Drawing Points of View from the Collections | Watercolors: Bird’s-Eye View

Thank you for joining us this evening. I am Danielle Beach, Senior Visitor Experience Representative and Event Specialist at the Princeton University Art Museum. It's my pleasure to welcome you to Drawing Points of View from the Collections. The museum partners with the Arts Council of Princeton to provide free virtual painting classes taught by artist instructor, Barbara DiLorenzo. With an emphasis on painting with watercolors, each week's lesson in this series will be inspired by an object from the museum's collections that depicts a different point of view. This event is part of the museum's late Thursday's programming, made possible in part by Heather and Paul G. Haga Jr., class of 1970. Tonight's class is inspired by Manuel Carrillo's photograph, Mother and Child, from 1961. In this session, we will explore painting from a bird's eye view. Bundled together inside swaths of fabric, mother and child become one in Manuel Carrillo's work. Carrillo photographed the pair from above, a perspective that emphasizes their faces and their connection. Their dark hair and the folds of the voluminous wrap called the rebozo contrast with the lighter tones of their skin and the spotted tile floor. Carrillo is known for photographs such as this one, which picture everyday people and scenes in his native Mexico. His work celebrates Mexican culture through the language of photographic modernism, exemplified in his use of bold forms, tonal contrasts, and unexpected perspective. By blending modernist visual language with scenes from everyday life, Carrillo offered a fresh approach to the immemorial subject of mother and child. I am now happy to turn the program over to Barbara. thank you so much Danielle thanks Barbara looking forward to the class great welcome back everybody this will be a fun class I'm gonna share my screen and get us started uh the first thing I wanted to look at is this beautiful uh painting by Sally Kay um from last week it just is so beautiful with all these abstract moments within basically what felt like windows to me when I was painting them myself I just I really enjoy the the fluidity and the expressiveness and it represents a unique take on it but there were so many beautiful unique interpretations of this that I saw pop up all over social media and I just I thought oh it's inspired a lot of really cool paintings so I think this is wonderful okay so this evening uh-oh Creative Cloud is mad at me um this is our beautiful uh photograph to work from uh this evening and uh it has two figures and traditionally figures are the thing that a lot of people feel very worried about uh drawing let alone painting in watercolor so we're going to get started on this pretty quickly just so that we can have enough time to do what we need to do I have my sketchbook out because I don't feel comfortable even though I've been painting all day and other things I don't feel comfortable jumping right into a watercolor painting so I have my sketchbook out and this is my way to kind of warm up and say I just want to test out some ideas and some shapes that I'm seeing before I do the actual painting. Now, the nice thing about Zoom is I can pull up a little red pen and I can kind of highlight some things that I wouldn't normally be able to do in person. And one thing I just I'm going to do really whoops sorry and went a weird way. I'm going to just kind of outline the shapes of each person's head and I'm just going to show you before we even start to draw whoops for some reason the mouse is a little funny tonight. I just want to show you how much is actually the top of their heads and I just want to kind of put almost a percentage to this so that when we are drawing our brains do not override us and say oh a face I know what a face looks like because when that happens typically what my brain does is it says okay here are some eyes um here is a nose here's a mouth and i i make it upright but what i'm seeing right now is in the woman the mother there is almost 50 percent of the top of her head the top of her head takes up about 50 percent of this length if i were to draw a line a straight line this time from the back of her head to her chin, I would say that this area and this area are almost 50%. So by giving myself a number, I don't leave it open to interpretation as much. Maybe that isn't quite 50%. You have to erase that a little. But this is really helpful. And then the area that her fabric kind of covers her head there's an arc like this and then down here this is where her hairline is and then so between this area and this area is going to be her entire face. The child you might be tempted to think oh a child must be smaller well they actually have very big heads compared to the rest of their body and if you look at this proportion from this angle I would say that's somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters depending on what you see and where you put that line exactly. There's a lot more at the top of this child's head so this face is going to fit into a very small area almost like a moon like this almost looks like a moon shape here or crescent moon that is what I'm almost seeing here it's just this little little bit of space to put in all those features so if we kind of think