Lessons

Lesson Info

Q&A

um you know I actually I'd like to kick it off with one question you know you listed a bunch of things that you'd like us to get can you kind of walk us through what some of this stuff is you've got a lot of it's sitting right in front of my d'oh why don't I walk you through the the set that uh daniel smelt have may put together for everybody in the class okay so this is well I have one here but this is the board that my friend and I made for everybody in the class and it's black gate aboard and what we did was we laminated it was something so that we didn't have to spray it with acrylic and then we put a gorilla tape around the edge like I said to make sure that nobody got cut and the gorilla tape also has attacked to it so that when you want to lift up the board on your table and prop it up with something it won't slide very easily my board slides so we made these for everybody then the next thing is to have your paper and we got enough paper for people to paint for five weeks which ...

I went ahead and cut into him a quarter sheets this is a quarter sheet size it's fifteen by eleven it's actually about eleven and a quarter I think the sheets work out to be about twenty two and a half and it it'll fit fine on that board that we cut and when you want to paint wedding toe wet you went both sides of the paper and actually if you wet both sides of the paper and get really good and soaking wet it will stick to the board for a long time without buckling and you don't even need to staple it and you can paint on it that way for quite a long time but then eventually it'll start to dry and it drives along the edges first so eventually you're gonna want to staple it down while it's wet so we got lots of paper then they were kind enough I requested this this is a paper sampler and it's all different kinds the paper because I wanted everybody to have a chance to try a bunch of different kinds so they could figure out what they liked the best yes creek now I got a question about that so you you talk about people in the class there they're going to people in the live class we painted with materials next week and we're gonna put out a list of all this online for people to bail purchase and get things ready for next week is that paper stamp or something that people will be able to order or is that something so that is something that dale smith sells for general purpose now you'll have tio young the paper sampler package will come and full twenty to buy thirty and sheets it won't come this small this has been cut down so I don't don't want to mislead anybody there so but this is great because he's there's rough in here they're smooth there's thie artist cold press that I love so much there's lots of fiber yano and there's even something there's even a piece of you po in here for people to see how the u po paints the smooth paper I don't know I don't know if you can see the shine on it but that's the u po paper there so and I have numbered for the people in the class I numbered the sheets with the number that corresponds to the piece of paper so that when you pick up sheet eight oh that's sheet ate you look down oh that's far beyond the artistic oh extra white hundred forty pounds so that's your paper so there's some people online thing well daniel smith have the supply list or we need to specify alden fell the individual components they have they this comes their package they're talking about everything I think they're talking about all the components that were o now so we're going to put together a shopping list for this yes and maybe we'll contact some of it down smith and see if we can make it easier for people to order in bulk if they want teo but but that we're going to send a follow up email with all the stuff that you've talked about yes okay group I can so I already have the list because I had to supply it to daniel smith so I'll just send it on to you now this is a tape that a lot kind of tape that a lot of artists when they have a soaking wet piece of paper and they want to stretch it on their board they'll tape it down with this kind of tape this is the kind of tape that you use like a wet sponge and you wet this portion of it it's gummed and what you do is you tape it down over the edge of your paper just like this and it sticks to your board and it holds your paper in place sometimes it's probably a good idea to still put a few staples in it just to make sure it doesn't slip uh you once your paper dries you have to wear this again to get it up so you have to be pretty careful cause you don't wantto hurtyou your paper but the other thing is is that if if it's been taped there and you're going to mad it it's going to be behind the matte anyway so even if you do lift up some of your paper it's not the end of the world it probably won't show so they supplied this here's a small travel palette that that we requested one and I open it can I open this up these are great especially if you want to paint outside if I can open it up and go very inexpensive you khun slip your thumb and hold your palette just like this and their yield there a lot of videos out there where artists a painting like in florence italy or in venice venice is um huge destination spot and there standing there and they've got their little wooden easel and they're painting on their easel and they're holding their little travel palate and some of them even tilted you know up like this and I mean it's your your pal it becomes part of your brush you're not going to a separate place and coming over here it's just he's a great then these are all the paints these air you're cool warm and opaque yellow's cool warm and a pick reds cool warm and opaque blues the