 Hi everybody, it's Sandy. I'm hoping you're seeing me here. I haven't done one of these YouTube lives in forever and I have all kinds of new equipment that I'm using. And I'm hoping it's all going to work just Primo. So let me know if you can hear, if you can see me, all that good stuff. It's good to see everybody in the chat. Be sure to let us know where you're coming in from. Where are you at? And what's your weather like? Is it raining everywhere? Is it just winter yet all over the place? If you are in the Southern Hemisphere, are you having, I don't know, maybe a drink with an umbrella in it? Make us jealous. Well, I'm glad to see you all here. I, as I said, haven't done one of these lives in forever because I haven't liked what my cell phone ended up putting out on a live video. But I have this fancy equipment now and all sorts of software and this crazy microphone that makes me feel like I'm a pro in some way. And so I decided to give it a shot. This is my sabbatical. And I'm working harder during my sabbatical than I usually do. But hopefully just doing new fun things that I'm enjoying. And so it's good to be able to see all of your comments. I finally have that worked out so that I can see my comments and my computer and everything all at once. And a couple of questions I'll start off with on the supplies. In the doobly-doo, the description down below the video is where the list of supplies is. So the brushes that I'll be using today, my paint selection is just the normal palette that I've had for ages. I'll be changing that up again come spring. We'll see how that goes. And yeah, so you can see the links down there. Hopefully you can see it while this is live. Sometimes those things are hidden while a video is going on but afterward you should be able to see it. And I'm gonna be using a combination probably of mainly two brushes, my two really favorite fine art brushes. One is a needle nose brush. So it has this little tiny point as well as a belly on it. And then the other is just a nice stable natural hair brush. And I'm gonna be painting two things today. I'm gonna start off with something that's a little smaller and a little simpler because I think the simpler one gives you the concept of where I'm going with the more complex painting. And hopefully that's going to help to make sense of it as we get to that. Cause it's gonna look weird at first. I'm just gonna tell you that right away. If you saw the Instagram video that I did on my Sandy on Fine Art yesterday, that's basically what I'm gonna do for the first painting and it's gonna be a small one. But in that one, it's much more, you could do that one card size. You could make it small because I know lots of you are card makers. So are you ready to get started? Shall we do that and have me just stop blathering? So let me switch to, I have all these different settings. Okay, so this one has my little paper. And this is, I don't know exactly what size we've got going here. Cause I know someone will ask. I've taken an eighth of a sheet. So this is all together 11 by seven and a half. And I've divided it in half cause I just want to make a small one because I really want to get to the bigger painting. But I should probably show you the pictures first. I think I have the pictures set up in here too. So let me grab that. So these are the two pictures that I'll be working with and it's gonna be the same technique for both of them. So I want you to kind of get the idea. On the left is the simpler picture. There's basically big blobs of snow and they have little bits of the pine needles coming out from underneath of them. And that one is much easier to do than the other but the concept is the same. The second photo has those blobs but there's just more of the greenery in front of them and they're more complex. They're not just simple blobs. So, so that is that. That is the references that I'll be working from and I am going to post the links to those photos when I'm all done cause I totally forgot to post them in there so that you can go look at them yourself. And of course now I don't have them in front of me so I'm gonna make up my own tree branches cause they're off my screen now and I'm not gonna take the time to go figure that out but the concept will still work. So if you have a branch of a tree and then maybe another branch coming in here and maybe this one goes up. That for me is all I need to draw to get this started. So I know that seems like very little to get started with. On the Instagram video that I posted yesterday that you can go see on my social media in that particular one I went in a different order and I did that deliberately cause I wanted you to know you could do it in either order from what I'm doing. So I'm mixing up right here some Pains Blue Gray which has a little bit of my green mixed into it so it's not completely only Pains Blue but just some really thin paint and wherever this branch is there's gonna be snow on top so I'm gonna paint some snow. This is the shadows of the snow and of course it's greener than it should be but there you go. So the shadows of that blob of snow there's gonna be a top to it up here but I'm not gonna draw that in I'm gonna draw that with my brush and then this part here is also gonna have some a blob of snow on it and then we'll have more snow down in here and then this one is gonna have snow and while it should be bluer than this and not just the green because my green heth runneth over I'm gonna throw in a little bit of Cobalt Blue just to make sure that we end