 Hello there, this is Sandy Alnok, and this is the first part in a two-part series on comparing the differences between layering and glazing in watercolor. And they're both going to be roses, so let's get started. Before I get started painting, I thought I'd capture a little of how I tear watercolor paper down to size because I buy it in sheets. It's more cost effective to do that than to use pads, and I just fold it in half, and then I just go back and forth on that same fold over and over again. I don't use anything special to crease it, just using my hand. And going back and forth breaks those fibers so that you can tear it easily, and you'll get that nice, deckled edge that the watercolor paper comes with when you tear it this way. Now don't tear it upwards, don't tear it towards you, you want to tear it sideways. You want to do this on a nice big table so you can just pull the paper apart sideways. If it doesn't tear easily, just fold it some more. And for a full sheet, I tear it typically into quarter sheets, so I do this twice. But for the paintings in this series of two, I'm using eighth sheets, so each one of those is torn down even smaller. So for the first wash, or I often call it the first pass, I'm going to use really light colors for this. In layering or glazing, you can start out with really light colors. It really depends on what your end result is going to be. In the second painting in this series, I'll be doing a white flower. So both of the first passes will be lighter, but this one is not going to be a white flower. So I'm putting in a little more color and doing it while it's very wet, so I get some very soft and loose edges to begin with. And for my first pass, I tend to try to take the white out of the paper, except for where I want the white to remain. And with a very, very light wash, a mixture of paint that's very, very watery, you can achieve that kind of a look. You can make it lighter than this. If your painting is going to be much lighter, then add more water to the paint. But you want everything to be really, really wet. And then in between, you want it to be really dry. So dry it completely so that when you rub your hand over the whole piece of paper, you don't feel any of those bumps in the paper, the warbling that the watercolor paper tends to get. So then you'll know it's really, really dry. And then I'm going to begin with my mid-tones, anywhere where I want to start to bring in some richness and some darkness to it. Some people might consider this glazing because I'm using thin watercolor to do this. Thicker than when I did the first pass, but I'm controlling it more. I'm getting some hard edges and I can also use water to get some of these edges softened. So you'll see me put down paint and then I go and rinse my brush, excuse me, and start to bring in water that's going to give me a little softer edge in some spots. But in general, I've got a lot of that softness built in. So that's what that first pass was all about. There are some areas that I absolutely loved. And I'm going to make sure I do what I can to keep those areas. So this section on the left here, I love that watercolor bloom. It's at the top of this dark area. So I used water to take the paint that I'd put in the bottom section and get it to meet up with that top section so I can keep that edge. I want that to remain in the final watercolor. And when you come up with something like that in that first wash, look to find the things that you love and that you don't want to lose and determine how you're going to work around that. How you handle any given area is, of course, going to be dependent on what effect you want to end up with, as well as what effect you created in your first wash. Now, as I start moving around some of these areas, I want to change from darker pigment to lighter as I go across and then maybe back to dark again. So I'm alternating in that section of painting. Now I used a more watery mix in the center and then I went back to using more color toward the right hand side so I get that roundness start to develop. In the bottom section here, you can see the paint is thicker that I've put into my palette. I've also then mixed in the top well of the palette. I've mixed a darker color because I want those areas around the outside to start to fall away. The rose that I was looking at had some kind of gray areas around the outside edges of it. And I recommend if you're just getting started painting roses, try painting something where you're zoomed in like this. I cropped in the picture so that I was just looking at that center part and I didn't have to then worry about the outside edges and what that looked like because the outside edges of this rose changed color. It turned into like a whitish, blue, grayish kind of edge. And I wanted to stick with just these colors so I didn't have a whole lot of that to deal with. I did put a little of the gray out there in the corners, but the main focus of it is in the center. In this third pass, you'll notice I'll be doing what is basically a third and fourth pass, but doing them together. And that's because I want to have some very, very dark areas, some really deep, rich darks, which are going to create that illusion of real depth where the flower gets very dark at the bottom as it as all of those petals cascade toward the center. But I want to have soft edges on them. And when I combine a third and a fourth pass, that's going to give me the ability to get soft edges on those really, really deep areas. But it requires first putting in a section where you've got a darker pigment, so we're layering in more pigment into the rose. And I'm using water at the top section to get that to bleed out into the lighter color. And I'm not just painting right over top of everything. When I get to an area where I've got color underneath that I want to be the finished color, I'm using water over top of it to soften that edge so that I don't