 Well, hi everybody, it's Sandy Onok. It is World Watercolor Month, July 2019 and Since the prompt today was ocean creatures I decided to get out my Darcy's stamp set that has this absolutely cute little crayfish He's so adorable and I will do some watercoloring on him. Let's get started. I Picked up this darling stamp set from Darcy's because it had a crab and I used to collect hermit crabs when I was a Kid when we were at the beach and it also has this little crayfish I'm just going to show you how to paint the crayfish, but same technique on the crab card that I'll show you in just a few minutes But in my classes I teach how to just paint a background using a blank piece of paper No stamp on it. Just practice painting the scene itself And then I get a lot of questions from people that say well How do I paint around an image? Do you just kind of stop at the edge of it? And this is the same kind of principle for other mediums as well, but especially with watercolor It's kind of hard to figure out how to you know paint into all those little tiny places When you've got a delicate little image like this with lots of little bits and pieces Well, just go over it Just go ahead and bleed right into the image if the image is going to have Really dark colors in it and I'm going to color really rich reds in the crayfish Which means it's going to cover up the little bit of brown and the little bit of blue that I get in there So I'm going to paint some mid tones in here for this underwater scene There is now if you haven't caught that yet There is an underwater scenes class for watercolor as well as for pencil and Copic marker last year was Copic and This year I added the other two mediums and I'm just painting right up and through the image and getting my colors on there as best I can and Making sure that I'm covering all those little areas like inside the claws and that sort of thing let it dry completely and Then I can start painting in the image now You might also want to paint any dark stuff in the background that I'm going to do it afterward rather than doing it first and As I'm doing this little claw I was thinking about saving some highlights and then I kind of missed it So I am going to go back in with a white pen afterward to add some highlights onto my little Krabby or my little crayfish here And I'm going to be more careful painting in here I'm using a number eight instead of the number 12 that I used for the big background so that's a great reason to have more than one brush and I did remember in some areas here to leave some of these highlight spots on the body and I when I stamped it by the way, I also wiped off that bottom section So it looks like he's kind of standing in the sand itself. So he's kind of set down into it Over here. I'm trying to leave some more of these highlights that I forgot on the other side just to see if I can do it I was a little bit on the inner hurry side when I was painting this so I didn't take my time as I might have Now when I paint backgrounds, I don't take my time I just move and paint and do it because I want all those colors to blend When I'm working on something like this this little, you know fussy detail thing I'm going to work on each section and you can stop in between each section that kind of thing If you don't need them to blend together but on a background you want it to kind of feel seamless So you want to take broad strokes with that and a bigger brush is going to help you to do that I know a lot of people are like, I don't know what to do with the big brush. It's too big If you practice your backgrounds with no image in them, just go right over top of things Just smash right through the paper and make the scene You'll get the practice at that and then by the time you start trying to paint around a stamped image You're much more able to do that because you've already at least got the technique down Now for this little guy, I wanted to add some shading and I want to show you this perlene maroon color It's a dark red and in general I tell people you don't need to have a dark red If you have a red you can mix other things with it to make it a different red You can mix some Some neutral tint with it You can mix some paints blue-gray with it to make it a deep dark color But if you just want a dark red and you want one in your palette Perlene maroon is kind of in my world an equivalent No, not necessarily equivalent for an r89 and Copic But you guys know how much I love my r89 if you watch my comic videos But I thought it would be nice to have a rich dark red because a lot of times when I'm painting something It's really hard to mix deep rich colors That's one of the areas where I struggle the most because you have to mix enough paint and You have to mix it dark and By the time you start mixing enough then you have to add more water to make more paint and everything gets water down And I wanted a couple rich colors So I have perlene maroon and perlene green in my palette for that reason specifically So I will be doing some more things with this perlene maroon around the holidays because it's really nice for Things like ornaments and getting a nice deep dark shadow around them But here I've got that perlene maroon mixed with paints blue-gray and look how much rich color I can get with that now. I didn't even need to have The perlene maroon to make this kind of a nice dark color. I could have taken and you could take whatever red You've got I've got anthraquinoid scarlet that I was using you can take any red And mix a dark color with it. That's one of the reasons why there is no hex chart for water color and I had a lot of Comments and questions and all sorts of things on my watercolor hex chart video if you haven't seen that I will link it up here at the end for you I Named it that because a lot of people asked for a watercolor hex chart But this what I showed you here in mixing that really dark color with the paints blue-gray and the red is why you don't really need to have a hex chart because You don't need to know whether or not there's a darker red Unless you know well, I should say if you want to just know that there is a darker red Then yes, it's helpful to see all the colors and you could do that by getting the dot cards of everything And then you'll have a swatch of them rather than having to buy them all however You can mix any color that you want Literally your palette could be red yellow and blue and there are many artists who say all they want in their palette is a warm red a Warm yellow a warm blue a cool of each one of those three and That's all they need and they even mix their own grays and blacks and that sort of thing I don't like mixing all that stuff all the time and I have some struggle with mixing greens So I have several greens in my palette I like having a couple options for blues and I have a palette with 24 colors here So I can fill that with whatever I want So that's why I've done that and there are some special colors that I love I'm a little nervous because I've ordered a palette and it's one of those It's like this really fancy shmancy handmade palette and it's custom made for me And it doesn't come until next summer So I have to till next summer to figure out how to pair my palette down to 15 colors And I don't know what I'm gonna do with that because I can't pick 15 But I guess I'm gonna have to at some point when that time comes. So anyway, here is the finished card I cut it down to a square card and just added some white highlights with a white pen You could also do that with a titanium or Chinese white paint probably titanium would be a better recommendation But a white pen works great And then I'm also going to add some black pen to create a little bit more texture in the sand Very simply done and don't make it really even don't try to make the line the dots all line up or anything The more random it is the better And here's the little crammy card Same scene same kind of way to paint right through the image And then just make sure the image itself is darker colors And in another video at another time, I'll try to address how to do that with a lighter image It's a little a little tougher to do But there you go Hope this was helpful supplies are all in the doobly-doo. There's more stuff over on the blog and I will see you later. Bye. Bye