thing about this primary triad is that basically any color can be made from these three colors I don't know if you were taught color wheels growing up in school like I was but but red yellow blue are your basic primaries now I chose warm and cool versions of these because a painter needs both but there is a neutral ah set of primaries and we'll go into that next week because I'm actually going to do some color wheel demonstrations were actually going to paint a color wheel next week to so ah and I'll be bringing supplies for you in the class to so that you don't have to draw it you can just go right in and painted so these are the paints they provided daniel smith has come out with this new tool their own line I think it's new of uh miss kit masking fluid and it's great because it has the's little nibs that you put on and the nibs are thick and thin so you can put on a very very thin beat of masking tape and then a masking fluid and then you take that nip off and you can put on another name and get a thicker bead so this is a great tool really great tool I forgot the brushes there it almost more important than anything can't paint on that brush is okay I lost the protector on the trigger there go okay this is your skinny rigor brush that's the one that you what you do with the rigor see here's my rigor what you do with the rigor is you hold it up near the tip and you put it on your paper you know what I'm going to show you cool that's the whole point of having this set up I've been hoping you're gonna paint something for us okay you put the rigor on the paper and you get these kinds of things can you see how that can you see that at all yeah holding up for us is great see how that will give you the sort of tree branches and tree limbs and things like that in a very sort of representational way and it's a it's a great brush I use a rigor a lot so I thought it was essential to have it in our kit here so that's a rigger this is your number eight round thes watercolor these daniel smith watercolor brush is great by the way I loved them this is a number eight round and it's for smaller areas you're number twelve round is a good sized brush you can do a lot with this brush that painter ted not all that I mentioned to you before uses one brush and one brush only he's is a number sixteen kalinsky kalinsky kolinsky sable doesn't use any other brush he doesn't use a rigor he uses nothing because you know he's the one who does the portrait and he does everything with the number sixteen sable brush because it comes to an amazing point so you can get a pretty fine line but you can also press it into the paper and get a large round dot it also holds an amazing amount of paper he could do a half sheet watercolor and with just one load of the brush get the entire upper left corner painted with one load of the brush so a good sized brush is really essential and I recommended to everybody the other thing always use the biggest brush you can for the area that you're painting if you're going to paint a six inch area use the biggest brush you can in that area that you can still maintain control of because it just your painting goes faster and believe me there are times when you really want it to go faster because you need to get to another area before it dries and it's just a good good thing too dio makes you work more efficiently and then this is the number the one inch flat this is good for your washes and things so next week when we start doing flat water ah we start to wet an area and drop in paint will wet the area with the flat will probably do the color wheel with the flat will do the value scale with the flat uh these air good for geometric shapes you want to paint a rectangle you don't use this brush you use this brush this is the scrubber brush can you see this um I'm doing that right I'm going in the wrong direction it has short wiry bristle hairs on the end of it this allows you to go in I'll show you this allows you to go into an area of your painting that's dry needs to be dry can you see that very cool so it's not it is a racing it or just softening it it's softening it and lifting it off the surface of the paper the brush doesn't hold anything needs to be nice and wet these come in various sizes but I find that I used this size the most so that's the size that I asked to be in the kid it comes in a much larger size comes in that size and it comes in a much smaller sides and the other sizes you're showing us they're from your own personal these air from my own personal not right not from the list you're using yeah no no no there's only one scrubber bush in the in the list do you think for highlights what what what you can you use it for highlights but you don't use it for anything that needs to be hard edged if you want a hard edged highlight the best thing to do is to cut a stencil or to even take a piece of tape like masking tape or something like that and put it down on the painting and cut out and then um you could get a nice crisp bench but I don't know if you could see that this edges soft it's a softer can you see see how the edges soft this works pretty well thiss does camera seems be focused right on the death so it's not really focusing but that were pretty what works pretty well you know it's our it's our twenty first century you know angled mirrors we'll figure out how it works as we go along and you know what those angled mirrors they're great but the people sitting in the back of the room can't see anything it's ah I I mean I love them but yeah if you get there late you're kind of a look okay just little pencil sharpeners and this is a two b pencil he's a great pencils and then the other thing they supplied and you can use what