 Hello there. I'm Sandy Olnach. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'll be doing an intermediate slash advanced watercolor. And this is a daunting image. And if it's too much for you, I get that. But I do have something for beginners, which is the fresh pumpkin's class at art venture, not art dash classes at art venture, which is my community on Mighty Networks. This class is only a few bucks. Stay tuned to the end for more details. The reference photo that I used for this painting is by Werner Bauer in Austria. This is on paint my photo a free website where you can use photos that people upload without copyright concerns. And I will put a link in the doobly-doo if you want to go try this painting. I'm putting water on the paper, letting it sit there while I mix my colors so that it soaks in a bit. And then I'm just going to paint colors in the areas of each of the pumpkins that I saw some of that glow coming through new gambos. I'll mix an orange by adding some quinrose and then some cobalt blue. These three colors are primaries, which means I need to be careful about not mixing a brown by accident. So I'm going to be conscious of where I'm putting these and how much of them is blending into each other because it can be a toxic combination. If you're not aware of that. The sketch for this I made very simple. It's the opposite of my previous video in which I did a hyper realistic detailed sketch and then did the watercolor. If you're new at painting and you struggle with, oh my gosh, I don't like drawing. I don't like the drawing part. So I just skip to the paint and then nothing ever works out right. Well, there's a reason for that is that if you're painting on something that is not drawn accurately, or if you haven't sketched enough of it in, then you could actually get yourself in trouble in the painting portion. Because when you're painting, you're worrying about your water management and your color and your edges and everything else. And you can very easily get lost because now you have to also think about what is that dog's eyeball look like in his ear? And where is the shadow on this thing? And it could be mentally overwhelming. It's one reason I know a lot of people give up on watercolor because it just feels like a lot of work because you're thinking about so much at once. And if you do a more detailed drawing and a more detailed study first, then it's a lot easier to get a better painting out of it. Because now you at least have the subject under control. So if you want to see that or see the pet portrait classes that I launched along with it, then see the links in the doobly-do because that's going to really help you a lot. That series is going to continue and I'll eventually get to the point where we do a simple outline and let the watercolor do the muscle and the ear definition part and not do so much in the drawing. But you kind of have to get through that that ugly phase of like, I have to draw, you want me to what? So I will put links to all that down below. Okay, back to the pumpkins. Lunar blue is the color that I'm using for most of the next layer of the painting. I'll be adding a little bit more of the oranges and golds in there, but it's mostly lunar blue in different mixtures. So sometimes very thin. So I get just barely anything on the paper and then other times thicker, sometimes dropping thicker into wet paint. And a lot of this is trying to work out the negative painting to create the shapes of each of the pumpkins because each of these are one in front of the other. And how do you render that edge without putting a line there? Well, you let the line around the pumpkin, there's that big pumpkin in the center, the line around the right hand side, I want you to watch what happens. Here I'm putting in the stripes that are on that particular pumpkin in the lunar blue. The next pumpkin down, I wanted to do something different. So I added some of the orangey color and then dropped in lunar blue so that I could get a different look for a different, just a little corner of a pumpkin. And later on, I'm going to put another set of color in the next pumpkin. So watch that right edge of this pumpkin start to be defined by a whole bunch of different blocks of color. That's going to make it look more natural than just I'm going to paint a whole line around the whole thing. And while that sometimes is accurate to what the photo has, it's more natural if the colors change and the light shifts as well while you're doing the outline of that particular pumpkin or that particular shape. So some of my areas I needed to add extra of the new gamboge or the new gamboge with quinrose just to add more color into them, because watercolor always dries lighter than you expect. And I also wanted to add more of that detail in some of the pumpkins and make them brighter at the top that are closer to the light. So here's that other section. Now I've got another chunk of orange that's helping to define that middle pumpkin. And he's just slowly starting to pop forward because I'm putting all the darker color behind him. So that's really the gist of negative painting. Just painting the other thing and letting it stop at the edge of the object that's in front of it. That's one of my very favorite things to do in my paintings is concentrate on where the negative painting defines something. So as I'm moving