about that ahead of time we're not going to just again make this upright face and what ends up happening sometimes is you make the upright face but then you also add a lot of the head and then everything looks a little bit strange and it's it's really based on the fact our our helpful brains want to tell us how to draw a face but we really need to forget what we think we see and let our eye give us the information and let our hand just be the tool that puts it down so from the mother actually let me make this bigger so that you can really see it this is So this is the mother's head. And like I said, like halfway through, this is where the hairline is. And then we have the fabric coming over this way. And just to kind of get my bearings, I'm gonna put this little line there for the hairline. Her face isn't this U shape. It actually kind of tapers in a little on both sides. She has a really elegant shape here. and then the chin. So I can erase extra lines that are getting in my way. I don't necessarily want them to mislead me. I can sort of see how this is not exactly symmetrical. This is another thing to point out to myself. If I were to draw a line down the center of her nose, and then I see a little tiny bit of a lip there and a little bit there and a little bit of chin I can see a little more clearly what's happening so this is this forehead then we have her nose and then there's a little bit of a lip a little bit of lip in the chin so maybe this has to come in a little and so on either side here would be her eyebrows and this is just a sketch it's an informational sketch only just to give me the bravery to go into the work that's all we're doing right now just kind of sketching and looking oh I went too far down that's my brain tricking me a little bit so this is coming over and I'm looking at the shape of the nostril on this side versus this side and then under that is where we get a little bit of the lip lower lip and the chin So it feels so weird to draw shapes this close together. When you go back up to this face, there's if this is the hairline, these are the eyebrows, this is the nose, and this is the chin, it's almost a third, a third, and a third, which is a really helpful way to think about drawing faces. It is not how this face looks though from this angle. So it's important to just again take a look at that, understand it, and just see the shapes that are there. And for the little child, I know that he's not this close to her. I'm just going to put like his little bit of his face here. We don't see a big forehead because his hair is coming down. We see the curve of the eyebrows a little. They're not very big on a child. They're just kind of little there. I can see kind of like how she has these arcs of her eyes he has something of that too but we can actually see some of that pupil I don't want to put that in just yet we see the nose and then immediately after the nose we see these cute little lips coming out and really sweet cheeks on both sides very pudgy compared to the mom mom's face dips in the child has some baby fat there and it just is super cute but again it feels weird to whoops it stopped looking i took my eye off it for a second it feels weird to draw something with this kind of foreshortening but if you really allow yourself to see the shapes it becomes so much easier. And then when we get to the fabric, we can kind of, we can play with it and make some of these shapes that are there. They're not that close. They're not positioned correctly, but I was just testing things out. Now, the other thing about looking at a grayscale image like this is it's very helpful for values. Values are different in the art world than in other contexts. Values mean light to dark. So if you were to put five boxes, you don't have to do this now. I just want to show you really quickly. You make five as dark as you can make your pencil go. One, you leave the white of the paper. Three, you make some kind of a middle gray. Two is something in between. One and three. And four is somewhere in between three and five you get kind of a sense of this value system now this might need to go a little later actually you know what's happening is the um the light is reflecting off of there so that makes it a little different but if i were to look over at this photograph i can see that we have some very light areas um this one i'll give this a one it's pretty close um you know there's some areas that are pretty light and then there are some places that are super dark like there's not much light coming in this area so this might be a five um some hearts of the hair in the shadow those are five maybe down here there's also some values that are five um middle grays these uh lighter grays that could be three you could sit there and sort of label everything you see but what's really important as you're working is to look at what the neighboring values are doing is the neighboring hair lighter or darker? Is the neighboring tile lighter or darker? That's all you really need to do as you work through an image. And in this case, it's spelling it out for us without having to interpret it through color. So that's nice. Because this is a grayscale image, my plan this evening is to do this in one, maybe two colors. It's helpful to stick to something that's more monochromatic. So even though