Hello everyone, today I'm just going to be going over my process for this watercolor piece. It was a draw this in your style of Lord Gris piece on Instagram. I'll link the piece below. It was a draw this in their style competition or yeah it was a competition. I think I did it after the competition, but it doesn't even matter. I started this piece very soon after the news about the artist Quenese passing. So I included the stars and stuff instead of the frogs just in her memory even though I was never one that commented and was all over her art, but I did follow her for quite a long time. I don't think quite back to like the Deviant Art Days, but I followed her on Instagram on Twitter and on YouTube after a while. Quenese animation night light, so obviously an animation popped up and I was like oh nice. So that was the first, not the first time I'd ever seen her stuff, but it was the first time I ever really got into it. At first I thought I was going to talk more about her in this video, but because I wasn't as big of a fan to some people where it felt rude almost maybe. I don't even know. This piece I decided to incorporate a little bit of the things she like just as any kind of remembrance. So to get back to the art, I use a Graph Gear 500 Graphic Architect pencil to sketch. It's my favorite pencil by far. It's got like a nice weight to it on the end and it's kind of like a $10 pencil so like it's not crazy bad, but it's a little bit more expensive. I think they're pretty standard in art stores now. They're pretty easy to find and I use the .5 and I say that. So my process for doing most watercolors because I don't want to deal with all the pencil is I'll do the sketch on really bad quality sketch paper or news print or like anything that's just you just whip it out and throw it away and it does not matter. And then I use a light box to trace that and I used to use pencil to trace it onto a better piece of paper that I'm going to do the watercolor on. At this moment, my favorite paper to use is the Cancin mixed media paper. I was using their extra large size so it's like 9 by 14 paper for this one because the watercolor paper is too textured for me. I don't just use watercolor. I use pen at the end, which you'll see. The mixed media paper seems to hold up great to watercolor though. I don't use a ton of water when I watercolor ironically enough. It holds up well. It does crinkle a little bit. I should have taped this down but I didn't. I went in and added some darker shadows and then I added some blues and greens to those darker colors to try to give it that reflective vibe like I will with the lily pads later. So it looks a little funky right now if it's almost gray. For the hair, I wet it down a little bit and then mixed my orange colors and tried to spread that out around. And I wanted to try to get more of that like watercolor look for this where you place color and kind of leads and then you'll go in once it dries and add a little bit more detail. I also forgot I included the little fish from night lights because that was the thing by Queenie that inspired me most. I guess I would put it. So I went in and laid down more color and I tried to add some variation while it was still too wet but I wanted to get that bleed like I said so I kept adding more and more different colors. I need to figure out how to add more different colors without just darker orange or brighter yellow when I'm coloring an orange thing. And then I went and added some of the blue and green, blue, greeny color, whatever for the reflective against the lily pads. And then I went and did some eyebrows. The eyebrows came out a lot darker than I wanted to. I just wanted the dark brown like it was in the reference photo but it came down like black. So I stopped that. And then the shirt is also a Queenie thing with the constellation type look or the sky constellation type look. The eyes I was also trying to get some orange and blue in there. And then the stars, the stars I struggled with because I wanted them to glow like they do and all of her art but that was a very hard thing to get with watercolor. So I just laid down the yellow base and then I tried to get the lily pads that are going to be green so I tried to add a little bit of like the reflective color from the lily pads. Which I don't know if it was a good choice or not. It turned out like something. So I wanted to get some of the colors that were in the rest of it. I wanted to make a cohesive piece. And then one of my favorite things to like draw and paint is lips weirdly enough. So I went in and I added extra color to the lips. And then since the hair was dry I went in and add more of the hair detail with the darker oranges and some red. I use a variety of watercolors. I made my own palettes and I have a cheat sheet for the colors in my palettes too. Some of them are like Windsor and Newton and other ones are these Chinese watercolors. Because I found in my grandma's basement I made this palette a long time ago and I just keep using it because obviously I dumped a lot of watercolors in those. The best thing I ever did for watercoloring was get a spray bottle to like wet down the palette before you use it. It works really well to help like activate the watercolors a little bit so you don't need quite as much water when you're going in and you don't drip on your painting like I like to do. Then I went in and tried to add like an orange glow around the stars which was a bad decision but I wanted to get that like difference. It probably needs like a darker background color to get the difference that I wanted and I was trying to do it with white background which just didn't work. I went in and tried to lighten up some of the spots in the stars too which you can kind of take back some things when you do watercolor. So then for the lily pads I really wanted to get more of the watercolor look. The splotty, not splotty but the like runny color that just, it's like thinner and then it like builds up on the ends where it dries and it's just a bunch of colors like thrown in together and not specifically laid down perfectly at the beginning. So I used straight green and then I tried to add a lot of yellows and blues into the lily pads to get them to look more of like that. I went in with the darker green to add backgrounds and shadows to the or depth to the lily pads and then blues to give it more gradient type of look. I went in when it was still wet to try to get it to bleed a little bit more into the yellow I had added before and the green adding darker green while trying to get some valleys in there and then I went back and touched up the lips a little bit once they were dry because I got way too much water at them right at the beginning and going back in over the skin once it was completely dry and adding some darker shadows. And I went back in and touched up the lily pads a little bit, tried to give them a little bit more depth. I used a lot of blue here to try to mimic that they're reflecting off of a blue water surface. I wouldn't fix the teardrops a little bit, they got too blue, they should have been a little bit lighter but you can kind of backspace on the watercolor but it's not like digital art where you can literally just undo or erase perfectly so I just tried to make it work for the best I could. The brushes I use are very basic like art store brushes. A lot of them were hand me downs from my grandma's basement, she had a lot of watercolor stuff. I didn't like the amount of water in tears or whatever I had originally so I went and added a little bit more just kind of really randomly. I just went straight in with the watercolor and just placed it in there and hoped for the best and adding some dripping off the lily pads because I somehow forgot to do that. Then I went in with a... With a... Oh I can't read this. It's a Japanese like calligraphy pen that I bought at an art store a couple days before and I didn't even test if it was waterproof before I went for it so it was a good thing I did it after the fact, after the piece was dry and then I used a brown micron pen for the eyes and the eyelashes and stuff because I didn't want to use solid black on those like I was using for the rest of it. One of my favorite parts of watercolor is actually going in at the end and like inking it because it's just all of a sudden it like comes together in ways you didn't know it was going to because the watercolor I can't get the watercolor to have quite enough definition for me or else I can't get a can't get watercolor to have enough contrast for me so adding the black inks at the end just make everything pop how I want it to. This pen had a one of those weird like felty tips which kind of gives you a little bit of line with line variation which was something I hadn't planned on incorporating in this piece I do like to use a lot of line with variation in my pieces most of the time to really like pop the dark spots in the shadows and then when the light spots like really thin line work to bring those out farther. I did go in and erase a little bit of the pencil because unsurprisingly I didn't stay in the lines or get to the lines so I just had a little bit of pencil to erase. I wanted to outline the stars some way not in black pen so I have the Ouhu four no 72 marker color set so I was like I'm going to use one of those to outline it also I don't think it was a great idea. I don't I don't like how the stars worked at all I did edit them a lot digitally and then going in with a little bit of white gel pen for like the whites of the eyes and I add a little little white to the water droplets and the tears and stuff like that. When I tried the white gel pen for some reason it wasn't working well so I went in with a little bit of white gouache instead of gel pen like I normally would. So yeah here's the final piece and a little bit of digital editing there to make the stars a little bit fancier. So thank you so much for watching if you like this video remember to leave a like and subscribe for more.