 Hello there, it's Sandy Olmock and today I've got another piece of artwork in honor of Jules Bass who died recently and I thought it would be fun to paint some of the characters created in their holiday specials over the years that I've enjoyed so much as a child and today we've got Rudolph and Clarice out on a hot date in the forest. Let's get started. In this painting, there are a lot of tips that I have, things that I did wrong deliberately and by accident so I'm going to tell you how I fixed them because I was very satisfied with the result when I was all done but there are a number of things I could have avoided. One was letting the masking fluid dry which I didn't. I kind of proceeded because I got excited about painting this and it didn't matter a whole lot except there were some areas that I had to repair around the edges. If you're going to be painting directly over top of the masking fluid, you definitely need it dry but if you're painting around it the way I am, it's not overly crucial. You want to use enough pigment. I put a blob of Prussian Blue on my palette and that is plenty. The rest of the colors are very weak. You can see the difference and watch when the Prussian Blue comes out but you need to make a plan to work quickly when you're doing a full background like this. Whether it's a galaxy or something else, make a plan for how you're going to attack it. I knew I wanted to put the yellows and the reds down first and kind of get an explosion going across the sky and then cut into it with the Prussian Blue but I needed to have the Prussian Blue ready. It had to be thick and it's not a color that's in my palette so I just squeezed some out into the mixing well and I could make a huge puddle of it. I do have a plan for using all that extra pigment when I'm all done so that's going to be another tip in just a few minutes. But I'm using a big wide flat brush. I'm not getting in there with a little teeny tiny anything. You need to be able to move quickly and if you use a really small brush you're not going to get that kind of movement. You're going to need to tilt the board to move paint a lot of times. Here pigment is collecting. The paper is small and it's buckling so I'm ending up with collected pigment and just going to move the board until those puddles of pigment disperse and I'll have to keep doing that. If you get a puddle and it's got yellow, blue and red in it, it's going to make brown so you don't want to have any brown mixes in your sky like this. Know your pigments. One of my favorite pigments that I don't have in my palette because it's kind of a yucky color by itself is this Nickel Azo. It does these most beautiful explosions when it touches other things but you need to practice with it so you know how wet your pigment needs to be and how much pigment needs to be there because in this particular kind of thing, Galaxy, you have a lot of pigment to work with. A lot is dancing around on the page which is why you need to have the masking fluid because you don't want to be worried about painting around something like that when you've got this much color moving on the page. But once I was pretty satisfied with it, I soaked up a few blobs of color and then once it was just starting to not necessarily lose its sheen, I went back in with a very few choice drops of color in small areas. I made sure that there was color right up to the masking fluid because sometimes you get crazy and things don't really come down. Those areas will be hard to repair. A really dark area right next to one of the figures is going to be easy to repair but those little soft subtle blends, those are going to be really hard to mimic if you're trying to fix them later. So once I was satisfied with it, I started drying it all, got it completely dry. And then know your color mixes. In this particular case, the color that goes really well with Prussian Blue to make a black color is Alizarin Crimson. Permanent Alizarin Crimson works really nicely. It does make a bit of a paint with a sheen because I was using it super thick for these trees with my needle brush. Just making some dancing motions with the brush across the paper and creating a bunch of trees. Now this is a great way if you've got some bleeds and things that happened in the sky that weren't perfect. In something like this, they're out in the forest. It is really easy to just throw trees in there and cover up any areas that you didn't like. And I did make sure that some of the trees went through the characters. So it didn't look like they were just being framed by them. They were standing in front of them to be able to create that kind of natural scene. Now I should have done the stars first before I did the trees. So now I have to target my spray application using a toothbrush and some gouache. And I'm going to spritz the stars on there. If you get any of the stars on the trees, some of them will look like they're coming from in-betweens you're seeing through the trees into the sky. Or you can use a baby wipe to dab some off or use some of that dark paint to just cover that up just a little bit. But I was pretty happy with where it was and how it worked out because my star coverage was very light. So no big deal. Now clean off the masking fluid and dry it before you remove the masking