 Guys, we are here with a little, hopefully what will be a short quick tutorial for my creative year. I announced at the beginning of the month that we were going to work with monochromatic colors and my thoughts behind that and then I said I promised I would do some kind of tutorial and then I had computer issues, we had the wildfires here on the west coast. You know, because COVID is not enough. So anyway, it's been crazy. So it is the 23rd of September, my daughter's birthday and I am just now getting to the tutorial. Anyway, I am taping off a page in this book. Now this is actually a watercolor book. I'm not a huge fan of the paper. I don't like the way it reacts to water media. Yeah, it's not there's some interesting paintings I've done in here. I really do like this piece I did for Mike Deacon's Mission Inspiration, but that being said, I wouldn't buy another one of these. It does better with like pencil and pen than it does in my opinion with like watercolor paint. We're going to try acrylic paint in here because I don't think that's the one thing I don't think I've done yet. Yeah. So we're going to try it. I'm going to tape off four little sections and we're going to do four little paintings. This is just plain hardware store painters tape. Nothing special. Excuse me. All right. So I have white and black paint. Now to be fair, this white paint is actually white gesso. If you don't know what gesso is, think of it as primer for artwork. It is tinted white, so it should work just fine. And then I have black. I'm using inexpensive craft quality paints. You don't have to have anything fancy, but I have black and white to shade and tint my primary color. I've picked four primary colors because we're going to do four paintings, one with each color. So I have orange, purple, green and yellow. All colors I would never use like on their own ever. Let's see. I'm going to zoom in just a little bit. Here we go. All right. So and I have one of my inspiration journals out and this is actually a picture of my face, which, you know, if I'm going to screw up anybody's face, let's just screw up my own. So the first thing we're going to do is grab a paintbrush, let's see, one that's less messed up than the others. This one works. I might grab a smaller one too. Okay. I tend to be a brush mixer, which isn't really a proper way to mix your paint, but that's what it is. I'm going to start with some of my orange, a couple of smaller, like three blobs to one of the blobs. I'm going to put next to it some black. I can get any black to come out. There we go. And next to the other one, I'm going to put some white. This white, Jessam has been in this bottle for literally for years. It was part of a travel kit and I'm surprised it's like not all dried up, but that being said, the lids completely clogged up, so it needs to get used up. All right. So I've got my inspiration photo off to the side. I'm going to start with mixing a dark shade of the orange or tone. And so I'm going to actually mix the black and the orange together. One of the things I enjoy about watercolor, I mean, about acrylic paint is that you can really, you can start with your dark colors and work your way lighter. Just dry everything in between. With watercolor, you really have to be careful about how you put your paints on the paper. So I'm going to just sort of map out roughly. This is too big a brush. Let's go with the little one for this. This is a very abstracted copy of a picture of my face, which is fine. You could do something simple. You could do a flower. You could do anything. I'm going to take some of the orange and I'm going to mix it in with some of the dark orangey black that we just made to get a lighter shade. And this is ivory black and primary orange, bright, sorry, bright orange. Let's see if I can get my features kind of mapped out on here. So I'm going to play and I'm going to experiment and I'm going to keep going like this, mixing my main color with white and or black to get different shades and tones. And I'm going to experiment doing my face four times. I'm going to speed forward through the process and I'll be right back. OK, so now we're going to remove the tape, stick with one color, even if you can because you're just so tempted most of the time to like grab another color, grab the teal or grab the purple or you know, whatever. Did you see that right there? Yeah. That's one of the reasons I don't like this paper. OK, I'll fix it. I'll put some gel medium on there, glue it back to our Elmer's glue, glue it back down. A little piece of lifted. We're going to take some of the white gesso and fix this little smudgy bit over here because I seem to always get one section that goes under the tape that never fails. That's more of a Gina painting and being really messy thing than it is a thing about this paper. This paper though just pills really easily and tears really easily. It's not very sturdy in my opinion. I think this journal is from Hobby Lobby, but I don't remember. But there you go. So for color studies, this is the original, which is a altered photograph of my face that I altered it in some different apps on my iPad and then printed it out and stuck it here in my face's reference book and I've used it before. It's really challenging and interesting to figure out what you can do with just one color and then black and white. It's good practice to learn your materials, to learn to refine your technique and even to work with a particular image to figure out how or how you want to do it, what way you want to do it. I really enjoy these kind of processes in my artwork and I encourage you to do the same. I love to see what you can do with something like this in the group here on Facebook. This video is just for you guys. It's not for anybody else and do share what you're doing. If you have a question, comment or concern, be sure to tag me in the post or one of the other admins and don't forget to support the free content here in the Facebook group. I in particular have ways you can support my content in my video description. The other admins and teachers have the same. So check it out if you're not sure, ask and above all just go out and have a great time with it. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay creative and go out and do go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and that's it for right now. Play with your monochromatic color tones and let's see what happens. All right, I'll be I'll see you in the next video.