 Hello there, I'm Sandy Allnock and I am a full-time artist living just south of Seattle, Washington in the United States. I have been doing this full-time since 2013 when I quit my career as a graphic designer and illustrator. I love to be inspired by nature, whether it's working from photographs or going outside and painting out in the mountains in the beautiful area that I live in. The part I love the most is teaching other people and helping them to grow into their own careers as artists. So I do hope you'll join me for this class. It's going to be a lot of fun and I'm excited to get busy painting with you. Thank you so much for joining us today. So just a quick check if you can hear us and see us okay. Please type Lama in the chat just like I'm showing right here. And let us know where you're viewing from. Let us know how is it there. I see some people typing in that it's a bit chilly where you guys are. Well, it's a bit humid where I'm at. We are really different from different parts of the globe. How is it where you're at Sandy? It is cloudy and cool but I am hoping it's going to stay dry because I got to mow the lawn today. How do I already have to mow the lawn when it's not even April yet? Oh my gosh, climate change I guess. I see a lot of llamas in the chat. Hello everyone. Okay, we've got from Belleville. We've got from London. Amazing. And some of you guys have been interacting with Sandy already even before we begin. So I guess we can begin. So hello everyone. I'm Kathleen. I'm with Etcher Studio and I'll be your host for today. I will be while assisting Sandy right here. For those who are new with Etcher, we are an art learning platform who works with our teachers from all across the globe. And today's free demo is brought to you by Sandy Alnok. And this works as a preview for her 90 minute class. That's going to be on May 1, 2pm Eastern time. And I'm going to be dropping that link in the chat. Hello from a cold and partly snowy Sweden. Oh wow. Pretty interesting then. I'm glad we don't have snow here. I'm glad we don't have snow. Yeah, we'll take that anytime. And speaking of the 90 minute class, she will be talking about how to do watercolor textures, layers, negative paintings, to make a nature inspired, well, nature is seen, not nature inspired. And by watching her purchasing Sandy's content, you'll be directly contributing to how much she makes. So you might want to consider having a look at that. So before we begin, if you have any questions for Sandy, I'll go ahead and drop the format in the chat how you would be needing to type them. We could type them in all capital letters. Also, we have a private Facebook group open to anyone making art related to both our free content and paid classes. I'm going to be also dropping that link in the chat. Hello from Seattle, Florence, Italy. People are already coming in. Okay, so with that said then, I'll go ahead and pass things over to Sandy. Can you let us know what you'll be doing today and how that connects to your etcher class? Sure. Today, we're going to be just talking about color. And I wanted you to have a chance to spend the month before that May 1 class getting to know your colors in a different way. So I have developed a whole way of swatching. And I've made myself a swatch book that is growing and getting bigger over time. And I'm going to show you how to do that. The way that it relates to the class coming up is that we're going to be painting trees. And you're going to need to know how to mix some greens and some browns and grays based on the colors that you have in your palette. You don't have to have my colors. I'll certainly tell you what they are, but you can have your own colors and learn how to mix them in your own way. So let's get busy painting. Great. The class that we're doing today, as I said, is just going to be swatching. So there's no reference photo or anything for it. And the painting that I just showed you that we're going to be doing in the class, I also have done in a sketchbook format. So you're going to see more of this sketchbook later on in this presentation. I'll be able to share some of the other paintings that I've done in this accordion book. But supplies that I'm using today are a watercolor block, a pencil, a brush, watercolors. Of course, water. I love this Goodwill jar that I got from my water. And I'm going to be putting mine on a ring, but you can also put them in a book. You can leave them on sheets, whatever way works for you in having your swatches. So if you've never used a watercolor block before, this one is a cold press block. And it's got glue basically all the way around all the outside. So I'll show you in a little bit how that actually matters when you try to get to the next page. But we're going to talk a little bit about color theory and then get to the color mixing. In color theory, there's all different kinds of words you can use to describe colors. And warm and cool is one of them. So I've made myself a color wheel that has warm colors on the outside, cool colors on the inside, so that I could just get a general comparison of what those are. There's no science to say you have to have this particular color for a warm and this one for a cool or anything. There just are some colors that are warmer and cooler. And I've got a palette that I put together with warm colors on one side and cool on the other just for teaching and examples and that sort of thing. So when you make any kind of a color wheel, you need a red, a yellow, and blue. Those are primaries. And you can see the difference most clearly with the warm and the cool in the yellows. Someone in the reds, you get more of a tomato versus a cherry red when you talk about warm versus cool. It's really hard to tell with blues. There's people, artists all over the world who fight about what is warm