up feeling bluish by the time it's done. While it's still wet I am going to paint the sky around it and by the way I mentioned in my comments in the chat that my friend Lisa Spangler you can see her there in chat. I've asked her to you help answer questions or ping me if there's something like important that I miss and so you can rely on Lisa for good information. So what I'm gonna do now is paint the sky but I'm gonna paint around the top edges of the snow. See how that creates just a bottom for the snow and a top for the snow and then the sky is going to reach into where the shadow of the snow is. So this part will touch right here but it won't touch there and then anywhere where I want that outside edge I'm just gonna paint around it. It's negative painting because you're painting the shapes of things around something as opposed to the shape itself because it's white, you can't paint a white shape. So then I join those and now you can see I'm getting a couple of branches here and I'm gonna then paint the rest of the sky in here. So that's the first step. And aside from the fact that I've got more green in there than I want, I'm pretty satisfied with this. If you want to soften some edges, you know, if things just got out of hand then you can lift up a little bit of that. I'm gonna lift out a little bit of the green just so I have enough of the blue in there and it softens a few edges but by the time this is done, it's not gonna need that. So I'm gonna dry it up here so I can move on to the next stage. Now you can use really thick paint to move on to the next step and not have to, not have to fully dry it but that is more advanced than a lot of people are so I will do the drying. On the next one, I might not do the drying. We'll see. So I can show you the difference. So a big thank you to Lisa by the way for hopping into chat for me. It was kind of a last minute thing. I realized, you know, she's a painter. She knows how to talk paint so if you have paint questions, she might be able to help because I don't know if I can paint and talk at the same time but I'm trying. I also have given both of the dogs a giant bone. I gave it to them like five minutes before I started so that they would sit there and chew on their bones and leave us alone. Let's hope it lasts an hour. So yeah, I'm gonna see how quickly I can get this one done because I wanna get on to the other painting. Okay. So that is pretty dry and I can hear Vienna in the other room crying already so apparently her bone did not work. If you hear a nasal whistling sound, then you will know it's her. So now I'm going to mix up some thick green paint and that is going to be, I'm gonna mix two different types of paint. I'm gonna take some brighter paint because not all of the pine needles are gonna be the same color. So I'm gonna mix up some lighter first, just some sap green and I should have softened up my paints before I started this. So I'm gonna throw in some sap green and I'm even gonna brighten that just a tinge with a drop of nickel azo, just a little bit. Because that'll brighten it up. And then I'm gonna take all of my dark green. So I've got green appetite and some periling green and then I'll also mix up. And this is the mix that I'll be mixing repeatedly. So if you say, hey, what's that color you did? It's just various mixes of this. It doesn't have to be the same throughout but it's green appetite, periling green and Payne's blue gray, two varying amounts of different ones. And it should be relatively thick. See how it's not moving very much but this one is moving a lot, it's much thinner because that's gonna be my lighter color and that's gonna be my darker and I'm gonna mix the two of them on the paper. So now, make sure I get this on screen here. Half the time when I do live things I end up halfway off the screen. I'm gonna start off with a couple of the brighter branches on these and they're gonna be the ones that are higher up. So if there's a couple of these that go upward this is my needle brush. Then I'm gonna do just a couple of these strokes and it's kind of like when I talk about doing flicking with Copic markers, you wanna kinda do that. You want them to not end in a just a line that's gonna just end with a blob at the end. You wanna end with a point on it. But fortunately, these are really forgiving. This whole painting pine boughs thing which I got into last year because I started painting one pine bough and now I just, it's my exercise to warm me up when I'm working on painting in the winter time. So there's a couple of those. They're not all going the same way. They're kind of going kitty wampus here and there and then I'm gonna take my darks and I'm gonna go in between some of them. If you're looking at a picture or if you're looking at a tree in your backyard you might want to figure out where those dark places are, where all the different branches come from, what angles they stretch out to and where the clusters of darkness are. So this one I just painted right over top of everything but when I come to this portion I need to figure out how to make these go behind it because I'm not masking it. I'm just gonna paint them right up to it but I don't wanna have a line here necessarily. I could have a shape here but I wanna try to basically carve into that with the dark paint. If I screw it up I can go in and make that a lower top part on that because my dark paint is gonna just cover it and define whatever's underneath of there. Whatever the shape of it is. And then here I'm gonna make some more that