 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. Today I'm on a watercolor or harvest moon But this video could also be entitled Handling your hot mess moments We have all had those moments and This card is going to provide one of them So you get to see some hot messes along the way with the cute little witch and the ghost Fun little sentiments in this stamp set as well. I have it all stamped on some watercolor paper This is the cold press arches and I've drawn in a moon by using a roll of tape Just a little circle there. The reason that I started doing this was earlier this summer Actually right around the time I was filming this one a while back There was these really weird skies we had because of a bunch of fires It's been a heck of a fire season all over the country But we had our little bout with it where I live and we had a really strange looking sky one day it was an orangey yellowy kind of sky and as it got towards sunset the Sun itself turned this really weird color and I it got me thinking about harvest moons So when I was gonna do a Halloween card, but well Let's do a really cool harvest moon and I started looking for pictures Found one that had an orange sky like the one that I saw and the moon itself was richly colored It wasn't like a light moon at all. It was really this I don't know kind of darkish yellow and had all these yellow and You know like darker yellow and orangey and brown kind of spots in it It was really really an amazing photograph if you just look up harvest moon You'll see a lot of really interesting stuff. So anyway, I started painting my sky with quenacridone burnt Orange and then the moon is mostly Quenacridone gold and I wanted to see if I could get some of that movement going between the two that I could get them Bleeding so I painted them right up to the edge of each other and you can see there's in a few spaces There's a little white gap there because I was trying to see if I could get them to merge to each into each other But not real evenly. I wanted it to be this kind of loose thing. So that part started working. Okay, I wanted it Build on the sky. So I'm gonna add more color to it But I wanted this orange undertone to the whole thing and then I had to figure out how to end it So I just kept going with getting that yellow lighter as it got down Further in the picture and I wanted everything to stay where it was I don't often do heat setting when I watercolor it because I like the watercolor to be able to do what it wants But when something is really good and that was looking really awesome I said, oh, let me dry it and heat set it so that it's really dry when I do my glazing for my sky And this is where things started going awry. I Was doing my glazing. I had my purple color all mixed up I dipped my brush in to make some more of the The orangey color and look at that I've got blooms appearing because that paint is thinner than the purple paint and then I was like, oh, no, no, what do I do? Okay, so, you know breathe when you're doing this and this happens just breathe and I'm gonna just mix the colors together and Push that water around so it's even across the whole thing It's kind of like mixing in the palette But I'm just mixing on the paper instead to try to even out the water so that the water is not Puddling up in one place and then I can start dropping in heavier color Ficker that thicker purple paints and I even added more purple to it so it'd be thicker and Then start dropping it in and I it gave me the option to have this kind of modeled sky anyway Which was fine and that's kind of the look I was going for and Yeah, then I had to figure out how to end that before I got to the land So there's a lot of decisions being made a long way I thought oh, let me just continue some of that orangey color and maybe make the land a little darker And that was too dark or it was very dark for that top portion I wanted that to get lighter So I was trying to use a dry-ish brush because I didn't want to put more water in Once I'd already made that mistake once and then I thought oh, I could do some shadows Like she's got shadows coming from the moon. Well, that'd be cool Well, wait a minute there would be a shadow on the left of her not just on the right of her So now what do I do? I've totally screwed that up, right? So I've got my my great shadow on the right-hand side. So no I just Lifted I took a clean dry brush and just lifted color And it gave me a really soft edge on one side hard edge on the other. It was kind of cool So my lesson to you in all of this and it's something that I do all the time when I'm watercoloring is Keep going just keep working at it if you take the Take a class for me called Watercolor jumpstart. I don't know if it's gonna be live by the time this video goes out if it is go take it and If not then watch for an announcement when the class is coming out But I talk a lot about water management and that was the reason that I could do this card and have these These kind of water issues work out in my favor because I was paying careful attention To how much water was in my brush and what the mixes were in my palette in the class I'll actually show you the palettes you can watch the paint being mixed didn't have that going on here But I'm loving what's going on around that moon. I love that the orange is pushing out into the sky and I've just got this push pull going