end up just re layering over top of everything because I'm trying to just deepen a few sections. So here I've mixed some really dark pigment, much thicker, used a little bit of a darker red than previous and start to drop that into the wet areas because when it's wet, it's much easier to move it around. If I want to have of an area where that really deep rich shadow blends out into my mid tone shadow or my my darker than mid tone shadow, then doing it while it's wet is going to work a lot better. And now I have in my palette a puddle of the darker mid tone and a puddle of the dark dark. When I keep both of those in the palette at the same time, then I can go back and forth between them. I can work on one pedal, add in some of the darkish area and then zip over and drop in some of the really thick pigment. My palette tends to contain at any given point several mixes of color and mixes of thickness so that I have them at the ready. And I had somebody ask me once how I paint when I have such small puddles of pigment on my my palette. Well, I'm constantly mixing extra new color because I never mix like just a ton of what I need for a full painting. But what comes with that is you're going to constantly be morphing the color because every time you add more water or more pigment in order to make another puddle, it's not going to be the identical mix from previous. So just know that if you're going to work like me with smaller puddles, then you'll want to get good at mixing that same amount or a close to it amount repeatedly, because that's what this does require. But as I'm adding both the medium darkish and the dark dark, you can see that I'm starting to develop even more depth in the flower, just more and more as I go over with more layers. It's making the color richer and brighter. As I started working on this left side, I was very conscious of the fact that I had that area that I discovered early in the painting and I wanted to keep that. So I'm using color on the right hand side of that section and then water to start bleeding over into that area that's very soft. And I didn't like how much water and pigment was moving. So I just used a baby wipe and lifted some up because I want to not take a chance on pushing too much into that area because I want to keep that little section. I loved what the paint did there. I'm using thinner pigment. And of course, like I said, I've got all different kinds of mixes. I'm using thinner pigment for some of the white areas in here because now that my painting is starting to really develop, I can see there's some areas where having that leading white edge slip into a peach color is going to give it more depth because that pedal now looks like it's cascading toward the center of the rose instead of all sitting up at the very same level. And when you paint in layers, you have all kinds of options to just keep adding more layers that will create the depth that you're looking for in your painting. It's also is going to give you richer color because more color is sitting on the paper. Watercolor always dries back about 30 to 40 percent from what you've painted that originally. And when you add more layers, you're adding richness to the color of it. I love the richness because I love contrast. Contrast is what creates depth and I love depth in my work. And that's where I end up getting a lot of it is from using layers one on top of another to create that kind of depth. Another thing you'll see me constantly doing in this painting is going back and reworking areas. So I wanted to create a stronger shadow and I can go back into it at different levels of moisture on the paper. So I'm kind of keeping an eye on things to see how wet is it? And when I go back and rework an area, am I going to want to leave that area really wet so that all of my paint that I add in is going to be super soft and blend in? Or do I need to create a sharp edge? And here I waited till this center was pretty dry so that I could have a hard edge on one side or another of the super dark sections. And you can't really see it in the puddle at the top of my palette. But I've mixed Pains Blue Gray with some of the reds so that it's not a pure Pains Blue Gray. I didn't want to add something that felt like a black kind of color in here. But I needed something that was going to just add that extra pop. And you can see that those areas do start to fall into the flower even further and those shadows get even stronger. This is not glazing. You'll see glazing in the next video. This is layering. Layering is just building up more and more color to add depth to it. Glazing will see changes the tone of something. And while, yes, layering also changes the tone, that's not the purpose of it. The purpose for layering is adding more pigments. You get a nice, deep, contrasting kind of painting. And this works for any subject, whatever you're painting. If you want more color, if you don't like how watercolor does tend to get lighter over time, then you're going to want to use layers to darken everything. My final touches are to take some of the white areas, knock them back to a peach, go in and add a little bit more red over top of some of the areas where I've put the Pains Blue-Grey, that color that doesn't really harmonize with everything quite that well because it's created to give it that that pop of shadow. And then we're done. I really loved how this painting came out. It's a great practice exercise for me. If you're going to try painting roses, try painting just the center of a rose and get used to the idea of following those exact shapes and building up your color with layers of paint. My next video on Friday is going to be painting a white rose and I went through some, yeah, some trouble trying to get that color just right. But glazing really helped and we'll talk about that in the next video. So subscribe if you haven't already because you're going to want to see that one. I'll see you Friday.