7 Day Watercolor Challenge for Everyone - Build Painting Habits & Master Fundamentals

1. Intro, trailer: Watercolor painting is such a wonderful, creative activity to have in your life. Engaging in this process is almost like a meditation. You can disappear into the world of merging pigments and flowing water. However, getting your watercolor to look fresh and vivid can be harder than it looks. But this process doesn't have to be so overwhelming. There are proven ways to approach watercolor in a way that satisfies and motivates. AG Beta, I'm an artist working with watercolor and a top teacher here on Skillshare. My watercolor journey started 14 years ago, and I love painting, complex portrait works and florals, but I also like to create simple approachable watercolor demos for everybody who wants to build a watercolor skill. I have a studio in my hometown in Slovakia, where I teach watercolor workshops. This class is a seven day watercolor challenge. It is designed to walk you through many watercolor techniques and approaches in a very digestible format. I noticed this on myself and my students that we just 60 minutes per day during a seven day period. You can push your skill from uncomfortable to very comfortable even to easy. But with this class, you're not just going to be trying for better results. I will show you my best tips and tricks on how to approach this medium. This class consists of 15 lessons. In the first lesson, I'll walk you through the materials. I love to do all the exercises and demos in my sketchbook. Next 14 lessons, contain exercises and demos. Each day, you will work on a simple exercise and then a wood colored demo. Exercises are a great opportunity to practice technique, get comfortable with it. Try tips and tricks before you actually paint the finished piece. Every demo dedicated to a particular day follows the exercise to apply all the learned principles. This challenge contains a variety of subjects from simple botanicals to more complex florals. Some still life and bird studies. From day three, I will walk you through sketching basics and I will explain it in a way that's very easy and applicable immediately into your work. As your class project, you will have seven watercolor paintings to show off. On Skillshare, you can share your project to gather feedback from me and others. So if pushing your painting and sketching skill is something that you want to do, I invite you to join this challenge and looking forward to spend the following seven days guiding you through this process. And I'll see you in class. Okay. 2. Class orientation: Welcome to the class. I'm so glad that you've chosen to enroll in this project, we're going to have a lot of fun. But before we start, I want to give you a quick overview of the entire class, how to take it Basically, just how to take full advantage of the tools that you have at hand here. So first lesson is about materials. Check it out before you start your challenge. It helps you to pick the right kind of materials and set up everything before day one. When you're all set up, you can start the challenge, and I do recommend that you take it over the period of seven days as it was designed. Each day, you'll have two lessons to watch and paint along. First lesson of the day will always be an exercise. I will always do this on the left side of the sketch book. Second lesson of the day is a demo. I will paint this here on the right side of my sketchbook. All the lessons are slow pace and you will be able to paint along in real time. I'm estimating that both the exercise and the demo of each day will take you somewhere 30-90 minutes. I started to challenge with very simple exercises and demos that are quite quick to finish. And probably the seventh day is the most challenging one, but even that one shouldn't take you more than 90 minutes to finish. I do recommend that you use a hair dryer to speed up the drying process as I always do, because this saves me a lot of time. It is really as simple as that just follow the exercise and follow the demo for the day for the next seven days and you'll be able to enjoy your newly acquired watercolor skill very soon. This class is also project based. I invite you to take full advantage of skill share community and aplo your class project done below after you have completed the challenge, There is a tab done below the class. It's called projects and resources. This is where you upload photos of your painting demos. You can also include the exercises. It's up to you, but you can also just include seven demos. It is fine. Please upload all seven photos into one project. You can also write something about your experience, going through this challenge. You can write about your ups and downs. This gives me a great opportunity to give you personalized feedback, not just to see your paintings, but also I get the idea of how you did and what was particularly bothering you during this challenge. I always write feedback to every single project that is uploaded to my classes. And it's not just for me, but other students, they tend to browse the project section a little bit. They tend to like the projects and leave their own feedback. And your project has therefore, a great ability to support other people to join the challenge as well and level up their watercolor skills. So please upload your project. It all makes learning more fun. One last thing in the projects and resources tabbed down below. There are also class resources that you can download. I included step by step sheets of every demo, my sketches of the demo that you can use. There's also a full list of materials, and I also included high resolution scans of every page, the exercise and the demo, so that you can take a closer look at my final results. And so now that you know how to proceed, I will see you in the next lesson about watercolor materials. 3. Materials: In this lesson, let me introduce materials. This is my setup that I will be using for this class. This is just my recommendation purely based on what I currently have in my studio. I want to show you each material one by one. Feel free to substitute for whatever else you use in your own work. There is a PDF down below in projects and resources section. You can download that PDF. You have a list of all the materials and colors that I'm using for this class there. We're going to need some drawing supplies. This is my favorite brand of pencil. This is Marcumgrap by Stadler. It's in two B. You just grab any pencil that you have at hand. I like to B. If you like something like HB, which is a bit harder. I also use mechanical pencil from time to time. This is also with two B lead in it. It's 0.5. This is graph 600. I don't think they make this anymore, but it's like an old mechanical pencil. I don't have to sharpen it. This is one thing why I prefer it sometimes. I do rougher sketches with the regular pencil and sometimes I add the mechanical pencil lines. But it's not you only need one pencil. So now my erasers, they are very important. I use three. This one, I use rarely, but if you want to get rid of line completely, then hard pencil eraser will be just fine. This is fabricstle dust free eraser. You have it in my PDF. This is a needed eraser, I think, widely used this one. This is for lightening your sketch, getting rid of the marks from the under sketch. So that is my probably most frequently used eraser in Warraclor And then I have this eraser in a pencil. It's Chino. I don't know if you will be able to find this locally, but we here in Slovakia, we have this in the local art stores. It's really available. It's cheap. It costs about one euro, and it erases for details, very well, the eraser is nice and soft. I also have a sharpener to sharpen both my pencil eraser and to be pencil. I'll be doing this class as an sketchbook exercise. What I like about sketch books is that they are not so intimidating. You don't really have to be worried about messing up too much. What type of sketch book you pick is up to you. There's so many types of watercolor sketch books on the market. Please search for a type that is filled with watercolor paper, which means at least 300 GSM paper. Different brands, they make paper very differently, and the paper behaves very differently. For practice, you don't have to worry about having 100% cotton paper. These are Strathmore 400 series watercolor sketch books. They have student grade, like paper made from pulp. They are quite good quality. You can paint on both sides of the paper, and it's just fine for practice. They're a bit less expensive. I'd recommend that you start with something like this or similar, but look for 300 GSM paper. Some sketchbooks have 200 GSM paper. Those might be suitable for painting outside, but for our techniques, search for 300 GSM. The size of your sketchbook, ideally, this is A four. You want to pick something like this. This is A five sketchbook. This is very small for what we're going to do in this class. So A four, or something similar or close to A four. I will be using a cotton paper in my sketchbook. I have this other brand of sketchbook made by hand, brand this coal sketchbooks and they fill their sketchbooks with artist brand paper. This one is fabriano paper, 100% cotton. So it is higher budget than the Strathmore, but always cotton paper behaves a little bit better. I would work in Strathmore, but I don't have many pages left in there. This is the one that I've already worked in, but just a few pages were covered so far. I think this will be the sketchbook that I will use for this class now. I use this clips to kind of hold the pages while I paint. I don't use tape in my sketchbook. If you don't have a watercolor sketchbook, feel free to use regular kind of watercolor paper. Tape it down. With masking tape to some kind of board so that it straightens that it holds position. You can also use the regular watercolor pads that are gummed on all four sides. In that case, you won't need the masking tape. In this class, we'll also use these three special materials. This is masking fluid or drawing gum. You will need some old synthetic, very cheap, thin brush. I use it only as a masking fluid applicator. We will use drawing on day six. I will then explain in more detail how to use this one. You'll also need kitchen salt. This is regular table salt. We'll use it for some special watercolor effects. In one of them, I will also use the designer's guage permanent white color. It is opaque color to add some details on top of your watercolor painting. And now we have more important tools, brushes and colors. I'm going to use only four brushes, but I will give you some alternatives, very basic Color brush that I use. Usually, I paint like 90% of my painting with this one brush. This is what's called color round brush. So it has soft bristles, always has a tip. You can make a lot of marks with this brush. It can have a wider mark, but if you only paint with a tip, it can be quite sharp. The result can be a sharper line. So I really like this brush, one kind of brush that you will use for most of your painting, and it is one of the most important brushes that you will ever purchase. So if you find a brush that has natural bristles or, like, very, very high quality soft synthetic bristles, you can use that. Let me show you some alternatives. This one of mine is Winsor Newton series seven, which is, like, finest sable brush, so it's a bit pricey. Alternatively, this brush costs less than ten euros, and it can also hold quite a lot of water. It can create a good mark It has a cheap search for a round brush that is similar to this one. This is a synthetic brush. This is Princeton velvet touch round. Just keep in mind that this will be brush that will hold less wature than these tools. Probably the cheapest option, and also a very good option, I think, is one of these brushes, there's no brand, but these are Asian brushes for calligraphy. You can get in any art supply store very, very cheap. It's just a couple of euros. And they also have soft bristles. They're best working when they're new, and in time, I find that the bristles tend to split, but still it's a very good value for the amount of money that you spend, and it has even softer tip, so you can draw very fine lines with it. I have another brush that I will use in this class. It is the same round brush, but it's number three. Alternatively, pick any cheap brush that you can get your hands on. This should not be an investment. They should be just a couple of euros. So you'll be good to go with two round brushes, one larger, one smaller, preferably something that has a tip and can hold more water. For painting, I will only have third brush here. This will be my Part. This is three eighth of an inch. This brush is flat, also has sable bristles. I really like this one. Having stable bristles because it is very thirsty. Usually, I use it for backgrounds or if I want more expressive brush stroke. Good option is Princeton Neptune. This is a small 11 half of an inch square wash. A vinci has an option that is very inexpensive. This one is called cosmotop mix B, and it's a mix of natural and synthetic bristles. Compared to the priority is the best alternative. One last brush that I'll be using. This is also a flat brush and it has synthetic bristles. This is not for painting. It wouldn't really work because it would lift more pigment than it would put down on the paper. But we will use it for lifting technique, which means that if you have a clean brush with stiffer bristles, then you can easily lift some of the pigment. Away from the page. And you can correct mistakes this way, red highlights. I'll explain the technique. When we come to it during our challenge, we'll use it many times, but this brush is not for painting, just for the lifting technique. Final material are my watercolor paints. You don't have to have exact brands, exact type of paints. Just look for shades that are a bit similar. You can also replace the shades with something that you have. I like to purchase from a local art supply stores. Some brands are more common in my country than I do countries. In Europe, most commonly available paints are Wins Newton and also SminkyHradms. We also have Sinar paints and use Sinar on occasion. Daniel Smith are also available in Europe, but a bit more pricey. Here, I still like that brand very much. In US, Daniel Smith, I hear is very common and easy to find not as expensive. So that's a very good brand of order color paints. You can have student rate paints. Every large brand has two lines. Wins Newtons is called Cotman. And the professional line that's the highest artistic quality. Those are called Winster won professional. The student line will be always cheaper, a bit more available. The student line is something that you can use, and it will be just fine for your sketchbook. I tend to use the artistic line. It is just what I usually have on my palette, and I don't want to have two palettes. So I paint with the same palette, whether I do sketchbook work or large scape work that goes to an exhibition. And now I want to introduce you to the individual ten colors that have picked. So I tend to do a lot of nodes in my sketchbook because my sketchbook work is usually a preparation for painting larger. Feel free to also get into this habit of creating nodes, and I think that it will encourage you to treat your sketchbook as a practice field. We'll be using yellow. This is lemon yellow. And here, I'm going to water the paint down so that you see how the paint looks when it's when it's a bit thicker. That means more pigment and less water and how it looks when you dilute it with water. We're going to do this with every color. Next one is green gold. I also use transparent yellow from W Newton, that one I like more, but currently I run out of that paint, so this is similar. This is green gold. I would say it's a yellow, but I don't have many greens on my palette, so this color is a nice shortcut to quickly mix in your green. Then we're going to use cadmium red. This is I think a staple kind of red that you should have on your palette. The red maybe are one of those colors that can look a bit more vivid when you have the artist kind. For example, on the purpose, you don't really see that much of a difference, but on red, I can see that a cadum is very high quality red that shines. The next one, I use it a lot for different works and portraits. It's another staple of mine, and this is Alizarin crimson. Usually, I use permanent version. It's called permanent Alizarin crimson, either by Daniel Smith or ShmkyHdm also has permanent version. Next is magenta. Magenta is like a rouge or similar to carmine. But this color is also one of those that you should have on your palette because it is used to create very intense mixes of purple, all kinds of purple very easily. Next one is a purple. You don't really have to have this color because you can easily mix it. From the rest of the colors from taking magenta and the blue that will follow. You can mix them together. But I still use this particular shade. This is permanent move by Windsor Newton, and I use it because it has granulation. It tends to look a bit more rough. This is a convenience color. You don't really have to have it on your palette because you can easily mix it from the magenta and the blue that will follow, but sometimes for convenience, some secondary colors are fine to have at hand. I'm going to use cobbled turquoise. This is cobalt turquoise. And guys, if you don't have this pigment, then you will be not able to get it. This is like a primary color. You might have a problem finding this shade in student gray lines because this pigment I think only is available at the artist lines. If you only have budget to invest in one color that is artist grade, this should be one. Primary blue that we'll use will be cobbled blue. We don't need to go darker. This will be cobbled blue. A beautiful color as a standalone color, but also creates a white range of mixes that are very useful. Next color is paints gray. I actually have one particular brand that I like because every brand makes paints gray. But some of them they look very different from every brand. This is weird, but most of the brands, when you look at the paints gray, it looks like a blue color, similar to indigo, maybe very bluish. But I buy a particular paints gray from the brand seniliar it is a bit more neutral. It doesn't go that blue. It's not a problem if you have any kind of paints gray, just something that I have on my palette because I like this brand for this color. Usually, this is the base for my palette. I don't have greens, I mix greens very easily. But for this class, I have one green that I added to my palette. It's added actually on the side here, and it is prucian green. So if I have to have one green, I usually opt out for this one. I like that it's dark. Gives me like strong pigmented mixes of color. The brand is Daniel Smith, but you can use any other brand. So these are all the ten shades. For every painting that we'll do, we'll pick two up until six colors the most out of this range of paints. Please go now find something similar. And once you are ready with your watercolor setup, please join me in the next lesson. This will be the first day of our watercolor challenge. And in our first exercise, but we'll learn how to create different marks with watercolor, how watercolor behaves on a dry and wet surface. I will see you there. 