 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to be painting ostriches, and I'll be painting a background for them as well, which I don't do very often, so in for a little treat. I'm using WPlus9's stamp set, and notice that I blacked out one of the sentiments. I didn't realize there was one with a bad word in it here, so I've not only blacked it out, but I've removed it and thrown it away, so when I gift this in my, one of my giveaways, somebody's going to get a stamp without that sentiment in it, so there you go. The images are stamped onto some watercolor paper from Arches, and I'm going to be painting with Daniel Smith watercolors, as I always do. The sky color that I'm using here is a phthalo. Phthalo blues are beautiful, but they are very staining, so what that means is if you let any of the edges dry, and you want to turn them into soft edges, they're not going to go soft unless you mess with them right away, so I've got a baby wipe, and I'm going to quickly wipe some clouds into it and lighten that color, because I didn't want the sky to be super dark. Used a little bit of Carbazole Violet to make some mountains in the distance, just a little hint of a hillside out there. When I was trying to figure out where do ostriches live, what do their surroundings look like? I just pulled up some pictures on Google just to see, and there was a place that had little purple mountains in the background, so I thought that would be usable and doable. And then there's a bunch of green on either side, and then a yellowish brownish path coming down the middle that they're hanging around on, because he needs to have some dirt to shove his head into the ground, right? So I'm going to mix up some quin gold, I think, with sepia in order to make a brownish color. Of course, I did not make enough of it, so I will have to solve for that. That's a common problem that I have, you might have, and we have to be aware of these kind of things when we're painting, whether or not we're making enough of a puddle of paint, but a lot of times it seems impossible for me to make a big enough pile of the same color, big enough puddle that's going to last for a long time. I work on a lot of larger fine art pieces, and that's a real challenge when you get to a large piece. So I often mix on the paper, which gives me a lot more freedom. And when you're doing something like this, I'm mixing quickly and painting quickly because those leading edges of that path are starting to dry, and I want to make sure I hit them while they're wet so that I don't get those hard edges. So a lot of folks get too fussy and stress out about the color that they're mixing. You can glaze over it later if you need to. You can add some more paint into it, do it while it's wet. But your wetness needs to match between the two colors that you're using together. If you have too much water in one, it's going to bleed into the other. And that's the issue that I'm going to have on this left hand side. I have very watery green paint, and the brown paint was thicker. So where it touches on that left side, it's bleeding right into it. So I'll have to glaze over that and take care of that and fix it. So a lot of watercolor is about fixing things. And it's just the way life goes. When you're a watercolorist, you get used to the idea. You have to repair stuff sometimes. I know there are professional artists. I watch them paint and take their classes. And I'm amazed that they can do it without having an instance like that, but not me. That just doesn't happen. But it's all about faking it until you make it. So I figure someday I'm going to discover the secrets, but it's really practice. There's definitely a value in taking classes in person and online. I've done the same, and you need to learn things by learning from experts, people who know how to do what they're doing. But there is no substitute for actually doing it yourself. You can't watch enough videos to make your hand do what it needs to do in order to paint. Now, I just recently watched a video on how to make a sketchbook out of the kind of paper that I want to make a sketchbook out of. I can now do that. Mentally, I know I can go do it. I will probably refer to the video again when I actually make it. But I mentally know how to do it. But until I actually do it, it's not going to make any difference how many times I watch that video because I haven't actually experienced it. So that's what you need to do is you need to experience the actual painting of something and not just watching videos on it over and over and over again. You need to actually do it in order to understand the process and how it works and how it's going to look like these legs and heads that I'm doing. I started painting them in browns. And that didn't quite look right compared to the photographs that I had seen because they had a little bit of a pink tinge to them. So I'm starting to glaze a little bit with some of the pink and then wiping some of it off and then adding some of it back in. And that's experimentation. There's no way I can say I'm going to mix up exactly that color and have it come out right. I'm experimenting. I'm learning as I go. And that's just what I do. That's the way I paint. So the ostriches that I found online, a bunch of them have