 Well, hi there and happy New Year. It's Sandy Almak. Welcome to 2021. You've survived 2020. Congratulations. And today I'm going to be painting a card and doing a number of my favorite things. Painting a dog, painting with yellow and playing with light. It's one of my favorite things to do. And anytime that I'm doing any kind of artwork, I generally get lost in thinking about what I might do to create a really interesting light source. Light and shadow is what makes things look dimensional. And the more you can help yourself to see it and understand it and play with it, the more you're going to end up creating things that look more realistic. In this particular instance, I wanted to take this dog and this is a stamp from the Colorado Craft Company. And I wanted the dog to look like she's laying on this blanket in a shaft of light. In my studio, there's a daybed. And in particular times of the year, with particular times of the day, there's a shaft of light that comes through the window and hits that daybed. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, Vienna makes a beeline for that bed. And she lays in that worm spot and just keeps kind of nudging over as the light moves and then looks very sad when it's gone. I think she understands that that is like the best little spot in the whole wide world to take a nap. And that's what I'm trying to capture here. But this first pass is just getting the basic color down. The only place that I'm worrying about the light right now is on the dog. And my dog is a black and white dog, which means she'll have white highlights. If you're painting a dog that's say brown, you're going to have a lighter brown on top and a darker brown in the shadows. So I just wanted to get the basic shadow down for that and then color overall. I chose watercolor because it's not going to allow me to get into all those fine details. Well, I guess it could, but it's less conducive to that than say markers would be or colored pencils might be. Watercolor is going to have more flow to it and it wants bigger sections. And one of the things I found during my sabbatical time off during December is that simplicity is really starting to appeal to me more and more. Trying to find ways to simplify things and and just convey the most important things rather than trying to capture every single detail. And that's what just painting squares in the blankets is doing. It's simplifying that blanket so that it's not as busy because the blanket is not the story in my rendition of the stamp. The blanket is just the supporting character to the light that I'm going to create. I'm also using one of my soft sable brushes and these natural hair brushes, in addition to being more expensive, are a little softer than what you'll get from a synthetic brush. So the ones that I generally recommend for crafters are the silver brush line from the Silver Brush Company, the black velvet brushes, because those have more snap to them. And for a lot of card making, you don't need to have a soft brush like this because you're painting small things. But for me, when I'm trying to create something where the colors I want to blend, I want to stay looser using a softer brush is helpful to get me to do that. But just because I'm using this brush doesn't mean you need to go get one. I will link to that and the silver brushes in the doobly-doo for those who want to explore both, but I generally recommend the silver brushes for crafting. I'm using yellows in this partially because Pantone chose yellow for one of their colors of the year. They've paired it with gray and you can read on their website whether or not you think their rationale was right for choosing those colors this year. But I'm happy they chose yellow anyway, no matter why they chose it. So there you go. In the future, I might do a video talking more about the color of the year, but for now I'm just going to use it in my painting. And I'm using more yellow and green and blue and no red in the blanket because if I were to use red, the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, will make brown. So if they end up touching each other since the painting is wet next to wet, I could end up with browns in there, which I didn't want. So I just stayed with colors that are not going to make a big brown mess on my blanket. And a lot of this also, by the time it's all done, is going to mostly disappear because it's going to fall into shadow. But I want this color underneath so you have the idea that the color was there in the first place. And that's why I'm painting this first pass with all of this basic color in there, not worrying about shadows at the time. I'm just worrying about getting the color in there. I have a little error in here that I was trying to fix. And I'll tell you not to fix it the way that I'm fixing it. I dabbed it up with a baby wipe, which was fine. And then I tried to fix it, but I didn't test out the color to see if it was the right tone of gray. So I got a little more in there than I wanted, rinsed my brush so I could then just move the same color around a little bit and increase the shadow on the rest of the dog. I could have tried to lift that up more and pull out more of that gray color. But I did know it was going to eventually dry lighter anyway, and also it would just increase the shadow. So