fluid. There's a couple areas where I have some color that moved into the area that I'm going to be painting because it was still wet on the surface of the masking fluid. And when I used my rubber cement pickup, excuse me, it smushed a little bit of color. So then you want to repair the edges, but don't just paint an outline around it unless you're in an area where, you know, like down by Clarice's back end, I can use a straight line. But when you've got colors that are going back and forth between whatever's in the background, if you put a hard line there, it's going to look weird. So use your colors in the background as a guide for what you're going to repair those edges with. Now I decided that even though Clarice and Rudolph have giant black eyes in all of the Rankin and Bass stuff that they do, they all their characters have big black eyes, I decided I wanted to do something a little special and I put blue eyes because I did find out that caribou have blue eyes in the winter. And then in the summer it goes to brown, which I did not know any animal did. But there you go. Now I highly recommend using as large a brush as you possibly can when you're working on areas like this because if you use a tiny brush because you want to get in and around all the eye and you just want to be really careful, you're going to end up painting a thousand brushstrokes when you could have painted one large one. And it may not be the perfect brushstroke, but if it's one stroke, it's going to be easier to repair. You also want to make sure you're watching what's drying because I can see now that the area on his cheek is already starting to dry and it's got a hard edge appearing. I have to fix that later. But if you can find that when it's happening and not let it dry like that. And that's where working quickly and just having a plan so you know you're moving from this area to that area, you know, find a stopping point, that sort of thing. What I decided to do here was to just paint over it and see if that would fix all of that. I also hadn't gotten the paint. I hadn't finished it all the way down the front of his face. Like, I don't know what I was thinking. I just had moved on to the body. So when you're doing these kinds of things, dry it quickly. If it's looking good, dry it right then and keep it from moving because as you work on something else, you're going to end up with a bleed left behind or a hard edge that you weren't really expecting. Now the second deer in here, Clarice, she's a lighter deer. And I knew I was going to make both of these even darker than this because I could already see that Rudolph was looking very pale compared to what he should be given the nighttime situation that I was painting. But I proceeded, unfortunately, with giving Clarice light color because I was a little worried about giving her a darker color even though she was going to end up needing a darker color because it was not going to match his. Both of the reindeer are different tones. If you watch the Rankin' Abass show, like it is definite, they have definite different colors. But I was, I don't know, I was trying to work it out in my head on the fly. And I had not tested out mixes to decide exactly how dark that I wanted to do it. The perfect time to figure that out would have been once all that background was dry, I should have tested out what kinds of colors on a scrap paper would be the ones that would work. Now limit your palette whenever possible. The colors that I just used to mix a gray are colors that were already in my palette. So I mixed a brown and a blue. And that's going to help to just bring some unity to it. I didn't include necessarily all those colors that were in that background because the background is a thing in and of itself. But I wanted to use the same colors I'm using for the reindeer. And the colors I'm mixing for the browns are my transparent red oxide with cobalt blue. So I can mix those to a very reddish brown, a very neutral kind of brown. I can make a gray out of them, all depending on how much pigment of each one that I use and how much water. So I can even make them as I'm doing here very black. But I think I was even using a little bit of the black that was left from the mix of the Prussian blue with the Alizarin crimson that I used for the trees. Put some of that on his horns, his horns, antlers. Antlers, that's it. Remember that your darkest darks next to your lightest lights are generally your focal point. And here, of course, you want them to look at the eyes. You want people to look at the faces and the relationship between the two of them. So I made sure I put dark centers in the eyes and I decided to put more dark around the eyes to give more focus to it. Now remember I had already painted them with a gray because I wanted the figures to be backlit. So since all of the whites of the figures except for the highlights on the eyes, the sparkle in the eyes is all gray, then the black right next to that white is going to be the part that draws people's attention. Now here is a place where I regretted what I was doing but I couldn't seem to make myself stop. I was using a small brush. I had this idea in my head that I was going to add all this roundness to the figures and everything. No, I should have used the bigger brush because what