Hi, my name is Van James. I'm a teaching artist from Hawaii and I would like to introduce a series of painting videos, painting exercises for teachers who work with students in grades one through twelve. Look for a separate video on supplies, the materials you'll need to start these lessons and once you're prepared with that, let's get started. Around the fifth, sixth or seventh grade it's a good idea to introduce the students to wet on dry painting, moving away from the wet on wet. This is also called veil painting. Look at my supplies video for directions on how to wet down your paper, prepare the colors and so forth. Today we'll be doing a sixth grade painting in connection with mineralogy, painting of crystals. And here you see an example in the single color blue and the single color red. And of course you can add lots of other colors, but first we'll start with a simple single color crystal painting. Now when working wet on dry you do want to have the picture upright. So a standing easel or a table easel or even a chair on a desk or table. And just begin in the upper corner with some very straight Prussian blue. This could be done with Ultramarine blue and you can have the children do this with sort of straight edged applications of the color. The white of the paper will be the crystal itself. So we're actually painting negative space. We can apply very lightly but with very straight edges to make eventually crystal forms. So when the first application of color dries then go ahead and take a second application. Again doing very flat straight angle and you can create new areas of darkness which then can pop out new areas of light. The more you restrict the pure white to a certain area the more intense your light will be. A rinsing of your brush, with a little water and sharpening edges. So as areas dry we add more crystal like veils. These can cover larger areas or very small areas. Keep applying the veils adding new areas darkening the periphery the outside. Keeping white on the inside sometimes just little streaks sometimes bigger areas. By overlapping transparent veils time and time again you'll build up more and more of this transparent appearance of the color. This requires a bit of patience on the part of the students. One doesn't expect to finish the entire painting in one session and this provides a new discipline for the students. It comes at a time when they're studying physics, mineralogy, astronomy. Minerals are like the stars of the earth are the gems of the cosmos. You bring more and more darkness to the outside below. You'll get more and more intense light above and inside. Crimson red can bring you towards a violet for amethyst crystals. Yellow can make a greenish emerald or even go very far towards sulfur crystals. You can get all kinds of different colored crystals from this. So good luck with your own painting of crystals. I hope you enjoyed this painting exercise and found some ideas for how you can develop your own further. Remember to not just observe them but actually do the painting exercises because you learn so much more through the hand eye intelligence that you gather from the work. If you want more resources, look into my book, Painting with Hand Head and Heart and keep painting a loha, a hui ho.