 Well, hey there, it's Sandy All Knock, and today I'm going to talk about how to find out which of your watercolors are friends. I have done a number of paintings in Yellow Ochre and Moonglow because I discovered the two in combination have some really interesting things that they do together. And I've had people ask me, how did you figure that out? How did you know that? Well, I didn't know that until I was painting one day and the two colors touched and I went, ooh, yeah, and I tried to see how far I could push that. So how do you figure that out? I've got an exercise for you. I'm going to start by looking at the Pantone colors, illuminating an ultimate gray for 2021. I've decided that's the colors for this year and I thought I would do a little exploration with the new yellow that's in my palette and show you kind of an exercise that you can do to try out colors in your palette. The bottom palette down here is my 2019 palettes, my crafty palette that I recommend for crafters. Top one is my new maybe kind of test palette that I did a video on recently, but it's got Oriolan in it, which I want to use for the yellow. And the old palette has neutral tint in it, which is kind of a gray-black. And I'm going to use those two colors for this test for the Pantone colors. And I'm using the neutral tint instead of mixing a neutral out of my palette, my landscape palette, because I didn't feel like spending the time to mix the color. So watch the video on my new palette, I'll link it at the end of this video and you'll know why. It's a little on the challenging side, but I don't paint very often with grays. So I'm just eliminating that one from the palette. So the exercise is going to be to create circles of the two colors that you want to test. So pick whatever two colors in your palette you want to play with and see what happens when they touch. The key is to make sure everything's wet. It stays wet. So you've got to work relatively quickly. And you want to try different mixes of each color. You want to try some that are thin and watery, some that are really thick and that aren't going to move much. And you want to see what happens when the two colors touch. Because you're going to find sometimes that, like in this case, the yellow will bleed into the neutral tint. Sometimes the neutral tint will bleed into the yellow. And the second thing to assess, other than the fact that one's going one direction, one's going the other, is how wet were the two paints when you put them down. Because sometimes that is the reason why you get one edge or another. And sometimes it's the pigment. It's the property of the pigment itself. It always does that when it's touching another color. So this is one way to test it out, to try and see what happens. Do colors push into each other with those kind of fingery sorts of little rivulets that it makes? If you've ever seen those. Does it do it with a really soft blend like these colors are doing? Or does it do it with a kind of broccoli or cauliflower shaped edge to it? Which I don't happen to like, but you may like it. This will tell you what kinds of edges those make. You need to do this on whatever paper you're going to do, your finished paintings on regularly. Don't use the cheap stuff because you're not going to get the same edges. For me, this is a matter of seeing the edges that are created, the colors that are created between the colors that I'm testing, so that I can figure out how they play together. After I get this phase done, then I start doing a painting, a full on painting with those two colors. If I have further study that I want to do with it and see if I can recreate some of these effects in that painting. For people who are new at this, you may want to, as you're working and do this quickly, jot down with a pen on the tape that you've taped the paper down with, what you did. So if there's an area where you're like, hey, I want to try this again with wet paint for the yellow and thick paint for the black, and tell yourself that so you remember what to test, but don't stop and take forever to do it because you need to do this while it's wet. The colors aren't going to react the same if they're all dry. The second color that I'm going to test here is the Lunar Blue, which you may have noticed of late. I love my Lunar Blue. I'm going to see a lot of that in the coming year, I think, because it does so many delicious things. It's a heavily granulating paint, and it also has some color properties that I am discovering, and I'm enjoying playing with. I'm doing these kinds of exercises, these kind of mental tests for myself with Lunar Blue quite a lot, because I want to push it to its limits. I want to see what are the favorite colors that it does things with, and this one I was really interested to see that the Lunar Blue sometimes gets eaten away at by the Oriolan, and sometimes it pushes into the Oriolan. That's probably a factor of how much moisture is in both of those circles, but there's also a really cool teal at the edge when it blends in there. I want to try some things using heavy water with these two colors together and see if I can create that teal color and really pull that out in a painting, because I think that would be really amazing. You can do this with all the different colors you have, test them all out, have fun playing with them, goof off, make spots, make dots of color, drop color into wet areas, and if there's any techniques that you normally use, try it out on this. Try it on one of the circles if there's a way you like to apply paint, or if you're a person who really loves to use saran wrap, do that on part of this, test it out, and see what happens, because different pigments will do different things. And then once you're all done with this, you've got your design done, and it may look like poop for this first bit, then get out of pen, because I love to do well, so I'm just going to get out of pen and make little works of art out of these. You can totally do that. And you can use a fountain pen like I'm doing, this is a twizbee eco, or you can get out a Sharpie marker or any kind of black pen to do some doodling on top. I'm not trying to match the edges, I'm not trying to make perfect circles. I'm crisscrossing circles so they don't end up looking so like they're trying to be perfect. Put some designs in different areas of them, add little dots and spots, and just have fun with these. It's a great thing to go in the studio and do all the painting part, and then go sit by the TV with the family and spend the EV with them and do your doodling. And then you can either frame these little pieces, these are five by sevens, or you can, you know, cut them down and make cards out of them, lots