Next class now that we've looked at what layering means, and what glazing is, it brings us to transparency. Now we know that what color is transparent, we know we can see through it. We can say layers below the top layer, and we can see the texture of the paper. But what does that mean in the context of painting? Right? What that means is that with one color of paint, we can actually create multiple tints and tones, just by using one pigment, it's gonna form the basis for our final project as well.

So this is really important because a lot of beginners in class asked me there's no white you haven't given me any white. How do I lighten the color? Right, so we're going to look at that now. We're on to page two of our worksheet. So The idea of transparency with watercolors is that you can start with a wash of color that's got a lot of paint and a small amount of water. And that will give you a really dark valley value of that color.

If you add some water, you're changing the ratio of water to paint and you add a little bit more water to it, then it lightens the value of the color, you add a bit more water. And again, let's see if I can get this right. It lightens the value of the color and so with just one color of paint, you can get an endless variety of tints and tones. Now it is practice knowing how much water you need to add to get that ratio just right So if you had a bit of difficulty with the previous class, with maybe your first layer went down way too dark, and you couldn't get the second layer show up, then this will really help with that. Right. So when you're mixing a color, you need to be aware, are you aiming for this one, or this one, or this one?

Right, if you're wanting to put down a base layer to glaze over the top of, you don't want to use this color. Because anything that you try and glazed over the top of that is just not going to show up. So you need to be aware of this. Now we can also join those all together to make a graduated wash and this is worth practicing. This is something that you'll find in any watercolor fundamentals class. So we start with with really dark and we add some water to it.

Lighten lighting it up. There's lots of different ways that you can do this. Some are more foolproof than others like tinting the page as you go. As I said, it's it's sort of practice as to how much water you need to add to get the ratio just right. And that's going to be different with each color. Some pigments are really strong, others lighten up really fast.

When you're doing this, don't do it with yellow, pick a green or a blue something that you can get a really thick, dark color when you mix it really thick. If you're watching this class, and this is new to you, do yourself a favor and in your sketchbook pick a color picker green pick your favorite color and try and mix at least three or four different tonal values with the same color. This is this is a thick wash and this is a thin wash. So this has a lot of paint in it to water and this is mostly water are going to feel in our pyramid here. And with that color, so You can actually do it in your palette on your plate or whatever is you can mix a thick wash, mix, medium wash, mix a light wash, and mix a really light wash so that we can fill in each of these sections in our pyramid.

And you don't have to just eyeball it and just hope that it's right, you know, grab a scrap piece of paper and test them out beforehand to make sure that they are the color that you want, right. So I've got 123 and four so that I can complete them. Right when we do our turtle exercise when we're going to be doing a similar thing we will be missing mixing for washes of the same color. So that's why we're practicing this now. So start off with I'm going to paint inside my pencil lines so that I can erase them. And remember, if you have two wet layers that touch each other, they're going to bleed together.

That's a fundamental of watercolor. So if we leave a tiny gap Then I could get away with doing this quite quickly without having to wait for layers to dry in between. It's winter here at the moment. So normally things dry almost as I paint them on the page. And with this way that's taking a bit longer. And you notice with an area like this, I'm keeping the edges wet as I bring it down.

I'm not just outlining the whole shape, and then coloring it in like we sort of do with textures. Because you will end up with a layer you form a layer around the edge that will dry before you get back to it. Okay, is Elijah to take this as an opportunity to to practice your precision? All right, really take your time to try and concentrate on the edges of your Work, keep your if you if you feel like you lack brush control, then try and hold your brush closer to the tip. Okay and work with in a vertical manner. If you are a really loose person, it's very hard to control the tip when you're holding it all the way back here, okay, once again 45 degree angle fulfilling in areas, but fairly upright for outlining and precision work.

And if you put one of these layers down and go, Oh, it's too light or it's too dark. That's okay, you can rectify that by doing a bit of mixing on the page. I like to work from one side to the next, try and keep everything wet as I move along so that it doesn't dry and get patchy. And you'll see that I don't have huge amounts of paint flooding across the page. I'm working relatively dry and I've got a small brush. So I'm controlling the flow of paint.

So these are gradients. If we want to compare that to glazing, what we can do here is we can actually do the whole area in our number one in our lightest color, and this is going to lead us into negative painting, laying down a flat wash, even color over the whole area. And we can let that dry. So here we are. Here we've mixed four different gradients of the same color and we've liked them. We've left a gap just to expedite the process.

But you can say That you get a fairly similar result from glazing them. Apart from the fact I haven't left a gap here, you saw that I layered the entire area with the lightest color. And then I left this and then washed over the entire area with the second color, and so on. And so there's actually four layers. In this bottom area, these colors look a little different because this one is still wet. But I feel like it's really down to personal preference as to the way that you enjoy working.

I tend to work in less layers and I mix the color that I need, whereas other artists prefer to work with lots of thin layers building up to the color that they need. So there's two different techniques for you to use and to decide what works for you.