 Hello there, it's Sandy Alnok and today I'm going to be creating this piece and sharing some design tips on things to think about if you're trying to create a piece with motion in it. For this piece I started with the underpainting and in order to guide myself with the underpainting I wouldn't necessarily have had to draw this but for your sake I decided to do so and I've chosen a focal point, a center point that's not in the center so that this thing has something a little off kilter and basically draw on a starburst and the lines don't have to be straight or anything. I'm not going to follow them necessarily anyway. I just want to give that kind of a starburst feel to the whole thing so that it feels like it's exploding. That was the feeling that I wanted to create with this and I'm using some watercolor on Arches cold press paper and I'm just slathering it on. This is new Gamboge. I mixed in to make an orange, a little bit of anthraquinoid scarlet, did some splattering with it. You could get a spray bottle out and just put lots of water on it. You could tilt the board, lots of different things you can do to create just a messy background like this and it doesn't necessarily have to be messy either. I suppose you could plot it out more but I didn't feel like plotting it out. I was just going for it and this is Lunar Blue so basically I have a red, yellow and blue in this so I'm trying to create some open spaces. That was the one thing I was trying to focus on. I wanted a stripe of white traveling through the whole thing as well as some spots of white in between some of the sections of color. Once I got the main areas with paint on them I just kept loading my brush up with the colors that were in the painting and trying to keep it just to those three and then splattering them and to get splatters you just need to figure out with your brush because every brush is different. What is the mixture of water and pigment that you need to have for that brush to release paint because every brush is going to be different. Synthetics are going to act different than others so you have to kind of test that out but I've mixed really thick paint sometimes, really thin paint others. I'm trying not to put dots in every single square inch of it and you can see I'm kind of developing a white that's coming out from that center. It goes up toward the right and then down to the left with just some random whites in other sections of the whole thing and then I dried it all up and started the doodling. I'm using a fountain pen, an eco-twizby fountain pen, a medium nib. When I do large pieces like this I feel like I need the medium or else it takes me like a week and a half to do something this size because the lines are so small and then I end up getting really small and fussy and I wanted some big bold lines in this. I also used a bunch of just areas of painted on ink and I was using diatramentus document black ink it's waterproof ink so if I needed to go back in and watercolor some more I could do that but basically what I was doing here was looking for sections in the watercolor that had edges that I could use to basically trace around and in some cases the lines were great to trace in some sections and then they would end in a weird place so I would just take my line wherever I felt like it or I'd put some black over it. I added some things that were drawn objects so the big flower in the center the small little popcorn flowers I have different types of textures as well lots of linear textures I tend to really like those and they also help with the motion but I also have created a couple of different textures that I repeat in a few areas like that popcorn flower appears another in another place I don't know I call it popcorn flower it's like a dandelion so it's one of the few areas that has that texture so I wanted to replicate it just repeat it somewhere else and not have it just in one section but I also didn't want to add too many textures to the drawing because what I find is when I start adding a different texture with every square inch that I'm drawing I end up with just a cacophony going on you can't see anything because there's so much to look at and there's still gonna be a lot to look at here but I don't want it to be overwhelming so when I started working on this pebble type of texture I was thinking ahead that I needed to repeat that somewhere else just like the popcorn flower the lines are going to be easy to repeat because that's going to help with the motion and then I just needed to think through the black sections when I was going to add in some rich black where was I going to add them and how would I do that so that I didn't end up with sections that just felt random I wanted them to feel like they were sprouting out from that center point and yet not being just stripes coming out from the center point so there's things in front of the black sections but that they all felt joined together still in some kind of a way but the structure of this whole thing allowed me to just start doing the doodling and not be thinking and the reason that I was doing this it was I was working on this during the couple of days when we had heard that Ukraine was going to come under attack and it was going to be a really awful time and I had the news on and I just couldn't do anything else I I just didn't want to think I didn't want didn't want to do anything but pray but I wanted to get some artwork done because that gives me peace so I just had the news on and was doodling since I had that structure this made it really easy to come out with a great drawing by the end because I was just following the structure that was already there I only had to think long enough to do the painting in the first place that starburst to just have something to follow along with and then periodically re-engage my brain so that I could end up having a little bit of you know a little bit of thought put into certain sections like when it came to some of the white areas where I wanted to put a flower in I would kind of start to think about okay what kind of flower do I want to put in there and what would it look like what angle would it be at and then I could just go back to making lines and shapes every time I painted one of the black areas in I just made it chunky brush strokes and then went around the edge of and then went around the edge of it so I could give it the character that matched the rest of the lines that I had in the the rest of the drawing and it was just a really relaxing piece to do even though my mind was in just turmoil over everything that's going on in the world right now I totally wish I could just do something other than sit here and draw I wanted to just get on a plane and go