I use or anything but I wanted this for this class because this is a water container that collapses and then when you open it up it stands up on your table and it has pockets for your brushes so it'll be easy for people painting in the class to have their water right here and the brushes right here all contained in one spot and uh I'm really grateful they agreed to contribute thes cause I think these air great that way should put a disclaimer here basically we're putting this class together in mali start making a list of everything that she needed to have for the for the live seattle audience trail to paint um and we put out an e mail to dale smith and just because they're about a mile up the road from us the graciously agreed to basically provide enough materials for the people in this in the seattle audience and unfortunately focus those people those seats were already taken so if you're in seattle and go you know those seats really filled up for this claps yeah we needed to make sure that that people in those seats could be here every friday and be part of the audience on a regular basis and so we had to sort of pre pre select that so that's it that's the kid oh one more thing a kneaded eraser very important needed a racers do not mara the paper at all and they don't leave a residue on the paper and they're just great and the person daniel smith I ordered these from these this stuff from remembered this and that's what I mean about everybody there knowing what they're doing um because I forgot to put it on the list got him anyway so that's it that's it for the supplies that'll get you started that's a lot of that's a lot of stuff it is it is and folks we're going toe so I actually seeing this stuff for the first time there's a really cool that's like christmas for the people who came in yeah no it is definitely how much how much does all this cost um it depends I mean like like you don't need this you can use this you don't need the best brushes in the world I mean all of this stuff is top of the line stuff okay um paper don't scrimp but I would say all of this stuff and this wood will get you through well the paint will last a long time the mist the masking fluid blast yield brushes the last forever I mean all of this stuff would be probably between one twenty five and one fifty something like that but if you didn't buy this and you didn't buy this and you've got some other you know you could probably I said in the first class at around one hundred dollars I would say between one hundred one hundred twenty you can get all of this and be not hampered by your supplies ok so so tell you what so after after class today you and I can sit down we will create a list will will call down smith see if they could put a kid together whatever it takes and we'll put on e mail to everyone so that we can have a list of the absolute minimum that they should have available nor be able to participate in the full course and then all the other cool stuff like like for example the really cool water container isn't a required thing to be able to right what is it because you could show yours you're using you know my cd cover you use a seedy cover turned upside down with water and this used to have yogurt in it so so we've got the really the high class and then we've got the uh just kind so basically spend the money on paper spend the money in pigment right and get a good suit and get a decent break yeah I mean if you'd like sometimes you can buy a brush that when you wet it like this and then you go like this it doesn't doesn't bounce back see how this bounces back can I mean it's still a nice soft brush but it bounces back I've had brushes where I go like this and and when I take my finger off the brush just stays just like that it's like assuming brush sumi brushes work like that and that made me crazy I could not I could not paint with that brush so I just tossed it I mean there was just no reason to keep it and one thing about masking fluid I want to let you know you can put masking fluid on in in various ways you can have a a tool like this I use a quill pen because you can just dip it right in you get a very fine line the whiskers on the cat at the very beginning I used to quill pen to put the miss king a masking fluid down I don't I always want to call it miss kit for some reason you can also use a brush and but if you leave it in the brush too long and you don't wash it soon enough it'll ruin your brush so if you do use a brush just get some really cheap brushes somewhere and use those because chances are over time you'll be doing something you'll forget about it you'll go to pick it up it'll be hard as a rock and that won't that won't work so I have found that you can clean the brush is pretty well though with this thing called goo gone it's a product that you can buy and I just decided to try it one day and it worked great I had to work at it I really had to work at it but all the miskin came out and I was able to you know resurrect the brush so there are fixes for just about everything even though people say they're no fixes in watercolor and I mean I saw a woman at the I'm a member of both the northwest watercolor society and thie eastside association of fine arts matter fact I just designed the eastside association of fine arts website so anybody is interested in joining that organization gold go to their website it's called a fa dot or g e a f a dot org's um I'm a woman that I I knew from my d n lemley paint teacher used to paint and study with d n for years and she was a magnificent watercolorist I mean just oh I was just aspired to paint like her like it was just unbelievable and in the last two shows that have been given in the seattle area