2 Minute Art Tips with Julie
I Like Shiney!!
Alcohol + Watercolor=😲
Hello and welcome to Cheap Joe's Art Stuff. My name is Julie and I'm here to impart some knowledge to you today via a Two Minute
Art Tip and recently I just realized that we have never approached this subject. So, I want to
talk to you a little bit about a little trick with rubbing alcohol and a handy dandy spray
bottle. Okay, so this is just like a travel you know bottle that you know you would go
pack for vacations, it's very very small, and I just put straight rubbing alcohol in here.
Now it doesn't matter what the concentration is 70, 90 don't care doesn't matter. I have found no
profound difference with either of them. But what I want to show you is how you can use alcohol to
kind of alter the behavior of your watercolor when it's on the surface. So what I have here is
I already have an existing wet wash so what we did was we wet the paper generously and then we put
you know wet color into it and then I'm going to take my wet brush (Julie is adding paint to her brush) and use the exact same color
this is American journey Blue Stone and we're going to take it straight out of the palette (Julie is painting on the paper)
and use it in a more dry format. So this isn't wet into wet this is wet onto dry paper because
I want you to see what the difference is. When you use it when it's wet (Julie continues to add paint on paper) you get a really nice effect
while it's wet but it dries back a little bit more subtle. When it's drier like this and
we have a you know a higher concentration of color onto the surface the effect is very
different. So I wanted you to see the difference between the two applications. This one's drier (Julie points to the application on the right which is drier)
this one's more wet (Julie points to the application on the left, which is more wet) and we're going to put a much more dense application a color on here (Julie continues to paint and add color)
The alcohol is gonna mess with all of this sometimes. Not terribly concerned that we
have you know irregularities within this wash. So okay so color, ready, here we. We're gonna hit
this with some alcohol (Julie is spraying alcohol from the spray bottle onto the paint) and you can see how it does like cool stuff it's moving the pigment around
changing the placement and you can see that it's much more exaggerated in this dryer format than it
is in this wet because the water is diluting the effect of the alcohol here. So what we're going to
get in this is some undulation in the color you're going to get some a little bit of speckling and
stuff like this this one (Julie is pointing to the painting on the right) you're going to get texture, you're going to get what looks like,
sometimes they look like little geodes to me and when you use it like this (Julie is spraying alcohol holding the bottle higher) where we are coming down on it,
you can see that you can get like really cool kind of changes in the the color while I do it
instead of having a like this (Julie is spraying from the side) where you get like a directional, you know that way. It's just kind of
amazing it's so fun and freeing and kind of a just cool tool to have in your pocket. A way to mess
with the color, create these kind of like really kind of amorphous effects with you know (Julie holds up and sets the bottle down)
two cents worth of rubbing alcohol. Hello how fun is that. So just wanted to make sure that you
knew about this handy tool that is so amazing. So we hope that you enjoy, thank you for watching
and go try this at home, right now. Go, it's awesome and we'll see you next time thanks for watching
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