 Hi there, my name is Sandy Allnach. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. And I want to share with you the new painterly days water coloring, coloring books that these are new. I've just got one of them. And thank you to Christie Rice for sending it to me so I could review it and play with it and try it. And I'll walk through it with you and show you all the beautiful pages inside. It has some great introductory information about the artist, a nice forward in it. I love the setup of the book. It's really well done compared to a lot of the coloring books I've seen. It has a watercolor wheel here in the front. And then it calls it tutorials, but there are more of general tips. And if you've studied some watercolor, these will be things that are not new to you, but they are really great little tips and they're very accurate. And then you open the other side. This is where the fun begins. And over here you have a list of supplies. This is the supplies that Christie recommends. They're not the same things that I have on my list, but you can listen to whatever watercolors do you want and make your own decisions because there's so many different kinds of beautiful watercolors. Inside the book now, she has a little blurb on each one of the pictures. So she'll talk about the drawing itself. She'll talk about some painting tips and then give you just some creative inspiration, some artistic inspiration, things to think about. So these are really fun to read as you go through the book and color the pages. And there are 13 designs in here and they are front and backs. So on the front you get the drawing and then on the back you get the same drawing. So you could try it in two different watercolors. You could try it in a couple of different mediums. You could try one and then and do all your practice on that one. And the other one would be the one that you would take out and frame after you finish it because you've already practiced it once. All different kinds of ways you could approach this book. And as I said, there are three of them. So you might wanna collect the others because I certainly am going to. And there are 13 designs in here. The last page only has one on one side. So there's actually 25 pictures to color but they are 13 designs since they're replicated. And they're gorgeous. As you can see, they're printed in kind of a gray and they have a little heavy line. I'll do a comparison later to another book that I've showed you before but these are beautiful. They have lots of wide open spaces to paint in. So it makes it really easy for you to just get loose with a brush and not get really like crazy and detailed and have to worry about too small of spaces because there's some of the coloring books even the ones that I love that have spaces that are so tiny that they can become stressful. So these are very nice that way. There's some beautiful quotes in here as well which are just gorgeous. The paper is a hot press paper and it's not going to act exactly like your cold press. I recommend the cold press and lots of you follow me in that. So this will be a little different feel to get used to but it's not a difficult one. It's not a difficult thing to get used to. This page here with these little cameos on it is one that I used to test. So you'll see my tests in just a few minutes. I would recommend that you test out some of the watercolors you have and pick one page that you may not want to frame perhaps. Like that one would be great on cards. Maybe you could cut that piece up and use each cameo on a card. But on one side you could do all your testing to see how your watercolors are going to react on that paper and that sort of thing. And here it has information about the other books because there are two others. And that is the flip through of this book. Let's look at some watercolor sets that I tested because I wanted to make sure that there weren't any that went through the paper. So I tried my Daniel Smith paints. They're in the lower left of those little cameos. They worked great. Of course, they're a set of six and I'll show you a demonstration of how you can mix some colors. This set is the Kiritaki again, Cytambi. This is the 36 set. There's also smaller set so you can invest less by getting fewer colors but they worked great. This is the little Koi set, the one in the middle on the top row. And this one is a great little tiny set. So if you don't have much space, you just want a little something compact. These are great and I love their colors and I love the way that they work. I mean, I took this set with me to Europe and really used the hack out of it and hardly used up any of the color. They last really long time. This is the Peerless set which a lot of people like. I'm not a huge fan of it but I wanted to test it to make sure it didn't go through the back because it's gone through on some projects I've worked on. But it's basically the paint is on the paper. You pick it up with a brush and paint it. And they don't come in that little book. I made that book myself. And then there's Brusho. Brusho is a watercolor powder which I'll also demonstrate for you. And you can see nothing went through. I was really surprised that these were so good. So let's look at that Daniel Smith set. It comes with two yellows, two reds and two blues. And I will