 Hello there, I'm Sandy Allnach and today I'm going to show you how to make this beautiful leaf with all this great texture using watercolor pencils. And there are a couple other variations on this technique that I've been playing with and I want to share those with you too but they will not be here on YouTube and they will not be on social media. And I'll tell you at the end of the video where you can go and find those. But for now, let's get started. I decided to go for a walk this week because the weather has been absolutely glorious this September, where I live. We haven't had a full change of color. There's a few bushes that had changed color as I was walking around this nature preserve in my town. But most everything was still green, but the thing that I wanted to go for was leaf size. I wanted to find leaves of different sizes and shapes that I could play with. Because I wasn't worried about replicating them and trying to draw the leaf itself. I just wanted the shapes to be able to work with. And I also wanted the excuse to go out and film some beautiful footage of walking out here. Isn't it gorgeous? I know a lot of you are not having beautiful weather. So I am stealing all of it and keeping it for myself because it's been amazing. So I was looking for small leaves and some that were bunched up on branches. So I'd take a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I'd find leaves on the ground that were changing in color. So some of them might be changing in color because the whole bush is and some just because it fell off the tree. And then some this was just funny to have a leaf that was this ginormous like that's crazy big. I have no idea what that plant is. If anybody knows, let me know. And then you want to pick one of those leaves to trace. For this project, I'm going to choose one that's relatively simple in size. It does have a serrated edge, but you could do the same thing with something much simpler than this. Just go out in your backyard and find something. But I would recommend going for a walk, getting out there in nature to go find something. And then you want to grate some powdered pigment and we do that using a tea strainer. I've used this with regular color pencils. I've used it with graphite and here I'm using it with watercolor pencil. And it makes a pigment that just sits on the paper. It's just like a dust. And I'm using different colors that I know will go together for what I'm doing, which is yellows, oranges, pinks, a little bit of purple and sometimes a little bit of a rusty brown color. You can do this in whatever colors. Just know that they're going to mix and blend. If your tea strainer gets a little jammed up with all of that pigment, make sure you get all that delicious color out. I use a toothbrush to do that and then get a spray bottle to mist the paper. You don't want to get it wet. You want to mist it. And if you do it from too close, it'll blow all the pigment off the paper. Ask me how I know and just get it wet enough to just make the texture. Don't let it get drippy, soppy and have like areas that collect pools of water. It's going to work best if you can control that rather than the spray creating that for you, because you don't know where it's going to happen. And you want to be able to control where you get those splooges of water. So then we're going to paint judiciously with just a little bit of a damp brush. It's clean water. I'm not adding any pigment here. I'm just moving pigment that's already on the paper. And I'm choosing a couple areas outside of the leaf in the background because that's going to help to define where the leaf is. But I don't want to do this absolutely everywhere. I'm just going to choose some sections and dabbing the water off the brush. So I don't end up with too much. When you start putting water on this, you're going to lose the texture underneath of it for the most part. And the drier your brush is, the less of it you lose. And when you have all the beautiful texture in some areas and then others get completely smooth, it just looks kind of odd. So I recommend being a little careful about that. I'm using my baby wipe with my finger inside of it to tap off some of the excess. And here's what I mean by like using too much water is going to smooth out that whole area at the top. There may be some corners where you want to do that. A few areas in the background, but you can also dab some of that off, but it's going to not have texture in it as much. So next I'm going to indicate some veins. And you can skip this part if you're scared that it's going to mess it up. If you like everything else and you want to leave it all, then totally go for it. I did a bunch of samples that I'll post over on the blog that don't have any veins in them. And you can see how that looks compared to this. I kind of thought it was a nice idea to try and to be able to talk about doing this as lost and found painting, drawing, whatever it is that you do with water color pencils, and I'm using a brush that is just barely, barely, barely wet. If I feel like I'm getting too much water on the paper, I just dab it off on that baby wipe because any extra moisture is just going to start mixing all that stuff into brown and all the texture will just go. And I'm not going to paint the veins absolutely everywhere. On the left side here, I decided I'm going to let the background determine the edge and define that edge of the leaf. So the veins that I'm painting in here, I'm kind of leaving some lighter color going out to the outside edge. And on the right hand side, there's not a lot of color in the background. So I'm going to let the leaf define the shape. So I'm going to let the water go all the way out to the edge. So I'm not saying you need to do this on the left or the right, but look at the pigment on the paper and kind of see what makes