And then one day it happened. The watercolor started pouring out perseverance, persistence. Keep at it until it breaks. Once it breaks, you've got it for the rest of your born days. Now this painting just needs another 15 or 20 minutes of work, and it will look just fine. But at the time, I thought it was what we call a stinker, but it has all kinds of good things soft edges here, soft edges here, a little hard edge here, soft and hard, and definitely the paint mixed in all by itself here.

So I did stand back and watch. It's just the one who stood back and watched it didn't like what was happening. Why? This is why I had been very used to very controlled watercolors using washes all the time and very small bits of paint applied. This painting is probably 20 years old. And you can see there's a lot of control there.

If I take it away, you'll see a lack of control. I was used to controlling things and not letting the water colors control. Although this is a good picture, I could just as well have done it in oils or acrylics. It didn't really capture the creative genius that lies dormant in a watercolor. There's our principle at work, stand back and watch what happens. Let's see what happened a little bit later when some of them started working and I started to understand how they weren't.

Okay, things are starting to happen here. Remember, all these paintings were done outside. None of them were done in a studio. I had between 20 minutes and 35 to 40 minutes to complete a painting because if I worked on them too long They would just get very heady and I'd start to put things in that I thought should be there. So this started working eautiful soft Red Cloud up here. I would never think of doing that.

Look at this here how it just sort of went like that. It was winter. So there's little bits of snow all around the place. A lot of areas in this painting worked. Now I could take this in the studio, and I could add gradation and work on this in the winter months and make it into a fine watercolor. So first step is wet, dry, and watch and bring it home and put it away for a while and bring it out later and see if there's something you can do to it.

Let's look at one more when things really started happening. Okay, here we have a tree out by the river, probably about a 20 minute sketch and it's got some great hardware edges and soft edges. I took it home in the studio and did a little bit of lifting here and there and added a few darks. And within another 20 minutes, I had a very, I had a nice little picture of a tree. Now that says this is what we're talking about is get your get outside and use the three secrets, bring them home, let them sit for a while. Keep it up for a while, until you start to see how it's happening and what you can do.