 Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Olnock. I'm an artist and I work in a lot of different mediums today It's gonna be watercolor and it's gonna be something that has more of a springy thing to it because it's really cold where I live It's been in the 20s by night and 30s by day and I am super cold and I'm really tired of that I'm ready for spring So I'm gonna bring you a little bit of spring in this video and paint a beautiful duckling swimming in water and give you some duck facts along the way So let's get started so this is obviously gonna be a speed watercolor with only sections of it shown and This is the photo reference not a great photo But I picked it because it had large areas of black and I wanted to test out Jane's black this is the rest of the palette in addition to Jane's black and I Mixed each one of these wells specifically to start off with the first pass with very light washes and then as I Went through the painting. I would just add more of these colors to each of these wells So that I'd have darker pigments or thicker pigments depending on what I need it at the time But those wells kind of stayed true throughout the whole painting so one of the things that I chose as I said this photo for was the black I have tried so many blacks in my day I've just gone through them and I put them in my palette thinking Yeah, this this looks good in swatch form and then when I actually used it in paintings It just did not work it ended up looking very fake and I wanted something that looked mixed and I know that that sounds weird. Maybe I'm just a freakish color nerd I don't really know but I wanted something that looked like it was part of my painting Not that it was just you know grabbing this big heavy thick synthetic looking kind of color might be the way to describe it and Jane's black There's a couple different ones and the one that I'm gonna be using here is the blue orange Which means they've mixed it out of blue and orange It's not just a black pigment. It's blue and orange together when I normally mix my own blacks Because I don't like that weird fake looking color I end up mixing a blue and an orange in general You can also do that with a red and a green, you know specific kinds of different colors when you mix them really thick You can get a really nice black color But if I had a tube of it and it already was mixed that way I could do paintings with larger dark areas and right now I can't mix enough when I'm mixing my own So I tend to avoid paintings that have maybe a large dark section in them because I didn't have any blacks That didn't feel fake and weird So that is where this test is coming from so I painted the rest of the background the first wash That I'm going to cover with lots more But this is where I get loose and crazy and then everything else tightens up after that The duck I did last I was leaving the little white feathers on the top of the duck the nice bright color The feathers I don't think in reality would have been white Because when I looked up to try to find out what kind of duck this was I think it's a mallard. I believe The domestic ducks are the little yellow ones that you see at Easter time a little pictures of little cuties Those are Bread to be cute and yellow and they don't need to be like hidden out in the wild Whereas a little duck like this has to stay safe So having a lot of modeled colors on him will hide him from predators And this particular one The picture had the whole backside being very white and the top of the head being very white may have just been blow out in the Either the photograph itself in the lighting or photo processing not really sure which But I decided to go with it anyway because I liked the brightness of it But mallard ducks have another stripe along their head So it goes from their beak all the way to the back across the crown and then to the back of the head And then their bodies are modeled. There's You know gold colors and brown colors and black colors and all this kind of stuff mixed in And that's one of the places where I was going to be testing the black first this jane's black to see The other thing I noticed in the photo was that the value on that white chest Was actually not white Especially when it's compared to the white on the sunny side of the bird and it had a lot more blue in it So I you know had added a bunch of You know that that kind of blue color when I did the first wash And then here I just felt like I needed a little bit more and you'll see later on I'm going to add even more Because once I started really getting into this and started Adding a lot of contrast the chest started looking whiter and whiter and whiter So here's when you'll start to see some of that happen because everything is in relation to everything else And the white isn't on the chest is in relation to the black that's next to it And it just starts looking brighter in by comparison just because there is all this dark color next door But this is the jane's black and Literally that is what I would have probably mixed myself It's a blue orange and You can mix blacks with other colors But since I do it so much with blue orange if I had this color in my palette I would not have to labor so much To mix that color all the time It's one of the things that I recommend when people are looking for what colors they should have in their palette Put colors in there that you use a lot That you don't want to ever mix again because you're sick to death of them Like they're just really hard to mix or you can't get them consistent enough That's when you really want to add a color to your palette And you don't need a gajillion colors this palette that I have only has 18 wells in it and that is more than enough colors There's a number of colors that I'm ready to vote off the island because I hardly ever use them anymore They've just fallen out of Out of use. I mean, they're not bad colors, but I just you know, since I Have changed what I'm painting and how I'm painting then they might end up getting voted off the island But the black has always been a struggle for me and this just might be the thing that does it because in Doing that wash along where all that water is I could get it nice and thin without Making it look like a weird gray color. It lets some of that blue come out from underneath Did some beautiful things with it And it just has more of the properties. I'm used to in my mixed blacks Rather than just like here. Let me splooge some black across Now here's where I started really digging into the value on that chest Look how dark that needs to be and I made it so light. It looked light in the beginning But as I worked through it the reflection I got the right color The down in the water But it needed to have that blue above that it was reflecting from So I'm painting some of these leaves which were part of my issue with the photo itself because That big leaf behind the duckling has a mountain shaped shadow Resting on it like something behind it is casting that shadow something very weird going on there So I struggled with that. I struggled with the big leaf on the left And painted over I I think I spent more time on that leaf in the left than I did on anything else Because I just couldn't figure out how to get it right. So I'd leave it for a while and then go back to it On the right hand side, I kind of guessed that all these amorphous shapes in the photo Were probably a rock or a bunch of rocks or something And then there was some bright highlight on the water back there I don't I don't know what that was either But I made it into a rock. So I just you know, simplified that I started to simplify The leaves and things that were in the background A lot of these leaves were sticking up out of the water in weird ways that I'm not used to leaves Kind of coming up out of the water So there were some odd things in here that I was trying to figure out how to render them But still trying to look at them and say what is it that I'm seeing not What does my brain say a leaf should look like but what am I seeing shape-wise? And there was a bunch of it that was Just kind of fuzzy and you couldn't tell what things were And it just made it difficult. So that top left section Totally reworked and made that more rocks because I didn't didn't know what to do with it I don't know what the vertical thing is some kind of a pole In behind it But nonetheless and in a second you'll see the actual painting Which has better color than what the video did, you know Really hard to get good color sometimes When you're capturing video on a day when the sun is streaming in on top of what you're painting But since it's so cold don't let me complain about sunshine Thank you so much for joining me for this video I hope you liked it if you did click the like button if you haven't yet subscribed This is a good time to do that so that you'll be back for my next videos next week If you do like ducks you might enjoy my rubber ducky video that I did last time Links in the doobly-doo for that if you want to go see it And uh, yeah, that's about it for today. I will see you next week Take care and go create something every day