I have this really nice clean now palette of paint, there's lots of different options here. I'm actually gonna stick to either burnt sienna, which is actually, I'll bring my sketchbook back for a second. Sometimes sketch testing out the colors ahead of time is actually really helpful. So this is burnt sienna, which is more of an orangey brown. And then this is burnt umber, which is more of a, just lacks a little bit of that orange. I don't know how else to describe it. So I was thinking I could keep to those tones, or maybe I'll just stick with this one, burnt umber. There might be parts of this picture that need to go even darker than the darkest brown can go. So I might sparingly use my Payne's gray which is kind of a cool dark color. Cool as in temperature. Cool as in like maybe a little bit of blue. So I'm just going to write burnt umber for this one. Burnt sienna for this one, and Payne's Gray. There are many fans of Payne's Gray. There's also lots of different paints that are variations of Payne's Gray, too, that you can look for, and they're just, they're fun to see all the different options that are out there. But that's what I have in my palette tonight. I'm going to keep it simple because we have a lot of complicated forms to get through. All right, so one thing I could have done tonight is started out with watercolor pencil. And that way it would have been easier if I made a mistake in my drawing. But I figured most people wouldn't have a watercolor pencil. So tonight I'm just using a regular pencil. This is a 6B pencil. So it's a little softer and a little darker than most pencils. But I do that so you can see what I'm doing. If I were to use a very light pencil you'd be guessing what is she doing how is she how is she doing this um I'm just looking for the shapes I'm just looking for the basic shapes having drawn this quickly I remember the proportions that I'm looking for here I'm trying to mimic like this shape I'm not telling myself this is hair I'm telling myself it's just sort of this rounded area where her hairline is this part's rounded as well and this area is sort of kind of a gentle curve this comes down as well it's a little smaller like a rounded triangle and then the swoops down this as well and it might help a little bit actually this might need to come up a little it might help to kind of give an arc to where the eyebrows are going to go and where the nose is going to go and her cheeks are kind of lovely coming out this way and then they kind of dip it this dips in and then it kind of comes out again I can tell I'm already trying to expand this I'm trying to make it look more straight on I can see that I'm doing that even though I just said beware of that I can tell I'm already trying to I call it writing the ship sort of tilting it up i don't want to do that so i'm just going to take a moment and really figure out where i want this hairline to be kind of carefully draw it this is going to all turn pretty dark anyway and then i'm going to establish this is where the eyebrow is coming in here's where another eyebrow is coming over and i can tell it sort of moved over a little bit from the part in her hair and then her cheek and let's see her nose so here's her forehead her nose we see just a little on the left we see a little bit more on the right and I'm just looking for a gentle shape I don't want to put too much in fact that might be a little too broad I can I can come back and adjust that but down here there is not much happening it's just a little hint of lips a little hint of the chin then it comes right back up into her face now when i look at that right now it's not exact but it's close enough um i'm gonna leave these sort of little curved areas for her eyes and just see, you know, this feels a little low to me. I'm going to just erase it gently and maybe tip it up just a smidge. I feel like that needs to be up here just a little bit more. Okay, and like I said, this is probably too wide, so I'm just gonna tilt that. and bring her mouth up a little. Okay, and now I'm going to sort of follow this line of the cloth, how it comes down, and it makes a nice little shape here, this negative space coming off her head, and it goes, it flows right into where her child's head begins. So that's about here. There's like a narrow little gap between mom's face and then where the child is. And like I mentioned when we were sketching, just a little bit of space here for the face. There is not a lot of room. I want to make it nice and wide because that the child's head is still pretty wide. This is not easy by the way. Just drawing a child straight on is not easy and then drawing this foreshortened version is not easy. So what we're tackling tonight, we're tackling it together so hopefully next time you do something like this you won't be nervous about it. This is, this took a long time in the um canon of our history to figure out how to make realistic children i feel like it was not a simple thing just like perspective took some effort and drawing figures you know not not all this just comes naturally it takes a long time to trust your eye to give you the shapes now i left some area open for the pupils it looks weird i i know it looks like a baby with like glowing eyes try not to see it that way just try to see it as once we get painting that will