4. Day 1, Exercise (Watercolor fundamentals): Okay. Welcome to your first day of a seven day watercolor challenge. In this lesson, we will do a short exercise before painting your first watercolor piece. In this exercise, we'll take a look at some general watercolor principles. I also want to show you how to draw with your brush and how to blend colors. Today we are only using two colors, magenta, and prucianGreen. Let's get started. We are going to get familiar with watercolor technique first by learning how to dilute watercolor and how to apply to paper. First, we'll grab a bit of watercolor. You can use any type of brush that you have at hand. I prefer to do this with my flat sable brush. First, I'm going to grab a bit of watercolor with my damp brush from the pen and apply it to the mixing space on your palette. If your palate doesn't have a mixing space, you can use a plate like a regular porcelain white plate, that's what I also like to use, or you can get a very cheap mixing plastic palette have it on the side for these mixtures and apply just a bit of water to that pigment. Watercolor essentially is a pigment diluted with water like this. Resulting watercolor should be a puddle. The more water you add the more light will be the paint. So let's try to do this gradually. So I first only grab a bit of pigment here, a bit of pigment with damp brush. And I apply it here to my paper. It is quite dark. Then you can apply a bit more water to that puddle here and you can switch. And a bit more water and switch again. This is how we gradually add more water and switch again. This is how we gradually dilute that water color. By the way, having a tissue on your table and doing this dabbing your wet brush into it will help a lot because brush it cannot draw very well and tie the brush stroke if it has too much water on it. You can also have excess water on your marks. I tend to grab it with my damp brush and like this and get rid of that excess here. This way, I have better control over what happens to my wash. And I can dilute even more. We're still not finished with this. I can dilute even more, you have to get rid of all the extra pigment that you have on your brush. It's almost clean water. Here. The last stroke should be only with clean water like that. This is basically what is called a graded wash. You don't have to remember the names, but just so you know that this is how water color behaves. The more pigment you have and less water, the more dark it is. But we rarely draw with water color, like with temporary with guash or with acrylics to do this draw brush that's dry very rarely only when we want to obtain some texture. Usually, you create a pool of water mixed with your pigment and you try to mix here and look for that particular ratio of pigment and water that you are looking for either darker or lighter and then apply to your papers. This is like a basic first thing that you need to know about water color. You can do that also with the green. One of the basic things to know about water color is that you can apply it to either a dry paper like I just did. In that case, watercolor will have a dis hard edge around it, and this always happens if you apply it to papers, that's dry and let it dry like that. If you apply watercolor to a surface that's wet. We can now wet a little bit of that surface here a little bit of that paper. Here, this is now damp, completely damp. We can now make here a mix of paint. I'm going to make it a bit darker so that you can see properly. I will dry my brush just a little bit so that I don't have too much water, too much excess. I will paint the circle here in this pre dampened area. And this circle after it dries. It will not have such sharp edge like this one. It will have soft edge, a blurred edge. We sometimes apply watercolor in layers because of this rule. Sometimes you apply first layer into wet paper and let everything blend nicely. Then after that dries, you can apply watercolor again on top of this blurred out first shapes and create some nice hard edges, create some detail. You can also combine these techniques. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to first paint a circle here. The circle was painted on a dry paper, and so the edge of the circle will not be blurred out like this one, will remain sharp. But now I'm going to reach for the prucianGreen, just a little bit of color. Okay. And I'm going to put a bit of that green here and from the other side as well. I will do this with the green. Whenever the green was applied to dry paper, it will stay sharp. But inside when it touched the pre wet insides of that circle, it starts to blend here. Here, naturally, these two colors will blend together in a wet surface. We can now grab a bit of magenta, not a lot of water here, just a thicker pigment, with the tip of your brush, you can do some scribbles here inside. Okay. Okay. Just do the tip of your brush. And everything that jewel scribble here will soften, will blur out a little bit. This is one example of how to use both wet on dry and wet in wet at the same time. Now, I want to show you that even though we only have two colors in this exercise, they can produce a wide range of other secondary colors in between them. So I will grab magenta again. This is clean magenta paint with just a bit of water, very very little water because I want this color to be nice and dark But still, you have to still add some water in it. Let's start doing something similar like we did here. This is magenta. Now, let's add just a little bit of Prussian green in that magenta and mix. You can start just a little bit. You should still have something that looks more like magenta, but it shifted the color a little bit towards something darker because Prussian green is dark color. We can apply a bit more of the Prussian green now. We're starting to get something like purple, something that looks a bit more purple, and a bit more Prussian green. I will be relentless in mixing these two colors together. Even a bit more. Let's add even more Prussian green into this mixture. Look at this. This is almost black. With student grade paints, it will not be so black, it will be a bit grayish purple. We can continue adding green into the mixture. Like this. Until slowly in a moment, we will only be painting with Prussian green on the other side. Here. Now you can see one color blends into another color, and it produces a very wide range of secondary colors that can be of great use to us. We just two colors you can produce interesting painting that has some depth. You have some dark tones, you have greens, that's cool tones. You have some warmer tones. I would highly encourage you to work with less colors at first, and then we'll start adding more so that you get familiar with how these colors work. Now, let's learn another one technique, and then we'll go to paint today's demo. And that will be how to use your brush to draw shapes. I'm going to use mainly the round brush now. I'm going to just grab something that I have on my paltw colors not important. Just put the brush down and then lift it. If I put the brush down and pull a little bit and then lift, I get a shape like this. This is the typical shape that round brush produces. Try doing this shape again. Put down and lift. Sometimes I have to go over that mark again. We are always starting from the tip as I was drawing a line with the brush. Draw the line, but slowly increase the pressure as you drag the brush and then pull. What you get looks like a leaf, so you can use this technique to create a wide variety of botanical elements such as leaves. I want you to try to work with this brush and utilize this technique, just to exercise. I'm going to do one row that contains these leaves that are a bit shorter. You can also mix the magenta in that color doesn't matter. Something like this. These are shorter leaves. One more and one more just to practice. Now I want you to try to do a bit longer shape. First, just draw a line like this. You can do it slowly. You don't have to rush. Then you can do the same, increase the pressure, and that will produce line that is a bit thicker, like this one. Let's do this again with even more pressure. Now you're getting line that is really thick like this one. Quite consistent if you can keep the same pressure. Now, let's combine all this tree in one line. Let's start with a small line, then increase the pressure and increase the pressure again, and then start lowering the pressure and lifting the brush as you drag, and then finally left the brush. Something like this, it's a longer shape that reminds you of a leaf. The more you practice this, the better you will get at it, one more time. Start as a thin line, increase the pressure, increase the pressure some more and then lift and lift. You can go back here, there's a space. You can go back with some color. You can add pops of color while the paint is still wet and you can let it dry like this. It will have an interesting texture in the end. We still have some room left, so we can try to use this technique, but let's curve the leaf in different directions. I can go like this. I can start here, increase the pressure, slowly drag and then lift. I can go the other direction. I can I can create a curve here like that. Can add some water. I can even go and cross the previously painted shapes with another one. And I can go like this. Here, I like to do this leaves with my larger brush, but you can do the same with smaller brush if you want to practice some more. You will have similar shapes just in smaller versions. Doing this exercise, it greatly helps you to control water color but also control your brush. For painting, utilizing our brush, learning to force it to produce the kind of interesting mark that we want is one of the more important things. Keep on practicing. And once you are done, I will meet you here and we'll do our first demo together. This page. I hope you're not exhausted from the exercise. We are nicely warmed up now and in the next lesson, we'll use all of these techniques to create a lovely watercolor piece. I will see you there. 5. Day 1, Demo (Peonies): Okay. In today's demo, we will utilize all of the techniques that we learned during a one exercise. We will create our first painting with these approaches. Let's get started. We'll first start by preparing this pool of magenta, add more water, less pigment to have it nice and transparent like this. We can start creating a circle. We'll do the PN bad here. With my brush, I will grab more intense pigment straight from the pan here. We'll dry my brush a bit so that I really have thicker pigment on the tip of my brush. We're going to paint into wet area, so we don't really need excess water here. If you are painting on dry surface, then it's better to have more excess water on your brush. But if you go wet and wet, the wet is already there, so here you can have thicker pigment. Gently draw in here at the top of the bud, just add some texture. I'm I'm just going to apply some random strokes bit that magenta paint, and you can you can let it sit there, you can let it spread a little bit. Now into this magenta, we need to apply a bit of Prussian green and create that the dark purple that we had. You can put it in the middle, just a bit here. Now, I'm going to only grab Prussian green dry the brush a little bit. Okay. Yeah, dry the brush a little bit before applying. And I'm going to add a stroke here and a stroke here. And we will here draw something that looks like a stem flower stem. I want to create a mixture of the two pigments here that is very dark like almost black and put it here. Because that flower usually has the shadow there. Now you can deal the green and let's add a few of these lovely looking leaf shapes around that bud. I like to paint leaves a bit more transparent, so not a thick paint, just more transparent paint. I will go like this and I drag and push a bit, and then I pull and lift my brush, same as we did before. This is something that happens wet in wet. The colors, they mingle together. It's okay. Don't worry about it. It looks nice. In the end, you don't have to control these transitions very much. Now, let's add a bit more here. This is going to be a thinner leaf here, another leaf, very carefully, slowly, you don't have to rush. And for this, if you want, you can use smaller brush. Sometimes this larger brush doesn't have such a sharp tip. The smaller brush will do a better job here like that. Into that wet paint, you can always add a pop of color here and there to make it more interesting. Let's paint another bud and test the technique again. Okay. So another maybe a bit smaller puddle of light magenta paint. I'm going to get rid of all the excess water actually so that I have this wet but not overflowing with water. If you have excess water here like this, always lift it with your brush. I usually just put a tip of the damp brush in it and it will suck all the excess water. I'm going to grab the magenta, and I am going to do the scribble here, just a bit. Just to scribble some texture in it, mix magenta and green add some texture as well. And with green, I want to maybe lighter green this time, I want to hear paint a stem a bit darker pigment here and leafy shapes to attach Okay. And you can practice different directions of that stroke. They can curve in multiple directions. To create this dark purple. I like to have dark pops of color here and there. Sometimes when working wet in wet, you will find that the color that you applied and it looks strong enough that it suddenly is not there. Feel free while it's still wet, though, feel free to return and then add some more pigment if you think is not going to pop that color. Now it's going to pop a bit more. I want pops of green as well. Let's not over this will be I want fresh spontaneous water color, so that's what we'll do. One last bad I think three will be enough for us for today's demo. I'm going to have one here. I might be a bit but a bit a bit more of that. Agenda color. I'm going to grab some pigment and do the scribble, again, dark on top. Maybe some extra water on top here to make it a bit lighter. Just push the paint back and forth, keep it wet while you can, but not excessively. When you see that there is a pool of water, then you can just grab it like this with your brush, get rid of it. And add some extra pigment on top. And with the green, we can add some dark green here at the bottom. Like that. And we can drag this stem a bit further. But I'm trying to add more water as I drag so that's a bit lighter at the bottom and a bit so a bit darker here. And we also need to add leaves, but let's make them a bit larger this time so that we practice a whole range of shapes like we did here. Let's create these leaves a bit larger like that. And here can be another one. Okay. Another one. Sometimes I just add clean water and just drag that pigment that I already have on the page. I very much like when these wet shapes they touch and one color bleeds into another area spontaneously like this. Try not to resist the spontaneous watercolor effects. The real this is the point of actually trying to work with watercolor. I'm going to make another one here. Maybe a smaller stroke. Okay. And we can now we can finish these stems here and here. I'm going to leave this one like this. This one, it will go like this and here and maybe it's not so great with the cross, but it's okay for practice. Let's add a bit more leaves. These leaves in the meantime, we can go create another shape. Okay. And we can also add a bit more magenta into the leaves. Why not? We'll look fine. It's a two color study. Like that. As I told you, sometimes I like to add pops of color. So here, for example. In some areas, it's nice to have these pops. So just play around with the color a little bit more like here, hope. Okay. Are we good? Maybe a few more. Okay. Sometimes when the shape doesn't look so great. Sometimes I can't do it with larger brush. I just grab a smaller one and I correct the shape. You can also grab a brush. You can load it with pigment. Okay. And create a few splatters that will serve as some decoration at some detail to the painting, and we're done with them one. Going to let it dry and we'll see if the textures look all right. This is too much of a water pool. I'm going to suck it out with my brush. Like that. If you want to hair dry this, you will have to get rid of all the excess water. Otherwise, the hair dryer might create a mess from the standing water. And that's it for the day one. So that was a successful day one of our seven day watercolor challenge. Don't forget to return tomorrow and watch the next lesson. We'll be exploring different watercolor effects, mastering splatters. And there's another quick and fun demo waiting for you to try out. I'll see you there. 