 Well, hey there, I'm Sandy Olnok. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'm going to be painting a rabbit or a hare, I guess. The most popular view of a hare that I think there is in watercolor land. So why is that? While I work on the sketch, let me tell you a few things. One is that tomorrow is my birthday, March 27th, and today is the 26th. So the 26th, 27th, 28th, I am having a birthday sale, and the sale is over on my art classes website. So if there's a class that you are interested in taking, feel free to go over there and sign up for it. There's a link in the doobly-doo, coupon code, and everything is going to be down there. I also have a sale that is continuing through the end of the month on my fine art, that is on my fine art website, links down below for that, and the coupon code for that. That one continues to the end of the month, and the class's sale is just for these three days. So I wanted to let you know about that. Why is it that business owners end up giving presents to everyone else when it's our birthday, but whatever. Happy to do that. I also want to let you know that I may be out of pocket by now. I am recording this voiceover like a week or ish earlier than today. And at the time that I am recording this, my heart is somewhere else. My mom is in the hospital once again, and it's not looking good. I might need to jump on a plane within hours of when I'm recording this. So that's why I figured I'd get this done so I could get it scheduled and not have to think about that at least. So pray for my mom if you're able to. I will put an update in the doobly-doo with her status as of the date that this publishes. But also if that happens and you order some of my fine art, I may or may not be able to get it shipped to you right away. I usually try to do that within like a day or two of your purchase, but that might need to wait until I get back. So I will put a note on that website if that happens. Just so everyone will be aware of that. So let's get on to this hair, this rabbit, this thing that is the most popular of all hairs on the internet. If you Google for water-colored rabbit, water-colored hair, you will find pictures of like a gajillion people painting basically this view but with just the neck, not the whole body like I'm doing. My photo reference had more of the body in it and I wondered why is that? What is it about this view? Just like the two eyes sticking out of the side, two ears up and a neck down below the face. And I think it's because there's not as much drawing involved because the side profile of a rabbit can look a little awkward, like just the shape of it, depending on what kind of rabbit it is, can look a little stumpy. And if you make it too long, like the schnoz is too long, it looks weird. Or if it's one that has a longer nose on it, then if you make it too stumpy, then that looks weird. There's just a lot of opportunities when you're doing more drawing for more errors to enter in. So I think that might be why. But for me, like this looks like a psychotic hair. Like the two big eyeballs staring at you. It also got me wondering if that many people paint this thing including like some lady on Etsy. She just paints this particular view like different colors and stuff. She paints it all different ways, but she just paints this rabbit over and over and over and over and over again and sells them. And God bless her. Like if you you're the kind of person that can paint the same thing, that's awesome. I am not that kind of person. So I am just going to paint it this once. And I think once I got this one painting done, I'm good with it. I'm going to put it in my shop. So if you love this rabbit and you want to take this rabbit home with you, yeah, it'll be in part of the sale over on my site. So go snag it quickly if you want it. Anyway, the colors that I'm using here are yellow ochre and moon glow. If you haven't recognized them, they're two of my favorite colors to use together when I'm just going to use a limited color selection. And I didn't want to get really complicated with this one. And the two colors make a brown together. And you know why that is? It's because they are complements. There's a, you know, on the color wheel, there's a whole thing about complements, the color that's opposite of color on the color wheel. Those two colors together generally make a brown because one is usually made up of two colors. So the moon glow will be made up of, you know, technically it's a purple, so it'll be red and blue mixing that with the yellow gives you red, blue and yellow together, which is why you get brown. And the same thing happens with every pair of complements. One has two colors in it, you know, and I know that technically they have pigments and blah, blah, blah, but this is a general color theory I'm talking about. So with this one, the first pass that I do on any painting is generally just a loose wash with a large brush. I'm using a number eight brush and then I start, you know, mixing all the colors. I love doing wet in wet. And when I'm painting a large area, I try to keep the whole area wet so that I don't end up with edges that are going to dry in weird ways. But