 Hello and welcome to my studio. I'm Sandy Almok and I'm an artist. I work in a lot of different mediums and I make projects from small and mailable things to large and frameables and everything in between. Today I'll be working on watercolor because it is World Watercolor Month. Every July we celebrate the medium and every July I get to be an ambassador and that is exciting which means I'm gonna be painting a lot. You don't have to do anything special to participate in World Watercolor Month except for watercolor and it can be traditional watercolors or watercolor markers or gouache or brush show or whatever it is that you would like to paint with that day and there's prompts but you don't have to use them. You can use them if you're stumped for ideas on what to paint that day and then go post your work on social media and use World Watercolor Month as the hashtag. That is it. You don't have to sign up for anything but you can get on Doodle Wash's email list if you would like to get more information and I'll also put that link down below. I'm gonna be making good on two promises today in this video. One, I have already showed you, I got my hairs cut. Yes, my hair's cut, not my hair. I got all of them cut, every single one of them. I was looking like a moppet and it's really short now. My little lady who does my hair likes to make it shorter than I want it to be but that's okay because it'll grow. I also wanted to make good on the promise that I made that I would show you my painting that I turned in for the swag for World Watercolor Month. This is the mug that they have this year, new mugs. They used to only have these zipper pouches but now they have the mugs too and this is the big zipper pouch and you can get one of these in this size or smaller size or the mug and you can use the mug for your paint water or you can use it for your coffee or whatever you would like to use it for and the proceeds go to charity. So we help kids so that kids can make art and that's a good thing. So I'm gonna put a link to the store in the doobly-doo. I'm gonna link you to my page but you can scroll around and see what other artists have offered up and see if there's a design that you prefer. So now I wanna show you the painting that I created of this Rocky Beach. Let's get started. The photo reference I chose is one that I simplified significantly for my painting because I really wanted to capture that reflection on the water and the intensity of the rocks but not as much all the fine detail, all the little tiny pebbles and things. So you'll see me simplify a number of areas. One of which is the sky. The sky, I just put some blue at the top and bottom and then added some spray of water and used a baby wipe to lift off a bit of color as well so that I'd have more of these very soft clouds opening up and letting the light come through. I wanted a little bit of the intensity in the photo so I added just a bit of a phthalo so I'd have a punch of color and then joined the cloud section with the water so it would just blend in softly and while that's wet, add it in the sand, that distant sand because I wanted that to be a soft edge as well. I'm gonna add more to define it later on and left some water at the bottom so I could just bring that very softly downward on the painting. Then I moved to the bottom section while that was still wet in the center to add in some transparent red oxide mix and add some more of the sand so I could start building back up the color as I made my way toward the further distant sections of sand but leaving the open areas for the puddle because I wanted that puddle to really be strong in there and carefully added in some of the blue so that it didn't bleed too far. I knew I was gonna add some darks around the edges to clean that up but I made sure the top edge had water on it and even used a baby wipe again to soften it so that I'd get that additional soft glow going up toward the sky. Now once it's all dry, I started working with the flat brush to put a line of color like in the photograph, the distant water is just really distant and it's very, very thin. Everything else was just bringing down the sand and so this needed to be thin. I could have done it potentially using dry brush but that seemed like it was gonna be really hard to do in that thin of an area. So just using the tip of the flat brush, I could tap that color in and create something that looks like the crashing waves and that sort of thing and remember that's blue under there. It's gonna feel like it's got some white foam in it just because of the contrast between that and the water itself. So then I started bringing down wetter pigment and sort of fading that out as it gets down toward the sand which now I have to start working in the next line of sand because there is some dark sand out there in the distance. That's another of the things that attracted me to choosing this photograph to paint from is the fact that you have this really clear distance. It's one of those scenes where you really feel like it's a long walk to get out to the water and I wanted to capture that feeling, that feeling of the space itself. As I started working toward the sides of where the sand meets down with the water, I had to start creating crisper edges and that's what's going to make it look like it's a puddle of water, like the trail of the sea that had come into the land but then there will be some spots that will be softer and it's a matter of just playing