6. Day 2, Exercise (Watercolor effects): Okay. Welcome to second day of watercolor Challenge. Let's start with a short exercise. I will show you how to create a few fun watercolor effects. Today we'll use three colors and it will be yellow. Rd, we'll only use just a hint of it, and it will also be purple. The yellow and the purple will be our main colors. I just wanted to produce a different type of yellow. That's why the red because when you mix the yellow with just a bit of that red, you will get a different type of yellow, the warmer type. Something like this, and that is what we want for this exercise. We'll also today need the salt, the kitchen salt or table salt that we discussed in the materials lesson. You might just start with the yellow color that we have here. Maybe let's mix some more. Let's paint a wash with it here. White the water we want. For the washes, I really like to use the flat brush because it's quicker and it can give you a nice rectangle like this one. When you have it painted, grab a bit of that salt and sprinkle it on top of that wash. We want to do this while the wash is wet, there should be no hesitation between when you paint that wash and when you apply the salt, it should be seamless. Do it quickly. Let's do the same with purple. Because one color is light, the other one is dark and the texture will look a bit different. Yeah, we can add more water to wash to this texture, more water so that it flows nicely. Well, let's make it a bit more wide. Give us more space and now apply the salt. And we have to wait now for at least 10 minutes. You should slowly start to see how that salt soaks in water and pulls pigment away from each of these tiny little particles, and it creates effect that looks like crystal. While that salt is doing its job, let me show you a different effect that we'll also today use to decorate our painting. We'll do it like this. You're going to need a lot of water. That's why we're using the big one, the big brush. I have a pool of water here, so just grab soak it all in into your brush. And then, that's a happy accident. Now you can knock on your brush like this, and it will create some splitters. But then also one of them should be big like this one, a lot of water, lots of water here and here. Let's do the same with a purple color load your brush with tons of tons of water and pigment. You don't see my palette today. It's here. I'm going to load my brush with color and water. I'm going to knock on my brush with one finger. You can also just dip your brush into water has some spare pigment on it, but the splager will be much more transparent than this one. When I do spers I like to do it with very little pigment because they look better. If they're too dark, then they don't tend to look very nice. Let's also do the big splatters. The big ones. Lots of color drip in from your brush. The splatter is one standalone effect, but it is also nice to do what I call a blow effect. When you get this large pedal of water or pool of water, just blow on go closer and the colors merge in a way that is very unpredictable but nice in the end. Maybe we can try practicing the splatters with smaller brush now. The size of the splatter will always depend on the size of your brush. So I tend to use small splatters, large splatters, both brushes for these effects. I can grab the large brush. I will dip it here to get rid of excess water, and now I can soak in all the excess water that I have here. I'll be a bit more work, but then I will be able to use hair dryer to dry everything. Otherwise, I will have to wait at least 30 minutes before the settles. Here, especially. Now, the purple that I use is permanent malp here when it combines with the yellow, you can see how nicely granulated. It gives you that grainy texture. It's not a smooth watercolor. That's nice. If you don't have granulating permanent map or any other kind of granulating watercolor, do not worry. This is just to show you a difference and to let you know that if by any chance you have in your collection, a granulating pigment, that this is not a faulty color, that this is something that you can actually utilize in your paintings. In that very short amount of time while we did pleasures. Here is what our salt has been doing, but I would still give it five more minutes to see if it can go any further. But when the wetness goes away, the salt cannot do anything because the salt effect is always dependent on how much water you have in that wash. Once the wash is dried, the salt will no longer create any effect. This is what final effects look like after I dried the page. We are now ready to proceed with today's demo, so please join me in the next lesson, we'll paint an ice cream using mostly these textures. I'll see you there. 7. Day 2, Demo (Ice cream): In this lesson, we will paint a fun little watercolor demo, ice cream. We'll seize the opportunity to try out all the wonderful effects that we just discovered in a single painting, so let's get started. I'm going to first apply to my palette some of the yellow color and add a bit of purple in yellow and purpolar colors that create high contrast. So when you mix them together, they cancel each other and they create something like gray. Let me show you this is the combination. Let's add a hint of red in it, and we should have nice and we should have nice caramel color, something like this. And that's what we want for now. I'm going to hear draw a triangle shape. This will be a cone of our ice cream. You can add more water. Also, it's not so complicated. Something like this. I'm going to add more water as I approach the bottom. I'm going to I'm going to make it disappear. We can also add pops of color, like a bit of yellow, a bit of red, just pops of color to make it more fun. Let's paint two scoops of ice cream. You just add more red into the mixture will be orangey color. And this will be our first ice cream. Like that. On top of it, let's paint with purple color here. Shape that is round, but you know how it is ice cream. It doesn't have to be super clean. The shape is very random. I will apply a bit more pigment at some areas and a bit more water to some other areas. And while everything is still wet, you apply salt. What I also do to enhance texture a little bit is to grab a small brush, grab a bit of a thicker purple pigment and just do this. Just add some pops of the pigment here and there, as if those are some chunks inside that ice cream. We can try to do something similar here, but this is light colored it might not work as well with the purple. Like that. We already know that the salt and some excess water will take its time to create the effect. In the meantime, let's do splatters. First, I'm going to do the large splatters and we'll blow on them a little bit. I'm going to take the purple color and we'll do a large pedal or pull here, and I will blow on it like that. Maybe with some lighter pigment here, Okay. And now we can take a smaller brush loaded with pigment, more water than pigment. And I will tap it and create a few decordouspladers. I'm tempted to use pure yellow also and to let it blend. We can also use experimental little bitten, use clean water and Lai create another effect splattery effect inside this texture. A few purple splatters. Okay. That's enough. That's no splitters. You can do as many splitters, as you wish. You can do more, you can do less. It's really up to you. Whatever you find balance. Just remember, take out the excess water afterwards. I really recommend to let it dry naturally. Let it sit for B just take a break, have coffee, and return to it and only then finalize the drying process with hair dryer. That will be probably the best way to gather effects that That are well done because watercolor needs time to create the textures that we've tried here and talked about. Go to let it rest, and I will see you in about 30 minutes and we'll see how the effects will look afterwards. The textures and everything is all dry. I'm going to get rid of the salt. Just going to scrub it off. And these are the very nice looking textures that developed as we let that salt sit on top of our watercolor wash. I now I would like to show you just a few more tips and techniques to push this little demo into another stage, give it some more detail, not a lot. Well, finally, for the first time, we'll use this brush has synthetic bristles is a little bit more sturdy. I'm going to dampen it with water. You have to get rid of the excess and I'm going to get a paper towel here. Gently scrub off some of the pigment in this area, like that. I just want to create some highlight in order for the ice cream to look a bit more round. In this area, light here, in this area. Now the ice cream looks a bit more round. This brush can go aside for now. I now want to dit a bit more shadow. I'm going to get my smaller round brush. And for the shadow, we need to use this orange color plus some purple color. This will be our color for the shadows. Looks like brown a bit darker brown than what we used previously. I'm going to apply some of that shadow here as if it was underneath the the purple ice cream with just damp brush, I'm going to softly get rid of this edge here. Just rub it off with damp brush to soften the edge. The same I want to do here in this area. I want to like this. Separate the scone from the ice cream here. We add in a bit of shadow, and then we just damp brush, no pigment on it. I'm going to gently rub this edge off. In this way, you can merge the previous layer with the layer that is that is on top. Add the pig more pigment here. This was pretty easy. Now we have three separate layers. I'm going to dry this with the hair dryer, and I want to show you one more one last detail that I want to add to the scone, and that's some texture. I'm going to again do it with this brush and I'm going to demonstrate lifting because I forgot to do it during the exercise. When you dampen your brush, get rid of excess water, you can literally draw with that brush on top of already dried water color like this. But what that brush does, it lifts the pigment off the page. And shows some of the whiteness of the paper underneath. But the effect is more profound if you then use a tissue or something to get rid of that pigment that has been lifted. And you can draw You can draw textures, you can draw basically anything with this technique. You can lighten some areas, you can make it softer, you can make it sharp, you can draw with the brush as well. We're going to use this kind of drawing hatching for the texture of the cone, the ice cream cone. And I'm going to draw a few and you really have to wrap that pigment off the page. By the way, I have to tell you on some papers, this goes pretty easily, and other papers, it just doesn't work as well. It depends on the ability of paper to sack the pigment in into the bristles. Some papers, they hold the pigment, won't let go. But it also depends on the particular water color that you're using. Don't be disappointed if this doesn't work for you with the particular materials that you have because it really doesn't work 100% of the time and just a few more lines. We're drawing the opposite direction now. And there you have it. A ice cream study without that much detail, but you can see texture on the cone as well as on the ice cream itself. I hope you enjoyed today's demo and don't forget to tune back in tomorrow. There's another fun exercise and a painting demo waiting for you. We'll talk about sketching basics and paint a watercolor toucan I'll see you there. Perfect 8. Day 3, Exercise (Sketching basics): Welcome to day three of our watercolor painting challenge. I wanted to dedicate to exercise to sketching because as we transition towards more realistic subjects, creating a sketch for each painting will become more important. Sketching different subjects doesn't have to be complicated and everyone can do it with just a little bit of practice. Let me now show you a few basic principles on how to approach this. I have my drawing tools here. This is the T B pencil. These are the three erasers that I showed you in materials lasts. I'm going to put them aside for now. So I'm going to do the exercise on these pages as always. First, let's sketch basic geometric shapes that I think everyone will know how to sketch just in order to get the hand moving and just get started. You can grab your pencil like when you're writing like this. This particular grib however, allows you to make a precise line, but also a very short line because this grib does not allow for much movement within the hand itself. So When I'm in the first phase of sketching, I try to be really, very, very loose. I hold my pencil like one, like in Harry Porter movies, give you your hand a bit more motion in the wrist like this. Let's first try drawing some circles. This is a circle. If you have a grip like this, it will be more difficult for you. Even though you have more control, you have less movement, so to produce a circle that is more or less solid will be easier with this grip. You can use as many lines as you want, as long as the resulting shape is resembling circle. Sometimes I go outside the line and that's fine. That's okay. Let's try now to do an oval like an egg shape. This is also fun. A bit more difficult for me. This one is probably the most difficult shape that you can draw. Now let's try to draw some lines square. You will probably find that for you will be always more simple to draw a line that is straight than any kind of curve or circle or oval. Whenever we can, we will try to use straight lines in our drawings. Last one will be a rectangle, so two sides will be a bit shorter, two will be a bit longer. It doesn't have to be precise. The point is just to get your hand moving a bit. You can use many lines like I did. You can now notice that we produced some shapes, but we also produced a lot of lines. Now I would come back to the shape. And I would try to maybe you can switch your grip from the loose grip to this one. And you can try to find that average line. Something like this. You can now go back with needed eraser and needed eraser usually doesn't get rid of the lines that are a bit thicker. The easily get rid of all these extra lines that are soft. Now we can go back and we can clean the shape, the same with the oval. Find one line that will be the final one and get rid of all the excess lines. Usually, you need to clean a bit more afterwards, and we have an egg shape. Now, we can push lines around the square and the rectangle. You can make emphasis. Then also, get rid of the excess lines. Okay. And we produced four basic geometric shapes. I can also use this needed eraser to get rid of what I smudged on the page. Let's just take a look at what these shapes mean and how you can use them for sketching. Interest them, we use this reference photo of a two, but we first need to learn how to sketch it. When I look at the subject, this one is really a bit more simple, but you can do this approach with most complex subjects. You just have to kind imagine parts of the object that you're drawing as very, very simple geometric shapes. So what do we see? I see two big parts of the bird. This one is like the belly, then there is head. And then there is a beak. There's also a tail, and there's a lot of small things in between, but let's just focus on the large shapes first. Let's start from the largest shape. I'm going to draw an oval. It will be slightly tilted like this. I'm just going to sketch it very loosely. Then I'm going to take another shape, another large shape. Head is a bit smaller, large shape is big, something like this. Also, there is a circle that head reminds me of a circle and the tail. I would say it could be a triangle or something like this or a shape similar to this. It's like a triangle that's cut here. There you have shapes and if you put them together, you are going to get cc. Let's now try to put the shapes together. Let's take this one. Let's draw it here. Next to that one, there is a circle. At this point, you're going to have to experiment, check it's called proportion. Roughly, you have to pay attention to how large is the circle when you put it close to this shape. How large is one next to another. Which one is larger? Is it twice as large, three times as large. Sometimes you make a mistake and then you can correct it. This ability to assign a proper size to certain parts of the object that you're drawing. This requires to train your eye. There's no special explanation about proportions, no other way to learn how to do it other than draw a lot and force your brain to engage in this activity of comparing two objects. Let's put another shape here. And the last shape here. This is how I see it. Obviously, there is another shape and there is and that is this branch that it's sitting on, and there's some small shapes that we would have to address. Let's do read one more time here because I want to show you the two stages of how to put this entire sketch together. At first, you only have these basic shapes. This is one, this is two, three, four, the oval goes here, this is the beak, this is the head and this is the tail. When you put them together, you only did half the work. What we have to do now is to connect them in a way that appears like a subject that you're drawing. Let's notice this be a little bit further. It is not as wide. When I notice it a bit more closely, I don't see that it is as wide. There is a middle line here, and this end there will be slide curve to it here, slide curve that is a bit more exaggerated than what we do. Then we can continue by adding this shape with smaller shape on top of it. More interesting difference will be how you connect the head to it because it has a neck, but the circle and the oval, they're connected here in a bit more softer way. It is not a jump like this, but we need to connect them as if you were putting skin over these geometric shapes. Also here, I would say that this part is a bit more cut, not to stand too much in this direction. Now I'm noticing another shape and that is this hard shapes hard put on the side that white shape here. You can draw it in, something like that. Finally, we will connect here. From this, what was very simple triangle here, we'll just have to do cuts into that triangular shape in order to get something that's similar to this one. We can also add different smaller shapes such as I, that's another circle. If you look closer, there's another circle inside that circle and here are two more dark shapes. Like that. What about the feet? What shape do they remind you of? The way I see it, it's also just a half circle. Something similar to this. It's just a bit less thick. You can draw it like this. And cut that in half to create two fingers and a nail on the other side. More or less, it's the same. This kind of shape like a moon, cut it in half. There's lots of different ways, lots of other ways how one can see these shapes can start drawing with a circle and oval. You can start drawing with the heart and then connect an oval and oval. You can see it in many different ways. Sometimes it also helps when you're drawing to turn your sketchbook in a different position, then check the shapes, how they appear to you. If you even put your sketchbook upside down, then you can see the shapes a bit more clearly. Because this way, your head disconnects from seeing a bird. Now you don't see bird, now you just see these shapes, so you can compare them a little bit better than before. Now, for example, I see that this line doesn't really match this line, but I did not see it from the other side, so I can now here correct a bit more. And here also. When you turn your sketchbook, different mistakes about the drawing, different proportional views show up to you that did not show quite as well before. In this small sketch that already looks like a bird, you can still perceive the original sketch lines, but we can now gently wrap them off with needed eraser and we can emphasize certain lines that are now More important here I even suggest that the line is not solid, that it's a bit. It has feathers, so it has these bumps along the way. Here we can use some hatching in order to get more emphasis there because it's very dark. Yeah. And here, there's the branch. This is basically how you can draw anything. It takes a bit of practice, but not as much as you would think and anybody can do it. Using this simple shape approach, you can draw things that are simpler but also more complex. Every time, even with a very, very complex subject, you have to look for these large shapes that the subject contains. You just have to pay attention to what keeps it together rather than the details that separated. As a final test of your newly acquired sketching skill, let's do a sketch of this two to the other side of the sketchbook. This sketch will serve us to paint today's demo in the next lesson. Since you've already drawn this two con, it will not be hard for you to do it again. Just this time do it a bit larger. Now we want to feed the bird to an entire page. Leave some room above his head. I used roughly two thirds of this page for my two gun drawing and the upper third remained unused. There's a reference photo attached in the projects and resources step down below that will help you sketch this, but there's also my sketch attached. So if you prefer to trace it to a watercolor paper and proceed with the painting process, you can do that too. Just remember to sketch the first stage, very lightly, use the lighter pencil grip to make better shapes and then start connecting all shapes and refining your lines. Take your time and don't rush yourself. But keep in mind that your process will get much easier and much faster with practice. Your erasers are a great tool that will help you clean your sketch and achieve a refined look. When you have built a solid silhuette of the bird, you can start adding few details. There are a few black shapes on the beak that you can draw in the eye, which is basically two circles and then fingers. Sketch created for a watercolor painting doesn't need any kind of hedging, shading, strong lines, or too many details. It's point is to create a guide for where to put color during painting process. Adding too much detail or strong shading with pencil would obstruct transparent watercolor pigments. Usually, it is also a wasted work as details can be added on top of basic watercolor washes with color and thin brush. So just create a silhouette of basic features of the bird and you are done with today's exercise. In the next lesson, we'll use watercolor to paint this beautiful colorful bird. I'll see you there. 