أعلم أن really ITU did a great effort and still do a great effort in setting standards concerning the data and the information required from the different countries and ITU member states in the access area, in the usage area as well. This is in cooperation with the other international UN organization. We really benefit a lot from this data, from this standard during the last five years. We applied most of them, we add to this data as well based on the requirement of the policymaker in our country, and based as well on our experience and on our views, what will be also of interest and of importance to support his decision. I think we need to also to include more and more data about the mobile data in our country, especially that this industry is growing very fast and it's becoming an important industry all over the world. So we need more and more for this. Another area as well is to see maybe the digital divide within the country itself, its data on the governorate levels, because this will help us to set policies, specific policy in order to leverage and to minimize this gap between the governorate within the same country. In addition as well, I think data about the ICT and the content, I think this is also because the content industry is becoming important industry now, especially I think on the regional level. So we need to have some data about regions, Arab region, African region, Latin American region and so forth. The next priority in our next strategy is really is focusing on many areas. First is to continue the liberalization of the ICT sector and this will be through the unified license which will be launched recently before the end of this year and this will increase the competitiveness between our operator and will be in the benefit of our consumer. The second pillar is will be the manufacturing of electronics. Egypt was succeeded to be ranked and to have a position among worldwide concerning the ICT services. But now we have to look to the value added and we have to look to the products. This is our second pillar which already started and we have a plan for the year 2020 in order to position Egypt as well in this area. The third area is innovation and entrepreneurship and Egypt according to the category of age. We have young, we have 50% of our population are young and we paved the way for those young to be entrepreneur and to be innovator in the ICT area. The fourth one and this is also important is to use the ICT in order to achieve a government goal which is achieving social equity between the citizens in our country and to reach the remote area and the undeserved people. So we also, this is very important and we have different program to achieve this goal in the education, in the healthcare sector and other sector in order really to make ICT available for all these people and to help them to have services accessible and with good prices as well. This event has really become from year to year and more and more important not only for the specialized people in the area of statistics and of indicator as well as for the policy maker because you really achieve the equation which I founded, the difficult equation which you gather the policy maker in addition to the statistician and the statistics producer as well. This is very important to hear their opinion, what they need and to see what they also producer of statistics provide to them. For me every year I really, I learn from this symposium, I got many experiences and many information which help me when I return back to my country to set a new strategy for the information and the statistics for our country, for Egypt to present it to the policy maker to benefit our country and also to share what we learned here from the other experiences as well. So it's very important for me, for our ministry and I think for Egypt as a whole.


Hello, welcome to Out of the Comfort Zone. I'm your host, Arby Kelly, and you're watching OC16 Television with Think Tech Hawaii. Now, usually I open up with a body language tip and a book of the week, but today I'm really, really excited for our guests, so I'm just going to skip that because you're going to get a lot of tips during this interview, so please help me welcome Sean Knox. Hey, hello. Thank you, Sean. Thank you so much for coming. Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. What exactly do you do? Sure, Hawaii Employment is an employment agency, and so we are out there really working with a wide range of businesses and helping them fulfill their labor needs. That can be anything from individuals sorting through recycling out in Nanakuli through to executives looking for six-figure job opportunities. We do educational staffing. We do staffing at the convention center, and we're throughout the state. We have offices over in the Hui, Kahalui, Kona, and we're actually expanding into Hilo now, so we're really excited about that. Wow. Wow, you are expanding. That's impressive. Thanks. So it seems like this is a really unique thing to do. How did you get into this line of work? Great question. My wife and I were living in England from 96 to 99, and we were looking for an opportunity to move back to Hawaii. I'm originally from the Big Island, born and raised there in Hawaii, started off in the Hama Kua Sai, and ended up moving to Maui, and graduated from high school there, and moved away to the mainland to college, and then lived in England, and always wanted the opportunity to move home, and in 99 was really kind of the beginning of not too far into the internet age, and did a job search online, found an opportunity in sales and marketing, which involved recruiting and staffing, and really thought there was an opportunity there for me that was more rewarding than my current job. You know, the idea of helping people find work and getting matched to employers, it sounded really enticing, and was fortunate enough to land the opportunity, and have had a blast ever since. Good. Yeah. What an adventure. It was, yeah. So in your opinion, what is it that kind of holds people back? When they're staying in a job, they don't like it, they don't want to be there. What holds them back and keeps them from branching out and searching for another job? Well, I was in that space in 99. I was very comfortable in the career that I had, wasn't completely satisfied with the opportunity, and was worried that my skills didn't transfer into another industry. You know, I'd been doing that job for five years, and was worried that I didn't have a marketable skill set out there in the business community. And so, and I think that translates to a lot of people that, you know, there may be an opportunity right now, and they're just concerned that, am I going to have to take a large pay cut to move into a different industry? Do I have the skills necessary that another employer might be interested in? And my advice to someone that's in that position right now is, this is a perfect time to be evaluating that type of career, how those career contemplations, because the unemployment rate in Hawaii is so low and employers are looking for individuals that have the fundamental background and work skills that are challenging in the low unemployment market, people who will show up on time, people who are professional, people who are articulate, hardworking. And so if you have those, that core work ethic, then you're going to be marketable. That makes sense. Yeah. I'm curious. Do you usually start when a company contacts you saying, hey, we're looking for someone to fill this position? Or does it usually start when a person comes to you saying, hey, I don't like where I am. This is my dream opportunity. Can you find me something like that? What does the process look like? Chicken and the egg. What comes first? So it really is, it has to be a simultaneous effort. Really every day we are placing classified ads out for the current job opportunities that we are staffing for. But there's also a lot of positions that we know may be coming up.  We want to have the talent in place so when the client does call and they need an administrative professional to work out a school field that we have the individual in place that can get through the gate. Yeah, exactly. When people call an employment agency, usually it's a fairly 911 situation. They need someone that can start now, as quickly as possible. So if you don't have that pool of candidate base, then you're going to be missing out of some opportunities. That makes sense. It's very interesting.  Yeah. There's certain positions where interviews aren't required by the employer. In the low-skilled labor types of positions where they just need a certain amount of people to come for the day to help move equipment, work at the landfill. Those are positions where they trust the screening process that we've gone through. On a more professional level, when we're dealing with those executives that are looking at engineering opportunities or CFO, a controller type of positions, yeah. We want to provide them feedback in order for them to succeed and walk through what will be a difficult conversation, and it's not natural for a lot of people to go in and ace an interview, especially if they haven't had an interview in a while. They may have been working at their last employer for eight to ten years. Now they find themselves out in the job market, or they're wanting to be in the job market. The resumes far out of date, they haven't interviewed. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, we want to make sure that they're in a position to succeed. That makes sense. So what kind of process do you walk them through? How do you train them on the interviews? It really comes down to the employee that comes through the door. Some of them are polished, ready, ready to go. They know the fundamentals of an interview being on time, dressing professionally, making sure that you've researched the company in advance. So those are tips that we want to give them, reminders that we want to give them. But there are some individuals that show up to our interview, maybe a little bit late. They may have a tongue piercing and they're going, they're applying for very professional positions. And so tongue piercings are fine in certain elements, but- But it's not the thing you want to convey. Yeah, it may not be the right first image that you want to portray when you're going for administrative assistant position at a bank, or an insurance company, where they're a little bit more strict on the dress code and visible tattoos. So that's when we would coach them on, okay, you probably want to wear a long sleeve shirt if you have visible tattoos.  Do a thorough research on the company and prep yourself. Think about what common questions are going to be asked during that interview that you already know the answers to, and it can just make that conversation a little bit more fluid. That makes sense. Now, I know when we talked earlier, we also talked about the body language of interviews. What do you focus on when you're training your people for these interviews? Eye contact is always important. Smiling, you can never smile too much in an interview. People want to be comfortable with someone that they're bringing into their office environment. And if you're sitting there, arms crossed, avoiding eye contact, just slouching, not being engaged in the conversation, that's a big tail for an employer.  