 Hello there, I'm Sandy Olnok. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I will be watercoloring this lovely Akiya plant from Hawaii It's a small ground cover low to the ground and I thought it'd be great for my paper testing series and In this one, I'm going to be testing some Stonehenge Aqua. I bought a sheet of this at my local art store and It has two sides to it and you can definitely feel the difference This is the back side. You can see there is a texture that some people would consider watercolour texture and that's fine But it has a different feel it feels smoother than the front side. The front side is More like this and it's got just a softer touch to it But while we're talking about Hawaii I wanted to real quick take a left turn and let you know there's a color wheel fundraiser you can buy this color wheel image color it up any way you like and It is a fundraiser for disaster victims currently. It's going to victims of the fires on Maui Particularly in Lahaina. So please do see the link in the doobly-doo if you're interested in that and otherwise Let's get busy painting the plant that we'll be using is good for glazing because this one has Yellow in the little flowerettes and each of those leaves the paddle-shaped leaves are Either a green Green-green or a blue-green kind of color. There's more blue in some of them than others And I thought that would be a great chance to practice glazing And we'll talk about that as we go in a whole bunch of different layers There's five passes that I'll take on this painting, but it's gonna be a looser style Then is normally done in these tests This is the sketch and the sketch is available if you'd like to download it and trace it over in art Dash classes calm in the green thumb watercolor sketches class if you've already signed up for that then That lesson is right there for you and you can just go ahead and get started And if not you can go pick that class up for just a few bucks and join in the fun of painting green plants so this first pass that I'm going to do is Basically just yellow and you can use a hands a yellow and Oriolan Cobalt yellow just you know something very very light and use a lot of water with it You want it to be really really thin Because when you're glazing it's so nice to be able to shift colors just slightly And not do a lot of shifting and if you put down too much yellow When you go to add a blue leaf then you're gonna end up really fighting that yellow underneath So I wanted just a little bit for all the lightest places on the plant because there is no white there And then I decided to get crazy and do some dripping since I had this very very wet and liquidy type of paint and Then also added some specific yellow in the areas where those flowers are So those will be more yellow than everything else, but notice. There's some white places There's some just sploogey places all over because I wasn't really worried about being perfect in this I want to keep it looser and the second past then I've taken a little bit of The cascade green which is in that top well and put a little bit of it in the center And I wanted the paint a little bit thicker To add to that yellow so that the green that I'm adding is the green that I'm going to use when I get to the Blue-green, but if I use it here in my mix when I make of yellow green Then it's going to relate to the darker blue green color because it's got a little bit of that in it But notice it's not making a blue green color. It's making a very green green and the goal in this pass is to Work around each of those highlight areas each of the leaves Well, mostly shall I say has a bright edge to it So I'm painting everything except that edge and everything except those flowers So that I end up having that little yellow highlight sticking out And then we're going to work into the shadows into the darker areas through each pass during the painting Then I'm going to Just keep working around each one of these now in the class I will put a real-time version of this video With no narration in it So if you just want to sit and listen to music and watch the video go by while you're painting then you could certainly do that This is sped up about a hundred and seventy-five percent of normal speed So about three quarters of the the time faster than I would normally paint But if you'd like to see it real-time then you can see that just with some music behind it And if you don't like the music you can turn it off and go put on your own music and just mute it So now you can see that there is just some highlights left of that light yellow and The rest of it started going into this Greenish color So next up we're going to mix a darker color for pass three And in watercolor generally you work from light to dark Not always I'm not going to say always because there's not always a rule sometimes I do a glaze of a light color over everything else Which means it's a light color going on last but in general so I'm using the cascade green which is more of a blue green and I'm going to paint just the leaves that have that bluish tint to them and There's going to be some areas in here where I can't quite tell what the tint is especially down below Because those leaves they're just out of focus and you can't really see very much down there Especially since we're eliminating the background in the photo But at least that's going to give me a start in getting to be something on the bluish side and then mixing up a little bit thicker of the green mixture and I'm going to start switching back and forth between brushes because as I get to areas where I want a Big brush stroke to start off with I want to refine some of those edges in my large brush That's a number eight brush. It's a sable is not small enough to get into some of those small areas So a number four is going to do that for me And I'm using the two of them instead of just using the smaller brush, which a lot of people would do I used to do that. I Don't get that nice big flat area So all that nice big flat color is going to not give me a thousand brush strokes There's a lot of my paintings for just tons of my beginning ones Just came out looking like I had done death by a thousand brush strokes, and I still do that But on a painting like this, I wanted to keep it very Streamline so I was working really hard to make sure that I was not over brush stroking everything and putting too too too much fussiness in it Using that big fat brush for as much as I could of those leaves and then just dragging a little color With the smaller brush gives me some control in the really tight areas But then I get that nice big wide brush stroke So I get something simpler It does take practice to manage a larger brush And to be able to handle getting it into smaller areas There's sometimes when I can do a whole painting like this In that larger brush, but I thought I'd show you a way that you could get around doing that If you're just getting started and you're not really sure how to How to handle a big giant fat brush like that because for some people I know it's intimidating. It was for me when I started So give you some options here But working back and forth between the two brushes works great And you can see how flat all those leaves are coming out. They're starting to be some differentiation in color But they're for the most part just nice big shapes That's really what we're painting. We're not really thinking. Okay. I'm painting a bunch of leaves We're just painting shapes I did some splattering with this mixture of green and wanted to dab it off because I wasn't sure I wanted Quite that much and it really disappeared entirely by the time I dried it You can't even really see any of it anymore Especially in this overhead view, which is a little bright for what I'd like it to be but You know sometimes cameras do things the side view is from my phone So now I've mixed the cascade green up even thicker It's still not thick thick. It's thicker And