 are you today? Welcome to February in my creative year, which is an online Facebook teaching group and support group that's free over on Facebook. You can join by clicking the link in the description below. We show the videos here on YouTube and we have all the help support and teacher interaction and shares of projects over on Facebook. So anyway, welcome. This month for February, our topic for the month is color. This week, the prompt is red. I know, right? So I did something wild and wacky and crazy, which I'm going to cut away right here to a few clips that you can see and you're going to look at it and go, what the heck is she doing? So I watch a lot of YouTube and I don't really watch TV. I watch YouTube instead. And I was watching Sophia Nygaard not long ago. I'll click her video that inspired this idea in the description below. She was mixing together all of her lipsticks that she owns and to see what color that she would get. And she got a really pretty shade of a nude color, a brownish nude color that was real pretty. And then she did it with a couple of other makeup products. While I was watching her couple of videos she had on this, I saw, I thought, you know, I didn't get, I think it right away, but I thought it after the second or third video. I thought, you know, I really should, I should try this with paint. Before I could do anything about it, somebody did do it with paint. They mixed all of their, I think, acrylic paints together. I think it was acrylic paints. I don't think it was watercolor paint. I'll try to find the video and I'll link it below too. And of course, when you do that and you mix all of your different colors together, you're going to end up with a neutral shade, something brown, gray, something like that. So, which is what happened. It was pretty color, but that's what happened. So then I thought, okay, well, what if I take it one step further and I mix all of my reds together, all of my yellows together, all my blues together, all my greens together, then what would happen? If I didn't pick out warm reds or cool reds, I just took all of them and mixed them together. I thought, huh, I wonder what would happen. I decided to do it with my watercolor tubes and I'm really, really glad I did. So here we'll cut back to my table and this is the palette I ended up with. Now, keep in mind what I just said. I did not dig out or separate the warm reds, the yellowy orange reds from the blue, the cool reds, the blue or purpley reds. I mixed them all together thinking I was going to get sort of a muddy, muddy gray red. That's not what happened. I got this really, actually bright palette of colors, which I love. I did that with the oranges and fun fact, I discovered I don't have lots of orange watercolor paint because it's not my favorite color. Yellows, greens, blues, and purples. I got a really fun, interesting, bright palette of colors, brighter than I expected. And yeah, so we're going to be playing with this this month. At the end of the month, I am going to show you in that video what box these are in and how I put it together. And I'll talk you through that. Today, we're going to just play with the red one. We're not going to do anything else. I'm going to show you more clips though of what I did and how I did it as the month progresses. So for today, we're going to focus on the red and here's a swatch of that, a bigger swatch of that, right? Isn't that pretty? It's totally unexpected. I expected something a lot muddier. And yeah, I don't know. That's, it's interesting. So I have two watercolor ATC cards. This feels like 140 pound stock. This actually feels like 300 pound. I usually just take scraps and cut them up into ATC cards. So they're not marked. I don't know what they are. And then I have this other square scrap. So and I have my heat gun. I've got my watercolor paints. I've got a variety of red pencils and red brush pens. I've got the Jane Davenport watercolor brush pen thing, which to be perfectly honest, I'm not too jazzed about, but I own them now. So I'm going to try to use them up. They're okay. There's nothing wrong with them. It was probably something I really didn't need in my collection. But if you don't have any ink, water brush pens, you might really like these or especially if you don't have any watercolors. These are great. And the ink in here is water soluble. And yeah, you might really like them. Okay. Anyway, so the first ones we're going to do are going to just be kind of abstract. I'm going to show you something easy first. And then we're going to go to harder. I do want to put a piece of paper under this. Get a scrap piece of paper. I've got a wide flat watercolor brush. This is a Princeton Neptune three quarter inch flat brush. I am going to get the paper wet. I already put some water in the red watercolor and I'm going to zoom in here. There we go a little bit. So I'm going to get these wet. I'm going to grab just a little bit of the red paint. Remember with your watercolor, you want to start lighter and work your way darker. And as you can see, this red is pretty not only pretty bright and cool rather than warm or orangy, but it's pretty well pigmented. Yes, I put some artist quality paints in there, which would account for that, but not all of them. Some of them were student quality. So like I said, it's not the results I expected. I'm going to lift some of that because I want it lighter. This one's kind of