 Well, hi there! It's Sandy Alnok and today I'm going to use some real simple colors to do some real-time painting in my sketchbook. Well, welcome to the first day of World Watercolor Month and since it's July 1st and the prompt is Rejoice, I'm going to rejoice with some color. And I'm going to use, go back to the basics and use the Daniel Smith Essentials. There's two yellows, two reds, two blues, and I've put some into a little palette and and I'm going to just paint in a sketchbook and this is an Indigo Paper Arts sketchbook and it's got 300 pound paper. I have the warm colors on one side, the cools on the other, but you don't even need to know which is warm and which is cool because you can mix them. There are some people that think you can only use worms with warms and cools with cools. You'll just get different colors when you mix each of them. I'm taking a mechanical pencil and doing a light sketch of an outline and two stems because I'm going to do two stems of flowers and I've got out one of my favorite brushes. And it's an expensive brush. I'm just going to warn you ahead. There's going to be a list of all the brushes in the doobly-doo. This is a natural hair brush and natural brushes as opposed to synthetic or the ones that are man-made are more expensive because they come from critters that have to give up a couple of hairs to make these brushes, but they paint really beautifully and I find it much easier to paint with a good brush than with a cheaper one. There's just not the drag on the paper that there is with synthetic brushes. But you can certainly use synthetics. I don't have anything against them. You'll even see me using some in this video, in this painting. I just use them for specific things. But in an area where I want to get loose and crazy, this brush is soft and the way that it puts out the color, it's something that helps me to stay loose. Whereas a synthetic brush is going to put down lines that are a little more careful, I guess might be the way to describe it. So I'm going to mix some colors in with this blue. It's French Ultramarine blue that I started with and I'm going to add some of the cool yellow and see what color it makes. And then I'm going to rinse my brush and I'm going to add a little bit of the, well, a little more of the cool yellow and then I'm going to rinse my brush to add more of the warm yellow and see what that does. Now you can swatch these out in little squares, but isn't it more fun to see the colors mixing in a painting itself rather than in little squares? You can certainly write notes about which colors you put in which areas and if you don't remember, then you might want to take pictures of things along the way so that you can remember which colors created which areas. And you can get the same effect as making a bunch of squares, but I find that I become more intuitive in understanding my colors if I just paint with them and I paint a picture rather than just trying to paint a bunch of squares that doesn't tend to stick with me as well as when I do a painting itself. But the warm yellow made kind of a poopy color. It'll dry differently than this, of course, but I wasn't as pleased with it. So that's why I added more of the cool yellow, but I do want to have more of the warm yellow in here, not only because it's my favorite color, but also because I want it to carry throughout the painting. I don't want to have it in one spot and then say, oh no, it didn't do what I wanted. It made a poopy color, so I'm going to banish it from the painting. No, I want to incorporate it so that it feels like it's part of the painting. And one of the things that I've discovered over time is that when I first started, if I ruined a sketch in a sketchbook, I would just turn it and start on another page or tear it out. And I've stopped doing that because if you're going to use the page, you might as well cover it with stuff. I do a bunch of swatches on it, you know, paint some little figurines in the empty spaces, practice your trees, like whatever you need to do to enhance yourself as an artist, do that in the empty spaces on a piece of paper. Just use that space and don't waste that piece of paper since you've already gone there. But I just continue with the painting. I don't always recover things. I sometimes make it a worse hot mess, but that's what I recommend. So I've got this dry, that was my first pass, and I'm going to add a second pass with some detail on top of it. And to do that, I need a thinner brush. So I'm going to be using this one again, and it's an expensive brush and it's a needle brush, and it's got like five or 10 words in the full name of the brush because it's, yeah, I'll have it all linked in the doobly-doo. I can never remember what it's called, aside from the fact that it's this brush that has a wide belly and then a fine point on it. I am going to have a video next week that's going to talk all about brushes and go into some demoing specifically of what brushes do and how they paint and how they pour the water and the color out of them. So I'm going to save that for later, but for the moment, this is a brush that I'm going to use for the detail. I'm mixing phthalo blue with pyrrole scarlet because it makes a really dark color. Phthalo makes dark things darker when it's added to them, and so does the pyrrole scarlet. And these two together make a color that's going to be like a really dark navy for this painting. How did I find that out? I didn't go to a class and have someone tell me that. I just painted with it. And that's what I recommend you do with whatever colors you have, whatever brands of paints you've got, just play with them and see what happens. Don't wait for someone to tell you what to do. Don't wait for some video to come out where somebody says, here's the perfect color combination to use for flowers. You can certainly look at those to get new ideas for color combinations, but just because someone said a color combination was good doesn't mean it's the only one there is. So you can come up with your own by just playing and practicing and seeing what happens when you mix different colors. So the lines that this brush makes, the calligraphy that I can achieve with this is unlike any other brush. I absolutely love this brush, but there are some others that work as well. This is one of the silver brushes that I have used here on this channel for many years now. Recommend it definitely for crafters. And I'm going to add some accents with this. Now this brush is going to allow me to make more small details and not the super fine details, but I can make individual petals on a few of the flowers and put in some details that my large or larger and softer natural hair brushes may not be able to achieve. And I happen to know that because I've used this brush for a long time. It's a number eight and I know what it can do. I know what kind of marks I can make with it. And I have all kinds of different brushes. I had a teacher once who made brushes out of these horrible things that he got at hardware store and he just chopped off different bristles to make different shapes of brushes that worked for him in making treats. So you can use all different kinds of things. One teacher handed out sticks and twigs to everybody in class to encourage us to try seeing if we could paint with a stick. And you can do that or you can buy expensive brushes or you can do both, which is what I do. I paint with what works and I'm always excited to try different things, different brushes, and see what I can achieve with different ones. And you can see I'm just adding different colors and different marks around this flower sketch to carry that warmer yellow throughout and allow these flowers to just feel very loose and free and not give them too much detail. I've got my crazy needle brush out again to create some lines around the outside edges of my painting. And I'm going to just give it a very sketchy line. That's going to also help it to feel really loose. And to me it makes it feel a little bit finished to have some sort of a border on it sometimes. Not all the time, but it also helps me as I think about my layouts for paintings that sometimes off-center is good. And if I were to try to do this as a large painting, I might try that. So it gives me that guidance to remember to not just plot my flowers in the center of whatever it is that I'm painting. As I finish up my sketch by doing a little spattering in some of the areas that I wanted a few sharp details to remain, I wanted to remind you that I am doing dailies over on Instagram on my Sandy Allah Fine Art account. So you might want to follow that one. I do have a webpage that has all of that art on it. So even if you don't have an Instagram account, you can go see that. I will have a link to that in the doobly-do so that you can check it out even if you're not on Insta. And I also want to remind you that I told you last week there was going to be a watercolor class, Foundations, and it would cover trees. That is now live. And I will be making the preview video for it public sometime this weekend, but the class is available now. And this is one of the lessons in which we practice color mixing on paper. So you're going to get to make a tree that has all these lovely colors in it and play around with what colors you can mix into wet paint. It's just a beautiful thing that watercolor does that no other medium can. And in the class, we're going to learn how to take advantage of that to make some really interesting and beautiful trees. And it's also watercolor month over at Charlie's website. So I want to encourage you to go over and see him because he's got prompts and things. If you don't know what to paint, he's got ideas. And that's about it for today. I will see you again in another couple of days with another video. Go paint something beautiful and I'll see you again very soon. Bye bye.