stand in the middle of a battlefield and just yell at everybody and just stop fighting just stop shooting could I could I do that would they listen to me I don't know random lady just shows up in the middle of everything halfway around the world I don't speak their language so probably they would just not have any idea what I was doing so instead I opted to just fill the world with a little bit of beauty from my little corner because I can't do anything else besides that as I was having all those negative thoughts and whining at God about how unimportant my job felt at this moment I was reminded that I can actually do something to help this situation I am going to put this piece up for auction I'm going to have it over on my fine art website you can go check that out it'll be up for auction all weekend long and Sunday night the auction will end and if you are the high bidder when it ends at Sunday night Pacific time 11 59 59 or whatever that is I think the website tells you what time it is ending in your time if you have that set up on your computer so that it knows what time it is where you are but there's also going to be in addition to this piece some other things in the auction there's the bookmark that I made on Monday in that video there's going to be all the doodles that I made all week long because I'm just going to zone out and doodle all those doodles are going to be in the auction as well so you can you know find a small thing a card or a bookmark or you can bid on a bigger one whatever is in your price range and if you don't have money to bid on one of these things because some of them may go past where your budget is I don't really know hopefully that will happen I want people to bid high but if all you have is five bucks just go give five bucks to a refugee organization that's helping there because this is going to go on for a while there's going to be a lot of people in need of a lot of help I think they said there's going to be several million refugees people displaced so yeah we can do something from where we are even as in a small way we don't have to do something big if you're somebody who makes art and posts it on your Instagram you could always just do a quickie type of auction by just posting it on your Instagram or your Facebook and tell your followers that they can bid on it in the comments and set a time you don't have to have a fancy website like me and have a widget to do it you could just have people leave their bids in the comments and raise money yourself in that same kind of a way because we can do something as artists we don't have to just sit and belittle ourselves like I did in my great wine we can actually do something to help make the world a better place and that's what I love to do so we're getting closer to halfway on this piece one of the other weird thoughts that I had that I'll share with you was how this this whole piece is almost a metaphor for what's going on in the world the background was a hot mess you might have thought that I don't blame you for thinking that and wondering what is she doing why is she just throwing paint on the page but I knew what I was going to do I knew I was going to go in with the fountain pen and make some changes to it so I didn't worry that there were parts that didn't blend or parts that had hard edges that I didn't like or any of that stuff I just wasn't stressed out about it because I knew what was coming and as I was just praying for Ukraine God reminded me that guess what the world is a mess the world has edges that don't blend people that don't get along the world has people with sharp edges people that throw elbows and weapons and things at each other but it doesn't mean that those things cannot be made beautiful our world can get better it can be improved it just takes good people doing good things to make that happen so I challenge you to go do something good when you see some evil in the world and make a difference in some kind of a way so for the finishing of this piece I was pretty happy with where this was going there were a few sections that I wanted to work on I loved that white stripe that I got through the piece that diagonal but I wanted to shrink down this bottom section it was just too big and too stark so I started drawing in more flowers more lines adding those kind of things in there and then since I had used the waterproof ink I could just go in with watercolor and add some more color to it out of the same color selections I'd used in that first wash and I got out the spray bottle and just started kind of going to town on this I was looking for areas not just this one section that I wanted to fix but other sections where painting in some of the smaller areas might actually enhance some of the ones that are in the foreground so I could push some of the other stuff to the background and I was also looking for places where I could continue that starburst feel because there were some areas where I had that nice black spiral going outward but then there were other areas that I was missing that it just didn't continue from the center on out so I added more black in there and this was one of those really forgiving pieces that I could just keep adding to until I was pleased with each section and I would get back from it and squint at it and try to get a really good idea of what it is I was looking for in that section and where was I missing some detail where was there too much detail did I need to block out another section with black and and make some of the areas disappear just lots of little little kind of tweaks at the very end to add more flowers to it more of the little tiny fussy edges here and there and then I finally got finished I decided that I was going to just call it and say that's done now you could watercolor over top of all that pen and ink work get the pen and ink done first and then do the painting but for me that would make me too interested in trying to paint each one a different color and not getting loose and splashy with it because I would only get that that flower that was painted in half different colors by painting it the way that I did so if you want to see a smaller project this is the bookmark that I did on Monday and I did some doodling on that in a bunch of different ways using this fluid writer which was a really cool tool that I got recently and that is one of the bookmarks that you will see in the auction that's of course an early phase of it because I had a lots lots and lots of stuff to it so please do you go see the charity auction share it with your friends if you have somebody who wants to do something and wants to give send them the link so that they too can go give and go do something good and I'll see you guys next week bye bye