get some dark paint in there and it'll it'll all make more sense nice big head maybe too big I don't know take a little bit of that away I can always add to it But the important thing is that they're now connected with the fabric, and it doesn't have to be exactly what the photo is doing, just close enough. But they're sort of snuggled in together, and I think however you achieve that is fine. Getting that feeling is really what's more important than anything. and i'm just sort of looking at these shapes coming in and out there's some pattern to the fabric here i am not going to spend time on that right now the pattern is going to take an uh if i were if i had all the time in the world and i felt like the pattern was important i would focus on it but for right now i just want these other shapes in there notice that we don't see hands we don't really see feet maybe there's a foot like down there i'm not sure what that is but we just see ruffles we see ruffles of the fabric we see the fabric coming down you know off her head and kind of making these big shapes we don't see arms and legs and other things and that's okay that's all right if you feel like adding it i think the tiles are a nice component to this composition you don't have to you can totally skip it if you're not feeling it but I do think that that grid behind them it does help sort of tell the story of like where they are what they're doing why we're seeing this bird's view. Now is my chance to fix any last minute problems before I switch to paint. I'm noticing there's sort of some shadows over there that I want to include. I'm not sure her face is exactly right but I don't want to get fussy and that does become a trap for me for other artists. You know, there's a fine line between adjustments and refining, oh, this could have been up closer, and just getting so wound up in trying to get it to look perfect. So if you're feeling like I could fiddle with this for a lot longer, maybe join me in just letting it go and let's move on to paint because we might be able to correct some things too and paint, which would be great. Okay, setting the pencil down. I'm really honoring what I'm saying to you guys. Here is my typical paintbrush that I like to work with. You can work with it whatever you like, but this is the Princeton Aqua Leek Quill, number six. I really love this brush. And I'm going to start, like I said, with the burnt umber, I think is really the color that I want to work with tonight. And maybe start with something easy, like the fabric. and just have a lot of water in the brush and just kind of I might not put anything in the background right now I might just work on the fabric um although it wouldn't matter since I'm working monochromatically it's not a big deal if something oozes into something else chances are I'm gonna need to darken up some areas anyway after it dries so it's really okay if this is all you know fairly fairly if it overlaps in fact I'll just go right into the head because there's a lot there although one thing I didn't practice ahead of time was how I was going to create the texture of the hair on the baby so what I might do is grab some extra water and just put an ever so slight wash on the baby maybe allowing some parts to say very light but not quite white of the paper although the baby's chest is pretty light there so maybe a little bit more water watercolor tends to dry lighter so you might put paint down and think oh you know that's actually um gonna be really dark well give it a minute and once it dries you might be like oh no that's fine it worked out. Barbara we have a couple questions about paints um as you're getting started with that um one is just someone was asking if they could use gouache um if that would work as well and someone else was um just kind of asking about the difference between using the cakes um and the tubes sure okay the cakes and the tubes that's an easy question uh they're great either way i mean really if you look at my palette i mean i did spritz it before class but that paint is sitting in those wells and it dries so it becomes as dry as the cakes do uh within the week and it's the same principle you're re-wetting it you're reactivating it, and the only difference is that I would make sure, not difference, the only thing to think about really is, are you buying paint that is professional grade, or are you buying paint that is student grade, and I would recommend almost everybody to pick professional grade, whatever it is, tubes or cakes, because you, this is a very delicate medium that will fade, um so that's why a lot of museums are only allowed to show watercolors for a certain amount of time per every i think it's like 100 years you can only show something 10 years out of the 100 years or whatever that particular material you know allows because it'll fade over time and so if you're working with student grade paint you might paint an amazing picture you never know when those happen and then all of a sudden if it's student grade paint you're like oh no, a week later, why does it look different? You know, where did the values go? So it's really worth getting paint that will last as long as possible. So I would just encourage you to tubes or cakes, get the professional grade. And then when it comes to gouache, gouache is so much fun. Definitely