 Hello there, it's Sandy Alnok and today I'm going to be exploring two different paints I haven't used before and painting a watercolor postcard. Let's get going. I bought myself some Etcher postcards because I've had some in their sketchbooks for years and liked them and thought that this would make a really great tool to use for teaching watercolor. So stay tuned for a little more information at the end of this video. But I bought both the hot press and the cold press. They have both. Hot press is a smoother texture. Cold press has a little more texture to it, a little bumpier. They come in these boxes of 100. So you have a lot of postcards to play with and not feel like, oh my gosh, I messed that one up. I've ruined everything. I don't have any more paper left. You have 100 of these. I've been playing with them and painting on them for a couple of days now before shooting this video. And I find I like the cold press better. But I generally am somebody who likes bumpy paper better. But both of them paint very well. I am going to use, just for the sake of proving that it's possible, I'm going to use hot press in this particular video, the one I'm going to be painting. If you're going to keep the plastic bags in the boxes, then you might want to write whether they're hot or cold press on them if you get both. I got both, but you don't need both. Just pick one and get it. But you can see there's a visual texture. And you can also feel the texture difference between them. Let's take a first look at the paints that I'm going to be using today. First is Winsor Newton Dioxazine Violet. The reason I even entertained this color at all was because my mom gave me her box of paints like just from years and years and years ago. And there was an almost dried up tube of the student version of that paint. And I kind of liked it. So I thought, let me try buying a tube of the artist's grade. And I found that Emgram also has a dioxazine purple. They just name it something different. But both are made with the same base pigment, PV23. So I'm going to swatch them out. I have a book of all my swatches. And what I do is cut a little piece of watercolor paper. Always swatch on the paper you're going to paint on normally because you want to make sure that you're going to get the same results, basically. So I'm going to swatch the Winsor Newton on the left and the Emgram on the right. And what I do is put a rectangle of color, or I guess a square of color in here, leaving some room at the top and bottom so I can make my notations about the color itself and the brand, et cetera. You could also do that on the back instead if you don't want writing, bothering your eyes when you're looking at all your pretty colors. And then I put these in a sheet in a book. So I have a big notebook with plastic sheets in it. And I'll put links to all that stuff in the doobly-doo down below. Now, that was the Winsor Newton. This is the Emgram. And I always forget when I grab an Emgram color, which is not very often, that they're highly, highly pigmented. They're made with honey as part of their mix, which means they stay really creamy. And my brush picked up way more color than I was expecting it to. So I got this really dark color. So I got my brush wet again and added some water to it and tried to mix it a little so that the thickness of the pigment was going to approximate what was in the Winsor Newton. I didn't want to have an unfair comparison. And I guess it probably still is because, yeah, it came out much more intense. But that is why I don't believe really in trusting swatches when I make decisions about colors. So I'm not going to choose between these until I've used them for a while in real life testing. I want to see what they look like when I'm painting as I normally paint, as opposed to a swatch where I may or may not get the color mix or the color to water ratio correct and identical all the time so that the swatches don't pan out next to each other. But one thing I saw right away when I put the stripe of solid color, more mass tone on it, is that the M gram gets almost black, which is intriguing to me. I'm always looking for other colors that I can mix with things to make really good dark colors. On my swatches, I always write down what the pigment is that's in it. And with some of them, I write things on the back. I'll make notations about them. And I'm putting them here into my plastic page and realize that I wanted to move the Daniel Smith one over to be next to these guys. So the Carbazole Violet is the PV23. And you can see the difference between the three colors. The Windsor Newton is a little more on the red violet side. The M gram is a little more on the blue violet side. And the Imperial Purple, which is the one that's in my palette right now, is a different pigment number. And it's got a little more reddishness to it as well. These two also have different light fastness ratings. There are one and a two. The Windsor Newton is a one, which is the best. The M gram is number two. I have seen stuff online where I know people say that dioxazine, the pigment itself, is fugitive and that it will not hold up over time. I don't really know. I just know what it says on the tube, and that's what I'm going to go with. I've sketched out the bucket. And when I'm going to do a container of flowers, I find that it's helpful to have an idea where I want the flowers to be. Do I want a poofy basket of flowers or something that's going to hang down? And I like ones that hang down that spill over. They're really full. So I've drawn that cloud of flowers for myself so I can then remove the parts of the bucket that are not going to show, that I'm not going to see the edge on. And I did decide to put an edge back in there so that I would have some edge of the top of the bucket showing, and the flower is just spilling over some sections. To paint the bucket itself, I wanted to