How to Paint Playful Watercolor Fruit!

1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Amy and I'm a watercolor and ink artist.I would like to welcome you to my very first class on SkillShare about how to paint playful watercolor fruit. I'll be sharing with you one of my favorite watercolor techniques that I frequently use in my own artwork. It's really simple and easy yet can produce some stunning results. I'll take you through four different examples showing you how to apply this technique to different kinds of fruit. In the process showing you how I like to get playful with watercolor. This sounds like fun, please join me in the next lesson to get started. 2. Lesson 1: Materials: Welcome and thank you for joining me for playful watercolor fruit. If you're here and you decided to take my class, happy to be sharing this technique and this medium with you. It's really my absolute favorite way to paint. The first lesson is going to be about materials needed to complete this course, and the first thing you need is a set of watercolor paints. This could be any paint of your choice, you can use any quality of paint for this class. However, I would suggest using fewer colors that have more intense pigment rather than buying a larger, cheaper palette if you don't already have paints on hand. I think part of the beauty of what we're going to be doing is using very vibrant colors, so if you have more subdued colors, you're not going to get as good as a result from the paint. Also, I think you definitely need to have a pink, if you intend on doing any fruit in the peach or grape fruit families. Anything that's pink, you are not going to be able to mix a pink. If your palette just has red, you are going to end up with a muddy red color. That will be my only really strong comment. In addition to needing watercolor paints, that you're going to need some palette surface to mix on. A lot of watercolor sets come with trace as part of the whole kit. Like you buy the palette with the paint and there's mixing areas already provided. The next thing on the list is a paintbrush. I'm going to be using this size eight silver black velvet round brush. This is a combination of synthetic and natural hair fibers. I'm not going to advocate synthetic over natural hair one way or the other. I've used both and I think both are good and it's personal preference. Whatever you want to use is up to you. It just needs to be a round brush of a good size, I would say do not go any smaller than an eight. For this exercise, we're going to be just playing with color and using a really easy quick technique, and we don't want to get bogged down in the details. Next thing you need is two containers of water. I recommend using two, you can use one, but I find that it's good, it's a lot easier to have two. That way you can rinse most of the paint off your brush in the first one, then rinse it a second time in the second one, and you keep the second jar a lot cleaner that way, and you don't have to change your water as often. You also need a paper towel. I tend to keep this for a while like, I'll use them while I'm painting and then I let them dry, and I use them over and over again until they're completely covered with paint and I can't use them without contaminating my brush. You can also use any absorbent fabric, microfiber towels, regular towels, dish rags, you just have to be aware that it's going to stain the fabric. It'll have to be just for painting. I wouldn't want you to grab your favorite kitchen dish towel and ruin it with watercolor paint because it will stain. Moving on, next thing on our list is none other than a pencil. You can use pretty much any pencil you want. Have this barrel turquoise, 3H pencil. I like the harder lead because it leaves a very light line and you can erase it completely. I find if you use a really softer pencil like a bee lead pencil, it's difficult to get all of the graphite out of the paper because the paper is so textured. Regular 2B pencil would work just fine. Of course, if we're using a pencil, we're going to need some eraser. This is a staedtler, I'm not sure that I'm saying that correctly. I've had this one for a while obviously, but it's just a white soft eraser. I recommend this brand though. Some white erasers will smudge graphite, and I find that this one does a really good job and does not actually smudge at all. Next, we're going to need a waterproof pen. I don't know if you can read this, but this is a pigment micron pen by Saqqara, and the ink is pigment ink for waterproof and fade proof lines. If you're going to be using the pen prior to applying your watercolor paint, you need to have waterproof ink. Irregular ballpoint pen, a lot of gel pens, do not meet this requirement. They will bleed if you get them wet and it will reactivate the ink and it will spread across your paper. If you want that look, then that's fine, go ahead and use a non waterproof ink. If you don't want that, you could also opt to add your ink as your last step. You could do your sketch and then do your watercolor paint and as your final step. Add your line mark once everything is completely dry, and then it will not smudge. Any fine point pen of your choice, preferably with waterproof ink. Next, is watercolor paper. I like this paper, it's a really good price point, and I'm going to go with 140 pound cold press paper. We're using a wet in wet technique so it has to be able to handle the water. If i'ts anything under 140 pound is going to