link you to a video at the end of this that talks more about the set itself and how you can mix colors and stuff because I did a video on that in the past. Now I'm taking two little puddles of one yellow and I'm gonna mix one of the blues with it and then I'm gonna rinse my brush out and I'll mix the other blue with it. And this will give you a clue of how many colors you can mix because depending on how much blue or how much yellow you use, you'll also get a different color. You can get an infinite variety of greens just by using these four paints. Or actually these three paints, one yellow with two blues. You can try the other yellow with the two blues and get still different greens. You can use more water, like here I use more water in my brush to thin out the paint a little bit and then just paint it on here. I'm using a silver brush and this line of brushes, the round brushes, I love these because they point really well. You can see I've got a really good pointed tip on the end of it and I love how the way they hold color, the way they hold the paint and the water in the brush as well as how they give you that good fine control on the tip of it so that you can get into these spaces. Now this is a large painting in a large area. You don't need a super fine brush but I just love this one and it really helped me a lot as I was painting in this coloring book. I dabbed off color with a paper towel. I always keep a paper towel handy and now if I go over with the same color and this is called glazing, just do a glaze of the same color again and you can get a second shade of green and then you go in with another green and look you can put in some fine details over top and add a little bit of lines to make the veins in a leaf. So you can get crazy with it, you can leave it really simple. There's so many ways that you can paint and this is supposed to be relaxing so it's your chill out time, don't stress. Just put paint on and see what happens. And remember you have two sides to each one of these so you can try it again. If you completely fail, I would recommend continuing on the whole page and use that whole page for practice before you move on to a different page. Now here I'm using a technique where I've got paint on the tip of the brush and no paint in the rest, the big fat part of the brush, the part that's toward my hand. So I'm getting that soft edge and I just painted a pink over top of a yellow to get that. You can paint around the whole thing. I'm just gonna do a selection of a few areas just to give you some ideas to get started. Now here I'm using the paint and the brush almost like I would a marker. So I went around the edge and I didn't stay really like super fussy close to the edge. I let it be kind of a jaggedy line and then I left the inside of the flower empty and just left a white line in between. So it looks like one of those little flowers that has just a little stripe of white around the edge. If you wanna alter that pink color and make it a little more red, just drop some red in there. You can mix it on a palette or you can mix it in the paint itself, wet in wet, a variety of ways to do it. Here I'm gonna mix some blue with some of the pink. Now if you mix blue, pink, and yellow, I'm trying to stay away from the yellow that's there because if you mix the blue, the red, and the yellow together, you'll get brown. So if you want brown, that's great, but be careful of that. But I made some purple so I could put a little darker area around the center and I don't know if you can see the lines but I could see them and add a little bit of detail to my flower petals that way. Now here I've added a lot of water to the purple so that I could paint a little bit in the center and if I wanna fade that out to white, I dried off my brush, rinsed it, and then dried it and then I'm just pulling out color. It's like, it's a thirsty brush. The brush is pulling color into itself and you may need to keep rinsing it if you end up putting that color back down. If you wanna continue to lift it, then make sure your brush is good and clean but you can get all kinds of beautiful soft effects as well as hard edges on these things. I'm just gonna paint little striations in these because there's a little bit already in the line art that Christy has drawn and she's a very talented artist by the way. We should follow her on Instagram and all over the place because she does beautiful work. And then I'm using a really dark purple with more blue in it. The other one had more red in it and this has a little more blue in it just so I can add some detail to the centers of the flowers. I told you I was gonna show you some of the brush show which is that watercolor powder in the little container. If you haven't seen it, it's like a magic and since it didn't go through the back of the page, I really wanted to try it on a whole page and see what I could do with it. So I'm just gonna use a rose red. It comes in, there's I think 32 or 34 colors and I'll link you to a video at the end of this one that shows you more detail about them and how I made the little toppers. So I poked a hole in it and made a little color key for myself so I could follow along which color I'm using. So I'm gonna take a pink, a red and then I'm even gonna add a yellow into a pool of water, just painted clean water into