9. Day 3, Demo (Toucan): In this lesson, we'll paint a watercolor toucan. We will use a playful approach taking advantage of watercolor effects and some of the basic techniques that we already know from previous two days of our challenge. Let's get started. Now that we are finished with the sketch, let's paint today's demo together step by step. Let's select the few colors. In this case, it's going to be more colors because we can make this two can look a bit more colorful than is our reference photo. I'll start with yellow. Then we can also use the green gold. I would love to use alizarin crimson also to have just pops of red. That may be purple. Here. Okay. And turquoise, I don't think that we can go without this one. This is a tropical bird, so it would be very nice to have pops off this color and then paints gray for or to replace the black to make it very dark. I want to start with the beak. And I will start with the first color that's the lightest and that is our yellow. I mix a bit Asian crimson into the yellow and make it a bit warmer, very little pigment, like that. Now it gets a bit warmer and a bit more rich and a bit more of that green gold. And we'll just place it on the beak, and we can start adding other colors, z and crimson in between the yellows here. So we will connect the colors, but we'll only stay within the silhouette of the beak. We can now add the turquoise box of turquois here and there. And the purple. I think I overdid that with purple, so I'm going to remove some of it. But maybe smaller brush will be a bedder more handy right now. I will try to lighten some areas by trying to lift the pigment a bit with wet brush. Just a bit. Maybe I'll go back with yellow and adjust the color bit. We lost. I'll try to adjust that as well. So I'll try to just play around with color a little bit, but try not to try not to push the color too much back and forth. Try to make them stand next to one another. For this part, we can mix a little bit of more orange color with our Asian crimson and yellow. And we can start kind going here around the eye a little bit. But this time with very transparent color because this is a zone that is more or less white. I want to give it pops of color, make it look a bit more around, but not a strong color like on the big, very, very soft color. Like this, pops of color, very diluted, thinner brush. I'm going to grab just a bit of purple here. Added here a smart a little bit. But most of this area, I want to keep white. We are almost done for the first layer, but I would also like to color these parts, the legs. They are blue in color. I'm going to use the turquoise. I'm going to give it a bit color. And you can mix a bit of paints gray into turquoise to make it be also. What we'll do now is add a bit splatters to reach the painting even before we put on all the black. I want to do pops of color splatters. I want to use some that will be a bit more like purple. They can cover the body at this point. Just don't make them too dark, and we're going to blow on some turquoise. Whatever you add here, it will be very dark color sitting on top, so it doesn't really matter if the splatter goes because you can cover it up later. A few red splatters as well. I kind of missed that. I like this kind of painting to be very joyful. Have a lot of color, play around with it. Use your own eye to figure out what the balance is. When it comes to the platters, their color and their amount. Now when I think I have all of these platters already placed. As usual, I try to get rid of all the excess water. Try to soak it into my brush and then dry Usually I let it sit for 10 minutes on my table, and then I get a hair dryer and I finish drying that. So I'll meet you here in a few minutes after this is dry and we will continue. The entire page is now dry. And now I would like to paint all the dark areas on our bird. Mostly, we'll be using paints gray. There's a couple of those dark areas that we need to paint. This one over here, the largest area is here, the almost entire body of the bird, and then the tail. Here you can dilute it a little bit. It doesn't have to be too thick, and we can start from here, from this side. And first paint this shape. Then I'm going to go with these two smaller ones. If you have too much water on your brush, you can use the tissue like we did before, get rid of it. With a damp brush here, I'm going to remove some of the pigment to make it a bit larger on the top. If you do it like this, here is also a reflection, you will get it some volume. Now we're going to paint this large area here. While here, the edge is a bit more smooth on the inside. The outside the line will be a little bit broken to show that these are feathers. So here, I'm going to paint and draw some irregularities in that line. Okay. Here, carefully, we can mix in some other colors too. Don't have to be purely dark. Especially this part of the back is a bit lighter, so you can include other colors feel free. Okay. And here, we have to be careful in order to avoid this shape of the legs. So Sinar brush will be better choice here. Okay. Can you know the tail? That one will be darker. Okay. One thing that I forgot, and while I still have blue on my palette, I will do it now, and it's the inside of the eye. So you can do this. You can just paint the entire eye blue. And later when this dries, we will deal with the inside. I think I kind I have to do it one more time because I went over the edge of the sketch. Whenever I'm painting eyes, I tend to remove a bit of the pigment from the lower part here in order to give you the illusion of being a bit more round. So more pigment in the upper part, less pigment in the lower part. Now we'll let it dry. First, I'd like to do the branch, and for that, we will need our soft flat brush. We can mix our yellow with pines gray, maybe with a bit of red, and that should create brown. Brown is not a color to mix. Every time you mix every color that you have on your palette, you basically get a brown. I'm just balancing this to make it like this one with more yellow is a bit more greenish here. It is not the shade that I want, I'm going to add more red, and this is the shade that is better for the branch. Something like this is what we created. With more yellow, you will have a brown like that. With more red, you will get a brown like this. So what we're going to do is to load this brush with pigment. When you paint with your brush, you have it like this against the paper. But now you want to put it almost like flat down on the page and then do this. Then you get something like this. It's texture. We call it dry brush texture. Here, try to stay within the sketch. I just want to see some of the texture here. I first do the texture, and then I go back with more water, and I will connect. I will connect the paint. We'll fill out the rest, but from time to time, you need to leave out this dry texture spaces. So that it will have some highlights on the photo also, there are some highlights on that branch. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to put more paints gray in it and then do these darker spots. So while it's still wet, here and there, you just do these marks. This is going to be branch with very little work. I'm going to dry this and maybe just a bit more work a little bit underneath the legs, more shadows. Now, I want to show you how to do the final details and make the two C and look much more alive. First, I'd like to work on a big for some more. I want to make it look a bit more round, so we will need to remove some of the pigment to create this highlighted area over here. For that, we'll use the flat brush that has sturdy bristles. I'm going to dampen it and get rid of excess water. Now we can use it like an eraser. You can just rub the paint that's always this works only with already dried water color. You have to rub it like this and then use a tissue to lift the paint. I'm going to do it some more. Sometimes it requires patience, but usually that works nicely. I want to also create a sharper highlight around the middle line here. Because that's what I see also on the reference photo. I would like to use this technique also to read some of this texture on the beak. The texture on the reference photo is a bit more in color, but I want to make it light. Rub the pigment like this and create the folds. This will be a texture on the be like that. I think it looks really nice. We're not done with the beg yet. I also want to emphasize the highlight here. That a bit more on this side. This is a really powerful watercolor technique that you can use. I'm going to also create a highlight here now. Now I like it very much already. I'm going to grab a small brush going to take some color, maybe, maybe a bit more red, and we'll emphasize the middle middle line here a bit more. Okay. Now, a bit paints gray. I'm going to draw the inside here of an eye. With dark paint, this paints gray, I'm going to pat nails. This is just casual parts and then some Some of these details on top of these fingers here. We're almost done. These details I think help the subject a lot to stand out, but I want to do one last thing that is not completely necessary, and that's to use white guash. It is similar to watercolor. It can be dissolved with water, even when it dries, but it is a thick opaque paint, which is a difference from guash and watercolor. I use it to add highlights. Use your small brush, dip it into the guash paint, and we'll just paint a small highlight into the eye here and here. If you want to, you can also decorate with a few more highlighted areas. The bird or the textures here, just add some visual interest. Like this. You can also fix mistakes with us if there's something that didn't go quite as plant if you have a smudge that's really irritating. I'm going to maybe add a few here to the beak. And now we are. How did it go? Did you enjoy today's painting process? I hope you had fun. Just so you know tomorrow, we're going to do even more expressive and interesting studies. In the four exercise, we'll talk about how shading works. In the following demo, we'll paint beautiful, colorful pairs. I'll see you there. 10. Day 4, Exercise (Shading basics): Welcome to the four of our seven day watercolor challenge. Its exercise, we will practice shading techniques for simple objects using both pencil and watercolor. Let's get started. I have this subject here as a final level. But first, we will do exercises in pencil. We're going to shade a sphere. Then we're going to apply that to a pair. Let's try to draw a circle. First, there's circle and then there's sphere if we shade it. We already know how to draw circle. We learned that previous lesson. We can actually make it a bit larger. This is small. And let's make it 21, we will try to work with pencil and one with watercolor. Use the technique from the previous day to emphasize which lines are final to get the final edges of the circle, one and the other one as well. Let's make this circle into a sphere, and what makes something that is two dimensional, what makes it three dimensional is actually light and shadow. Imagine that we have a source of light like the sun, for example, and it's hitting an object from the side. What makes that object look three dimensional and perceived as something that has a form is actually the difference between the light and the shadow. Always going to be parts of this object that are closer to the source of light. Therefore, more exposed to the light, and some parts that will be in shadow. Every time that you paint an object or draw an object, you have to figure out which parts are close to the source of light and which are further away from the source of light. Let's say that the sun is hidden from the side. There will be one spot on that sphere here that will be almost completely white. That's the one tiny spot that is closest to the source of light. We call that a highlight. There's an area around the highlight that is going to be a bit more further away from the light source than the high light. So it's going to be a little bit, still very light, but a little bit darker, so we can hatch this part of the body of the sphere. Then there's another area that's a bit further than this one. It's going to be a bit more dark because it is It is going away from the light. I hope that now you're getting the idea, but it's going to get very interesting very soon. Since the bowl is round, the sphere is round, it's not going to be all that equal. This part this side is going to be a little larger than here, so we're going to have to do gradients. With every part that we're going to hatch, we're going to do a bit of the gradient. Next part. I would say that this area of the sphere is the area that's about halfway from the light source to where it should be darkest. We call that a mid tone. So we have to hatch. However, on this side, here is going to be slightly darker than here because this part is a bit closer to the light than this part. So there's more and this area is going really, really away from the light. There's not a lot of light hitting this part of the body of the sphere, so it's going to be even darker. And this my friends, this is what we call a core shadow. So this is darkest area of the sphere. It is not on the edge here. Here's going to be mid tone because some of the light is being reflected from the other side of the sphere, and as the sphere is round, you'll find its way back here to this area. Sphere is a bit more trickier than a cube or any object that is flat on the sides. Go what you would think is the darkest part of the sphere here is actually not. Darkest part is a little bit further away from the edge here. And when you draw or paint it like this, the sphere will look round. We have to even out these areas a bit more to ensure that the transition is better. So it should be lightest, light, mid tone, really dark. If the light source hits the sphere from the side, there will be a cast shadow, so we can draw a shadow here. You can hatch it. That would be. Since it's shadow, it's going to be something dark. Also, that shadow will have a little bit more reflected light in this area and it's going to be very, very dark in this area. That is the spot that will get the least amount of light in the entire situation. Ven less than here. Now you know how to shade the sphere. This is pretty easy to do with pencil. But now when we know where the shadows need to be placed. Let's try to place them on the page with watercolor because that gets a little bit more challenging. We already know that watercolor tends to run while the washes are wet. So how do you make the shading so precise? With pencil, you can control which part is midtone, which is highlight, which is very dark. With watercolor, it's going to be a little bit more of the pushing paint here and there, but Let's do it together. I hope that we can handle it. You can go ahead and draw the highlight in that will help you. Usually, I draw it with my brush, but you can do it with pencil for an exercise. And we can also draw the silhouette of the shadow so that it's a bit more easy for start. Let's make that sphere. Let's make it a red color. So I'll have the red color here. And I'm going to dilute it for now. We start painting from light to dark, so we will add the dark tones in the end. With a light color, we have to avoid that highlight. The rest of the sphere, it needs to go wet in wet. Well, gradually going to increase the amount of pigment we have on the brush, and we will add it just like we did with the pencil. Add more pigment as the body of the sphere goes away from the light source. In this part of the shadow, the red color isn't enough, so I'm going to use a bit of the pins gray to make it slightly. And a bit more diluted wash for this part. I'm also trying to keep the amount of pigment on my brush in by tapping the brush here, getting rid of the access. And damp brush, no pigment on it. We can just slightly lift some of the pigment here in this area to make that reflected light. We also need very dark pigment now to start painting the shadow and the occlusion, it needs to be the part. So here, And here is something very specific to watercolor. Do not worry if