dark. Plus, this is going to give me a little bit of a texture. And then we're going to heat set it with the gun. Okay, now we're going to go in with a little more color. I do have a sort of a composition in mind, but don't plan it out too much. This is going to be very abstract. I want those drips and marks. You can see how bright this color is. I just picked up just a little bit. That was hardly any. So I'm adding just a little bit more color while it's still wet, and that pigment is going to go where the water is, and it's going to stick there. Now we're going to dry in between each layer. And while the layer underneath the original layer may move a little bit when you put more water on there, this red color is very staining. So it's not going to move too much, especially if you're quick about it. So let's dry it again. You will notice every time I do this that it dries a bit lighter than it goes on. That's normal for most of your watercolors, if not all of them, that I'm aware of. So one more time. Add a little bit more of the darker color where we didn't before. Make it a bit darker than the layer was previously. Dry it one more time. Okay, now I'm going to take these two ATC cards, and I have this Love Word Stamp that is from my Design Line Stamp Set number 10, which you can get in my Etsy shop. The link is below. And I'm going to just randomly, and I'm using Rangers Tim Holtz Distressing in the color Fired Brick. And so I'm just going to randomly do it over the card. You could do these four little, what do you want to call them, Valentine's Day cards if you wanted. This would be cute. So I have this other brand new stamp set for 2018, number 15 called Hand in Heart. Again, it's on my Etsy shop. And in this stamp set, we have this pair of hands. There is also a heart bit. I think I want to use the pair of hands. It is a bit bigger than the ATC card, but that's okay. We're going to make it work. We're going to do it in black because it's going to be the focal point. This is Rangers Archival Ink in Jet Black. You know, I want it this way. I think I do. I'm going to do one each way, I think. So I'm going to just center it. And I hope I get a good impression because, you know, I don't have one of those fancy stamp things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oops, who are we? There we are. Love it. Let's do this one and do it the other way. So that works really well for me. Now you can just open. You can, if you want, as sort of a bonus thing. Take a little bit of white paint, white acrylic paint, and you can sort of highlight the hands. Use very little paint. You want almost a dry brush. And it's going to blend with the watercolor a bit. And if you use very little paint, it's not going to be opaque. It's not going to cover up the stamping. But what it will do is make your hands stand out just a little bit from the background. If you have one of those stamp positioner gizmos, lots of different companies sell them. I know Ranger has one. Then you could leave the card on there, do this, and then stamp it again. Y'all know what I mean. I don't know what they're called. And I don't have one, so. So you'll notice I'm not covering up all of the red and I'm not covering up all of the lines. I'm just adding a little bit of white to the hands. It just makes them stand out a little bit from the background. You could do it either way. So just go around your cards. Play with your red supplies. Play with your stamps. Maybe think about mixing up a custom paint with all the reds that you have. You could do this with acrylic paints. You're going to want to mix it, of course, in an airtight container if you're not planning on using it all up right away so that it doesn't dry out. And you may want to if you have some sort of pouring medium or extender or slow dry medium for acrylic paint. You might want to add that to your red as you're mixing it so that it doesn't dry out too quickly. Okay. My desk is a disaster, people. It's truly a disaster. Okay, I'm going to very hopefully carefully take a baby wipe. I'm going to wipe some back a little bit more. I got a little bit too much or it's not blended the way I want. Yeah, that's better. So there are the ATC cards. Now let's do something a little different. Maybe you want to do something that's a little more challenging. We can do that. Let's do that. So I'm going to take this is why I have all these red pencils out. That's like what color? I have Derwent pencils out. These are Inktense pencils and their regular artist pencil. I also have a couple of brush markers. Like I said, I have a Mozart brush pen, a Jane Davenport brush pen, and a Stabilo Biggie color pencil. Some of these are water soluble. Some of them are not. I am. That's like a dark red brown. That's red oxide. And I think we're going to start with that one. So when you have a color prompt like this and you want to do a drawing or a sketch, I always go to the internet, use it as your friend, and I will Google red things. What are red? So of course, the obvious red thing is a strawberry, right? So let's sketch a basic strawberry shape. Sorry about the dog barking. There must be somebody in the front yard. Okay, I'm keeping my pencil on the paper very, very light. I always draw the strawberry first, then I'll put the leaves for the top of the strawberry. And again, loose, loose sketchy lines, whether I'm doing this in pencil, ink. My process is usually the same. I'm going to