 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to paint snow spray coming off the back of a sled. Got a darling little Lawn Fawn stamp set. It's one of their little teeny tiny ones. They're really inexpensive and it's going to be so much fun to paint this and I hope I have some tips that will help you to make some snow spray for skiers, for all different kinds of sledders, anything that's got a big poof of snow behind and I'm using some manganese blue. You can use any kind of light blue you've got and painting the shadow part and letting water then fill up the rest of the area of the snow spray and I'm dropping in a little more color but leaving a lot of that is just water at the top because snow has shadows. There's actually color in it and there's depth to it when you add some stronger color to it so I've got this really pale color first and I'm using a baby wipe, you can use a paper towel or tissue to soften out some of those edges but while it's still wet I'm going to go in and add more color to it and I decided to add a darker color as well, not just the super light kind of blue color and I'm going to paint it in the negative space above the poof of snow spray and I'm going to let it be fairly light it's going to be a sky in the background but I'm going to kind of let it be light as it touches that snow spray because I want a soft edge there where the snow spray comes up but I'm making my paint darker and darker toward the top because I wanted to have a little darker of a sky up there but I wanted that soft edge right where the snow spray meets the sky and sometimes it's a challenge to get that kind of a soft edge in there and as I was trying to deepen the sky color as well I was trying to figure out whether or not this little bear would actually do his sledding at night, I'm not sure if that's something that little critters do while it's nighttime and the rest of us are asleep so do I make this a night sky or do I just make it a darker-ish blue sky I wanted a different blue than was in the snow but notice that I'm working quickly enough I mean this is sped up slightly but I'm working quickly enough that I can actually throw some of that sky color now into the wet paint that's still here that's how wet the paint was when I painted it I had enough water in there and you don't want just a puddle of water you want enough water and pigment in there that you can drop in a little bit of color and it's going to have a real soft edge to it gotta make sure I get my sky color right up to the little bear's hat I don't want any white gaps in there and I'm gonna now add a few streaks down the hillside just to add a little bit more of speed and context to the snow because there are like I said shadows in the snow coming down the hillside and I'm using a little bit of a dry brush almost to create that so that I end up getting some interesting edges when I kind of scrape across the surface of it with that brush that's not super soppy wet so I heat set everything and now I have this I actually have a nice solid blue sky which doesn't always happen when I paint skies because it's hard to do and I just want to say that because a lot of people get frustrated that their skies come out lumpy it just make it a cloudy sky if that happens that's what I do but I was very excited that this one came out nice and smooth and now I'm going to paint a couple trees out here in the distance because adding the contrast to the snow is going to make the snow appear whiter so I want to have some nice deep dark rich trees and I've mixed my green with some indenthrone blue to make it a nice rich dark green and I am going to drop in some more colors because I want it to feel a little more realistic not as cartoonish as a solid color can sometimes be when you're using your paints and you don't mix anything else in with it sometimes it just has that air of not being real not that realism is going to have a little bear in a sled going down a mountain I guess I'm not really looking into realism but I just want it to look nice and look kind of naturalish so I'm adding a few trees of different sizes and shapes in here and I decided not to add them around the whole cloud of snow on the left that whole poof because that's just I liked how it was really soft and if I were to try to add green trees behind that I would totally blow that soft edge that I've got so my trees are just going to be down here on the the bottom side of the hillside and I'm dropping in a really pale green I mixed up a really light spring green kind of color using some yellow and then I thought let me just add in a little bit of browns to it as well and just let those colors mix in while the paints wet I learned that from several of my landscape painting instructors that every green out there if you're talking about any kind of natural greens that are outside you're going to actually have some browns in them so you always want to drop in just a little bit of that nice warm color and then heat set now all watercolor dries about 30 lighter than it goes on well I shouldn't say all most watercolor dries 30 lighter that's the nature of it so I'm going to try as best I can to remember to dry things in between I'm getting better with that over time that I'm not having as much bleeding troubles because after failing with it enough times and having to fix where I started painting one wet area next to another wet area and then ruined something and had to do yeah after a while this old dog does learn a few new tricks I hope you're learning new tricks as you go because if we're not getting any better then we're not paying attention so we need to pay attention and get get ourselves a little better trained so I am learning to try to heat set a little bit in between I generally don't like to heat set as much as I like to let things air dry unless I'm trying to zap it so it stops moving where it is because I like whatever it's doing at the moment so that's usually the only time that I really do spend much time heat setting things it's using a little bit of quin gold in the details on the sled and that was some quin coral in the Santa Claus outfit and I decided to mix a red color I didn't like that kind of garish red it just came out too bright and too intense and I just kind of mixed it with some color that's already on my palette and that's one of the things that makes teaching watercolor also hard because I'm just using what's on my palette people say well what color did you use there I used a little of this and a little of that there was a little of something left on my palette from a previous project or from earlier in that painting and yeah it gets a little crazy so it's sometimes harder to be able to explain whereas with a Copic marker or a pencil I can say pick up pencil X and that tends to work a little bit better doesn't always happen when we're talking about watercolor so now I'm going to add just a little tiny bit to my trees because I did paint a little more in them than necessary but even the spots that were left in there didn't end up looking all blue because I had painted through them so it still worked if I had left more more highlights in my green would have still worked nicely to have the green trees painted right over top of that blue color but I put my snow dots all over the sky and in front of the sled and in front of the snow spray and everything because it now has something to show up against so you always want to do that when you're doing your snow because the snow doesn't fly behind the object in the scene it flies all around it so that is all I have for you today supplies are linked in the doobly-doo and they're also over on the blog if you need to pin something to your Pinterest board etc and I will see you again next time make sure you hit that like button subscribe if you haven't and I'll see you later