 Hello, and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Allnock, and I'm an artist. I work in a lot of different mediums, and I love to teach. That's my real passion. And I include something teachable in each one of my videos. So whether or not you work in that medium might just learn something from it. And today is a prime example. I'm going to be doing a real-time watercolor today, but I'm going to show you in the first portion how I got from a really complex idea down to something really simple. You would think it would go the opposite direction, but if you're somebody who tries to throw the kitchen sink into all of your work, when you really want to pare it down to something simple, this might be a big help to you. Before we get started, I want to let you know that on Saturday I'm going to be posting, get this, a second real-time watercolor in a row. I know Sandy who never does real-time watercolor. Is now doing two in a row. And I want to let you know that because I would like you to paint along with me in the description section of the premiere of that video. You can go find that with the link in the doobly-doo. Then you can find out what the colors are that we'll be using, the supplies you'll need, and you'll be able to download the reference photo that we're going to be using and paint along with me. It'll be noon Pacific because that's where I live and you can translate that into your time. I will be in the chat that day and answering questions along the way. So if you want to just watch the video and ask questions while the painting is going on, we can do that or you can paint along that day. All right, let's get started on painting the cute little alpaca. This piece, as I said, went on a long road and the initial idea started with a photograph. The website Paint My Photo, where they have all kinds of pictures that you can paint from without copyright worries, had this photograph on it. I've had it in my collection for a long time, waiting for the time and the inspiration to do something with it. I loved this cute little alpaca and decided that was going to be the subject that I was going to work with next. I decided to begin with basically an exploration of composition. If I were to create a portrait of this creature, what would I do with it? And if I were to do a straight up portrait just as is, I just wanted to assess some things about the photo. What's in the background? What's not in the background? Where's the lighting coming from? What's the expression on the face? Thinking about what medium would be best for it. And as I saw all that crazy fur, I was like, oh, it would be kind of fun to get into all that with colored pencils. So maybe I'll do a colored pencil drawing. I had all these things running through my head and taking the time to do these quick little thumbnail sketches gives me time to process and picture what it is that I want to do with it. And, you know, just take some time to see what else I could do to the photograph to change it for my drawing. So here I decided to see what would happen if I tilted it. If it looked like he had his head cocked or he was peeking in from the side. That would add some whimsy to it because he's kind of a whimsical creature. And, you know, just put the same background in, see what happens. So for any photograph, you can do this kind of an exercise. Just sketch it in a bunch of different ways. Move the main image from one place to another. Try eliminating some parts of it or adding something else to it and see what you like. So there I added a tilt. I thought I'd try doing it as a landscape rather than portrait. So horizontal rather than vertical. You can flop it the other way. If you have a photograph that's horizontal, you can make it vertical and see what that does for you. And here it leaves me lots of room to explore a background of some kind and put something else in there. I have lots of space. My initial idea is almost always my worst. And my initial idea was either to throw a barn in there if it's a domesticated type of alpaca or a mountain. If it's a wild alpaca, which would require a little research to figure out the proper landscape and that sort of thing. So you can change the orientation and add a landscape, a background. You can add some context basically to it. So think about, you know, what each orientation will do. Sometimes if you're moving an image into a portrait, then you're leaving a big sky. You can have something going on up in the sky. Some really amazing clouds or something like that. Lots of different ways that you can change things when you start adapting placement of the image. So here I'm exploring lighting. What if I change the lighting to be from the upper right and maybe a stronger lighting rather than weaker lighting. More of an overall kind of lighting. And here I'm going to really emphasize that by putting a dark color on the right side next to the highlight, which is going to make the highlight pop more and then let it fade into light color on the other side. Because on the other side, I have a shadow. And so I'm going to get double contrast if I change just flipping left to right that background that was in the original one photograph. So next up, okay, let's see if we can push this further. And I wanted to do something whimsical like tilting the head was great. What if I go further? And when you're trying to add some whimsy to something, you could put them in a sweater. You could make their