that pomegranate and now I'm dropping the color into it anywhere where the little powder goes outside of that pomegranate but there's no water, I can just blow it off with my breath or whatever. You can wait till it dries so that that powder won't move and brush it was one of the things you do need to manage how wet and how dry things are because if you're gonna paint a green leaf right next to a wet red pomegranate then the green will stick to the red if it's still wet so you wanna make sure you just manage that carefully is all. You can dab off color and then go back in and rework some so if it gets too heavy and you end up with too much intense color you can dab it off and then you can add more back in. This type of pigment, the brush out, rewets very easily so if you're coloring a yellow flower next to a red pomegranate then if your brush touches the red it's gonna pull some of the red into the yellow. So again, it's another thing to manage is to think ahead if you're going to do something yellow do you have enough control over your brush that you can keep it just in the yellow areas while you have a red pomegranate there or do you need to do all of your yellows first and then move on to your darker colors. So for the inside of this pomegranate I painted a whole bunch of little dots you know, a bunch of these little circles with some water shook on some of the powder just tapped some out of the bottle and then moved it around with a wet brush and since my wet brush had touched some of that red color now I have a little bit of pink that I'm putting into some of these other ones and I can shake a little more powder into those and just keep going until the whole inside of the pomegranate with all these little seeds are different shades of red so I can use different colors to create a whole really beautiful look. I can dab it off and they can be really beautiful soft light colors or if I added a lot more color to them I can make them really rich. So I just wanted to show you some variety that you can get from using Brush-O. You can get these in sets or you can buy them just one at a time just a single color and I'll put a link on my website on my blog post with a color chart for the Brush-O so you can see what all the color options are that you might want to try out. This one is a sea green and it splits into this beautiful yellow and beautiful blue, which I love. So I've done the same thing with them and now I'll do the same thing with some yellow petals on these flowers. So I did some yellow and a little bit of orange in the center and just used water to move them around and kept cleaning my brush. You'll pick up color very easily and your brush will end up having that color on it. So if you don't want to spread it just keep washing your brush out so that you can keep that lighter color. And then I decided I wanted a really dark red center so I put some real strong red in there and then moved out around just slightly but it left me with this beautiful granulated look. So let's take a look at these two finished ones because I did complete the whole page. This is the one with the Daniel Smith paint. So you can see how many colors. This is a small variety of what you can get from those six paints. So it's not an expensive set but you get like this crazy gamut of colors and nothing went through on the back, which is great. And then the one on the right is the brush-o and I did have a little overspray so I got a little bit on the back of the other page but that was just my own messiness as opposed to the paint doing anything. The paper does curl slightly but very little. I used a lot of water with it so that could have something to do with it. I want to compare it to these Pepin books. I've showed you these before and I love these, love, love, love them. So I wanted to compare the papers themselves. The Pepin paper is a little bit lighter weight. It's also a drawing paper, not a watercolor paper. It's got a little texture to it so it'll feel more like your cold press paper and the Painterly Days book is a little more hot press so it's real smooth. It's also whiter. Now the lines on the Pepin book are thinner and they're lighter gray and they're heavier and a darker gray in the Painterly Days book. The pictures are very different. The styles are very different in the two books. I see no reason why you have to choose between them. You can have both but on the Painterly Days book, in your light areas where you have light colors showing, you can still see some of those lines because they're a heavier gray and they are a thicker line but I don't think that makes them any less beautiful because they're gorgeous. Really depends on what kind of look you want with your painting. So there are links in the description to all of the products that you have seen here or used today. There's more information on my blog. As I said, the chart for the brush show colors if you want to pick out a few so you can try them. There's also some more videos here. One on coloring books that I did quite a while ago. There's a little bit on brush show, little bit on Daniel Smith and you can also subscribe to get more videos from me and I will see you guys next time. Have a wonderful day and go color something. Go paint something beautiful and relax while you do it. I'll see you next time. Bye bye.