Is this someone that is really engaged in this opportunity, excited about the position that we have, excited about the company, who we are? And if they're not portraying that in the interview, then let's see who else is available. That makes sense. Yeah. I think that I've noticed that has sometimes tripped people up is western culture, like mainlanders, they have a different idea of eye contact than islanders or the locals do. And so when it comes to eye contact, like, this is something I learned the hard way growing up, I didn't know any of this. But when it comes to eye contact, if you make too much eye contact, your scene is like creepy or aggressive. And this is something I tried in high school because I was trying to get a boyfriend. And so I'd look at these boys and they'd look at me and they'd look away and I'd keep looking at them, waiting for them to see what great eye contact we had. That doesn't actually work.  And so when you have the mainlanders who are used to making more eye contact and the islanders who are used to making less eye contact, each group thinks the other person is either being creepy or ignoring them based on their eye contact. So that's something that in job interviews and sales, that's something that a lot of people run into that kind of hurts their senses. It stumbles along. Yeah, and that's where it just comes down to situational awareness. You have to go into a room and feed off the cues that are given to you by the person you have the conversation with. Because they may not be as professional or polished as you are. It doesn't mean you have to, I guess, bring your levels of communication down a notch. It's just finding a rhythm that flows well with the conversation, as well as posturing that flows well with the conversation. That makes sense. I really like that. Can you tell us any stories about people who have come into this agency and then gotten a job? Who talks about that success? It happens every day. We're glad to report that we have a really high match ratio. Right now, if you're willing to work and you're ready to work, come to Hawaii Employment, and we're going to get you a job. It really comes down to that. What I'm excited about now is we're moving in. We've brought on this professional recruiter that has a strong background in staffing in the military sector and IT positions. And so Vanessa Perez came to us with a strong background in online recruiting and staffing. And we're really going hard into that sector. And we're hoping to provide more opportunities for the military families that come to Hawaii, whether it's a spouse or people transitioning out. We want to be that go-to resource that they're looking for. Because we have a lot of job opportunities that really require individuals to have base access. And so when we get those military spouses and they come to us, and they're getting frustrated with maybe some rejection in the local market, we can help be that bridge and provide them the links, the guidance to opportunities here in Hawaii that they may not know enough. That makes sense. Because I'm a military wife myself. And I know when I came here, it was like, I don't know anyone. I don't have any of the resources. I have no network. So if I'd known about you back then, I might not be sitting here on the show today. I might be working. But that is fascinating. That is so cool that you're branching out and trying to find more people to serve, more people to match up with these different opportunities. Yeah. You know, a perfect example of that. There's schools on the base for daycare. And they're having a very hard time filling those positions, which is a domino effect if the families can't find coverage for the kids. And they can't go to work. And so we're working with them to try and provide that solution that we have teachers in place. We have, any given day, 60, 70 substitute teachers working for us throughout the island of Oahu. We would love to be that resource to those daycares on the base so that the families can go out and get the jobs that they want in order to be a little more balanced here in Hawaii. Because it is tough. You moved to Hawaii. Like you said, you don't have friends. You don't have your network. And all the resources that you can give to those families to make that transition better, it just makes for a much more pleasant experience. I love that. I love that so much. So viewers, we are going to be back in just a second with more questions about job interviews and how you can succeed. But stay tuned for a brief message from our sponsors. This guy looks familiar. He calls himself the ultra fan. But that doesn't explain all this. Why? Why? He planned this party, planned the snacks, even planned to coordinate colored shirts. But he didn't plan to have a good time. Now you wouldn't do this in your own house, so don't do it in your team's house. Know your limits and plan ahead so that everyone can have a good time. Welcome back. You're in the right place. I'm your host, RB Kelly. And this is Out of the Comfort Zone with special guest, Sean Knox. Now when we left, Sean was telling us about his company and how it helps people and how if you are just coming to the island, whether you've been here all your life or you're just moving in as a military family, there are so many opportunities that his company can connect you with. Now Sean, I'm wondering, how has your company grown? I'm sure you didn't start out fully staffed, ready to go. What has the growth process been for you? That's a great question. In 2005, I left my employer at the time to start an agency called Poi Employment. It was literally a mom and pop operation. My wife decided to leave her job as an occupational therapist and she was our bookkeeper, payroll person. And it was the two of us we did well and then the recession hit and it was a little more challenging in 2008, 2009. And we found a very strong strategic partner with the Hawaii Group. They had accounting services in-house. They had payroll services in-house. And that allowed my wife to leave her role as a bookkeeper and go back into her chosen career as occupational therapist. And so we were very fortunate at that point to partner with the Hawaii Group and at that point it was myself and a part-time administrative assistant. And the reason why we're at, now we have 29 staff throughout the state. So that's, yeah, so since 2010 we have really enjoyed some nice growth. And the key to that has really been the people that we've brought on board. We started off with Barbara Gus who has a really strong background in executive staffing and placement that we brought in another individual that had a background in industrial staffing, agriculture, hospitality. So we then found ourselves placing field workers on Oahu, Adenkonea and over on Kauai. And then we're working with the Convention Center providing them janitorial services, staffing, supplemental security and now we're working with them to provide the dishwashers and stewards for their events. And we just kept growing. And we knew we wanted to get into educational staffing. We didn't have the right person that we felt had that knowledge of the education system. There was a teacher that wanted to move into staffing and for years we were struggling with that and we were very fortunate to find Mary and Lomado. She has a background, 15 years as a teacher, two years as a vice principal. She started this educational staffing program for Hawaii Employment which has just been phenomenal. The teachers enjoy, the services we provide, we're getting great feedback from the schools. And that's just how it's grown. It just starts with the employees that we're able to bring on board. They have that commitment to serving both of our clients. So when the businesses call us, they have a need. They have to have that labor component in order to make sure their operation is successful. And we have employees that reach out to us and are looking for those job opportunities. And it's a pretty heavy responsibility when you're dealing with an individual that may be living paycheck to paycheck or is looking for this opportunity to support their family. And it's not something we take lightly. So the staff that we have on board really go the extra mile to learn about the individuals that come in. They're not temp employees or employees of Hawaii Employment. What's going to work for Joe, Susie, Bob, whoever comes through the door. We can't just assume that they're going to want to work at a certain location. We have to talk to them. Draw out what part of the island works well for them. What compensation range are they willing to take? What can they do? What can't they do? What do they want to do? What don't they want to do? And so getting to know them as individuals allows us to make that match just that much better. And how much does it cost for someone coming in? They're looking for a job. They're coming to you. What is that? How much does that cost for them? There's no cost to an employee. Well. Yeah, so the employees that come in, we don't feel it's right to charge them for our services. They're needed a job for a reason. And it's just not the way we operate it. They come in board. Our fees are contingent to the client. And they know that going into it. So they're looking for us to provide them that labor. And they know that we have to cover our costs. And that's always included in the discussion with the client. I love that. So viewers, if you are watching this and you are thinking, I do not like my job. And you're thinking, but I don't have the money to coast while I search for another job. You should be paying attention. How can people contact you if they want to learn more? Sure. Hawaii Employment, we're pretty easy to find. We're at hiemployment, sorry, hi-finnemployment.com. We have all of our jobs listed there. You can also reach us at<PHONE_NUMBER>. If you go to our website, we do have the contact information for our local offices on the outer islands. Again, we have a location in Lihue, Kahalui, Kona. And we're now staffing positions in Hilo. Now, what makes your company different from some of the other employment agencies here? Sure. We would be what you'd consider a generalized employment agency. So whether a client needs someone to drive a forklift in a warehouse or do paperwork in the office for that same operation, we can staff both those positions. So there's a lot of agencies that aren't so comfortable doing industrial and light labor staffing. That's sort of been an area of comfort for us. It's a big portion of our business, but we do agricultural staffing. We also place teachers, we place professional executives, engineers. So we work with the spectrum of individuals. And so it can be a one-stop shop if you wanna talk about what makes us different is, there's not a lot of generalized employment agencies that can cover the wide range of positions that we staff for, but really it's a team that we have. We have an excellent group of recruiters that really take a lot of pride in their work and they enjoy what they do. That makes all the difference. It does, it does. So where do you see this company going in the next five years? What's the plan for you? Sure. As I mentioned, we're moving into the Hilo market. We're really excited about that. We already have some clients that are at that location. And when you have an office in Kona, Hilo, even though now it's, I think only about an hour and 20 minutes away, it still is the other side of the island. So in order for us to have a presence there, we need to have an office. And it means a lot to me, because I grew up in Hilo. And so it'll be very fulfilling when we're able to launch that location, have a brick and mortar location in Hilo. As I also talked about, we are moving into more contracting and hopefully staffing at the military locations and pulling in federal contracts. So in the final stages of getting their government service agreement or GSA, so we're a little more competitive in that market. That'll be nice. Yeah, it will be. We're excited about that. All right. And then I know we've got about maybe seven, eight minutes left. So just for the sake of our viewers, can you give us any more interview tips? Sure. You know, when you're interviewing for a job, you've already got your foot in the door through your resume, right?  