Hello my lovely how are you? Today I am doing a little piece in my Jane Davenport large mixed media art journal. I love this book so much. I'm painting a puffin and what I'm gonna do is mix a bit of watercolour, a bit of gouache and probably some colour pencil and whatever else happens. So I'm starting this puffin which happens to be one of my favourite birds in the whole world and all my life I have always loved puffins but I've never actually seen one in real life. One day I will and it will be a glorious glorious day. Anyway so what I've done so far is the body in my Daniel Smith moon glow of course because I moon glow everything. If you follow me you will know that by now. Moon glow and moon glow everywhere everywhere and so I'm also going to use the Windsor and Newton designers gouache which is my other absolute favourite medium. Now I didn't want to just paint a normal puffin because well I couldn't just paint a normal puffin so I'm kind of playing around and I don't know just gonna see what I come up with and how this little beauty evolves. You know I love pattern and I'm just gonna go for it that way and see what see what happens. So the colours that I'm using to make this orangey red now is the base of it is Naples yellow which I am obsessed with in designers gouache. Naples yellow is just the most beautiful colour to me it is the colour of the moment and also a Bengal rose which is quite pinky it's quite hot so I mix it with a bit of white just to bring it down a bit as well. So basically all the colours all the gouache are variations on these colours. The Naples yellow and the Bengal rose with a bit of white and I'm just gonna work those basic colours around to get different kind of peachy and red tones. So I've done the what would normally be the black part of the puffin, the crown and the wings in this peachy colour. To be honest with you I don't know I don't know about this I don't know if I'm really pulling this off but well I've done it now so we shall move forward but hey you know what this is what the process is all about right I mean this is what I do all the time I make something and in the beginning I make decisions and then I go oh I don't know about this I think I've stuffed this up but we push on and we work through the ugly phase and we're because you know we're committed here we're committed to this piece I'm not gonna walk away although you know there is a side of me that still wants to just rip it out of the book throw it away but anyway I don't do that I don't ever do that because that's not how you learn you know you have to just keep going with it keep going and you see where it takes you and where it evolves to and often more often than not it's pleasantly surprising so I am doing this lovely pattern botanical pattern with gouache over the top of the gouache I quite like it now I think it's it's made at work coming it's brought it down and and and brought it together a little bit having this having this pattern I'm quite into it especially on the feet I quite like it so I need a bit of background I'm going for this kind of seagrass type look behind the bird this is a mixture of acrylic gouache and designer's gouache now acrylic gouache is a kind of mix it's half acrylic half gouache I've got to tell you it's not my favorite I don't know if it's because of where I live being in Australia and being in cans right now it's it's really hot and the acrylic gouache dries up on the palette very very quickly and then because it's partly acrylic you can't reactivate it and get it watery which is the thing I love about gouache is that it's so it's opaque like acrylic but it's smooth and silky and it moves around like watercolour with acrylic gouache that doesn't work not for me not in this climate so I don't love acrylic gouache I suppose if I have one of those self-watering palettes that might be better but I don't have one of those anyway I've as you saw I've added a bit of color pencil just to put a bit of depth in the pattern area and I'm going to go ahead and use this ink this is Ecolon ink that I'm using to paint the part of the beak and around the eye a little bit blue and I'm back to the Windsor and Newton gouache for the yellow um this color here that I am now adding in is Windsor and Newton designer's gouache in lamp black now this lamp black is to die for I love this one of my absolute favorites as you can see you can get such a pitch black it is just fabulous it's matte and just deeply deeply black and it's just has so much impact look at it isn't it fabulous but being gouache you can water it down a lot and so you get lovely different smoky tones if you choose to it's really a stunning color I love it so my friends well I'm here I also wanted to let you know that I'm going to be away for the next month it's kind of an impromptu trip away I'm actually going to be flying over to England to visit my dad because he's not very well at the moment and he needs a bit of love and he needs a bit of care and so I will see how I go I had planned to be posting up and all this kind of stuff but you know life has happened and I will definitely be on Instagram so if I'm not on YouTube which I will try to post up something but if I'm not then you know you can always find me on Instagram and I'll be there and because it's just a lot easier to post photos than it is to post videos anyhow um I am now I've decided as you can see I've decided that we needed a bit more botanicals we needed some flowers some coastal flowers so I've drawn them in with a pencil just like just basically and I'm using the gouache in these shades of peach and this kind of it's kind of sky blue to fill them in and you know what I like it I like it it feels better now the only thing is this blue doesn't match the blue that I've got on the bird so I might have to paint over that um but I don't you love gouache this is the beauty of gouache you can just paint right over the top of what's underneath and it's opaque and it's beautiful and oh gosh I just love it my lovely thank you so much for joining me in this video and watching me mess around in my art journal and play and explore I hope this inspires you to play and explore in your art journals too and just to not bother about how things are supposed to look and what color they're supposed to be and just paint from your heart and you know put the patterns in there put the colors in there bring life to it just do what you love and don't worry if it looks bad in the beginning just go for it just commit to it just keep working on it and know that I am 100% with you bye!