 Hi there, my name is Sandy Allnock, and I want to extend a special welcome to Watercolorists. For some reason lately YouTube has been sending me lots of new people when I post watercolor videos. So welcome. I'm glad you're here. I do have some watercolor playlists you're welcome to check out and they're for all different levels of people. So you can go see if there's something of interest to you because I love to teach. Today, I'm going to be doing a watercolor on some Windsor and Newton paper. I'm going to talk about that a little bit. I'm going to be painting the Yankee Clipper, which is a boat that I did some sketches of in my previous video. I did some watercolor thumbnails. If you're interested in seeing that and understanding the process of thinking through which photograph I chose to do for this particular painting, I'm also going to talk about masking fluid and when to use that versus gouache and when to use that. Because I find they have two very different purposes and two very different looks. So let's talk about all of that and paint the Yankee Clipper together. When deciding between masking fluid and gouache, figure out whether or not the elements need to be white of the paper or whether it's just a small element you'll be adding in later and we'll talk about this more. But masking fluid has to be put on first, so it reserves the white of the paper and this misket that I love when I do use masking fluid, which is not terribly often. It's orange. It's got an tint to it. You just shake it up to make sure it mixes in and then you can actually see it on the paper once you start painting with it. I coat my brush in a little bit of liquid dishwashing soap, so it protects the brush a little bit. It's not going to make it last forever because masking fluid is just going to be really hard on brushes, so don't use anything good with it. But you'll just dip into the masking fluid and then start painting anything that needs to remain white. And the problem with this that I find is that you still can't get, for the most part, unless maybe somebody else is really good at this and I'm just terrible at it. I can't get a super crisp white line. There's always repair that's needed. And that's not always a bad thing because depending on what's behind it, you may find it's really easy to fix that. If there's a dark green behind your elements, then you can paint in with that dark green around some edges to clean them up. But as much as I would love it if I could get a really nice crisp line, I just am not capable of it. So I knew, even as I was working on this, that I was going to have to do some repair work later. And it's just a matter of whether or not the repair is going to be while using gouache or while using the color behind it to cover some areas up. Because until you remove it, you don't really know. So I've just gone around the entire boat. There's some areas, like on these rims of the boat, the trim, where it's a lighter gray rather than being the black paint and then even the bottom section of the boat is darker. So I did mask those off and then I'll use layering and glazing over top of them to bring all that together later. So those are not going to be white areas, but you can mask things that you plan on painting in later as well. But here's a really good example of why I wanted to use the masking fluid for a lot of those white bits, not all of them, just the thickest ones of them, because I wanted this wash, this soft tree wash behind here to end up going right behind all of that and not to feel like I had to very delicately go in and make each section in between all those white bits, make it all match. I wanted to keep that washy look across the whole thing, because that's just how I paint. I like to have all of those areas join together, but I didn't want the trees to be really dark. A lot of times I'll make my trees rich and dark and I'll get into a lot of details, but I wanted the main thing to be the boat. You'll see here I'm putting in a shadow that goes across the white portions of the boat and I wanted that to join in with everything else so the colors will just kind of keep merging throughout the whole painting, but that white area I didn't mask it out and when you're painting you'll start to realize eventually whether or not you're capable of remembering to leave that white or whether or not you need to mask it out because your brain is going to shut down because it happens to the best of us and if you're going to leave that white you need to be able to know what you can paint out and what you can't and here for the red I didn't want the red to entirely be over top of color so I left the red trim on the bottom of the boat in white just so I could mess around with it later. I'll have lots of other issues with it as I go you'll see, but you know there's there's some areas where I knew from my sketch that I was going to have have some issues with trying to figure out how to crisscross those areas and get the red to look like it's actually in the water and get it to merge with some of the colors that are there. So next was to add more darks into the greens and again this allows me to be really fresh and loose with the greens because I don't have to worry about you know starting and stopping a tree on one side or the other of that masking fluid because there's a lot of times when I start doing some really detailed work I'm trying to go around things I love to do negative painting and I could have done this with negative painting but trying to match the the green trees on the left and right side of every single one of these beams would be crazy ridiculous hard and I was not feeling in the mood for crazy ridiculous hard and I also wanted this kind of loose fresh background it didn't want everything to feel like it was you know labored over because the boat's going to have so much labor so this allowed me to just put some edges you know with my my fancy liner brush onto some of those trees I added more detail you know I was trying to put in for a little bit here some of the stems the trunks the trees and branches that ended up going away because this also started feeling like too much detail and I didn't want that much taking away from the boat because the boat's going to have a ton of little itty bitty detail in it so in order to recover from having done all that I just sprayed the heck out of it and let those colors move around pushed all that color around on the paper and fortunately somewhere in here I was interrupted by a friend of mine who rang the doorbell normally if I am at this stage of a painting I will not even answer the door because I need to keep going while things are wet but in this particular one I had finished these trees so