are going to go behind this but just don't make an outline around it. I'm gonna have like this part is gonna be across here but then skip a space so that it looks like there's air coming in between there or else it's just gonna look like you've outlined that little clump but I'm gonna do something else to that so that if you try this and you're like it looks weird, it doesn't look right then I'll show you another way to recover that. So my paint in the palette is getting drier as I work and notice I'm getting a lot of this dry brush stuff. You want the dry brush. Dry brush makes this look so great. Okay, so these are the back branches and now I've got this one in the front and I'm basically gonna do the same thing. Just mixing up a little bit more paint here and on these I can crisscross right over top of this so that even some of this disappears because some of these branches are gonna totally cover sections of the snow. And so if you come up with an area up here that got really wonky, just add more pine boughs to it. Add more pine needles and I'm gonna go back to my lighter color again because what I wanna add in here is just a little more realism as if there's another branch coming in this way, just the tip of it. That gives it the impression that the picture continues so I like doing things like that. Grab a little more of the lighter, wetter paint and make some more of these. So that is basically the technique. Paint the shadows in the snow and then the background or paint the background and then the shadows in the snow because in the Instagram TV video that I did, I did the background first and here I did the shadows first. You can do either one. I just recommend doing both of them together because it's a great way to learn to mix your edges because when you saw that first pass before I did all the drying, those colors were blending together and if there's any areas that end up being left seen, which I don't really have any here because it's one of the reasons why I thought this would be a great tutorial, this is eminently forgivable because you can just cover it with more pine needles and it'll be fine. But in your painting in general, there's gonna be times when you want edges to blend together and this is a great way to get used to doing that, get used to practicing it. So I'm gonna let that dry and we can take a look at it at the end when we're all done. But I thought I'd also show you, this is the one that I painted on Instagram and here I did the background first and then I did the gray for the snow and then I added the branches. Now I tried something that was a fail. In the past, I've done paintings of just tree branches without any pine needles on them, just regular tree branches and I wanted to see if it would look like a pine if I tried doing the same technique with all those smaller branches but with pine needles all over them and it looked terrible, so I won't be doing that. I had this other sketch that I worked on yesterday, maybe I should just switch to a different view here. If I can figure out which one I need to switch my camera to, doot, doot, doot. This one, maybe this one, there we go. So you can see the whole thing. This one I did the same way. I painted the gray in here into the shadows of the snow and then painted the sky around it and added all of the green detail afterward. So there's all kinds of things that you can do once you get the idea of how to create this look so that your snow blends in in the right ways and you save those white highlights. So there's that. But I wanted to, maybe I'll show you one, two other things before I get started painting. I did a large version yesterday also of this and painted the same thing, my shadows, my background. And of course, you can use any color for your background, whatever, this was moon glow in the background. The problem that I had with this one is that I made my strips of shadow really small in the original and these big washes here I made after I finished everything else and I dried it which is why the snow is really, really green because it picked up all the color. Oh, there's the dogs. Squirrels must be outside. It picked up all the color. So you can do a wash over it to add those shadows but I wouldn't recommend it. I would recommend trying to get that done first so that then all of these things are fresh because it also softened up a whole bunch of these edges that it didn't necessarily need to. But the one that I painted yesterday that I want to try today is from that second photograph that I showed you and that's this one. And again, I'm gonna do a different configuration of branches this time because I don't do the same thing twice but I'll do the same process. I went in and added all of my shadows first for the snow, then I did the background and then I added all of the pine needles and the branches and things and it's the same process that you just saw, the same doable process, it's just got more in it. I recommend staying simpler before you get to the complex but I will show you the complex one because that's how I roll. I don't do anything the easy way, right? So hopefully all this can be seen and I've already been doing this for 25 minutes so I'm gonna have to paint really, really fast. Yikes. Okay, so I am going to set this painting up upside down over here and follow an upside down configuration of the branches. Just so I have an idea in front of me. So I'm gonna have a branch that's gonna come out this way and then another one that's gonna come down here, maybe have some stuff like