Rachel's rocks painted turtle!

Hey guys! So I accidentally deleted the beginning of my video which showed you the types of rocks that I'm using before I painted them green, but you'll have to bear with me. So I've got six rocks, four legs, one head, and then of course the shell. And I'm covering it with my darkest green acrylic paint that I have. I don't have a very dark color so I'm using hunter green mixed with a little bit of brown and a little bit of black to make it really dark green. I'm doing the head right now. I will place them together in a moment so that you can see what they look like and what types of rocks you might have to go searching for in order to paint this project because we are painting a really cute turtle today. So this is my legs and I'm just doing, if need be, do more than one coat. But here's what I have for my head and my legs and my shell. Just little tiny rocks and I actually don't usually glue my parts together but it's up to you if you want to do that. So we're going to start with the shell and we're going to use a pencil and draw on a design, whichever one you're comfortable with. If you want to go look on Pinterest for turtle shell designs, that's basically where I started off at the very beginning. Now I'm going to use a lighter color green and outline all of these shapes. And once I've outlined it, I go in with my blending brush, which is just a paintbrush that I've used a lot and I've dabbed it a lot so it's all fuzzy at the end. And I'm going to go in with different shades of green in the center. I want it to be dark in the center and light green on the outside of these little shapes on our turtle shell. You can use whatever colors you want. Sometimes I do mandala turtles, which I'd like to do one soon, hopefully. But this time I'm doing more of a, not really realistic, but you know what it is when you see it. You know automatically it's going to be a turtle shell. So I'm just using different shades of green and giving the parts on the shell some depth by adding a dark center and light on the outside. So whatever shades of green you're comfortable using. Or if you want to be dark on the outside of the shape and then light on the inside, you can do it completely opposite for me. Or just do what I'm doing today and see how it turns out for you. Blending, if you haven't seen any of my videos, I basically just dab the paint on with a fuzzy brush while it's still wet and not too much paint. So you might have to wipe some of the paint off with a little paint towel or something. I usually use a towel on my lap because if I don't, it's all over me. So I just keep wiping off excess paint on the towel and it's easier to blend when you have a little bit. So I'm just drawing in all of my shapes with the lightest green. It's almost like a yellowish green. I just want it to be lighter on the very edge of the shapes. And then blend the darker greens into the center. And it's all coming together now. It looks really cool. This turtle is going to be bright. I thought it would be fun to do something else for the spring season coming very soon. And you can always keep like your darker shade that you covered your shell in prior to drawing on these shapes. Keep that shade because you might have to go in and fix around these shapes. You might blend too far on the outside of it and you might have to go back and fix. So always keep that dark green available like I have so I can go around and fix everything. Now I made a little opening at the front of the shell where the head's gonna sit. I basically just painted it in black so it looks like it's it's hollow in there almost. Now I'm going to use some gold of course. You know me. And a little blending brush. And I'm actually just going to get a small amount of gold on my brush. I don't want too much because I just kind of want to lightly dust it on just to give it some texture some depth on the the little green patches on the shell. It just kind of makes them stand out a little bit more. It looks really nice. And like I said not too much. Just lightly dust it on. You don't have to go all the way out to the edge. Just slightly in the middle of them. Just brush it on gently. You don't want to see the gold when you look at it. You want to see green. So make sure you don't put too much of that gold there because then you might have to re-blend the whole thing all over again. Now I'm going to outline my little shapes on my shell as well with the gold. Just because I'm a huge fan of gold I just feel like it makes my rock stand out a lot. So I usually outline everything in gold. You don't have to do this step if you don't want to. Or you can use like a dark metallic green or a light metallic green. But I find the gold does me just fine. So I'm done with that. I'm going to let it dry and work on the head and the feet. And I'm just going to show you here again now that the shell's been painted. He's looking kind of cute. And he's just going to be legless for a little bit. Now I'm just going to simply choose a lighter green and dot on the outer edge. So this this foot is going to be on the front left side. So I'm going to put the dots on the front left side of this one so that you know where these feet are placed. So if there's dots on the front left that's the front left foot. And you can do whatever you want. You don't even have to do any dots here. If you just want to leave it like this. I usually do the shell in a glossy shine spray acrylic spray or a resin coat which I've just started using. It's very difficult to get it right but once you do it's a lot of fun. But I leave the head and the legs a matte a matte varnish. So they are varnished but they're not shiny. I just want the shell to be shiny. So you'll see that at the end of the tutorial as well. So I've got the front left and right. The dots are on the front left and the front right. And I use the front legs a bit a bit bigger than the back ones. So you'll notice that as well once I put it all together. And I just did something simple. I didn't want to do too much with them. Just wanted to be able to tell where they were supposed to sit along the side of the body. Do the same thing with the back legs. I do the bottom left. I do dots around the bottom left of the foot or the bottom right of the foot. With the head I like to start off with two nostrils. So I know where my turtle's nostrils are. It just kind of gets me a little center spot to work with. And then I do a triangle. So there's a dot in the center of the two nostrils. A dot on the bottom left and the bottom right. So now I have a triangle to work with. And I'm just going to run dots up in that triangle. Because we're going to fill in that triangle with different sized green dots. And you can change it up. You can do different colors of dots. If you want to use different colors of green all in here that's completely up to you. I'm just using one shade of green. I guess it just kind of the dots just give it a little bit of texture. Kind of make it look a little bit like scales. It's just a simple technique to give your turtle parts a little bit of definition. I do turtles in all different colors as well. I've been doing these turtles for quite some time now. They're so much fun. I'm always looking for turtle parts whenever I go rock hunting. There I filled it in with all those different sized dots using my dotting tool. But you can use whatever you want for that. If you just use knitting needles or hole punch sets or what have you to do dots. Use whatever you've got. Toothpicks, pens. I've used just about everything. Once the, I've drawn two dots for eyes. Once they're dry we're going to add gold. But we still want to see the green. So just add a smaller dot of gold on top of the green dot. And then a even smaller black dot in the center of the gold. So you can see the green, the gold and the black. There we go. Super cute. Now I'm going to show you what he looks like all put together. And of course wait till your parts are dry before you play around with it. I know it's hard but you have to. So we're going to make his shell shine. There we go. And he's got a matte coat on his feet and his head. And he is just gorgeous. Just gorgeous. Thank you so much. Have fun with it.