the color bleeds here. It might not be 100% accurate. But it is something that we rather tend to keep in watercolor because it is a spontaneous effect. It doesn't really destroy overall look of the painted object. And here I'm going to add more of the diluted watercolor as I paint the shadow towards the area that gets a bit more reflected light. And this is how you paint a very simple three D looking sphere in watercolor. And even go back and add some of the pigment here if we lost. If we lost it, but only while it's wet. After it dries or if the wash is semi dry, just leave it. If you want to correct some mistakes or add more shadows, you can wait for this to dry and then add another layer to emphasize or deepen some shadows. Can be very simple and you can do a lot of shading in only one layer. Keep in mind that you can't have tons of water on your brush. You have to use the paper towel to get rid of the access always before doing a strokl. If you paint brush strokes with a brush that is too loaded with water, it will start flowing back and forth. You won't be able to keep that pigment in one area. I'm going to now dry this, and when it's dry, I will sketch the pair in pencil and we'll try to paint it in watercolor as an exercise. I'd like to sketch pair by trying to sketch a small circle representing this and a large circle that's here. And then you just connect them. Like this. You can also draw this ten. Not complicated, not too complicated. Another one, this will be the water color part A. Pretty simple. So we can now emphasize a little bit these edges Let's try to shade it a bit in pencil. We have to notice the highlighted area. The highlight is here. The highlight is very soft here and also on this side. I'm going to start to admit tone with pencil here just a little bit here. Sometimes it helps you to squint your eyes a little bit when looking at the reference and the tonal value is just pop. So first, I'm just hatching everywhere where I see midtone and then we're going to add dark ones. Like that. I see highlights here highlights. Here is a mid tone and now more of the dark areas need a bit more ching. Okay. Okay. So something like this. I need to clean the this sketch a little bit and leave and we will try to reproduce something similar but in water color. Oh, it also has a slight shadow like this here. The darkest part is definitely here. Now it is up to us to handle the water color. We can use similar color or we can use Asban crimson that's more close to this. First, I'm going to water it down and only work with light value and applied here. I'll try to avoid the areas that I marked here as a highlight. Sometimes with clean water, you can go into these areas and make these edges a little bit softer like this. But with clean water. Okay. Here, also with clean water. And only clean water in this area here. But now we can start applying more intense color to the areas that have more tone. Like here. We also will need some paints gray to make it even darker. Definitely will be here. Here. Not so dark here though. Here I got too much water so I'm just going to lift it more pigment over here. Here we have to lift. This is the reflective part. Shadow. I try to hold the shape. And sometimes there's too much water, so we have to lift it again. Okay. And here also. So here we got way too much pigment. I'll try to use my tissue to correct this. And we have the stem also need more dark pigment. A bit more shadow here. One last correction here, too much pigment. If you want to make it look a bit more fancy, you can always use your dam brush lifting technique to clean up some of these highlights here. And here add some extra highlight. Here also. To make this shape even more believable. Yeah. And if you want to be super super precise, you can even leave these tiny dots to add some texture of that pair. Like that. Okay. So sometimes I get totally consumed and trapped by the process of trying to make it the most balanced and it's not really necessary because this is an exercise. But you get my point. You can go pretty close to achieving this three dimensional effect with just a few techniques in just a few minutes. We are now ready to proceed to the four demo and paint these beautiful pairs. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Day 4, Demo (Pears): Okay. Welcome to the four of our seven day watercolor challenge. Let's paint today's demo, which will be colorful and expressive study of pairs. We now know how to approach shading three D objects with watercolor. So this will be a blast. Let's get started. First, I'm going to sharpen a pencil. I can draw a line here. Let's place three pairs next to one another. Like this. Really quick and easy sketch. Sometimes I like to leave the sketch marks. It makes very interesting combination with the paint. Now that we have the sketch ready, we can find colors. We can use a little bit of that green gold. We're going to use both types of red. I see some cadmium red when that skin of the pair is more on the light and Asian crimson more in the shadowy shadowy parts. So I think both reds will be good for this study, and then paints gray for some darkening. I think we can also use the purple color a bit for the shadows on the ground. Definitely we'll use turquoise, and I think we're going to use a lot of colors and cobbled blue as well to paint the sky. I'm going to start with very light green gold. Here. And I'm going to just pay attention to the values first. So very light color, very light red color also, and let's avoid all the light areas. Here. Here I see a bit more of the red pigment. And Azar and crimson. On this side is more present. Now we can use brush with clean water and merge them together these tonal values. But just clean water so that we don't have a lot of pigment in the highlighted areas. But we need to connect these colors. Here and I'm going to even use a bit of that purple. This is purple here and here, just a bit. Maybe with very thin brush. We're going to do this tiny space that is a little bit more dark and also with just clean water, smudge the edge of bit. I'm reaching for a bit of blue now in order to deepen the shadows here. Just a tiny bit. And here as well. Okay. Mm. I'm going to dampen this part. So I want a little bit of bleed here, but we have to connect all the pairs together. I'm going to start working on the next one with greenish yellow or green gold, just like a hint of it, like an underpainting then I'm going to continue with the mix of reds that I've watered down to do the similar thing and block in around the highlighted area. I go everywhere where I don't see light. With my brush. Here, I see pop of red. As and crimson, that is what I see, this kind of red, and here maybe more cut red, and here also, I want to connect them. I'm mixing more dark as I go here because that's the darker part. A little bit of purple there. And here as they connect. And lighter red. And clean water to connect here. Okay. So here. Removing the highlights in this area. Just try to find similar value disposition on the food reference. We can correct some areas later if we want to in the second layer. Let's go to do the third. Again, I'll go around the highlights. I see a lot of color here. But also purple when they connect. On this side, there's purple. I also see intense color here more intense color here. And then clean water. Okay. When you connect with clean water, some of the pigment will get inside that area, but not a lot and it will it should still stay light. It's just softens a little bit. Here to softens. Here I need more red. I like that and very intense red here. Okay. I think we're good for now. Let's paint the bottom. This is going to be major color is going to be the purple. You can do this. We already did the texture with the and some paints gray because it needs to be really dark in areas where the pair the bottom here to paint the shadow. And the rest we can maybe the rest, we can work out with some like for example, just quickly mix some brown like this. Okay. I can do a bit more splatters. But we now also have the background to paint. I'm going to use the turquoise color. Here is the turquoise, a bit of that blue, a bit of the green gold, and we can try to go around the pairs here. You can leave out white spaces sometimes. You can leave out tiny white spaces in the background here and there. It will look nice. And here we just clean water you can smash the paint. I'm doing everything with this flat brush, I really love to do this stuff with the flat brush here, getting the silhouette, but I do not come close to the red paint is still wet. Okay. Maybe we can make it a bit here with mixing paints gray into it. And here is just a few more spaces to fill. And it is done. We have to it's not done completely, but the first layer is done. I'm going to now dry before we dry, you know that you have to get rid of all these excess. And I'll meet you here in a few minutes after this is completely dried out. So my demo is now dry. We have to finish some of the details, but let me just tell you that what we did in this first layer, we did 90% of the painting, and it's really great and this kind of approach has me painting for longest periods of time with most interest because it's so free. It is not precise. You don't really color between the lines, but there's a whole new level of thrill when you follow this kind of approach, and the painting looks a bit raw, but it also has this energy that colored very precisely done paintings they just don't have. This is what I personally enjoy with art, and it is also what I really love to explore today in this particular sketch. But there is a downside to this wet in wet all free go all in approach. And that is that sometimes the textures of water color when they dry very flat because they flow into one another and they even out in this example. Here it didn't happen. Here the pigments, they stay separated. We can see the highlights, the mid part, and the parts that color really pops there. You can see the total differences. Here we can lost it. We have to go back and fix some of it with the second layer. Sometimes a few of these mistakes like I keep. Sometimes I make a decision to just keep it raw as it happened. Other times, this is the center of the entire picture. I might go back and try to fix. First thing that we do, we are going to soften some of these highlights. Even that will help you make that object look a bit more three D. Here and here. Soften some of the edges, make the total differences look a bit more realistic. So that already helped a little bit, but we also have to add shadow here and here, find some sort of red here with damp brush, I want to soften the edges a little bit. Soften this edge here. In a similar way, we have to do this on this side a little bit more we always have to at least a bit just soften the edges. Okay. And here there are a bit more. Okay, now that shape is standing out much more than it was before. Also, here I want to remove some of the pigment, make a bit more reflected light. This pair still a little bit messy in this part, so maybe we'll just fix that one. So better. I think it could also use removing a bit of that pigment. Dry. Grab a tiny brush with some dark brown and we'll paint the stems. Here on top, I only work with water, and here I remove some of the painted pigment because even that stem from the side, from the right side, it has lightness. There. In the bottom, we can add a bit more red color here. Okay. The second one And paints gray on top. And the last one. A bit more red here. A bit more dark at the bottom. And that's done. One last thing, should we try to remove some of the decorative textures or whatever you see on that I see lines and dots like this. And with a little brush can also paint some of these darker ones. But for an exercise, this is basically it. Tomorrow, we'll paint a beautiful red rose. Learn a lot about more complex shedding and we will level up our brush marking technique. So please don't forget to tune back in tomorrow and meet me in the next lesson. I'll see you there. Okay. 12. Day 5, Exercise (Complex shading): Welcome to the five of our seven day watercolor challenge. I hope you feel energized and curious as to what we're going to do today. I'll not let you wait any longer. Today, we're going to paint a beautiful red rose in watercolor. But before the painting demo, we'll do a drawing and a shading exercise that will be very useful for us and help us prepare for these a bit more difficult subjects. So let's get started. Today's topic will be to paint a watercolor row, so we'll go back a little bit to botanical theme is just a great subject to learn from. So first, I'd like to start our exercise by sketching it. When I try to sketch something like this, every petal has very different shape. So I try to look at the flower as a whole, and I try to find the closest possible shape to what I see here, maybe a diamond shape, something like this. At first glance, it just looks like this. But I also see when I look up close that there's basically two directions of the petals. One is all the petals going from this side up. It's this group of petals, and the other part is the petals facing down. This is the group. I would like to maybe draw a distinction, and then maybe draw this bottom part of the rows here, including all of these petals and the upper part. That could be something like this and here. Now we can go back to this shape and try to add more petals to it or on top of it. Usually, I would start with the largest petals, then find the smaller ones. Quite a large one is this one and it looks like a triangular shape here. Something like that. There's a bunch of smaller pedals all look like a smaller triangles or rectangles here. Not that difficult to sketch once you have this larger pedal placed. What about these? Here is one that is also looks like a rectangular shape, something similar to that. There's a fold to that pedal, like this part is folded a little bit. On the other side, there's another pedal, there's a fold here. It all returns back to this central point. From this point, whatever you draw, the curves doesn't have to match the reference, but it needs to go back to this center, like here and here. There are some petals on top of this and some shapes that will be more visible from this side. Look at this, we've got the rows in very small amount of time. We now have to clean the sketch with needed eerasor. I'll now try to emphasize some of these lines add maybe a bunch of folds here, another fold here. But remember, when you sketch always go from the large shapes and then add small shapes on top of it. Then, another one. A bit more clean up around the petals and we're almost done with the sketch. I really like doing these quick sketches on the other side of my sketch book because when I approach the main subject, my hand is a bit more skilled because I've already drawn it a couple of times. Draw a stem. There's a bunch of leaves here. And maybe a leaf Leaf over rose will be of this shape. It will have these little thorns on the side and very more prominent visible center, something like that. They will be usually, will be in groups. Like that. Maybe a third one on the other side. Now while we still have the pencil in our hand, we will need to place a bit more shadow. Here is a fold. Underneath the fold, there will be more shadow. In this area will be a bit more in shadow, so you can hatch that area. Even if you don't have reference for, you can sometimes apply logic to where the light will be and the shadow will be just imagine that the light is coming from this side. And then try to imagine the form, which parts of it would be more hidden from the sun. Usually, it is all of these little spaces that petals get on top of each other and they will prevent the light coming in between them. Usually those spaces will be pretty tight and therefore a bit more dark like here. All of these upper parts will be more exposed to the sun and will therefore be lighter. Here, some folds, a couple of folds, folds can also be a bit darker. And these parts might be a bit more like mid tone. Here these will be a bit more in shadow. These ones that are at the bottom will be darker. Here will be darker. Here will be darker because the light just doesn't go there. This will definitely be darker. This is just a very quick map of where the light and dark goes when it comes to rows. Now that we are a bit more familiar. Let's try to pick one area one or two pedals and then try to shape this in watercolor. We can pick this triangular pedal. I'm going to sketch it here. It goes maybe something like that. Here is the upper part. Here is this little one. There's another petal here, another here, and we can try to shake this in water color so that we familiarize ourselves with the techniques of applying color. I'm going to use cadmium red. For the exercise, but also a laser and crimson. I think there should be enough. Maybe a hint of purple for the darkest spaces here. I see that the entire petal is basically red so we can paint the first wash, that's going to be completely red That's going to include the pedals that we sketched are very close to this one. You don't really have to distinguish between them in your first layer. You can do a more or less flat wash. Like this. But then we have to go back in. First, we'll lift the color here and in areas that appear to be a bit lighter while the wash is still wet, here. Maybe a bit here. Then with Asian crimson, we can go back and in some areas that we see, there's a bit of a tonal difference, we can adjust that, we can add pigment to it here. Definitely here. Do this while the wash is wet. I'm going to get the purple and only get the darkest parts. This will be very small parts, just a few. Here. Maybe a few folds. And here is that that area over here. So we'll just smatch the color in this area. Any other differences that we found, I feel like here, we need more red. No, that's all. This is a very quick way to show you how to shade a pedal. It's best than in wet in wet setting, but we also can use layering approach to add more definition if we want to. Usually what I do is I do a flat wash the entire flower with one color, do some variations of the color here is more orange color. Here is more of color that looks like more than orange. And then when it dries in second layer, I ashadow, but we're not finished with the exercise yet. Just like in day one, we did leaves just by stamping our brush. That's how we're going to do the leaf of the rose as well. It's just going to be a bit more complex shape because it also has the tiny little thorns on the side. So let's practice this before we go to this page. I'm going to use the green gold as well as the prucian green that I have. Maybe we'll use also paints gray because when you mix paints gray with green gold, you will get really lovely like earthy green. This is the green gold, here is the prucian green, and here is the paints gray. I really like the combination of paints gray and green gold. We can start painting now. First, you'd just do what we've already done is to make this kind of shape with your brush and then another against it. But do not quite touch the two strokes. Now while the silhouette is still wet, with small brush, you can do this thorns. I like to use different colors for it. Like that. Now I did thorns with just green gold. Now I want to hear a just the stem with some pines gray, so I got at least three shades there. I really like to vary my colors like this. Let's try another one, more green gold. But the shape we need to practice the shape. One, then two. You can vary the color. Let's do the thorns. Like that. Why not add some red as well. We can try with different bruh, with a larger brush. Maybe the thorns will need to be done with the small one. So a bit definitely larger. I'm going to take this one for for the little thorns. Can you even do it with clean water. Since this is wet, so the water will get the pigment from inside that shape. Let's try another one. Maybe I will add some glue into the mixture as well. One, two, And now, let's try to paint multiple leaves on one branch. Let's paint a branch like this can vary the color a bit. I really like to use red in combination with green because it makes it look more brownish, if you mix the two. With green gold, you can do this tiny little leaves that take different turns. Here I do a thorn. Another one. And let's try to connect this while it's still wet. And one shape, second shape and little thorns. And here one shape. Second shape, a bit more blue and a little thorns. Like that. And maybe a larger one as well to connect here. When you practice like this, you will get faster with that shape. You will remember it. You will actually be able to paint it from memory after a while. Maybe one more thorn here, and that is done. In combination with these techniques, we can develop our rows study. Thank you so much for doing this exercise with me. You are doing so great, meet me in the next lesson in which we'll paint our rows together. After all this preparation, it will be so easy for us. I will see you there. 