 Well, hello there. It's Sandy and I have something a little different for you today. I'm going to compare something from a number of years ago to something I created just recently. On social media at the end of 2019, I posted a couple things that showed my progress because I had been trolling through my old, old pictures in social media to see if there was anything that I could do a direct comparison with. And these were quite popular. People thought they were very encouraging. So I thought it would be a good time to perhaps share a video remaking something that I had made here on YouTube years and years ago. This might have been one of my first watercolors I think on YouTube. And I watched it again and there was some crazy advice I gave in it. Not that you shouldn't listen to my old advice because it was given with a good heart and at the place where I was at the time. But I tried to force looseness in that video. I was like, hey, if you want it to look loose, then put a little blob of color here and little blob there. And what I've realized now is that the looseness comes from letting the watercolor do what it wants. And I wasn't letting the watercolor do anything in that video. Here I just put down a lot of water and color in the background. And then I'm dropping my poppies in. I wanted some soft poppies in the background so that it wouldn't just be one isolated poppy on the page. And I'm just adding them while it's wet. I'm letting the color do what it wants. I'm letting it mix as it wishes. I'm using Daniel Smith watercolors now too, which is different than that video. I was using a smaller craft oriented set of paints and the Daniel Smith paints act differently. You can get some similar effects, but the Daniel Smith paints are also going to last longer. So if you're making a card that you want to last longer, it might be helpful to use good paints. And that's why I say that they're a good one to a good brand to recommend because they're light fast, they won't fade on you. They also act the way that watercolor supposed to act. Now here's a place that little spot of dark green right above that flower. Originally, I was going to try to do some negative painting on this piece. And I either forgot or decided halfway that I wasn't going to. I think I just forgot that that was where my head was because I just got lost in watching the paint move and playing with it. So there you go. That that's going to be the only place on the painting for that. The rest of it is just going to be loose. I chose a color for the poppies that's not in my regular palette as well. I've been playing around with all of my Daniel Smith watercolors. I've bought many over the years. And when I first got started, they did gift me with a bunch of colors. And this is one of the colors they gifted me with and I've just not used it. It's organic vermilion and it's a really pretty color for poppies. And I just tested out all my colors to see what would work the best for a poppy color. And the color I'm dropping in is actually a combination of a couple of greens. I mixed up periling green with green appetite. So even though it looks black in the centers of those flowers, what I've learned since that video, and I kind of knew it before because it's part of color theory, which I did understand. But dropping in the opposite color on the color wheel and orangey red is has a green on the opposite side. That's what's going to make a neutral color when you use complementary colors together. So I've also learned that in order to get that looseness, I use a spray bottle quite a bit. And I let the color blend and move as it wants. In that video, I was just so, so determined that I wanted, I wanted to put the color where I wanted the looseness to be. And I'm really glad that over the years in all the classes that I've taken that I've learned that I don't control that looseness myself, that it is the brush and the paints and the pigments and the paper and all sorts of other factors. And it has very little to do with what I wanted to do. I didn't know where this painting was going when I began, other than I wanted a loose poppy garden. One other part of that old video that just made me laugh out loud was when I talked about that looseness being artsy fartsy. And I have been thinking about it for a little bit. What is it about that that made me say that about watercolor? And I think it was because I was so exclusively focused at the time on Copic markers and trying to get realism and hyper realism even and trying to be spot on and have every color and line where I wanted it. That expressiveness, I just didn't even have a word for it. I didn't even know how to think about it or how to talk about it or I just had no clue at the time. I was at a very different place as an artist. And what watercolor has given me the ability to do is to paint what I feel and not what I see. And that's what I'm doing here. I'm painting what I feel about the poppy garden photo that I was working from. It just had a garden full of flowers that faded in the distance. And I wanted to emphasize that light that was cascading onto the flowers. I wanted to emphasize the loose floppiness of the poppies. I wasn't trying to represent every single flower in the photograph as a representational flower. I looked at them for shapes and to sort of figure out the color in general. But I was looking for the connection between the flowers. Where do they touch each other? Where do I want them to touch each other? I moved some flowers from one place to another because I wanted some interaction between all the flowers. I wanted that one up on the upper left to just stand out and reach toward the sun. That's what I mean by painting what I feel instead of what I see. And that is where watercolor gives me much more freedom to do that because the water takes the control out of my hands and puts it in control of the pigments themselves. So I hope this was helpful and encouraging to you. Go look back at some of your old works and see where you are now. Notice your growth and celebrate it because you're worth celebrating. You're making progress. Thank you so much for spending a few minutes with me watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, click the like button. You can certainly share it with a friend who needs some encouragement as well. And I will see you very soon with another video because that's what I do. Have a great day and go make something beautiful. Bye-bye.