 Hello there! I'm Sandy Allnock and I'm going to do a mini flip through of my sketch a day. This is a sketchbook from Lake Michigan Book Press and Lake Michigan Book Press does custom sketchbooks. She has some that are standard that are listed on the website but you can customize the paper that you put in it. You can say how many pages you want in it, what kind of cover you want on it. There's lots of different ways to customize them if you wish and I asked for one that would have 365 pages in it which is called the sketch a day and it's taken me a long time to get through this mostly because I go through phases sometimes I'm just obsessive and I paint watercolor every day and then other times I get busy on other things and I've been doing a lot of pencil and pen sketches lately so I have not given this sketchbook much love and I am determined to finish this one by the end of the summer. I'm about three quarters of the way through this and I'm going to do another sketch today which will be a study of wet in wet with a little bit of wet on dry at the very end of it. Just a quick sketch and it might be a nice way for you to practice your own control of the water and the pigment but yeah. On Saturday I'm going to do something similar. I'll do a larger painting that'll be not this particular painting that I'm doing today but if you'd like to paint along with me I will put some information in the doobly-doo about exactly what supplies you might want to have on hand. I haven't filmed that yet so I don't know what those will be but I thought it would be nice to do a paint along if you're interested. It'll be something really simple that doesn't require sketching but I will work from a photo so you can have that downloaded ahead of time. So let's get started on today's sketch and cover another page in this book. I went out plein air painting with a couple friends recently and had a bit of a fail with my painting because I haven't been doing a lot of plein air watercolor lately and I totally lost control of my wet in wet painting and I needed practice with that so I'm doing lots of practice at home to just remind myself of how wet the paper needs to be, how much pigment I need to use, and how wet that pigment should be at each stage of the painting. A small study like this is helpful. It's going to be necessary for me to work larger because part of the problem was that I was working outside. It was very humid so things weren't drying quite right. I didn't have patience and I was also working vertical. Here I'm working horizontal just because filming is easier horizontal but when you're working vertical the pigment also slides downward on the paper and just there's lots of control issues but nonetheless I've got the paper really wet and I put some soft blue shapes in the background and then the water in the foreground and I'm just going to let those melt out. They're going to get really soft by the time this is done. As long as the paper is wet the pigment is going to continue to move and if you don't want to move then you want drier paper but if you want a really misty look and that's what I was going for here that's what I was trying to paint when I was outdoors. I just couldn't get that misty look if I had done the painting on dry paper because I wouldn't get those soft edges. So I've got some green gold that I'm dropping into the ground areas and some darker greens in the trees and I'll just put a very very hazy line of trees off in the distance just so I get that curve of a river winding through here. I have no photo reference for this by the way I'm just making it up out of my head to just get some practice done and I'm just going to start thickening up my pigment now because those pigments that I painted with already were very wet. There's just lots of water in there and now I'm going to just beef it up so that I can start creating some more distinct shapes. That first bit was just establishing in general where the spits of land are going to be and where the trees are going to be and now I can start adding in a few darker areas. The thicker pigment is not going to soften out as much. It's still going to get really soft but it's not going to blend out as much but it's going to start giving me that real misty kind of look that I wanted to create. As long as the paper stays wet then that pigment is just going to keep moving. If your paper gets dry then you can always just spritz it really lightly with water but if you can get that water consistency right at the beginning then you can start to figure out how long you have to paint all the shapes in there and that's where practice comes in because there's no way I can say you know you paint this much water down and then you have two minutes to get the rest of such and such done in order to get this effect. That's just not possible so practicing yourself just so you know what your pigments do and how you paint just know that there are sometimes working quickly is going to really help a lot. So I've put two different colors for just different tree colors on the left and right just to give it some variety mixed up a really thick pigment and I'm using my needle brush and this needle brush has a large belly and a very fine tip so I can get some nice calligraphy marks just you know little dancing brush strokes but I'm also using really thick pigment so some of this is going to give me more control more detail and the pigment is going to move less. The drier paper