and what is cool. But we'll leave all that aside because the temperature doesn't really matter as much as the results you get, right? So the outside that I did here is the warm colors. The inside is the cool colors. And you could see the difference in the kinds of colors that those warms and cools will make. That's the one place you want to know the difference between them. So the three primaries are separate from each other, equidistant around the color wheel. Everything halfway in between are secondary colors. And then there's tertiary. And you could actually do this like 27 levels down and keep making color mixes. But we're going to stick with things like an orange that's made out of yellow and red, a purple that's made out of red and blue. So those are your secondary colors, the ones to keep in mind for the rest of this class. So I've got the cool ones on the inside, warm ones on the outside, but that doesn't really matter. Didn't I tell you that already? Neutrals are how you get to them is by taking the red, the yellow, and the blue and mixing all three of them together. Now here's where I said get rid of that page on the block. I just stick a ruler under it or a pencil or a knife or something. Sometimes it's easy to tear the glue. Sometimes it's a little harder. So that is how you use a block. You just don't have to tape it down, which is nice. So let's talk about those three color mixes, the red, yellow, and blue. I've divided my paper into two inch strips and then horizontally across the page. I find it's easier to do this without cutting all the paper into strips first. And I'm going to show you what it looks like to mix a red, yellow, and blue and you get a neutral when you mix all three colors together. And sometimes they make a baby poo color and sometimes they make a nice gray or a nice brown. Really depends on how much of each color you put in it. So here I've mixed out of the warm colors, something that looks kind of gray. If I add a little more red to it or a little more yellow to it, I can make a color that's more brown. And if I want to push it back toward gray, I can add more blue to it. And you can get an infinite variety of browns out of colors like this. I could do the same thing with the cool colors, with the blue, the red, and the yellow in varying amounts of each other. And see what comes of that. It's really difficult to make this mix over and over and over again and get it consistent though. So as you can see, just one little dollop of red is going to totally change the color. And once I add a dollop of this particular blue, it's a phthalo blue, it's really strong. It goes immediately to gray. Well, how do we control all that? Because there's so much to think about when you've got three colors to mix. Well, I thought let's talk about making the same kind of mixes, but with two colors instead. And that's what my whole ring full of colors is. These are all two color mixes, but look how many colors I get out of each pair of colors that I decided to swatch. So I'm going to show you how I did that and how you can do it as well. One of the best places to start is complementary colors, colors that are opposite each other or just barely opposite each other. So opposite or neighbors to opposites. And the reason that that works is because you'll end up with one color that's compound, one color that's a single color. So say this purple color, it's an imperial purple. It's got a red and a blue in a purple. And you mix that with a color that's yellow and you have your red, blue and yellow all together. In my swatches, I've mixed them in various levels of mixes and we'll talk about that in a minute. But here's another example, lunar blue that has a little bit of yellow in it. The yellow orange or the yellow ochre, excuse me, has some red and yellow in it. So between that, you get red, yellow and blue, but you're only mixing two colors. So you don't have to fight with that third color. Here's moon glow with ariolan moon glow is a purple, but it's a really dull purple. And you add a really bright yellow to it. You can get a really nice gray. And here's one of the crazy ones that just seems like it shouldn't make sense. Green appetite with quinacridone rose. It's a pink and a green and you can get neutrals out of it. So I've taken both of my palates and I'll be working with both of them during this demonstration. So I've put the the earlier swatch that I made over to the side and we're going to try to see if we can replicate that. I put a dot of each of the two colors at the top of the swatch and after it dries, I'll add the color names to it, just indications of somehow that I'll know which colors they were. And then I want to find out what is the most natural mix that these two colors make. Like if I was just not thinking, putting in some purple, putting in some yellow and not really worried about what measurements of each one, like how much of each color, what color does it want to make? There's some combinations that are going to want to make a grayish color. Others are going to want to make a brownish color. And still others, depending on the strength of the pigment itself, whether it's as my friend Lisa Spangler says, it's a bully or not, the bullies can force a color mix into one direction because it's a really strong color. But here we've got the imperial purple with new gamboge. Crazy kind of an idea to mix purple and yellow. It's one of my favorite things to do because I get so many variations on neutrals. I dipped my brush in water so I could see what it makes as a mix when it's really pale. And then for those two small swatches in the middle of my swatch cards, I'm actually doing a mix on the left hand side that's mostly purple and just a little bit of yellow because that's going to tell me if I use that color and I want to dull it down a little