 Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Almak. I'm an artist. I work in all sorts of mediums making all sorts of projects and my calling in my life is to teach you how to do that as well. Whatever level of art you're at, whatever medium you love to use, you are welcome here. If you have specific things you want to learn, tell me in a comment and maybe it'll be included in a future video because I would love to help you. I am in the midst of kind of a Celtic Irish series because at the time this is being filmed we are almost at St. Patrick's Day. In my previous video I just want to reiterate to you in case you missed it, I showed you how to make a Celtic Trinity knot and my geometry teacher from high school would be so pleased with me for figuring out the math of it and it's super easy math. I swear if you can measure four inches, two inches, and one inch and use a compass like just a little spinny compass you can do this project. So there's a link to the video in the doobly-doo as well as a link to the free PDF where you can download the math and not even have to think about it. How easy is that? Alright that was my last video. In this video I'm going to talk about dew drops on clover and I'm going to do it in two projects. The first one is a single clover sitting on a table that has some dew drops on it. This is part of the green thumb watercolor class which is a class that's only a few bucks on my website and I keep adding to it periodically when I do one of these very simple plant paintings. You want to go get the full video there then use the link in the doobly-doo but I'm going to show you a shortened version of it here. The other project I'm going to show you is a little on the crazy side. My $10 up patrons get a bonus watercolor video every month and there's a couple of them already in there so if you want to become a $10 patron and see the series then you can log in over there for just 10 bucks a month. Super easy to support me and my work and get yourself some education while you do. So let's get started on doing these clover watercolor paintings with dew drops on them. Shall we begin? The first of the clover that I'm going to show you is from the green thumb watercolor sketches class and this one is an inexpensive class. It's level 2, a bunch of different types of plants. I add to the class periodically so you just keep getting more content. You just go log in and this lesson will be there along with the sketch, the colors and everything but I'm going to do a quick version of it here for you if you just need a quick St. Patrick's Day card. This might work. To draw a clover just make hearts and connect them at the center. They don't have a really skinny bottom to them so they don't get really long and they don't have a really deep divot in them either. I've drawn in some water droplets for mine and if you want to just try this and not go take the class then I would recommend just picking one of the water droplets that you like and just painting it with that one water droplet and not trying all of them because all of them can be kind of confusing all at once. So I've used a more traditional kind of green for the main color and just a very light wash of it. I made one of the petals a little on the lighter green side as if there's light cascading on it from the back side so it's glowing a bit and then reverted back to the darker green color for the rest. Now notice that I've painted right through some of those water droplets. It's because water is see-through and you'll see the color underneath through it and in some cases the light that hits it is going to make it glow more so these drops on this side I wanted the light to really hit them and I used more of a yellow green color in there but I'm painting it while it's wet so that I get some blending of those colors. We don't really want the water droplets to look like stickers so it's helpful to try to join them color-wise with each other but you could pick one of these droplets out and try painting this with that kind of particular droplet. You can also make your clover flat instead of looking like it's on a table dimensional that's fine too. Now as I said my petal on the left side is sticking up in the air so these others are going to be darker petals and I'm going to just kind of deepen them and darken them a little bit more and more just trying to feel through how dark I want them to be as I as I'm painting through it. I'm a layerer. I guess that's a layerer, a word. I like to layer. I like to adjust colors as I go because I'm terrible at making decisions on the fly and getting it right the first time. So here I've finished painting these bottom two leaves and I put a shadow on the shadow side of the droplets because droplets if they're dimensional if they're like really thick droplets they're going to cast a shadow onto whatever's underneath of them so I'm just going to put a little bit of shadow under them and in the class I'll talk about how to carve out those shapes that sort of thing but you can make them much simpler than that. A water droplet can have a highlight on the side where the light's hitting it it can have a highlight on the backside because the light goes through the drop and then catches and expands on the backside of the drop. That's why sometimes they look like they're kind of glowing but there's other drops that look like they're almost completely see-through. You can barely tell that they're there and whatever kind of droplet you make that's basically going to be okay because every droplet can look any old way. Now here I'm just trying to add a little bit more of the color into the droplet before then going in with a really dark color to make this petal also as dark as the other two. The nice thing about doing clover is you can do one leaf one petal at a time instead of doing the whole plant at the same time. It's one of the things that I like about plants that are so simple that you can divide them into that without having to stress out about trying to paint the whole thing all at once so that's nice. Now this top leaf I want to have a little bit of shadow at the top corner and then have it go down to the center where it's going to have that glow. So I started with a darker and thicker pigment up at the top and then kind of added in a little bit more yellow to blend that and let it get lighter and lighter toward the center of the plant itself or in the center of the clover and just kind of slowly working on it taking some water and letting that color blend very gently and add a little bit more dark color at the top to increase the contrast because now that petal doesn't feel like it belongs to the rest of the clover. I wanted to darken it so it's all still wet and I can add that color in and it's going to get a really nice soft transition from the top all the way down to the bottom. You can see each one of these drops has a totally different highlight to it. They have totally different approaches to where the light is hitting each one of them because that's how science is. Light hits all these drops and bounces around in different ways. If you want to find a reference and find an exact droplet then go for it but if you're doing like a St. Patrick's Day card this would be totally perfect. Everybody would think you're amazing if you just put one droplet on it much less trying to do a bunch of them. So a still picture of this will be on my blog if you just want to look at that and copy it and make it for yourself or you can sign up for the watercolor class and that one is like I said just a couple of bucks and you get a whole bunch of different plants in it so it will be really helpful I think in learning to watercolor especially in greens. The second painting is going to use a totally different way of handling the drops and it is kind of the opposite of what I tried to do in the single clover. The single one had nice big drops I could really see them I could focus on them. In a painting like this I had to keep the whole thing moving and the whole thing wet all at once and as I was trying to do that and think through how I was going to teach this to the patrons who are going to watch it because this was created for my $10 up patrons who get a bonus watercolor video every month and they'll get a much slower version of this. I was just struggling to figure out how to do this other than leaving the drops white at first because if I had painted through them the way that I did on the single clover I probably would have lost my mind trying to find them again and especially if I was trying to go quickly because when I try to shoot videos I try to paint a little faster than normal just so I can actually get it done and and make sense out of it when I'm doing voiceovers for it but anyway the drops are all very white and you can see they look like blobs of I don't know acrylic paint or something like that on them because they don't have any of that color going through them they don't have any transparency to them unless it's like transparency to the white of the paper but I had to add that color later to them they're going to end up looking more like stickers on top of the surface then they would had I done what I did in the single clover and painted right through them but in that one it was just such a simple one I could do that and show you whereas this would have taken me probably six hours to try to paint it handling each one of these water droplets in that way but instead I ended up adding my shadows to it then trying to soften the shadows and then trying to put a little more color into each of the petals or the leaves I guess of a clover to try to make them look like they belonged with it they had the same color shining through and it was just a whole different type of challenge but if you'd like to see that it's over on my Patreon page $10 up patrons can view that along with the other ones I started in January so this is number three in the series of Patreon videos thank you so much for joining me today it's been a delight to have you here want to give you a heads up on Saturday this coming weekend I am going to have the class that you guys said you wanted me to do I'm gonna have it fully edited by the weekend and it's all about drawing those plants so if you like drawing plants then that one might be interesting to you so come back on Saturday and I'll see you then take care and until then go create something every day bye bye