Hi, my name is Gina Kim and welcome to my art studio. A lot of people ask me, how do you do your backgrounds? And when I hear that question, it's essentially asking, how do you do your watercolor washes? Washes are the initial layer where pigment and water mingles together to really set the stage for your end product. It's a good skill to have and with practice. You can have a lot of fun with watercolor washes. You can texturize with them. It is the supporting cast, I think, sets the tone of the rest of the painting. And my hope today is that this short clip will just add to your working knowledge to apply to your art journals or your art practice in general. So let's get started. So I'm taking my foam brush and applying clean water to a cold pressed watercolor paper that I taped down on all sides to a sketch board. I ask my husband to break off the clip and I use sketch boards to be my platform. You'll see it's pretty essential when I merge the colors together. So here I'm dipping my brush in Naples Yellow Deep, I think it's by Sineleye. And just while the paper is wet, I just do gestural strokes, have fun, really loose, not knit picky, letting things flow and being gentle with my brush. And I get a different brush to pick up more pinks, reds and purples. That's permanent rose violet and a little bit of bright violet. So here I have with my second brush, just going over a little bit, not too much. And then I'm deepening the value here, adding some bright violet on the bottom and really just leaving the yellow sections alone. And now here comes the fun part. Grab a piece of paper towel. And as you tilt the board, you are letting the colors just run into each other. Now there are two reasons why is the paper towel pretty meticulously as these colors are going to drip. One is we're renting this property and I don't want any pigment to get on the carpet. The other is you really want to have a clean tactic, a clean approach. You don't want the color to dry and then these wet spots to pull back into your image. That would be dreadful. So right now this is looking good. Here I have a brush, a damp brush is key and while things are still wet, I kind of coax that little pocket of paper to be covered. And what helps is, you know, gravity is your friend. I know for most women, gravity is not your friend. But in watercolor gravity use it. Tilt your board here and there and just let the pigments essentially paint itself. Now right now this feels really good to me. The colors merge beautifully and pretty effortless, right? Just make sure you have clean water, different brushes always helps. And oh, here I have some salt. Not when the paper is dry. You've got to do it right when it's about damp, not too wet. But you want to add salt between those two phases. When the sheen, the light bouncing off the watercolor paper to be just about dissipating, that's when to add salt, salt kind of pushes away the pigment at its epicenter and it makes little star z's, I call them. I'm grabbing my hair dryer. I mean, it's ideal to blow dry it from a little bit farther away so you don't have these splotches of dry patches, but this is good. This is the paper dried and notice, this is something to remember. It dries about 25% lighter than what you would expect when it's wet. And those are the little stars you created. And so there you have it, watercolor background. I hope you enjoyed this clip. Thanks for watching.