bit, I can put just a little bit of the yellow in it and know what that makes versus using a little bit of purple in a bunch of the yellow. So this little swatch card is going to show me a lot of information about that color mix. And I'm going to know how I got there or at least mostly how I got there. That strip along the bottom, I decided just for fun to see if I could push colors to become almost black. How dark could I get them if I really worked to get most of the water out of it and make it mostly pigment? Excuse me, could I turn it into a really dark color of some kind and what kind of color does that make? Well, you can see the difference between my original swatch and the new one. They're a little different because you can never mix the same color twice exactly perfect. That's just not going to happen because that's that's what painting is all about. However, you can get a good idea of how much of each color can push it in one direction or the other and that sort of thing. So let's try another crazy combination, purple and green. These are not compliments because the purple has blue and red in it and the green has blue and yellow in it. You've got all three colors but these two make almost automatically they just love to make a gray. It's the strangest thing but I found it out because I was testing and you won't know which colors of yours do that until you test your colors in your palette. So I've watered it down so I can see if I can get a sidewalk color or a building color out of that a tree trunk or something and then did my mixes so I get a mostly purple with a little green and mostly green with a little purple and then I wanted to see what would happen and this is the super magic. If I use straight up perling green and straight up imperial purple together it makes black. It's amazing what a nice rich black that can make and you can use these colors in combination not just mixing them in your palette. If you're painting something and you want to make it go black now I know which color to mix with imperial purple if I want that imperial purple to go practically black. So let's try another combination and this is another one that is one of my favorites for making neutrals. Any kind of blue with any kind of red for the most part and this is a phthalo blue and anthraquinoid scarlet and these two almost immediately will make some kind of a neutral without even thinking about it because they just cancel each other out. The phthalo blue is a super strong color so you have to be a little bit careful how much of it you use and if you have it in your palette you'll probably know that it takes over it's the bully color it it wants to dominate that red and turn it into anything but a red. Now if I use more of that phthalo blue look what happens when I just add just a little tiny bit more of it it goes really blue. When you start testing the colors in your palette whatever's in it and don't feel like you have to go get my colors you're going to find out which colors are the bullies because if you try to make a 50-50 mix of something the bully will immediately make itself known the one that wants to take over and there's not always going to be a bully in every pair there's some that just naturally are going to work in in making a neutral mix it's just the the way things go but there's some colors that are immediately going to tell you I want to be in charge and you'll know when you start making a mix and you add that color you need to add less of it if you want to get something more neutral rather than letting that color take over so which pairs are the best ones you should swatch well you could swatch anything of course but I would recommend not going with those primaries necessarily do the compound colors the ones where you have a green that is a blue plus a yellow or a brown that's usually a red plus a yellow but a straight up yellow is not going to be all that helpful all the time except for when you're mixing it with one of those compounds pardon me get a drink of water here talking too much so we have cascade green with alizarin crimson now I happen to know alizarin crimson is one of my bullies it just absolutely loves to take over and look how how much it eats away at that cascade green because I had so much of it in the palette so I'm going to add some more of the cascade green when I use these two to make a neutral gray I already know immediately because I've used it enough that I should add more of the cascade green and less of the alizarin crimson and once you start doing these kind of practices you'll know that if you love the color that it makes but with one as the primary one is the secondary this is the place to work that out and as I'm doing here you can do smaller cards you don't have to do the whole swatching with the the majority and minority types of swatches in there you don't have to see what it does trying to go black with it you can do just single squares and see what those two colors do together and make it simpler on yourself and here I'm using another mix of a blue and a brown now I only have one brown in my entire palette and this brown is transparent red oxide it's very close to a burnt sienna and I use burnt sienna a lot in a lot of my videos so many of you may have that you can use that instead but what I decided was to see what I can turn that one brown in my palette into with all the different colors that I have in my palette what can I do with that one brown because then I don't have to actually own a whole ton of browns when I first started watercoloring I thought I had to have all the colors and I have so many palettes in a drawer that I never use because I felt like I had to have that color I didn't know how to mix it and once I learned better how I could mix the colors I keep in my palette are ones that make nice mixes with