mix it with watercolors. Or if you just want to paint with gouache, you can water it down and you can have it be very similar to watercolor um in fact as you know i've been painting in watercolor for so many decades now it feels like um i just learned something last weekend uh that i am excited to play with even more and it is uh based on this artist arthur melville that lived about 100 years ago that um would and i only discovered this because a student asked a really great question and we really started to look into how he was making his work. He would have wet watercolor like this and then he would get some gouache and water it down and kind of drop it in to different places and it would ooze. And I can show you one of them. Um, no, actually I had two here. Um, okay. So this is an example. It was a study of one of his works well out of copyright. It's a long time ago. Um, but I was dropping in some gouache that you can kind of see. I think I put some blue gouache in here. Um, I dropped some white gouache I think in there you can really see it I think right right in there I think there was some gouache and it just adds sort of this lighter smokier layer and then this was a page I mean I really like I told everyone last week I'm not the most comfortable with abstract but this was so much fun to do is put down the watercolors and then drop in I think this was only white that I used throughout and it just made some really interesting mixtures it behaves like watercolor to a certain extent but it's just different enough then here was another little study we were um sort of thinking about reflections and fog and just adding um some gouache into that so i think if you are game for experimentation uh add some gouache or just play with the gouache water it down it's usually meant to be very flat and opaque but that's how it was intended uh originally it doesn't mean that's how we have to as artists continue with it so have fun all right so some of this is starting to dry a little I'm still using that magnani 1404 paper which um like I mentioned before is sort of a slightly cheaper version than arches I just love arches so much but this is a fun one um to play with uh if i'm just you know not feeling like i want to spend a ton of money um other mediums i feel like i can get away with painting on almost any surface but watercolor needs that paper that's cotton that's really what i would recommend cotton paper to absorb the pigments if it's not a good quality watercolor paper it just is a lot harder to work with not impossible you can you can do a lot of things with a variety of materials depends on the artist. Make some of those little bangs he has. So cute. And I might want to sort of bunch up a few. I might not want them to be quite so literally separate. I'm also, this brush can get a very nice fine point if I slow down a little. I could get a nicer point to some of this, not make them look quite so chunky well not all of them anyway maybe I'll leave it there I don't want to get too crazy with it but I do want to go in and put some of the dark of the pupils in because I just feel like that was making him look a little not right I'll fix that kind of put the eyes in and the very faint little actually what I'm seeing more than eyebrows I'm seeing cute little eyelashes of course babies always have these wonderful eyelashes so there's a little bit of dark there I want to dissolve that a little so I put more water on my brush and i'm just bringing it down there's some shadow on this lower side of the baby's face so i'm gonna just give it some uh shadow down here it's like a light shadow just under that nose a little bit this cute little mouth coming out such a sweet kiddo and I'm definitely going to have to darken this up so I'm glad I didn't sit there and you know play with the the hair too much because this is darker and I'm going to definitely want to go darker there uh do I want to darken up anything here actually this actually looks a little darker by the cheek and maybe this too so lots of subtle actually maybe I'll wipe out some of the hair, I'll come back in and do the hair. This area I want to stay nice and light, the baby's chest. And then this is light for some reason, I must've forgotten to paint it. That's gonna get darker. This is gonna get darker too, and this as well. Now if I go right up against this, the dark will kind of go close to the baby and maybe get confusing. So I'll just kind of wipe it away from here. All right, this shouldn't be so light. I'm gonna knock out that value. There's some beautiful values up here. This is letting my brush kind of define some of that. A little sweep of the brush. Okay, so her face is very, very white. I don't want that to happen. So I'm going to take more burnt umber. I haven't used any of the Payne's Gray yet. Actually, one thing I think I need to do is I need to just do sort of a background because again, I don't want the white of the paper to become something that kind of pulls our eye. So I'm looking here, like which one's darker that the wrap on her is a little darker so whatever I put down here I might have to go back in and darken up her wrap or I mean I do have the freedom to change it if I I don't want to go back and redraw and repaint it I can always just say all right this is how this part's gonna go I