Lessons

Lesson Info

Painting the Wood

I did kind of like a night sky um on the piece that we're doing and so I'm just going to kind of a nice dark lappas blue and a little bit of the violet just to give it a little bit more depth of color what we're using today are some heavy body acrylic paints what's nice about thes is they're very true to the color so when you look at the label that is exactly the color you're going to get which sometimes when you open it to you like this is not the color I thought I was getting so I really appreciate that about thes pain since in particular is that they sick teo the color that they say they are another nice thing is because they're happy body they're very opaque so they get really good coverage with these pains so I'm gonna take and mix my my blue and my purple together here and using the phone brush I'm going to paint the middle insides and then I'm going to go back with a little detail brush just to get the corners but because we're gonna paint the rest of it another color later we'l...

l have to try to cover too much with it I'm just gonna take my phone brush and again because the wood is untreated it's just going to take that pain right and then it's just gonna suck it right into the wood green knowe if you guys do not want a night scene and you want to do something else feel free I am not taking your project home with you today you are so I want you to be happy with it so feel free to pick whatever colors are speaking to you for this part I'm just going to keep doing this it's taking up a lot of pain so you're gonna want to be really generous in your paint usage and I'm just painting the upper three panels because the bottom line I'm going to paint a different color here in a few minutes I'm just painting my upper three with this blue and purple mix and we talked a little bit in intro to mixed media yesterday um about the color wheel and color theory and the fact that I am not an artist like a trained I'm a self taught artist and I haven't taken color theory but what you learned in kindergarten about primary colors and secondary colors and things just kind of keep that in mind I always have ah color wheel with me and I mix my own colors and things but the most important thing to remember is you can mix colors all you want but just be careful not to get mud so when you're mixing just kind of keep in mind what you're doing so if you start mixing blue and orange it's probably not going to be the most beautiful result ok so I've got the middle dine and I'm just going to grab one of my more detail oriented brushes here I'm just going to get in and start getting right up to the edge there one thing that just really loved about these colors is just the rich pigment of them you don't have to keep adding as much to get that rich color which is really need yeah I really I love working in acrylics and they drive fast and they're just so easy to work with but I will say that the dark great richness is a definite bonus with these because there when you buy acrylic paints you can get them opaque like these are or they also come translucent just seem to be really cognizant of that when you purchase and if you're just starting out and wanted by acrylics and you just want to buy the ones that air in the craft section that air sixty nine cents ninety nine cents you can totally do that you may have tio put a couple of coats on because those are thinner to get that color where when you buy more of the heavy body it's a thicker product to begin with so you usually only need a coat to do something like this but I also tell people if you're just starting out and you don't want to invest in expensive heavy body acrylics you're totally fine you go making those purchases in the kraft section just till you see if you even like doing this or not there's nothing wrong with that giving here that and more this is a lot of little detail work, but I hear paint over there so I'm excited to see what's about to happen because yesterday when we were had our first two classes it was fun to look up because everybody gets the same kit to start and there's always different results which I love to see and I always learned from everybody else too. I'm excited to see what goodness is about to happen in studio here and if you guys air working along at home, please share what you're doing because I would love to see what everybody's making it was fun yesterday some people tag on instagram and their kids were watching along and melting kranz and all sorts of fun stuff that was kind of cool. We have a question from our online audience do you have to prep the wood at all beforehand or did you just start painting? I just started painting with this one because I knew it was just going to absorb right in and I just wanted that really rich color if I was going to do a lot of detail super intricate detail on here, I probably would prep it with more of a just to kind of smooth it out this is really kind of a rough texture right now, but I liked that about its my two started painting right on it the way that it is, but if you want to smoother surface, you can definitely go in with some sandpaper, sand it down at a layer of jess. Oh, and do those kinds of things, but I really liked it in its natural state, so I I just went for it because I can still see a lot of the grain and the nodding in things, which I think adds a lot of character. We're with the just so you would end up losing some that you do end up using more paint this way because the jess oh, would get soaked in verse and provide you with the buffer, so you'd have to you could use probably half a cz much paint as we're doing right now, but you kind of lose a little bit of that texture. So it's kind of what the effect is that you're looking for, um, when you're doing the project, so when I try to paint a little bottoms of the slats, if I can and cover up a little bit of that would color, and then we'll let that one dry and stephanie are online audience is wondering how you feel about dollar store would or canvases or I think it's one of those things that if you're just starting out and you just want to play and that's what you are ok with making an investment and I completely support doing that kind of thing I just think that once if you do something that you're doing on a regular basis and you're really honing your craft and turning it into a new artistic expression you'll start to realize that there's a difference in quality and things like that and you'll want to probably spend a little bit more on higher quality product but when you're getting started and just kind of messing around and giving it a go I'm like I said I'm totally cool with minimal investment until you feel comfortable with it and we can talk about that with the paints and things to do that there's nothing wrong with doing that at the beginning at all but if you're if you come become really serious about it and you really start playing and enjoying it you'll start to notice and learn and and see those differences and product quality and you'll come to appreciate the difference in the products so okay so I have got my dark blue down and I'm going tio look for at the turquoise did you guys have a sky over there did you find a sky blue okay, I wonder if we did maybe we didn't have it okay, so I'm going tio mix we'll take a little bit of the turquoise we'll take a little bit of this blue that I have and some white and I'm just going to make my own sky blue and what's nice with these pains to since they're all the same formula in the same brand when you mix them together, the color and the pigment stays really nice and consistent just mix this up that worked out well, I'm always surprised when an experiment goes good looks like I have mixed colors before or something a little more weight and I'll be happy so I just took a little bit of the lappas and some of the turquoise with