Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnock, artist and papercrafter here on YouTube. And today I'm going to paint Snow Spray coming off the back of a sled. Got a darling little lawn fawn stamp set. It's one of their little teeny tiny ones. They're really inexpensive and it's going to be so much fun to paint this. And I hope I have some tips that will help you to make some Snow Spray for skiers, for all different kinds of sliders, anything that's got a big poof of snow behind it. And I'm using some manganese blue. You can use any kind of light blue you've got. And painting the shadow part and letting water then fill up the rest of the area of the Snow Spray. And I'm dropping in a little more color, but leaving a lot of that is just water at the top. Because snow has shadows. There's actually color in it and there's depth to it when you add some stronger color to it. So I've got this really pale color first. And I'm using a baby wipe. You can use a paper towel or tissue to soften out some of those edges. But while it's still wet, I'm going to go in and add more color to it. And I decided to add a darker color as well, not just the super light kind of blue color. And I'm going to paint it in the negative space above the poof of Snow Spray. And I'm going to let it be fairly light. It's going to be a sky in the background. But I'm going to kind of let it be light as it touches that Snow Spray. Because I want a soft edge there where the Snow Spray comes up. But I'm making my paint darker and darker toward the top because I wanted to have a little darker of a sky up there. But I wanted that soft edge right where the Snow Spray meets the sky. And sometimes it's a challenge to get that kind of a soft edge in there. And as I was trying to deepen the sky color as well, I was trying to figure out whether or not this little bear would actually do his sledding at night. I'm not sure if that's something that little critters do while it's nighttime and the rest of us are asleep. So do I make this a night sky or do I just make it a darker-ish blue sky? I wanted a different blue than was in the snow. But notice that I'm working quickly enough. I mean this is sped up slightly, but I'm working quickly enough that I can actually throw some of that sky color now into the wet paint that's still here. That's how wet the paint was when I painted it. I had enough water in there. And you don't want just a puddle of water. You want enough water and pigment in there that you can drop in a little bit of color and it's going to have a real soft edge to it. I'm going to make sure I get my sky color right up to the little bear's hat. I don't want any white gaps in there. And I'm going to now add a few streaks down the hillside just to add a little bit more of speed and context to the snow because there are, like I said, shadows in the snow coming down the hillside. And I'm using a little bit of a dry brush almost to create that so that I end up getting some interesting edges when I kind of scrape across the surface of it with that brush that's not super softy wet. So I heat set everything and now I actually have a nice solid blue sky which doesn't always happen when I paint skies because it's hard to do. And I just want to say that because a lot of people get frustrated that their skies come out lumpy. It just make it a cloudy sky. If that happens, that's what I do. But I was very excited that this one came out nice and smooth. And now I'm going to paint a couple trees out here in the distance because adding the contrast to the snow is going to make the snow appear wider. So I want to have some nice, deep, dark, rich trees. And I've mixed my green with some indenthroen blue to make it a nice, rich, dark green. And I am going to drop in some more colors because I want it to feel a little more realistic, not as cartoonish as a solid color can sometimes be. When you're using your paints and you don't mix anything else in with it, sometimes it just has that air of not being real, not the realism is going to have a little bear in a sled going down a mountain. I guess I'm not really looking into realism, but I just want it to look nice and look kind of natural-ish. So I'm adding a few trees of different sizes and shapes in here. And I decided not to add them around the whole cloud of snow on the left, that whole poof, because that's just, I liked how it was really soft. And if I were to try to add green trees behind that, I would totally blow that soft edge that I've got. So my trees are just going to be down here on the bottom side of the hillside. And I'm dropping in a really pale green. I mixed up a really light spring green kind of color using some yellow. And then I thought let me just add in a little bit of browns to it as well. And just let those colors mix in while the paint's wet. I learned that from several of my landscape painting instructors that every green out there, if you're talking about any kind of natural greens that are outside, you're going to actually have some browns in them. So you always want to drop in just a little bit of that nice warm color. And then heat set. Now all watercolor dries about 30% lighter than it goes on. Well, I shouldn't say all. Most watercolor dries 30% lighter. That's the nature of it. So I'm going to try as best I can to remember to dry things in between. I'm getting better with that over time that I'm not having as much bleeding troubles because after failing with it enough times and having to fix where I started painting one wet area next to another wet area. And then ruin something and had to do. Yeah. After a while, this old dog does learn a few new tricks. I hope you're learning new tricks as you go because if we're not getting any better than we're not paying attention. So we need to pay attention and get get ourselves a little better train. So I am learning to try to heat set a little bit in between. I generally don't like the heat set as much as I like to let things air dry unless I'm trying to zap it so it stops moving where it is because I like whatever it's doing at the moment. So that's usually the only time that I really do spend much time heat setting things. It's me using a little bit of Quinn Gold in the details on the sled. And that was some Quinn Coral in the Santa Claus outfit and I decided to mix a red color. I didn't like that kind of garish red. It just came out to bright and to intense and I've just kind of mixed it with some color that's already on my palette. And that's one of the things that makes teaching water color also hard because I'm just using what's on my palette. People say, well what color did you use there? I used a little of this and a little of that. There was a little of something left on my palette from a previous project or from earlier in that painting and yeah it gets a little crazy. So it's sometimes harder to be able to explain. Whereas with a Copic marker or pencil, I can say pick up pencil X and that tends to work a little bit better. Doesn't always happen when we're talking about watercolor. So now I'm going to add just a little tiny bit to my trees because I did paint a little more in them than necessary. But even the spots that were left in there didn't end up looking all blue because I had painted through them. So it still worked if I had left more more highlights in my green would have still worked nicely to have the green trees painted right over top of that blue color. But I put my snow dots all over the sky and in front of the sled and in front of the snow spray and everything because it now has something to show up against. So you always want to do that when you're doing your snow because the snow doesn't fly behind the object in the scene. It flies all around it. So that is all I have for you today. Supplies are linked in the doobly-doo and they're also over on the blog if you need to pin something to your Pinterest board etc. And I will see you again next time. Make sure you hit that like button, subscribe if you haven't and I'll see you later.