 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Olnack, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I am going to loosely watercolor some poppies today. And actually I'm going to show you how to cheat on loosely watercoloring poppies. And I'm going to use the painted poppy set from MFT, which of course cries out to be watercolored. And I've stamped them onto some watercolor paper. And this is Arches. I believe it's the rough that I use, but you could also use the cold press. And I've sprayed on some water and then I'm spreading it out because I want kind of an even coating of water on here, but I don't want it puddley. So I'm going to let it dry for just a minute so that it's not super shiny. I want it wet enough to move the pigment, but not so shiny that it just puddles everything because I want to be in control of where it puddles and when. So here I just want the color to be able to move and I'm going to drop in color randomly in my flowers. This is some quinacridone coral that I'm using for my poppies and dropping the color in, letting it spill out over the edges and just kind of playing with it. Don't worry about filling in every bit of every flower. Let some of them be very loose and have some white edges to them. You'll notice that there's some spidery looking edges on some of them. You can keep the spidery edges if you like that. I wanted to be in control of some of that and I wanted them to be softer. So I'm taking a little spritz here and there of some water to soften those out so they bleed out to white a little bit more rather than having that spidery look to them. Now if you overspray you could end up making a disaster out of the whole thing. So deep breath don't get too crazy but I'm just kind of spritzing a little water on here so that I keep those edges from being being too much. While that's still moving I'm gonna throw in a little green. This is just some sap green from Daniel Smith. Use all Daniel Smith paints on my stuff to throw in some randomly in some of the green areas and letting it bleed out letting it bleed into the pink of one of the flowers. No harm is going to be done by having a little bit of that color bleed. Now here I'm going to let it dry longer and I went and had something to eat and I came back. I did have a bloom here but I'm going to use that bloom. There's one flower on which there's more of a hard edge. So what I'm going to do is first start on that bottom half and and paint some some of the carbazole violet again over top of it and then go right over that top one and look how nicely it turned that edge that was a hard weird edge into almost a crease in the flower petal. So I got very lucky by that and the reason that I got that bloom by the way is that there was water sitting on the side of my board while it was drying and it pushed back into the paint so if you have that kind of an issue coming from around the edges of what you're painting then dry those edges and dry those puddles of water before you let it sit dry. And now what I'm doing is choosing a couple of petals to start adding a little darker color too. I'm letting the pigment be on the tip of my brush so I'm painting that into the shadow areas and then laying the brush down or rinsing off the brush and then drying it so they have just a damp clean brush just barely damp and blending out that edge and laying down my brush so that I get that really soft edge and can get some lifting going on as well to pull some of that color back out. Notice that I'm not doing every single petal. I'm not doing everyone the same way. You want them all to be different. And here is where your control freak can come out because since you have that undercoating of all of that beautiful splashy color you can allow some of the darker colors here in the flowers to stay within the lines. Just don't go completely within the lines. I'm not filling in every flower. I'm just doing some shadow areas and that sort of thing. So don't get too tight with it but this is the point where your control freak can at least have some of your jollies even though having that much splashing might have freaked you out. This is where you can get back under control. Now there are artists who can just sit down with this whole piece of paper and paint this in one go and not have to put down a layer and then do each petal like this. I'm generally not one of those people. I'm getting closer to it because after years of trying really hard and working at it all the time this is my job remember. I'm getting closer. I'm getting better at that but it takes years of practice so don't feel bad that you may not have it yet. This is a cheater way that you can do that and what I'm planning on is a class. I'm working on putting together a watercolor jump start class. So for those who have taken color pencil and Copic Jump Start this is going to mimic that in some ways. It's going to have to be different too because of the medium and we can't print out all those charts but I have some really cool swatch practice types of things where we're going to do some exercises on both some heavy mixing exercises as well as water management and edges. So stay tuned for that. It's going to come out in the fall of 2018 along with the new website. I'm having the website rebuilt because there have been issues with it. The teaching website, I apologize for that for those who've had problems with it. I have been as frustrated as you so I'm kind of mortgaging my future here trying to pay somebody who is going to rebuild it correctly and get it fixed the right way so that it has long-term viability for me. But they say it will be done in mid to end of September and I plan to have the classes ready to launch when that does happen. So stay tuned for that announcement when it comes. And the watercolor jumpstart class will be one of a couple of classes that we'll be launching at the same time to celebrate things being fixed. All right back to the painting. We've been watching me add layers of darker color to some of the flower petals and I'm waiting till they dry just to see how much color remains. Watercolor always dries lighter than it goes on so I'm just putting more layers on as I see one dry I can add another layer to it and I'm not worrying about doing them evenly. Remember that you can always go back and add a little bit more color even after it completely dries you can add another glaze of color on top. Perfectly fine to do but some of them you're going to want to do while they're wet and this is a great kind of thing if you get a whole bunch of flowers like this great thing to practice on is to see how wet it needs to be to make that work and again everything that I talk about here on YouTube and in my classes everything takes practice and if you only sit down once a week and you haven't practiced every day on something if you sit down once a week you're not going to be like a hugely successful watercolorist I have spent years and taking like huge expensive glasses at an art store and and working every day and and that sort of thing and I'm still not there so I don't want you to feel discouraged that it's hard because watercolor is probably the hardest medium and that's okay it's okay for watercolor to be hard and for us all to be striving but in that class as well as here on YouTube I'm going to try to give you cheater steps like this to help you to be more successful as you you try things out now here's something that I'm going to try I'm going to show you the the boo boo thing that I did here I wanted to make a dark center on the flowers so you know poppies have that nice big black center and I decided to mix what sometimes works apparently this time it didn't because I didn't have enough of the carbazole in it carbazole violet with sap green makes a really nice blackish color and here it started going really green because I used way too much green and not enough of the purple so I tried spreading it out and then dabbing it off that didn't really go anywhere for me I was like have I totally screwed this up and decided okay fine I'm just going to fix it and see what happens add a little bit more of my my my coral back in there and I did miss one of the portions of the petals I will fix that later so for all of you on YouTube who are going to be commenting on how I mixed missed that one petal on that flower on the left it will get fixed just not in the video it'll it'll get fixed in the photograph at the end shall we say and now I'm adding some straight up carbazole to the center this sentiment that I stamped is from Ellen Hudson link in the doobly-doo to all the supplies by the way the inks that I used one of them was a red and one of them was a distress ink in picked raspberry because I didn't have a color that matched this quinacodon coral so don't be afraid to double stamp your sentiment in a couple different colors if you need to to build up layers of color to create the right kind of shade of pink or red so that's it for today I will see you again tomorrow for another fall floral video because I'm in a week of a whole series of videos and I will see you then take care