In the video embedded below, I'm demonstrating using size and placement to create depth in my landscape. Things that are closer to the viewer I made larger and sharper and things that are farther away I made smaller and more fuzzy.

​I also painted the mountains, not in neat rows, but with some placed here and there.

I was almost finished with my painting of Katie and Adelaya, but I knew I had to paint Katie's glasses. I remember looking at them and thinking, how am I going to paint those, but it was a lot easier than I thought.

It came down to using a liner brush and a transparent white. In this case, I used zinc white from Royal Talens's Amsterdam Standard Series line.

Watch the video below to find out why I chose to use the method I did and see how I got this look.

I just used a the Plein Air Naturecore Board from Fredrix Canvas for the first time. On it, I painted a portrait of my cousin Katie with her daughter Adelaya.

As with all my acrylic pieces, I started with a black and white underpainting.

After I got Katie's skin to look the way I wanted, I decided to paint her eyes. As you can see, though, from this pic, I have too much contrast between her irises and corneas. This is giving her eyes an unnatural, almost glow in the dark effect.

To counteract this effect, I glazed ultramarine blue mixed with ivory black over Katie's irises. Bye bye, creepy glow.

​Learning my lesson last week, I mixed green into the pink I used for Katie's lips.

When it came time to paint Adelaya's face, I decided to start with the darkest shadows and build on top of those. Here I've glazed grayish blue, mixed with orange, over the dark shadows that I'd already painted on Adelaya's face.

Then I went over her whole face with a layer of pink mixed with green.

For the uppermost layer, I mixed zinc white, transparent raw sienna, yellow, and just a bit of purple so the yellow wouldn't be overpowering.

Now, I never use straight yellow for blonde hair. I always mix some purple into it to make it more neutral and therefore more natural looking. But this time, I used even less yellow than usual. In fact, I mixed just a little bit of my purple and yellow mixture into some gray, made by mixing zinc white and ivory black, because I wanted her hair to have a grayish tone.

For the darker, more shaded parts of Adelaya's hair, I mixed some transparent burnt sienna into the aforementioned grayish yellow color.

I used a mixture of cyan and ultramarine blue with zinc white to paint Adelaya's top. I mixed, not only more of my blues, but also black in to make the shadows. Black dulls colors a bit and shadows don't work if they're too bright.

I knew I would need to add lighter color as well as darker color to make this look three dimensional, so I mixed some of my cyan and ultramarine mixture into some titanium white now. I wanted to color to sit on top of my base and not disappear into it, which is what would happen if I'd used zinc white. At first, I actually made the highlights a bit too light, so I went over them with a glaze of a darker version of my blue mixture.

I decided to add a streak of darker shading above the white line on the middle of Adelaya's top to give more of tthat depth I was talking about.

So...I have a real mess here. I need to fix it and in this article, I'm going to walk you through the steps I'm taking to do that. First, though, some context. This is a portrait of my cousin Katie with her daughter Adelaya. It's being done in acrylics.

The first thing I'm going to need to do is cancel out this yellow.

To do counteract this, I glazed purple over the top.

To solve the problem of the blue being in too many places, first I glazed over the excess with orange. Orange is the compliment of blue, so it'll cancel it out somewhat.

Next on my agenda will be going over the orange bits with zinc white until they look sufficiently light to me.

Then I layered more of my flesh color over the whole thing to blend it in to the rest of the face more.

Finally, in an effort to get rid of the line of demarcation between the darkness and the rest of her skin, I layered some red over the edges, so it would look more like what was next to it.

I've tried everything I can think of to fix the problem at this point by layering. To recap, I layered orange over the excess blue to neutralize it. Then I layered zinc white over those parts to lighten them. I glazed more of my flesh color over the whole thing to try to blend the blue into the rest of the face and then I glazed red over the outer part of the blue. I've decided to start over from the underpainting at this point.

Now that I'm starting on my color again, I've started with my dark blue gray ​first.

Then, I started layering the main flesh color on top of that. At this point, I'm already four or five layers in.

I decided to glaze some orange over the blue, in an attempt to tone it down, so it doesn't stand out so much.

After looking at the photo for a while, I saw some noticable pink in the blue-grey shadows on Katie's forehead and left cheek.

