The Creative Sketchbook: Start Your Daily Sketching Habit

16. Watercolour: Okay, so the actual ink has pretty much dried, so it's not smudging or anything like that when you rub your finger on it. That's one of the test to say that it's dried out. But again, if you're doubtful just give it maybe another 5 - 6 minutes, and then in the meantime, what we can do is you can just wet our watercolors. I'm just going to give my little watercolors a spray, and again, I'm just going to use my student grade. That'll do for this quick sketch. I'm just going to use the water wells hair for the mixing. I've got my nice brush over here, my size eight silver black velvet brush, one of my favorite brushes. So I think we can start. Just adding a bit of water to that brush and then decided now that I'm going to maybe go for the roof first. So let's use a little bit of this red. Put nice crimson over there, add it to my pan. Again, this is just such a beautiful sketch book to use, because you can go in with watercolor, and once the watercolor dries, the paper becomes completely flat. Now, do remember when you're using watercolor sketchbooks like this, like this small-skin [inaudible] , it will warp the paper depending on how much water you use. If you do use a lot of water on the page, it will start warping and [inaudible] , but so do be aware of that. Again, if you're interested in watercolor, then do check out my watercolor course where I explain all these aspects. But just generally for this particular class, I would probably recommend using some clips to clip the edges. But for me personally, I can't really bother doing that. I like to do quick watercolor. When I'm doing my water coloring in, I don't like to go in too much detail. So let's make a star on this. So I've got this nice red here, my adding maybe a little bit of orange to that to bring out a little bit more vibrancy, and I think we can go straight in with this. So I'm just going to go in and add in my red, and you can see the orbits of paint on there. So get rid of that little splotchy splodge of paint, and again, just adding a bit more water, and you can see how beautiful that color is. So easy to color once you've got your ink down. It's just an absolute relaxation as far as I'm concerned. So relaxing, don't worry about keeping the color within the lines and being super neat, just do a quick little wash of color. Now I've got my red there, I keep my red on this side. So I'm just going to bring that red down here and maybe read bit of red on the edge. Again, if you have these white spots, not to worry, just to leave it in the end of the day, it's just a quick sketch. So what I'm going to do now is I might intensify that color a bit more darker with this nice, beautiful color here, up that's on, we've got this gorgeous color down here and you can see it's intensified that color giving it a slight brown shade. So again, bringing that down here, what I'll do is, I'm not going to let it meet this side because otherwise it's just going to seep into that watercolor and make it all murky, will leave a highlight line there, and that's it. Then so it's just really nice and easy. What I'm doing is I'm holding the page down with my fingers here if you can see using my left hand, you just hold the page down because I'm adding water, you can see it's already started curling up a little bit. Just hold the page down. If you don't have any clips at hand, this is what I tend to do. I watercolor when I'm lying down on the floor because I just enjoy taking this sketch book wherever I am, and I just enjoy the entire process. Again, I'm not bothered about being super neat or making this into a perfect piece of art because that's not what it's about. It's just about quickly getting some color down and just adding a bit more interest to your beautiful sketches. So again, just going to add in a little bit color here on the border, give my brush a little clean, add in a bit more and maybe just add in some border color here on the doors and on the windows just to make it nice and cohesive, make it all gel together, and how about having the same color on this area here? We'll just color that whole area red, and then what we can do is once the watercolor dries up completely, you can actually go in and add more ink details after the water color has dried, and you can do that with any ink pen. You don't have to have water resistant ink for that. You can add ink with any pen. But then you got to remember that if you decide to watercolor over again, if you missed a spot, then you're going to get a muddy mess. So maybe best not to use a non-water resistant ink. Just stick to the normal water resistant ink that you have if you're going to add details later. So let's just quickly get on with this. A little bit of blue here, beautiful, ultra marine blue. Just go into that and take this color, add it to this to just gray it out slightly, and you've got this nice purplish shade, and what we'll do is we'll start coloring this area