Happy New Year dear friends and welcome to NV Fine Arts Studio. I'm Nina and I will be presenting you today a painting that I did for the creative tea subscribers on my Patreon. This is the paper I will be using. This is from the role, but I don't worry about that. I'll show you how I fix that without any stretching in advance. These are the brushes I usually use. And this is my palette. We'll go over the full list of supplies you might need for this painting in the demo, but please don't feel obliged to use what I use. We are all different and have different styles of painting. Use whatever you are comfortable with. I named this painting a winter branch. It is a perfect reflection of this beautiful snowy scene with the glimpse of sun through the frosty winter air. This demonstration is a great subject for practicing watercolor, no matter at what stage you are in your art journey. Whether you started yesterday or a decade ago, there is always something new to see, learn and get inspired by in the world of watercolor. This subject is not complex. It doesn't require lots of drawing, but we will still go over the essentials of successful sketch in my full demonstration anyway. Because this sketch is a skeleton of the painting. The crooked sketch will lead to a crooked painting. In this demonstration, we will mostly focus on the tonal values and edges. The tonal values will help us to get the feel of the light and distance in the painting. And the variety of edges will help us to create the soft and hazy atmosphere and define what is in the focal point. This painting will be done in two steps. First we will paint the background, leaving out a few white pages for the snorke on the tree. Usually I use only light values when I do my first wash, but not here. We will apply the middle tonal value range near the horizon. The importance of getting dark during the first wash lays in the fact that the background is very fuzzy here, and the only way to achieve this flawless smooth soft edge transition from light to dark is to build the darkness gradually. This is an absolute perfect opportunity to learn painting wet on wet, learning about properties of the wet surface, how they change with time, how it accepts different paint with different consistencies, how to control the thickness of the mixture and things like that. When the background is done, it's time to dry. Then the second stage will begin. This will be an official second layer. Remember, you can do anything to the wash while it's wet. Add paint, remove paint, spray with water, dab with tissue, paint again and so on, and it will still count as the same wash. As soon as it's dry, it's done. It's finished. That's why we are so keen on prolonging the wet stage of the wash. The second step will be to paint the tree branch. The most important part here is to simplify and suggest. This painting is not about being correct to the point where botting is determined, the kind of tree. It is about creating the festive mood and crisp wind-through atmosphere. We will need to keep this in mind when we paint the tree. Another important point. Don't be afraid to use darker and thicker paint. This painting is against the light, so the tree branch has to have a good contrast with the background. Otherwise, we will lose the sense of distance between the background and the foreground. If you paint such a dry and you cannot get a good dark tonal value from the well, don't be afraid to use paints straight out of the tube. You can just squeeze a little amount straight on the palette, then fully load your brush and paint away. Here's the finished piece. I hope you enjoyed it. Don't forget, the real reason we paint is for the sake of painting. Feel free to do anything you want, expressing our inside, our true nature. If you feel like you're struggling with the technical side of watercolor, please leave it for me and just indulge in the process of painting with me in real time on Patreon. I will be looking forward to meeting you there. Happy new year!