 It's Thursday afternoon and I've pretty much been writing most of the day and then trying to mark it my book a little bit more. I think when you work so hard on something you just want people to see it. So tonight I'm going to, I don't know if I told you guys but I'm in, well not in a play. There's this drama festival coming up from where I live and basically my drama group every year puts in a play. This year they're putting in a couple with two different directors. I'm helping out in one and I'm backstage basically and I have to like help with taking stuff on stage, taking stuff off stage, pulling down a swing that we have set up on the stage and things like that and generally just keep an eye on stuff backstage. Even though I'm quite disappointed because the play is really cool I wish I could just watch it. Tonight is the dress rehearsal so we'll see how it goes. Yeah but apart from that I've been doing my comics in the mornings obviously and trying to work on the second book that should be coming out soon. I don't know we have to see how this writing business will go. Decided to unfocus as I was finishing this, this sentence, I'm going to draw it in the background watching me with his disdain. I just wanted to take a break from writing and do some watercolours or something like that to just kind of do something different for a while because I think my brain is getting a bit fogged up from staring at words and words and words all day long so I want to do some painting and I thought I would talk about my watercolour sets. So I turned to the lights because I realised it's very dark because it's still winter. These paints are pretty dirty and I don't really use them very often, they're just sort of like a travel set so those are just like generic colours that they come with. This is a big set that I got for a birthday one year from my sister. I do use this one sometimes but I've taken a lot of the colours out into this set and this is going to sound really stupid and probably quite pretentious but I saw this video of this guy who had gotten Studio Ghibli set of watercolours so you can buy that in Japan I think they're still on sale and I was like I want to use those colours so he showed how he made his palette to be similar to that so I kind of picked out colours that I thought were similar to that kind of pan as well. These are my closest colours I could get to the ones that I saw that he had. You can look up the Studio Ghibli colour set online, it's pretty cool. So these are those and this is the set that I use most often and yes it's completely filthy as peuge because I'm messy as we know. So I thought I would just do some random painting today just because I feel like it. Yep, thanks Pist. Okay so I've done like a preliminary sketch. I hate saying that word. Preliminary sketch of the drawing. What I want to do is characters from my book. This is Cora and Satine and they're magical partners in the story and they're sharing a horse here so I'm not giving too much away. So here's like a study. I was like I looked up this girl and a horse for sort of some reference and so I was like studying the way that sat and like all the different hands. It's not very good but like quick sketches just sort of get the sketch down and now I want to take it to this paper. I started drawing straight to the watercolor paper and then I was like no I need to do a study first then I can get what I want down. So I have to re-draw this basically bigger to this paper. Hey everybody voiceover Steph here again. Oh yeah so I just wanted to talk about this illustration that I did. Painting thing. Put down that masking tape so masking tape. I put down that masking fluid and that is the big globual mass at the bottom of the page and I sketched out those characters I could said I would do onto the watercolor paper and then went ahead and started painting and I was really pleased with this process because I was like oh I just want to paint something. It turned out to be my characters from my book who are magical partners so they're like super best friends, soul twins kind of thing and they are just riding on horse here together and I think it turned out really well. The only thing that I'm not happy with is the main character is supposed to be quite dark and she didn't come out looking dark if that makes sense. I think I need to practice more painting darker skin tones. Yeah so then the horse turned out quite better than I expected. I was like how am I going to do this fricking watercolor horse and actually I quite liked how he turned out. He had a bit of a character of his own even though he has a super thin long neck which looking at afterwards I was like oh no but I like him. Oh here's a satisfying bit of pulling that masking tape off but obviously there was a bit of a accident with the paper ripped off a tiny bit. So I was just painting like shadows and depth into this piece and I wanted to do something different and get my mind flowing and ideas and it got me really thinking about the story. Not that I'm not thinking enough about that these days with my book because I'm just constantly in that universe. If that makes sense to somebody who's been working on a long project you kind of just can't get these characters and things out of your head because it's just you're there like for long periods of time of your day. My conclusion to that was to go and draw them. No not again oh well anyway um here's where I made my giant mistake because I really liked the way how those paints turned out and then I decided I'm going to draw white Posca all over these leaves and to bring them to the foreground and I regretted everything because I felt like it just kind of ruined it. So then I went over the Posca with like watercolor pens and colored pencils and things like that to kind of like bring it down a little bit but still keep them in the foreground and I kind of like the way it turned out but mostly wish I hadn't done that and just kept like basic block kind of watercolors but you know you learn from your mistakes I know not to do that next time and if you don't go ahead with experiments then you never know it could have been an amazing thing and I would never have done it if I was too scared but I wasn't too scared I was foolish and full of bravado that kind of backfired but whatever I I like how this piece turned out and I hope you guys like it too and let me know what you think and if you want to read the book it's down below in the link and if you want to see more about these characters let me know because I will draw more I'm probably going to do like some more book illustration stuff because that's my interest and that's where I find my happiness so if you want to see more of that stuff like and subscribe and I will see you next time guys catch you later bye