sense. But don't do these lines everywhere. Just let them be in a few spots because anybody looking at it, their eyeball is going to fill in the difference. Their eyeball is going to imagine that the rest of it is there. And that's the joy of lost and found is that people get to use their own imagination to bring to your art and to be able to see see something and make it up in their own minds. It's like when you read a storybook and not all the details are there. It's because the writer wants you to engage in it and to create those details for yourself. Now, in this outside area on the upper right, there's very little pigment out there. So I did let it go sploogee, but I'm going to fix that later on by adding some texture back in. And yes, you can add texture back in. I'll show you how when we get done. And here on this left side, I added a little more than intended. I was trying to take the brush and just kind of tap around the edge to see if I could break that up and make it look more like the rest of the painting. And it didn't work. So I just dabbed a bunch of that up and I'll add again, the texture back on top later on when I get to the very final stage of the art project. So just tap, tap, tap, and that will lighten up some of the color. It won't put the texture back in. We'll just lighten the color a little bit. I'm even, you know, spreading some of that color that's on the baby wipe into those open spaces. And I'm trying to leave some areas that are going to be whitish and I want it to feel light and airy. So next is going to be to add a few select darks. And when you do this, you're going to choose a few areas, just like when we picked which areas we're going to put those veins in. We didn't do it everywhere. We're going to put the background darks in, not everywhere. And notice like up in this section, I'm trying to put a whole section, an area of purple, not a line of purple, but an area of purple because a line of purple is going to make it look like I'm outlining the drawing. And that's not the point here. The point is to define the edge by creating a darker color next to it. And down here in the bottom, it looks like I made a line around it. I did that deliberately, so you can see that's not what we want. So I'm just taking my pencil and working it into the watercolor paper so that I can get an area of purple, maybe with a few dark spots in it. But I'm trying not to make it a line. And that sometimes will just mean putting more dark color right next to it and then a lighter color next to it and just keep graduating that out so it gets lighter and lighter. You can do this with a purple like I'm doing. You can do it with a brown, like whatever colors are going to work with your drawing. But I would recommend picking your colors out at the beginning and then just keeping with them through the whole thing. So it all kind of goes together. You may decide you need to spritz this. And you might also decide, depending on the texture of your watercolor paper, this is Arches Cold Press. Then you don't even have to do anything. You can just leave it because the texture of the pencil plus the paper looks very much like the texture that was there from the powdered pigment. So I decided to add a little bit more definition to this left side of the leaf using the pink, so I'd have a little bit more pink in here. And I'm going to try to not overwork it because it's really easy for me to go a little too crazy with this. But if you get to this stage, you're like, I have completely screwed it up. I use too much water. It's a mess. I don't know what to do with it. Well, we have one more thing that we can do, which is going to be to add one more layer of texture, just applying some texture back on top again. And we're going to do that by getting a couple of colors of powder pigment and put it all over in different places. So I've got it in a couple of different spots here. Pinks and purples. Usually the darker colors will work a little bit better at this stage. And then you're going to get your spray bottle again, hold it way high up and then missed. And you'll see the paper get a little darker in some areas where you've got your pigment. If you decide, OK, that worked really great. I just need more of it, then dry it completely, then add more. You don't want to keep adding on top of what you've already got because then you're going to start making splooges by getting too much water on it. But I was happy with this, so I decided I'd remove the tape. I was very pleased with how this came out. There are more examples on the blog of using this very same technique with and without using the veins in it, in different shapes of leaves. So you can go check those out. But if you want to see the other ones, and I told you there's other videos, then you need to join Art Venture over at Mighty Networks. I asked you a couple of weeks ago to start joining and lots of you did. It's been fun getting to know you and seeing your work. And we chat back and forth and have Zoom calls and all kinds of fun things. Well, this time I'm going to provide a video a day or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday with variations on this technique. So if you want to see those, that's the only place you'll get to see them. They're nowhere else. So it's almost like a free class. Wouldn't that be awesome to have a free class in watercolor pencils? So go join. The link is in the doobly-do. I recommend going outside today in your backyard, your neighborhood or a local park and collect some leaves, small, medium, large, different sizes, different shapes and press them in a book. So as you get to watching each one of these videos, you're able to have some options at your fingertips to be able to create those projects. I will see you over an art venture. And until then, get out there and create something every day.