tongue stick out. You can, you know, make their eyes look different directions. Lots of different elements that you could change in this. I decided I wanted to keep that, that dark on the right hand side and the light on the left hand side. There were a lot I liked there. And I thought, what if I just did something as simple as adding a monocle? You know, make it a smart alpaca because it looks like there's some intelligence going on in there. So I added some personality and then take it one step further. You could go 20 iterations on things like this and then really adapt your photograph to turn it into something really amazing. Here, I am going to keep the same lighting. I'm going to keep the monocle. But if this creature is really smart and needs some kind of a setting, some kind of a location, what if there's a library back here, you know, bookshelves or something so that this alpaca is a librarian? And that seemed like a reasonable place to go. So I decided that would be the one. Now that I've got my location settled, I'll just dive right in and do the drawing. And I got my pencils out and I shouldn't have. I should not have done that because I was not done with the explorations. But I wasted three days on a drawing I did not enjoy. And I know a lot of people will look at this and they'll think, why didn't you enjoy that? It's great. I'm having a discussion right now with my patrons about what I didn't enjoy here, what I didn't like, what didn't work. So if you want to hear part of that crazy discussion, then go join Patreon. But for the purpose of this video, we're going to go that step further that I should have done in the first place. I thought, let me pull back on the alpaca. And if this is a smart alpaca working in a library, it needs a way to carry the books around. A pack of some kind to hold the books. And then there's got to be a patron that they're helping in the library. So what if there's a little frog with a backpack and a sweater on sitting on a bookshelf? And I realize that might not be very realistic. So let's take the animals outside with the frog back on the ground where the frog would be. And turn the alpacas attention to lean down to the frog. There's a relationship going on there. I liked the relationship in the earlier one, but I really liked it here where there's some engagement and they're actually having a conversation. And here I was playing around with colors and what was I going to use for colors on this? I didn't like the gray a whole lot where I really lightened the alpaca to be a super white. Decided I didn't quite like that much, but I really liked connecting the frog and the backpack. So I changed the color of the pack to make it green. I put a bunch of little accoutrements on it. There's a cover that can pull down over top of the pack to keep the books all dry. There's a pocket in the front for a clipboard so she can keep track of who checked out which book. There's a pen pocket on the side, just lots of fun that I put into that. And I let all the detail be put in there instead of in a crazy background or in a pencil drawing where I was going to try to capture every piece of fur. Because I realized that was not making me happy. That was not a place that I had really intended to go. I should have simplified that much more than I did and it just hadn't worked. So let's try doing what I did in my sketchbook. I should have done that sketchbook exercise first because I would have gotten here much quicker and not spent a couple days on that other drawing. But I'm working in a sketchbook that has rough watercolor paper. It's Arches watercolor paper. And I'm putting a flood of color very simply in the background filled it with water and then just drop some color in. I wanted it darker at the top. So tilting the paper so that it collects that color upward and we get lighter color down at the base of the painting. And one of the reasons that I wanted to explore something this simple is because I've been talking to my pastor about working on a book with him, a children's book. So I cannot tell you what the book is about or anything like that. But suffice it to say we're just now having some discussions and getting started on thinking through it. And as the spring and summer goes on, we'll start doing more of the heavy lifting. What I have been kind of in the mindset of thinking about for the last couple of weeks is if I'm going to illustrate a children's book, I need to start working on simplifying my style at least as I'm thinking about the illustrations for that book. I don't picture them being super complicated pictures because the time setting that I'm imagining we're going to be working on with this is kind of an old timey historical type of thing. And I want to have the outfits from the historical time period, which means I can't have a whole lot of crazy detail detracting from that. I want the clothing to look just right. I want it to really stand out. And I want the kids to be impacted by what they're reading and by the pictures that they're seeing. So I'm going to be in the coming months. I don't know how much I'll do on YouTube, but I'm going to be practicing in my sketchbook a lot, taking complex things and simplifying them down and breaking them down into their main elements and not getting lost in the, oh my gosh, I have to draw every hair on the alpaca, which is where I went with the alpaca, that pencil drawing, just went a little bit too crazy with it. So