hello and welcome to my wife Alek tutorial on creating aged paper I'm going to cover my technique for giving your paper that really aged stained look most of my paintings have a scientific illustration style so I use this technique where I want one to have the feel of a sketch that's right out of the field notebook of an early nineteen hundred's naturalist you can achieve this look with coffee or tea I prefer to use watercolor though for a couple of reasons first of all I know it's archival I know I can guarantee that to anyone who buys my original paintings secondly I feel I have better control over the colors that end up on my paper what I use watercolor I just mix a light wash of any color I want and go with that when using coffee or tea you're kind of more beholden to the color of that liquid the first step is to get a flat wash all over your entire paper so I started with you hooker and I worked really wet with just a small amount of pigment in the water and I kind of just went in and worked very loose very messy just to get color on the paper and while the people are still wet I went in with paper towel and pulled a lot of it back out I did this step multiple times so I went in with a wash erase some of it with a paper towel went in again with the wash and erased some of that with a paper towel this is an important part of the process because it goes in ooh a random texture which really helps make it look like that eh paper up into this point to get that color in really fast and really loose I've been using a three-quarter inch oval wash brush but here once I really want to start focusing on darkening those edges I'm using a size five round brush I'm still laying in the paint really loose and really quick as you can see I just want it to be slightly darker but still blend into that yellow ochre I do periodically flip the paper one to make it easier on myself to reach different parts of the paper but also to let that burn see a kind of a drip in and do a lot of London work for me once I'm happy with that initial layer of bricks Fianna i'll let the paper dry for a short period of time I don't want it to get completely dry I just want it to the point where when I come back in with my second layer of burski and I took darken things up I don't want the paint to spread uncontrollably this whole technique relies on it being a push and pull with laying in color and bringing it back out an important thing to keep in mind is you want to soften those edges of the dark colors that you lay in from here on out all you need to do is darken the edges until you're satisfied with it if I decide to do another layer of marciana I'll let the paper get mostly dry before I start another layer and now for everyone's favorite part of the show I'd supplies the colors used in this technique are really straightforward there's only three of them the first is yellow ochre I use that for the base the second is burnt sienna which is used for the color around the edges of the paper and that third is ultramarine blue I have this too the burnt sienna to darken it and then I apply it again to the edges of the paper to get more variety in the tones the brands of watercolor paint I use are daniel Smith and Michael Wilcox I like these brands pretty much equally and there's no reason why I'm using you know Dana Smith burnt sienna and Michael Wilcox yellow ochre it's just the brains that I have had in those colors as far as brushes go I started with in three-quarter inch oval wash brush those are nice for laying in color really fast and really well when I got to the detail at the edge of the page I switched to a number five round sable brush that's it for the tutorial here's a detail shot of what the furniture product looks like thanks so much for watching and I have all my social media and site links below and if you enjoyed this video please don't forget to subscribe