 Well, hello there. I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to talk all about luminescent watercolors from Daniel Smith. I recently swatched out all the colors that I have. I have mostly Daniel Smith. I use their dot cards to do a lot of the swatching. I don't own all these colors. But I swatched them all out so I'd have references for them and I did swatch out the luminescence. But I didn't really know what to do with them. That's part of the reason that I'm even doing this video. There's iridescence, there's interference, there's pearlescence, and then we have the duochromes. And those are all considered luminescent paints. And in order to see what they look like, you kind of need to swatch them on white and on black. And black watercolor ground is what I use to paint half of each of my swatch sheets. You could also just do that with a marker or something if you needed to. But let's go through the definitions. Iridescent is reflections. The particle of light hits the paint or pigment matrix and bounces back much like a mirror. That is language from Daniel Smith. I found a post by them where John talks all about that. And with the iridescence, what I find, if I think about it like a mirror, that your eye looks at it and it bounces right back. There's not a lot of depth of color or anything in these. It's just shine on the surface. Iridescent electric blue is the only one that's in my current palette. And it shows up both on the white paper and the black paper. I don't paint a lot on black paper, although I may start now that I have all these wonderful paints and knowledge about them. Interference, these are really interesting. Refraction particle of light enters the paint or pigment matrix and scatters the light. So there is nothing that shows up on white, absolutely zippo. But you do get this beautiful haze of color. And there's a whole selection of colors as well for these guys. And we'll we'll talk more about all of this as we go on. Pearl essence, they say they add opal lessons like an opal or pearl to the color that it's mixed or glazed with. I find them to be more glitter than opal. I think of opal as more of a pearlized kind of thing. So think of them as you will. You can paint them as a glaze over top of something when it's done, or you can mix them with other colors to make them shimmery and glittery. And I'm going to show you a lot of different ways to use a lot of these different kinds of colors as we go on. Deuochromes are one pigment that bounces back and forth between two colors. If you think of like a bug that in one kind of light it looks like it's bluish and then it kind of looks like it's greenish or reddish or something. And that's what a lot of these colors do, some to a greater extent than others. But I noticed on my little swatches, I couldn't really see a lot of that. And that's part of the problem of having small swatches. That said, I have posted all of my pictures of my little swatch sheets, my little swatch cards on my blog. So if you want to see what any individual color looks like off of the black and on the black, they're not perfect, but at least it gives you a start. But next, let's talk about black papers before I go moving forward. There is a black cold press watercolor paper by Stonehenge. I love their drawing papers so much. I liked this and it works fine. It's a hundred forty pound paper. It's an eight by ten pad, but it's very expensive. So you can also take watercolor paper that you already have and you already love like my arches and use some Mars black Daniel Smith watercolor grounds on top of it. I'm using the Ranger application tool that we usually use for inks in crafting. But you can also use a foam brush, all different kinds of things. Just get it on as evenly as you can. It doesn't matter a whole lot if it's not like perfectly without lines or anything. You can see what mine looks like and make your own paper that way. But I want to talk about paintouts because paintouts are going to be much more realistic than what you're going to do in a swatch. All these little swatches look all perfect and solid because I worked hard on making them nice and perfect, but it doesn't really tell me what's going to happen with them. This is a little whiskey painter palette where I put all of my colors in that are my luminescence. I have four iridescence for interference, one pearlescent, and then the rest of these are duochromes. And you can kind of see a little bit of the color change in here, but you don't see very much when you're talking about small swatches of anything. So what I recommend is doing a little bit of a larger paint out of some sort. If you have a painting that you want to try something on and try to see what effect it has, then try it on a painting. And you'll see me do that in a little while. But first, I thought I would show each of these colors, not all of the ones in my palette, because that will take forever, but just kind of throwing some of the color on here so you can get an idea what these colors do, what these types of paints do. On one paper, they're a bright blue and on another, they're going to be like a dark greenish kind of color. And I'll show you after they're dry as well. Some of them change color more when they're dry than when they're wet. And I'm trying to put a little more pigment on one side of my blob than the other just to see what happens to it when it's thicker versus when it's not. Because some of them will have that duochrome change of color when that happens. Interference colors, remember, those are the ones that are basically absent on white paper, there's nothing there. But they do some really beautiful things when they're on black paper. Because remember, that's the description that I understand is that it collects the light and then scatters it. So it actually gets more intense on the black and it doesn't have anywhere to scatter it when it's on the white. So that is the interference copper color. Next, let's try the iridescent scarab red. Scarab red is a color that on the black, it turns into this kind of green to red type of change color change. I love that. And I almost want to do some insect paintings now. Because this really makes me think of the shells of bugs and that sort of thing. So I may start doing some more of that kind of thing. If you want to watch my Instagram, you may see more of these luminescent paints as they show up. Pearlescent shimmer was in my palette until this year. I did take it out of my palette because I didn't find that I regularly use pearlescent shimmer. I'll