Today we're going to concentrate on the middle of a painting and the end of a painting, which I don't usually do. So let's get started. Today, what I want to do is focus on not the beginning of a watercolor, but the middle part and the ending part. And I'm going to slow it down and do some triad work in a minute, so you'll be able to see that. I'm really influenced by using even fewer strokes than normal these days. I looked at some interesting things on the internet and that made me really influenced what I want to do. So I'm going to very quickly put in some of these beginning shapes. So I'm looking at the value how relatively light or dark something is and plugging value into color. So in other words, I don't... All I'm looking at is shape, color, and value and deciding how to execute that. Keeping things really, really simple. It's a 12 by 12 piece of arch paper and it's cold press and the brush is probably right now a 16 flat. Oh, I know because... But I'm going to pick up a larger brush in a minute because I have the commitment to have as few strokes as possible. So this has speeded up. This is probably about four times as fast as I work I'm guessing. And the whole point of this is, like I said, I'm calling the circles and squares. It's not really all circles and squares, but the point of it is I'll never be an abstract painter, but I would like to get as close to abstract as I possibly can. So what I'm doing, as I said, is just putting in the value relationships to start with my relatively lights, my mediums and my darks. And I'm not using any masking fluid or white out. I'm just painting around my whites. And we're going to get through this stage fairly quickly because I want to concentrate on the middle part. Because I think lots of times with my videos I concentrate on the beginning, but not necessarily the middle and the end. So I've picked up... I think that's a bigger brush. I'm not sure. No, same brush, same brush. And for the most part, the colors that I'm using here are Alazare and Crimson, Ultramarine Blue, Naples Yellow, and Cerulean Blue. Not... that's probably about the core of what's going on here. There are a few outliers to those colors, but almost everything is being mixed from those colors. So this is what I call my first pass at a painting. I'm going to get everything really well established, but there are no real dark, darks yet. There are some light lights, like I said, I'm leaving the whites of the paper whites, so those are going to remain. But in a minute, I'm going to address these midtones and make some distinctions, and that's what I want to concentrate on. So hang on for a second, and we will get there. I notice in doing these how much I seem to circle around in a circular pattern as I do these paintings, which is kind of interesting in me. I don't look at individual things. You probably know that by now. Everything is related to everything else, and everything is connected, so there are no individual things. Alright, in one second, we're going to get onto the triad work, which is the reason I wanted to make this video. Triad work, here we go. Alright, so everything has dried from step number one, because I've gone away, and now I'm coming back in and boy, I'm sorry that I cut off that top. This is the triad work that I want to concentrate on doing. I have ultra-marine blue, a permanent rose, and also some yellow ochre. And with a large brush, this is a larger brush now. It's a number 20 flat. I've loaded it up, and I'm doing some triad work. I started with ultra-marine blue out of the rose, and then you can see the yellow ochre coming in. Back to the rose. Here's the ultra-marine blue. Going in, and while everything is still wet, putting in the rose, and a little bit of that yellow ochre. So you can see, I'm using three colors to accomplish one task here, and the task was to make this patch darker than what had been there before. I had laid in something earlier, but I needed something to be darker. All the work that's going on here now is triad work. Same thing, ultra-marine blue with a little bit of permanent rose. This is slowed down, I should say, too. No, no, this isn't real time, that's right. I'm so used to doing this fast, this is real time. So you could see how that triad went in. I don't wet the paper first. I let the wet paint work into the wet paint. So it joins each other. This is still part of the second step. Again, triad work. I've established my triad as I said before. It's ultra-marine blue, permanent rose, and a little bit of yellow ochre to make things warm. Typically for me a triad is a red, a yellow, and a blue, because I need that because what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to portray a gray here. But rather than mix up a gray, I want three colors to accomplish that task. Now I'm starting to work faster because I'm realizing that I've got pretty well established relationships I want. Now we're going to look at the last step because I always speed through the last step. I had a barking dog, so I had to close the door just for a second. So here we go. This is where I established my darkest darks. They're there, they're going in, and it's two colors in this case. I'm using, well not all the time, but on that piece of red paper, it would have been Alizarin Crimson and some ultra-marine blue. I really, really, really need these next darks to unite the painting. The overall painting is sort of in the midtones, so I need a few darks in order for it to pop. If I don't put those darks in, it's going to be sort of when you could go back to the middle part and you'll see, you just end up with midtones. A lot of paintings that I see with students end up in the midtones because they don't bring the value range all the way from the whitest whites down to the darkest darks. Now this, my darkest dark in this case is probably, I'm going to think maybe a seven or eight. So I could go darker, but everything is relative. And if I go much darker than I already am with my darks, it would be out of balance, two darks, so to speak. But I want those shapes. All I care about is the shapes and they have to be pleasing shapes. And my interest in this is, like I said, really approaching this as if it's an abstract painting. It's just a lot of round shapes and square shapes. I'm interested in sort of going near where abstract is, but remaining in the world of what real things are. And there you can see the triad work on that triangle up above that I talked you through when we slowed down a little bit. And there's the finished painting. So remember to keep the whites your paper white, your paint sweat, mass for value, mix for color. And mass for value means find the mass, find the general mass, and then mix up three colors to fill it in. All right, see you next time. Bye-bye.