13. Day 5, Demo (Rose): Welcome to the five painting demo in this lesson, we'll paint the Watercolor roses, which would not be an easy task. But we have been exercising, experimenting, and thinking about our subject so thoroughly that this will surely go well. Let's now use all of the techniques that we learned in the previous exercise and create some magic. You start painting, try to sketch the rows one more time. Use the same approach as we did during the exercise. Start with very basic geometric shape, divide it into two sections, each for petals facing different sides. Then start adding medium shapes, look for larger petals and think about the kind of shape they represent, and then add the smallest ones in the end. When all the shapes are placed, you can use needed eraser to clean your sketch, refine your lines. I always try to make the curves look a bit more elegant, but at the same time, keep in mind that all the shapes have to fit together as part of just this one rows. So try to also view them as an entity. Interesting thing about flowers is that they're both easy and hard to draw and paint, easy, in a sense that if you draw them disproportionately as opposed to human portraits, nobody will notice this. It will probably still read as a flower. And hard because between all of these petals, everything you paint is basically abstract. The amount of petals, shadows between them running in different directions, up close to a painter rarely make any sense. And so it's easy to get lost in details of a flower. I added this rose bud here. I don't have a reference for it, but we'll just improvise this one. Now that I have my sketch finished, we can start to paint. I'm going to use my larger round brush for the first layer. I will start selecting colors first. I want to use a bit of that green gold. I'm going to use both the reds. I will use purple. Even though it doesn't really show that much, but it's for darkest areas. Pruian green. Even though we might not need Brucian green for this demo as much. When we mix this one with paints gray that I'm about to add, we should get sufficient dark green. Here, I also used a bit of blue. I forgot to add it here. I like the pops of blue when I'm painting leaves. Let's start with the green yellow first as like this wash that goes underneath the red. Now we can paint with red. Here be careful about the silhouette. Try to stick with the silhouette We might need smaller brush for these edges. And we go in with lighter paint first. Like that. As we descend, we are going to add more of the Alizarin crimson. And more crimson. In these bottom parts it's going to be even more of that. Crimson mixed with purple. Hey. H Now, with larger brush, only damp brush. We can lift some of the pigment in these areas that show a bit more light here, just like we did with this exercise. And here and a little bit here. I'm going to push some clean water into these areas in order to reveal some of that and create some texture. Here we can Add some more of the redness here. Here and there, while it's still wet, it will slightly dissolve. We won't have that much work in the second layer anymore. It's just like pops of red. You can see some difference in u and mainly in tone. This bottom part is still. I'm going to now paint with laser and crimson mixed with purple. I'm going to add here the dark areas here also. And pure alizarin in these areas. There should not be a lot of work. But while the wash is still it can be really nice if you add some distinction and value variety now, S. The tiny splitters. I don't mind, actually, I wanted to add some, but make sure that they are rather more transparent than this one so that it doesn't look like you cut your finger, and then there's blood on the page. Yeah. Just a few could try to paint this bod. It could be cut red. For starters. And then add some of the darker reds here and on this side, even purple here, and those greens that we have here left over from the previous exercise. We can connect to this stem. And with green gold, and just just a bit of this. I want to add this little shiny little leaves here. And a bit of blue. Like that. Here we can also connect. I like to do the dry brush here. Just drag a brush that we previously got rid of some extra water, and it has this effect showing a bit of texture. You can also paint the leaves here. Green, gold, and blue and just mix everything that you have on your palette and try to do every brush dro with a different variety of different version of green and it will look really nice. We can continue adding these th with small brush. And a bit of thorns, we already practiced this so should be easy now. And we can try to add of these leaves. Here. Here, just a bit of that extra detail and some more darkness and can add one here as well. And a large one here. And some thorns. We can also do greens to decorate the painting a bit. Maybe one more here to balance out these shapes. And now we have to let everything dry. I don't think there's that much to do now. The first layer is dry. We can continue with shading the rows. We've done a lot in the first layer, which is awesome, but we really need to emphasize some value differences in the second layer. First, we remove the pigment as to create more highlights. That's what I always do first. Let's start with the bud. I would go here and make it look a bit more round. Here are some parts that ought to be a bit lighter. That's I think all of the important highlights, and now just a few shadows. Most of the shadows, I will do with combination of algien con and the purple. It can be more diluted than this. Let's start here at the top. There are some fools that are a bit darker. I'll just apply paint there. Sometimes you have to apply and then smudge the paint a little bit with wet brush to push and create gradients. Here just a couple of these folds. You can just apply paint like this and smudge a little bit like that. Then you have a fold in a pedal. But this top part is, I think sufficiently shaded more or less. Here, I smudge there's not that much light in these parts where the pedals occlude themselves. Here we will be more shadow. Here will be here more shadow, and we need clean brush to just smug this and connect these shadows here as to create a gradient. Here also will be shadow here will be shadow. Always with wet brush, try to smudge a little bit and connect with everything that you've previously painted. Kind of harsher shadows are here here and here. And connect with water. Yeah, I didn't even believe that it's this easy, but it's really done we've shaded most of it in the first layer. Maybe here I would add more definition, one more shadow here with a red that is a little bit closer to mid tone than to a shadow, and then with clean brushes connected. That now it looks a bit more round also maybe here a bit at the tone and then smudge the paint like that. And I think yeah. I think I'm going to gar this and then carefully observe if it needs anything else, but I think we're done. Thank you so much for joining me in another day of our watercolor challenge, and I really hope to see you back tomorrow. We're going to learn how to apply maskin fluid and what handy tricks we can use to make it work in our advantage. We'll paint red mushrooms, and it will be a great day again. I'll see you there. 14. Day 6, Exercise (Masking fluid): Welcome today six of our seven day watercolor challenge. Are you still on board? I hope you are. Today, we'll explore special type of material that's called masking fluid. This technique will give you lots of different possibilities to try out within your usual watercolor practice. Let's get started with the exercise very easy today. Today we'll be drawing new subject red mushrooms. We will explore contrast. A little bit. We will also learn a new watercolor technique, which is using masking fluid. I think it's a lot of fun first. I would like to sketch the mushroom from at least two different angles than explore coloring. Before we start working on our final demo, I want to show you how to use masking fluid so that there are no surprises. I would like to sketch this one. Shape is similar to half and oval. So if you have an oval, you can cut it in half. There you have mushroom cap. Then it has the leg. This particular mushroom, it has some squirt in here, this shape, like that. If you look from down, you can open that cap a little bit here. You can make it look a bit more open. If you look from up, then the mushroom can look something like this. You will not see this inside part anymore, but you'll still see the skirt here and the leg. Maybe the mushroom will be a little bit more flat in this area. I will clean the sketch now, and I'll try to now make my lines a bit more clean. At the bottom, it also has some foldings like here. It's not completely smooth. We'll clean this a little bit more. You may notice that the mushrooms, they have these white spots. If I want to paint these differences between the red and the white, I would have to draw every white piece and then very carefully with a small brush, go around the white areas with red paint. That's probably what comes to mind about how you would do this. It is not the best solution. There's a better technique to be used with watercolor and that's maskin fluid. This is masking fluid or drawing gum. I'm usually using this one by Pebble. It's the most common type that I can get in local art supplies and it's also very cheap. I have done another brands that are white in color. This one is blue. Now I want to explain to you what it does, painted, where you want to have white areas. It masks the white of the paper. Once it is dry, it will seal the paper underneath so you can paint over it. That's very convenient. One thing you have to know is that once you paint the spots with maskin fluid, you have to wait. It needs to be completely dry, and the drying t largely depends on the amount of maskin fluid that you put to the paper. If it's too thick, then you have to wait longer, maybe an hour, maybe even more. If it's not too thick, then you can start painting within 20 minutes. When I was first starting to learn, I used masking fluid a lot. Later I avoided because of the drying time slows down my process nowadays. But for starters, it is very, very useful. One last before we start to apply it. You really have to apply it with the brush that you dedicate to masking fluid because it ruins your brushes. Never touch the masking fluid with your regular watercolor brush because it ruins it, it will be gone, it will be destroyed. I have this one cheap synthetic brush that I only have for masking fluid purposes after I'm done with painting. I will keep the masking fluid on it to dry, then I will just rub it off and I use it again as masking fluid applicator. Be very, very careful with your brushes. I do recommend you not have them anywhere near where you're working with masking fluid, only when it's dry then pick your watercolor brushes. We can now draw these white spots. L you see them on the reference photo. I really am trying not to create too thick washes of these muscum fluid, sometimes is very hard sometimes. Sometimes you make a larger drop of it. Next one, a bit smaller here. If you mess up and if the mask in fluid gets anywhere else that you do not want, try not to scrub it, wait until that spot is, and then you can scrub it very easily when it's. Sometimes I prefer the colorful masking fluid because when you apply to the paper, you can see it. Many masking fluid brands, they make masking fluid that is white. Sometimes when you're applying it to white paper, there's not much contrast between white paper and white masking fluid, so you can't really see it very well. But once you start painting, you can see what you're going to get. Even though the rest of the mushroom like the leg and the skirt is also white. We do not need to use masking fluid for those areas. Those are large areas. You don't have to mask large areas. You can easily bypass them with your brush, just paint around them. The small areas are the problem. Reflections in the eyes and these tiny little details you can use masking fluid for. That's what it's made for. Just going to put my brush here to dry. While we wait, let's explore the color combinations. I'd like to do red mushroom cap. We're going to use cadmium red, lesbian crimson. We're going to paint the cap with these. I'd like to use green gold in combination with the reds in order to shade these legs. I can show you what I mean. When you take these and bits of the red, you get something like this. Very watered down. It creates a very subtle color that you can use for shading like here. I'm going to apply it at these parts like the sides with only clean water, I'm going to join the two sides and then we have just a very subtle shadow. One side could be more than the other. We also will need a background. I think here I'm going to do more of the green gold. E for the background, we'll use turquoise and I think even a little bit of Let's use prucian green since we have it, that can't be bad. We can use prucian green. Now that we have the cobalt turquoise. We can also invite to this party and help us shade these legs like that. I think with the addition of the cobalt is a bit better. To decorate, we can learn how to paint these tiny little parts of the forest that could be that could be like that that will grow from underneath the mushroom. With just a tiny brush. We'll use this to decorate the picture a little bit. We can even do a snail. Very illustrative, not very realistic, just to decorate our picture. Like that. Now we have the color combination ready, but we still have to wait for the masking fluid to dry. So I'm going to now wait when it's, I'll come back and I'll show you how to the cap. A few minutes past and my masking fluid is dry. I always test it with my finger like I tap on it. If no masking fluid is left behind on my finger, then it's dry. When your masking fluid is wet, it's a bit milky. But when it's dry, it is clear, usually transparent. However, it will always be glossy and a little bit sticky, so don't worry about that. That's how it's supposed to look. Now we can start shading the cap and we'll start working with our larger brush and cadmium red paint. This is the cad red. You can basically do this. You can go and paint the entire cap. With one red. Here also. Now we take Azer and crimson, which is a bit more dark. We'll apply here, more to the top. H that's how I see it on reference. On this one, also at the bottom, because there's a curve a slight curve, maybe here. We can also try to lift some of the pigments we think the highlight would be where we think the paint would be a little bit lighter. We can try to dry this. You can probably now understand what I talked about when I mentioned color this balance when using blue masking fluid. This is not the big deal, not the end of the world, but if you use a white masking fluid. After you paint over it, you will no longer be confused, you will see white spots, but now we see blue spots, that can be a bit confusing. I'm now going to wrap off the masking fluid. You can wrap it off with your finger. I do prefer my harder eraser for it because I don't want my paper to be sticky. And this is what we get. Use of skin food is as easy as this. But you do have to care for your brushes. I erased a bit of my underdrawing. When we do our final demo, we will push this a bit further, but I will show you those tips on the demo itself. Now I just want to test how the colors will balance if I add the background. I want to add a mix of teals and the Prus green. Here I have some greens left from the previous demo, and the prucan green I really like the combination. Here we can just paint around. I'm leaving a bit of a gap like we did previously with the pairs. Just a little bit. I think it will work the colors, they compliment each other nicely. I'm going to try a bit darker here on this side to see how that will work, but I think even darker is quite nice looking. Both will work just fine. I think that now we sufficiently plant the upcoming picture. Clean up just a little bit. I'm going to dry and we can start working on our demo. I'll see you in the next lesson. We will use masking fluid one more time in an interesting and colorful demo painting. Let's do this. H. 15. Day 6, Demo (Red Mushrooms): Welcome today six of our seven day watercolor challenge, which is completed