want to knock out the white and now it does something it changes the focus now this is super light i'm gonna i'm not gonna knock down a lot of these values but by getting rid of the white around them it's it's making it feel more cozy and connected here this is gonna get a lot darker a little bit more paint now this is all quite dark so just all these little highlights that have popped up for whatever reason i'm just gonna get rid of them so knock them all back this is going to be darker in terms of since people have questions about paint in terms of brands it doesn't really matter what brands you choose to work with you can mix them and and use them in the same painting it's absolutely fine so if you got let's say Winsor Newton Daniel Smith and M. Graham all those different brands are going to play well together you may have an affinity for a certain type of paint like M. Graham although not ideal for vegans it's a great paint they use honey so that's why I say not great for vegans but it's a very fluid beautiful paint that you may just like the feel of and you may want to buy only that um or i know some vegans that choose their materials based on what is um also vegan for art materials and you know papers can also be either um vegan friendly or not depending on the sizing i think that they put in uh which is sort of a something in the paper that helps you lift the colors. So, you know, I needed to keep this hairline a little lighter and I didn't. I'm going to use some water and lift just a little bit of that out. For a lot. I just lifted a lot. Watercolor is so easy to control. I'm going to take a little bit of this clean paper towel and just hold it up right to the area that I'm trying to blot and just trying to get this runaway puddle. Oh I made another very light mark. I can always get rid of that. The the this little light mark needed to be there for the light to make sense as it's coming down and sort of hitting the top of the child's head and her side of her face see so under here is supposed to be a little darker so now it's just a game of like sort of chasing where all those dark values belong you could have done this in brown like me or forest green or blue it really doesn't matter as long as you're picking something and just staying with that color that's really all you need to do And I will come back and fix this once it's dry. I think I also want to get rid of a little bit of the white on her face. It's really seeming like light is very strongly hitting that part of her face. It's not. So I'm just going to get that all darker. and this too just a little bit um and I think his face I don't know why I've decided it's a boy it could be a girl um this might want to get a little darker oops that's kind of heavy-handed there's no white over here and this is throwing my eye off so i'm actually even though i put the color in for the people i'm just gonna get rid of all the white knock it all back and then now i'm seeing some of this creep in where i don't really want it so i'm just pulling out some of that tone pulling out some up here it's pretty light then over here this part of the nose is lighter and this part is darker. So I have that in reverse. I just want to make sure that things are making sense given where the light is coming from. And over here there's like a little bit of light on her cheek and a little bit up here on her brow. Okay this baby probably just needs darker hair at this point so I'm getting to get darker with this color I'm not adding a lot of water and you can see there's like this very dark tone but there's also little bits of paper coming through that's called dry brush when that happens it's gonna take a while to cover this baby's head with dry brush but the nice thing is it does kind of read as hair, which I appreciate. At least more so than my individual little clunky hairs. I can always blend a few of these too. Don't forget, you know, when we're making a study of these pieces, we want something of our own personality and our own voice to come through in them um we want to learn we want to gain something from looking at what another artist is showing us but allow it to be different allow your marks to be um your marks uh most recently i went to uh i think i talked about a little bit last weekend or last week uh where i was planning to go see the john singer sergeant exhibit in new york at the mat uh and i went with a whole bunch of um art students uh from the arts council princeton and uh it was a lot of fun and we had done a lot of studies of sergeant paintings in advance and um i kind of tortured some of my class uh classes with uh madam x and a couple other paintings that were really quite beautiful but a challenge to make a copy of but the end result was it was so exciting to see the work in person and I all I could think about was the Princeton Museum actually when I was there because we have spent so much time looking at different works of art and more you know you spend an hour with something you really committed that to a part of your brain and when you see it in person it just is so exciting it feels like you're in front of a famous person um it's just a really special connection we have with the work uh so i just am super excited for the museum to open it can't open soon enough i know there's a big event planned on