around with them. It was partially here where I tuned out being obsessive about looking at the photograph too much because there's so much detail in it and that's one of the things that I made a great mistake with when I was a new painter and I still feel like I'm green. I'm not sure I can even say that I'm no longer a new painter. I've only been painting since 20, I think it was 2017, I wanna say. So I just don't feel very experienced but anyway, when I first began, if I had chosen this photograph, I would have tried painting every single rock in exactly the place it was. I would have sketched them all out, I would have put in all of the little textures in all the rocky areas and here I felt like I've come so far because I was able to just say to myself it's not necessary to do every single little thing that is pictured in that photograph because I'm trying to capture the overall essence of the place, that sense of distance, that sense of light cascading down and reflecting and that freed me up. I could use this nice flat brush to start making rocks and not really worrying about am I making this rock exactly as it's shown in the photo because I'm not trying to replicate that. Somebody already got a great photo of it, I'm never going to get it as good as that photo but I can get my painting to represent what it is that I loved about that photo and focus on that part of it and just make my own rocks. I'm putting them in general in the kinds of areas, the kinds of size relationships that I saw in the photo and I'll still glance at it while I'm working but I wasn't really trying hard to make it look like you would recognize every rock when you went to the beach. Oh, that was the second one from the left that she painted because I just wanted it to have that feeling. I'm using lighter, thinner paint as I'm doing this portion and if you're new, this is one of the things that I also kind of realized over time is that it's real easy to get intimidated when you're putting a really dark color down next to a really light color and it's a little safer in my mind, at least it helps me mentally to process what I'm doing when I start painting in a lighter color and then I can just slowly add my darks to it. I can start to build up that color and decide how dark do I really want these rocks to be and not lock into it in that first stroke because when you're jumping into a painting and all of a sudden you have a really high contrast between two objects, it can actually just scare you as an artist like, oh my gosh, now I don't know what, did I do that right? Did I do too much? And you'll either make the error of continuing on and trying too hard to start pushing all of the rocks to be that dark color or you'll get timid and you'll get afraid and everything will dry before you start being able to work into it. And here I was keeping the rocks nice and wet while I was working on them and adding extra shadows to them and stuff and you saw me lifting color as well. So if you're still working while it's wet and you're not freaked out because oh my gosh, I've added too much color, then if you get to the point where you wanna dry your brush off and just lift color out of it to create a highlight, you can do that. And I used to just get frozen when I was painting. I would look at what I had done and think I've totally messed this up and then I would sit there and stare at it, trying to figure out how I was gonna fix it instead of proceeding while the paint was wet. And all of these rocks are still in some phase of dampness. So I can still go back into any one of them. I had a bit of an oops with the camera. It stopped filming and didn't tell me so we missed a couple of brush strokes there but not a big deal. I'm using colors for the reflections that are the same colors in the rest of the painting. Not gonna add something new at this stage and that is one of the other things that I've learned since I first began with watercolor. I used to try to use an individual color for everything. And I found that my paintings were very disjointed because all of a sudden you'd end up with a different color in an area that had not been seen elsewhere. And I didn't know why it just was jarring to me but I've come up with much more calm types of paintings since I started limiting my color palette and choosing those first colors as ones that I can mix later. So as I'm getting these grays into the rocks it's actually using the blues that were in the sky to add to the browns in various quantities. So when you're mixing any kind of a neutral color if you mix red, yellow and blue in different kinds of red, yellow and blues and different kinds of quantities you'll get varying amounts of browns or grays. So I could add a bunch of blue to the brown mixes and end up with a color that's a gray or even a blackish color without using any black in the painting because those colors when they're mixed really thickly will turn into a black color. But you can see how adding those blue grays on top of these brown rocks starts to really develop them into rocks that look realistic as opposed to brown blobs which is where the first wash across the rocks had been. And this just allows me to work slowly into them with a smaller brush and get some texture, build in some of the curves of the rocks and the gaps underneath and that sort of thing so that I can individually handle each rocks that don't look like they're all clones of each other. And again, you can use the photograph