I'm creating for myself is a lot of tiny brush strokes. And once again, I didn't use a dark enough color. Yes, it is darker than it was before but it's not as dark as it needs to be for the figures to work with the amount of darkness that's out in this night scene. So I will fix it when I get to that point because I have to darken it one more time. I have to darken the grays, I have to darken a lot of things. And when you're glazing over top of something you wanna use as few strokes as possible. And here's where I switched finally to the bigger brush because goodness gracious I was just making all kinds of danger for myself. And then went in with the large brush to put in some big strokes. I mean, just whoosh it across the body and don't sit there and fuss back and forth with trying to do it with 30 strokes when you could do it with two or three. The 30 is what's gonna give you that very muddy look. Now I do have some of that muddy look underneath of it because of some of those mistakes they made along the way. But sometimes that's just what happens. And here I am trying to fix that ear that I had messed up on because I ended up with that small brush making a lot of strokes that I wanted to get rid of. Now I needed to mix a darker gray because now you can hardly see that there was a gray there. I wanted it to be obvious that they're in shadow. So I mixed a darker gray so that I could darken all that up. And look how the sparkle on the eye starts to pop because everything else is going darker. And that's what happens when you figure out what your plan is for contrast. Where is your darkest dark and your lightest light? Where are those places going to be so that you can plan to do them properly? Now here's a spot where glazing carefully matters. If I had scrubbed back and forth over her eyelids or her eyelashes, if I had used several strokes to go across that, I totally would have lifted up the paint. But since I just went really carefully one stroke across it, I don't want to touch that anymore at all period. Maybe when it's dry, I could put a little more over it but it's a big risk to do that. And I wanted to make sure that her eyelashes didn't bleed all over the place. So the eyelashes could have been put in at the end but I apparently decided to do that early. Yeah, not a great move, but I did decide I was gonna put some more dark on her cheeks and I only went right up to the eyelashes. I did not go over them because I knew what danger that I was in and even considering that. And now I did use a whole bunch of strokes in her body. So now I had to go back and try to fix them but I'm trying to do that with as wide of strokes as possible to just join them in large washes of color rather than just try to fuss around the edges. And sometimes if you're used to other mediums, colored pencils or markers, you're used to being able to just sit and fuss on a spot you wanna just use big wide strokes. Now here's where I'm gonna be pulling root off together using much darker color because I really wanted to deepen him and look how simple the strokes are. I'm not using 30 strokes to cover that section of his body. I'm just using a big brush and covering it. And even though there's a bunch of mess underneath of it, a lot of it has disappeared but it really takes practice at not using all the little fussy strokes in the first place. I was kicking myself a bit for making the mistakes that I did because I had just completed painting Clarice and root off, I don't know, five or six times before I got to this one. But the thing I had been doing was trying to replicate from the photograph that I was looking at. I was trying to match exactly the colors. I was trying to exactly match the lighting. And I was trying to do it the way Rankin and Bass did it in the TV show. I was not painting the way I paint. The way I paint, the way I draw, the way I create is to do crazy things with lighting, to create scenes, to tell a story. And when I freed myself of the desire to replicate what I saw, just make that, that was not, for me, that was not creative. That was just an exercising, copying something. As soon as I let that go and said, I'm gonna use that as a launching point, but I am going to do something different. Even if this process wasn't perfect, I am incredibly happy with the painting. So perhaps if you're struggling with not being able to replicate something that you're trying to work on, consider what it is that you bring to it. And don't just try to replicate. Don't try to just mimic. See what you can do to make it your own. And I think you'll find there's a really big difference there. If you would like to see a real-time version of this and have a little discussion on the kinds of things that I was thinking as I went through the painting process and why I did some of the things that I did, please do join me on Patreon. There's a link in the doobly-doo to that. And add a little tiny pink to Clarissa's nose to carry the glow from Rudolph to her. So that is my painting for today. All the supplies are linked in the doobly-doo. Patreon is down there. And I hope to see you when I put another video up in another couple of days, because you know me, that's what I do around here. I will see you again later. Go create something every day. I'll see you later. Bye-bye.