that, a little branch here and that's it. And I'm going to begin, pull the comments to the front so I can see. I don't see any major questions. How did I learn how to paint beautifully? I don't know that I've learned how to paint beautifully. I've learned how to paint some things beautifully. So we'll call it that. I'm going to begin by trying to clean out. For some reason, I cannot seem to get the green. My pearling green is right next to my paint's blue-gray and I don't know if I just spilled paint over into it or if I ended up actually squeezing the wrong paint into there at one point. So my paint's blue-gray always comes out kind of on the greenish side. So I've mixed that with some French ultramarine just to make sure it goes a little bluer. And one of the things that I found is that I tend to start the snow shadows way too light. So I'm gonna try going really bold with them and make it nice and strong in color. Now these are going to have multiple clusters in them. So I'm leaving some highlights in between these. I didn't do that up here, but you'll see the difference when there are multiple highlight sections once we get to adding the pine needles. Cause that's when you'll see how all of these clusters of negative painting work out. And literally I'm not looking at the photo, I'm just making blobs. And I know that for some people just making blobs alone is frightening and that's okay. That's why I said start with the easier one. And there's just so much green in that paint. I know that I didn't squeeze a whole bunch of Paraline green in there, but I must have made quite the mess at some point. Break up some of those. Now there's sometimes when I worry a whole lot about trying to mix up enough of a color to do a large portion of a painting. In this particular case, I'm gonna wanna have a goodly amount for the background that's gonna be about the same. So instead of making a mixed color to do that with, I'm gonna use straight up neutral tint. That's what I did on the painting that I showed you. So that I could have in the photograph, there's all kinds of trees in the background and there that you can definitely see. I'll pull up the photo afterwards so we can take a look at it. And I am cutting off down at the bottom, there's some snow in the background that we're gonna ignore. But in the background, the background itself is very much gray. It's kind of gray trees and that sort of thing as opposed to the snow that has more bluish color in it. And so remember that when we get to looking at the final photo again after we finish this. Or maybe I can do that. I can pull those photos up while I do the drying of this layer. So I'm connecting my background color with the bottoms of the different portions that have snow, these different clusters. But I'm not connecting it with the top. So that's helping me to create branches. And I know this looks like nothing. This does not look like branches. It looks like a hot mess. I get that. But is what it is. It is the technique that I have found works for painting things like this. Let's see, so we're gonna make some more of this in here. And the fact that these are all blending together also means that I don't have to worry too much about that color being perfect because it doesn't really matter. This is just giving it a base to work from. So I'm gonna dry this. And while I do, I'm gonna throw those pictures up there. Again, on the screen, let me see. I gotta label these better because I misspelled this one. So there are the photos. So you can observe them and enjoy while I sit here and dry this. And you can see that the clusters on the simpler one are much clearer, like they're actual shapes. But the clusters on the second photo are also just as simple. They just have more stuff in front of them. That's the only difference. But the shadows on the snow are definitely a different color than the background, which is what I was trying to explain earlier. And I also removed that snowy hillside because it just seemed like that was gonna be too much complexity to communicate in a painting. At least as far as I'm concerned, I'm not quite capable of that. So I'm hoping this next pass on this one is gonna go really nice and quickly. I deliberately chose this time today because I have a meeting with my bank and online meeting with them afterward so that I could make myself get through this and not take three hours of your day. Because I know it's a weekday and for a lot of you, it's gonna be quite possibly the, let's see, do that one, I think. Okay. So there is where this is at this point. Remember this and how much of a mess it looks like. Like you would look at this and go, I have no idea what she's painting. I have no idea where she's headed. But you know where I'm headed because you saw the last one and it's the same process. With one exception, I'm gonna paint more of the branches into this one. Let me pull up my comments. They keep sliding behind every time I try switching my views. The software is really cool if I could figure out how to use it because it allows me to set up different views. So I have one where I had this little picture and picture of my face, which I feel like I need to duck down because it's set up to look at my neck apparently. I have to figure that part out. But it allows me to have all these different views and I can have one set up for the photo reference and switch back and forth to those relatively easily. The branch color could be something like a burnt sienna, but I don't want it to be bright burnt sienna, not for