 Well, hello there from a very very very soppy rainy day in my studio. I'm gonna be painting something lush Inspired by all that moisture because it's been so dry here. I'm thrilled. We have some rain But I wanted to show you a little snippet of my life My fish tank is now in my bedroom It used to be in the living room with one giant fish in it who loved his other fishy friends so much She ate them so he ended up being a one fish tank and now we're excited since everything got rearranged recently The fish tank is in the bedroom and it has lots of little fish in there and giallo Just thinks it is fun to watch them eat their breakfast and Swim around and he does not jump on the tank so everything's safe, but he just enjoys sitting and watching it And so I decided I would make some breakfast for me as well and tell you about my favorite juice This mango nectar that you can get at Costco is insanely Delicious. Let me just tell you I could give up like drinking sodas all day if I could just Guzzle down this stuff. It's so good And then I made some toast with my mom's favorite thing that she used to do when we were kids Which was have some cinnamon and sugar mixed together. This is too much I did have to shake some off, but you put it on top of some buttered toast and it is delicious It's time for the morning sketch sometimes I watercolor sometimes I do a pencil sketch or something But I always try to start my day off with something small while I have my little breakfast So I got some fresh water so I can do some watercolor But I also want to show you this mug because this mug is brand new and you too can get one that has my Painting on it and we'll talk about that. It's my new world watercolor month mug As always, I'm gonna be an ambassador for world watercolor month in July So for 2023, this is the piece of art that will be on my products And you are welcome to go purchase one for charity raises money for kids to be able to make art And I got the big bag this time the honkin giant bag. It fits my entire palette. Oh my goodness It's huge the smaller ones, which I normally get will hold something like this is just for relative length a silver brush But I can't take my bigger brushes in these pouches when I go places Because they don't quite fit they would bend back those brushes So I'm gonna put a small roll inside of this larger one so that it holds the brushes in place Because I don't want them flopping around in there, but it does fit the entire bigger brushes So you can keep other supplies and it doesn't have to be watercolor supplies You could also use the mug to drink out of or to use as your paint water or holding brushes or whatever whatever you want So I'm preparing my paints. This is my house of Hoffman palette. Yes, it's overkill So those of you who've looked it up. It's overkill. You don't need it But I bought this eight by eight pad of fluid 300 pound watercolor paper and it's a block so it's sealed on the top and bottom Most blocks are sealed all the way around four sides with some sort of opening so you can get it off I'll show you at the end how you remove it But this one I don't really understand why you would put 300 pound paper in a block Because the point is with a block to make it so that things stay still and you don't curl up on you and 300 pound paper is not gonna curl up on you anyway because it's so heavy Again, I'll show you at the end what I mean by how heavy it is So for the painting I've sketched out my plant and put some water in a leaf and I was thinking and you know, maybe it didn't work out as well as I had thought but I was thinking of painting some undercoat undercoat of color so that the Center veins in each of these leaves would carry this lighter color because I wanted to do leaves that had lighter veins in center rather than darker and That meant with the way that I was doing this was going with the gradation and I used cobalt yellow Which is oriolan and cobalt blue And I haven't really used these two to make greenings particularly much And I thought maybe I'm gonna try to see if I can paint this whole thing in these two colors and see what happens How dark can I get the color? Cobalt blue doesn't go really dark, but maybe with a lot of layers Then I could get it to do that But I was discovering real early in this process that this paper does suck in the paint. It sucks in the moisture and Needs to be kind of worked with pretty quickly So I wanted to mix up some color in my palette. So it was ready to go instead of Constantly mixing smaller batches and since I was gonna use oriolan or cobalt yellow with the cobalt blue Then I'm just gonna mix up a giant puddle and I'm gonna mix it in two halves On one side, I'm gonna have a mixture that's more cobalt blue and the other side more yellow So I'll have a blue green and a yellow green to choose from And both of them will be very related to each other and they'll blend nicely because they have the same two colors You could make two entirely different greens and blend those together and that would be fine But these are gonna work better because they have the same colors within them Even though they look very different. So Here we go next layer on the second pass. This is on dry paper and I could just feel immediately that I was This was gonna be a challenge because the paint just sinks in I mean, there's there's not a lot of flow flow to it I mean, I thought the name of the company is fluid. This should be fluid paper, right? But I decided I had switched my bigger brush. I got that small line in first Went to the bigger brush to put more water on the paper I just wanted something that's gonna flow better and even there it was just starting to sink in quickly I wanted to put some darker color right at the edge of where that center vein is and put some of the more blue color it was a little too blue and I couldn't get it to keep moving So I just added in some more green but that'll just be the darker side of the leaf and we'll call it Call it good there But it was kind of interesting to see the pilling start to happen You can see little flakes of fibers starting to appear in the paint Part of that is user error because with some papers if they are the kind that pill up then If you are painting and you scrub a whole lot while you're working on like dry paper You put the watercolor down and then you keep working at it Then you're gonna be scrubbing up some of the surface fibers And so if you've got a paper that does pill on you then do as simple a layer as you can Which is not what I was doing here I was I was doing some scrubbing and working back and forth in the same areas Which tends to cause that kind of Pilling to to be generated So part of that is user error in not using the Paint properly on this kind of paper, but also I don't tend to like papers that are gonna pill up on me So this may not be the one for me, but I do have a whole pad of it So I will be using it because I don't throw stuff out. I just use it so now we're getting into another pass a darker pass and You know just trying to emphasize those center veins that I had in the The middles of each of these leaves and As I was working on it some of the color from underneath really started lifting Not used to paint that lifts quite this much. It will happen with any watercolor paper But this one really did it a lot more than I was ready for I was not expecting that So I had a bunch of areas that I was like, okay Well, I guess I'm gonna go in for another pass and add darker contrast to it Because that will cover up some of those areas that didn't work great But here you can see I had blue on my brush earlier the blue green and then switch to the yellow green and I can make a nice Transition anywhere in that leaf when I have both paint colors ready There's another area that again I was just fussing with it and I just wanted to see was this paint really lifting from underneath and you can Really see that happening but again, I was doing a lot of Scrubbly bubbling with my brush going back and forth which Encourages that kind of lifting to happen So don't do that make really simple very very straightforward motions with the brush just real simple strokes as much as you can and Some of that will be eliminated So I'm doing some negative painting around Some of the veins that go out on the sides of each of the leaves in addition to the center veins that go down the middle of each one And I think I'm gonna be doing more green plants like this one for the paper testing that I'll be doing throughout July So if there is a particular kind of plant that you would like to see me do then leave a comment And we'll see if I can include that in the roster Now for breaking the seal on the adhesive around the outside sometimes you can just lift them with a finger But this one boy goodness gracious I had to use a knife to cut through it and even though the knife was able to cut through it I'm using a fingertip knife. I Still end up with all the glue goo Sometimes you can just peel that right off But this was not going anywhere So I did have to use a ruler and a knife to trim it down and get rid of that Told you I was gonna show you how heavy this paper is and you can hear when you tap it on the desk It is quite thick if you're used to 140 the 300 is twice as thick So I'm gonna leave your links to the supplies that I used for my painting as well as the World Watercolor Month link So if you want to go get yourself some swag and be ready for the July launch of World Watercolor Month Then come on back for that make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss a thing And I will see you with a little more tropical something in alcohol marker coming up this weekend So I will see you on Saturday with another video and in the meantime go create something every day. I'll see you later