 Well hey there it's Sandy and I'm back and I am feeling better but not in a billion percent so this will be a quickie. I repainted another old painting this one is from the same era as the barn that I had redone in the last video I'll put a link to that one in the doobly-doo so you can kind of hear a little more about where this challenge came from but in this one I wanted to focus a little bit differently. I wanted to take another of these paintings from this free lesson. It's like a whole free class over on my website if you want to go check it out and in that I had really focused on making the paintings ones that somebody who had never really painted before never really drew anything could just take a quick sketch that I made and see if they could make something that they would be happy with just to see if they're interested in watercolor so it I kept everything really simple and here I've made it more complex I've changed the lighting changed the sky I've made the lighthouse more delicate and I'm focusing on techniques that I've learned over the years since I had done that painting because there's a lot of stuff I just didn't know at the time when I created those and one of them was making that beautiful background gradation but I ended up with a bloom at the top and one of the things that I've learned to do is let the bloom be part of the painting and I ended up creating clouds I lifted color with a baby wipe and dropped in just a little bit of color into the top side so they look like they're lit from the bottom each of those clouds and I also painted right through the lighthouse except for the leading edge where the highlight is and in the past I would have just left the lighthouse completely white painted the whole background and then tried to paint a gray over top of the lighthouse and then ended up having an edge where the background and the gray cross and you end up with like a weird dark edge that's just impossible to paint so I have learned over the years not to put myself through that by just painting through it and then I could just do a light wash of the gray and I don't have any weird edges to mess with next I was celebrating the fact that I now know how to join my elements I painted the house while the lighthouse was wet and then I painted the trees behind them while the roof of the house was still wet so I started getting some blending between all those elements because they kind of disappear in the dark I wanted all this to feel very very dark with all of the shadow sides facing the viewer so the sunny side of everything will be facing the sun you're not seeing much of it I wanted just the highlight on the face of the house and the edge of the lighthouse to be the brightest things in the painting so I then moved on to joining all of those shapes at the top with all of the rocks using a warm color and then I switched to a cool just start putting more detail into the rocks and breaking them up and like all of these things are things that I have learned over the years and there are times in your artistic career when it just helps to redo something so that you know you got better like you know you've improved something and here I'm getting out that like fabulous brush I love this brush there'll be a link to it in the doobly-doo it hasn't been very available since the pandemic but I'll see if I can find some alternates if you want to get one but it holds a lot of paint in the belly and then lets the paint out that nice fine nib and I use it for what I call calligraphy I love that term because it's like handwriting your handwriting isn't unique to you it's not going to be like anybody else's and it's taken me a long time to feel comfortable with my calligraphy to to feel like I wasn't just throwing lines and scribbles all over everything and for a long time it will feel awkward and it'll feel like you're just making a mess onto some painting that you've already loved and you did a great job on and now you're just going to wreck it well eventually it does start to come together and I just want to encourage you to keep trying keep practicing because in my mind that that gives a painting the feeling that you've created it it becomes your signature type of of thing and I can do this on trees I can do it on rocks and it's kind of visible that it's me doing it because my calligraphy is different than anybody else's so to finish it off I went through and just kind of tidied up a few details and added some super darks into a couple of areas and I also added just a sprinkle of gouache onto some of the rocks themselves so that there'd be a little bit of highly just a tiny bit not enough to make it look like snow because we don't want snow on the rocks but I think this whole thing came out so beautifully and I am pleased as punch with myself in seeing the growth that I've made over the years so I recommend that you give that a shot too and if you want to go take the original class with the easier paintings not the hard one feel free to do that links in the doobly do to that as well as some other free resources and the watercolor classes that you might be interested in as well I will talk to you guys again next week have a great weekend and I'll see you later bye