the branches themselves. So I've added some Payne's blue-gray to it. Now I can see my pencil lines in here that I had. So I'm gonna throw in just a few branches to get myself started and this is gonna remind me of where they are in addition to giving me a few guidelines to start with. But I'm not gonna just paint solid branches over all of it, because remember how much of them are covered by everything else? I'm just gonna toss in a couple of broken branches here. And in that photograph, there were also a bunch of dead branches. So I am gonna add some of those like I did in the painting that I showed you earlier, but I'm gonna do a little less of that in this one. And again, this is more of the burnt sienna in this because they're a brighter reddish color, these dead branches. You know, thinner paint, so it'll be a little lighter. I don't want it to be super heavy. And I'll just pick a few spots to have some of these more dead brown branches. And you know what, I totally forgot to put in pine cones. I don't know if I have a spot I can put a pine cone in. I'm gonna put a pine cone in here because I forgot to include a pine cone, just the bottom section of it and drop in some Payne's blue-gray. To make some sections in my pine cone while it's wet, so it'll just blend in. Now I'm gonna get going on the greens. Remember, I have two different greens. I'm gonna go for a dark green that it's gonna morph from time to time. There's no way to say put in this much of this green and that much of that green because that's not gonna be super helpful because I'm not worried about mixing up that ton of a particular color so that it ends up always being the same. Now this green, I'm mixing Payne's, or not Payne's, sap green with just a drop of the burnt sienna because that's gonna give it a little more of an olive feel and I'm gonna throw in a few of the bright branches that come out into the light. Giala just left the studio here. She was making all kinds of racket behind me and now I'm worried about what trouble he's getting into out in the living room with his sister. She has probably stolen her bone. She's funny about getting bones because when I give her a bone, she carries it around for a while and just sits and looks at it and then as soon as Giala has finished gnawing on his bone and he's all done with it, then she starts in and she will carry that thing around for days and just sit right in front of him just to say, ha ha, I have mine left and you don't. All right, now each of these clusters, remember, that's the top of a cluster. So I'm gonna have little pine needles that are gonna come out of that cluster that are gonna define the top edge of it and here we have some snow coming across, so I'm gonna have pine boughs that come out from behind it. Throughout this painting, all of that is gonna work together to define all of those little shapes. A lot of this is just gonna go off into the distance up here with a few dark streaks and now all of this has defined this shape right in here and now it's time to start breaking up these. I can start out here by creating just a few coming out of the one that I can see and maybe that's a better way to start so that you can see that more clearly because I'm making these little pine needles come out of the areas in between each of the snow clusters because that's where you'll see them rise up out of. There's gonna be some that are gonna come right out of the middle because it's snowed around them and so you can put a few of those strays in there but for the most part it's gonna come out of the base of wherever that branch landed. The next one in front of it is gonna come out of the next dark place to define this portion and then maybe some will come out of here. I mean it's just a matter, if you're working from a photo of looking for where some of those parts come out of where do the shoots grow out of and then here's another cluster so I can put some at the base of this. Is this making sense to you guys? I'm hoping it is. I tried teaching this in an in-person class and I don't know that I explained it particularly well in that class because a lot of people just looked at me like I was out of my mind because just seeing the mess that it is in the first place scares most newer painters when I would have them do that first step of putting in those light colors, the shadows of the snow and they'd be like I can't even see where my snow is, I don't even know where it is. So part of it is just being able to think ahead which is a practiced art. It's not something that comes naturally. There's no way that I can tell you exactly how to do it but hopefully demonstrating it like this with a simple way and then a hard way will communicate that to you in a way that will stay in your brain. Now when it comes to things like this, I'll give you a little hint and this is something you can do if you're not real controlled with your brush but you want to retain that white of the snow, I'm gonna stick a couple of pieces of tape right along here. It doesn't have to be on here perfect, I'm just using regular old masking tape to hide away a little bit of that snow because I've got some branches that need to come or some of the pine needles that need to come down right here. If I were to stop this pine needle right there because I'm afraid of my brush getting out of control then this is not gonna look like it's going behind it. So I need it to continue across that and if you don't have a lot of brush control yet then use some tape. I don't use masking fluids unless I'm