she had two entries both juried in they were both oils and so I saw a thief a meeting and I said marla what you're not I don't see any water colors she said oh I stopped painting in watercolors and I said why and she said she leaned down she didn't want anybody to hear she leaned down and she said oils are so much easier but you know what I'm here to say that if I can learn it anybody can learn it and that no matter what you do in it you can fix it there are ways to fix it so if watercolor if looking and staring at a watercolor is what you like to do pick up that medium because oils just don't do it for me and I like him but you know they just I don't know they don't float my boat all right well I appreciate so I kind of dominated the q and a portion to start with just to go over all the materials I know that david has got a pile of questions for you so great at about twenty minutes left well let's get to some of the questions okay uh first question was if you could define glazing okay glazing is where when I talked about that painting before that had thea striped the purple striped wallpaper glazing is where you take I'll just do one you know what give me two seconds to get this stuff out of the way izing is where you take a light thin wash of a color and put it on top of something that's already been painted so so something that is wet no so the goods drone it's got to be absolutely dry bone dry now glazing you should probably get a bigger brush I use when you get to glazing I mean I didn't even start blazing until I've been painting for I don't know a while but I use one of these big squirrel brushes it's because they have very very fine very soft hairs and when you glaze with it I don't know if you can see how how soft that is but I'm just going to take a color here this is called palate juice over here and because I'm such a clean orderly person I would get rid of my palit juice at the end of every class until I realized it was probably throwing away about five dollars worth of pain and so really and truly some artists covet their palate juice and use it in their shadows because it's got a bunch of different colors in it but glazing would be let me do it down here that's a glaze okay see what it does to the paint yes now let's do a blue glaze it seems to have more of an effect on the the lighter a color it is that it's going unnecessarily well yes okay see you don't do a dark color I mean if you're gonna use a really dark color then you're not glazing glazing is it's like glass it's like it's a glass term and it's about how you cool something down or warm something up but maintaining the height of its transparency like glass that's glazing um will you be talking about pricing uh for selling artwork alright anything about thie profession of being an artist well I certainly will ask answer questions about all of that but since this is a beginning class I didn't I didn't plan on making that a part of the actual regular presentation or the demonstrations or anything like that but certainly if anybody has a question I'll answer to the best of my knowledge I really have only been selling for a few years myself and pricing is all over the place it depends on whether you have a name or not I I don't have the name in the artistic community that my teacher dan lynley does and I will tell you one thing water two colors don't get the respect in the economic world that oil paints too deion is a master of both oils and watercolors she paints in both mediums and I you know her her oil paintings are about the best I've ever seen she'll do a twelve inch square oil painting and get twelve hundred and fifty dollars for it she'll do a full sheet watercolor and get a thousand so it's you know it's just I don't I don't know why that is especially because it is in many respects a more difficult medium to most people it it may stem from the fact that at one point in time watercolors were not archival and not light fast the way that oil paints have always been and but they are now for the most part I mean you know your paper is archival your paints or archival they have a uh daniel smith does a great job on their website by the way of giving the light fastness of all their paints and so there's such a thing it's called fugitive paints and I'm actually teaching next week's class already but fugitive paints will fade over time because of their exposure to light and so it's as if you really know you want your painting you know you love it and you want it to last into posterity you would pay attention to stuff like that um you mentioned sprinkling salt on the paintings what does that do it creates that texture that mottled texture and do you remember the painting of the sunflowers up front and all the bottom had modeled texture in it down there what salt does you put it on the paper at just the right point did you put her on too soon it it it won't work a swell but if you wait until the xin is just about to leave the paper and you throw salt on it it the salt soaks up the paint in a little area around each crystal so you get a mottled effect and we're going to be doing that that last week it's where we're going to be doing a lot of these techniques were going to be throwing salt we're going to be using masking fluid we're going to be doing other techniques putting uh dropping water on wet paint to create controlled blooms you can even use alcohol you khun drop alcohol into paint and that does some very interesting things you khun take saran paper saran wrap and crinkle it up and put it down in your painting and let it sit there for a little while for long enough for the paint to start drawing and then you lift it off and you've got this amazing texture on your