as kind of an idea if even if you're making up your own rocks like I am I would occasionally if I got stumped with okay, I wanna make a unique shape here what could that be? I would look at one of the rocks in the photograph and say, oh look, that one has a slope to the left or it has a ding in it on that right side and I could use that on this other rock that I'm creating. So it was a way of adapting the elements that are in the photograph to this thing that I had put together on my own with my own shapes of the rocks but still carry the flavor of the scene itself the place and the kind of rocks that ended up on this particular beach but the more of the grayish colors and especially the deeper pigments the thicker type of colors, you know that's pains blue gray mostly doing a lot of that work in there because it's got a lot of bluishness in it along with a bit of cobalt blue and then those browns just makes these really nice perfect rock colors which can change and vary depending on how much water is in the puddle. So my puddles end up being giant messes from one section of the well of the pallet to another so that I can have all these colors that relate in the rocks and mimic each other without everything turning into the same color because I want them to feel like they're all different but as I started working into the rocks and feeling a little happier with them I needed to start adding some shadows to them since I want the light to be clearly coming from that far distance and that meant I needed to switch to a larger brush in order to put more of that dark color now that foreground section on the right is all little itty bitty tiny rocks didn't really want to get all that detail in there I wanted a little something and did some splattering in order to create just a small amount of interest and when it splatters on the rest of the painting just grab a baby wipe or paper towel and dab it off baby wipe tends to do that a little better because it lifts it with a little bit of dampness and as long as the colors are not staining colors it's pretty easy to wipe that back off as I always like me a little bit of splatter it just creates a nice random texture somewhere on the painting which typically makes me pretty happy so there I'm using the baby wipe to add some highlights back into some rocks that just felt like they had gotten really dark when you're talking about watercolor you can lift color back off if I wanted to, I felt like I was kind of polishing rocks adding on some highlights by just removing a slight bit of color and then I can go back in with the brush into any of them and add more texture if my finger took out too much and if I overdid it you can just paint right into that area again especially since it's damp you'll get nice soft edges so this little sloped hillside on the other portion of the puddle is gonna be darker because it's got the shadow side facing the viewer and just added some more dark color in there just start to balance that out at this point I was just looking at the overall painting are there areas that needed to have more depth and richness and then I realized yes because I had all section of rocks that I just had sort of left down so started working on painting some more rocks in the distance and the great thing was I already knew how to do that because I'd already had these rocks working in the foreground really well they just need to get smaller and smaller as they get further away because the more contrast you can have between those sizes the easier it's gonna be to start creating that depth across the entire set of rocks so I dried those up a little bit so I could add in a small amount of detail in them to create some shadows under them and then it was just fussing with small details to the end of the painting to try to finish it off and not overwork it like I am just so good at overworking things and keeping on going until like I just can't even see straight anymore it's just yeah that is still my struggle in watercolor hopefully at some point in my painting career I will get over that, let's hope so right? But small brushes will get into the small details and I avoid getting too much into those like small brushes when I'm doing background things when I'm doing this ground because it's really easy to get over detailed in some of those and I didn't want the little tiny rocks and the textures in the sand to start taking over all of the rest of the detail that was in the rocks themselves one of them to take stage. For the final detail I got out my needle brush this is the one that is just absent in all of the stores I wish it was more available for people but I love, love, love this brush haven't found a good replacement for it yet but maybe that will happen who knows but the calligraphy down here is just gonna give an interesting different look to that section than the rest of the painting speaking of which there is the rest of the painting and if you would like to try painting this yourself I'll put a link in the doobly-do to the photograph at Paint My Photo it's a free membership to go be able to use their photos for your paintings. Thank you so much for hanging out with me if you have not yet subscribed please do so and if you haven't got your swag yet for World Watercolor Month head over to the store and pick yourself up some goodies that are for charity and I will see you again very soon in the meantime go out there and create something every day hopefully in watercolor.