absolutely in need of it. I'll show you after Christmas a commission that I did, I'm gonna do kind of a review of all of my Christmas paintings because I did Christmas paintings for a lot of people and some commissions and just talk about the process and there is one that I used a lot of masking fluid on, it was a lot of buildings and that one was very different for me as a painter and it really needed masking fluid. Something like this, trying to mask this out would just be a whole lot of putting on the masking fluid and then cleaning it off and then putting it on and cleaning it off so I don't think it would be very particularly helpful because you'd have to put it on this section and paint that and then put it on this section and take that off and you'd be constantly waiting for masking fluid to dry and for me, if a painting takes more than three hours then I'm putting too much into it if that's the case and I don't mean too much in terms of like I care too much about it but I've ruined it by the time I've spent four hours on a painting and I know for a lot of people that's like, well, I can't paint that fast. Once you start thinking about it, not as being fast but as in not overworking, it becomes a lot easier to paint quickly. See, I have enough brush control that I can kind of take some of these and stop and start them and make them go around that but if you need to use a little bit of tape, don't be ashamed of doing that as you're starting. Certainly doable. G.L. is back. So whatever trouble he started in the living room has gone away. He has finished causing whatever his problems were. I didn't hear loud noises so I don't think he started any major fights although he may have taken Diana's bone and hidden it from her because he will try to do that if at all possible. So there's some areas where, like trying to figure out how to handle the transition in this one. I just want something soft. I'm tired of everything being hard edge so I'm gonna go in here with just a round brush and soften a few areas. You can also just take a little bit of a spray. I'll do that over some of these areas and add a little bit of looseness. Okay, 15 minutes. Can I do this in 15 minutes? That would be amazing if I got two paintings done. Well, even one that was just the mini in one hour. But we'll hope we'll cross our fingers. I'm gonna return you to your weekday, whatever you are doing today. I know I saw lots of international people leaving their locations in the comments and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to try this because I have a lot more of my crafters I think or in the United States and my fine art followers. I have a lot in other countries. So welcome to you all wherever you're from. Very glad to have you here today. I haven't seen any trolls yet. Has anybody seen any troll comments? I've had like every single one of my videos ever since I hit 100,000 subscribers. Every video when it first goes live has like, at least three or four comments from somebody linking to porn sites. And I have to go hide them from my channel and ban them so they can't comment anymore. And it's just crazy. Like I don't have that many people who watch my videos on a regular basis. So I don't know why they bother and why they think that an audience of mostly women, my demographic is mostly women, why we would be interested in porn sites because they're not like, go see hot guys. It's all go see hot girls and get a date from Russia and stuff, which is weird. But yeah, no trolls so far. So I begged everybody on my social media yesterday to come and save me from the trolls. So you guys did a wonderful job because they didn't even show up. Yeah. And if they did show up, then maybe they'd learn something about painting and come up with something better to do in their lives than being trolls. Because who wants to live a life as a troll? That's just ridiculous. No fun at all. So does anybody think you're gonna try this technique for painting snowy branches? I would love to see it if you do. So make sure you tag me on Insta or wherever you share your artwork because I'd love to see what I communicated and did it actually get through and was it doable? Get back to some brighter branches out here again, brighten up that green a bit. Refuse you to come out into the sunshine. This needle brush has been like, I don't know, I think it's gonna be one of the signatures of my painting style to do things that I can do with this brush because I love that I can get a thick blobby line if I need one and I can also get just really nice all different kinds of brush strokes from it and it might be an expensive brush but it is so worthwhile. Let me try the easy one tomorrow, yes. You can definitely try the easy one first. I don't even know if most people need to try the hard one but I thought this might be a really good example of how to do layering as well even if it's not something you ended up painting yourself because it's a really clear way to show how layering builds up color because you can start with something that's really, really light and then start bringing in your darker colors to define everything on top and don't ever give up on a piece of paper because if you can add layers on top that start to clean things up you could really rescue paintings that you might not have thought you could before. That's getting way too linear there. We're gonna have a bunch of that stuff and here I can even, if I don't like the edge of a bit of snow, I can go in and change it with the dark paints. Come through the other