do little sort of tick marks for the seeds and the strawberry. Now, when you're doing this, you're going to think, God, that's ugly. It doesn't look like a strawberry. Looks like a kindergartner did it. I'm not happy. Okay, every painting, drawing, whatever I've ever done has that stage. So first of all, stop being so hard on yourself. All right, now we're going to take one of our watercolor brushes, and this is a Princeton Select pointed filbert number four. That just means it has a fancy shape on the end. And remember what I said about this pencil being water soluble. This is an inktense pencil. So once it dries, it's ink, it doesn't move. So I'm going to go through and I'm going to get the pencil wet. I'm going to use that red color as hopefully as my shadow color, and I'm going to get all the little seeds wet. I'm just touching it with water. I'm barely touching my paintbrush to the paper, no digging any holes to chine it with your brush. You don't need to push that hard. Okay, we're going to switch to a different brush now, and I'm going to go in with a round, again, a Princeton Select round number eight, one of my favorite brushes. I'm going to just use this paper as sort of a palette. It's going to absorb some of the paint, but that's okay. I'm going to lay some pigment down, and then I'm going to add water for blending. So I'm going to go in there where I made a boo boo. I'm going to put some water. If you do it right away, sometimes you can lift the pigment right off the page. I should be using my porcelain palette, but it's hidden under a bunch of stuff right now. I love this watercolor paint that I made. It's a really pretty, pretty color. So surprising. I can't wait to see what you all come up with. So I'm using darker, less blended pigments of the watercolor in the places where the shadows are. I'm letting the intense pencil help me with those shadows because it's a different color of red, and I'm letting the paint blend out to the color of the paper and or a very light color of red where I want the highlights of our berry to be, right? So the parts farther away from you would be darker, and the parts closer to you would be lighter. So, you know, like the sun is coming from this way. Let's see what other colors of pen. I have crimson. What is this crimson? Just crimson. So this is another intense pencil. Don't be afraid of the sketchy lines. Let them help you define your shape and your painting. I like a loose sketch. It's one of my favorite things. I don't want it to look perfect and blended. Don't be afraid of the push and pull in your painting. As you go and you add layers, you're going to lose maybe some of the detail, but you can always bring it back with another layer of marks. Keep control of your water. Watercolor painting is all about controlling the water. I almost stuck my pencil right in the water thing. That would be bad. Now this painting is about the red. So I'm actually not going to add the green for the leaves. Normally I would make the leaves green, but we're not going to do that because it's about the red. I really like this. I'm going to dry it and I'll be right back. Okay, I have a red ball point pen and we still have some of our white acrylic paint. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the white acrylic paint. I'm just going to dab, little dab, like give the little seeds a highlight. Don't be afraid of using other mediums with your watercolor. That's just goofy. We're mixed media artists. That means we don't have to pick and choose just between only one medium. If you want to add a little bit of acrylic paint, ink, pencil, pen to your paintings, then do that. Do it. Have fun with it. I'm going to add a few little brush strokes to our leaves. Now I'm going to take this as a red, big, crystal ballpoint pen. Nothing special. And I'm going to just right here. Here. Let's see. You are very sweet. Get it? Very sweet. I'm going to sign it down here at the bottom. I'm doing this. It's still January, so okay. I'm also going to sign these. I'm going to actually sign these, I think, on the back because there's no, oh, maybe I can sign it on the front down here. No, it doesn't really show up. Okay. So there we have it. This week is all about the red. Now I'm going to keep one of these and put them, put it in my journal for this month. The others are going to be gifted to somebody on the rack list. So make sure your name is on that list because you never know who in the group is going to want to send you something. It may be one of your fellow students. It may be one of us teachers you never know. That's it for this week. This week. Have fun. Play with your red colors. Look forward to the other teachers this week. They each have a different take on red and what they're going to do with it, what it means to them, and I look forward as much as you probably all do to what they're going to come out with. So that's it this week. Red. It's all about the red. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe if you will. If you're not in the Facebook group and you'd like to be, then please join Shop in the Etsy Shop if to support my channel. Visit Sophia Nygaard's channel and if I can find the link about mixing the paint together, I'll link that one too. They were some fun interesting videos and that's it for today. Don't forget the most important thing. Go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I will see you later. Bye guys.