 Why hello there and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Olnok. I'm an artist. I need a haircut really badly. My bangs are really long and I'm really glad you're here with me today. I'm glad you stopped by. If you haven't subscribed yet I want to invite you to do that. I share art videos every Tuesday and Saturday so you'll get lots of art tips from this channel and hopefully you'll have some contributions to make too in the comments section because I love to hear from you. Today I'm going to be talking about something that I was reminded of and wanted to do this video a long time ago but I was reminded during the open studio session in December when I was working on this drawing it's a tiger cub and it was just a charcoal drawing on newsprint. It wasn't anything super exciting but somebody said something at the end of the zoom call she said I thought you were done with that 15 minutes ago and then you added the darks and then it came alive and it reminded me that I'm constantly getting this kind of a comment from people saying how do you know when you've reached that dark value how do you know I always stop too early how do I get there well I have a little tool that I want to share with you today it works in any medium but it's going to be especially nice to see it here in watercolor because I'm going to be using color and you can see the value scale that I'll be creating it worked in black and white in the charcoal but it also is going to work in any other medium as well so I'm going to teach you how to do that we're going to talk about a whole bunch of different things and I'm going to take one of the letters from my previous video when I talked about this crazy alphabet that I've been drawing and I'm going to turn that pen and ink drawing into a watercolor painting and while you are probably not going to ever need to watercolor a letter the way that I'm doing the tips that I'm going to give you are going to apply to almost any painting that you make so let's get busy and talk about value let's begin with the preparation and supplies so I've got my letter that I'm going to trace and my light box and a drawing pencil I'm tracing this onto some cold press watercolor paper by arches and using just a drawing pencil to trace the lines on here if you need a light box I can highly recommend these art graph I wish I'd gotten a bigger size that's the only complaint I have about it because often I'm sliding things around to try to fit my little 8 by 10 window and be able to see through it but it works very nicely this is my watercolor sticks I found a box finally to fit them this is a new mixing palette that you might see here and there here on my youtube channel I'll tell you more about it in a minute while I start mixing the colors but they sent me this one to try out and I thought I'd give it give it a whirl on this project the watercolor sticks are basically watercolor pigment but it's in a stick form instead of a tube form and it's of course not liquid so these are more cost effective per amount of pigment than a tube would be so I use these sometimes when I don't really know what colors I'm going to use if my palette is maybe not got the colors that I need in it I can pull colors out of here real easily rather than getting a tube out and squeezing things you just use a little bit of it what I do is put some water into whatever well I want to mix my pigment into and then scribble basically with the watercolor stick I said I was going to tell you about the palette these palettes come in different orientation so there's some that are round some that are rectangle I was thinking this was going to be a good one to use with my sketch easel outdoors but I've realized I will drop this piece of ceramic when I'm outside and it's always going to hit a sidewalk I'm guaranteeing it because I am a klutz so it's going to stay in the studio but it's great for projects like this where I want to be able to have a mixing area and work with my sticks instead of with my big watercolor palette so you may see this one from time to time here but now let's take a momentary break for a word from our sponsor which is patreon over on patreon this weekend like later on this morning there's going to be a watercolor painting I told you about that recently $10 and up patrons are going to get a watercolor painting video every month complete with a photograph and a sketch and real-time painting etc so $10 and up we'll be getting that later on this morning but what if you are a person who does not have mula to do $10 a month because I totally understand that I am not trying to break anybody's bank but if you would like to see the sketchbook flip through of my sketch a day sketchbook any patron at any level so a dollar a month you can see the sketchbook flip through when you get to the patreon page just go back you know like scroll down a post and you will see that in the title and you can watch that it's like 20 minutes or so I'm just slowly flipping through and looking at the paintings I don't talk through it at all and one other piece of follow-up before we get back to the painting is the bookish printable that I showed you in my previous video you can print out when you purchase the printable you can print out from a pdf this one that has these really faded lines and what I did was print it out and then colored in colored pencil I printed it on my favorite Stonehenge drawing paper so to make one of these books look realistic put some gray shading on the side of the book where the paper is and then add some dark gray shading underneath the top of the book cover and then here's the secret add almost an overly shape a little thicker right where the gutter is where the you know the back of the book is the spine and then it looks like a book and when you order the printable you get a copy of this as well a nice flat one so you can see where I put like shadows in between the shapes because there's some kind of vacant areas in between some of the books so now we're ready to get back to painting and creating a value scale I've chosen my three colors and I need to