 Hello there, it's Sandy Almuk, artist here on YouTube and I'm going to be watercoloring a campfire for you today. I don't have a lot to teach you about watercoloring fire. And so if you're watching this video to find out how you can watch and see if you learn anything from this, but I'll tell you there's a lot of things that I wouldn't recommend that I did here. But what I will talk to you about is something that hopefully will help you as an artist anyway. Even though I can't tell you what I did here or why I did it because there was a lot of stuff that I found myself recovering from because I made lots of mistakes along the way and had to go back and fix things. So one of the things that I found when I've been doing this study of fire is that I was looking for people who paint fire. There's not very many people who have painted fire. It's just it's not a subject that is very common. And so I've found a couple of YouTube videos. I found some people who have painted fire and I found myself in this painting trying to replicate some things that they did because my earlier attempts at painting fire without any instruction, I decided to deliberately not go find anyone else's tutorials because what that would end up doing would be to teach me how to paint fire like them. And so my first couple paintings were a real struggle, very difficult because it's a whole new subject and trying to figure out what my style is and how it fits with fire is just a whole different ball game. There's just a different mental space that I need to be in. So I found myself finally breaking down and saying, okay, fine, I'm going to go see what YouTube has to offer. I found myself wanting to do things the way a couple of different people on YouTube tried to do things and sometimes it worked for them. Sometimes it didn't, but what I found was when I and I find this all the time when I try to be like someone else, when I try to paint something or draw something the way someone else has done, I generally tend to not feel very authentic in that and it shows in my painting. And what I need to get to the point of doing is painting fire often enough. And I'm starting a daily fire study in one of my sketchbooks. So I just keep working at it and keep working at it until I figure out what my style is going to be. I know what my trees look like. And when I look at my paintings of trees, I know I painted those trees because there's just something that I bring to them. It's my kind of calligraphy that comes with my watercolor paintings. And that's just that's my my signature thing. And I couldn't find how to put that into this painting because here the calligraphy is not necessarily the dark parts. The calligraphy is in the light parts. So it's all reversed. It's there's just it's all upside down and backwards in my brain. So it's going to take me a while to get to that point where I can make this look like like me. And my encouragement to you as an artist is to go for the same kind of an idea when you want to learn how to paint something, whatever that thing is. I've gone through bouts with snow. I've gone through bouts with trees. I've spent like weeks and weeks and weeks painting rocks. I've had times when I just painted puddles, just all kinds of puddles. And now every time I see a great puddle, I stop and take a picture of it. So when I get back into my puddle phase, I'll have lots of puddle references in my camera. I mean, just different subjects in nature that I want to master even though it seems like a dumb subject is going to help you at some point. And this painting is one of those places that those studies have helped. This reference photo that had the flames in it and the wood stacked this way was great, except I wanted to put rocks around it. I wanted to have a surrounding around it because I don't know, I just wanted to. And there were no rocks in the picture. So how do you put rocks into a picture when they don't exist in the photograph? If you've done enough studies of that other element of those rocks, then you'll know how to do that. You'll be able to figure out the rocks, the lighting, the shadows underneath them because you've studied rocks a lot. And I when I say a lot, I mean, like a hundred paintings of rocks will teach you how to paint rocks. Five paintings of rocks is not going to get you so far. But if you do daily sketches of rocks and study their shadows, study their textures, then by the time you get to something like this, where you're trying to create rocks that are lit on different sides in different ways, the ones in the foreground are lit on the side that's away from the viewer and the ones in the background are lit on the side that is facing the viewer. So they're opposite and trying to figure out how to make the dirt, textures and the shadows under the rocks. And all that comes from all of my rock studies. So while it may have seemed rather silly that there's a sketchbook that I have is filled with just dumb rock drawings and paintings. That comes in handy. And so if you want to be able to paint a tree out of your brain, instead of, you know, I need to go find a reference that's just this way. The trees are on the left and there's one that's taller. And like instead of trying to find a reference that exactly what you need for your newest painting, then you've already got a vocabulary. You've got a toolbox full of all the trees you've ever painted. And if you've painted a hundred paintings of trees, you're going to have a very good vocabulary. And you're also going to start realizing what your style is because. When you paint it just three or four times, and especially when you do them from tutorials, you're going to be painting the way the tutorial says to do. Once you start doing a daily sketch of whatever that subject is and you just keep doing it day after day after day after day, your style will start to come through. It may not be anything you can put words to. I can't put words to what it is that makes my paintings my paintings. I know that this is not it. I know this is not where I'm going to end up at. But I was happy enough with it that I was willing to put it on YouTube. So there's that. So I encourage you to pick a subject and just dive into it and just keep doing it again and again. Do more and more of it until you feel like you know it well. And if you want a few tips that are a little more beginner on fire, Monday's video has some Copic marker campfire and you'll get to see how I transformed a cute little stamp into something that looks more realistic. So we go from cartoony to realistic using some shading techniques to make that fire look like it's really hot and burning. Thank you so much for tapping the like button for visiting me today here on YouTube. I will see you again very soon like Monday. Bye, guys.