Are you interested in the job? And are you going to be a fit for their team? And so the resume gives a snapshot of your skills, but they're going to be throwing some technical questions at you, so you're going to want to make sure you're prepared for that. The match do you want the job is also really important. And we talked about the body language there as a key component to that conversation because if you're not engaged in the conversation, you're not really showing much interest. If you haven't done your homework ahead of time to learn more about the company and the job, you're not going to ask the inquisitive questions and make sure that it's a match for you because ultimately it's got to be a win on both sides of the equation. And so you really want to take that time to get to know the business, really research the job and make sure it's the right opportunity for you. And that's going to make that interview process go that much smoother. So can you do the job? Are you interested in the job? So don't play hard to get. You don't have an agent out there looking out for you, trying to get the best deal. If you're excited about the job, let the employer know and try and close the deal. Let them know. I had a great time meeting with you. What's the next step in this process? And always, always follow up with a thank you note. Hand written is always preferred, but at least by email is really important. You want to make sure again that the employer knows that you're engaged and excited about the opportunity. I love this. Now in your, when you were growing up, did you ever make mistakes in not using any of these tips that you've just given us? Oh, all the time, yeah. So it's one of those things that you kind of learned along the way. I didn't have an interview coach coming out of college. Yes, they did some kind of career coaching for lack of a better term. But no, there are times that even internal positions when I was at the previous company, there's jobs that I thought I was the most qualified for, but I stepped out of the interview realizing, you know, I wasn't as prepared as I should have been and I didn't get the job. So yeah, there's hard lessons along the way and the key to that is just preparing yourself, just making sure that you do everything you can to make sure that you're better than the other guy that they're interviewing for that job. I love that. And it sounds like you have learned from your early mistakes. The ones that we all make when we're interviewing, we all do this. And so you're trying to make it so the people who come to your business, to your foundation, they don't have to make those mistakes. They have the best chance of getting the job full stop. Absolutely. I love that. Thanks. Now, we've got just a couple of minutes left. Can I share with you a cool study that talks about body language in job interviews. So this is a cool study. It was done by science of people, but the study took a bunch of college kids and had them apply for mock job interviews. And the job interviews were only about 20 minutes long, but they filmed the interviews. And then they gave them to a group of evaluators and they were rated for warmth, competence, and higher ability. And then they went back to the videos and they cut them down to they were just 20 seconds long. So all these candidates had time to do was open the door, walk in, shake hands and sit down, and then we ended the tape. So now they hadn't even had a chance to say a word. And we gave these 20 second films to another group of trained evaluators and they were rated for warmth, competence, and higher ability. And so now we have a 20 minute and a 20 second video for each candidate and two sets of ratings. And then we compared the ratings. And it would make sense. A lot of people, especially our viewers, will probably think that, oh, if you have a high 20 second rating, like you walk in really confident, but then you bomb the interview, you'll have a low 20 minute rating. And a lot of them would think that, oh, if you walk in really shy, really nervous, you'll have a low 20 second rating, but then if you blossom and know all the answers, you'll have a high 20 minute rating. Scientists people found that wasn't the case at all.    Because that first impression is one of the most important parts of the interview. And that's one of the ways that people judge you the most. No, that's fantastic, great, that's an excellent example. I bet that doesn't surprise you at all. No, no, it doesn't, but yeah. I haven't heard about it in that context, but it makes absolute sense and you're right. You never get a second chance to make that first impression as an old saying, but it really rings true, especially when you're applying for a job. I love it. Thank you so much for coming, Sean. Oh, you're welcome. I'm really pleased to have you here. Thank you. And I hope we get a chance to talk again. I'd love to have you back. Great, thank you. All right, so viewers, you've heard it from us. The expert and me about job interviews. So if you are hating your job, if you know someone who needs a new job, if you are struggling to pay the bills, looking for a second job, whatever it is, you don't have to be unhappy where you are. There are steps you can take to branch out and get closer to fulfilling your dreams. So if you are needing help, if you are wanting to find another job, please reach out, look up the Hawaii Employment Foundation and get in there today to start making your dreams come true. And yes, it'll force you to get out of the comfort zone, but it will be worth it. Thank you, everyone, and I'll see you next week.


April was Sexual Assault Prevention Awareness Month, and sailors from Fleet Activities Yacosca were bringing that awareness with some unusual approaches. One of the events sailors took part in was a flash mob, freezing in place, holding signs, informing passers-byes about sexual assault prevention awareness. We have our posters that have something to do with sapper in any way, whether it is, you know, if you know your part, do your part, or it's a right to know that it's not your fault. And you just freeze for three minutes. Elsewhere in Yacosca, sailors got together on USS Chancellorville to make a human teal ribbon. The teal ribbon represents sexual assault awareness. Sexual assault undermines our team and undermines cohesion, undermines our mission readiness, and we're united as one team against that to keep our sailors capable and keep ourselves mission ready. Petty Officer Jacob Allison, Yacosca Naval Base, Japan.


I'm a big fan of the power of ggplot2 and all the wonderful things we can do to make attractive plots in R and make them really efficiently. But if you're also like me, you're a little bit intimidated by using the theme function to start changing the formatting and the appearance of your plots. Well, don't be afraid because today we're going to dig into that theme function and see how we can take a faceted plot where we've got labels on each of our facets and turn those facets into those y-axis labels and how we can make some other modifications to make our plots look publication worthy. Hey, everyone, I'm Pat Schloss and this is Code Club. In each episode of Code Club, I use principles of reproducible research and apply them to an interesting biological question. Recently, we've been doing that by looking at the sensitivity and specificity of Amplicon sequence variants, also called ASVs, or operational taxonomic units, also called O2s. Now, please don't run away with that jargon. It doesn't really matter because what I'm showing you are tricks and principles of again, reproducible research and how we can apply them. We're currently at a point in our project where we're building figures for a publication that I'd like to submit here in the next month. If you look at the last episode, I showed you a bit of my process for critiquing my figures and then making a list of things that I want to do to make them better. I don't spend a lot of time when I'm doing my exploratory data analysis making those figures look polished because many of those figures will never get published, so why polish them? Today, we're going to take a look at a second figure that actually uses panels generated from facet wrap. What I'd like to do though is use those facet labels as my y-axis label. And so to do that, we have to use a little bit of trickery along the way and we'll also see again another iteration of my process for making these publication quality figures. We'll go ahead now and dig into the project and I will move to my project root directory and open up my RStudio project. I'm also going to come to my GitHub repository, my repository on GitHub. It's a Git repository. And look at exploratory and the figure that I'd like to incorporate into my paper in some form is from this lumping and splitting analysis that we did. When did we do that? Back in November, end of November. And so we looked at, this was an episode I think when I did this, looking at facet wrap and facet grid. And I looked at lumping and splitting for each of the four regions. And so lumping was when we had two species that were merged together within an OTU or an ASV and splitting was when we had a single genome split apart into multiple bins for different OTU and ASV definitions. And so we looked at the data in slightly different ways. Here we plotted both lumping and splitting in each panel and we had four panels for each of the four regions. I didn't totally like this because lumping and splitting are kind of different fractions or fractions of different things. And so this next iteration I kind of liked, where again I had the fraction lumped, split, and