white and got a really nice pretty sky blue I'll take that and that's the color that I'm gonna put on the bottom section here and actually that's still a little dark for me, so I'm going to add a little more weight to it now that it's on the wood that wanted a little lighter and if this part swirls a little bit that's ok, because this is kind of my ocean area, so there's, um, color swirls in there and it's not perfectly mixed, I'm ok with that yeah, and this down here and kind of repeat the same thing that we did above and just get our paint on there, watch it just get soaked into the wood and I'm reading here a question from online sent me when you're layering paints do you need toe wait for one layer to dreyer's it okay to just keep flaring them on? I think it depends on if you're at changing colors then you definitely want to let them dry if you're adding the same color I like to get it as dry as I can especially if I'm not happy with the opaqueness of it so if this was two thing I would let the strike completely before adding the next layer because you run the risk of lifting up a little bit of what's already there so I tend to like to let it dry if I can if it's just a little touch up spot then it's not such a big deal but if you're going to repaint the whole thing with the second coat than I do let it dry in between just so I don't run the risk of that almost looks like a bald spot and they're harder to fix them you would think sometimes so just adding in my my blue down here and that said while this is what I'm probably going to take a little bit of turquoise and sperl it in because I want that little bit of a mix of them blending together in spots but if you wanted it to stand out on its own I would definitely let it wait but I want that kind of swirled together look where the colors kind of come together so I'm going to do that while it's still wet because you're white, I'm just being a very sloppy painter today, but that's okay, I'm gonna grab a little bit of my church coy's I'm just gonna use my detail brush and I'm just going to kind of swirl it in a little bit and it just adds a little bit of texture and depth to the color that's there but doesn't really mix mix it just kind of highlights and swirls itself in and there's no rhyme or reason to how I'm doing this. I'm just kind of moving my brush around and letting it happen, okay, get them in there. How are you guys doing over there? Good greens, the purple, the purple always looks really nice, I like them some baby blue. I am that lappas in that purple both are just so dark and rich, I just love how they turn out, so I'm really just dabbing this all over and kind of mixing it in and I'm going to hit this whole section with the heat gun so that it can get dry before we move to the next step, which is going to be mold making with our people, play my, grabbed the heat gun and let that start to dry and you may see some spots because I can see, like little specks where the woods shone through, where it's gotten sucked in there, but I leave those because I kind of like that natural green showing through a little bit, but if you really don't like that feel freedom, just completely cover it as much as you want, just get the strain dekel posh side should be pretty well checking that right now and it seems to be pretty good, so we're in good shape on this project so far, so this is technically supposed to be like a serving train, and when they sent it to me immediately like this is not a serving tray. This is a three d art despite I love finding things that air intended are meant to be one thing and doing if you turn it this way or you'll move it that way, you can make something else out of it a little bit about your background kind of how you started getting into mit media were a couple of curious questions here about how how you kind of get into this. Yeah, yeah, I, um I grew up with parents who were really good and like, let me just plain exploring I mentioned small, the wood that's always takes me back to my childhood, my dad had a wood shop and I think by the time I was four I had my own work bench and I had a hammer and I would just randomly make things that weren't things but they were ok with that so I would get all the little scraps and things and then when I wasn't doing that, I had kranz and reams of paper and paints and all of those things and um it just was always a part of who I was and I grew up going to craft shows and as my dad selling handmade gorgeous wooden pieces, I've got little felt christmas ornament magnet things that I would cut out and make and sell along with um and I've just always had that as part of who I was and I was lucky that my parents really let me do that andan as I got older I still made stuff you know, home to core a little bits and crafts and things and then, um later in life I started scrapbooking and I call that my gateway drug into art and crafts and it really there's just something about that that I loved and I was always the one who took the really weird stuff tha scrapbooking events and wood melt cran on my layouts and everybody freaked out because it wasn't archival safe but for me it was just a way another way to play and make art and do things and so I just had done that for a long time, and just I kind of grew up that way, but I didn't take art as a class, I never took art as, um, something that could be a job, and I just always did it as a hobby and ended up with a job in the craft industry on the marketing side and realized people actually do this for a living and then kind of just really decided to take it on wholeheartedly, and now I just get to play, and what was really fun about my corporate job was I had a lot of opportunities to work with paint companies and urine companies and just try out products and learn that way. I learned more from the makers of the products than I did from, like, taking art classes and things like that, I got to learn right from them about how they make their products and what you should do with them and stuff like that. So I had a head of I'd back doorway into industry, but I've just always been a maker. I think it hurt. Following up on that question a little bit, one of our online audience members is asking before, usually start with the project, do you picture it? Or do you just go about doing what you feel like? And it just kind of starts doing it or usually, I start if I start with the plan and never goes to play in, so I tend to not start the plan just because I don't wantto and then it turns out as good as I think it's going to when I start with plans, so usually I'll go into it with a vague idea. Um, but a lot of times, some of my favorite things was just it started out, I threw some paint on the canvas or I started with the project and just kind of watched it evolve that was always that's always fun for me is it's almost like opening a president, you don't know how it's going to turn out in the end something like this. I knew I was going to a shadow box, but as I worked on it, it was kind of I watched it evolve and how it turned out at the end and I was really just playing when I built this class and experimenting and having fun, so I knew I wanted take it and do something other than a serving tray with it, but I was insurance as I kept going, I watched it evolve that way, but if I if I have a plan, I'm always sad because it doesn't go quite the way that I think it's going to go, I'm gonna clean up my space here a little bit. Some of those deco pies out of the way, and I'm gonna wipe my hands off really good, so that when we do the paper, clay, I don't get stuff all over it. I'm just gonna sit the box of the side right now to kind of dry the first layer. We're going to go back in and add some other colors and paint to it after we do the paper clay. But I want to give the first coat a nice chance toe drive before we add other colors on top of it.