right at the end of the trees was when their doorbell rang she was bringing over for me which was really really nice a painting that I had won she had done a painting and I had entered a raffle and she had told me recently that I won so she was bringing it over and she was also picking up some of my black paint that I had used for my kitchen cabinets and my dining room table because she was inspired by seeing my my tour of all the art in my house if you miss that one I will put a link to it in the doobly-doo because I recently did a big renovation which I manually did most of the work myself because I didn't have any money to do it so I was just yeah just making sure I muscled through it all on my own and she was so inspired by seeing it that she was going to go paint some of her cabinets and I told her hey come and get the paint because I did not want to have all that paint left over so we had a nice visit and by the time I was done I was ready to dump jump in here on this portion of the boat so I combined using some some black and some paints blue gray I was debating whether I wanted a more washy look or if I wanted it to feel more solid this was not drying quite as well as I wanted a lot of it was due to the masking fluid because the masking fluid pushes things away from the edge of it and I also was painting this on an angle I had my desk pulled up at about a 30 degree angle for this so I could get all that paint moving and that caused some movement of the paint as well so I did end up having to put another wash of color over top of the boat to really make it good and black but then came the water and just playing around with how I was going to render that I knew from my sketch that I was going to have deep dark rich color along one side of it down to this left and then I added more of the red in there because I realized how weak that that had dried by the time I was all said and done and just kept adding to it and with the water I couldn't decide whether or not I wanted to have there was some white ripples in the photo and I wasn't really liking those white ripples because I didn't have enough intention to render them really well and that was going to end up making them look crazy so I did simplify by the time it was all said and done this bottom area because I started putting in the waves and when you're doing wave ripples I did a video on that recently when I talked about close up like right in front of you you're going to get more of an overhead view of water so you're going to get more curviness and bigger shapes and as it moves into the distance away from you it's going to get flatter and with smaller shapes so I was trying some of that but it was just feeling like I didn't have an anchor to the bottom and so you'll see as I progress that I did decide to just kind of paint more of that in and darken that whole bottom section I added some more wave texture over in the right hand side and I got a little bit overly fussy with it I didn't want this part to be as prominent as it was going to get but I did have a plan in my head if this didn't go right because I knew I wanted all that water on the left hand side to get much darker and I could just do a glaze over all of it and darken the entire thing because there really isn't a whole lot of pure white white jumping out of that water so I wanted to smooth out and join all of those sections so on the right hand side I did that with mostly water first and then was able to go back in with a darker glaze on the left hand side and just use more blue in there as well to change the color of the water and try to bring it all together so you can watch it kind of develop as I just start darkening in those areas you can use a small brush and do a thousand strokes like I was doing here you can just get a big brush and wash over the whole thing which is what I eventually decided to do my nice big flat brush and that just pulled everything together so it had that same kind of water texture that smoothness that the boat has and that's kind of what I wanted to match I grabbed my rubber cement pickup which is basically this thing that is sticky and you can rub it across the surface and it'll grab onto the masking fluid and pull it up now if you're not using good paper this can be a very dangerous moment because you could ruin the surface and then you won't be able to go back in and paint anything where the masking fluid was because it's ripped off that top layer always test it and don't test it by just putting some masking fluid on a scrap of whatever you're testing put it on there let it dry paint over it let it dry paint over another layer let it dry and then remove it just to make sure that it's going to work in actual context so now I have some nice crisp white lines that I'm going to be able to deal with and add all this detail into the painting this bottom section remember I put the trim on using the masking fluid now I'm going back in with some paints blue gray and then I'll use some black as well to start to cover that up so that I get the look of having black trim on a black boat and I can you know go around carefully all the buoys and start to add some sharpness to them because they lost their sharpness the masking fluid just wasn't wasn't really helpful in terms of getting some nice crisp outlines to it but around this black area it was really easy to fix some other areas are not as easy so the bottom section of the boat is darker since it's in shadow and then just a little lip under the top and then get into a lot of that detail work because there's a ton of little itty bitty details in this entire boat just lots of little windows elements that are part of the boat itself trying to create some grays within the blacks and this is where if your surface has pulled up from the masking fluid that you won't be able to go back in and add these visual differences between a gray and a black and a white and like that you know there's some areas where some transitions across the white are going to make it look realistic instead of looking like a ghostly white bunch of lines it needs to look like these are posts and some of these posts and beams and everything are going to be gray and if I use a really light wash a very thin mix then I can paint it right into there and even if I get a kissed edge I've talked about kissed edges before where you're painting something and there's already something right next to it and you end up getting a dark liner along the edge where the two cross I don't have that much problem with it when I use a very very pale wash so sometimes I'll use a pale wash two three four times in order to make sure that I get the rich color that I want but that I don't end up with too much of a kissed edge