in, where we've got this road area where the car is, and that's what you got to do with the watercolor sketching, using watercolor fairly quickly. It's always a good idea to color in the areas where there's a gap between the actual water color and the illustration. That way you can focus more on just getting the color down and not having to worry about a bleeding into each other, and usually the watercolor will dry fairly quick. Keep your washes as light as you can. Don't go in with too much water. Otherwise, you're going to have some bumpiness and some little texture areas bobbling up. So got that color there, happy with that. How about adding some blue shade down here where we've got this water area. We've got this divide, wont touch this, we will straight into this. I love this nice [inaudible] of blue here. Could actually add that to the mix down here, to give us a nice shade of blue. So let's do that, add in that blue, look at that gorgeous blue. That's okay. Calm myself down and not get too excited. Could be just at the early stage of the coloring, we've not even reached halfway. I get excited with new colors, with new art, look at that. Absolutely gorgeous color that I think I'm going to try remembering how I made that color, and again with watercolor, you've got so much of a huge, vast array of colors that you can produce. You can keep making new colors as you go along, and that's a great advantage of it. But the problem is that if you don't remember how you made the color, then it's always difficult to make more. So it's always a good idea when you're making your colors make enough of it so that you can start coming back to it if you need to do some touch-up work. So again, just going in the wet on dry method, let's just pick up maybe a bit of this Van Dyke brown, so have that brown there and keep it nice and moist, got that nice brown over here, and let's just use this brown as it says, just going to use my finger to hold that down, and just this border area of the house, I'm just going to go in and just add this brown to the border area, and again, you don't need to plan too much with your watercolors. Don't worry about thinking that, "Oh no, will this color work with this, will that color work with that?" Just don't worry about it. Just get that color onto that page coloring your sketch. I mean, you don't even have to completely color it in. You can just partly color it in and just leave some of it as it is. Why not? It's just that experience. It's a journey. Isn't it all about the journey, not about the end result? It's about that journey. Right. Let's just go in maybe add in that board brown area down here. Now our roof area should be a little bit dry. So we would probably start looking at some of the details on the actual main part of the house. The main parts of the coffee cup are looking good. 17. Building Colour: Let's now look at some of the house elements. Let's create a nice light color, maybe use this color here. We've got this raw ocher over here, add that to the brown, lighten it up, bring in maybe some of this color, and just like that, do some color mixing. To be honest with you, I don't really like that color. I think it's a bit too murky, so I've changed my mind. Let's go back to the blue. Let's go back to the blue and create our self a nice cool color to contrast with the red. How about adding a little bit of this color to it here, and that will bring it out quite nicely. There you go. Again, with watercolor, just keep making your colors, mixing your colors. But even if you haven't got much experience with watercolor, I still say, try this out. What I'm going to do here is, I'm not going to bother about these little round things down here. I'm just going to literally go over it. Then once the watercolor dries, then I can go in and start adding more details and add more color if I need to. It's very flexible in how you're using it, and it looks quite nice. I do like that blue. You can tell that I'm a fan of blue. I do like blue. We've got this nice shade of blue here. It's like a indigo type of blue, isn't it? These windows over here, the watercolor isn't completely dry, but you know what? It doesn't matter. Even if it starts bleeding all over the place, don't worry about it. It's just about getting that color on to complete your gorgeous drawing. Let's just go in into this area again. I'm just going to go in straight with my watercolor and finish off that chimney area. If the watercolor goes over another one, not to worry. Let's make a slightly darker shade. I think I've got pure indigo here, so let's just add that pure indigo, which is a beautiful color, just to darken up the shade so that we can maybe add a little bit of variance on the one on the back. Just a slight variant. Everything in watercolor is subtle, so you can make these slight changes by just adding a dab of color. You can see that it elevates your overall feel and look of your illustrations. You can see a slightly darker color at the back, maybe add