it's going to start to give me some darker shapes And now that I have a slight difference between The blue green leaves that I painted earlier and the green green leaves Then it's pretty easy for me to track which ones were going to be more blue But this darker color Allows me to kind of push that a little bit extra to the blue side And it's you know watching the photo looking back and forth From your work from your painting to the photo reference And then back the other direction so you don't get lost But then also at some point You may find that your brush made a different leaf that you just ended up having to adjust even from your sketch And yet had to make some changes to it So you know such as life things happen And you're allowed to move a leaf around if you need to Especially on those bottom ones because like how in the heck are we supposed to figure out that? It doesn't make a lot of sense down there When it's all fuzzy and out of out of shape and out of focus So I'm mixing up a little bit more of that green wish I had done that earlier To get it a little bit closer to what it had been but I think I've got a pretty good one I wanted something as dark or a little bit darker than that cascade mix for the second half of this pass So remember I was just doing the cascade color onto the leaves that were bluish And then every time that there's a leaf that has like a darker tip to it like that one I just put a little bit at the end and then use water to paint all the way down This leaf I wanted to just wash over the whole leaf and darken it And so that's that's more of pure glazing when you're just taking a whole shape And going over it with a color so that you can change the color of it And that's changing the value of it as well as the color But sometimes you'll just have something that's A pinkish purple and you need it to be a bluish purple so you can just wash over it with some blue And here I just did that with some green in order to darken up that color Every pass of this just makes everything slightly richer slightly darker And increases the contrast but it doesn't do it with like Giant stroke with very dark thick paint Which you can do but I did a first one on this painting my first try Came out quite terrible because I leapt into it with very dark color first This paper did not like that did not like it one bit And it all started pilling up So that's why I decided to try soft glazed glazed glazed layers So that I could maybe not have it do that and this worked much better than trying to go in with A big bold stroke of dark when I got to the shadows Because it took over everything and then it got really modeled and It just wasn't flat color anymore. It was just a big blobby dark shape that Had too many variations in it. You could see all the little tiny brush strokes in it I did have a little bit more of that trouble when I got into the very darks in the next pass But it wasn't nearly as much as I'd had the first time So I did more spritzing with the paint Splattering all over the place and left much darker color this time Worked much better to have a stronger Type of color, but I did wipe it off or dab it off of the leaves themselves Just had the spray of water and paint on the outside Now for the color that I'm going to use for the deepest shadows I'm mixing cascade, but I'm throwing in some alizarin crimson Permanent alizarin crimson. There are two alizarin crimsons. One is permanent and one is fugitive So I have the permanent one so it won't disappear out of my painting But you can see that that darkens and Desaturates the green a bit and that's because these are complementary colors Your opposites on the color wheel and anytime you're looking to darken a color Try mixing it with its complement to see if that's what's going to make it darker Because it's not always going to be adding black to try to make it look dark Now this is going to let make it look more natural if it's got just a bit of red in it because red is opposite of green You may need to try out a couple of reds and see which one works because some of them You know if I were to use like a pyrrole scarlet in here, I might end up with a brown It may depend on how much of each color is in it, but I don't want to end up with that I want it to feel like a very dark green and the alizarin crimson did that rather permanent alizarin crimson I'm going to say the right name did that very well for me So I'm starting to really get that pop of The super darks in the center portions of the plant And then the lighter colors around it Moving all the way out to those very light tips on the leaves This dark area is one place where you can make up for some of the other things that may have gone wrong There's some places where there may not be much of a shadow But if I had a few stray brushstrokes that didn't go so well This is a great time to Pretend that there's a shadow in there and on a plant like this It's so complex. Nobody's really going to stress out over it There are some that might be garish shadows if you jump in there with them But if you have a spot that you just need a little extra TLC for If you put a color maybe on you know to the left or to the right of a bad edge That can kind of fix them At least until you're Getting better at your painting and you realize that you're making that error before you end up getting to the error It does take a long time. I can say that from experience Because we make a lot of mistakes along the way But mistakes are not a bad thing mistakes are just a way to figure out how to not Do that thing again Down here. I had just this weird area I was trying to do some of that repair work With a bit of the dark trying to figure out how much of that to make dark because it just something it underneath of it hadn't worked out right and Just played around with those shapes a bit to try to make them nice and crisp But it's looking better than the first one that I did Because this paper just did not like going in with really thick paint. It doesn't tend to go on really smoothly I might even have to try this on my my own in my sketchbook On another paper try it on arches and see if it's easier or if it's just A symptom of the colors and the technique that I was using But I did find it was much easier to accomplish this On this paper using light layers of glaze And not really getting dark until I got to this last phase And even then it's not like super thick dark, but since it has enough color underneath of it I didn't need it to go super super dark either And here i'm just adding touches of bright yellow Because that first yellow wash remember it looked so strong in those areas where I dropped it in where the flowers were going to be Well at this point It's not looking so strong those colors weaken next to something else. I'm just adding more yellow on top of them And then on a few of those edges of the leaves that are just feeling too white Just going to go over them real quick with a glaze of a yellow yellow green kind of color And that's going to take the sting out of them. So they're not feeling quite so much like they are screamy yellow bright kind of color And then if there's a you know little spot once everything's dry If there's something I can do in like one two three areas Maybe just don't go crazy with one more pass Of the really dark in just the very very very darkest Because the more contrast you have the more the eye recognizes what the shape is that it's looking At because we we notice things we see the shapes and the differences between one shape and another Simply because of their value Sometimes their color, but typically their value especially when it's a whole green plant So there's the achia plant achia. I don't know if i'm saying that right But I've got the lovely splashes on it If you're interested in the green thumb watercolor sketches class then go check that out It's just a few bucks And I'll see you again in my next video. Take care. See you guys later. Bye. Bye