 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnok, and today I'm going to talk a bit about Dry Brush, which is a watercolor technique that's used by more advanced watercolors, and I'm going to be using a stamp set from Honey Bee. It has some Valentine's sentiments in it, but it's also got plenty to be used year round. And with Easter coming, this seemed like another good one to add to the Bunny Series this week, so this is the second of my rabbit videos for the week. I'm making a 5x7 card, because when you're doing a watercolor scene, you're actually painting a watercolor scene, it's not like Copic Markers where you can get into tiny details. So I tend to want to make a bigger card if I'm going to use a full scene and do anything other than generic trees in the background, that kind of thing. So this is a 5x7, and I stamped it in a Distress ink, and this one is Antique Linen on some rough watercolor paper, so I can get some good texture. And Dry Brush works best with texture, because what Dry Brush is, is when you take the brush and you skip it across the surface of the paper, when you've got highs and lows in the paper, then you can skip across it and get all kinds of interesting textures. I won't be employing that here in the painting of the rabbits though, because with the rabbits I'm just trying to put some color in and get them painted, and typically I tend to try to paint the scene first and then paint whatever the main item is, but in this particular case I wanted to leave it in the misty in order to have the option to do one little detail piece at the end. So even if you're not into doing full scenes and things on your watercolors, this might be a little tip that you will enjoy anyway. So I've painted a couple layers into the bunnies, started with some yellow ochre, and then dropped in some darker mix of color in the shadow areas, and did some lifting by rinsing and drying the brush, not fully drying, drying it pretty well, and then lifting color off to get those soft blends on the edges. With this red scooter that they're riding, I painted it first, and while it was still wet, I dropped in a mix of a darker red color that was also thicker. If you drop in a mix that's thinner, it's going to just run into everything and bleed all over the place. If the mix you're dropping in is thicker than the paint that's already on the paper, it'll stay a little bit more toward whatever shadow side, so you're going to get something that looks more dimensional. With the tires of the little scooter, I decided not to paint all the way to the bottom of them, because I want it to look like they're riding in dirt, so I wanted to have some brown down there, and when you look at any tire on the road, you basically see a little flat bottom on them, that's just the way tires work, and I wanted to make it look like they were riding on something rather than floating above it. The other parts of the scooter I made in gray, and if I got it a little too dark, I wanted to dab off a little bit with either paper towel or baby wipe or something, and now we have the finished scooter. Well, here is the tip for the beginners. If you want to use this one, you're welcome to it. I'm going to use a distress marker to put the eyes and the whiskers and the noses back in, and that way I can have the image stamped and re-stamp it in the same place using the MISTI, and then take it off and put it on my board in order to do the whole scene. Since I knew I was going to have a lot of water everywhere, I taped the whole thing down, and that sort of thing. I'm going to sketch real quickly some of the lines of this and just divide it into sectors. I'm going to have a fence in the background, two trees on the left, a house on the right hand side, and then I got to figure out where the grass is going to start as well as these little stairs that are going to go up to the front of the house, and then we'll have a roof, a roof line coming down at an angle, maybe even throw in a window into the house itself, and I'm keeping the lines really minimal and really light because as I paint, I can change that up all that I want to. Because it's light pencil lines, they'll not really completely disappear, but they can be hidden by everything else that I paint. So then I've got the strip of grass leading up to the fence, and I'm ready to start my painting. To do the fence, I was thinking about using the yellow ochre again, which is the same color I used with the rabbits, but I didn't want it to feel like it was the same as the rabbits. So I switched it and added in some of the new gamboche just to brighten it up a little bit, change the color of it, and I'm using a different brush notice for this background. When I do large areas, I find that using a bigger brush is going to help, and in this particular case, it's one of my fine art brushes. Fine art brushes just paint a little differently, a little bit better, and I can get better coverage with them and better dry brush with them. So you can practice with whatever brushes you have to see if you can get some of that dry brush or in this particular case, a little wet and wet as well. So I'm painting the grass while the fence is still wet so that the little bits of the grass that are right there by the bottom of the fence start to move up into the fence and it starts to look like the tops of the grass and it looks very natural as opposed to trying to paint every little strand of grass. And if you want to stop it right where it is, then by all means just grab a pecan and zap it so that it doesn't go further than it is right now, which is what I did. And then I still have some green in my brush so when I painted my sky, my sky has a little bit of green in it, so I'm going to add some cobalt just to make sure it feels more blue. But there's going to be a bunch of things in the sky so I'm not too worried about it. I just wanted something to feel like there were clouds and some happy blue in there. And I didn't want it to feel like there was nothing behind the bunny's ears. I wanted it to feel like the sky had continued right across. So I did paint carefully around the ears a little bit in order to get that continuity across the sky. Dabbed off a little bit extra just to make sure that I didn't have too much color there. Everything dries back about 30% so you can always remember that when you're doing watercolor. You don't have to worry too much about trying to keep everything as light as you might want it. So here is the first little bit of dry brush, which is the fence. And I've mixed up a thicker color. It's kind of like the dark bunny color, maybe a little bit more of the yellow ochre than a brown in it. And I'm just using a dry brush technique with my silver brush. And I switched to the silver brush because it's smaller. When I'm trying to do small stuff, the big brushes don't tend to work all that well. The silver brushes have a little more snap to them so a lot of times I'll switch to them for smaller details. And now I'm going to paint across the ground where the bunnies are riding with, again, that same color that I had mixed up for the fence, for all that dry brush on the fence. And I'm going to try to just keep it a little bit loose if I can leave any small areas of white. It's always helpful to be able to leave just some flex here