 Look who came with me on today's adventure, not just Vienna, but oops, there's giallo. We are out and about at our local free little library because we are going to add some art to it today. If you just want to see the installation of the show, then zoom on over to 16 minutes and 45 seconds, otherwise I'm going to show you how I painted one of the pieces that's going in the show. This is one of my gouache pallets. These are all Holbein colors and I bought their set that has a lot of colors in it. They're small tubes, but you get a pretty decent selection of color from it. These have been recently reconstituted. I've been trying to use these up because they dry out much faster than the other brands that I have. I like the color selection for newbies because you don't have to mix a lot of colors, but this is kind of a ritual that I go through on a regular basis. I want to get a whole new set and try a different method with them and I'll let you know when that happens, but I'm trying to use these up. These tiny paintings have been a great way to do that, just making lots and lots of paintings, but mixing them up with a little bit of water and a toothpick generally gets them back to a decent consistency. I was in a local art store and found they had a great sale on a whole bunch of these little easels and little teeny tiny canvases that were so cute. Oh my goodness, 40% off I could not resist, so I bought a whole bunch of those. I've got some brushes. These are my Jack Richardson brush set and then I'm going to need something to mix the paint on and I use a mixing tile. It's basically an 89 cent tile from the hardware store and then I keep a rag handy and that's really all the supplies that I'm going to need for this. So let's do a little painting and this one is real basic. I take it further than you need to in order to make a nice little painting, but I also will let you know this is filmed on my phone. There were a bunch of sections in which my big hand was right in front of it. I'm used to filming from overhead so that you can see things better. So there's going to be some places that things will cut out because you didn't need to see the back of my hand, but I'm mixing up some color that's already on the palette. I leave the colors here because in general my first pass at the very least just needs some color to put on the canvas or on the paper. Canvas is not the best place to paint with gouache because you can see if you get a really watery wash, it doesn't look like watercolor because these are opaque watercolors and typically when I'm working on paper, I'll do something that looks more like a watercolor wash. On canvas, unless you have it primed with something, you kind of need to use some thicker paint. So I've mixed up a thicker light blue color so that I can paint the sky in pretty much nice and solid. You can go over it a couple of times. It stays wet kind of like watercolor does for a bit so you can rework things. And if it dries, you can always re-wet it because this will continually re-wet. It's one of the reasons why you need to use a fixative on it afterward and I'll link to the fixative that I use in the supply list down below the video. So I've got my sky in there and then I took some of the darker blue color and mixed it with some other mess on the palette because what I wanted was a sort of desaturated blue. I thought it would be nice to put some mountains in the background and I'm just making this kind of mush color because I wanted it to feel like these mountains were off in the distance and then have in the foreground a field and some flowers in it. At least that was the plan when I started. I was trying to figure out something that would be a real quick painting because I've been surprised at how long it can take me to do a little two inch painting. It's just as long as it takes to do an eight inch painting. Like I don't know. Maybe I'm just terrible at gouache. That could possibly be. Eventually maybe I will speed up a bit. So I have some greens on the palette as well. So I reconstituted some of that and then started blending from the mountains down into lower on the picture because I want to bring all of this together. I don't paint the way a lot of people paint. They'll just do strips across and try to get some really nice blend going. I wanted to create something that looks more realistic. That's the kind of painter I am when I work in any kind of medium. I like something that looks a little more realistic and I have been having fun with things that feel more like I'm doing almost oil painting type of techniques. I mean I don't know much about oil painting so I don't know if I am but I get that kind of a look where you see the brush strokes and I'm really having fun using this big fat brush. This is the largest brush in the set and it's a flat one which I don't really use in watercolor very much but I'm using it in gouache because I get these really fun brush strokes that feel like an oil painting. So now I'm mixing the green to kind of pull that color downward and create a hillside. The blue is still wet and it's going to do a little bit of blending. It's not blendy like watercolor would be. It doesn't blend in terms of one color charging into the other like I'm used to with watercolor but you can get some soft edges when you use wet and wet. Part of the challenge to myself was to try to film this while painting on the easel. So I had to tape my easel down so it wouldn't move and tape the canvas itself down to the easel and I also had in addition to my big hand being in the way filming at this angle