halloween um i was talking to care about it today and um it just it sounds like it's going to be so much fun uh and she reminded me that uh the museum is free and it's going to be open to everybody and people could just come and there's two evenings where there's late nights uh so if you're working and you can't get over to see the museum uh that might be an option and i just it made me so excited uh that it's so open so uh anyway things like this you know when you see this image in the museum you know after painting it you may really have a different feeling than other images. I know I felt that way in the Sargent exhibit that the pieces I have painted directly I really connected to in person. I was like oh my gosh there's that painting I did and I spent so much time with and then other works are obviously very wonderful to look at just really special but when you've done a study it's it's really um a unique way to have learned about that artist and that work and i i have to say none of my paintings look like sargent did them um they are just studies uh but they are special to me because they're my voice but also learning from him and that's what we're doing we're learning from different artists and this is fun to work from a photo uh we don't often get to do that sometimes we work from other paintings or sculpture which we'll do uh next week but you know photos are special because a photographer has to figure out a really interesting composition and um has to figure out actually values, especially in grayscale like this, values become a very big part of it. So it's nice to have it already sorted as we get to the project. We're like, oh, we don't have to think about it too much. We just follow what they have laid out for us. But I'm also adding, I've just started adding a little bit of dry brush just to make it more fun. You can add your own flair with color if you want. Whatever you feel like. Okay, I'm going to take a moment just to stop and look at it and sort of see like if some of the lights are making sense or if some things aren't totally there yet. I feel like obviously down here needs a little bit more shadow, So, but, you know, maybe some of this needs to get a little darker too. I just want to make sure the light makes sense. So even though it's painful to go over that eye, because I worked on it, I don't want to, like, ruin what I've been toiling over. But if that needs to get darker, it needs to get darker. And if this gets darker, then chances are this needs to get darker. So I have to let that dry a little. and sometimes I just go right over the work and do that because I just need a darker value there and nothing else is going to fix it but the nice thing with watercolor is you really can go darker darker darker and you can lift you can go lighter I know a lot of people feel like it's a challenging medium because they feel like you can't go lighter but you can you can lift it depending on the color so up here this value is very very similar and i knew that from an earlier moment putting in the background that this was darker i didn't really want to darken it but now i do so i'm coming through darkening up this and i think that actually helped really bring the focus back to their faces so i'm glad i did that her hairline here, her part is too wide. I'm going to pull some lines this way so it feels like the hair is sort of coming back and then some hairs going this way. It's not really a line so much is kind of a wiggly line actually there should be it should be a little lighter there maybe this could come down a little more too at a certain point I might get a little fussy and decide you know it's starting to go to a point of getting a little overworked and of course that's a very famous thing about watercolor you know when you know that you're done um i try to stop early so that's my recommendation for a lot of people just stop a little shy of where you think it's done and if you need to go back into it you can but maybe give it time give it maybe a day or two uh and then if you're like you know what the way this dried you know something needs to change like right now this is the white of the paper it's feeling really really light to me um so i what i'm gonna do this also feels a little too light like in where her eye is i'm gonna just darken up this a little and there's like a little bit of dark under there there's a little dark on this side too a little bit darker over here I'm just going to take a little pass. Just get rid of the white. Everything just got darker. It's okay. Actually, in person, it's not quite as light as that. I think the camera's picking up a little bit. It looks weird not to have the eye there, but if I start adding very dark color right now, what's going to happen is it's going to ooze everywhere and it's going to look strange. So I have to be patient. I'm not always patient. Sometimes I just go for it and I regret it. So if that is happening to you, you're not alone, but try to be patient. Try to let it just dry and come back to it. Now, I feel like I've put so many little brushstrokes in here that the gauzyness of this fabric feels like a different texture than what's in the photo. That's okay with me though, I don't mind it. But if you're finding that you want the texture to be a little different, you can always just wet it