I let another artist pick my supplies, and I picked hers! Hello, and welcome back to
Jenna Gets Creative. Or simply welcome! This is a collaboration with Darkest Raven Designs,
so welcome and thank you new viewers and subscribers, and if you're seeing my video first, please
don't forget to check out Darkest Raven Design's video after this.
We decided to do a 5 colour watercolour challenge, but the catch is we traded photos of our watercolour
collections and let the other artist choose which 5 colours we had to use AND which prompt
to stick to. The colours Darkest Raven Designs picked for
me were Sap Green and Prussian Blue from my Thomas Kinkade palette, Light Oxide Red from
Van Gogh by Royal Talens, and Lemon Yellow Hue and Alizarin Crimson from my Winsor & Newton
Cotman palette. The prompt she gave me was to make an improvement on my favourite animal.
If you're curious which colours I picked for her, and which prompt I sent along, you'll
have to watch her video. I've seen the result, and I love it!
These were definitely interesting colours to try to use together. At a glance I thought
it would be really simple, because it's the primaries, a secondary, and a nice medium
brown, but on closer inspection I knew I was going to have a challenge if I wanted to do
much mixing. The blue, green, and yellow are all cool tones, which means those will mix
nicely together, but the red and brown are warm. If you've ever tried to mix secondaries
from primaries that weren't either all warm or all cool tones, you'll know it's easy to
accidentally mix mud. This red and blue makes a passable cool purple, but the red and yellow
don't make the nicest orange. The palette they come from also has a warm yellow, Cadmium
Yellow Hue, so when I paint with just that palette and need orange, that's the yellow
I use. So I decided to go with a storybook illustration
style, rather than trying to mix a bunch of different shades and go for realism. The prompt
has me going into the realm of fantasy anyway, right?
Before I explain my illustration and the story behind it, I'd like to introduce myself and
the channel to the new viewers coming over. My name is Jenna, as you might have guessed,
and I upload art content here on YouTube at least twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
It's usually traditional mediums on paper or canvas, rather than crafts or digital,
but I do dabble in both of those as well. I love using my art and my channel to do art
product reviews, provide tutorials on topics my audience requests, review books, movies
and shows with fan art time lapses, and sometimes even talk about history topics or current
events I find interesting or important. The visuals are always art! I just change up the
talking points. I'm also an aspiring author, so sometimes I'll draw my characters and talk
about those stories. I dabble in many mediums, but my favourites
are alcohol markers, watercolour, and coloured pencil.
Our creed here on the channel is live life creatively, and my goal is to inspire and
teach you to do that, so if that sounds interesting to you, I'd love it if you would subscribe
and join me on this journey! I'm actually planning to hold a big giveaway
once I'm qualified for the YouTube Partner Program, and I'm getting close! The requirements
to apply are 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours total over the last 12 months. My giveaway
will be open to all of my channel subscribers age 14+, no matter where you are in the world,
as long as you're able to receive a package mailed from Canada. The giveaway prize will
include an assortment of new and like-new, tested once art supplies as well as a small
original artwork. If you'd like to see that giveaway happen as soon as possible, then
keep watching to help me with those watch hours, and subscribe to be eligible.
All right, so the illustration. The prompt was to improve my favourite animal, and my
favourite animal is the horse. When I was a little kid, I used to wish and ask for a
robotic horse. Sorry, a "robotical" horse. Apparently that's how I thought the word was
said. This robot horse would be just like a real horse, so I could ride it to school
and go on weekend trail rides, but since it wasn't actually alive, I could keep it in
the garage. It wouldn't matter that our property wasn't zoned as farmland, making horses illegal
to keep there, because it wasn't a live horse. There would also be pretty much no upkeep,
because it's a robot. Done for the day? Turn it off! No feeding requirements. No piles
of horse poop. I seriously asked for this for multiple years in a row at Christmas time.
I wonder if that was the craziest thing those shopping mall Santas heard those days!
Then I went through a phase where I chose to believe, not because I thought it was possible
but because I thought it was fun, that all my toys did indeed come to life and have complex
lives whenever humans weren't looking. This was pre-Toy Story. I think I was inspired
by the 80s film Where the Toys Come From. Either way, like any little girl obsessed
with horses, I had toy horses. And at some point I was choosing to believe that they
could come to life. Naturally the next step was to wish that I could not only witness
my toy horses coming to life, but have the ability to make them life size at will. I
had a bunch of tiny plastic horses from the Grand Champions toy line, and I figured if
they could come to life AND become life size whenever I wanted, how perfect would that
be? A pocket sized horse that becomes a real horse when I need it, and then goes back in
my pocket when I don't. How cool would that be? My favourite of these tiny plastic horses
was a chestnut mare named Dutchess, and I believe the set she came in was meant to be
a family of Morgans, but honestly she looked like a Welsh to me.
So for this illustration, I've drawn of a robotic horse inspired by carousel horse in
armour designs, and coloured some parts to look like that little chestnut mare toy. The
use of the yellow may not be obvious if you weren't paying really close attention at the
beginning, because it's an under layer to the brown parts, and blended into a glaze
over the initial green of the background. I did bring it back at the very end to try
to rub some highlights into the browns, but I'm undecided on how successful that was.
You might think based on all this that my ideal horse would be a chestnut mare on the
small side, and I can see why, but oddly enough that's not the case at all. I don't know why
my favourite horse toy was the little chestnut mare. I've always, ALWAYS loved stock breeds,
particularly the American Quarter Horse, and I like my horses on the bigger side. My ideal
horse would be a Quarter Horse gelding, at least 15.2 hands, with a rich golden Buckskin
coat. Maybe one with some recent Thoroughbred bloodlines for size and speed! And if I couldn't
have that? Friesian, Clydesdale, Spanish Purebred. Something big, dark, and very hairy! If you're
a horse lover, I'd love to hear what your ideal horse would be.
When I was done with painting, I was actually torn about whether or not I wanted to add
line art, but ultimately I decided that since we did agree we could add a liner pen, and
since I was trying to lean in to an illustrative style, line work was the best option. I decided
to use my hard nibbed Tombow Fudenosuke pen because it allows for some amount of variation
in line weight, but it's not very pliable, which I find easier to control. It was this
or pick a very small gauge fineliner and build up the parts I wanted heavier. This is definitely
a faster way to do that! I need to remember to use my plastic nibbed pens like the Fudenosukes
and Micron PN more often. If you were to make improvements on your favourite
animal, what would they be? Let me know in the comments down below. If you haven't seen
Darkest Raven Designs' video yet, definitely go check her out now. I'll have her video
linked everywhere! She's painting with 5 colours I picked from her collection, and the prompt
I gave her was quite open ended. If you have seen hers and you're looking for
something else to watch, I've got some suggestions up on the left side of the screen now. I upload
art content twice a week at minimum, every Tuesday and Thursday, and if you like living
life creatively, whatever that means to you, I'd love to have you along for the ride. Bye
guys!