it's still very wet but it's not it's not as wet as it was in the first place the drier paper is going to help this pigment stay in place as well as the thickness of the pigment the thickness of the paint that I've got mixed up because if you're using paint that's mixed really thin it's going to blend out into whatever water or whatever pigment is already there the thicker it is compared to the paper it's going to stay put more and I wanted to just get another level of soft blending versus you know really crisp detail with a lot of contrast but notice that the tree trunks that I painted in there in the first place are already melting out one of the things this starts to give you is a whole set of layers of softness and that's what I was trying in the plein air painting that I did I wanted these layers of trees where I was in a forest and trying to paint like the foreground trees really crisp and distant ones really soft and I just couldn't figure out how to do that so I can't wait to go back to that location once I get some practice under me and see if I can if I can fix that and if I can learn how to do that because I just have a great vision for this clearing that I wanted to paint that was among some trees so I've decided I'm going to mix the pigment even thicker and put more in there and the first ones disappeared these will stay a little bit more but again the paper is still wet so this will soften out you can keep going with this until you decide you've got enough of those layers in there of the soft edges and and just you know keep layering and layering because all the ones that are underneath that are you know the earlier layers that got really soft those will continue to melt out until you decide okay now is the time to zap it so I've got my heat gun out to dry it so that then I can add in some very crisp details now when I'm out painting plein air I don't have a hairdryer with me and I was joking with a lady who walked by she was just a random person walking through the park and she was also a watercolorist and she's like oh I see you're having water management troubles they need to have a little plug out here in one of the trees so you can plug in a hairdryer or something I'm like yeah that would be nice but instead what I needed to do is just be patient I needed to lay the painting flat and just wait and give it a good half an hour but I didn't want to I wanted to keep painting so gonna have a better strategy next time but now I'm painting that same thick pigment on top of dry paper because it's all completely dried and now the pigment is only going to move where there's water so as long as I'm not using much water at all I get really crisp edges and that's where I can do my calligraphy that I love to do and I call it calligraphy I don't know I've heard a couple of my teachers call it that um not sure if that's an official word for it but it feels like that it feels like handwriting and the way that you do any kind of calligraphy on your work is going to be different than anybody else because it's the way you wield your brush and this needle brush does that really beautifully because I can get that that fine tip where the the belly of the brush narrows down I can lay it down on its side and get some larger areas in there and create some dry brush look this brush has a lot of versatility when you get to this phase of adding it in it's perfect for trees it is an expensive brush and I have tried a couple other ones and maybe I'll try doing a video sometime comparing them I have not found another one that works the way my da Vinci's work and I have a couple sizes in the da Vinci but the these brushes just are so nice and the way they operate is very different possibly because these are also stable brushes and the other ones that I've bought I've been trying to look for other ones because I want to find something cheaper for those who want to do this kind of work in your painting but you don't want to spend as much on the brush I've been looking I really have have not found anything that works quite the way this one does but now I'm I'm mixed in a little bit more water because I was finding I was getting way too much thickness in the paint it was just hard to move things around and as I was going to work on the land a little bit adding some grasses and scrub underneath of the trees a little bit of water makes a difference and if you're using another brand of brush because I know a lot of you have you know bought some when you found a needle brush somewhere oh that looks like sandies if you're struggling with it then just mix more water in it or mix it thicker and try both and see which works better because those other brushes I found that I had to add more water which means you can't get really dark dark darks when you're adding a lot of water to try to get the brush to release the color so it there's pros and cons to all different kinds of brushes and no brush is going to make your work do what you want it to do you have to do what you want it to do it's there's no magic bullet in finding a brush and picking out one like that so peel off my tape and my little sketch for today is done another page covered in my sketch book hopefully this was helpful to you I'll see you on Saturday and watch the doobly do here as well as the premiere that I will post so that you can get a list of supplies and stuff from either this video or that one about what to bring with you I'll see you Saturday take care