then each line represented a different region. Here we kind of pulled it apart. And I kind of liked that. This was kind of transposing it. And so I kind of like this look, but I think I use up a lot of real estate by putting each region into its own column of the facet. But I do kind of like having the lump and split be separate rows in my front data frame. And if I come back to this plot, what I'd like to do is perhaps instead of putting them side by side is put them on top of each other. So why don't we do that? I'm going to come back to RStudio and create a new R script. And I will save this to get that saving step out of the way. And as you can see, I call my R scripts to generate figures plot underscore, and I'll call lump lump, split dot R. So you'll recall that a few episodes ago, we actually repeated that analysis, the lumping and splitting analysis. The exploratory analysis I did was for one iteration of grabbing one genome from each species. What we did previously was just a couple episodes ago was to repeat that 100 times so we could get a median or an average of those 100 iterations of randomly sampling genomes by species. And so again, if we look at data, and it was in process, we had lumped split rate dot TSV. So I'll go ahead and do library tidy verse, run that to get that loaded. And then I will do lump split. And that will be read TSV and read in as data processed lumped split rate TSV. And again, just to be explicit about my column specification, I'll do call types equals calls. And then I'll say region equals call character. And I will then do default equals call double. Okay, read that all in and then look at lump split. And again, we've got our region or threshold or split rate, our lump rate, and we're in good shape. I'm going to come back to my code here that I used to build the side by side. And that is this. So I'll go ahead and paste that in here. And I'm noticing that I had the data in a slightly different format before. And that was that I probably gathered things together. So yeah, I did this pivot longer, where I drew the things together. So why don't I go ahead and do that as well, so that we have kind of a common naming system. So I'll throw that in there. And yeah, I think that should be good. So again, that's kind of the problem when you're cobbling things together and copying and pasting. But we'll get it figured out, don't worry. So I think I'll remove that variable. And let's go ahead and then add the pivot longer to this.  And lump rate. And our names will go to method. And our values to will go fraction, and I'll leave I'll leave that. And maybe I'll do a select to get rid of things that ends end with ends with IQR, because again, those IQR values are so small that I just it's hard to get excited about them. So it needs to be in quotes. Great. So we've got that. And we're now ready to pipe this into building the GG plot. And so let's make sure that we get a plot that looks good. Yeah, so this is the side by side look. And again, we did facet wrap method, and I'm going to do n row equals two. And so that then puts it top the bottom. So we're in good shape, right? So I always like theme classic. To make it black and white, I'm now going to think about this plot and what I like about it and what I don't like about it. And what I'd like to do is to put the lump rate title over here, in place of fraction and split rate over here in place of fraction, effectively so that both of my plots have different y axis labels. Also my threshold is down here. Something that I remember from my text is that I've always been expressing these values in terms of a percentage. And so I need to change my threshold. So I will do scale x continuous. And we saw something like this in the last episode with scale y log 10, where I didn't like the thresholds. And so I'm going to put in breaks. And I'll do zero, 0.025, 0.05, 0.075 and 0.1. And then my labels, I'm going to make it a character vector with the actual values I want on there. So I'll do zero, 2.5, five, 7.5. And I've kind of screwed up my quotes here. Let's see 7.5 and then 10. And let's see. Do I have everything lined up? And I need quotes around that. That will look good and add that. And so now we should see, yeah, we've got the values there. And so I'll do labs and x, I'm going to do distance, and I'll put a percent. And then y, I'm going to do null. And that they, and I forgot my, this needs to be in quotes as a character. And I forgot my plus sign at the end of that line. But you see we've got distance, maybe I'll say distance threshold to define ASV, go to you, be a little bit more descriptive, right? So that looks nice. And I'm not totally thrilled with the name on my legend there, or the values that I have there. So another thing I can do would be scale color manual. And I can then say name equals null. So I don't want it to say region, because that's going to be obvious that it's the region. And I will then do breaks equals C, v19, v34, v4, v45. And I can then do colors. And I'll do C, let's do black, blue, green, and red. I know red and green are not the colors we want to wind up with. But we'll talk about colors maybe in the next episode. And so we'll revisit that later. And then I will do labels, see v1 to v9, v3 to v4, v4, and v4, v5. Okay. And put the plus sign on that colors. There should be values. Yeah. So then we get our black, blue, green, and red, for our different colors. And we then got rid of the legend title. The next thing we want to do is to modify the theme. And we talked about this a little bit in the last episode where we saw how we can get rid of the label for the strip. And what we want is this this rectangle is called the strip on each of the panels for doing the facet wrap from up here, right? And that I really want this label to be over here, parallel to my y axis. So we should be able to do that by modifying our facet wrap arguments. And I forget the exact argument. So let's do facet wrap. Nope, got to spell it right. So as we look at this documentation, I think the argument that I would like is the strip position equals top. And maybe I want to set it to left. So let's look down here at the description of strip position. By default, the labels are displayed on the top of the plot use strip position, it is possible to place the labels on either of the four sides by doing top bottom left right. So let's do left and see what happens with that. So let's do strip dot position equals left. Give that a shot. And voila, it's on the left side, right? But it's on the inside of the plot. I'd like it to be on the outside of the plot. And so we can then look at the theme arguments. And we've seen before that there's a bazillion of these. And the one that I'm thinking we want is strip placement. What we can do is strip placement equals outside. And so let's give that a run. And yeah, sure enough, it now puts them on the outside. Excellent. So what I don't like, of course, are the color, the colored border around the label. And we've seen that before as well, where we can do strip dot background. Yeah, I think it's background. And it is it says it takes element wrecked. And let's look at the arguments for element wrecked. All right. Yeah, so that will draw the borders and the background. So element blank draws nothing. Element wrecked controls the borders and the backgrounds. So element wrecked. I think what we want is color equals na. So let's give that a shot. I think that we'll get rid of Yeah, I got rid of the border on the facet. So look, hopefully, you can see that we now have yx labels for our two different panels. Now what we need to do is to modify those labels to be something a little bit more descriptive for what we're trying to get at. And so what we can do is if we come back up here where we've done facet wrap by method, and we set names to method up here. So let's look and see what the method labels are. And we've got lump rate, split rate. So what I want to do is modify those to change lump rate and split rate to something a bit more descriptive, that's going to then show up in my y axis label. So I'll do mutate method equals. And let's do if else. So if else if it's lump rate, then I'm going to do what I'm going to say. Fraction of fraction of species merged together. And then else, so that will be then the split rate fraction of genomes split apart. Okay. And so now, ah, it's not happy. Why isn't it happy? Oh, because no, let's see. Oh, because I needed to say if method equals equals lump rate than do that. And so sure enough, now we get the nice labels. And we will then pipe that into ggplot. And we'll then see our labels. So of course, this looks like garbage. And at this point, it would be good to again output it with gg save to set our actual dimensions. So we'll do gg save. And we'll do figures forward slash lump split dot tiff. And let's do let's see what width or let's do height. And I remember from last time nine inches was the maximum height and width or no, sorry. Yeah, and I think the maximum width was six point something. So I'm going to make this like, let's do width equals three and height equals five. And I'll also make a PDF version of this. So let's go ahead and source this and see what we get. And I will come back and open up some figures, lump split and see what these look like. So this is the tiff. That actually doesn't look horrible. And this is the PDF version, which also looks pretty reasonable. The y the x axis label needs to be maybe cut in half, so to speak. I'm also noticing the font size on the x is different than the y. And so we can modify that as well. So we'll go ahead and let's go and put a line break in here, right like that. We'll source it and see what we get. And so that looks pretty decent. It is a little bit tight width wise. So maybe I'll make the width four and four. And let's go ahead and source that and see what it looks like. So it looks a bit better. Again, the font sizes are different. I'm not totally loving that. Let's go ahead and see if we can make the font size of the strip a little bit larger to match what we have. So we can then do strip dot text, element text. And let's come back to our help. And let's see element text family face color size. Let's do size equals 12. And let's just see what we get using 12. See if that matches any better. So that's bigger. It looks a bit bigger than what we had. So let's do 10. Look, look bigger than what we had on the x axis. That looks good. Although now it does run along run across. And so we probably want to put a line break in here. So let's do that. Save that source it. Now look at the output. That looks good. Maybe it maybe it is a little bit larger. Again, there's all this like poking and iterating and seeing how things change. I think that looks pretty, pretty good. So something I'm thinking about, why don't I go ahead and put the legend up here in the upper right corner and give us a little bit more real estate to play with. There's no reason for it to really be out here all the way to the right. It uses up a lot of space in the plot. So what we can do is we're going to add to our theme. And we can do