use a grayish color. I wanted it to look like a silver bucket that might be a little rusty. So I mixed some Pains Blue Gray with burnt sienna. I'm using my 2019 palette, by the way, because it's more of a floral palette and it has different colors than my House of Hoffman palette. I will link you to both of them in the doobly do if you want to see videos on what's in those palettes. If you go overboard with the colors and you need to lift more so you have more room for flowers, just use a baby wipe and dab that up. You can lift color when it's really pale like this. Most colors, even staining ones, if they're heavily saturated with water, then you can usually lift up a good amount of it. So I'm mixing some of the burnt sienna in a little more directly so I get that rusty feel to the bucket. And then mix some thicker pigment, not quite thick enough, because it started bleeding into the bucket. Don't panic if it bleeds into the bucket. Anytime your paint bleeds, use a dry brush, like no water on it, no pigment in it. Wipe it off really well and paint with that. And you can move a lot of that color around. If your brush has a lot of water in it, when you go to try to fix something like that, you'll end up pouring more water into it and making more of a mess. So just use as little extra pigment, extra water as necessary. As the postcard was drying, I could add more dark colors and get some of those lines to stay, even though they're a little bit blended, they're also going to stay put because the paper is drier. There's just not all that puddle of moisture fighting me. For the background, I was a little nervous about putting a full background in because hot press watercolor paper generally doesn't agree with me. And watching it go on, I was like, oh no, this is going to be a hot mess. This is going to be terrible, this is going to be terrible, it's going to be terrible, look at this. I did put a second coat on it while it's still wet, so I wanted the color to be a little stronger. And it's basically a Payne's blue-grey mix with whatever was left in my palette, so kind of a palette juice mix. And even as it was starting to dry, I was looking at it going, oh man, this might be a bad idea, this might not have been good, but I proceeded in trust that I'm going to learn something from the paper, even if it didn't work out. I used a baby wipe to dab off a few edges and soften them so that the top edge is negatively painted so the flowers will look like they have a really nice kind of danced edge, I guess you can call it. The brush just dances across the paper. I created the same kind of edge at the bottom of the flowers so that you can basically see some areas through the flowers in between that show the wall behind, or whatever that is behind. So it gives a little more depth to the painting when you're able to let the viewer see the other side through the subject. I used a heat gun to dry it and it looked pretty decent. I was pretty pleased. And in all of the practice that I've done in preparing for the watercolor class, that I'll tell you about in a few minutes, I have found that the hot press has worked. It's still not my favorite, I still like cold press more, but if you like hot press paper, these postcards are not bad at all in using them for this class in particular. You could also, in the class, you can use regular paper, you don't have to use postcards, but I just thought I'd offer that up as a suggestion so that you could have some inexpensive paper that you can do a lot of painting on. The flowers that I'm painting here are part of the research that I did for the class. I found some flowers, and I don't remember what these were called, but they're very pale, pale, pale lavender, and they have a dark center in them. And I found that the Windsor and Newton color, which is a little more on the pink side, just very slightly, more on the pink side, also lifts better than the M gram. If you see that big kind of stained purple well that my color is in, that is from my play with the M gram. It is very staining. It doesn't like to lift as much. You can lift it, of course, you can lift some of it, but it likes to stain the paper. It loves to have big, bold color. I don't know if that's the case with all M grams because I haven't played with a lot of them, but M gram is made with honey and it just acts a little bit differently. So if you decide you need that color in your life, just be prepared to have a little learning curve with how to use it. So to paint these flowers, this is another type of flower that I found in my research, I wanted something that was gonna have an overall darkness to it. I wanted some strong color to contrast with all of those little pale violet flowers. And these are, they come in clumps, or they grow in clumps, I shouldn't say come in clumps, I guess you could buy them that way, but they have clumps with all of their stems tightly together. So they look like a really dark purple mass. And so that's why I use the M gram for it because I could get some really rich color. And they have little heads on them, little dots. I'm sure they're little flowers, but in the pictures online that I found couldn't really tell what they were. I added centers to the Windsor and Newton flowers and then a few more details after it was dry on top of the M gram flowers. I'm calling them by that, so you'll at least know the difference in the two colors and see one is slightly pinker than the other one. For all the leaves in between, now this is bringing the rest of the basket to life because there's gonna be greenery in it. To do white flowers, a section of white flowers, I've painted basically a bunch of dots and dropped green color into them and then connected some of them. So it wouldn't be just dots in there, but it would be sections. So I get some negative coloring where it looks like white flowers. For the pale flowers on the left, I'm