I ended up having to repaint that shadow again that I was hoping was going to just stay there from the earlier wash but watercolor always dries 30 lighter than than it goes on and I just never seem to be able to figure that out when I'm doing my first wash of anything there are some elements on this boat that have darker areas and you know they're just they're dark poles of some kind there's also a dinghy in the back of the boat and those things can get painted on last because they're darks painted on top of the darks in the background I've mixed up some red so I can make the buoys red I decided to make all my buoys red even though some of them are white in the photograph because I just thought they looked festive being all red here and sorry about the color on this it just kind of blasted out I don't know what is the deal sometimes with watercolor things just get a little on the crazy side there is a guy in the front of the boat and he's working on something there's some pieces up there in the front of the boat that I'll add some detail to a lot of this little stuff when it comes to painting boats buildings cars that sort of stuff rather than trying to paint every object I find I actually prefer the look of suggested details as opposed to carefully delineated ones you know letting lines come and go let letting them disappear suggestions of small shapes but without trying to make everything look hyper realistic because even though my work has a good sense of realism to it if you look close up there's just not a lot of perfect detail in it and that makes the painting much more joyful for me to paint and a lot of why I paint is because I enjoy it and I don't enjoy spending that kind of time on that sort of detail now I also wanted to mention about this paper this is the Windsor Newton professional watercolor paper this is the rough version and in my video a couple weeks ago where I painted on this I mentioned that it's more expensive than arches and I was not surprised that it performed beautifully because it's got money cheaper papers are just harder to paint on and don't give you as good a results but when I was doing the supply list and checking my links on that video I discovered and I did put it in both the blog post and in the comments on YouTube I discovered that if you buy 10 sheets it comes down to less than six dollars a sheet so it goes from ten bucks a sheet to six when you buy 10 now I know not everybody can afford to buy 10 at once but I save up so I can buy 10 at once and then I feel like I have lots of paper and I don't treat it as so precious so I I put that forth to you as a paper that you might want to consider because I'm definitely going to order some up very very soon there is a dinghy in the back of the boat I believe that's a dinghy and it has a structure around it everything but I did forget to put masking fluid on the top of it so that is going to require a bit of a highlight using the white gouache when I'm all done so it's very clear to me it's just about time to bring the gouache in and start doing a little bit of repair work and one of the reasons I don't like to use gouache unless it's absolutely necessary is because it ends up looking like repair work it looks like something is painted on top of a watercolor painting and there are some places where you know if you enter a painting into something and they say they need it to be all fully watercolor and you say well you know I have watercolor plus a little gouache there's a lot of people that don't understand that gouache is watercolor and you may find that you won't end up being able to enter your work into a particular show because it has some gouache on it but there are some things like painting the words yanky clipper on it that are impossible absolutely impossible to paint around that and it's really difficult to try to do that kind of little lettering using masking fluid the brush that I had used during the masking fluid portion was actually the equivalent of probably a number one brush and even that was not able to get in some of the very finest details and this is a zero brush that I'm using with my gouache and I'm trying to get not perfect lines I'm trying to actually create some dry brush lines so that it fits with the character of what's in my painting because the character of the painting is loose there's a lot of dry brush kinds of edges already going on and gouache if you use it full strength and nice and thick looks like it's a stroke of acrylic across the top of it or something and it can end up looking very fake and not suit the character of your watercolor so depending on the cleanness of the lines that you've already got in your painting you may choose that you don't want to add some gouache to it there's also the possibility to add titanium white watercolor if you want something really really soft and I considered that for this but I also needed some of these you know big beams that I was adding in I needed some of them to be white white and titanium white just doesn't get me that kind of whiteness but playing around with it and just trying to make some random marks so that it doesn't look like everything is super careful I don't want it to look like it's a gel pen I've seen some paintings where they've used gouache so it looks like they've basically drawn it in with a gel pen and that does not suit the character of my painting hasn't suited the character of the ones that I've seen it in but each to their own getting some practice knowing how crisp or how clean of a line that you can make with masking fluid versus gouache will help you to make decisions on which parts you want to leave for the masking fluid and which ones you want to leave for gouache and whether or not you can even leave some of that as negative painting so here's my painting I want to invite you over to the blog if you want to see nice close-ups and study some of these areas in more detail than there are some juicy photos over there for you to enjoy I'm glad you stuck around for the end of this video because I want to let you know there's a 10 off coupon code that you can use for watercolor classes through the end of July 2023 and that code to put in that checkout is WC 2023 and it's good on any of my 31 or 32 watercolor classes I think I have quite a few and they're at all different levels so hopefully there's something you're interested in learning and getting a discount as well I'll see you again next week I'm here every Tuesday and Saturday mornings at 8 a.m pacific if you want to join me for any of the premieres of my videos I love to chat live with you in the chat box during the first play of a video I'll see you then in the meantime go out and create something every day see you later