legend dot placement position. Sorry. And I forget the argument. But I think it takes. Yeah, I don't know. Let's give it I think it's a vector of the x y coordinates. So let me let me just experiment with 0.5 0.5. And let's see where that gets us. Yeah, so that put it right in the middle of the plot. And so it is proportional. So I'm going to go ahead and do some acts of 0.9 y of 0.8 save this and run it and see what it looks like. So that's close. So I want it to be perhaps a little bit left and a little bit up. So a little bit left would be say seven and up would be say 0.9. All right, so I think that's a good vertical I want to move it over to the right a bit. And so let's do 0.8 and source that. And that looks pretty good, I think. Again, this is my tiff version, which is zoomed in. The other thing I don't totally like is that the lines of my legends seem kind of far apart. Let's try legends spacing y and see if that gets I think that's I think that's the spacing between different legends. But I'm not sure. So let's do unit one cm and see what we get with that source that. I'm not sure if anything changed. So let me sometimes if I'm not sure if things are taking, I try to use like a excessive value like 10 centimeters. See if that changes anything. Yeah, so that is vertically spacing it between different legends. That's not what I want. Another thought would be key size, legend key size. And that takes unit again. So let's do let's let's try with that and see what we get there. So that's huge. Let's do one centimeter and see what we get. So yeah, I think this is what we want. So let's do 0.25. Source that I think that will get it a little bit closer. Yeah, so now they're compressed. Let's do 0.4. And that looks pretty decent. If you wanted you could put a box around the legend. Again, I like things to look clean and not cluttered. So I'm happy with this. And I think this looks looks pretty good. So I will leave that there. So I will come back. We've got this save. And again, the the figure I'm going to be working with is lump split PDF. And I should go ahead and put this compression LZW. If you saw the last episode, you know that I kind of struggled with this because it didn't seem to be doing the compression on the figures that these figures are still quite large 6.9 9.6. I don't I don't know why they're so big and why the compression doesn't seem to be working. But I still need to look into that. I will open up my R Markdown document. And again, come back to the bottom of this, where I was inserting my figures. And I will go ahead and put on a separate page. So new page, figure two. And this is going to be a lump split split. And I'll I'm just putting in some holder text. So rate of lumping and splitting by distance threshold and save that. And that looks good. And I will of course now add this as a dependency in my make file. So I will open up Adam and add this there. And where do I have my make file? And I need to also create one for figures forward slash lump split dot percent and the code plot lump split r. And that is based on the data processed lump split rate. So data processed lump split rate.tsv. That's good. And we can then do period forward slash code plot lump split dot r. So that's good. I need to make this executable need x. And then I can do this. Sorry. You know what? I forgot to what am I doing? I forgot to put the shebang line in there. So it's complaining. All right, good. So let me come back to the top here and grab that shebang line from somewhere else because for the life of me, I cannot memorize the shebang line. Alright, so I'll use this one. Put that in there, save that. And then let's go ahead and try that. That's working. And again, if we look at our figures lump split, we could again do lump open figure lump split PDF, see what that looks like. That looks good. And we can then again, what we're going to do is modify our make routine here. Let me put it down a line so it's so the figures are in order. When I am when I'm confident of the figures and the numbering, then I will make versions in submission manuscript called figure one, figure two, so that I can keep things straight. Okay, so now I will go ahead and make this. And we will see if we get the figure embedded in our markdown document. Very good manuscript PDF. And if we come to the end, we see sure enough, we have the figure embedded in our markdown document following the figure we made in the last episode. Alright, excellent. So I really like how that came out. Again, the nice thing here is that we've got two panels on a figure and the x axis is shared between them. And it lines up and it looks nice. It looks cohesive, which is better than back in the battle days where we might import figures into PowerPoint and kind of fiddle with things to get things nudged back and forth.  So I'm going to change the colors in a script, but I don't have to worry about again doing all that nudging and bumping things around. So I think this looks good. I'm happy with this. Feel free to tell me down in the comments below what you think of this figure, and what, you know, might make it look a little bit nicer. In the next episode again, we will talk a little bit more about colors and how we can pick colors that are appropriate, that are discriminating, and that are friendly to our friends who can't perceive the difference between red and green. So there's probably a good number of you that can't differentiate between the color of my v4 and v45 region here on these plots. And also that green is just a bit jarring. Anyway, please be sure to like the video. Tell me what you think down below. Tell me if you've got any questions. I'd love to get feedback. I've loved the feedback and interaction that we've had so far. I could definitely use a lot more of that. So please use the comment below. I do read everything and I try to respond to everything. Anyway, keep practicing, play around with this stuff. Don't be afraid to go into that theme function and look at the different arguments that are there in the help menu and see how you can modify basically anything in your plot. It's really powerful and really useful for making elegant and nice figures for your manuscripts. All right, so we'll see you next time for another episode of Code Club.


Are you ready for some Christmas fun? Well, here in Monet Cafe, I certainly am. So I am serving you up some easy watercolor postcard tutorials. These can be Christmas cards or postcards. This should be great for artists of every level, lots of fun. You could even have a painting party and host it with your friends and family. That's how easy these lessons are. Now, I'm going to be going over all of the supplies so you can get everything ahead of time to get started. Also, I've provided the 12 traceable designs for this lesson in my coffee shop. It's $5 for all 12 or whatever you would like to pay. And if you're a patron of mine, you will be getting these traceable designs for free. As always, thank you guys so much for your faithful support. It's how I keep these videos coming. Now, let's talk about these products. This is my setup in my studio on my craft table. And to make these Christmas postcards, I'll be using some pre-cut postcards that I got from Arteza. They're nice enough to send me some of their products. I absolutely loved these. And it is 100% cotton. So these are quality. I love Arteza's packaging.  And there are 30 cards. You see it's even got the little pre-stamped postcard address information. But you don't have to have these postcards to do this lesson. You can make your own. Just cut some watercolor paper that is 4 inches by 5 and 3 quarter inches. And you're good to go. Now, my brushes, I really only used this one brush. I'd say for the majority of all the paintings. It's a 40-50 round by Princeton Brush Company. That one was a number 10. This one is a number 6 if you wanted a little bit of a smaller brush. But just like the paper, use what you have. And these lessons are supposed to be easy, relaxing, and fun. Of course, you'll need some water. And I like to fold up little paper towels to keep near me for water control. I'll talk about that more during the lessons. Now, I will be using watercolor paints in tube format. But I work with such basic primary colors that you could even use one of these little kids watercolor sets if you wanted to have some fun during the Christmas holidays. Now, you could use a set that's already arranged in a dry watercolor format such as this Arteza 36 set. I love this set. But there are many manufacturers that make their own watercolor sets. Now, I'll be working with these little porcelain palettes. I love these because they wash up so easily with no staining. But if you're working from tube paint, you could even use these from the dollar store. So, once again, the options are limitless. All right, let me talk a little bit about these colors regardless of whether you're using tube paint or not. You'll need some basic primary colors. I like various blues. This is an ultramarine blue. The one you saw before was a cobalt blue. I like to have a blue that's a little cooler and a blue that's a little warmer that leans a little more towards green, which this one does. This is a Prussian blue. It makes a great teal type of greenish blue. And I like a purple and this one is a quinacridone violet. Don't let that color scare you. That's a big old word, isn't it? It could just be any type of purple or violet color. Also, too, I have an Indian yellow. This is a warmer yellow. If you see it already in the little tray, it leans towards orange. Now, that dark there that I just pointed at, you can make your own dark. You don't need this, but this is called Payne's Gray. I don't work with black often, but you can make your own darks by combining some primary colors. So, I'll be sure to show you that. Also, too, I'm using a sap green even though I like to make my own greens. You don't even have to have green. What colors do you use to mix green? This is a test. Yellow and blue. Okay, so we can make our own greens. The Alizarin Crimson is a nice red. And if you want a red that's a little bit more leaning towards pink. Permanent Rose is a great red. And I also have an orange here. You can make your own orange, though. Well, how would you make orange? Red and yellow. Now, here is a color I really like. Again, you don't have to have it for this video, but it's quinacridone gold. There's that big word again. It's basically like a really beautiful yellow gold. And another yellow I like is azo yellow. It's a little bit cooler than the Indian yellow, which lends itself towards orange. This is a product that I will use towards the end to add some snow. I'm using gouache rather than watercolor. You say that word like squash, gouache. And notice there's no white in watercolor. It's because it won't show up. But gouache is opaque. That means it will show up as white on top of the watercolor. I also am going to be making some outlines to my designs. And I love this Micron marker. This is the 0.45 millimeter size. And it's awesome because it doesn't smear when you add water to it. So you don't