my phone kept doing the zoom thing because it couldn't figure out where to focus so if you're getting dizzy my apologies. There's not too much of it at least I hope for some of you. So I'm using a bunch of different greens to create this really soft grassy area and then I used a damp brush to break up the mountain a little bit. I wanted some soft areas and the damp brush lifts that color so that the color rewets anytime you touch a wet brush to it. So if you don't like what you're doing you can take it practically back to zero especially on a canvas like this you could wash it under the sink most likely and get most of the color off and start all over. So here's what it looks like when my big fat hand is in the way. Yes it did happen quite a number of times but I added more greens to it. I wanted to break it up a little bit more and here's kind of how I mix the colors I just take parts from one section of the palette and mix it with something else to see what happens. I've got some black and red in one section and when I mix that with a green I start getting more of a brown color so I put blue in it that brings it to a little bit more of a dark gray if I throw some green in then I'll get a dark green out of it and then I need to add more black to it because then it turned into light green. With gouache as in acrylics and oils you can just keep adding layers and work at it until you're happy with it. Just remember anytime you add water you could be lifting up color underneath so you might get some color mixing and things might feel kind of dull. If you need to brighten it up then use thicker paint because thicker paint will cover it without lifting things up as long as you don't scrub at it you just need to learn to touch it and let it go and not fuss around with it. But here I'm trying to get everything to blend so touching it with a damp brush is a way to soften all these edges and try to create something that looks a little bit more like scrubby ground and next up while that dries I'm going to work on clouds. Clouds you can paint in just straight up white and you can make really crisp clouds but I like something more realistic. So my brush has some water in it and you'll see in this top cloud I'm letting the water squish out of the brush so I've got a little bit of the white paint but there's a lot of water in there that gives me that soft edge. I rinsed my brush and dried it off a bit more on the towel that's beside me and then I could touch it to the wet paint that was down here in the bottom cloud and soften the bottom edge of it. Using the water soluble properties of gouache is a great way to do some soft blends. I could have stopped here and just had a mountain and some clouds and some hills and that would have been just great right? But I thought instead I'd show you a little bit about where I get complicated when I start adding other things. So I'm going to add some cone flowers and I start with the darker color and then work my way toward lighter colors. And you might think gee whiz that's an awfully weird yucky color. Cone flowers are pretty. They're like the ones I was going to paint. We're going to be these bright happy purple ones. Well I put down the color that is in the top part of the cone and then just carried it out into the flower shapes just so I could get them started. And then when I started mixing a lighter purple color to go over it, all that paint had to be dry so I could go over it. Then I started getting a little bit of that purplish kind of hue to everything with the darker red color staying in the top part of the flower. And then I had to mix an even lighter one. I mean you have to just keep going until you get as light as you want. You'd be surprised when you're looking at the palette how much you kind of need to do that in order to make something really pop. Because I just did layer after layer after layer and building them up. Now maybe there are people who are smart enough or experienced enough to do that in much quicker fashion to get to the end. But it takes me a few layers to figure out exactly what the value is. I'm still getting used to the idea of colors changing as they dry. Because that happens with gouache just like it happens in other paints. But these seem to get darker rather than lighter. I'm used to watercolor that lightens as it dries and these darken as they dry. And the purple colors in this Holbein set are also a little bit hard to work with. I've found it takes me a lot to get to the kind of color that I want. You would think they look really pretty in the container. I really liked the way they come out. But to paint with, they just look a little bit on the fake side. So it was a bit of a struggle to try to get this to work. I ended up putting in darker purple again because these started feeling like very pale, pansy kind of colors. But I'll add more to that later. But for the time being, I decided I would just start putting in a little more detail into the grasses sections. Not trying to draw every petal and every stem. Because that would just be a little bit too much like an illustration, which is what a lot of people use gouache for. I wanted it to feel more like a loose painting. And so I'm just creating some negative shapes for a few stems, positive shapes for other stems. And then I'm letting the messiness of all of that opaque watercolor underneath all that gouache just stay there. Because it's just going to give it a painterly feel. And that's what I'm looking for is a painterly feel rather than the kind of graphic perfection that a lot of people go for with