 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnock. This is part two and I will be painting a stick and if you missed part one you might want to watch that one first. In this portion of the process we're gonna be talking about changing everything from being a complex sketch and a complex stick into being a much looser kind of painting. And it begins with editing ruthlessly, like just really making yourself make some choices about what you're going to include and what you're not. What I did was create the outline first around the edges of the stick so I could have that as a base guideline but I wanted to show you how I've just made a few simple lines to create some shapes that I'm going to put color in. I've chosen the biggest most obvious sections anywhere that I saw either a color change or a value change like from light to dark and anywhere the bark was peeling up was a great place to do that because there's shadows around it and when there's a section with lichen or what moss or whatever these little things are that are growing on this stick those parts were obvious things to note. Anywhere where I saw some very deep shadows that was a great place to just put a quick little line and even marking off sections where I wanted specific color. I liked that reddish color on the left-hand side that reddish brown so I just put a line around it to mark that I wanted to just throw some color in that direction. I'm gonna do a color flood across the whole thing and this is basically a map to tell me where to do that where to put those colors and then some of the lines a few of the detailed lines which are not going to be very many are going to show me where particular sections are there was some of that area around the top that I wanted to create the shapes and some areas around that bottom that whole gray light gray section was just somewhat intriguing and I wanted to treat the inside of it the light gray part different than the outside part of it so I drew lines around it so that that was a section I was going to handle differently. There's also this portion right here in the middle and you can't see it from where you're looking at it from overhead but it's actually three branches that have been cut off so whenever whatever knocked this branch off the tree lopped that section off really specifically and it the three light brown or you know kind of brownish circles you see are each the centers of the three branches so that's what it looks like from the side but from above I just wanted to have that general shape in there because those were a nice little pop of color that I wanted to anchor in the middle because we've got the reddish brown on the left and the right and so that gives us a little more specific reddish brown in the middle started following along I like that that little thing that sticks up off the top that that little tiny curled bit I wanted to have some shapes that we're going to lead up to that and then delineate a few of the shapes over on the right hand side but I'm not drawing all those details that I did in the full sketch all that little line work it all goes away I'm not going to put it all in here and this is as much as I'm going to do I'm going to lighten the pencil work first because I don't want all that pencil line showing I don't generally mind that to see pencil line but a lot of this was delineating color sections so I didn't want to have obvious obvious lines when those colors start to bleed together but taking a kneaded eraser really soft squishy eraser and rolling it so it's more like a hot dog shape and rolling it across the top of the pencil will just lift off a whole bunch of that I'm picking colors from the color mixing video that I did about a month ago or so some orangey red color that'll be a mixture of transparent red oxide and yellow ochre I've got some two different combinations for grays so transparent red oxide and cobalt blue moon glow and Oriolan and then there's some greens there's like a little bit of like weird green colors that I'm going to use cobalt blue plus a little drop of new gambos so that I can get all these mixes to work together I chose two of them having cobalt blue in them so that they relate to each other instead of adding yet another color combination that's not already in anything so it's always nice to try to limit yourself to not having every color in your palette in every painting you can keep that down to a dull roar it's usually helpful so that first little puddle was the first mixture transparent red oxide and yellow ochre this one is transparent red oxide plus cobalt blue and the more blue you put in it the grayer it goes the more transparent red oxide you put in it the more brown it is same thing with moon glow when it's lots of moon glow it's going to be toward the grayer side and the more yellow you add it's going to go more toward the brown side so I'll just keep adding moon glow until I'm happy with it because I wanted two different grays and here's that greenish kind of color it's going to sort of a sicko kind of green on the stick itself so this seemed like a really good mixture to work with one of those combinations from the cobalt and new gamboge so I am going to slide things over a little bit so that you can still see the mixing wells just not the paint wells that I'm pulling from but all those puddles will be the same colors as they work through this so first off is going to be the wash that goes across everything and I'm going to use very very wet paints very wet lots of water but I have lots of pigment in it so it's not super pale color there's plenty of color but very very wet because I want everything to blend into everything else and I'm going from one color to another starting with the the yellowish mix the yellowish red mix one of the grays let them touch each other and then my brush had a lot of water in it so I got a lighter version of that grayish color and a drop in some of the green leaving some open white spaces and then just go back to one of the the gray colors now that I had some of the yellow yellow green color in my brush so it changed the color of the cobalt and transparent red oxide mix so I had to just add a little more blue in it to make it gray again and then I'm going to use the the purple mixture with the moon glow and then the mixture with the cobalt and then the moon glow and the cobalt just go back and forth between them it's going to give me a nice change of color a shift of color between them and as I add all these colors when they're wet the edges are all going to bleed into each other it's just going to give me a really nice feel across the whole thing so it feels like one painting as opposed to I'm painting this section in one color I'm painting that section another color I'm letting them all play with each other the light gray section that I spoke of earlier I just added water into it and left a little bit of the color in my brush so I got a very pale version of it and left some white openings in it so lots of different ways that you can give yourself variety as you work across painting something even as simple as a stick just keep changing colors changing colors going from one to another you can change the density of the mixture sometimes it's got more color in it sometimes it's just got more water in it but all of it just keep it nice and moist so it keeps moving if you keep it nice and wet then when you get to the end you can drop more strong color into a few areas so you get more wet in wet bleeding otherwise you're stuck with having to do that that kind of pops of color later on in the process and it just isn't going to be as blended and beautiful so you'll see what I mean when I get to the very end of this because I wanted to add a little bit more of the transparent red oxide to just make things sing a little bit and more of that water added into the open areas so those lighter grays and I'm leaving the section around those three tree branch sections just letting it dry by itself I'll put the dark color around it later but I use some straight-up transparent red oxide to drop wet and wet into a few areas and then I'm going to let the whole thing dry it looks like a