in my little care package so come back on Tuesday and check it out with me I'll see you then take care bye