along, I'm going to add more oranges into some areas. Sometimes I put the orange color first and then dropped some blue or blue into them, sometimes the other direction. And there are some areas where I wanted it to get a little more brown because when you mix yellow red and blue together, they turn neutral. And there are some places where I wanted to let that happen. So I pushed it a little farther to let the lunar blue dive into the orangey colors so I could get that difference in color between them. And there were other pumpkins in the photograph that were just blue. There was no orange or yellow or anything showing. They just had texture in them. So I dropped some texture into wet paint. Sometimes I did it with paint on dry paper just to get different edges. And then in the cracks, the nooks and crannies in between pumpkins is often where it gets darkest. So paying attention to where those really rich dark areas were and sometimes putting that wet paint into wet paint to get a soft edge. And then other times letting my brush just skip across the surface to create more of those striped textures. This little guy here at the bottom, I'm going to use very thin paint. The thin paint is going to allow some of the color from underneath to show through. And then the lunar blue starts to look more green in an instance where it's thinned on top of the yellow or the orange. It might sometimes turn more of an olive color. And all of that layering of color is just one of the things watercolor does so beautifully. And I think it's one of the things that I love best about watercolor. I had a discussion with an artist friend recently and we just kind of talked about what our favorite thing would be to do if we could just do anything we wanted art wise and not have to worry about making money or having an income or anything. What would you create if you could do anything? And if I, you know, if I had a desert island and I could only take one medium and that was what I was going to do the rest of my life, it would be watercolor because it's so flexible and you can get so many different looks with it unlike a lot of other mediums. So I got out my swanky liner brush to just kind of make that little string coming off of my, the top of my pumpkins. One of the things that attracted me as well as the glow of the color pulled me in for this photo. I forgot one of the pumpkins up top. So I added that in, dried everything up and working now on the next layer of color on top of what's already there. So I'm just getting deeper and richer with the colors, putting in darker shadows and letting the second layer and the first layer show in between. So I'm trying not to cover everything up, but just allowing some of those other layers to shine through to just bring that light out. Here we've got another bit of, you know, negative painting that starts to define a pumpkin in front of it. And it's just the same process for the whole thing. So a little hot tip for you, if you're looking to practice a particular thing like pumpkins, then find a photo reference that you want to paint that has a lot of pumpkins in it. And there's a whole bunch of them on paint my photo. And if you have a whole bunch of pumpkins to paint, you can practice on one and then practice the next and practice the next. And by the time you get the painting done, you'll kind of know how to paint a pumpkin. And you might want to paint the whole thing over once you get through all that practice. But if you want to do a particular flower, find somewhere where you have that same flower in five different angles and, you know, do a study on that in what do those colors look like every time the flower turns the angle from the sun in a different direction and just practice that same thing. And you will find yourself getting better at it because you learn with everything you try, you learn with every paint stroke you make and how to improve it and how to render it better. And sometimes you just learn what didn't work. There are some of these pumpkins that didn't do as great as others. And fortunately, they were not the main pumpkins that I was worried about. But, you know, if you learn the ways you don't want to paint something, sometimes that is as valuable as learning how you do want to paint it because that just eliminates one more thing you're going to try next time. And if you make lots of notes about what you're doing so that you don't forget what you just learned about how you want to paint that thing, then there you go. A couple last brush strokes to add a few details and this painting's done. But I'm guessing some of you might be thinking this is a crazy painting to even try. But you still want to paint pumpkins. So I have a beginner class on pumpkins over at Art Venture. And Art Venture is my community on Mighty Networks. There's a couple thousand of us sharing our artwork every day over there. And there's no algorithms to get in our way. And there's no ads. And there's no craziness. It's just us in our art. So please do join us. It's free to join there. The class is only a few dollars to try to raise some funds to pay for the platform. And you get to learn how to watercolor pumpkins. So I hope to see you over there. And if I don't see you there, I will see you in a couple days with a new video. And in the meantime, get out there and create something every day. See you later.