it means kind of keeping it high all the time on the whole paper and seeing where everything's at, like how wet or how dry is it? And knowing where the areas are where you can stop, like I knew I could separate the ears from the rest of the body because there's in the photo. There was a little more white going on between them. So the connection between them wouldn't be mandatory having to be painted at the same time so I could do the ears separately. But lots and lots of things go through my brain when I'm painting something like this. But I usually try to get a plan together for how I'm going to approach whatever the subject is. So, you know, knowing that I was going to be using these two colors then that that's kind of where I started deciding to do the whole wash of the yellow ochre and then start dropping in all of the moon glow. And then in some areas like the inside of the ears, I wanted them to feel more gray and the moon glow when it's really light can feel more like a gray than a brown when it doesn't have the yellowish color mixed in with it. So that kind of allowed me to do the just the kind of color mixing that I'm working on the eyes. I did pop in a little bit of I believe it was New Gamboge and a little bit of one of my reds. I don't remember which red I dipped into might have been Quinn Rose just for a little bit more punch in the color. But I'm going to go back in and put more detail into the rest of the hair. But for now, I just wanted to get, you know, the ears and everything done. So I'm going to start layering in some deeper color now. And I'm going to speed this up because it is late enough. And I want to get another video edited and ready to roll because that's how I am. I thought while I'm doing this layering, I would maybe talk about mom a little bit because she is one of the reasons that I am who I am. My mom is determined if nothing else. We nearly lost her a number of times in the last few months to any number of ailments. She's had COVID, she's had cancer surgery. She's just been through the wringer. And at 94, I am amazed that she's still hanging on and fighting. She's quite the woman. And I think I get a lot of my stick to it ofness from her because when she's determined, she is just absolutely determined. When she's, you know, getting taken care of by doctors, she tells them what their job is and what they should do. God bless her. She's just, she's an amazing woman. And I am looking forward to getting to see her again here shortly and getting to see my sisters as well. But another reason that I wanted to talk about mom a little bit is that mom collects rabbits, or at least she used to before she lived in a small facility. So she used to collect rabbits and had all kinds of little figurines and, you know, all the things. I did not collect rabbits, but now I collect rabbits because I think my sisters have kind of told her, you know, I don't really want your rabbits. So she's been mailing them to me for a long time. So I have not the full collection, but every once in a while for birthdays and Christmas, I used to get rabbits that I knew had been sitting in her China cabinet for a long time. And when she had to downsize, she sent me a lot of the rabbits. So I've got them sprinkled in various places. One of my favorites is in the studio and it's a yellow rabbit. I will post a picture of that over on my blog. If you want to see mom's yellow rabbit, it was kind of a perfect size, perfect shape, perfect color and everything for me. I have had to glue on the rabbit's ear several times because it broke in transit and every once in a while it just escapes from his little body, but he's a cutie. And regardless of how mom gets through this latest bout, that is going to be one of my little treasures to have for mom. Now, once I finished the rabbit, I decided to put a background in. I almost didn't because everybody else on the Googles paints this rabbit on white background. And I decided, meh, I'll put something else back there. Now there's a whole video on painting Boca and doing so, I guess painting and drawing Boca on doing it in watercolor as well as in color pencil and alcohol markers and stuff. So if you'd like to see that one, I will put a link to that in the doobly-do because I did forget to film this part apparently. So I only caught the whiskers for this last phase, but basically I took, while it was wet, I took a baby wipe, wrapped it around my finger and just lifted color out of the background. That background is my new chromium oxide green color. I kept that down to just one color. And this is white gouache. And I also used some of the Moonglow for the whiskers that go out into the background area so that they would be seen because white wouldn't be seen out there. So there is meh rabbit. And I will put links to stuff in the doobly-do as I always do. So if you want to know more about whatever mom's progress is, I'll put an update on the blog. There'll be links for the classes and links for the fine art sale and everything, all in the doobly-do. So take advantage of the sale and I will see you guys again soon. My second video this week will be on Friday instead of Saturday. So I'll see you then.