hot mess right now but you just wait we'll get better on pass to pass to is painted on dry paper it's all completely dry you can use a heat gun or you can just let it air dry and I'm going to change this whole well so that it's a mixture of the transparent red oxide and cobalt blue and you can even mix in if you want to get it darker you could mix in some pains blue gray you know something really dark to make it more of a blackish color but what I'm going for is using my big brush to mix a bunch of thick color in the whole well and then when I get to my smaller brush I'll make a section with a different thickness of paint so you'll see that happen in just a minute but I've got a nice gray going on with these two colors and then I'll mix the other well with a different mixture so that I have two grays to pull from this one will be the purple and the yellow the moon glow with the Oriolan and that's going to give me some options to work with as I start putting in the colors in past number two so here I'm using a number four brush the other was a number 10 it's number four brush to mix a small section within the big puddle same colors but thicker paint because as I work through past number two I'm going to try to use different thicknesses of paint and having them available to me in the same well it's really easy to just grab from one side or the other I'm going to pick a few spots where I see the darkest colors and add the really strong contrasting areas be aware that if you want those strong contrasting areas to have an edge that bleeds into something else you need to make sure you do that while it's wet don't let it dry first and then expect that you can get a soft edge and some areas I'm going to want to do that some areas I won't but I'm going to continually be working from different parts of the puddle in my palette sometimes from the thicker part sometimes from the thinner part really depends on what I'm painting and how the brush work is going I'm doing a lot of dry brush and dry brush is when there's not a lot of water on the brush itself and you're getting that texture of the paper you get some kind of some skipping as it moves across the surface and gives you a very nice watercoloury chunky edge and I'm just going to keep adding sections around the whole stick at this point I'm almost not looking at the stick anymore at all I've completed a sketch I did the whole drawing of the entire stick so I know the stick really well I know the textures I know the areas that I'm going to be painting and the stick is right there if I need to take a quick look at it but at this point I'm now just painting from my gut and that's where having the experience of spending the time learning the stick itself learning the textures and the colors is going to help you to have that confidence that you know what you're doing you're you're just filling in the blanks where where all the details should be I'm changing some of the color here and there going back from back and forth with different puddles or just adding more of one color in or another as I start working through it sometimes the color starts to shift back to a brown and I want some gray to be there as well here I've added some water in the area around those three branches and just dropped in some darker color in certain sections so that I get some light and dark variations when I painted the first pass notice I didn't include all the branches that stick out in the top of the bottom a little little extra bits because I can add them in this section anything that that didn't work out in that first pass is totally fixable at this point because that's all really light color the rest of this is is just really loose let the brush work just happen I don't know how to explain it in my classes I call it calligraphy basically your line style when you use a brush is going to be different than anybody else's just like your handwriting is not like anybody else's so your calligraphy marks are going to be different and every watercolors has a different look when they've got a little dancing brush in their hand there is no real way to teach that it's it's incredibly difficult to explain how to do this but it's just it is just what it is if you want to see this whole video in real time without being sped up I do have it over available for my patrons to watch there's no audio with it but you can just watch the brush work happen if that's something that's of interest to you you can join as a patron at any time links in the doobly-doo as always but I don't know how much that really helps you because your calligraphy work is going to be different than mine at this point I'm using a lot more water I've added more water both into the palette and then sometimes just letting more water sit on my brush when I go to rinse it so that I have a lighter version or more watered-down version of whatever I had been painting with and letting that play around the whole stick some of the areas where I put the darkest colors when I did the darkest calligraphy work began to look like I had outlined the stick and most objects when you paint them are not going to be outlined there's very few things that come with outlines in nature so I just wanted to join them and that meant bringing some dark and mid tones from the darkest areas across the center of the stick and letting some of the colors show through from underneath by doing a lot of dry brush work on the very top and letting all of that bounce around and play together I did keep varying the color as I moved around the stick and again not watching what's going on with the stick itself I'm just watching my painting at this point and paying attention to how the color is playing where do I have worms where do I have cools do I need to add a little bit more blue to my color mixture or am I going to grab a little bit of the the purplish mix from the from the other well and bouncing back and forth between those to just keep them interesting but then I noticed I needed some really rich darks on the right hand side I wanted something darker over there and I just hadn't achieved it in the earlier earlier part of this pass so I mixed the transparent red oxide the cobalt blue and a little bit of paints blue gray and that gave me a nice deep rich mixture that I can go back in and add in a few other deep dark shadows just find a few spots to add a sparkle of that color so that it wasn't only in one section make sure there's just a little bit of it showing up here and there in other places the last thing was using a very wet big fat brush and just a little bit of color barely any color in it to go over some of those areas that had a lot of white in them because they just they weren't actually technically white because there was a wash from earlier but it was so pale I wanted some more going on in there and then I started just dropping color randomly in from my palette just different mixtures different colors and letting them play together I love when little accidents happen there's certain areas of this painting that I didn't plan out but I do love how they actually worked out in the long run I love that you can paint the same thing over and over and still come out with a completely different look each time this is a practice painting that I did prior to turning on the camera and it's different but it's also gorgeous so there you go I hope you'll try making a stick painting of your own and if you've missed the stick sketching video you can go see that I might be the only person on YouTube who shows anybody how to sketch or paint a stick maybe that'll be my my moment of fame right and on Sunday we're gonna be taking this photograph over on Etcher and turning it into a painting and I'm gonna teach you a lots of crazy things in a live class so you can go watch that one it's inexpensive I would love to have you there love to answer your questions that you can ask during the class and you can also share your work in their Facebook group because I'd love to see your version of this painting I will see you either in class on Sunday or I will see you heck here on Monday how about that we'll do this again come next week have a great weekend everybody bye bye