and there. And it feels more like watercolor when there's some of the fresh white paper showing. So then I mixed a thicker color. Again, I didn't want it to be thin because the thin would just run out into all of that dirt. And I wanted a shadow under the scooter. So I put some there and also just a couple strokes here and there into the rest of the dirt so that there would be a little variation in it. And it wouldn't be all just one color, that kind of thing. Give it just a little slight bit of dimension. And it also gives enough color right around those puffs of smoke at the back of the scooter that it starts to help them to show up more. Next is going to be the house. And I added a little bit more of a reddish color to that. So it would be in the same browns family, but it'll have a little bit of burnt sienna in it, which is going to make the house feel a little bit different. I didn't want every color in the universe in my painting. So usually, even when I start using something like a burnt sienna and I introduce it, I will add some of the other colors that are already in the painting so that there's some relation of all the colors to each other. So it might have a little bit of the yellow ochre in it, or I might put some of the other browns, that sort of thing in it. And then while this is still wet, haven't dried it in a while, I'm going to start painting all the bushes and greenery down here at the bottom. I wanted this to feel very nondescript down here. It's not important to the painting. It's just a little scene setter. So with my nice wide brush, I'm just making some very loose brushstrokes, leaving, again, a little of those flicks of white at the top just to allow some of the paint to mix in with the things that are above it and leaving some air spaces as well. And then I'll mix an even darker brown or darker red, darker green with a little bit of brownish in it, just a couple of different colors to throw into the grassy area so it has a little variation. And now it's time to dry everything for the next step. I tend to dry when I get to a place where I don't want the next thing to bleed into something else. And I was going to work on the trees and I didn't want them to bleed into the fence or into the sky. So I got out my nice... This is one of my nice brushes, my Sables, I think it's a number eight, Kolinsky. And it makes really thin lines and it makes really thick lines. So I was trying to demonstrate that for you, even though I wanted bigger, heavier tree trunks to the picture. And I'm going to create a little bit of negative painting around the bottom so that I end up with something that looks like it's tucked into the grass. There's little grasses in front of it. And then comes the tree, just some loose painting of the tree with all the different greens that are left in the palette, just a mess of whatever's there, leaving some dry brush open spaces. And if you're using... If you're used to using your hot press paper all the time, you won't get that kind of a dry brush effect, like you will with a rough paper. So the rough paper has valleys and peaks to it and when the brush skips across and doesn't let anything into some of those valleys, that's when it creates these little open spaces and this texture. So I'm going to add a whole bunch more little details around certain edges of the tree, not every single bit of it. And those who have taken my trees class will understand what I mean when I start talking about just choosing a few areas, not making every bit of the tree the same amount of detail and picking different kinds of greens to just drop in, wet and wet. And it makes that tree feel very alive and very unique and different instead of just feeling like I've taken a Copic marker and tried to blend it all perfectly. Watercolor is not all that great for little tiny details. It does better with big brush strokes, with big moves, not with little fine details. And there are moments when it can, you saw on coloring the stamp itself, that it's possible. But if you put that much detail into everything in a scene like this, no one is going to know where to look. So as long as I keep everything else in the scene, kind of generic and open and big spaces and big brush moves, then all the focus gets to go to those little bunnies. The place where my eye goes is to the pop of red for one, which is why I'm not putting red anywhere else, as well as the detail where the little bunnies are sitting on that very dark seat. Anywhere that draws your tension tends to be where your very light colors are right next to your very dark colors. And that creates such a contrast that you start to look there automatically. The house started feeling very light and it felt like the same kind of color as the bunnies. So I wanted to add more to it. So I added another layer of color to it, which with watercolors is something you can do very easily, just paint right over top of it. I was considering putting maybe some bricks in it and started working on that, but realized now I really just wanted the base of that house to be darker first and then add a texture to it. And the texture is gonna be very generic as well. It's not going to be very tight. I wanted it to stay loose, but making it darker helped to make the steps appear to be part of that same shape and made the shape less important. Because the fact that they're driving in front of their house and they're leaving home and going to work or whatever they're doing for the day is not as important as them being on that little scooter. So I wanted the house to start to feel like it. It was disappearing. It was just a big shape rather than a detailed element. And when I started putting in the steps, those got nice and dark. And I really liked the darkness of those in contrast to the darkness of the wheels and that tree trunk in the back. And then took that same dark brownish black color and started adding into the house some bricks, just loose shapes, not trying to paint every little brick in there. If you try to do that, you'll drive yourself crazy and you'll draw all kinds of attention to the house. So once it dries, that's going to become more of just a single shape with some little dark variations in it and not much more. And then a little more dry brush on the bottom here with the grasses and just skipping the brush over top of it to add texture to certain areas not everywhere. Like Mother Nature doesn't do everything in an even way. So you don't want your painting to be the same amount of detail or the same amount of anything all over the place. So now we take the tape off, which is always the magic moment of reveal. And there is my finished card. And I stamped Bonjour on to it because I have been watching a French Village. If anybody else has been watching it, please let me know in the comments. I've just started almost through season one, I think. And it's really good, but it's in French and I'm remembering all the French that I once learned back in the day. And my card has a bunch of card stock layers on it, including the inside. So don't forget to make the inside special as well. And that's about it for me. I think I've talked really fast through this one, but hopefully you learned something along the way. And I will see you again with one more bunny this week. I'll see you later, bye-bye.