I’m learning things about painting clouds in watercolor while working on my current painting. At first, I just followed what I saw in my reference photo as best I could. After I put down a few shapes, though, I wasn’t happy with my results. My edges were too harsh. I tried wiggling my brush back and forth, thinking this would help me get the soft edges I was looking for. It helped, but it wasn’t enough. Then I thought to myself, you know, this is probably the perfect time to use wet on wet. Wet on wet is for when you need soft edges, which of course, is what I needed here. I thinly wetted the area I was going to paint and when I did, boy did I love the results. The paint was a little runny, but those soft, almost smokey edges seemed to almost create themselves. It takes a lot longer to build up your darkest darks using this method, but it’s worth it, as I’m finding.

Note: After I've built up a few layers, I find that I can start using wet on dry again for the darkest shadows. Here's an updated picture.

I found out that alizarin crimson makes a beautiful orange when mixed with cadmium yellow and a gorgeous purple and violet when mixed with cobalt blue. I found this out while experimenting with these colors in my mixed media art book in the 2nd craft studio of my community’s clubhouse, a room my family has unofficially dubbed the art room.

My goal for my bird in my painting has changed. You may remember me saying I wanted him to be stark black. Well, having seen how it’s coming along, I’m starting to think a more iridescent effect would be cool. I’m doing this by increasing the warmth of the purple and the coolness of the green, because it’s that contrast that’s going to give me shimmer. Also, because the essence of iridescence means that an object reflects the colors of the other objects around it, I’m bringing some of the orange of the pumpkin into the bird.

This is the second half of my attempt at doing a painting mixing all the colors from just the three primaries, plus black and white. 'A couple of things I learned:

1.Sometimes mixing via glazing on the canvas yields better results than mixing on the palette.

2.This is something I already knew, but needed to be reminded of, and that's not all colors are equal in strength. Blue is much stronger than red or yellow and will over power these other colors when all three are used in equal amounts.

To find out how I came to these conclusions and what it was like for me to do this painting this way, watch the video below.