an exercise dedicated to the use of masking fluid, which is a material typical for watercolor. In this lesson, we will use it in our final demo painting of red mushrooms. Let's get started. I'd like to sketch the mushrooms. There's a reference photo that we can use. I do, probably two mushrooms, but I like the idea of having one that is larger. The large mushroom, it has a cap that is white, and then it will have a leg that goes like this and that skirt here. That's like main Main idea here. Now let's do a smaller one. We can make them overlap a bit here. The skirt will be attached here and the leg will be shown a bit. I kind of like this composition. Maybe we could do one more, but two will be enough. So I'll keep just two for today. I'm going to make the lines a bit more bold, bit bolder. That was not a difficult sketch. That's a very easy sketch. Maybe I will make some adjustments here to make this a bit more visually interesting. That. Now that we have sketch ready, we can start painting these white spots with masking fluid. Careful again, reminder put aside your watercolor brushes until you're done with this process. So Some of these white spots will kind of stand away from the cap like here, towards the background, there will be some volume to these spots. Now that we're done, we're going to let this dry. I waited a few minutes, and this is already dry. Let me do my test, and it's just fine. We can start painting. First layer will be done like we did during exercise. I'm going to grab my round brush, a bit of and we can get started. It's straightforward. But just keep the silhouette of the cap clean if possible. Paint within the lines that you previously sketched. One and two. I love this brush because it keeps so much paint in it. You don't have to go back and forth. You can just paint. It runs out only after you're done painting a really wide wash. Adding some ser and crimson here, and here also just a little bit on the top like that. We can also try to get rid of some of it, make the highlights a bit more stand out. Even I'm going to in some extra water to create ture Well, this is dray. I can still work a little bit, but I'm going to do this. I'm going to wet this for ground here. I'm going to mix a bit of this brown color. Into my reds, I'm applying yellow gold. Also a bit of paints gray to darken this now I have this color, and so we can run like that. You have to tilt your sketchbook just a little bit to let this flow towards the bottom of the page. Now I think we're okay to dry. Now that this is dry, we can get started on a background. I want to do background before these parts because here we still have the masking fluid on and these white parts, they stick into the background. I want to preserve that white space. Let's paint the background with the green Prusi green and cobalt teal, like we did before during our exercise. We don't have to paint the whole page. You can just Just go around that mushroom. Can leave out some areas here. I will need smaller ash here in this area. Now I'm inspired to do a bits to decorate this part. Sometimes I like to do splatters with clean water into wash that's not quite dry yet and it will have a very interesting effect sometimes. You can splatter both on dry surface and on wet surface. It will have some interesting watercolor effects as. We will have to probably. Maybe I go a bit further. Here. I don't like that line there. But I'm going to make this bottom part a little bit lighter. Drying time. Everything has dried but here, I do not like these hard edges. I will with clean water just with clean water on my brush, I will try to smudge and get rid of that. Here, maybe also just some softer transitions at times because hard edges, they tend to capture way too much attention visually. I'd like that attention somewhere else. Do this always with very soft brush, if possible. We can get rid of Musk in fluid. We don't need that anymore. The contrast is a bit higher because the blue masking fluid is no longer obstructing the colors. Now we get to the parts to create some details and shade these areas that normally would be white. White is actually never white. It also has highlights and shadowy parts. The shadow color can be something like we mixed in our exercise. Green gold together with red, but also you can include a bit of cobalt turquoise like this color, and you'll get something like this. This color just make sure that you dilute that mixture with water, so that is a bit lighter. Here will be a shadow that the cap will throw a little bit. I can add a bit more of the green gold Then we have to work very delicately because we want to add some color, but we don't want to lose the white. I'm going to just wet this entire skirt with clean water, more or less clean. My water is no longer 100% clean. Then into this wet wash, we can insert some tones such as the browns and the green gold. But everything will be diluted, we will be watered down. But just hints of color, not too much. The same we can do here. Water this first, and then insert some of the color Lightness is important. I also want to do something similar here. Apply the paint on the sides of the leg and then just clean water and you can merge this. Like that. We can go up here a little bit, with the color on the sides. Clean water. Just merge this color. Keep the middle part white parts on the sides need to be slightly darker, but the pigment is very, very light, very diluted. Last part is this part. I'm going to leave a gap between this area and the, the red cap, just a tiny line that will separate it to give it some space, make it a bit more airy, and I guess more shadow will be on the sides. Here will be a bit more here, maybe more here, more. You can also insert some clean water in it that will lighten that wash bit. Here with light brown color, I'm going to do this to just suggest some of this some texture. And there's still a lot to do, but we have to now dry everything in order to continue. Oh, no, we can still do one more thing. That is to shade these white areas. Because these white spots, those are actually three D objects on the cap. They will have a very tiny shadow underneath each of them, that's going to be easy enough to paint it, but you have to go inside every single one of them. You just mix similar color like this. Put it on your brush, and then like bottom part of every single white spot. You have to paint the shadow here. Half of it will be now painted. You can just do a quick mark like this. But it needs to have some tone down below. And here as well. Like that. That will give it some volume. One of the last details that we need to add to suggest some texture of these skirts. Similar color that we used for shading. This time, you can add a bit more pigment on your tiny brush because we're just going to draw lines like this. Also here you can show a little bit of the lines. And I think we're done with this. My background usually is a bit larger than what I made today. I might have to mix a darker brown color. So I'm going to use a bit more of the paints gray. They're not very visible, but it's okay. And that is our demo day six. I hope you enjoyed. We have one more day ahead. I hope that you still have energy to finish our watercolor challenge. I'm looking for tomorrow. That's going to be the day when we use of what we've learned. We're going to do exercises, nice blending of the colors, and I can't wait to meet you, so I'll see you in the next lesson tomorrow. 16. Day 7, Exercise (Color blending, complex sketching) - Part 1: Hello, my friends. Welcome to day seven of a seven day watercolor challenge. You heard me right. It's the last day. But before we celebrate it, we made it and acknowledge how much we grew during this challenge. We have one last exercise and demo to complete. I picked the most interesting demo and also the hardest for the end. Here we have a wonderful opportunity to use nearly everything that we've learned. We blend colors, shade a bit more complex objects, and use expressive brush strokes to insert some life into our paintings. And so without further ado, let's get to work. One last note, this exercise is a bit longer than previous ones, and therefore, it's split into two parts. For today, I've chosen a red parrot is the subject that I painted a couple of times that it was always so much fun. We're going to do studies of this bird. I want to take full advantage of this beautiful palette of colors. My main goal is to show you that even complex subjects can be simplified and painted with ease. First, I'd like to focus on the main shape of the bird and explore it in pencil. Maybe we can start with this one. Let's first try to draw it. If you can remember day three when we painted our two can. Then did an exercise that was all about drawing using very simple shape. That's what we're going to do now. Try to find very simple geometric shapes that could be applied to this particular subject. We can start with a whole silhouette. You can see a shape like this, for example, right? We can find a shape like that. We can take the whole body of a parrot. But we can also find smaller shapes within. Maybe the head, you can perceive it as a square or rectangle, it can also be perceived as a circle here. We can try to do that. Peak can be like a half circle at start, something like that. Here the belly as an oval. We can just connect these shapes. We can also apply the oval shape for both of these wings. I'm going to use one here and one here, and you have to just connect everything now. Like that. Then there is this shape and then there are legs. That's going to be similar than what we drew when we were drawing the two and look at this. We can use a small circle for the eye, and then we can try to adjust the shape. I'm going to make the big a bit smaller. But in general, it is no than this. I'm going to now clean the sketch. Maybe use my mechanical pencil this time and try to make it a bit more precise. Here, I'm just suggesting that the line is broken and it's not solid. Here, maybe just a little bit too because there are feathers. This is very quick sketch of parrot. No that we are a bit more familiar with that shape. Let's try to sketch another one, maybe another position. I'd actually like to explore this one. This shows more color on the wings from this angle. But it's a bit more difficult to sketch, so let's tackle that now. Probably we'll have to sketch it a bit smaller so that it fits in here. I'm going to try to imagine that the head is a circle here. Try to do something that looks like a snowman basically. Here is the wing like one wing. Going to try to very, very loosely get the idea of how that shape works. Maybe here is the belly like this. If you can barely touch the paper with your pencil, you can just literally just feel that form. Without making too much commitment, you don't have to push that pencil too hard. Here is another oval for another wing. Here two more ovals for these leg parts. One and the other. Here is something that it stands on and we don't see this part of the wing, but that's okay. What's going on with this head? Here is another oval. It's going to be a big from the side side view. Something like this. This white area, it really reminds me of a triangle that's a bit more curved and there's the eye. I think that's enough. We can now clean the sketch. Again, try to build on top of what we sketched loosely with I like to use mechanical pencil for this because it allows me for more precise lines. Now I'm trying to make the shape a bit and There's a pattern on the face, so we can draw that as well. Where is very, very colorful, but it still has certain areas that are a bit more in the dark, hard to shade this thing because there's so many colors, but there's some areas that will always be a little bit darker. Let's find them and try to dg that with pencil just so that we realize them, then we'll be easier to apply the color. I would say that there are some areas that have more contrast around the Big. These areas here, they tend to be a bit more dark and also here on the bag. Around the eye, the upper part, will be darker. Here underneath will be a bit of a darker patch here. There's the belly. The belly will be a bit lighter in this part and just a little bit darker in this part, and here because the wing cast shadow. This part will be Here also. Definitely darker. Very similar situation here in this part. The belly will cast shadow. Here. This is interesting. There's texture here and a lot of color. But this part usually catches a lot of light. However, underneath these feathers, there's a bit more darkness. We'll have to apply color here, a bit more tone. That is not so hard, but I like to do this before painting to go around that form, trying to realize where the shadow would be. Or where things get a little bit more dark so that I don't have to try to figure out when my paint is wet. This really helps me out. Maybe this part just a little bit of tone. It gets you thinking about the form before you paint so that ultimately when I paint, I'm not as confused with the form because I already got myself familiar with it. When you think about it, the sketches, there are 15 minutes both of these pairs, that's not a lot of time, and I'm much more efficient when I'm doing the final painting. We can try to do the same with the previous bird. But that one has a lot of the darker areas because here we don't see the color of the bird as much as we see a lot of shadows. He is very much affected by light and shadow. He is under a very strong light coming from the other side. The entire big will have a high light here on top, but this other part is almost always in shadow, almost all of it is very, very dark and in shadow. Even this white part is basically in shadow. This part will be in shadow. S, this entire part on the back is more in shadow. You can just has this. There is cast shadow here. This is probably the shadow being cast by the beak here that needs to be sharper and this will be very dark. I bit of it here as well. This subject, I've been such strong light, it makes for a very interesting painting process. This is also interesting. The wing will have here rim light, and on both sides, there's shadows. This will all be in shadow. And here will be quite strong shadow. It will be really strong shadow. I'd like to do a lot of these in pencil because that's just everything would be in pencil. It's enough if you just suggest that there's light and there's shadow. Similar situation on the other wing, probably the darkest area will be here. All of this very in shadow, and here very dark shadow. We can now try to go and explore in water color. Plan the colors and explore how to place them on the page. For this exercise, which colors do we need? Definitely red, Alizarin crimson. Usually when I paint red subjects, somehow I find them necessary use both of them. We're going to need our green gold. For the wings, we're going to need turquoise, coupled blue. We're going to mix them together. I think we're going to need paints gray because of all of these darker areas on the face and details and darkening of some. Yes, so three warm, three cool colors, and we should be fine. Despite of having such strong light, I think that this one will be more fun and easier actually. Let's start with just applying basic color. What I mean by basic color is that if there was no strong light, what color would the parrot be? Top of his head, it would be cadmium red. And sarin crimson because here this part, I'm going to need to paint with smaller brush, suggest some of the feathers and then continue using mostly lyserin crimson here. But be careful, you have to leave out this area. Now we can use a bit more cadmium red. Here are these parts that they are more transparent. And you can smog that paint. You can continue here for this. Basically, this is a red bird. This is a sketch and a study, you don't have to be timid about this. You can just place all the colors there quite quickly. There's green gold here, and I see a bit of turquoise also. There maybe a bit of blue, like that. Just hints of it. Definitely see blue here. And the red down here. You can be expressive like that. Please don't spend 2 hours on the exercise. Before that dries, I want to also just give a bit of color. I'm just going to use some paints grade that's left over on my palette for the legs here. Just a suggestion is fine. Some texture for that wood that it's sitting on like that. Some texture. Now, we will need to paint this part. It cannot be white, so you can mix something that you have left over on your palette with a lot of water to create this muddy very light color. Something like that. That's going to be how white spaces appear in shadow. If you have a water that you use for cleaning your brush, and you used it for a bit usually gets this color. So you can just use that. You can dry this. We can apply the shadow. I'm going to use Az Crimson, you can mix with some paints gray, and you're going to get this shadowy color. We can try it out. I think that will work. And we have to apply that everywhere you see that shadow. Every place that we hatched before. If there's some spaces like here that's going to be sharp, shadow. With clean brush. I'm going to clean it. I want to hear blend a little bit. Here not. Only here. But this has sharp edge, so you have to leave it like that. Maybe the shadow on the face is not sufficient. Maybe I have to go a little bit. And the bottom is also in shadow. But I'm being very extremely loose with this. Now we can see light and shadow. It should be similar to what we have on the reference photo. This one is a difficult subject, but it's fun to explore it like this. Dry in time. I don't want to pay attention to the details too much because this is a study, but we have to do some. This pattern that I see on the face, try to get the general direction of the strokes. You get the idea of it working. You can finish the beak. We can apply the detail. Tip of the nose, focus on the areas that are very dark. With clean water, on your brush, you can blend towards the areas that are a bit lighter so that you're working with the pigment that you already have on your page. This is probably the quickest way to do a baclor study is to first apply the pigment to the areas that are very dark and then just smudge with clean brush towards the areas with mid tone, that's very easy and quick. Might not work for more detailed pieces that need more attention, but for study is fine. Maybe the nails, just like we did with the Tc, I'm just going to add some of these details. I think for the study, this should suffice. I'll still try with my sturdier watercolor flat brush, lighten some areas. And here also lost some of the lightness. Here maybe here these areas. We can try to push