gouache. It's not that anything is wrong with that. That's just not the way I like to paint. And this is what I've been practicing. All those little paintings in the background, I've been working on these. I've been challenging myself to do a little bit of gouache every day. Usually in the evening when I'm sitting watching TV, catching up on the news and whatever, then I'll end up putting in just a little bit of time on one of these tiny paintings and learning a lot more as I go. Some people think that when I say at the end of my videos, go create something every day that that's just a phrase. That's just a thing I say. But honestly, that's the way I live. I do this every day. And with gouache right now, I'm trying to push myself to do specifically gouache every day because I'm trying to learn it. But you can do the same thing with whatever medium you're working on, whether you're making cards or you're making paintings or you're just trying to learn how to draw hands and feet, like whatever it is you're trying to do. If you do like just a few minutes of it every day, you will be amazed at the progress you can make. It's like going to the gym. If you go to the gym, like maybe two times a week, you're not going to get very far. But if you go to the gym every day, if you work out every day or run every day, you'll make progress a lot faster. So if you're not satisfied with the speed of your improvement in your art, then just do something every day. Now, finishing off a canvas, you can paint the color around it, but you have to actually think about that while you're painting so you can continue the same color. And since I don't like to try to remix the same color, because I have no idea how to remix the same thing and get exactly the same value, I just paint black around the outside edge, call it done. Other people will paint another color around it as well. Well, I also found in that art store, these little gals. Oh my goodness, it was so perfect. I thought they could be little patrons that I could put into each of the little libraries or little art galleries. And so I painted her in gouache. The gouache didn't like the plastic surface very much. Perhaps acrylic could have been better because with gouache, every time you touch it with water, more comes off of it. You're lifting color up and it might have been better if I had some color that would stick there because that's what acrylic does. It stays there once it dries. However, this is what I had out, so I didn't bother getting out any of my acrylics to try to do this because I was lazy. That's how I roll. When I got finished with both the little doll here as well as the painting that's going into the show, I did spray some fixative on them and I will link you to that in the supply list. The reason is because people are gonna assume that that is an acrylic painting and people are in some way in their minds. I don't know how much they know about it, but they might assume that it could get wet. Your kid could touch it with sticky fingers and be just fine. And that would not be the case with wash. It would actually wash off. So that would be a problem if they ended up having this painting, having an issue. So nonetheless, spraying them is gonna be really important in this particular case because they have no idea what they're getting. And it's gonna be out in the wild in this little library, so I wanted to keep it protected. And her, I painted with a red dress because my favorite color to paint with in this set is the red because it's always constituted just perfectly for painting really thick. The other colors dry faster. Each one of the colors has its own rate of drying. And then I offered her a bit of time to spend looking at the art so she could see what kind of work is here in my own gallery. Yeah, she's a little small for these maybe. I need to find some larger figures. But next, it was time to set up the art show. So I headed back over to the park where this little library is. And we'll take a better look at it. You can go to a website. I'll put the link down below and go find out where there is a little library near you because there's probably one. This one was in a bit of a state of a mess when I got there this time. There was this big book that doesn't really fit vertically on the shelf. So I did a little rearranging because I am a tidy freak when it comes to bookshelves. I like books when they're in vertical order, like the tall books are with the tall books and the short books are with the short books. And since these were not in any dewy decimal order or anything, I just kind of rearranged and made them tidy so the library was all cleaned up. And that left the top shelf available. And I put some pieces of illustration board in here. So there'll be stiff pieces of art. Put a sticky note on it, asking people to take one and make their own art and bring it back for the show. And then put in a couple of easels. And one of the pieces that I put in here was a pencil drawing that I did just recently. If you look through my shorts, you'll see that one. I'll try to put a link in the doobly-doo. You need to stand up. You need to stand up. Here we go. I'm curious to see if other people are gonna take on the challenge to make their own art or whether books will just keep shoving the art aside. I have no idea. But I'm gonna be watching to find out how it goes. Join me on Saturday and I'm gonna come back with some more free little art in other mediums this time, just cause it's fun. I'll see you guys later. Thank you for visiting. Thank you for subscribing and I'll see you next time.