side and I am going to put both this painting and the other one that I showed you, the same style. I'm gonna put them both in my fine art store on my fine art website. So if anybody wants to purchase one because you just wanna see how the heck this looks in real life versus how it looked on YouTube then I will sell them so you can have them in your house and remind yourself, painting is not always difficult. Sometimes we make it hard but it doesn't have to be hard. It's all a matter of thinking through what your process is going to be for a particular painting and how you're going to approach it because for me, once I figured out that that I could simply layer this, I got so excited about learning how to paint snow because, man, painting snow is a lot of fun. It's really forgiving because the colors are so light that once you start painting a tree or something in front of whatever the dark thing is, whether it's a fence or a tree branch or whatever, it just, it can clean up all of that stuff that may have not worked under the surface. Sticker paint so I can do more dry brush and I am gonna go through the comments and read all of them. I've just kind of picked up on a few here and there as I've glanced up but it's hard to keep my eyes on that and on painting at the same time. So if you have any questions that haven't gotten answers, I will respond to them. By the way, I do read all comments on YouTube. I have an app that shows them to me in chronological order so I've had some people that leave messages on old videos and they say, I'm sure you'll never see this but wanted to ask this question and yes, I do see them all. So you can leave comments on older ones too and I will do my best to answer the non snarky ones because there are some that are snarky. I ignore those. I don't like the trolley ones. So there you go. I'm trying to read Lisa's answer to somebody to see if there's something pulling it toward the ends of the handle. Are you looking at, you have a rigger, I guess I'll have to reload paint more often. This brush is not a rigger. This one is a, I mean, it's a needle, something, something. It's got like 15 different names to it and this particular brush, I would say is not very much like a rigger. A rigger is, it's just the long part at the end. It's not, it doesn't have this big belly on it. The belly does hold more stuff but you can see I'm still reloading paint all the time anyway but it holds more than a rigger is gonna hold. Not sure if that answered what was being asked. Or discussed there. And then I'm gonna leave this corner I think relatively blank. I had a painting teacher once that was really obsessive about making sure all of your four corners are different from each other. So I have some snow in that one. I have some snow shadow in that one, sky in this one. So maybe this one does need maybe just a couple little branches sticking in so that it's not the same. I'm not obsessive about that but I usually at the end I make sure I check to see that, because sometimes just instinctively you start making things look too much the same and that becomes sometimes weird. I don't even soften that so that'll have a different look to it as well. Let more of these down here start to fade away. And now I'm just gonna squint and see where I might need a little extra of something. Are there places where I have too much of a line of something because you saw in the photograph that it's just cacophony of pine needles all over the place. There isn't a whole lot of snow that you can see. I wanna leave more snow just because I think it's beautiful that way. But I wanna be a little truer to the feeling of that by breaking up a few more of the bits of snow. But one of the things that's starting to happen and there's no more snow shadow like on this one. And maybe I'll show you the, after I get this dried, I'll show you how you can add shadows back in and what happens to it in doing that because that's what I did with my other one and a lot of those shadows turned green but I didn't wait quite long enough for it to be completely dry. So I'll see if I can pull off adding more shadows to some of this snow because you can see all of that darkness that seemed like, oh my God, Sandy's putting in crazy amounts of dark shadows in there. A lot of that has disappeared. You don't even see that anymore. I'm going to dry it now. I have four minutes if I'm to make it in an hour. I'm going to be cutting it really close, super, super close to my target of an hour. I mean, I can go over time but when I set a goal for myself, I try to make it. And there's a squirrel in the backyard. I don't know if you can hear the cacophony. My microphone blocks out a lot of the ambient sound so I hope you can't hear that. It sounds like I live in a kennel. I often wonder what my neighbors think. Do they think I have like 16 of the bumpus dogs? If you remember the bumpus dogs from a Christmas story, do they think that I have a dozen dogs living in my house who bark like frenzied beasts when a squirrel walks across the yard? Because the squirrels, you know, in the summertime, they come around occasionally, but boy in the fall, they started walking across the grass and picking up little things to go take back to their nests or whatever they do. And the dogs have just been unglued for the entire fall season for babies. Now what I'm feeling for is general temperature but also for lumpiness because once you have the paper really dry, it should be flat. You shouldn't have any of the rivulets so like there's a little rivulet