painting basically around them and getting a cloud of green for them to sit on and then adding dark color into it. Again, this paper dried faster than I expected, so I was thinking this dark green that I put in was going to move more. I did have to help it around with my brush, but that was really easy to do. Just mix a nice dark color to put into a lighter green and push it around using a barely damp brush. When you get to the edges of things, just use your brush to make leaves at the edges. That will be nice and delicate. You get that feeling of a basket that has lots of leaves growing from it and that sort of thing. They don't even have to touch the flowers. They can just be dots almost flying through the air and be suggestive of flowers as opposed to trying to paint every leaf and every stem exactly. Just let them be loose and expressive. I've added some really dark color that includes some of that emgram purple for some of these really dark sections because that is a thing the emgram does really well is it gives you a really, really rich dark color. So I used it in conjunction with the green to get some strong contrast in the darkest, deepest areas of the flower basket. So I proceeded making more of the same kinds of flowers on the right-hand side in the same ways that I did before, putting down water and then dropping color into it. Pretty fun kind of technique and in the class that launches today, you're gonna learn a lot more techniques for painting flowers. They're gonna be in different styles. Some of them may appeal to you, some of them may not. My style changes all the time. So I just let myself paint any old way that I could because that's how I roll. And you might find different tips from different techniques that you can incorporate into your style, whatever that turns out to be. And doing it with flowers is always great fun, right? So I'm finishing this up, adding in my darkest areas and just squinting at it. Basically, as I get to the end of each of my paintings, I squint to see where are my darks in my lights? And are those, as I'm squinting at it, are those telling the story of a basket? Does that look like a basket or does it all look like one big mass? Can I tell that there's clumps of different flowers? Can I tell that they're different sizes of flowers? And I could on this. I was pretty pleased with how this came out. Got it all dried up and then removed the tape for the big reveal. This is always my favorite part is seeing that nice clean white edge for my painting and being thrilled with the outcome of the work. So there we go. Winsor & Newton, M. Graham. I don't know what my final decision is on any of these purples, but as I find out, I will let you know. And it's finally time to talk about that class, 30 days, two more confident watercolor sketching. Just launched this one and it is called a drip class, meaning when you sign up for the class, the first day you get lesson one made available to you, the second day at the same hour that you signed up, if you sign up at 10 in the morning, then each day at 10 in the morning, the next lesson will be made available to you. So you don't get to run ahead. You to just spend your day on one painting idea. The paintings all have flowers in them. As you can see, I've been just flower happy for quite some time now. And I have painted them on postcards. You can paint them in a sketchbook. You can paint them on cut up watercolor paper. You can do whatever you would like. You could put them on cards, all different kinds of fun things. And you can also use any colors that you want. You don't have to use my colors. And once you get through the first bunch of lessons and start to master a few flowers, you could change up the flowers because later on in the class, I start to focus more on things about how to make the scene and how to do the lighting, as opposed to just like, here's how you paint that flower. So there are some more techniques for flowers involved in later ones, but you can change them up if you have a certain type of flower that you've fallen in love with and you wanna just keep making that one. You can do that too. Lots of these are interchangeable with the scenes and the elements and everything. So you get tons and tons and tons of information on how to do watercolor flowers in particular, but lots of elements that go along with them. There's a very simple list of supplies in the free pre-class lesson, but basically I used my 2019 crafty palette. So if you've been around here for a while and you know that palette well, then you'll know what colors there are. They're listed in the classroom. And you'll need some brushes. I used a number six and a number eight brush and a number eight in my fancy brushes, but you can also just step up to a 10 or 12 to have a larger brush on hand. And then you need paper and something to tape your thing down to on a board and that's really it. So if you've already done some watercolor, you probably have all the supplies that you need. If you're a new ish to watercolor, just know this is an intermediate class. And I called it that because I'm not gonna be covering the very basics, the very foundations of watercolor and like color theory and all that kind of thing. I'm gonna be covering them as they come up in class. So if there are some particular things about a particular painting, then yes, we're mixing a particular color, but for the most part I'm trusting that you already have gotten some experience under your belt. So I'm excited to see your work, especially shared in our Facebook group where you can qualify to win free prizes like half off classes and stuff. So be sure to share your work there. And yeah, that's about it. I will see you guys hopefully in the class and over in the Facebook group. Take care, thanks so much. Links to all the supplies for today's postcard are also in the doobly-doo and I'll see ya, bye-bye.