I don't know, as I said, how much is going to make it onto YouTube, but my sketchbooks are going to see some simplicity coming their way. The colors that I've used here for the sky was phthalo blue turquoise. I love that color. It doesn't mix to make a gray very well. So in this particular one, I had to switch to mixing cobalt blue with my transparent red oxide to make a gray. I do mix my neutrals for the most part. I don't tend to, you know, just use something out of a tube. I try to mix those colors just because I can push the tint of it just a little bit. I can put more blue in it if I want to have something that's a cooler type of gray, or I can warm it up by adding more transparent red oxide. For the olive drab color that I wanted for the canvas, there's no olive drab color in my palette. So I mixed some transparent red oxide with sap green and a little bit of green gold. If you're trying to figure out how you can mix that from colors that you have in your palette, just mix something that's got an orangey color to it, like the transparent red oxide or if you've got some burnt sienna, that kind of thing. Mix that with your different greens that you have to see what kind of olive drab that you can make. This was the point at which I realized that I hadn't sketched in the pocket that was going to go on the side to hold pens. So I had to paint around what I thought I was going to use there. I could have stopped and grabbed a pencil and sketched it in, but decided to trust myself that I could withhold my little white spot with the pens of the pens and then moved on to messing around with the froggy. Frog a little bit of color. And the frog is based on a bullfrog. I did some research to try to figure out what kind of animals live in the same habitat as an alpaca out in the wild. And it turns out there are bullfrogs in Peru, where I was kind of looking at alpacas out in the wild. And they didn't have any pictures, though. I couldn't find out what kind of bullfrog. So it's an American bullfrog. However, what I realized is that this alpaca, since it is a bookmobile alpaca, it's carrying the books out to the other animals, could actually be in any setting. It could be visiting the frog in whatever country that frog lives in. It does not have to be where the alpaca lives. And maybe this alpaca is like Santa and Gary's books year-round to everywhere. I don't really know. But nonetheless, I decided that I was going to go with it and not really worry about whether or not it was the appropriate place for the frog and the alpaca to meet. It was the right country. The brushes that I've been using here are my good sable brushes. And for those who want to yell at me for using sable brushes, I'm sorry. I'm going to use them anyway. They just hold more water than other brushes do. And they release water differently. And that's what I like about them. And I find even though I have all the silver brushes, I have a whole cup full of them, but I just don't use them all that often anymore because I really like how these brushes release the water. There's different brushes that do different things. And this particular brush is a number four. And it holds enough water and enough pigment to paint with, but it doesn't hold so much that it splooges anything out for the most part. And I really like that about it. When I move to a zero brush, then that one doesn't hold practically any water or pigment in it. So I can hardly get any color off of it at all. I've been using it a lot in my gouache studies that I've been doing. And it works well for that because I don't want a lot of water. So that one has been particularly good for gouache, but it's not as good for watercolor. I know there's a lot of people who use tiny brushes all the time and then they wonder why they don't get any flow going. And that's because the brushes don't hold water. But for something like this small detail, the eye, I didn't want big sploogee water and I wanted to have something just much calmer. I didn't want the color to go crazy. So I switched to the zero. And then I went back for another darker layer to add some shadows onto the legs of the alpaca using the number four brush again. Because that I could get enough color into the brush to do so. And there's some brushes where you can get a dry brush look and some brushes where you're just going to get linear detail. And knowing your own brushes and your own painting style is going to tell you whether or not a brush is going to be correct for the purpose that you're using it. Just because some artist on YouTube, me or anyone else, says use brush X doesn't mean you should use brush X. So for there I wanted to get some really sharp detail in there. So I used the very tiny zero brush in those deep dark shadow corners because I wanted those shadows to have a really strong contrast. Adding some detail now onto the backpack as well. And putting some shadows under there. I don't have a heavy, heavy light source on this. There's kind of upper right is where the sun is. But there's not a whole lot of contrast in this. I decided I wanted to keep it much lighter and simpler. Again, as I'm thinking about the children's illustrations, there might be some night time seeing things in there and I need to start working out how to keep things simpler and keep the lighting more convincing and simpler for children when I get to that stage. But now I'm just trying to keep it simple. Painting in that pocket where the