Hi, it's Deb Watson again. Whether you're a beginner or a master, I think background washes are essential to watercolor painting. First, you'll see the background basics. How to apply a wash of smooth color without brush strokes. Then we're going to use those basics to do a dark wash behind our lemons. First, comes materials. Good watercolor paper is essential for a beautiful wash. Soft wash brushes like the black oval or the flat hake or hockey can also help. In order to do a flat wash, you need to mix up way more paint than you think you're going to need. The easiest way to get thick paint is to get it right from the tube. For this 8x10, I'm going to put in about that much paint. You notice I'm mixing this up in a plastic bowl. That way it'll hold the paint and I can keep it for later. Now to mix up paint, you want a stiff brush. I don't want any lumps. If you're unsure whether you have enough paint or the right color, you can use a piece of scrap paper to test this and keep adding paint until you get it exactly the way you want it. I'm going to take my wash brush and load it up with the paint, nice and drippy. I've got a lot of paint and a lot of water. Starting at the top, I'm going to bring it straight across. Load up again, come straight across and repeat. Now you can increase your chances of having a smooth wash if you make your paper a little bit tilted. In which case you can see there's kind of a bead of water or bead of liquid paint going down. This lets gravity help you blend to create that smooth, flat wash. You want it wet enough that you have that bead of paint. Now what if you say, oh I missed this up here. I should go back up. No. You don't want to go back into any wash. You want to leave it. If you go back into the wash, it's likely you're going to mess it up. So just work from top to bottom or from one side to the other without going back into it. If you're working on a board, you can tilt it back and forth a little bit if you want to help it blend. But if you have excess paint on the side, you're going to want to wipe that up because it's likely that that as the paper dries might get wicked back in and create a bloom. You'll also notice that I didn't keep dipping into my water. I stuck to the paint I mixed up for my wash. Now your backgrounds will need to go around a subject. Let's look at how to do that with a dark wash. This time I'm going to wet the paper first. I want my background colors to mix on the paper. So I slop on some of my orange. Then I turn the paper so I can work from one side to the other. This wash brush has a good point and I'm trying to be very careful as I go around the limits. I don't outline them before I start. I just work on the edges as I work the wash around. I tilt the paper to keep the paint moving down in the direction I'm painting. For the tiny detail, I'm also using a small round brush. But using a large brush means fewer brush strokes and a smoother wash. Then wipe the edges and because I taped this paper, it's buckling a bit. So I tilt the board to help smooth that out. For another video on dark washes, please see the watercolor card, how to spatter and erase. For a mixed wash, visit my popular Pinecon lesson. DevWatson.org has lots of beginner lessons and in 2021, I'll be posting some master class lessons. Thanks for watching and visit today.