paper these air what I called techniques my teacher dan lemley she's not a technique painter she doesn't do any of this stuff she studied with the famous russian artist named sergei baumgarten and she's she's a complete purest she hardly even uses masking fluid she's the one who just puts like a fuse key places all the rest of her paintings just paint on paper um but others use thes techniques very effectively and I like the techniques because I love the variation that they that they can give you on your painting um could you talk about how you stretch paper yeah well what I do is I take a sheet of paper and I use this big fat brush loaded with pure absolute clean water and I go back and forth back and forth and I get it soaking wet on one side then I turn it over and I get it soaking wet on the other side then I turned it over I put more water on it and I stroke it again and you keep wedding it until the piece of paper lies down on your board and has no bubbles in it anywhere you keep wedding it until your paper is absolutely flat on the board with no bubbles no wrinkles no nothing that's when it's soaked enough that's when it's soaked enough and the paper will has been stretched out because of the amount of water in it and then at that point is when I usually go in and staple it along the edges so that when it starts to dry and the paper contracts the paper doesn't buckle when you paint on it again now somebody asked in the last class and I have felt bad about this ever since because when they ask the question I didn't realize what they were asking I thought they were saying are you going to recommend some blog's blogs but what they were saying is are you going to recommend some blocks and the watercolor paper comes in blocks as well and fabbiano I know does blocks and artist does blocks and what that is is it's sort of pre stretched paper that's laid down in sheets and then the edges are sealed with an adhesive so that it's absolutely perfectly flat which means that you can paint on it without stretching it but the problem is you can't wet the back side of the paper so if you really want a soaking what's sheet of paper because you wanted to stay wet for a long time because you've got a lot of work that you want to do due on it while it's what it's you can't get to it and now you can take it off the block you can cut it off with a razor and then work with it that way I I personally just like I just like the feel of the paper I like the way it smells I like that I like the dekel dedge I mean there's just there's just nothing like a good clean white sheet of watercolor paper to me so I don't use the blocks I and and the block I did use once I I didn't much like the way it painted it didn't paint the same to me now do you staple the paper to the gator board yep yep now make sure you get a piece of gator board that that's thick enough I got one that wasn't once and I used to long staples and I did it on top of my kitchen counter and that was a mistake didn't work too well but yeah you just staple it right and you get a state a good utility staple gun one of those one of those little guys that's not going to do it but you get a good utility staple gun with staples just you know a sixteenth of an inch shallower than your gator board and just staple it right down and you put your stables a couple of inches apart two two and a half inches apart because if you put one here and one there it'll buckle in the middle so you pretty much staple all the way along the edge now do you mask before you soak in stretch or well normally if you're going to use masking fluid you would mask it after you've soaked it stretched it and let it get completely dry um normally because you don't it's it's the paper underneath getting wet I I don't know I just never masked before I wet paper okay what do you what did you use to laminate uh the blackboards just some kind of matt lamb I don't even know what it was we didn't do it by hand we used a machine okay and how do we know which paints are stayner's how do you choose your stayner's well you'd at where wherever you buy your pains they'll anybody that you buy your paints from will know that but there's a uh a term called they low blue and they lo green those they low colors I mentioned earlier in the banter our stayner's and you can you can pretty much find that out any catalogue should be able to would be able to tell you but that they low colors or stayner's I can think of I don't know what their windsor colors windsor red wins or blue wins or yellow some of those air stayner's there are several of them out there they're not hugely common but but it's important to have one or two of them on your palate um when you're when you set up your your water dish teo to use one for cool colors one for warm does it matter if you mix the colors no it doesn't matter if you mix your colors but I always have a second dish here so that if this water gets dirty and like if you use stay low in the beginning of your process this water will get get turned tail oh blue just right away so if you want it make sure that you have a clean brush say you're going to lay yellow next to it then you rents it first in here and get most of the pigment out in the big container and then you run over to your little one that is clean and that way you always will be able to have an ability to get back to a pretty clean brush so that's why he's two containers and I would suggest the students in the class to come in with a yogurt container or something next week themselves if they don't want to have to because you don't want to have to especially in the class get up I have to go get clean water um see someone asks back when you were talking about printing