I was going to leave it. Sometimes if you try too hard to fix things, you just make it worse and worse and worse. And what I find is if I can find a solution that requires less fussing to recover from it, I'm a little better off. So there you go. Next step is going to be to completely dry it. You don't want this to be damp at all when you do this next step. If anybody's brave enough to try it, because you'll make a mess. So I'm going to get out my heat gun and dry this really completely so there's no ripples left in the paper or anything really good and solid dry. And this is my wow dual speed heat gun. I do like the dual speed. I wasn't sure I was going to like it and that I could recommend it, but I think I can because sometimes I need a little zap. Sometimes I need more and this gives me that option. So I'll get it all dry. And then we come to the place where you're going to want to hold your breath. So just be ready. I want you to to not freak out when we get to this next step. I've had many, many teachers who have done this when doing demo paintings and absolutely I had nearly had my own meltdown watching them do it. And then as soon as it was done, I went, Oh, now I get it. Now I understand they would paint an entire cityscape and then throw in a giant shadow from a building or something. And while it's scary to do this, it really is effective when you're trying to create a shaft of light or a big strong shadow. And in this particular case, I'm using Payne's blue gray. I'm just going to paint right over top of that whole blanket part that's in shadow and then leave that shaft of light over the dog a little bit of shadow on the blanket behind the dog because there'd be a little cast shadow there. And then do the same thing in the background. Go right through that whole wall in the back. And all of a sudden, now you start seeing a little bit of light coming in across the dog, and everything else starts to disappear. Now the key thing about this is if you end up with your your final pass here, going back and forth and back and forth with the brush or doing it in a lot of brush strokes, you're going to end up lifting all the color that's underneath and making a mess because all that color is going to want to reactivate and start to move. So you want to do this in as few strokes as possible. So you don't end up lifting all that color. And then I'm drying it real quickly so that it doesn't have any time to reactivate anything just by being wet. I want it to be nice and dry. And you can see that that that overall color does dry quickly and lightens quite a bit as well. So that I don't have what seemed at first to be a big scary shadow across everything. Now, depending on the thickness that you do this final layer with, you could end up with a big, a big black shadow. And I'm not going to end up doing that. But I did want to push the background further back. This is going to increase the contrast between the background and the dog so that it disappears. So again, I'm just going to paint right through with more of the Pains Blue Gray right across everything. And you can see immediately, the dog pops forward because of all that shadow behind. And then it's going to be a matter of painting the rest of the details in the the dog itself to start adding that contrast. And I'm going to do that with some neutral tint. And that is a color that is close to black, but it's not quite it reacts slightly differently. And I'm mixing it really thick. There's very, very, very little water in there. Because my dog has black ears and two black spots over each eye and a big black nose. And I'll add a little bit of black for her tail. She's got a little spot at the base of her tail that's black. And all of a sudden this starts bringing the dog forward because now I've got contrast. I've got that really strong black next to white highlights and that sort of thing. That kind of contrast is where realism happens in a piece of artwork. So if you're finding your work feels flat or something just looks flat and wrong about it, look for where your contrast is. Are you getting enough contrast overall in your painting, your drawing, whatever it is you're creating, because that contrast is where the attention is drawn. And immediately in this now, you look at the dog's head, everything else starts to disappear and you just see the dog's head because of that. I added a yellow color on here and I realized as I was doing that, I think we need to do some shopping for colors because both my dogs have black colors. How did we do that? How can I be an artist and not have chosen swanky colors for my dogs? I think 2021 might have to be the year of buying new colors for my dogs, which is might be. So get that all nice and dried and then trim down and put onto a card. And the sentiment in this one is hilarious because a dog recommending that more naps the better is the best advice in the world. It is absolutely the best. I love naps. I really, really love naps. And I try to treat myself to at least a little one every day. And I recommend you do the same because if Vienna has any good advice for humans at all, it's that naps are really, really good and squirrels are really, really bad. Alright, I'll see you guys in the next video. Go create something beautiful today and I'll see you later. Bye bye.