 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnok, and today I'm going to show you three different mediums to create bokeh effect backgrounds. I'm going to start with colored pencil, which is by far the easiest out of the three of these different mediums that I'll be using today. And I'm using powdered pencil. I don't have an image in the front of my picture in this one, but you could easily do that with an image you've already got drawn or something you just have a pencil outline or a stamped outline for and then create this background around it. Using a tea strainer, I've created powder out of a bunch of different analogous colored pencils, oranges and yellows and golds. And then I added in a dark gray just because I wanted to have some contrast, a dark area in addition to some lighter areas. If you look at bokeh background photographs, you know when they take pictures of things, there's often really strong contrast between darks and lights. And I just think they look more beautiful when they have that kind of contrast. You can add more layers onto it once you add the first layer. You can keep going until you're satisfied with it. It's one of the things that makes it very forgiving because you can just keep adapting it. And it also doesn't have to be perfect. I'm using the cotton ball to spread the color, but you can see I didn't worry about making sure everything was perfectly blended, just that it's mostly blended before I start this next step, which is using a kneaded eraser, K-N-E-A-D-E-D. And a kneaded eraser is one where you can stretch and pull and twist it and stuff in order to make it into whatever shape you need or to soften it or to clean it. It's a self-cleaning kind of eraser. I'm putting on the background bokeh dots first. And the ones in the background are going to be further away. So they're going to be softer and fuzzier and they're not going to be pure white. You might wonder why do I have all this pure white on there because I'm going to push it back into the background. Using that cotton ball that already had some gold powder on it, I can dim these down so that they're not bright white. The bokeh backgrounds that you see in beautiful photographs have many layers of colors and sometimes it's different incredibly intense colors. Lots of different things you can try with it. So just Google for bokeh effect and you will see just tons of amazing samples that you can follow for your own art. I decided to try to add a little more intense color. So I'm using my yellow golds and my gold pencils in order to add pigment directly on the paper and then I also did some blending with the cotton ball in between. Now I'm going to do another layer of bokeh dots and you can see how these are starting to pull forward because the other ones in the background are just sort of drifting and being really soft and now I can soften these as well and you can keep going with this process to make the bokeh as detailed as you want or you can make it really simple. Having different sized bokeh dots is usually what makes it look really great so don't try to make them all the same size. That tends to just get a little bit boring and rigid and if they're all evenly spread out there's no empty space in between them they also don't look very realistic. Bokeh is made by looking at lights in the distance that are way out of focus. Something in the foreground whatever your main image is would be the thing in focus. Everything in the background is just twinkling lights or sometimes it's the twinkling of dust particles in the air that the sun is hitting so it's not going to be something that you're going to have real rigid lines for. So I used a stick eraser to add more intense and very small dots to it and then remove the tape for the big reveal and isn't that beautiful? Look at all that rich beautiful gold color, the smooth texture and yet everything is all fuzzy in the background just lovely. So now we're going to try one in watercolor this is going to be a little bit harder. Whatever image is going to be in the foreground of your painting you'll want to have either sketched in or if you're using a stamp to make a card you want to have that stamped image there and if you need to pre-do a sketch so you know what your highlights are I would highly advise doing that. I know on my rabbit where I want the white highlights so I painted water everywhere except those white highlights and I'm going to let the color in the background this is yellow ochre. I'll let that flow across the page right across the rabbit except for those white highlights and that's going to help the rabbit to not look like a sticker when it's all finished so he's going to have some color that's merging in and out of the rabbit as well as the background. I added some new gambos to that and this is transparent red oxide. I'll start getting more intense with my colors and keeping it in that same kind of goldish feel that I had for the pencil one because I wanted to see if I could get these to coordinate so they'd make a beautiful picture when I have all of my pieces together but now I'm going to tilt the board and you can see just how wet it is if your board dries up add some spray of water to it so that that color just runs nicely. If you need to dab off some of your white areas then do that to pull out some of the color that may have run over and before it's dry you want to make sure it's still nice and wet before it's dry add your dark and my dark is going to be moon glow which yes is a purple but purple and yellow are going to be opposite each other on the color wheel so guess what they're going to do they're going to turn into a neutral. This is going to help to create some neutral areas in this so that the sparkles of the bokeh background are going to really work because I have some dark areas in contrast to the lights. I'm going to be tilting my board a bit and as the moisture gets to the outside edges just sopping some of that off of the paper towel along the outside edge so that I can start to work toward getting it drier because right now it's just super soppy wet as you can see and I want to keep turning the board until I have this relatively even coverage. I can have some streaks in it but I didn't want it to be just so puddley but just before it's dry it shouldn't be puddley soppy wet but it can still be a little bit shiny that's when you want to remove the bokeh dots and by doing so you just take a baby wipe lift those up by tapping the baby wipe into the wet pigment and I'm going to make sure they're nice and uneven I've got lots of different sizes and I'm not going to have as many as I had in the previous one because this one it's going to be much bigger it's a different focused image and this is going to help to create the distance the sense of distance that I want and then I'm going to let it completely dry before I start painting the rabbit because now I can create some hard edges in the rabbit that aren't going to be looking like a sticker since I do have that color that's coming from the background right across the rabbit's back it's going to bring some harmony to the whole piece that