 Hi there, I'm Sandy and today I'm going to start off showing you some pieces that did not achieve what I was trying for. This one, there's a watercolor and pen and ink piece on my social media, I'll link you to those in the doobly-doo. This one was a practice piece and it had some good things about it, I like some of the tones, but there was something missing, just something that was not feeling like me and I didn't know what it was. And then I remembered this because it was out on my desk, it's a fundraiser pouch, but it's a painting that I did that had motion, which is part of my visual vocabulary that these others were missing. Today's video is sponsored by my own class. I just launched a Christmas berries class and since it's related to the content in this video, I thought I would share that class with you if you're interested. It's a mini class, five short lessons, and you can make some Christmas cards with it and learn some skills for your painting that you're going to be able to apply far beyond making a couple of holiday cards. And if you're interested in that, links in the doobly-doo down below, I'm excited to see what you create. Right, enough of that, let's get to the topic of the day, what is visual vocabulary? Well, a lot of people would refer to it as line, shape, space, texture, color, all of those kinds of art words, but I refer to visual vocabulary as the tools in your toolbox. These are the things you have available to you to create with. Some people have one that's very empty because they've only just begun. They haven't really embarked on their learning journey. They're just getting started. And that's fine. There's plenty of people who are well experienced, who have decades and decades under their belt. They have a very full, heavy toolbox because they've got a lot of things they've learned over the years. And developing your own toolbox is what's going to help to grow your vocabulary. It's going to help you to have more things available to you to use when you do your work. Yesterday on social media, I posted a tiny tutorial about visual vocabulary because one of the common questions that comes up when I create a painting or a drawing is, was there a reference for that? Or did you create that from your imagination? And in order to create from your imagination, you need to have tools in your toolbox. And my, my commendation to people was to expand your visual vocabulary, practice the elements of the subject matter that you want to paint over and over and over again until your hand and your brush or your pencil, remember them. It's a very simple definition of what practice can do for you. And that is what I am doing here. I'm practicing brush strokes. I recommend that you take any paper that you're going to throw away in the trash because whatever was on the front side of it didn't work. Take the back side and just do practice. Just spend 10 minutes making brush strokes or making marker strokes or making pencil lines, practicing some skill that's going to get you to the goal of whatever it is you're trying to create. If you're trying to paint greenery, then you're going to want to paint a lot of different types of leaves so that your hand starts to build a visual vocabulary around how to make a leaf, how to make it in different directions, how to make it tilt on its side. You may find your hand does a better leaf when your paper is turned a different direction. You may find that a different tool is going to work better than one that you're trying. There's a lot of different things you can learn from just practicing a whole page full of hundreds and hundreds of whatever it is you're trying to do. Last week, I was on seagulls. I was practicing pages and pages and pages of seagulls because I was trying to get better at them. I was trying to get my brain to be able to remember them and be able to create them on the fly without having to go look up a reference for a seagull. Let's talk about supplies for today's project. First I'm using Arches rough watercolor paper and love the texture. Tape down to a board with artist tape and the brush that I'm using is the one you've already seen, DaVinci Maestro. I'm trying to find a good replacement for one of my other favorite brushes that I've been using for years that's no longer available. This one is climbing on the list. This one is becoming a rapid favorite. It's pricey, but it works beautifully, so there you go. The only color I'll be using on this painting is Cascade green with the exception of a tiny bit of white gouache at the very end for some highlights on the berries. To start this painting, I established motion lines because I wanted that part of my visual vocabulary expressed in my painting. For me, this is just to serve as a reminder of where I want this painting to go. It's not necessarily something where I'm going to trace all these lines for my branches. It's just a guideline to remember what I'm doing and not get lost in the details of, oh my gosh, another branch. My first wash is going to be all pale tints, and I'm going to be using a bunch of leaves and branches that I've been practicing. I have sheets and sheets and sheets, not just that little swatch that I showed you. I have tons where I was practicing different kinds of branches and leaves and textures because I used some of them in the Christmas berries class, and then some of them I just wanted to get better at. I wanted more tools in my tool belt, and practicing them really made a huge difference because when I came to a place in my painting and I needed to have another texture, I could look at the area that I was working at and figure out, did I want something that's more rounded? Did I want a leaf that's more pointed? Using those practice sessions as places to say, okay, this one is a more restful pattern that I can paint on top of later when I come in with another layer because it's simpler. The leaves are bigger. And then when I found smaller leaves in my practice, I thought those would be ones that I could add for small, detailed areas. While I was recording the voiceover for this video, comments started coming in on Instagram. Yes, I'm running late this week. And I decided I would answer a few of those questions and comments here. So June said that her brush strokes don't taper off like mine do, and they don't have a flow. They come out straight in the same width, and I'm going to guess chunky. That would be my word for how my brush strokes used to come out. And it wasn't as much getting better brushes that made the difference because you might be looking at this brush and drooling and thinking, that one, I need that one to do that. No, you can do this with lesser brushes. The Christmas Berries class, I deliberately taught using the silver brushes so that you could see you would get those kinds of motions with a much cheaper brush. An expensive one helps. It makes it easier, but you can actually do a lot with a cheaper brush. Just do your practice. And lots and lots of