out a photo do you print it you're you're printing it directly from photo ship shop under your paper or yeah I think that's what I usually do I could I go out and I get that man I don't like glossy I don't like glossy paper so I go out and I get man reproduction paper photo reproduction paper and just run it through my inkjet and I'm lucky I've got a big inch it I have a twelve by eighteen it'll print up to a twelve eight tin sheet you know as a graphic designer that was good for me to get that um but it doesn't matter because if you're going to grit it the way I do it you can print it out on an eight by ten or eight and a half by eleven put your grid down and then transfer your drawing by putting the grid on your paper so what you do is you grid you've got your sheet of paper or your image size and that's the format you grid in threes that's the rule of thirds and what they what they say can you see that yeah you can see that what they say is for good composition you're your areas of interest should be in these areas now this is if you're going to be you printed out a photo and then you are copying over the image right but um one of the questions was could you print out a photo directly onto watercolor painter in the paper and then well uh that was a question that we asked earlier because I you know I tried to print out big black stripes that we're going to do paint tests with next week on watercolor paper using my ancient in the minute I ran the wet brush over the inn chet ain't just blurred right out so no that doesn't work on an ink jet but somebody wrote in and it's somebody answered online that it lasers yeah we heard from people online that laser printers were lasers work fine yes correct so for next week we're going to sending everybody pdf ce yes with with templates that they're going to painting on for next week's exercises um that's be free to everyone whether they're where they pay for the downloads or not right and that will be posted a few days before the class so the night we'll print that directly on there on their paper so they'll just need to kind of take that pdf look at it and kind of trace out that on to mark our paper well I I'm actually I actually did and I did print them for everybody is going to be in the life class I did leinart on the color wheel and I actually labelled the inside of the color wheel with red you know like our for read y for yellow and then I took the color wheel that I had painted and I created outlines around the painted areas that I had painted and then I'm put those in the file very light like a just a ten or fifteen percent gray and I've run those out on watercolor paper on my ancient and I took one and I tried to paint in it and because they're painting inside the lines and the lines are so thin and so faint and don't have much ink on them they'll be able to do their color wheel without having to waste time in class drawing all of that stuff so I did that and I'm going to be supplying that to the class and that will also be in the pdf so people want to try it fantastic and then folks this is going to be in an email that we'll be sending out next week to everybody that isn't rolled um I suspect we'll probably have the shopping list figured out and sent people probably saturday sunday or monday I can give you the file on the shopping list before I leave here today and we can we conclude that the pdf is well for next week great I have that already how much time ahead of time before you start painting do you wet your paper how long does it usually take the paper to dry it can take all night it depends on the climate you live in you know where my son is in austin texas it would probably take twelve hours but up here it would probably take twenty four it depends on the climate and depends on the temperature depends on how wet you got it before you stapled it down um but you should plan on it taking quite a while uh most of the paintings when I when I start a painting and I really want to stretch it first and um paint wedding toe wet I I soak it stretch it stable it and start painting right away I don't let it dry at all because I'm looking for that wedding went look and usually when you do an under painting you're under paintings are wet on wet you don't you very rarely go in and do an under painting that has hard chris blind so you're looking for the paint to bleed and let me I'll show you what I'm talking about the paint to bleed now this is the back side of the sheets so it has a little more twos to it that's one thing else um there's usually two sides to a sheet of paper one side is a little bit smoother than the other there's no right or wrong side there's just two smoother side and a rougher side and some people paint on the rougher side because that's what they like to do uh should they have a a piece of paper wet and stretched before next week's class I think that's a good idea I do because if we paint went into wet now let me caveat here we're not going to be painting a tree on a landscape with clouds in the sky were doing exercises we're going to do a five point value scale we're going to do a color wheel uh we're going to paint what I call my mickey mouse ears which is two dabs of color that you create a channel between and let the paint mix in together in the bottom portion so it looks like really around face with mickey mouse ears on we're going to be doing exercises next week because as craig so aptly said once you have to learn the scales before you can play the concerto oh yeah and so we're learning that this class is about scales okay what I'm hoping people will do is experiment do the end during the week and take chances on their own I'm also hoping people will take pictures