buckle and warp and you're going to have a really hard time getting into lay flat as the finished product already. The last thing we're going to need for this class is some fruit, because that is what we're painting after all. Personally, I have discovered that working from real life objects enhances my work and improves the outcome of my paintings. There's something different that I can't really describe about how my eye sees and then my brain interprets that image versus what you get from looking at a photograph and what's captured from a camera. It's difficult to define, but I feel like I connect better with my subject and I get a better sketch or a better drawing from working from life. I went to the grocery store earlier today and I bought some fruit. Some of this is specifically for this class. These limes will probably get turned into [inaudible] later by my boyfriend, and then I saw these super cute little tiny pears that were just adorable. I decided I had to have them. I really like how this one in particular goes from this really pretty bright pink to the green. I really like painting fruit that has two colors like that, and a transition between the two. Pink and green is going to be a little bit challenging, but I think it's going to come out fine. This lemon I think was like 79 cents. The limes were $2 for a whole bag. If you don't have a chance to go out to the store and buy some fruit or that's not something that's in your budget, no worries. I have put together a Pinterest page full of both other artists work to use as a style reference, as well as photos that you can use for fruit reference. All of the images are from Pixabay. All of the images are free to download and view their copyright free as well. You can use them in your work and you don't have to worry about any copyright infringement. Just double-check the image before you download it to make sure that that's actually where it's coming from, if it's something that you feel like it's going to be used for more than just personal use. That concludes lesson 1. 3. Lesson 2: Sketching: For lesson 2, we're going to be talking about sketching. This should just be a really quick, loose, light pencil sketch or pen if you want to skip the pencil. We want to keep our lines and the weight of the pencil on the paper really light because the intention is to erase these lines later. I'm just going to try and keep a very basic format. I'm going to be centering my fruit in the middle of my paper. These lines are just meant to serve as a guide or an underdrawing. My focus for these types of sketches is mainly on the overall shape. I'm not trying to capture any details. I'm trying to do this fairly quickly because I want to keep it loose. When I say quick I mean this shouldn't take you more than five minutes. If it's taking you more than five minutes you're putting way too much detail in and that's not what we're going for here. We're going for really simple, really easy. I'm going to start over because I don't like this. I'm just going to erase it. You can see that I was going too heavily and my lines are not erasing. That's what I'm talking about going really light touch, because otherwise what happens is that you've got this shadow on your paper that doesn't want to go away. Let's try this again and I'm going to hold my pencil farther away and from the side and see if that doesn't help me get some lighter, looser lines. Fruit in general is a super forgiving a subject. It's so easily recognizable that most people are going to know what you're trying to draw even if your proportions are not perfect and you don't have everything just so. You don't need to worry about it. Don't worry that people won't know what you're trying to draw because they will. Our brains are as it were hard-wired to recognize shape. All ready. That's all I'm going to do. It really doesn't need to be any more than that. We're ready to move on to the next step which will be inking. 4. Lesson 3: Inking: In lesson 3, we're going to be talking about inking in our sketch. I'm just going to go over it pretty roughly and pretty quickly. The intention is just to refine what I've already got and to do it with loose quick strokes just to have more expressive line work. This is not supposed to be this super refined precise, photorealistic sketch. This is supposed to be fun, loose, quick. This step should take you even less time than the pencil sketch. So I'm going to start with a stem because that comes in front of part of the pear. Then there's this curve in the front here. I'm just really refining what I've got. If there's anything that I feel like I want to do slightly differently, now is the time to implement those changes. I feel almost like in this step, it's kind of like sculpting. I'm trying to sculpt my fruit. This can be applied to anything, anything that you want to draw, anything you want to paint. I feel like my line work is building on something and I'll put one mark and then I'll build on that mark. Then that connects to the next. One thing to be aware of is the direction of your lines, especially when you're working with contours. The direction of the line really is what will help convey some of that three-dimensionality. So like if I want to come in here and mark a shadow area, I want to make sure that those lines are curbing and match the contour of my fruit. The same goes for your brush stroke. Your brushstrokes need to be going in the direction of your contours. All right, so that's all I'm