the pigment away from the paper here to and uncover some of these. On top of his head as well, we lost some light there. We've got the point and that's all that. I wanted for an exercise. Let's try to do this one. Probably with just small brush very quickly, and then we move to final demo. 17. Day 7, Exercise (Color blending, complex sketching) - Part 2: In part two of our exercise, we will continue with watercolor study of the second bird. This one is a little bit different because we have to blend colors. There's more colors, there's cool colors, here is red, but we still will do one layer and we try to put the colors next to one another. I'm working with green gold here. I'm starting from the top of his head. Here is a bit of the green gold color. Then here it connects to. Red. I'm going to add red. I'll just add colors like I see them on the reference for them. Here I see more orange, cadmium red, and then connecting to that, I see more of the lyser and crimson. Here. Try your watercolor be a bit more watery. Your brush should not be dry. Here Here there's dark area. To that area, there connects more red here. More orange red, you can mix with the yellow to get more orangey tone here and more of the strong red all the way to the legs. On the legs, I will mix the red with a bit of paints gray that is on my palette to darken it up. I'm going to start using turquoise a little bit here connecting to the red and a bit of green gold. Just basically apply the colors next to one another. On his wing, we have to start with the green gold and start applying turquoise, the cobalt turquoise to these wings. Then as we descend, start applying the cobald blue. Here and there, you can leave out some highlights that looks always nice. As we move down, I think you can start adding paints gray to that blue so that it looks a bit more like this. It changes hue a little bit. Feathers at the bottom are green gold. Legs similarly to what we did here. Then there's that branch. I'm just going to do a branch here. That was quick, but you see that we block all of the colors. We can do more, but we have to now dry. We don't have to apply too much tone to this area. Here, it was a lot in shadow when you compare the two, this one is more white than here. Doesn't mean that it cannot have any tone, could have slight tone, but it's not supposed to be as dark as here. Now we can add a few more details, a little bit of shading. I'll start this time with details on the face. I have the paints gray here, going to be very similar to what we did here. But the pattern is not red. It appears more of the same color like the beak, so I'm just going to do that. Then there's the beak. There are more intense areas that I'm going to feel with color first. Then I'm going to water down the pines gray and kind of feel the rest of the areas. When I have paints gray here, we can mix it a little bit into the alizarin crimson and try to shade the area here around the belly. Here, it needs just a bit more tone and here as well, and you can blend that with brush that is a bit dump. I can just do this blending. I'm going to do similar thing with blue and paints gray, and here is the shadows that we have to add. Add pattern and add these shadows. But this is just a suggestion, please do not be too literal. We're just studying wood color to apply were. Maybe a few more dark tones around the legs and we're done. We could grab turquoise and do more here, suggest that there's something going on with the texture. Here as well. Not too many details. For a quick color study, I really like it. Now you know how to approach even a complicated subject that contains a lot of colors. My role is to keep it fresh, paint a bit more quickly, put more emotion, less thinking, but that comes of course with practice. But this is our seven days, so Hopefully your hand is used to the technique. I'm excited to do the final demo. A final demo, I would like to do pair of birds, like to do it even more complex because this is our seventh day. We have to outdone ourselves today. But there's one detail that everybody is always so confused about. So let's sketch that as last part of our exercise and as the legs. Draw these legs or this one. I'm going to imagine the leg or the finger as like one large oval like this. Another finger next to it as another oval that here will connect to the leg, the body of the leg. Like that. Here's one finger, another finger, and it wraps here, will wrap around this branch, and here it will have a nail, usually very dark nail. And it has this like a texture on top that contains these lines. So it looks like this. This is the branch, and it wraps around it. This is it. I can paint it with some grayish color and maybe the branch as well with some textures, trying to do the dry brush a little bit. And that will be a bit darker at the bottom. That leg will also be a little bit darker here like here in between, the fingers, maybe here, a little bit darker. And that nail will be really dark. Like that. This is the detail. This is an exercise, but a very important one, you can always break down details of every painting that you're going to do like this. Last thing that I just want to check is if the color of the background will fit. We have some space here. I'd like to apply maybe green gold and teal colors. Mix them with a bit of red. If you get green and teal, they're very strong, very saturated. If you mix a bit of red into it, it will get more subtle, like a minty type of earthy green. I like that a little bit more. Let's check if that works. And I think that will work nicely. Either this or that. Here, like this subtle more green as a background. We can apply that to our final painting. I'd like to maybe explore the possibility of using a stronger color for the background. I'm mixing the blue with paints gray, and I try to apply it here. No, I think it would be too dark in the end. Yeah, but this is a sketch page. After we dress, you can see from distance and use whatever you like in your final approach. Now that we're finished with our final exercise, meet me in the next lesson, and we will paint our last demo together red parrots. So I hope that we can finish this strong and I will see you there. 18. Day 7, Demo (Red parrot): Welcome to your last painting demo, final demo of our seven day watercolor challenge. We already studied red parrots in the previous exercise. We learned how to draw them, paint them using two layer approach, and now we use all of these techniques to create one intriguing watercolor piece. I'm excited for this lesson, so let's do this. First, let's sketch. We could start by placing the branch. It's going to be like this. There's the main branch. One parrot will be sitting here, and the other one next to him. One will have a head here and the other one here. That's a very simple way to approach this. One wing. I can perceive it as very in oval here. Something like this. That will be its belly. The other wing is hidden here, like that. Here we have head of the other bird belly, and then wing hidden here and tails. I always try to place large shapes first, so the bellies and then attach the rest. Because in this situation, if you decide that you need them larger or move them, it's not really that big of a problem because you only have a couple of ovals on the page. Later on, if you decide that they need to be bigger, it will be a problem because you'll have details and the big sketched and you won't be willing to move it all. I will add secondary features that are a bit smaller. These white areas, like white faces, I would say. Here is one. The other one here like that. Here is going to be the eye. The beaks I perceive as an oval here that will have a bit of this thing coming out of it, a bit of a thorn coming out of it. Here is the oval and here will be the thorn. The other one will be a little bit easier. Its like half oval and here is the thorn. I think we have most of it sketched, but the legs are missing. Remember what we discussed here when we were sketching this finger, you have to simplify them into these kind of shapes. A or leg that's going to belong to this bird and the last one, it really wraps around this branch. Here's going to be a little bit inner neck and this wing. I think we've sketched quite a lot. I'm going to take needed eraser and we'll clean my sketch now. So I'll just try to lighten it. And then go and make these lines a bite. But I'm building on what I've already sketched very loosely. I adjusted the wing to be closer to the body. And I hear the nails. So I always see two fingers wrapping around the branch. So that's what I keep in mind when I'm drawing. Preliminary sched looked very simple. And easy to do. The one that I came up now, when I cleaned it up, it looks really neat. Always sketch like this and you'll be satisfied with whatever your sketching just forget the complexity at first step, always draw large shapes, draw a snowman basically. Then in the second stage, refine, pay a little bit attention to whether that line is smooth and nice or a bit curvy or a bit dobbly. That's all. When you do that, you'll end up with a very solid sketch. That is all, guys, we have a sketch, and now we are going to paint. Going to apply the same principle that we learned during our exercise. I think I'm going to start with sarin crimson as that's the color that I perceive here. We can start applying the red color here, and then we'll continue with cadmium red, which is the lighter red as that is what I see on this side, a little bit. Lighter. Here is a pop of color. Here is almost orange. Maybe you can mix in a little bit of that yellow in it. Here. Then I'm going to continue with Alizarin crimson around the beak and under the neck here. This is the strong pigment, but now I only with clean water, I'm going to smudge it towards these areas because these are a little bit more in the light. It's the same pigment from here. I'm just going to push it with bruh clean water and it will create a gradient. Here and there's just like pops of pigment. This wing is going to contain yellow and blue connect these colors. Green gold that I'm connecting to the previously placed color. Here I'm using cobbled blue. As I have it on my brush, I'm going to apply it here because that's going to be also present in this area. Now, the red again, here is going to be red and more red to apply here, more pigment actually. You can leave out some of these whit spaces. Don't worry about that, that will give your painting a little bit more air. So to say, not a lot, but just will look nice. Working with a bit more of the Alisan crimson, maybe mix in some of the blue that's left on my palette because here is a bit. It will be darker around the wings as well. And a bit more red here. We can move to the other bird. Almost orange color will be here. There. I'm actually going to use yellow, a little bit of yellow with wet brush just will move towards that head. But now we start applying here and here of intense Az crimson, dark red color. More hydrid in this area. We can smudge it a little bit with be brush and then more lyser and crimson also in these areas that contain pops of color. Here more dark. More blue. I'm going to add paints gray to my blue here. Is going to be der. Like that. Here, maybe pops off that similar color while this is still wet. Ultimately, you want to join all the colors into one wet wash. For the feathers here, first we need blue. Feathers are blue, one, two, three, and then red And here, we're just going to do very loosely these suggestions of these feathers, tails here. This works for me with bigger brush a little better. While we're on it, we can add some texture to the branch. I'm going to add yellow into everything that I have on my palette. That's brown. That's basically Brown is one of the colors that are easiest to mix. I'm just going to do the dry brush. I'm just going to do some of the texture here. Then with a bit darker paint, I'm going to do some pops. Now like to blend the texture a little bit with clean water. But still leave out some white spaces. Because we don't need all of these highlights. We just need a few. You either wait or you grab a hair dryer, dry these so that we can continue. I'd like to do actually background so that I can see all the colors. I really favored some sort of color that looks like this. I think we made it by using green gold and mixed into our blue. This color is still very bright, so you can use your red or brown to tone it down a little bit to make it more subtle. Then we can apply this to the birds. It doesn't have to be even, it can be larger and darker at times, and you can keep some distance from the birds. I like applying my backgrounds like that. We're just having a little bit of distance from the subject here. I can contain pops of turquoise that's fine as well. We can even do these decorative drops and drips. Now, we're going to suck the water out and then dry. We can now do details and some shading. Let's start with the details so that we can see their heads a bit more clearly. I'd like to mix that which can be done from basically all of the paints on your palette. But watered down very much is this gray. We want to leave out the highlight of the beak and paint everything else with this color. This is the highlight. I'm not touching that. I'll just paint everything else. Here also just a little bit of white area, white space, and everything else is gray. Let's mix the gray, but more intense pigment, and we can paint the fingers with this color. You can also make them blue if you want. Now, we have to use clean paints gray. This dark color make sure that the brush is not overly soaked with it and paint all of the dark details, just like we did during the practice here. I'm starting with the areas that are very d here that pops off dark. The eye another eye blend the color with wet brush. This part is very dark, and here is dark. The rest is white or almost white. Around the eye, you can do small shadow. They also have pattern on their face like here, but on this reference photo, it is barely visible, but I can see that it is in lighter red color like here. Maybe we'll make it a little bit more profound. Here it is crucial that your brush does not contain too much water because it will not draw a thin line if it does. Some more definition to the beaks like here. Now, we have to paint shadows. Let's start with these wings, mixed with paints gray. That's my instinct. Paint these shadowy parts like each one will be one stroke. Sometimes I use the dry brush approach like paint these shadows with less water on my brush. Sometimes I blend them like this. Then there is shadows in the red part, they will need to be red. Maybe alizarin crimson, which is the darker type of red, and you really need to go in there and kind of suggest the divisions between feathers like that. That's quite a nice detail. Some of them might be a bit lighter. I need to lighten. Lighten them. As they approach this part, they will be a bit lighter. As they go away from the light, they might be a bit darker. We have to do some lines, suggesting shadows of the fur here on the belly. Just here and there, you can see these darker pops of color, and that's your detail. In this area, it will need some definitions of some darker areas need to be covered. Here, since I have it on my brush already, we have to do the same. This bird needs some of these. Maybe use a little bit of blending. I tend to work a bit quickly. Try to not lose the freshness. I do not try to shade very strictly, try to copy the reference 100%, like the expression more than the facts of this. Just suggest that there is some darker areas that will give the bird volume, but will not destroy the underlying texture that water color created. Here we might go a little bit wider, blend in more deep shadow. Maybe a pop of color more, and some blending. Maybe add some more decorative splatters, maybe even red ones. I would finish here. But if you are tempted to step a bit further, we can risk it together and do some of these palms in the background. We'll only need some of the green age that we already have on our palette, and we could use the technique from lesson one to just add some of these palm leaves. Then I can add a stronger color here. Here is going to be from the other side. One more. And I'm using very light color just like I don't want to destroy the subject. I just want to slightly switch things up. And I don't even keep it like this. Sometimes I notice that the values aren't so great. Here, I like the values because the leaves can stand out on this background, but here is all just one tone. I'm going to try to do this. With our lifting brush. I will try to lighten the background that's between these leaves, O only enough to make that leaf read a bit, like a little bit better. I'll just basically lighten the spaces be these leaves. Like it a little bit more. This is the final artwork that we've done together during our seven day watercolor challenge. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed this challenge. This is very hard to paint a nice watercolor painting without preparation. My goal during this watercolor challenge was also to give you the preparation and show you its importance. There are days that I am in a rush and I think for myself, L et's just keep the preparation. I don't have time for that today. Let's just do the final demo. And then I end up regretting this because often enough, I mess up the final painting. Try not to think of the exercises and studies as an extra amount of time that you might not need to spend. This really sets you up for a success. And I'm so grateful that you've lasted those seven days. I'm very proud of you, and I hope to be able to create more challenges like this one in the future. 19. Final Thoughts: I want to genuinely thank you for joining me for the seven day watercolor intense training. You've outdone yourself, and I'm sure that you feel much more comfortable with the medium now. I'm excited to see your project. So once that you painted seven demos, take a photo of them and upload them to the projects and resources section down below. So that I can give you feedback and other students get to see and like your project as well. And what is next? My watercolor journey hopefully never ends as this is my big passion, and I really hope that yours doesn't end here either. I would love to get your feedback as to which subjects resonated with you the most, which ones were most fun to do during this challenge. This allows me to prepare my next class with your suggestions in mind. And to make sure that you don't miss my next class, follow me here on Skillshare. I also announce these classes on my Instagram and YouTube so you can check those channels out also. And so I'll see you next time. Bye.