 Well, hi there. My name is Sandy Olnock and I am an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube I'll be painting with a thirsty brush with only three colors And I want to show you how I got a variety of colors out of three simple tubes of paint these are from the Daniel Smith Essentials set and I was very excited to be able to produce results like this from just three paints And I'll show you how I did. I started off by stamping on some arches rough watercolor paper with Distress Inks by Ranger and this is going to allow some of that color to break down a little bit and Disappear for the most part. I'm using weathered wood and bundled sage I believe for these and here's the color chart that I made in a previous video that I'll link you to at the end There are color names at the top I just apparently didn't move the camera enough to see them But I can look on this grid and see which colors Mixed to make each one of those shades of purples blues oranges greens, etc The amount of color is also indicated on here So I can tell whether a purple is made by adding more blue or less blue than the red and here with the green I want this green so I'm going to mix a couple shades of green based on Hansa yellow light and some ultra marine blue So these are two of the colors that are in that six essential set I started off by just putting a little bit of the blue into the Hansa yellow light I realized I wanted an even lighter color so I just made another pool of color so I could mix a lighter version of it and Leave the other part for later in the leaves I'm just painting straight over top of this Distress Ink To color the highlight portions of the leaves and I'll use the mid-tone to color the bottom section I want the leaves to pretty much disappear I want the flowers to be the highlight in the painting and on the card But I wanted to get some color in here in a little bit of depth I'll add a little more detail to them at the very very end But I'm just gonna throw the color in here and let it sit there while I paint the flowers But I realized also there are stems in here I didn't find all of them at this time so I will jump in later and go back and do some stems So I'm leaving all that paint there so I can go back and add it later on But I just mixed another kind of green using more blue and you can get an infinite variety by the amounts of each color that you add Next I'll be mixing the beautiful quinacridone rose color along with some of that same French ultramarine blue that I just used with the green and Making two different kinds of purples one is going to be more heavily blue The other will be more heavily red You can have a piece of scratch paper off to the side and test all your colors But on a flower like a hydrangea the variety of purples that are within one little bunch of flowers is huge And I'm just going to be playing around with how to move the color and how to blend the color Do I want some of it to be real washy and others to be a little on the I Guess more dry brush side and as I worked through just playing around Letting the watercolor do its own thing I would just make a little pool of a very watery color and Drop in another color into it drop in a little more of the bluish purple into the pinkish And just see what happens this stamp is perfect for that kind of practice because the flowers are very forgiving They're just a whole bunch of blossoms, and it's real easy to do In between all of this that I'm doing I have a paper towel off to the side, and I'm wiping the brush Sometimes I leave a little moisture in it So it's a damp brush and the dampness is what's pulling a little bit of that color around so it's very pale There are other times when I pull out even more water up out of it And I start pulling that color around and I get a very dry brush look Because I'm not pushing more water around if you have more water loaded in it's going to make it a softer Blend that's gonna it's gonna move the color more and I like the hard edges that I'm getting and as I start creating this So throughout all of this I just started using that dryer brush And this is called a thirsty brush technique because what it's doing is absorbing some of that extra paint If you have pools of paint if you've mixed up a color that's too watery and you just have too much of it on there Empty your brush of color and water and squeeze it all out on your paper towel And then just lay it down and let it suck the color back out You could do it with a paper towel, but sometimes you get a really interesting effect Using the brush to pull that color out instead of trying to dab it in some way Because you can dab it out of just one little tiny corner if you target it with your brush The brush I'm using is a silver brush from their black velvet line Which is my favorite and one of the things that's really nice is even though I'm using a big fat brush This is a number eight. I'm also getting a lot of detail You can see how small of a line I can get because it has a real nice point to it And I'm speeding up the painting because there's gonna be a lot of this same type of flower painting going on But I'll chat a little bit more with you as I go along here When you're buying brushes one of the important things that That you need to look for is will it hold enough paint and water in it? And there are some brushes that literally, you know as soon as you get your paint in them and try them It just it's almost like they're dry immediately once you put that that color out there But here with this brush it allows it to continue to put out a little color and a little water Because it's got a really nice body to it. It also has a very nice fine point And there are a lot of brushes that don't necessarily get to a fine point like this Now here I found my spot where I all those little stems are inside of the flower So I stopped to mix a little bit of that green and when you are mixing your colors You can leave them on your palette and you can re-wet anything and reuse that color again So I can get that same green that I had before just by picking it up on the palette Now throughout this I didn't mix up a ton of purple I'm just mixing up a little at a time to see how much I need Because I tend to wash my palette entirely when I'm done with my painting unless I'm gonna paint something else It's gonna have those colors right away But in generally I just I have in this weird habit I know there are a lot of artists who'd love to have all that color sitting on their palette But I like clean places so I can choose what colors are going to be on there rather than Okay, yesterday I painted with green so now everything I paint is gonna have a green tinge do it So I'm a little crazy that way But here I'm I mixed up a color that wasn't quite the same purple But what I'm doing is taking a thirsty brush and pushing some of that color from the shadow Across each petal and I'm leaving white space because the white space is what's going to make it have that