pens are on the right-hand side of the pack. The little roll, I thought that was a nice touch. It's almost like a brush roll, a piece of canvas fabric with a button on the end of it that the alpaca can use to save the books from the rain, if need be. Just kind of having fun painting the details here. I tend not to, as you may know, use tiny brushes very often. I don't tend to do little details like this because with watercolor, I prefer a looser, kind of crazy wild look. And to do that, I need bigger brushes. I need bolder strokes. I don't want to get into all these super fine details because then I get lost in details. Here I decided that the fine detail on this particular watercolor was okay because I had simplified the scene enough. If I had done a giant painting and then this was just a small element of it, I don't know if I would have gotten into this much detail because the bigger painting would be at stake if I was pulling all this attention down to these very fine details here. But for a small painting like this, this worked well and for a simple painting like this. There's just not a lot of detail. There's no scene behind it. I had debated the idea of putting trees in the background so that they would actually be in a forest. And it's not that I couldn't add them at this point. I could still decide to. And who knows, maybe I will at some point. It is a sketchbook and sketchbooks can evolve. But I wanted to try it with just the simple creatures and the grass underneath of them. And that's all. You know, right now it looks like they're in the snow because it's still white down there. But I wanted to finish them before I started painting in the background. I wanted the toes, especially of that frog, the back toes, to be in place before I started the background so that they will hopefully retain just a little bit of definition when I do a flood for that green background all the way around. Add some stitching onto the backpack. And again, this is detail that it was fun to add. Typically, I would not add that much on a lot of other types of paintings. But in this particular one, when everything's really simple, it can handle having this much detail poured into the pack itself. And that doesn't take away from the rest of the painting that's going on. Adding a little more shadows, just a little more context to where the light's coming from. And then worked around with that tiny brush, the pens that are in the pocket, because we've got to keep track of who's checked out the books. And they've got to return them. Just like people do, animals have to return the books. The board had kind of disappeared into being the same value as the green backpack. So beef that color up as well as the color in the books. And then it was getting close to the point of moving toward that green on the bottom. Often I'll paint in something like the green background, or the green grass early in a painting, because I want to see how much contrast I need to add into everything else. In this particular case, I decided to add everything else first, because I wanted to get those things set, because I didn't want to get carried away. If I put too much color down here in the green before painting everything else, I would end up unfortunately just making all kinds of other decisions on the backpack based on how much depth I put into the grass down here. I started with a lighter flood of color than I intended to have in the long run, because I knew I was going to have to keep putting more paint into this ground area in order to keep it wet and be able to pull the grasses up from it. So I saved myself the ability to add some depth to it later and got out my needle brush, love my needle brush, or things like grasses. It has a wide belly to it and a very thin tip on it. And while it's an expensive brush, it is save my bacon on enough times that it's paid for itself, which is good. You could also do similar things with maybe a number two brush, number two round, which you can get a little less expensively. But I'm just keeping that area right underneath of the grasses nice and wet so that I don't end up with too much of a hard edge. There's going to be somewhat of a hard edge, but I wanted the grasses to feel like they really grow up from that. You know, not necessarily smoothly, but now I can add more depth to the color, because I wanted this to again be cool since the greens in the frog and the pack are warm. And this allows me then to just do some quick strokes pulling upward, and then I have multiple colors in the greens. But the colors that I added to this to cool it off are a little bit of sap green and some cascade green, which has more blue in it, so that those would feel very different than the greens that I had in the rest of the picture. By the time I finished painting this, I felt so much better. I felt like I had recovered from the effort that I had put into the other drawing and all of the planning that had gone awry, and I felt good again. And I hope this made you feel good too. I also hope you're going to join me on Saturday for the real-time video of a snow scene. This is actually the value study, so it's a smaller study of a larger painting that I'll be doing. You can work small or you can work full-size, whatever you would like, and you can see more details about that in the description of the premiere of that video. And please do join me in chat live that day. I will see you guys later. Have a great week. Bye-bye.