have to have this brand, but some type of water friendly marker would be helpful. You don't need this tool either. But I love my Posca markers. This is a white acrylic marker. It shakes up like a spray can, a spray paint can. It has a little ball in it. So you have to shake it up. But it, like the gouache, can be used to apply snow or white when you want to get the white back from your watercolor painting. And that's basically it. But if you want some little flair and maybe a bit tacky, you might want to add some glitter. I play with some glitter with some of these. Now if you're going to actually send these as postcards, man, I wouldn't want them to get messed up in the mail, right? So these are clear bags that I get from clearbags.com. They are awesome. And by the way, these are the bags that I use to store my pastel paintings in. I put them in with a piece of foam core cut to fit foam core board. And that's one of the most common questions I get is how do you store your pastel paintings? Well, just so you know, I never spray fix it at the end. You might also want to use some salt. I'm going to show you in this very first tutorial how fun it is. This is another product. It's called Masking Fluid. What it does is it preserves the white. You do not have to have this at all. But it's kind of a neat effect. All right. These are some of the simple designs. I told you they're traceables. And what's neat about these is they are already sized to fit the postcard size. Also too, I created the traceables in reverse. So when you use the transfer method I'm going to show you, they'll come out forward facing. And I created the designs by altering many of the photos that I got from some copyright free websites. One of them is unsplash.com that I've been using quite often. It had some great Christmas photos. Another is from pixabay.com. So many of the images are ones that I altered to create these cards. I did this one in Photoshop. Added a little candy cane under that little fella's feet. And just as with the traceables, my patrons will get all of these images as part of their post. But I'm going to be putting up these photos while I paint. So you can paint along during this tutorial. All right. Phew! That was a lot of information. But I wanted to make sure you guys have the right products. So this is successful. Now here's what I meant by the traceable. You see a little gray kind of border around that. And that's what we're going to use to line up either our Arteza postcard or what you pre-cut yourself. And I've got to mention they sent me this little Arteza pencil pouch. I love that. I promise this is the last Arteza product I'll talk about. But I really did like it. And purple is my favorite color. So what I'll be using is a charcoal pencil to do an outline. This is how we're going to transfer the image to your postcard. So if you purchase the traceable or your patron of mine and you have the traceable, you just print it out. Get yourself. I don't recommend pencil because it's not going to transfer well. You'll see what I mean. Get yourself a charcoal pencil or something that will transfer more easily. And just give it a decent outline. You don't have to press super hard if you're using charcoal. And I do have my pencil pretty sharp. I'll show you a little sharpening tool soon. A lot of people, a lot of pastel artists who use pastel pencils. There's always this challenge of how do you sharpen charcoal and pastel pencils without them breaking so easily. But I'll show you that sharpener in a minute. So now all we're going to do is take our our postcard or our watercolor paper we've already cut. And we're going to lay it down on top of this to transfer the image. Now I like to tape my watercolor paper to the traceable image so that it's not going to wiggle around when I go to transfer the image. So now I flipped it over. Now you need something sturdy like a credit card. This is actually a burnishing tool that came with another product of mine. My dog chewed it up but I still use it. It has one edge that's kind of somewhat straight. So again some sort of straight hard flat edge. And all you're going to do is just rub that image. And like I posted in the text, this is the simplest of all of the designs and trust me anyone can do this. Now we turn it back over, we take off our tape, and voila we have a transferred image. Now as you can see the transfer is very light and that's what you want. I actually lighten it up even more. I use a kneaded eraser to kind of make the charcoal a little more subtle because I don't want it to blend with the watercolor. But I have another technique that I'll show you later that works well too. Now by the way this is the only time I'm going to show this transfer method. It's the same one that's used for the rest of the the tutorials that I'll have on this lesson or this video. So just keep that in mind and trust me most of these especially this one are so simple you don't need a traceable. Okay but we're going to get to painting now. And here's where the micron marker comes in. I don't trace all of the designs with the marker. I would say most of them. I'm going to have, I don't even know how many paintings I'm going to have in this lesson yet, but I am going to be doing a lot of them just like this where I just give a little outline of the image especially whatever is the focal point. And in this painting the focal point is the are the ornaments. So just trace the ornaments if you like. But I made a little mark there. But trust me you don't have to trace these. You can just start painting with watercolor without the markers. It just makes it kind of fun. This lesson is supposed to be festive and fun and a little break. I needed a break. How about you guys you sometimes need an artistic break. So I just wanted something that was fun and relaxing. All right so we've got our main shapes in and that's it. We're going to add watercolor now. There are a couple of different ways to approach applications of color with watercolor. Well there's a few, but one is called a wet-on-wet technique and that's where you're going to end up with a more smooth application. That's where you wet your paper with water and then you apply your color. It makes the color just flow into that little area of water so nicely and smoothly. So that's the technique that I'm using with the ornaments. I am just applying water first. I'm using painting on the right ornament first. You see I already applied the water. Now this is all real time by the way. The rest of the lessons I'm not going to give as much instruction and I will speed them up. This video would be way too long with all these little watercolor paintings. And now I'm just applying that particular color. It's the one that I like, the Quinacridone Nicolaiso Gold, Quinacridone Gold basically. But you could use yellow. This could totally be that Indian yellow that's right next to it. So I'm first just getting kind of a nice even application and now I'm adding a little bit more paint. Now when I was first watercolor painting it would bother me that little just dabbing it on like that. I would be like oh my gosh I gotta fix it. I gotta fix it. I gotta blend it in. Well what I didn't realize is when it's wet like this it's gonna settle in. It's gonna blend itself in. You don't have to keep working with it. Now what I'm doing with this little extra layer of paint is I'm making kind of a shadow. The ornament that's in front is obviously shading the one that's behind. And so you see how I gave it a kind of a rounded strokes too. I used my strokes a little directional and you can very easily give an object a feeling of being three-dimensional by just a little value change. So the outside of it it's the lighter that I did with just the wash and the inside to the left behind the first ornament is a little bit darker. Alright now I'm mixing up some color for the second ornament. I'm sorry it's not in the screen there but this is basically just a red. I think this is the permanent rose. See it's kind of pink. And notice I didn't do a wash with this one. I wanted to show you how you can do two techniques. All I'm doing with this one is adding the red but notice the directional strokes and I'm going to leave that bottom section there a little lighter. So I'm just adding a wash here. So I'm adding a little bit of water here and then the paint will kind of blend those little edges there and so you already have a feeling of it being round because of that little highlight right there. And now I realized I wanted that same highlight on the yellow ornament. So all I did I got water on my brush and I'm lifting up the paint. So this is another watercolor technique. So you have a little ability to do this when the watercolor is still wet like this. So I'm just using water to kind of lighten this area and lift up some paint. And now we've got our initial layer of color down. We're going to add a little bit more value. Value just means the lightness or darkness. So I'm giving this some mass or some form like a three-dimensional object with creating more of a darker tone on the area that's not catching the highlight. I even just added some of the yellow onto the red ornament and I'm adding a little bit of the red into the yellow ornament. Why would I do this? Well color is always interacting with other objects especially nearby. So this yellow object would be catching some of the reflected light from the red ornament and it just makes color interest. And now while the paint or the water and watercolor is still a little bit wet I'm going to apply some salt. And you don't have to do this but I thought I'd share with this first lesson just a few different techniques that'll help you with the remaining lessons.  