Obviously this is just a bit too rosy, though. So I glazed green over it, which is the complement of red and pink, to create the look you see here.

I'd been realizing for a while that I had the blue shadows spread a bit too far. To rectify this, I mixed a bit of transparent raw sienna from the Liquitex heavy body line into some zinc white and layered that on the areas where I'd taken the blue-grey shadows too far.

Now about that orange spot in the middle of her forehead. I went over it with blue and it took the orange right out of it. I also used some flesh color that was slightly darker than what I had originally where the shdow merts the main color on her forehead.

I once got a comment on one of my youtube videos telling me I was just drawing gourds with faces, so I decided to do exactly that. I have a Mommy Gourd, a Daddy Gourd, and two baby gourds.

The message I want to convey here is not to let hate get you down. I can't think of any better way to stick it to your haters than to do exactly what they complained about. You can hear more about my thoughts and see the process of my drawing in the video embedded below.

Drawing while only looking at your subject and not your paper can actually imprint that subject in your mind better than either just looking at it alone, or drawing while looking at your paper would. You will be tempted to look back at your drawing to see how it's coming along, but don't. Also don't be embarrassed if you're drawing comes out looking super ridiculous. The point is not to make a great drawing. If anything, just try to laugh at it.

You can see the process of doing a blind contour and hear more of my thoughts in the video below.

Sometime ago I was inspired by this video to try blending oil pastels with OMS(odorless mineral spirits or odorless paint thinner. The way it works is I dip a brush into the paint thinner and either stroke it onto the pastel stick or rub the stick onto my palette and stroke the oms dipped brush onto it, and "paint" the pastel onto my paper with the brush, rather than simply rubbing it onto the paper straight from the stick.

I'm using 140 pound hot press watercolor paper from Fabriano Studio for this project. I chose to use watercolor paper because I need a paper that I can get wet without it warping and I chose to use hot press, rather than cold press, because it gives me the smooth surface I want. It would be impossible to get the pastel into all the nooks and crannies of the cold press paper, giving me a bumpy look.

So far I've painted lashes with a liner brush,

creating a flesh tone by mixing raw sienna, white, and red pastels with OMS and a brush,

painted thin lines with black pastel, OMS and a liner brush, just to see if I could,

and mixed violet and purple.

In doing this I've learned that by stroking the pastel onto my palette and dipping my brush with the OMS into that, I'm able to get much more pigment onto my brush than by stroking the brush with the OMS directly onto the stick. I found I can get a much truer, more attractive CVolir by blending out my pastel layers with paint thhinner than I can by layering alone.

I also have to keep in mind that the things I learned about tthe unequal strengths of colors while working in acrylics also applies to pastels. That means that if I want to make orange, I have to put down my yellow more heavily thsn my red, otherwise the the red will take over because it's such a strong color.

I decided to try out how rhe principal of toning down colors with their complements would work when OMS was added into the mix. I set about trying to create a muted yellow by mixing it with its complement, purple. All I ended up getting, though, were varying shades of purple. I demonstrated in my first youtube video about working with oil pastels that purple is much stronger than yellow andI huess I underestimated just how much stronger it was. Just a little more than a dab of the purple can completely take over the yellow.

​I'm starting with a black and white grisaille. In the second photo, I've just added more values and softened my edges a bit more than in the first photo. I feel like the key to making something look shiny, like silk, is to use lots of different colors/shades and have soft edges.

​Even though this dress is technically blue, I've started by painting the raised parts violet.

When it came time to add the blue, I added some black into my Prussian blue that was already on my palette to dull it. I applied this to the rest of the painting using the wet on wet technique.

At this point, I still didn't feel like the piece had the shiny look I wanted it to have. I realized I needed to add more contrast by adding darker shades next to my lighter ones.

The more contrast between light and dark you add, the silkier something will look. In the next pick, I added even more contrast.

I want to point out that I showed this painting to my mom when it was in the stage before I'd added the extra contrast and she didn't say anything. I asked her what she thought and she said the painting didn't speak to her. But when I showed it to my mom after I added the extra contrast, she was like, "Ooh, wow, now I see it". To me, this drove home the fact that contrast, or lack thereof, can mean the difference between someone stopping and looking at your work, (and possibly buying it) and walking on by without giving it a second thought.

