5 Minute Creativity: Making Watercolor Blooms

1. Watercolor Blooms: Watercolor blooms are one of my favorite effects of working with the watercolor medium. In this quick video, I'm going to show you some examples of what dried watercolor blooms look like, as well as how I create them. Fun fact, most traditional watercolor artists will go out of their way to avoid watercolor blooms, but since this class is about modern watercolor techniques, we're going to embrace them. You can create intentional watercolor blooms by pulling loads of water and pigment together like this. In this area, this big purple circle, what I'm going to do is just dip in lots of water and you can see how it begins to pool outwards. We want to create more of that. Let's drip more water in, pour maybe a little bit more. Now I'm going to add a little bit of blue to this as well, and just adding more water. You can see the blooming effect starting to happen over here in these edges and it will just become even more apparent as it begins to dry. The water in these pools is pushing this pigment outwards towards the edges where it'll start drying in these really irregular shapes with a very defined outline. You're starting to see a little bit of that here and it's just going to become even more apparent as it dries. You typically watercolor bloom in areas with really loose abstract backgrounds, but I especially like to use this effect in tight and controlled areas. The two ingredients you need to create a really beautiful watercolor bloom are lots of water and lots of pigments. As that water begins to dry, it pushes the pigment to the outer edges and that's what creates the bloom. The watercolor bloom effect is starting to happen here, following this line. It creates this crinkled effect it's really interesting. You'll also see it a little bit more right over here. Then as these really saturated areas on the edges begin to dry as well, the bloom effects will occur there as well. Let's see what happens as this begins to dry. All right, now that the paint is mostly dry, you can see the final effects of what color blooming really looks like. It's really evident on the edges where the water was settling right before it dried and it has this crinkly crisp effect as the paint dries in that shape. I added additional pigments in this blue turquoise area. You can see what it looks like with the green paint kind of heads and then the blue, there's a little bit of overlap, but those natural boundaries are cool as well.