throw it on top of something to add a little bit of a glitter to it, a little bit of shine. But I don't use it in my normal painting. So it was not worth the space that it held. But I do keep it handy because I definitely do use it from time to time. Iridescent gold is kind of weak, weak sauce, weak tea over on the white paper. But on black, it shows up really well. Duochrome aquamarine is very, very soft and has this beautiful soft watercolor. And I mean that in the terms of the color of water. But look what happens on dark. The Duochrome aquamarine turns into this amazing blue color. So it's helpful to swatch these out in whatever way you're going to use them in order to have a sample so you know what's going to happen when you add it to your painting. So interference silver, again, nothing shows up on the white, but it's nice and silver on the black paper. We'll do a couple more of these. Duochrome arctic fire is a color that turns really beautiful, purplish on black. I was really surprised by this arctic fire. I was expecting to be white and it's not quite white. It's this beautiful purple. So you'll see that in a couple of minutes when it's dry. And then Duochrome adobe has very little color on white, but it has much more richness on. I'm attempting to show you as best I can. The color changes that you can see in the light as I tilt the board. And each of these are now dry. So you can see they're a little bit different once they are dry. Having paintouts like this on hand will tell you a little bit more about what they're going to do on your painting. So if you're going to add them to a painting, it's nice to know what's going to change prior to actually painting it on there so you don't get any unexpected effects. And you want to know whether painting a little bit on is necessary or painting a lot on is necessary. So I will talk a little bit more about that in the next section of this video as well. And I will be trying to do some more work with these in the coming months, primarily on Instagram, if you want to see more. So fine art application. I have a number of water paintings that I've done recently because I wanted to be able to test out some of these and see what I would do. And I did this whole section on the left with these little spots. So you can see the difference between just having the paint underneath and then having the luminescent on top. And literally all I did was take some of the luminescent color and paint it on top of the places that I wanted some sparkle. And back in that black section back there, that dark area, I had lost a lot of the detail. So I painted over top of it. And you can see once it's dry that those little areas have those strokes that I made in there. So if you lose some some lights that you want some shimmer in a dark spot, these are really good paints to kind of go back in and add that shimmer. You won't see it for the most part, looking straight on, but you will see it if you walk up to a painting and look at it a little bit closer. This is a waterfall in Tumwater, Washington that I painted Plain Air recently. And I'm adding colors not only to the water, but I'm adding some of the Arctic fire onto the rocks. So I get a little bit of purple shimmer. And you can see this is the paint when it's wet and I tried to dry it so that I could see what it's going to look like when it's dry as well. And you still get that shimmer. It's not just from being wet paint, but you can see there's a difference in the areas that have shimmer. And this is yet a third Plain Air painting. I've been trying to paint water in advance of doing this video, knowing that that was going to be something I wanted to add more of the luminescence to. This painting in particular, I was glad to be able to add the luminescence because that water in the foreground there has rocks underneath of it. And I was having trouble communicating that the rocks are below it and that there was this wonderful shimmer on the surface. What I'm doing is very subtle. I use the iridescent jade in the green water and out here in the white areas. I'm using a little bit of the pearlescent shimmer. Just a little bit and I tried zooming in to see if I could capture some of that. And I can see it. I don't know if you can, but there is just a little bit of shimmer on the surface of the water around the rocks, which is what I was looking for because I had lost that in my painting and out there on the water as well on the surface of the water, just trying to let some of that shimmer hang out on the top of the painting. Now, this is a painting that I did just in my last video. So there will be a link to that as well. I use titanium white in combination with the luminescence in order to paint a shark. So if you'd like to see these paints used on black paper and this one is on the Stonehenge paper, then you can click to see that. Now, card makers, lots of my followers are crafters. So I pulled out all my sharks. I have more sharks than this, but I'm just showing you three of the sets because they're really fun. There's great sharks in there, different types. There's hammerheads and all kinds of fun stuff. And what I did was stamp them in VersaFine Onyx Black on this black paper. Now, you can't see very much of that, but they're stamped all over the entire surface. And at an angle, I can still see them. You could try embossing them if you wanted, but I just decided to paint the shapes on there. And I just went around with all of my different colors and just painted all of them and had a blast doing it. This would be a great way to test out from perhaps a dot card, all the different colors and see what you liked. But do yourself a favor and write them down. I did not write down what any of these were. I only know that they were in my little Whiskey Painter palette that I have for my colors. So yeah, oops on me. Do as I say and not as I do. To finish off my cards, I have my layer of yellow and my layer of the blue. And I complimented that layer of yellow by using some delicata gold ink around the outside edges just to add a little bit of shimmer on the outside and then a yellow sentiment across my cards and a white insert so that I can write on the inside of the cards. So there is my epic, crazy, luminescent watercolor video. Hope this was helpful to you. If it was, hit the like button. You could also subscribe if you wish. Go see the blog to see swatches of all the colors and more information. And I will talk to you later on the screen or a couple other videos you may wish to see and I'll see you next time. Bye bye.