see where they're going to take me on the spectrum from light to dark and how dark do I want to go how dark will these colors get and how dark do I want to go so I make five blocks generally and I used to do these all the time I don't need to do them really anymore because I mostly know how my colors will perform but I start with putting in the center my middle color whatever that middle color is and I let it be whatever I've mixed already and it's a very light version of that there's not a whole lot of pigment in that but the yellow has more pigment in it it's hands a yellow deep and it has a lot more pigment so I added some white to it and then ended up adding a little bit more of the pigment so I get a lighter yellow I just want to see how those that yellow is going to darken there's some colors that have a big range of value within them and then some that don't so the quinburn orange I decided to add some more pigment into the puddle so I can get another dark color before I then switch over to the burnt umber which is the darkest color that I'll be using and it just didn't feel very dark again it was mixed really thinly with not enough pigment so I just dropped some more in there to see what happens and then I'm going to dry the whole thing and you want to see what it looks like when it's dry don't judge anything while it's wet because watercolor always dries lighter than you expect and that's often our troubles with watercolor is that we get done with a pass in our painting and everything feels really soft it feels like it's all disappeared and I like to use that to my advantage by painting the first wash with something really thin so that it will lighten and then I have a light base to paint on top of and to get darker with so we get this pretty much dry so that I can see how I'm going from the lighter to the darker and I can see some areas that I want to start playing with and see if there's a darker yet that I can still do or a lighter yet and I'm going to start with the burnt umber I mixed in some extra pigment into the puddle so I can see how dark does that dark yet does it get like almost blackish does it not there's some pigments that will some that won't you may find when you get to that section that you need to switch to a totally different color because you're not getting something that feels like the kind of dark you want in your painting so I also mixed up just for fun a little bit more into the quin burnt orange so I could see whether or not it actually is going to get dark enough to to be using it at that value and in the long run I decided not to put anything that reddish in but I will use the other two mixes and then I'm not going to go for the really dark in the burnt umber either because that's just too contrasting I want this to feel a little more on the golden side because I love yellow and I wanted something that feels like like a pretty golden color for me I mixed more water into the yellow so I could see what that's going to look like if I put in a really thin wash and that is even a little bit much I want a little bit lighter than that so when I get to the painting I know I have the freedom to use a lot of water in that first pass and I don't really want to get as thick as some of those darker darker values on this particular one on another painting I might decide I want that range but if you keep some extra strips cut off of other paintings or the backs of other paintings do one of these value studies with whatever colors you're choosing for your painting because it's going to help you to have a guide to know when you've gone far enough with your value so here I've just taken a nice big brush this is a number 10 I believe and just painted some water in and then threw in some of that Hansa yellow deep just letting the color kind of play around putting it in a few areas where I wanted to have a little darker color but not stressing out about it too much I like the mix of having a loose wash underneath and then tighter on top because sometimes I'll be able to retain some of that looseness other times I can get rid of it because I'm painting so light that when I add darker pigment on top it's going to cover that anyway but this is going to give me that light base just to start with across the entire letter the entire painting now I'm not mixing any colors together you know like a yellow and a red to make an an orangey red so I recommend as you're starting doing this if you're a beginner painter don't worry about mixing colors if you have some colors that you can paint with that are just straight up colors it's going to be easier to do something like this and then start adding in color mixes later because you have to learn how to mix colors so that they come to the right amount of value the the right thickness of pigment and that's tougher to do with multiple multiple colors in one painting mixture so this is the second yellow that thicker mixture of the yellow paint and it's you know it's gotten lots more density to it which is great I finished painting with that and while it was still a little bit damp I even painted in with the next level of the quinacridone burnt orange so I get a few soft edges here and there when it hits a wet spot but I'm letting this one be tighter than the original wash but looser than what the final will be because I'm you know going over some of these lines there's going to be multiple little shapes in here so now I switch from that number four brush down to a number two I've just gotten even smaller you'll have to remember that your number two brush is not going to hold as much paint as your number four brush so you'll have to keep going back to the well over and over to pick up more pigment but I'm just painting in between some of those shapes to start lifting up the negative ones the ones that I want to be yellow I'm not painting and then painting everything in between now I've switched to the burnt umber mix just going to move into the darker areas the tinier sections in between the the ones that I've already put down so I'm only painting into portions of the quinacridone burnt orange