 Hi, I'm Sandy coming to you from the Virtual Studio with a tip for practicing your brushstrokes. I'm going to be using what is called a repeatable water drawing board or a Buddha board, or I even call it myself the artist's etch-a-sketch. Because you can draw on this with water, painting on it with water, and then keep drawing because the water evaporates and the picture goes away and you just keep going. You can start all over again with a completely different picture. And I like to practice brushstrokes on this because my hand needs practice. The more your hand gets used to the motion of the brush, the more you can consistently make different kinds of brushstrokes. This is a silver brush, black velvet line, number eight round, and I can get some really thick lines out of it when I lay the brush completely down on its side, or I can hold it by the very end of it and get some very thin lines. I am totally practicing what one of my teachers has told me, which is not to pet the paper. Lots of times when we try to make a mark, we use five marks where one will do. And this is a great place to practice making a big bold line and doing it in one consistent stroke rather than trying to make it in five different little ones. I've switched now to the number 12 round in the same line of brushes. You can see that the tree trunk there got nice and thick. That's the difference between a number eight and number 12 is you can get that bigger thicker line, but you can also get nice thin lines out of a number 12. And that's something that takes practice to do. Your hand needs to get used to the motion and you need to get used to how much water your brush needs to carry to make that thin line. And different brands of brushes, some of them want the paint to be thinner, so you'll need to mix thinner paint in order to do it. And this kind of a board helps you to practice knowing what that amount of water is, what is it that's going to create the kind of line you're looking for. But this number 12 does a great job of giving you a wide variety of lines from very, very thick ones when laying the brush down to much thinner ones as you work your way out to the branches on the ends. The great thing about drawing tree branches is that they go kitty wampas every different direction. They generally don't line up. Mother Nature doesn't do things symmetrically, so you can just do all kinds of crazy branches and come out with something that looks quite nice, except that it's going to disappear by the time you feel you're very satisfied with it. So get used to that if you're going to use one of these boards. I want to also show you my Maestro needle brush. It's a Da Vinci. It's not an inexpensive one, but it makes a super, super fine line. The brush is constructed in such a way that it has a wide belly, and then that goes down to a fine needle at the very tip. And the belly releases the water down into that tip. So you can get a very long, relatively consistent line to make very, very fine, long strokes. I don't use this one particularly often because I don't have a lot of things that I paint that call for that kind of a super fine line, but it is a great one to have in the brush collection for those moments when I do need a super fine line. I will warn you, however, that these boards are incredibly addictive. You can paint on them forever, and I can waste many hours in the studio just practicing brush strokes, except it's not really a waste because any practice you get makes you a better artist.