down and change it. Can re-wet an area and work on it again. That's a cute little baby. Oh, I might wanna make the head a little wider on the side though. My son always had a really big head as a kid. And so this kind of reminds me of that a little. It's very cute. I hope he doesn't hear me say that. Now that I've said it in a very public forum. I know you guys will keep that safe here. Were there any other questions, Danielle? We do have a couple of questions. One is someone was asking if you would remind us all of the dry brush technique. And then the other question is about what kind of tape you use. Someone said that when they bought artist tape, it pulled the top layer of paper up when they took it off. Someone else says beautiful painting. Thank you. artist tape really should be gentler than masking tape so I'm sorry that happened to you um sometimes if I don't have any artist tape nearby and I just have masking tape I will stick the masking tape first to my um like whatever clothing like my shirt or something uh just to pick up little fibers and that will actually that will be between your paper and the tape and make it come up a little easier it's a low-tech method but it's one that does pretty much help out with preventing ripping um which is nice uh but i'm so sorry you experienced that that's a bummer um and then the other question was uh forgot already um yeah i loaded you up with two um the other question is um a reminder of the dry brushing technique okay so dry brush is really interesting sometimes when I'm like okay I'm ready for that like perfect dry brush technique which is what happened over here sometimes it just doesn't work and sometimes I'm just panning along I'm not really paying attention all of a sudden it does a beautiful job so when I'm not sure if it's going to work or not I'll pull up another piece of paper um so here is my sketchbook now this is a smooth paper so it's probably not going to dry brush as well oh see there I had low expectations and it worked um if you can almost imagine this is water and there's sun glistening on it this is one way that um dry brush can be so much fun um to work with if you just you know pull out a piece of paper and play with it what it has to be is like a little bit dry. Let's put a little sailboat up here. Never mind, I can't trust sailboat. If you have too much water, it won't do that. But if you have a nice textured paper like this, it should, well there's too much water in my brush now, it should do a nice dry brush technique like that. And that's what was happening here a little bit. I was, I was letting that happen because I felt like it was appropriate for hair for that to happen um but it's it's worth playing with because uh dry brush can really give some nice texture to a piece um and in the hands of someone like Winslow Homer uh dry brush will look like sparkles on the water very easily um really wonderful painter that I believe the museum has several of his paintings but I don't remember off top of my head which ones. This is just another tool in the toolbox, a really good technique to have. So now I've put this dark in here but it's feeling a little too dark. So I'm going to just blend that a little and maybe just put a little bit more of that up here, just a little break up the regularity of that. I so want that to be dry. Let's see how many more minutes. I guess we're getting close to the end so I better figure this out quickly. Sometimes I feel like I need someone to pull me away from my painting before I do too much damage. So if you feel that way you are not alone, but maybe do yourself a favor and pull yourself away before you do too many marks on your piece. You can always come back to it, always come back to it. Yeah, I'm just going to let that be wet again because just not going to get resolved tonight. That's okay. We had someone just write in and say that they've found it sometimes helpful to use a hair dryer on the tape to help release the tape. Yeah that warms up the adhesive. Also hair dryers in general with watercolor are very helpful in letting them dry faster if you're you know trying to get something put together pretty quickly you can let it you can have the hair dryer in between dry your watercolor so that you know what you're dealing with and what the colors really should look like. This was such a fun piece to look at. I mean, I'm a mom. So I relate to a mom and a little one. But you know, I feel like it's a really special photograph. This is a special painting to work from today. Grateful to the museum for that. If I could just get this little one's other eye in, I'd be very happy. Barbara, thank you so much. This has been wonderful to watch, as always. I've learned a lot. And if you'd like to see Manuel Carrillo's photograph, Mother and Child, again, please visit the link we are dropping in the chat. Please be sure to share your artwork on social media. We will include the Instagram information in the chat as well. I'd like to invite you to join us next week on Wednesday next week, Wednesday, June 18 at 8 p.m. for the third class in the series inspired by a red figure ceramic attributed to the Ariana painter from around 460 BCE. So we're doing some time traveling. Next week's session, we will explore painting an object in the round. Be well. We'll see you next week.