area and I finished this section and I want to kind of move around to talking about the whole thing before I get back to painting more those dark colors in I covered the whole thing with the same sets of values so I went in with the water and adding in the lightest yellow and then adding in a second pass with the yellow so I get some more dark colors then began putting in some of the quinacridone burnt orange one of the things I want you to notice here now that we're kind of getting a pulled back view is that I'm creating sections of darks just you know groupings of darks and they're with that really thin quinacridone burnt orange because then I can go in with a second pass and divide those into smaller sections with the thicker quinacridone burnt orange so I'm just very slowly building up to thicker and thicker pigments and that's the patience that it takes to do this but there's some places where you need to work quickly and that's when you're doing a large wash when you're doing a small section when it's an area where you don't need to bleed the paint into something else you don't need to have those colors mixed then you can take your time and that's what I'm doing here is taking plenty of time constantly mixing more pigment as needed and now I at least know about what mixtures that I want for each of those sections because I've been painting with them throughout the whole painting so far the scale of the detail that you're going to be able to get with something like this is going to differ based on the size that you paint I do find that a lot of beginners try to paint really small and you know paint a post card or that sort of thing this one is eight by ten and if you try to paint this this same painting and just reduce it down to an eight by ten you'd start to have to use like zero brushes in order to get this kind of detail in there and I recommend I strongly recommend that even beginners learn to paint a little bit larger an eight by ten is going to teach you more about painting than something where you're trying to get into the itty bitty bitty bitty places I realize that it's scary to you feel like I'm using that big piece of paper and it can feel intimidating but you're going to be able to get more of these details in if you're working a little bit larger it's just really difficult to do and you won't get this kind of a fine detailed look because your your piece of paper is just too small so now I'm going to go in since I've got all of my quin burnt orange in here I'm going to go in with my brown at burnt umber I'm not using the deepest darkest mix so I'm not making like blackish kinds of marks in here because I don't want anything blackish I did that first section so I could see how dark I want to go that first section though has something done to it that I didn't catch on film sorry about that but I will show you at the end how I did that because you'll notice there's not the stripiness in that bottom completed section like there is in the one that I'm painting now because I'm creating very crisp strong edges in between a lot of these strands and a lot of times I'll create something and is deliberately a little too contrasty it's got too much going on in it because I know I'm going to do a wash at the end that's going to pull it all together and that's something that will take practice and it'll also take a deep breath when you start doing it because it does feel a little scary so you take this this thing that you've spent hours laboring over and just do something crazy to it but I promise you it will work and it will start to tie this whole thing back together because right now it feels very much like spaghetti these all feel like very harsh strands they don't feel like they have a united flow to them and that's okay for right now because I know where I'm headed because I I worked on that first section and I know the magic that happened when I did the last step so I do want to you know let you know that I knew this was going to work and that's why I proceeded this way but as you grow as a painter you'll find little tricks like that that are going to help you to like make those final moves on your painting when I say move just a shift of some kind and I'm going to want to make a shift that's going to tie this together as you can see the softness in that bottom section versus all of those harsh edges in the rest of the s so what I've done is mixed a really thin version of the yellow and a thin version of the burnt quinactinone burnt orange and I'm just going to paint right over top of everything I already painted it's nice and dry I didn't use colors that lift so I can go in here and just darken sections and I'm darkening them all at the same time and it's doing a slight bit of lifting just like the most minimal bit of lifting underneath but notice that I'm not scrubbing back and forth I'm not like trying to move the paint I'm just letting a glaze of color over the top that's starting to pull those areas back in together and they're they're going to dry soft like the bottom part of the s and they're just going to come together better and it's also going to make those little white flowers there's little daisies in there it's going to make those pop not every painting will need this kind of a move at the end but for me it really made those values work together because there wasn't such a big gap between the yellow in all of those strands and the darker colors so it even things out just a bit now if you are interested in the rest of that alphabet that I have drawn they're not all finished yet but in the last video which I'll put on the screen here at the end I showed the alphabet as it is so far and talked a little bit about my maybe plans for it and there's also the bookish printable is linked in the doobly-doo if you want to go purchase that one and color it up and if you would like to become a patron and join in for the watercolors or for just the flip through of the sketchbook all that's linked in the doobly-doo in the meantime go create something every day I will see next time with my new palette for 2024 I'll see you later bye