different white spots in different places. Some of them, it's underneath of their bodies. Some of it is like their tail feathers. And you can have them match and be a matching pair of ostriches, which is what I decided to do to have the top part of their back feathers. These are not the same feathers that I saw in the photographs because they were more of like poofy tails that kind of got curly. But I thought this would still work because I'm making their back ends kind of the white portion. And I'm doing first a very light glaze because when you've got something that's full black, like these are really, really black birds, their back ends. But I wanted to have some dimension in them still. So I'm using a darker black, basically a thicker black paint on top of the gray paint in order to build up some of that black. I decided after a while that drawing in all those feathers was not helping me. It was not getting me anywhere because I really needed that rich black. And I stopped short of the highlight area on the bird and then put a little bit of darker black on the other side of the wing. So I'm going to be able to make that wing look like it's dimensional. But I want that line to remain slightly hard. So I'm going to let it dry a little bit while I paint the other bird. And I'll go back in and soften it in just a minute once I finish this other bird. Because I want to give it just a second to dry. And that's one of those things that you'll learn eventually is that with a certain amount of time, things will dry enough for the idea that you want to get across for whatever kind of brush stroke. So I'm using a damp brush that's clean to do this blending on the outside edges of those highlights. But I knew that I couldn't do that right away or else I might push that color back into the feathers on the back of the birds and that was not going to work either. I wasn't happy with what I did so far on the legs because they didn't have enough dimension to them. And I really studied some of the photographs and they all have knees. And I know birds have knees. Who would have known? I'm sure it's not called a knee for a bird. But that was one of the things that seemed to be missing on these birds. There were no knees really drawn in necessarily. So I painted them in myself by creating a stronger shadow on each side of the legs and then just putting a little kind of almost a comma underneath of the knees. And then I'm using a damp brush in order to do some of that blending and a little bit of darker color in a few spots where it's needed to create some deeper shadows. Much happier with the way the legs are looking now because I have that contrast. For me it's all about having contrast in something to make that realism happen. A little bit on that guy's head and then I'm going to start working on the rest of the scene. I've got shadows coming from them and I'm going to put kind of long shadows off the back side of them so the sun is going to be low-ish on the horizon. And shadows tend to be like long strips when you're looking at an animal or an object from the side. If you're looking at it from up above it would look wider, that sort of thing. Long lessons that would be needed in how to do shadows but suffice it to say this would be good enough for most things. For the grasses I wanted to have the grasses in front look like they're larger and I don't know more detailed. So I've created those grasses right along the edge of the path and then I added some bright yellow that I'm going to put into the rest of the grasses so that separates them from the hills in the very far distance. So I get multiple layers in my scene around the ostriches. That bright yellow is going to help to make the grasses just look closer because it's a more vibrant color as well as just differentiating it from that background. So now not only do those trees recede, that purple from the mountains that was there before seems to almost be invisible. So I'm going to have to go back in and add that back in if the purple is important. Then just putting a little tiny, barely visible line across there and then use a clean brush with just a little bit of water on it to soften out that edge so I don't end up with a hard outline around my mountains. And everything's drying lighter than it went on so just kind of keeping an eye on what's contrasting with what. And I noticed their tail feathers were just looking way too bright. So I did add a few, just a couple little strokes of gray fur on there. And then I took a micron pen to just add some hair on them because the pictures I saw they're all like little like bald but hairy kinds of heads and necks, which I thought would be kind of funny to make them a little funnier. So things will get better seem the perfect sentiment. To send this to a friend who's having a hard time. Yes, things will get better. I'm your friend and I'm standing here with you as a second ostrich in the picture. And hopefully that would be good encouragement for somebody who needs it. So thank you so much for staying tuned for this video. Go over to my blog if you need to pin this for future reference. You can make sure you click that like button and subscribe if you haven't yet already and I will see you again next time. Thanks so much. Take care. Bye bye.