others so I can keep one brown and just keep mixing it with different things mixing this with a green seemed crazy to me but it makes the most beautiful orangey kind of color it's quite nice you can mix a more granulating type of color with it you can mix colors that have different properties in them and change the entire tone of that brown you could do the same kind of a thing if you have a favorite gray color mix it with all of the different colors of your palette and see what happens with them and this will also inform you as I said before of what's going to happen if you drop a color wet in wet into another one I've done a lot of landscapes in which I use primarily a moon glow which is a purple with a yellow ochre which is a yellowish color and the whole scene feels very brown and very neutral and very vintage but I knew that because I'd played with those two colors together and until you start playing with your colors you won't learn those lessons and know how those things are going to react on paper and speaking of which when you do your swatching it's really helpful to do them on the kind of paper that you're going to be painting on so don't just opt for the cheap paper because you're just doing testing necessarily you can certainly do some initial tests but if you're going to have some swatches you keep make sure those are on the kind of paper that you love to paint on so that you know exactly how they're going to turn out when you are doing your painting itself so these are all the finished swatches I eventually made for the transparent red oxide look at all this I mixed them with every single one and one of my favorite mixes was transparent red oxide with panes blue gray because you can push that real easily to a gray or push it real easily to a brown and I wanted two cards with it so I could know what colors were available then out of that that pairing now this is a little bit of a crazy this is me and my weird color science I wanted to see what colors of neutrals would be good for things like tree bark and I categorized all the tree bark that's out there that I could find on the web there are some that I put in the middle that are more true neutral grays for the most part there were some that I found that had an orange tint to them some were heavier orange really strong orange color in the bark and some had just a tint or a wash of orange the reds there are some bark that is just really really red some has a pink cast to it so all of these different browns and neutrals that you're mixing are going to have a use if you paint a lot of trees there are some barks that have yellow in them a yellow tone to the colors and you can have some that have green a tint of green sometimes it's the bark color itself sometimes it's moss or sometimes it's reflections off of other things in the scene around it there are blue greens I found some wood that has actually like turquoise to it which was amazing and I wrote all these down put all the color names because I want to go paint each one of these in my big accordion sketchbook because it's really fun to think about all those colors in there there's even violets and blues so all of these color swatches are going to help me every time I try to do some color matching if I want to try to find a particular green from a particular tree I can make all the green swatches in the world I can take all these combinations and see which ones make interesting greens and they may not be greens they may not have a green mixed in them it's hard to say until you actually do this watching and see what happens when you mix different colors together but you can get all kinds of varieties just by mixing two colors instead of stressing out about three as long as you have some red some blue and some yellow in whatever the combination is that you're mixing you'll get a neutral of some kind and if you don't worry about having all three you can get greens you can test for purples all sorts of stuff so here's that accordion sketchbook and it I've just been painting trees in it just trees tree trunks and I want to fill this I've got pages and pages and pages I've been putting even more in this since this this moment of opening this sketchbook I am just loving practicing with all of the different colors that I've already tested out and seeing what else I could create with them and I hope that by the time we get to the class on May 1st to paint this scene that you're going to have practiced your browns and your grays and your greens so that we're going to be able to do that painting and use a lot of those combinations in a real-life context so how many of you are thinking you want to go get busy swatching now I have a feeling Kathleen's going to be doing that oh gosh yeah I was telling Sandy earlier it's midnight where I'm at but I'm going to spend the whole evening just do or at least I'm from the future now to do some swatching and I can guarantee you that it's going to be the same for our audience I've got a lovely comment right here from Sue saying all beginner all beginners need to see this before hoarding all the colors speaking from experience see now all of your extra money you have saved from not having to buy all that paint you could just send that to me that'd be totally fine well that would be a great idea so we could put some use to it so um great that was a lovely swatching exercise um never seen so many streams at one time I know right Sandy has um went down the rabbit hole just to like give you all of these references all in one place and so we've got some questions right here I will oh I've got a raised hand emoji I think she's down for some swatching all right so um just to confirm again I think this is from Sam will you be using the exact same palette for your 90-minute class I believe I'll be used well there's two palettes that were