of different things you can do with little pieces of treasured art like this. So I highly recommend doing this to get to know your colors so well that you don't have to refer to cheat sheets like this. And that's my goal when I start doing this kind of testing because I want to know and be able to deliberately create an effect when I'm doing painting. But right now these colors are new to me. I don't know what they do in concert with each other. Now the neutral tint I probably will never use with Oriolan because I didn't like what it did. Yes, it had feathery edges, that kind of thing, but I didn't like the two colors together. Now this on the other hand, Lunar Blue with Oriolan is going to be a lot of fun to play with. So I cannot wait to get the chance to goof around with those two colors. Now I'm going to do another one with another combination and this one's going to be larger. So I'm going to do it on a bigger piece of paper, this wooden pump is two of those five by sevens. And I'm going to do the same thing. This time I'm going to use my good brushes because what I do find is that there are sometimes the way you put the paint down on the paper can make a difference as well. And for my landscape painting, I use my sable brushes for the most part. So instead of using the silver brushes, this time I'm going to try using the samples and the color that I'm going to use with this is Payne's Blue Gray. Because Payne's Blue Gray is for me now the new dark in my new palette. Payne's Blue Gray can get nice and dark. It can neutralize things a little bit, but it pushes them toward the blue. And with Oriolan, it pushes everything toward the green. So it makes some really interesting greens over time as well. So I wanted to play with it and see in an exercise like this, what does it do? Because I know what it does now as I've painted a few times. And I'll show you a painting at the end of this. I kind of have an idea how these two work together and the kinds of greens they can make. But I wanted to just test it out a little bit more in a more controlled situation like this to see if there are things that I want to push the next painting that I do. So just going to create a bunch of these circles and design wise on something like this. Really, it does not matter a whole lot because as you see, they're just a whole bunch of loose doodles all over the place. The people who are perfectionists, you can feel free to draw yourself a bunch of circles, but I would recommend not doing that. Just let your brush do it and practice being loose this way because nothing has to be perfect. It's just a test and you're going to doodle over it because doodling over it is going to cover a myriad of whatever is left. But you can see I'm using some really dark, thick mixes of the colors and some that are really light and then there's, you know, different ways that the paints are reacting to each other. And that's what you want to keep an eye on with whatever colors you end up using. So let's skip to the doodling part and as with the last ones, just drawing around each one of the shapes. If you come up with some that are funky, you can certainly make your circles bigger and wider so that they cover some of those areas. I try to make sure if there's something that I want to remember that I don't doodle over that area. If I want to note for myself that a particular combination looks really interesting and I want to try that again, I will make sure I don't doodle all over it to cover that up. But if there's any areas that kind of look like poop or some areas that didn't blend well or, you know, bled into each other in weird ways that I didn't like, well, those are areas that I can do a right over top of and no one's going to have any idea there was anything crazy underneath of it. I'm also doing a little bit of doodling outside of the circles, just adding in some little fun bubbles out in the open areas and you could go back in there. If you're using a waterproof pen, you can go back in there and add more color into them if you want, totally fine, have fun with it. Just remembering that if you're using any opaque colors, you don't want to do the opaques over top of the penwork because then you'll lighten the penwork with something like that. And for these little guys, I decided I would add some little stuff coming out of the middle of the flowers, just some little doodles and not out of all of them, but just out of some of them because I thought that would be kind of silly and fun. Taking off the tape is always a really delicious moment. I'm just creating that nice, crisp white edge. I love that part. And then I took nice closeups of each one. And I can keep these in my phone, make cards out of the swatches and keep these in my phone or in a file on my computer if I need to reference them. And you can see them all over on my blog, but I highly recommend doing this for yourself with your own colors. You're going to need to know how much water and how much pigment was in each one of those mixes because you can't you can see what's possible from this. But unless you really have been there, you don't really know how that was created. This is green appetite. And I love the green that it makes when green appetite mixes with Oriolan at the edges when they get that soft blend. Really cool. I get those little tendrils. These are the fingers that I mentioned. And that's what happens with the failed blue turquoise. And I'm going to mark that in my brain to try to see if I can use that in some way sometime. The moon glow does similar things with Oriolan, but not as delicious as it does with the yellow ochre. Green gold didn't do anything. I ended up with cauliflower edges. So these two colors, they are really close together. So I probably won't use them together anyway, very often. This is a sketch that I did. The underpainting for the whole daffodil section was Oriolan. I added a little new gambos in the distance. And then all of those rows in between are done with the Pains blue gray. And I dropped in just a little tiny bit down the centers of a few of them, a little tiny bit of transparent red oxide, just to make it feel more like dirt. But these colors make kind of a green when they layer over top of each other. And that's something that I learned from all of the tests that I run to figure out how these colors are going to work in a painting itself. So I recommend that you do as much testing as you can stand, because it's going to make you a better painter, because you're going to get to know your colors a whole lot better. All right, that's it from me. I'm going to go and I hope that you go have some fun testing your own colors. And I'll see you again very, very soon. Bye bye.