on right around the edge of that moon and I'm kind of liking it at this point. I'm kind of pleased with where it went and This whole thing is kind of an exercise in water management for me. I'm learning just like you're learning and It's really it like watercolor is just one of those things you have to keep practicing and even in the class I can't tell you Mix this much water and this much pigment you have to practice it and learn it on your own Even I'm learning it. You watched me make a mess here It's just what happens when we start painting So I did all that background work first because if I totally wrecked it I wasn't gonna spend all my time painting the images I just re-stamp and start all over again But since I was fairly happy with that and I have a plan for more stuff going along the ground By the way, I'm gonna add some trees in there But I thought okay now it's safe to go and paint everything So I'm just using a couple of Halloween-ish kind of colors to To start painting these things you can see it. I once again bled my colors I didn't wait for my purple to dry and it went right into the orange, but I just dried it Put the orange right over top. Don't worry about it. Just keep moving and With a card like this where the background is like this amazing crazy moon and this beautiful sky that came out so cool I don't even have to worry about putting a whole lot of shading in my image or doing any Super amazing coloring on that because the impact that the sky is gonna have is really huge and the characters and stuff in it are important, but they're not uber important and That's where I was trying to figure out. How am I gonna keep the focus on that background? Because I was so proud of how those colors went together I love when edges are lost and then found and then lost and then found again and A lot of my watercolour teachers that I've taken classes from are always talking about connecting your images and here I really felt like I successfully connected the moon and the sky and it was pretty cool So I've painted the images and I wanted to add now my trees in the background so using some black that's actually mixed with Some Carbazole violet because I wanted to reflect some of the violet that's already in here But I also didn't want my lunar black, which is a highly highly Granulating color to take over I didn't want over a granulation going on in here And the Carbazole will cut some of that down just because it's not as granulating Just scribbling trees in here And if I've done lots of videos in the past if you look through my old videos on doing trees It's just scribble scribble scribble making basically triangles with scribbled edges It's really what trees are and It really is going to set off the moon to have this real strong contrast right in front of it And then the moon and everything behind it if you try something like this And then you totally have wrecked the background just put some trees over the areas that you didn't like call it done So now I was going to figure out do I need more shading on my images and then I went you know Wait a minute. Hold on a second. I'm gonna try to be brave. The rest of the card came out cool. I want to limit the Impact of this little girl and the and the ghost that is her buddy So I decided I'm just going to shade over top of the whole thing And this is where I was like, oh no, it's gonna be hot mess It's gonna be hot mess and there's gonna be a hot mess moment here coming because look at my brush It was too full of paint I was not thinking because I was all excited and I was trying to do this while it was all wet and yeah There you go. So had to dab some of that off Be careful about how much pigment you pick up on your brush It's a constant learning and I want you to know that it is constant So even if I can give you a class that'll tell you that I still don't do it myself half the time And it's just how it is It's the life of art and it's the life of watercolor Watercolor is just a difficult medium and it it simply is challenging and We're always gonna keep learning so Now you can see against white the color is a little bit better here As I'm trying to add my white details with my pen After everything's all dry have a couple layers of cardstock to just set the thing off And added some stars with my white pen and I'm just going to add a few White highlights in a couple areas Just a few things and if on something like this the pen ends up looking jarring because it's So white and such a sharp line Just rub it with your finger a little bit and it will start to soften out some of it Because basically I think what's inside of white pen is almost like an acrylic paint So soften that by moving it while it's still wet With your finger and you won't end up with like a huge hard edge But even though I probably went a little too dark on shading the witch And stuff I'm really pleased with the outcome of the card That sky and the moon just makes me giggle. I love the way it just almost looks like the moon is on fire really fun And it took some bravery to actually keep moving through it But I want to encourage you to continue being brave as you have your hot mess moments as well So click on some links if you want to watch more videos go over to the blog post And I will see you guys later. Have a really awesome day. Go make something beautiful. Don't forget to subscribe. I'll see you later