will make it work together it took me a long time to learn that as a watercolorist I wish I had learned that sooner but it's a very difficult thing to do because your mind tells you don't let the background bleed into the foreground and yet that's what's going to make it work to mix the browns that I'm using I'm going to just use the same colors I already have in the painting so I'm using yellow ochre and you know whatever was in that puddle there's even a little bit of new gambosian there mixing that with some of the moon glow it's going to create harmony on the whole piece again so that everything feels like it works together that's what I I want to try to achieve when I create a painting the only color that I added anything extra with was a little bit of a pinkish peach for the ears and for that I even had a little bit of new gambos in with the quinacridone rose so that I would still have a little bit of that flavor of that yellow in there so that it wouldn't be just a sore thumb that sticks out on the painting and as I start working around it I switch to a smaller brush as I go if you're trying to paint real fine detail then wait until the last possible minute switch to your smaller brush the bigger brush you can use on any of your earlier passes the better because you don't want to get stuck painting all the teeny tiny bits before you get the overall things starting to work together and the way that the rabbit came together on this one I was just so tickled with all I had to do was add a little bit of fur to him and all that color that was under really worked nicely this painting by the way is going to be in my fine art store so a lot of the stuff that I'm creating I want you to have access to if you want to go and buy this piece and have it so you can examine what that actually looks like you can do that the copic version I'm going to call the hardest just because there's a lot of people that aren't used to creating this kind of a soft background effect and the kinds of colors that I'll be using I wanted to keep it again with the same flavor of colors yellows and purples as I've been using already in this video with the other mediums I started with really really pale colors and just started building up intensity in these yellows you can see the colors over on my blog I'll have them listed for you but I'm not listing them on the screen because really just use the colors that you want in your background if you wanted to be all pinks use some really light pinks and then get bolder with the color as you go then I'm going to add a contrasting color it's that purple it's the complement so look for the complement of whatever color you've already used note that you might want to start real pale if you start testing colors to see what looks right and you find that something just looks real garish try using desaturated colors because those are going to tone down the others really well and here the blue violets that I'm using are going to work really nicely with these golden colors because I can go back and forth between them if it starts getting too purple I'll be able to add some yellow later and go back and forth until I'm pleased with it I wanted to have another glow in the background like it did with the rabbit so I left the left corner this time with barely any color touching it at all but next up is going to be your best friend which is the colorless blinder it has some kind of magic in it that makes the color push out from the center of whatever dot you're making and it create it does create a little loop around the outside you can see there's heavier color so they almost look like they're barely outlined but it still is going to work I'm going to layer these again just like I did with the pencil and add color over top of them so this is the background layer and then I can add more color and just keep building up over time another really nice thing about using this bokeh background for something like this is that you can put the dots in places where you didn't like what happened in the background so if you had an area that didn't blend the way you wanted just add more of the bokeh dots in there now here I'm adding more yellows sometimes specifically in some of the dots sometimes just across the background and just wiping the colors across the surface of each other so that they continue to blend and make a neutral I don't want anything that's going to be real garish either on the purple or yellow end I picked out two of the dark purples that I put in the collection of markers for this picture and I wanted to add some grasses in the foreground and I used the chisel nib here from one of those pens because it happens to be really dry that nib is dry the front is fine the super brush nib works great but the chisel nib is kind of as you can see it's spent there's not much life left in it but boy I can make some really soft lines so if you ever are looking for a marker that you can do that with try the back ends of some of your markers and see if they're dry enough to create something like that so I'm using the lighter of the two purples this is a bv17 using that to create the basis for the pieces of this grass and I wanted that to be the lighter part on the outside edge and the darker in the center so this is the bv08 and I wanted them to feel like they're glowing because the light is coming from behind them and it's going to give them a bit of a soft glow I thought wait a minute that soft glue is going to have some yellow in it so let's add some yellow and that went a little nicer I kind of liked the combination of the two of those they looked more natural and then I got all excited and I added a brown oh my gosh that scared me so I walked away from that for a moment so I could go add more grasses and doing the same kind of thing but off in the distance I didn't want these to be focal points though so I went over them with lighter blue violets to soften them and that you can just keep doing as you work on the piece if you don't like a certain area then go over it with something light and push that more to the background to the distance and I started giving more yellow to the background to just warm the whole picture up a little bit because it started to feel very purplish and then went back in with more golds to try to add more featheriness to the edges of those grasses you can go back over those with purple again if it gets too yellow there's just infinite possibilities for making all kinds of changes with something like this I love how this one came out and I hope that you might try something like this really really gorgeous kind of bokeh background now I hope this week that you'll stay tuned to my social media because I am going to have a lot more on bokeh all week long and Friday I've got a bigger video that's a little bit on the crazy side these beautiful flowers that I'm using the same kind of colors for purples and yellows so stay tuned for that on Friday I will see you here on YouTube then and aside from that I'll see you over on social media so have a wonderful wonderful week create something beautiful with bokeh and tag me I'd love to see what you're making