practice. Make hundreds and thousands of brush strokes so that you can get your hand used to that motion and be able to do that on the fly. Just pressing down harder to get a thicker line and lift it up to get a thinner line. Now Kathy, oh dear Kathy, you have provided a list of things that you like to paint, which is great. I'm glad you have broad interests. But my recommendation is to pick one or pick two to do together, like an ocean and skies. Because when you're trying to learn to paint everything, you're zipping around from one thing to another. You never really accomplish learning one thing before you moved on to another. I'm doing an exercise in 2022 where I spend a whole week on a topic and I do a whole bunch of it. And you can watch my social media to see how much of it I do. I'm painting the same thing over and over again, or doing it in different mediums, doing it in different ways so that I can get better at it. Because when I was zipping from one thing to another and every two days I had a new video on a new topic and a new medium and knew everything, I wasn't really doing any deep dives. So I recommend limiting your list a little bit and choosing something to focus on. Ms. Laura, I'm going to give you the same advice that I just gave to Kathy because you took her long list of landscape elements and you've added flowers to it. It's really hard to resist the urge of trying to paint everything in a painting at once, and then you get frustrated. What I have done in the past is I wanted to paint the mountain, the river, the sky, the trees, the grasses. I wanted everything in the painting, or I wanted to paint a vase of flowers in front of a window with light streaming through and the glass vase and the shine and the shadows. I wanted all of it. And what I ended up doing when I painted things was to try to distract myself and my viewers with the details. So if I painted every blade of grass, then it didn't matter if I screwed up the trees because I got every blade of grass in there. And that's where I say if you can focus on an element, choose an element and focus on learning that one and then learn the next one, then once you've learned how to paint a waterfall and you've learned how to paint trees, you can do a waterfall and trees together. And then you can do a waterfall and trees and a field of flowers, but you can't do them all at once. You can't learn all that at the same time. That's just too much for our brains to handle. All of that at once plus water management and color theory and everything else. If you simplify what you're trying to learn so that you can nail one thing before moving on to the next, you're going to be in better shape. It's one of the reasons that I started the landscape foundations series of classes and I want to start doing some more of those now that I'm learning more because in the landscape foundations, I'm trying to teach one element. So the first one is just one tree. The second one is how to do a bunch of trees together so that you can start building that visual vocabulary and then be able to add other things to it later like water and mountains and clouds. So I commend you for doing clouds and skies every day for a month. You're going to end up so good at clouds and skies by the time World Watercolor Month is over that it's going to amaze you. And I recommend doing a practice like that for anybody. If you only paint like once a week, you might want to extend your focus time on a topic a little bit longer. If you paint every day, then you can make that time period shorter because you'll make progress faster. There are three areas that I believe all artists should constantly be trying to grow our visual vocabulary. The first would be foundations. All of the basics of line, shape, space, texture, color, all of that stuff goes into the work that you do and the more you learn about it, the more options you have in your toolbox when you go to create something. The second would be technique, practicing the tools, the actual physical tools that you have in your toolbox. How do you wield the marker? How do you make your marks with it? How do you blend with it? How do you make pencil lines that are going to achieve the kind of look that you want? And if you can't get there, how can you learn that? How can you go find somebody who knows how to do that? Learning to improve your technique is going to help you a ton. But the third is one that I think gets short shrift, which is becoming a subject matter expert in whatever subject you're trying to work on. If you want to paint a fantastical scene that's on another planet that doesn't exist and it's in your head, it was in a dream, it's, you know, whatever idea came to you and you need a way to put that onto paper, then you need all of the tools to create that. You know how to make whatever elements are in that landscape on another planet. And the way to learn that is to study the ones that are here on earth. You can adapt from them once you know them. But if you don't study them and you don't know how to paint them, then you're not going to be able to do that when it comes to creating your big epic piece that's in your heart that you really want to get out. So I highly recommend figuring out what those things are and they can just be for a season as well. Like I said, I'm doing weekly studies. I'm not trying to make a commitment that I'm going to be a landscape artist only for now and forever. I'm playing around with all different kinds of things and giving myself permission to learn and grow. And this week has been a week of practicing leaves of all sorts and this painting is what came out of that practice. But it also came out of understanding other things about me as an artist. I know that one of the things that I do well and that I want to continue to celebrate in my own work is motion and creating some kind of motion in what I would consider a painted doodle like this one. I've created plenty of pieces in other mediums that have this kind of motion to them like lots of pen and ink stuff, lots of alcohol ink and adding pencil to it. But I hadn't really put two and two together about how important motion is for my visual vocabulary. It's one of my tools in my toolbox that I want to pay more attention to. And it was a great learning for me this week. And if you've learned something from this video, please do click the like button. Subscribe if you have not yet already. And in the doobly-doo, which is the description down below, I have linked two classes, not just the Christmas berries class, but an older one, which is called branching out. It's a level two class, so it's going to be a bit simpler. So if the berries look daunting, then branching out might be right up your alley and you could change those to reds and greens and make them Christmas cards. So you can be just as Christmas card ready when the season comes as everybody else. That's it for me. I'll see you again very soon. Take care and have a creative day. Bye-bye.