During the time of writing this article, I visited my aunt in New Jersey. She takes watercolor classes and she told me about a trick of spraying the edges on a watercolor painting with water to soften them. By the time I heard about this, the painting had been sitting dry for days, but that wasn't a problem, because, as I've said before, watercolor can be reactivated after it's dry. I spritzed the edges of this painting with my little spray bottle and I think that was just what it needed.

​Now that the watercolor portion of this lesson is finished, or at least as good as I can make it, today it was time to start on the acrylic portion. I almost got through the underpainting.

I started by mixing up some gray blue from zinc white, mars black, and ultramarine blue and painted this onto the patch, followed by some violet, made by mixing a little bit of ultramarine blue into red.

To amp up the shine even more, I added some mars black along the edges of my violet with a liner brush and lots of water. I layered gray made by mixing zinc white and mars black over my purple patches to adjust them.

I decided I wanted to lighten some areas even more, so I added zinc white, which is a transparent white from the Amsterdam line to them and blended the edges with my brush.

​As with my painting of the rose, I'm determining where my whites will go first on the watercolor version of this painting. I decided to try the grisaille method this time with my watercolor painting.

​I thought I'd cleaned out the section of my palette that I put my black on pretty well, but it turned out there was still some residual red paint, which showed up in the painting. Now, this is a sunset, so the red works. That brings me to an important point. Part of being a good artist is learning how to fix mistakes, or if you can't fix them, how to make them work for you in the painting.

​When I was painting the sky, I was careful to leave a space open for the sun. When it came to painting the sun, I thought the rim around it was a bit too reddish and I wanted it to be more toward the yellow orange side. I don't have much practice glazing in watercolor and I don't know how effective I can make it, but I decided to try it with this painting. I glazed yellow, lightened with water of course, over the rim of around the sun.

When it came time to add color, I filled the sky with blues and greens. I would periodically take a brush with nothing but water on it and soften my edges, blending my colors into each other.
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​I feel I should mention, I used Prussian blue to paint the water because it's brighter than my usual ultramarine blue.

On the second day of painting, I went over my waves with some black paint and a liner brush, because I decided they needed to be redefined. I used a liner brush, even though the waves are a bit thick, because it gives me the most control, so I'm able to make the specific shapes that I wanted to. ​I also thought the blue of the water wasn't intense enough, so I put another layer of it on. In some parts I thought the paint had gone on too thick, so I took a brush with, again, nothing but water on it, no paint, and spread and thinned the paint out. When watercolor paint has the right amount of water mixed into it, it's a pleasure to work with.

The last thing I did was go over the sun again with more yellow to intensify it and glaze some of the yellow over the orange part to give it more of a glow.

​Now that the watercolor version of this painting is done, I’m starting on the acrylic version. I’ve started with a layer of a midtone gray and I’ll layer darker and lighter shades on top.

Here's the result of adding extra values to my initial midtone painting. When it came to painting the water, I actually drew my the shapes of the waves in with a charcoal pencil.

I layered phthalo blue on top of ultramarine for the top part of the sky. I painted the main part of the sky a transparent blue green. I didn't bother to leave space for the ultramarine streaks I would be painting on, because I actually wanted the blue green to show through them.

I glazed burnt umber over the right hand side of my blue streak and brought it into the green. This has nothing to do with the lesson, but I just want to say that I'd been using my transparent burnt umber from the Liquitex Soft body line, but this time I decided to try the burnt umber from Amsterdam. It worked for the technique I was using, but I think I might like the results I get from the Liquitex paint better.

The water in my reference photo is a really beautiful blue and I was debating with myself over how I was going to capture that. For the watercolor portion, I used prussian blue, but for the acrylic version of this painting, I decided to mix ultramarine blue with cyan and I glazed that over the entire water portion, right over my waves. Then I took some yellow orange that I mixed from Cadmium yellow and Cadmium orange, and using a liner brush, painted that over some of the light blue waves.

I tried to paint my sun straight on top of my sky, but the paint I was using was too translucent for that. So I painted the sun with titanium white and then painted my yellow and orange over it. That titanium white works like a charm. I also painted rays of light coming off the sun using a liner brush and both zinc white, because I wanted the yellow to show through some of the rays, and titanium white. You can see, I also painted a streak of titanium white going straight through the sky and sun.