Now I wasn't even sure if this would work. I'm using my pink Himalayan salt. I don't use the regular iodized salt but typically and it did work but typically you would use just regular table salt. So I sprinkle a little salt on the watercolor that's still a little bit damp. You don't want it super damp and you certainly don't want it dry and then you wait. And now you should be able to see the neat little textured effect that the salt added to the ornaments. And once again you don't have to do this. I just thought it was fun. Now I'm just adding a little bit of the yellow or gold as in my case to the tops of these ornaments. The little part that holds the string and just dabbing in a little watercolor and it's as easy as that. And now we'll be doing another little neat effect. I wanted in this first lesson to kind of give a really basic watercolor instruction information for those of you who you may have experience with watercolor but you may want to do this tutorial with some friends and family. Like I said it's the holidays. I was trying to make something that might be neat for friends and family even kids you know to just have a fun painting experience. So now you can see I'm just adding water all around the ornaments. Now just so you know if you don't let the ornaments dry the red and the yellow and you touch the sides of the color it's going to bleed. And in this case I didn't really want this one to bleed. Sometimes in other words the color will run into the water. Water acts as a channel and it just pulls that color. And for the background I wanted some cooler colors since the ornaments were so warm with the red and the yellow. So I'm using I believe that's the cobalt blue and the one right underneath it is the ultramarine blue. So I'm mixing up some blue and some green. There's the ultramarine blue so I have it in its little well there. Once again I love these little porcelain palettes. They clean up so nicely. They don't stain at all. Now I'm going down to my sap green rather than pre-mixing a green. I just grabbed that green and I'm cooling it off a bit. I didn't want it that warm so I have a blue on the top that I mixed kind of a combo of the cobalt blue and the ultramarine and then I have a little bit of my green that I mixed with the ultramarine and the sap green. So with the blue I am just using my brush on the side. This is something early on that I did wrong in watercolor too. I would just paint with the tip of the brush and everything looked very tight. It didn't look painterly at all. Now I'm just grabbing more of just the cobalt blue. You see it's very blue blue without anything added to it. So often I like to mix colors and sometimes I like them to mix on the paper rather than mixing it in the well. It's really interesting that way. So because the paper is already wet these colors are going to dry lighter. I've got some flexibility. I can move the color around and once again use the side of your brush and just keep the strokes loose energetic and free. Also you don't have to fill in every bit of the paper. I'm not going all the way to the edges with this. I'm leaving some blank space in spots and that's what's going to make your painting look more free painterly and impressionistic. And that's the style I like to go for. So you see how easy that was and it really doesn't get much easier than this. So you can play around with this but don't overwork it. That's something that has a tendency to happen with watercolor. Especially when I was getting started with it. It's not like pastel painting acrylic or oil where you can just continue to add value on top of it. You will very soon muddy your colors or get them too dark too quickly. We want to preserve that beautiful luminosity of the white of the paper showing through. And really the only thing I do more to this is I enhance the color a bit more. Now these ornaments are dry so I'm just getting my paint liquid enough. That's another challenge I had when I started. I had my paint too thick. I forgot to let the water do the work. We want to embrace the water. So I'm just giving a little bit more of a shadow and it's okay that the salt is on there. I'm just kind of dabbing in where there would be a darker value. Once again that one ornament behind the other one. And then I do the same thing with a little bit of the red. Being careful not to overwork this and not to contaminate color and get the muddy looking. And wasn't that easy? I did decide to do one more thing to this. Like I said I like to use this first very simple one as a learning opportunity for you guys to learn a few different techniques. So what I decided to do was give it some of the watercolor splatters which are fun and carefree. Now if you do this technique when your paper is still wet the paint that splatters is going to bleed which is kind of soft and impressionistic.  Otherwise let it dry and then the splatters will be a little bit more like flex. So what I did is I grabbed some color. This is some red and you'll see how these are the paper is still a bit wet. So these are going to kind of get subdued. I always have a problem with getting them in the right direction. So sometimes I flick the paint off my brush and sometimes I tap my brush. But my favorite technique is just tapping it on my hand. I didn't like where some of these splatters fell. So once again the flexibility of watercolor is really awesome. I'm just softening the edges with my brush and ended up liking the end effect of that. I splattered a few of the other colors some of the gold. There's the technique where I do it on my finger. I seem to have more control that way. And once you let this dry if you like you can add a caption to it. Merry Christmas. Praise the Lord Jesus is born whatever you want to add to it. So this was easy peasy and you learned a whole lot of techniques. Now it's time to move on to the next painting.  I just had to paint him. This is that little sharpener I was telling you about. It's in my Etsy shop under other painting products or something like that. It's a German made pencil sharpener and it is so great about for not breaking the soft ends of the charcoal.  Like I said I kind of altered these images. This one I believe was from Pixabay. Just a cute little snowman. I think he was kind of like a little snow doll somebody had made. But I thought he was adorable. So I'm doing the same thing like I mentioned. There's no sense in doing this all real time again. I'm just tracing over the image. Like I said if you get the traceable you can print it out. And I've designed it in reverse so that when you put your watercolor paper or the Arteza postcard on top of it and burnish it to get the image on it it'll come out right side. Same as the photograph that you'll be seeing that I'm using to paint from. So a lot of pre-planning work went into this tutorial that's for sure. All right here we go again. Burnishing and now we have our little light image. With this one I did use my kneaded eraser to kind of really lighten up that tree in the background. I want that to be so subtle and subdued. So I just blotted it off a little bit. But I realized I don't need to erase these marks for something I'm going to be tracing over. And the reason is because I can just use the eraser afterwards. This marker worked fine over the charcoal. So once again speeding this up you don't need to see this whole thing for every video. But that just gives you my method now. I don't have to erase the charcoal if I add marker outlines to it. And now it's time to paint. I am putting the little image up here that sometimes I'll have to move it if I'm grabbing some paint I want you to see. But basically what I'm starting with is a little bit of the ultramarine blue with the paint's gray. And I have not added water to the paper as a wash as I did with the first ornament in that example. But I've made my watercolor so diluted with water that it almost appears as a wash. Now I am doing a wash for this background. And notice in the reference image that's a lot of white, right? But I still noticed a little bit of gray tones. I want the just like in the photo the background sky to just blend right into the snow so there's no real horizon line there. So I'm going to be adding some color. Once again the trick with this one is very diluted. I put this back to real time so you could see what I'm doing here. I wanted to warm up that blue. I noticed in the reference image it was a little gray. So I added a little, I think it's a burnt sienna I added to my palette there, but you could do the same thing by adding a little bit of green and yellow to your blue. You're basically trying to just neutralize it. And you can get neutral colors by adding compliments together and compliments are what's opposite on the color wheel. So I just kind of grayed down and warmed up the blue a little bit so that it wasn't the exact same cool colors in the tree. Now you see I added a little bit more of the blues to the tree and I am just getting a little bit more of that wash established. And be sure not to add too much color too soon. Because this is still wet I'm dabbing in a little bit of that neutral gray tone there. And it's going to kind of represent some of the darker values in the tree. Places where the tree is deeper in between the leaves. And that will all kind of blend together because it's so wet already. Now I added a little bit of my prussian blue. It's that little teeny bit of blue I stuck down at the bottom of my green. It's a little blob of blue right below the green. And notice how I said it has a hint more green. It's a little bit more teal colored. And so I thought the blues the cooler blues like the ultramarine and the warmer blues like the prussian blue would make a great very cool wintery palette. In winter scenes like this you're not going to get a lot of warm tones reds and yellows. I mean unless the sun is really shining on something. So I'm using a little of my panes gray. A little bit of my burnt sienna to neutralize some of these colors. And I talk about neutral colors often when I do pastel paintings too. And what power they have. Often we think we have to add this bold color to everything in the painting. And if you do that then it's nothing is standing out. So now what I'm doing I notice the snowman. There would be a tendency to paint him white. But in the reference image he was a little warmer. And plus I wanted him to stand out from the snow. I mean if I just have him as white as the snow on the ground then he's not going to have much dimension. Plus he seemed to be a little bit in shadow. Almost like the sun was at his back. Well you can tell that based on the shadow underneath him. By the way creating shadows is another way to give objects three dimensionality. Dimensionality to them. And now I'm adding shadows with some neutral tones around his face. It was like his cheeks. He was smiling and his cheeks were kind of poking out. So they stayed in the light. But the areas like his eyes were almost indented.  