there. So that area is still damp. But those little waves in the paper that come and go, once it's dry, there should mostly go away. I mean, there's always gonna be a little bit because it's paper and water and that's what paper and water do together. It's important if you're trying to make like, you know, a street lamp and you need a straight line. Make sure it's just really good and dry. All right, now I'm going to attempt, attempt to add two shadows in a couple of places and I'll show you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take that same color, which of course I have to add more blue too because I still have green in that paint. And I'm gonna mix it really thin because if I start mixing too much, well, maybe not that thin. And anything that you add, you wanna go quickly and easily and you don't wanna dwell. So if I wanna put a shadow over that bit of snow, I'm not gonna scrub at it. I'm gonna just go over it real quickly and see the difference that that makes to create that shadowed snow. And for each one of these sections, if you dry it right away, you're more likely to not have a whole lot of bleed going on. So I'll dry these as I go. But I'm gonna squint at it and see if there are particular areas where I wanna knock something back so that it kind of goes back into feeling more like a shadow. So even though I thought I had left plenty and there goes the bumpus dogs, I had thought when I did this, you know, did the first pass that I had enough. But once you start adding all the pine boughs, kind of isn't enough anymore. There is a real potential when you do this to add weird hard edges to things. And I'll do one deliberately to explain what I mean by that in a second here. So be careful. In this particular case, the green is so dense and it's so messy all over the place that it doesn't matter a whole lot. So if I go in here to paint in this one, I could end up with a hard line in here if I use paint that's too thick. But if I use paint that's real thin and is the same, is a lighter hue than what I'm covering over, then I don't get that edge in there. But I would tend to practice some of that if I were you before going too nuts with it because it can be really dangerous. Now this went completely green. Did you see that? Because it picked up some paint that was apparently not wet enough or it was just really thick. So you will get some spots of that if you try to add this wash too late in the process. But it is doable. So I'm gonna knock back a couple more here. That was really blue. Across there. So you can add a light shadow wash over something later in a painting, but just know that you're potentially threatening the life of your painting. And who wants to do that, right? When you get to this stage. So Terry says hit the like button. So I would recommend going with Terry's advice and hit the like button. You could also hit the share button. And your friends could come and watch the replay. Peeling the tape off, peel it as much as you can low to the surface of the paper and you will tend to get less of the tape grabbing the board or the paper itself. This bottom piece does not want to come off. This doesn't want to come off of my board. It's happy to come off of the paper, but there we are. Voila, finished painting. I think I have something special I can add to this. Let me see if I can find that button because there's a button here somewhere. Where is it? Is it this one? No, that wasn't it. Oh, here we go. If that's it. I don't know if it did. I think it did. Was that applause? I have the sound turned off on my computer so that I don't hear myself talking back. So hopefully that was the applause button because I have a little applause button in this piece of software. So there we go. That is the finished painting. Let me put my face back up here so I can chat with you just a few minutes before we go. So thank you very, very much for joining me for this first live video in forever. It's been ages since I've done one here. I do live videos if you're interested in more live stuff over on Crowdcast and I do it for patrons. You could be a patron for a buck a month. It's like no big deal. And there's every month, all patrons get invited to one a month and $10 up patrons get two live videos a month. They're both like about an hour or so. I also do live Facebook videos with MFT on my live day or the day that I, whatever day it is that I end up doing my monthly video for them. So there's a couple opportunities and maybe I'll start doing some YouTube lives if this turned out to be popular. It looks like a bunch of people came. I still can't see how many but I can see that there are lots of comments. So that's good. Yay. And I think that's about all I have to say for today. Anybody else have any questions before I go? Cause I think it's time to hit the road. Hit the road, Jack. Get back to whatever you were doing before I called you here to YouTube. And I have to go find out what the squirrel is doing outside. Oh, there's a doorbell. That might mean the chewy order is here because the dogs have been awaiting the Christmas chewy order. And hopefully that's it. So I will see you guys again another time, like soon. That would be really fun. Now I have my outro here. Let me see if I can figure out how to play my outro. Is it gonna let me? No, it tells me my scene is locked. So I can't do that. If I unlock that, can I play my outro? I wanna do this fancy thing and play my outro and you have to applaud if I get it to work because that's a thing. I'll see you guys later.