I decided to paint the area of the ocean that was around the sun titanium white and then go over it with pale orange and green, to brighten up the area.

When I showed the painting to my mom and this stage, she asked if the green line going across wias the green flash and I was like, I hadn't thought of it, but I guess it is.

...and here's the acrylic version of this painting finished.

The first difference between painting in watercolor and acrylic begins before I even start painting. When I work in watercolor, I draw in all my details with pencil before I start painting. This is because watercolor is transparent, so it's very hard to layer one color on top of another. It's impossible to layer a darker color over a lighter one in watercolor, period. ​Because of this, it's very important to have where I'm going to put all my shades mapped out, since if I put the wrong color down somewhere, I can't easily fix it, unlike acrylics. This brings me to...

When working in acrylics on the other hand, I really just get the basic shape down before I start painting. Acrylic is opaque, unless you're glazing, which I'll get into in a bit, so you can easily layer colors over each other. I can even layer a lighter over a darker one in acrylic. So to have all my details drawn before I start painting is unnecessary and would really just create extra work for myself because I would need to worry about painting around all the details that I'd drawn.

​I'll give you an example of when trying to draw in all my details before I started painting in acrylics has created extra work for me. Take a look at this peacock I painted.

​'See all the detail in his chest? Well, I meticulously drew in all of that before I started painting. Then I tried I tried to paint around it, realized it was slowing me down, so I ended painting over all the details and drawing them back in later.

The next difference is in how we use white in both mediums. In watercolor, we normally don't use white. If a part of our piece is going to be white, we use the white of the paper. In the pic above, you can see a pale yellow liquid in various parts of my painting. This is called masking fluid. You don't have to use masking fluid when working in watercolor, but it offers extra insurance that you won't accidentally get paint on an area that you want to keep white, because it's impossible to get paint or water on an area that has masking fluid on it.

When it comes to acrylics on the other hand, we add our whites in with white paint.

When I work in acrylics, I'm not that concerned with the cleanliness of my water. I can go days or weeks without replacing my water and won't effect the quality of my painting. Not so with watercolor. If the water is dirty when I work in watercolor, that will muddy up the paint I'm using. So I always make sure to keep my water as clean as possible.

Something interesting happened in this painting session, though. I'd intended to apply a layer of clear water to my paper and put paint over it. This is called painting wet-on-wet. Now, earlier, I'd used my brush to mix some water into some red that was already on my palette and, while I did clean the brush, it turned out there was still some residual paint on it which got in my water and actually turned it into the perfect light pink color. There's one of those happy accidents for you.

Now it's time to add shadows and for the watercolor painting, I just used the same red that I used for my base color, just with less water in it. When I put my first stroke of this paint down, I actually thought it was too dark, so I just mixed water into it and it lightened it right up. That's the cool thing about watercolor. Even after it's dry, you can reactivate it with water, both on your palette and on your paper. For the pink in this painting, I was using red that I still had left over from when I did my cat painting.

After I'd put in my shading, I thought I was done, until I realized I was forgetting the white highlights, which is a very important part of the piece. But then after those were in, it still didn't pop the way I wanted it to, so I thought I needed more red shadows. Actually, it had bothering me for awhile how dull this rose was looking, so I thought a glaze of red was just what it needed to brighten it up. After that I was so much happier with it.

But I still didn't feel like the petals had enough dimension. I decided that the purple shadows just weren't dark enough. I needed to go all the way to black. Which I did, and then glazed over with purple so it wouldn't look flat.

​​All in all, when I compare the two paintings side by side, I really prefer the acrylic one. I think the colors are more vibrant and I really like what adding that little touch of black did for the folds in the rose. I didn't spend as much time on the watercolor version of this painting and part of that was because I've only recently started to use watercolor after years of not using it, so I'm not as confident in working in it as I am in acrylics. So I didn't want to try techniques like grisaille, or glazing, which I did with the acrylic painting, just because I didn't know how well they would come out. I wanted to stick with what I understood, because I wanted this to be a straight up tutorial and not one of those I'm-just-trying-this-out posts I sometimes do. Not I don't love doing those, by the way.
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So I hope this post has helped you understand better how I work in watercolor vs how I work in acrylics.