shown I'll be using the big palette with the big wells in it and tomorrow on my blog I'm going to post the the replay of this along with the color list that's in that palette so if you're going to be taking that class and you want to use that palette of colors you can certainly do that but as I said you can use your colors because you already have colors I know you do and you don't need to go buy my colors so gosh which I think answers my blog great great um which I think answers another question um what about color mixing with other paint brands um or is it better with sticking with just one paint brand or is does that even matter it doesn't really matter a whole lot I mean there are some brands that are higher quality brands and some that are lower quality brands if the lower quality is what you can afford then use them but you can still mix and match them any any old way it how I'll just put one caveat on that if you were to use something like opera pink opera pink is of what they call a fugitive color it disappears over time when it goes to light so if you make opera pink with I don't know phthalo blue or any other blue then eventually that color will no longer be purple it might start out as purple but it will disappear because it'll just leave the phthalo blue in there so you want to make sure you have good light fastness if you want to keep the painting for a long period of time as far as just mixing and painting use what you have and mix and match brands totally fine great advice and yeah I totally agree with that some colors are just um deceiving I guess all right we've got some more questions right here or comments rather um trying to build my art brand around it with p&w themed and inspired work and designs um and then let's see we've got I think I saw some lovely comments right here hold on let me just go ahead and backtrack with it and meanwhile if you do have final questions for sandy just go ahead and type them in the chat um I've done swatches but not your way love this method says natalie ingram thank you so much natalie um I only just came up with this recently so I haven't seen anybody else do it either but I was just really curious about how to get to certain colors and this was the best way that I could figure out to do that all right and we're glad that you found out this way to be honest it was really an amazing way um tim says love this process I've been thinking about swatching to better understand the paints I have now I have a solid process to lay them out thank you so much and um oh question from Nancy do you do this same type of swatching for other color mixes when you're not trying to find neutrals you certainly can and I've started to add to my book you saw some greens in there originally I started out I was just looking for neutrals and then I realized oh I could I could figure out more green options that I have I live in the pacific northwest or we have trees trees trees trees trees trees and the grass goes from one shade in one season to another shade in another season and I was just having a blast mixing different greens you could do the same for purples all different kinds of colors could follow through with this method very easily great um we've got oh some pretty interesting questions um I think these are both related do you ever use white and if you're mixing a black would you only use colors that are already in your painting okay good questions I don't use white very much if at all the only time that I really do would be if I was trying to do say uh what do you call it I've lost my my strings like the the wires that go across from telephone pole to telephone pole telephone wires yeah okay my my brain is slowly engaging if I were to try to add something like that or a sparkle highlight on something I might use a little but I don't mix it with any colors if I want an opaque color I have an opaque color generally to to use and I don't tend to with watercolor because I always figure watercolor is all about the transparency so I don't mess with that and what was the second question the second question was a good yeah sure um if you're mixing a black would you only use colors that are already in your painting that is one of the reasons I was testing to see what makes a black because there's a lot of times when I don't want to just add black into something I I only have one black in my palette and I rarely touch it because what I found is that it just adds a garish kind of feeling to an area if I just suddenly dollop in a black I tend to use more of a paints blue gray if I'm going to introduce another color at that point but it's much better if I'm using purple and green and I have a purple and green that coming together make a black it's a lot better to use that in a painting and limit the number of colors you have in the whole painting itself by using various mixes of what's already in there hey um you've got more I'm so glad you're reading the questions not me I bring it lost I would start getting getting lost in somebody telling me the weather there so you're oh my gosh well thank you well to be honest you're not making easier for me people are just super enthusiastic here um let's see um we've got a few more questions um what let's see I think I've lost it too now I'm lost either let's see um we've got one right here oh somebody's asking about if this will be posted in the um in this youtube um yes we will be having this posted so if you've missed the first few parts of it no worries because we'll have this um once we end the live you could definitely just refresh the page um but if not it may take quite um some time and Sandy mentioned that she's going to be posting a blog about it um about the materials someone's asking about the materials that you used um all of it is in the description below um in this video and if you want