real water color feel Because it almost it sort of makes the flower start to sparkle I guess you might say and It doesn't matter that the purple is a little different. It's a little more red So this bottom flower is a little more on the heavy red side I've just alternating my flowers. So some of them I'll pull from the blue pile of paint and some I pull from the red and alternate the back and forth and Just by the way, I'm laying my brush down and sort of laying it on its side So that I get those funky little edges that you get from water coloring this way So let's speed through the rest of this and you can watch the flower develop and You could also see that some of that rich color that we had on the left hand side is starting to dry So it's lightening for the most part. All water color is going to lighten. There's very few excuse me That are going to stay Exactly the color that you put them down So if you want something to be richer you can either mix a richer color to start with and I would test it out on a piece of paper to make sure it's the color that you want and Let it dry fully so you can see what it's going to dry like Or just go back over with some layers at the end and do a little glazing with a deeper color so at the very end of this I'm going to add more deep shadows because I Started seeing how much it was softening and that there were some areas that had nice rich contrast and others that didn't But with watercolor you can always go back in And add a little bit more later on and you can also lift off some colors. There's lots of different ways that you can Sort of modulate the color after you're finished with the first layer the first place of paint So Just about finished with this and I was debating whether or not I wanted Background around it or whether I just wanted to leave these colors against this fresh white background and The more I looked at it the more I just was thinking in my brain. Look at that beautiful blue. That's on my palette Just look at that. What would happen if I tried to do a blue background now. I have tried large areas of solid colors before I Haven't tried it. I don't think on arches And if I have then I didn't have success at it because I know I've tried this a few times And it was not the best move But I decided to try it with this and it for the most part came out Okay, and I'll give you a few tips if you're trying this, but it's not for the fainted heart I Watched a video from Anna Mason and she has an online watercolor school and it is fabulous She is amazing and she's the one that put a video up that taught me this and I was just absolutely blown away I'll link you to it at the end of this video and She talked about how to keep the edges wet So with watercolor as soon as you let one edge dry It's gonna have a little hard edge there and you want to keep working it and keep that edge the leading edge wet Which means you're kind of working in multiple places at the same time. I stopped the blue I didn't finish that one side over on the far left end as you're looking at it now Because I wanted to continue keeping this other area wet that little section I could fill in later so I'm trying to just push the paint around and Keep my brush moving quickly enough and keep all of those edges wet at the same time So you can see me working on all different directions at once It may be easier to try to find something where you have the background painted in between Some more spaces where there's things like these leaves to break it up I I'm not sure what possessed me to try this, but it was difficult Came out really beautiful But it was challenging to try to get this whole background to look pretty much the same There's a few spots that were a little darker, but it did set off these flowers nicely and I was able to Make them pop a little bit more because the only white in the painting now is the white on those flowers But I realized I had to go over with a second coat because part of the blue had been darker This top section was lighter So I put on another glaze of the blue to try to even it all out This is one of those things you could noodle with forever and drive yourself crazy with so it's not for the fainted heart But I think the effect is still quite beautiful So now I'm going to add a little bit more detail to the rest of the painting These are the leaves so I went in with that a little bit darker of the green So I mixed a slightly darker green out of the same colors And I'm just adding a little detail on the lower side of the leaves because that's going to give them a little depth But not so much that I end up with all the focus going to them The focus is still going to be on the flowers And add this down to the bottom section as well And I'm just using really simple strokes along the same direction as the lines of the stamp That already gave me that guidance The stamp lines did not really disappear like I had thought they might I know a lot of people use distress inks when they're stamping images that are going to be used with watercolor because it disappears And I haven't found that to be the case here. So my my lines are still there But now I'm going to go in and add more detail and depth into my flowers And I'm going to start with a dark color And just really put it in there clean off the brush And then go in alongside the edge of it And just push that color around with my dry brush as soon as I feel like I'm getting too much paint moving I'll clean the brush off again So that I don't put more paint on and the dry brush that thirsty brush will just pick up some of that color and start to move it around And I just would squint at the painting as I was working and see okay Where are the areas that I need more depth? And if you squint at it right now you can see that flower at the bottom looks really rich and has lots of shadows in it The one at the top not so much And that's a a good test with whatever medium you're coloring with Squint at it and see what you see If there are areas that fully disappear You'll be able to tell where you need to add more depth and more contrast to make it really pop So here's the finished card And I just absolutely love how it came out. It is totally fabulous. The die is also a die from ellen hudson in this new release The totally is die cut out of a piece of vellum so that it sticks up off of The little piece of vellum that little flag banner thing that I made And the fabulous is die cut out of black shimmery card stock I blew down so Here's a couple other videos including that one that I told you about that I made the chart And then the Anna Mason video about the background as well as another of my dango smith videos Thank you so much for joining me and really appreciate it Be sure to click on my link down below to get to the blog hop and see lots more ideas with this release Julie ever sold it an amazing job on all the designs Click the subscribe button if you have not yet and I will talk to you guys later Have a great day. Bye. Bye