a bit more to that to darken it even further, and then what we can do, you can just drop in some of that, darken it up. Fantastic. Let that dry and then maybe add in a same color over here, just across there. Super-duper. I'm going to let all that dry now and let's see if we can find some more dry spots. How about using the same color and bringing out some color down? If we just use that same dark shade and maybe add a bit of this yellow into it, this kind of murky brown, we'll get a [inaudible] of green. That'll add a bit more variance to our color palette. There we go. That's a beautiful color as well. Look at that. Gorgeous. Gorgeous colors. We've got that nice darkish indigo, turquoise ecoline. We'll just fill [inaudible] , and again, I'm not bothered about the white spots. I don't really care about them. As long as I've covered the main areas, it's just an indication of color in your scene, and I think that's looking good. Let's now focus on these stony areas. For the stony areas, what we can do is we can actually create a new color. I'm just going to clean out my [inaudible] , then I have some fresh [inaudible] here. Just go in and let's start creating some gray. Again, let's go in with the blue, bit of blue and a bit of this nice dark brown here. That'll create a really nice gray. We got ourselves a nice gray there. All I'm going to do is just drop that in into the stony areas. I've got this little step thing that steps into the pavement from the watery area. I can see, very nice and subtle. The sails of this boat, I'm going to leave them as white as I can, so just going to leave it to the white of the paper. So let's just be a little bit more careful when we're painting around them, and there we have it. We got our self a nice stony color there. Let's go in and add in that indigo, a bit of indigo, dry out the brush, and then with the indigo, let's just add in maybe a bit of shadow here on the underbelly of the stones, just to add a little bit of interest. Again, we're not here doing photorealistic coloring or anything like that. No. We're here just to do some quick little sketching and have a bit of fun doing it. What we'll do now is let's use some bright colors. Let's brighten it up a little bit.. Let's go into the orange. Do you like a bit of orange? Look at that beautiful color, that orange. Pure orange. We've got a bit of pure orange there, and maybe use a little bit of yellow ocher, add that to the orange to make it really nice and vibrant. Look at that gorgeous color. Its like a saffron color. Then what I'll do is I'm going to make my Corvette, I don't think it's a Corvette anyway, but [inaudible] like one of these old school 1970 cars, which I absolutely love. Let's just add this orange to this. Take a little bit more time doing this one. You can see I'm just covering it up. Once that watercolor dries, it'll look fantastic. Again, just a bit on the roof edge and the spokes of the roof. [inaudible] Leave that part white. Then what we can do is we can go in and maybe use a little bit of sharp green. This is pthalo green over here. Add that to that mixture in the middle, you can see we've got that gorgeous vibrant color, and then bring that that into the orange color that we just created, and it gives us a nice muted green. With that muted green, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go in, I'm just going to dab that on to this edge, dabbing it onto the edge, and over here, just around this cup, just to add a bit of brightness to the illustrations, or just there effectively. It's coming across here. What we don't really want is that mixing with the orange on the car because that will become quite murky. So we'll just leave that little gap right above the car. Bring the green all the way down here, just like so, and then finish it off over there. We'll finish that green off there, bit more green. Let's just finish these edges to stop all these white gaps popping all over the place. I think that's about enough. With that other green, we can intensify it a little bit. Maybe add a little bit of this to this green here. You can see we've got a slightly darker green, and what that'll do is if we just add that here, it will add a little bit more variation and interest. As you can see you've got two greens, effectively like a separation between this little garden-y element and the green pavement, if you like. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to create a nice light color to go on the background so we could actually go for maybe, bleh, stick to the orange. Let's do an orange. Add it to the green, and then we've got our self a nice copper, brown color. Nice copper brown color there. Then what we can do is actually, we can use this copper brown color for the boat. You've got this really nice copper-ish brownish color, another color that I absolutely love, copper. Water color copper is a beautiful color. Copper, blue, green, I like all colors made don't I? Yes, I do. Let's come down now and just clean our brush.