So that's going to get a little bit more of the shading. And now I'm just kind of blending it together a little bit so I don't have such stark edges. But see how I got a little bit of those brownish tones in the snowman. And now to add the only warmth that is in this painting. His little smile. I just added little rosy cheeks. Well also the nose. And I added a bit more orange to the nose. In the reference image I'm not sure what the actual nose was made of. But I wanted it to be more like a carrot. So I made it orange. Also I apologize for not being able to keep all of these real time. But it would make the tutorial way too long. And let me give you some advice though. If you're following along with these. The ones that are a little bit sped up. I recommend that you of course watch the first one. Because most of the learning is on the first one with the ornaments. But also to just pause it. Listen to my instructions. Pause the video. Do what I say. And come on back to it. Start it up again. Now I'm adding a little bit of blue to that shadowy area. Just to kind of cool it off. And leaving the highlights again around the cheeks. And around the little carrot nose. But not so stark. You see how I'm just kind of using some water to blend it. To kind of soften those edges. And now let's get to these little birdies. I used pretty much pure Prussian blue for them. They're just that beautiful little blue bird color. And I kept it wet enough. But not nearly as diluted as some of the washes I did at the beginning. Because I wanted them bright and bold. And if you've worked with watercolor you know that watercolor dries lighter. You can see that tree in the background. It's already lighter and more subdued than when I first applied the color. Now I'm combining a little bit of the Prussian blue. And some of the Cobalt blue. Just to get a nice blue. Again if all you have is blue. Just use blue. But this will give you something to aspire to. If you really get into this. And you want to buy some more colors. This will help you. So all I'm doing now. I created kind of a little bit of a wash. Or a more diluted color on a scarf. But then I'm going in with other blues that aren't quite as diluted. It's a little more paint to water in other words. And I'm adding where I see little shadowy areas. And usually shadows are where there are folds in things. Also those little weird clumps you see. If you were wondering what they were. They're little clumps of snow on his hat and his scarf. I thought the ones on the hat on the top of the hat were cute. They looked like hearts. So I just drew them as hearts. So now I'm adding just a little color to a scarf. Blowing in the wind. I love that. I accentuated that a little bit more. And so just working around. I'm trying not to hit some of the snow clumps on a scarf. But I didn't want it so cartoony. Or what do I say. You know how people just like paint by numbers. You fill in just the numbers. I like things to have lost edges. So things bleeding or blending is often a good thing. But you got to know when to do these things. But you learn the more you do. And now I'm adding a little bit of purple. I mixed some of my magenta color with some blue. I didn't want it so magenta. That quinacridone violet that I have is borders on pink. So I wanted it to be a little more blue-purple. So I added a little blue to my magenta. And purple is a great color for shadows. It's also just a great color for interest. You know. It's just such an interesting color. And also too. I find that purple is great for snow. Along with these cooler colors that I'm using. So now I'm just kind of working on his hat with the same principles and philosophy as before. Get kind of a little wash in. And then you go back and add your darker or more paint to water ratio colors. And he does have a little bit of a shadow underneath that brim of his hoodie. His little cap there. And that's going to give a three-dimensional feel too. I'm blending it in up top. And I think I go back and even make it a little darker. Again where there are crevices and folds and things. That's the best way to do it. And notice I have just let the watercolor and the water do the work. And that's what gives it that really beautiful fun watercolor feel. It's just something that's just intrinsic to this medium. That's why I love it. All right. Now I'm going to add some color to the ground. Now it's cute like this. But I thought it'd be better if I add a wash. And just add little bits of texture to the ground. You know there's going to be snow where there's little humps and valleys. And so I'm adding a little bit of blue in some areas. My grayed down blue. And once again using the side of my brush I grabbed some that I had. Also I'm going to warm it up a bit with a little bit of the the snow area. So you see I'm going back and forth with some of the colors. I'm keeping usually I keep darker colors at the borders of my painting. And I'll keep that snow behind him lighter. But I am going to do more with adding magenta and blue here to get a purple. And now I just add a little burnt sienna to that. And now I've got a warmer tone. You see that it's kind of a purple brown. A neutral purple you could call this. And I thought that would give I didn't want it so bright bold purple. Remember what I said about neutrals. If everything is a bold color nothing gets attention. So I didn't want to take anything away from the snowman. So that's why I neutralized that purple shadow. And you know I just I loved this little guy. This was a lot of fun. And another place I'm adding some of this neutralized purple is in the shadows underneath the scarf. Kind of around his face where the scarf is coming up around. And I'm just adding little bits here and there to give again more of that three-dimensional feel by giving it some depth. And now is when we're going to have a little bit more creative fun with this. I decided to add some glitter like you heard at the beginning. I said maybe it's tacky but I don't care. This is Christmas time. We're having fun.  I mean add a little sparkle make them smile. So this is a product called Mod Podge. It's great for applying if you want to add glitter. It dries very clear. I do recommend you use an old paintbrush if you're going to do this. Along with if you ever use masking fluid the product I also showed at the beginning.  Now here's some glitter I had. Oh my gosh when I was doing some art lessons for kids I had just like four different colors of glitter. I thought this blue would be pretty in the background for the snow falling. And notice I didn't put the the glue obviously on the snowman. It's just on the background.  This is really just for an example for you guys to see how some of the future paintings in this lesson will have snow. Now this is not going to show up as much on my snowman because he's the background is so light already. But what I do is I have my gouache. This is the Arteza gouache. You can use whatever brand. Again it's opaque. It's not see-through like watercolor. But it's a water medium. A water based medium. So I'm going to mix up. I know you can't see it. Well no you can. Mix up some of my gouache to do the same technique with tapping it on my finger. You have to add enough water to it for it to come off the brush. You can see some of it on the ground there underneath the little birds. But again this technique is going to show up more in some of the other paintings that I do. Hopefully these two lessons have provided you a lot of instructions so that you can use that information to paint the rest of these from your traceables if you choose to get the traceables. So these next ones are going to be really sped up just so you can watch and get an idea of the colors that I use. Now if you're a patron of mine let me know if any of these other ones that I haven't given a lot of commentary to. If you would like me to maybe pick one or two of them and provide a more detailed lesson on them. So just one of the perks from being a patron. All right I'm not going anywhere. Watch these to the lovely Christmas music. Enjoy Christmas. I mean really we should be praising and just celebrating that Jesus Christ was born and he died for our sins was resurrected on the third day and we have the most beautiful hope. I'm going to see my mama again who just passed away not long ago and that is something to celebrate. Oh I will add these little gingerbread people. I had so much fun painting these little guys. One of the tricks to making them not look so flat is the dimension that I give them in the shadows. Kind of on the edges of their you'll see kind of where the little shadow is under their feet in their hands. See I'm giving a little darker there and then also afterwards you'll see me add shadows underneath them. They're sitting like on a platter or something but I add like some little blue and purple shadows underneath them. That's going to make them feel like they're you know three dimensional. So have fun with these. If you haven't subscribed to this channel and you enjoyed this so far hit that subscribe button and hit the bell icon because that means whenever I post a new video you'll be notified and you'll get to see it right away. Also if you're a patron of mine thank you so much. You don't know how much you guys have helped me out. I don't share this often. My husband and I we lost our jobs due to COVID and if I hadn't had my Patreon account I don't know what we would have done. You know it's not like I have as many patrons as a lot of people but I certainly do appreciate that support. So God bless you and I have the greatest friends my virtual friends. Y'all are awesome. Also too if you would like to join the Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook that's just a free group on Facebook. You can join. There's a lot of great people on there. Also find and follow me on Instagram. I am at Susan Jenkins Artist. So just follow me at Susan Jenkins Artist and I'm loving when a lot of you create artwork from my tutorials and you tag me on Instagram. I get to see what you do. I love that so keep that up. Alright guys here's some lovely Christmas music. I will be back at the end. So let me know what you thought about these though. Leave a comment and definitely if you're a patron of mine I can't wait to see what you do when you share it in our homework album. Alright guys enjoy. Happy Christmas. God bless you all and I hope you're learning a lot.  I hope you guys enjoyed that. A little bit of a departure from my more serious pastel pieces but hey we got to let our hair down and have some fun especially at Christmas time. So if you've watched this far please like this video. It really does help. It helps when you comment as well of course subscribe and as always happy painting and blessed Christmas.


there's a knowledge base article that we will definitely put in the show notes. This is all late breaking here, at least as far as we're aware. The knowledge base article is how to adjust an app's settings to appear below the camera area on your 14 inch or 16 inch MacBook Pro. It goes on to say you can adjust an app setting so that it uses the whole display or uses only the area below the camera housing. So this is essentially avoid the notch, right? And yeah, so I'm going to quit a third party app.  And then there is an option in the info panel that says scale to fit below built in camera. So I've checked that for for Slack. And of course, we're not recording on an M1 machine, so I can't show you this. And it doesn't seem to change anything. So the menu bar is still up where the menu bar is. I'm not sure what this is going to do. If you turn it on for an app, and the app has menu bar items or windows that would appear behind the camera housing, ah, so you need something that would go full width of the menu or more than half width, all open apps or apps that share the same space appear below the camera until you quit the app using the scaled setting. Okay, so this is doing this dynamically, but only if you turn it on and tell it to do so. I'm not sure that I've seen the only thing that I've seen spill into the menu bar is menu items, which are on the right side of the screen. And, and but it's going to only happen dynamically if you have an app that would spill into that. So that's interesting. I'm not sure that's the most elegant solution to this. And of course, it doesn't appear to address the menu bar issues, but but that's, you know, it's something, you know, okay.  Let's be fair. But you know, when they say to fit below, what are they the camera housing? Okay, okay. So the notch is the camera housing. Thanks for that. Thanks for that apple.