or scan and what they do and send it in ahead of time because in the band her up front I could take a look at some of this stuff and say oh very cool you're a natural born painter or what have you you know I think that would be fun a lot of fun actually uh is there a substitute for gator board some people whose masonite um some people use something called central but that's even more explain expensive most everybody I know uses gator board it might be a little bit expensive but you use the board over and over and over and it's lightweight also so I have a follow up for that because the gator board is the one thing that you've provided to the students here that's not on your shopping list right I did not put that on the shopping list what what what is that what people who are at home you need to do if they don't want it if they don't want to go through the trouble of laminating their own border putting something together just can you make sure we include in the list the thing that they need to buy well some people can paint on foam core but you can't staple it gaeta board is the one thing out there that's light weight affordable and that you can staple on and that's why I find it pretty helpful so this is just can we have the camera yeah this's just paint dropped in on a wet a wet surface and I started talking in between so the surface isn't even a sweat as I wanted it to be but these are the kinds of things that will happen on wet paper and when these run together they'll mix on the paper and create interesting colors on the paper that still maintain their vibrancy that don't necessarily stay the vibrancy doesn't stay when you mix a lot of colors on your palette uh there are painters out there who don't ever mix cars on their palate and ah there's one here in kirkland washington named elizabeth kincaid but I mean the patient she has to paint her paintings is unbelievable but their luminous I I can't even describe them any other way than to say there absolutely luminous paintings but she's spends hours on them because she masks everything and she does thie entire painting in layers of big washes of flat color and she never uses ah brush that she used with blue she never sticks that blue brush in any other color but that blue and she uses a separate enamel tray for every color so that they don't even mix on her palate I mean it's it's that's methodical yeah yeah it's an amazing way to paint but I I wish you could see her work I mean she's elizabeth kincaid I should have put her name on there what size is your gator board the one that you're using this one right here um I think it's about fifteen by twenty or something like that the ones that I prepared for the class are slightly different because we wanted to get economical cuts out of the sheet well this isn't so they don't remember my paper it's like yeah it's fourteen by like twenty one twenty one and a half this was just an extra sheet of gate aboard lying around that I trimmed down but these that we made you want to make sure that you you have a good inch and a half or two inches around the size of paper that you're going to be working on we've got someone in the u k who has never heard of what gator board is is there a international equivalent for what you might call it I don't I have no idea I'm sorry I have no idea not a clue I just have always called it gate aboard you can get it in white and black most people use white I don't like the white because it soaks up the paint and then eventually you have this horribly messy edge all around because you've been painting off your paper in the paints soaks into the gate aboard and most people the reason it soaks into the gate aboard because nobody coats the white you know you don't have to there's no pigment in the in the white that's going to bleed back on to your sheet so you don't have to coat it but that creates just a mess around the edge of the board and then that drives me crazy and where do you usually get that from art supply stores or art supply stores sell gate a board and you know people who yeah supply sign shops and you know places like that suppliers I would just you know check on search gate aboard online I mean you you're going to find lots of places out there there's a place called doc you mounts docu mou nt s they're down and I think they're in portland and uh they do all kinds of art supplies first for uh artists that aren't paint and brush related they do other stuff so I've got people saying that they think it's polystyrene foam core phone cords different fun corps is different and the one of the main reasons I don't like foam core is that it bends gator board is flat and foam corp will bend and from cars justice it's expensive in the thickness that you need as as gaeta board is you can use it you can but I don't like it because there times when you need your painting to be absolute lee latte and I've never gotten a piece of foam core yet that wasn't bowed a little bit and if you paint on a bough and your painting wedding toe wet all of that paint is going to just it's goingto lou let's just run downhill so you need a you need a flat surface or I mean I'm not saying you always paint flat because some people paint like this and you till like I'm goingto another thing that I want to suggest to the students in the class brings something that you can lift your board upon underneath because we're going to be doing great it washes and grated washes work best when the board is tilted so that the water runs down you get a beat of paint along the bottom line and it needs so we need something I mean I'm sure we could just get a coffee cup from the kitchen or something if we had to but we'll need something to hold the boards up