to learn more or ask more about um how Sandy has prepared her um swatching palette right here um I think it will be helpful to post some instagram stories maybe um do you think Sandy that might help absolutely I'm going to go through the questions after we're done and see if there's anything else because it's still color theory week on my instagram I have all week long I've been going crazy on color theory and I'm going to be adding more to it so I'll be answering some of your questions in that way as well as on the blog I'll have this video I'll have the supply list I'll have um also a handout there's a handout that we've been trying to figure out getting it uploaded never even doesn't get uploaded it'll be in the blog post tomorrow and it has that chart with all the tree trunks in the different colors so that you can go and research those tree trunks yourself if you want to see like what tree trunk has turquoise I now know I'm so excited oh gosh yeah it's a really completely different way on how to look at trees right now um I think we've got last question what colors do you use on the cover of your swatch book I'm pretty curious myself that is alizarin crimson with caskey green amazing all right so I think you guys are done with your questions but some of these specific questions um sandy can answer because I think this has something to do with most of the materials you used um and just wait for that blog post all right so I think we can wrap up so thank you so much sandy for that lovely demonstration and lovely um just watching exercise so everybody we do have these live demos a couple of times a week so make sure to hit that subscribe button below to subscribe um to sandy's youtube and also i'm going to be dropping the link on etcher studios um youtube so that you could go ahead and subscribe to that too and we have a subscription um so that you could go ahead and access have access to all live 90 minute classes classes including sandy's 90 minute class which will be again for the newcomers um that's going to be on may one that's 2 p.m eastern time i'm going to be dropping that link i'm going to drop a bulk link actually um first oh okay oh one last question I think we can entertain one more then so from sand um is the right thing to do uh is to take the first little palette of warms and cool reds blues and yellows you don't have to make a color wheel if you don't want to this is more about showing you why those three colors make neutrals so I wanted to show you that like the traditional thought behind why red yellow and blue make neutrals but most people aren't going to want to do that now it's fun sometimes to see if you can create oranges and yellow oranges red oranges out of the colors you have i'm not going to stop you from doing that because it's fun but you don't have to do that in order to do these two color swatches to get to know your colors because what I want you to do is know them so well that when your brush goes into your palette you know what you're going to choose and why because you know how it mixes with something else you're using amazing all right thank you so much and somebody said great for minimizing colors for travel sketching I totally agree um it's going to be a great help for them and okay so like I mentioned we do these live sessions a couple of times a week so go ahead and visit our youtube channel as well you um at your studio so that you could go ahead and check out more live classes there and also I'm going to be dropping a link to our feedback survey so if you loved how sandy has broken down all of these um seemingly complex color swatches um and has broken down to a simple way for you go ahead and um let us know through our feedback survey which I think is already being flooded so I'll go ahead and drop that link again um I'll go ahead and drop that link right here in the chat um so let us know how you thought about sandy how this demo was super helpful for you or just give us a like or leave a comment below this video and I'm going to be dropping sandy's instagram account in case you followed along today I'll go ahead and tag sandy on instagram or join our private facebook group where you could share your swatches so maybe you could have like more colors that you might have discovered so it's great to share um excellent session and before we end I just wanted to let you guys know that apart from this live um class preview sandy has also guested in our make more art podcast which was the topic earlier um in the chat so you might want to check that out hers is on episode 95 and 96 I'm going to be dropping that link right here and you're the queen I am yep I should have and while I am doing that uh do you have any final thoughts sandy before we sadly have to close the session I just want to encourage everybody to get to know your paints better and especially if you're planning on coming to the 90-minute class because I'm not going to spend time just talking about every single mix that we've got going on because we're going to be doing negative paging we're going to be doing textures we're going to be laying out an entire picture and I don't want to get distracted with that because we've got a lot of painting to do in just 90 minutes so I'm hoping that you're going to get all your practice done anytime from here until then that you have questions on your color mixing just give me a shout out either on my blog on my instagram or wherever I'll be happy to help you out amazing all right so I think we can end um apparently we have to close the session so that you guys can do your swatches so thank you so much sandy for that wonderful demonstration and thank you everybody for being super enthusiastic in the chat for being so active and for your appreciation I hope we made your day and until next time everybody make more art bye for now