Today we're going to paint fire and we're going to use watercolor in order to do it. You know that sounds a little weird, but let's get started. So today we're going to paint fire and the reason that we're painting fire is because it's going to be fun, but the other reason is because it is the monthly challenge from the daily paintworks. DailyPaintworks.com is a place you can join and exhibit your art and you can also enter these challenges and that is a free service that they give you. And every month there's a challenge. And I like to enter them because I like a challenge and because it's fun to see how other people solve the challenge. The challenge for this month is to paint something hot or just the word hot, which is a great challenge for the month of November when things are kind of cold and gray, at least they are here in Vermont. So what I've put done first, put down some masking fluid. I've bought some new masking fluid because I usually don't use it stuff because I'm so clumsy with it. It's called Pibo, P-E-E-B-O. And it comes out looking a little bit green. It's very easy to put on and very easy to take off, which I like, but I have to adapt my eye because I tend to not use masking fluid. I just keep the weights of my paper white. So I have to remember that those are going to be my whites. That's an adjustment I'm going to make over time. So the challenge with this fire painting is that the fire has a lot of color in it, a really high chroma. So I'm going to put in my yellows and my reds and my yellows, reds. Yeah, yellows and reds for the most part. But I want to keep things very, very bright. So I'm almost using paint directly from the well. I'm not doing much mixing because I don't want anything to be dulled down when it comes to the fire. What's going to be important is the contrast between how bright the colors are of the fire and the colors are bright because they're coming right from the tube or basically from the well. And the neutrals that I'm going to surround the fire with and I mix my own neutrals. So and I'm going to use colors from that fire to mix my neutrals. So I will have used, oh, I'm sure there's a, a lizard in crimson is in there and indigo and probably quite a bit of that verencian. A verencian is playing a big part in this painting in terms of the the mortar that's holding the whole painting together. It's in the fire. It's also in the background and mixed in with quite a few of the surrounding colors. Sometimes it really helps to limit your palette and have one color kind of throughout a painting because it will be more cohesive. I'm using a round brush. The paper is arch cold press. Usually it comes on a pad, but I'm using the back of paper. I use the fronts and the backs of my paper just because that's a, I like to paint a lot and it's fairly expensive stuff. The brush I'm using today is a round. It's a number 18 round Kalinsky Red Sable Brush. I've been using exclusively flats for almost a year now except when I do portraits then I'll bring it around every once in a while. So I don't know why I picked up the round. I think that what happened was I looked at the fire and studied it for a while and I got these the idea that it really was quite liquid in a way. There are a lot of fluid shapes in fire and I thought that the round brush might be helpful. Now the flat brush has come in. That's a number 16 flat and I'm using that for my broader areas. So it's a fairly simple painting but I do think that it's pretty effective and I think that it does solve the challenge. Here's what all watercolors do. You know you turn your paper upside down, wet the area and drop some color in. That's a typical watercolor sky. And again, I did want to make it a blue sky. You know what my, I'm still following the theme and the strategy from the very beginning which is keep really intense color in one place and then keep everything else stalled down or neutral around it. That's going to make those colors seem even brighter than they actually are. At the very end here I brought in a very small brush. This is a tiny brush. I mean I almost never use a tiny brush but sometimes a challenge makes you pick up something that you haven't for a long time. And there were just a couple places where that masking fluid when it came off left what usually appears. It looks like a band-aid has been ripped off. Exposing skin. I don't like that so I wanted to soften some of those edges and I used the um that very tiny brush to do it. It's it's a really tiny detail. I don't like to get lost in small details. If you watch my channel you know I like to use as few strokes as possible and find simplistic shapes and and just use value decisions to get there. You know color mixing and value but that that's why a good challenge is fun to do. So you might want to check out daily paint works and there's some gouache going in at the very end to create some of those sparks. If it had been a different type of paper like a you know more weight to the paper I think you can use when you call it a razor blade or something to gouge the paper but I don't like to gouge. So remember keep the white to your paper white your paint sweat. That's for value mix for color and remember the photograph is there if you want to paint fire and I'll see you next time. Okay bye bye.