going to do for inking, didn't take me very long, 2-3 minutes tops. Now that I'm sure that the ink is dry, I'm going to erase or do my best to erase all of these pencil lines. But I don't want muddying my watercolors. Again, if you don't have a waterproof pen, you can wait to do the inking for last and maybe just go in and clean up your pencil lines a little bit. Another option without complicating things too much would be to use a watercolor pencil for your sketch lines. Those will just melt into the painting and no longer show once they've been wet. 5. Lesson 4: Watercolor Warm Up: We're going to do a quick warm-up painting exercise just so that our hand is loose. This is also a great opportunity to mix up some colors and match some colors to your fruit, just so you know what colors to use, and you don't put something down on the page and then decide later that, "That wasn't quite right, and I don't like it now." For this class, we're going to be using wet-in-wet watercolor technique. What that means is, we're going to use our clean brush with clean water from our jar, and we're going to wet a section of the paper. I'm just going to do a circle here, it could be any shape. You could draw the shapes out in advance, it really doesn't matter. This is just to learn and get a feel for how your paint is going to work on the paper. Again, like I said, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to do some color matching so that my final piece comes out the color that I want. Now, you can see that there's a sheen on the paper, and that's how you know it's really good and wet. Sometimes you have to repeat the process of wetting the paper because it will soak up and absorb so much of that water that you no longer have that beautiful sheen resting on the page which we'll need for wet-in-wet. The next thing that I do, or you could do this in advance, is I take some water and I drop it into my palate so that my paints have time to soften up, and loosen, and really be ready for me to grab onto my brush so that I don't have to spend a lot of time scrubbing the top of my paint to get it onto the brush itself. Because we're using this wet-in-wet technique, that's why we need the heavier paper. If we were to use a lighter paper for this project, it would definitely warp and you would see that in your final piece. Another note about color is that you don't have to match it back to real life, you don't have to match it back to your fruit. You can use any color you want because fruit is so identifiable and easily recognizable, people are going to know what it is and it doesn't really matter if it's not quite right. Here we go. I'm just dropping more pigment onto the page. You can see how my brush is pretty wet, and loose, and I don't want to say sloppy, but it's heavily loaded and there's a lot of water in the brush. So that's where the wet-in-wet technique comes in. The paper is wet, the paint is wet, and your brush is really wet. To enhance this, I'm going to tilt my page, and you can see how that is running and creating some beautiful balloons and textures. That's what we're going for in our final piece, is to see those balloons and the colors run together on their own without us having to really work and do anything. This is the magic of watercolor, it's going to do the work for you. Again, another thing I should mention is, when we get back to our finished piece, it doesn't matter if the paint goes out of the lines, it can be quick and loose. You want expressive lines, expressive strokes, and you want to be free with it. Don't worry about making mistakes or going outside the lines, it's going to be totally fine. Honestly, as one of the finishing touches, we can definitely go in and add splatter and splashes of paint, and we don't need to worry about being stuck and adhering to those lines. You are free to do and create whatever makes your heart happy. Please, do not feel like you have to stick to some predetermined thing or even what I'm doing, if this inspires you to do a different technique, a different way, like more power to your art, go for it. That is how you learn as an artist is by experimenting, and trying new things, and not being afraid of making mistakes because fear of making mistakes, all it does is hold you back. I'm just dropping this in, and you can see how it's mixing on its own on the paper and creating some really beautiful purple, and blue, and green. I'm just tipping it to encourage some of that blending, but that looks fantastic. If you want to make your apple pink and turquoise, go for it. Don't let anybody tell you what your art should be. Your art is what you decide to make it. I would suggest doing a couple of these circles, or squares, or just quick squashes. You want to make sure you get a good amount of water on the paper so that when you tilt the paper, you can see that there is a very shiny pool of water resting on your paper. Let's try something else that's crazy and vibrant. Another thing I'm going to encourage you to do is, if you find a picture and you're like, "I really like this orange, but it's not that bright. I want to make my orange super bright." Go for it. Don't be afraid to enhance the colors. Go wild, go crazy, splatter, and just play around and see what happens. I think that looks awesome, it looks so cool. I would never be able to achieve that if I tried to be tight and controlled with both my brushstrokes and the paint. I can't make a truly random pattern, but the splatter is random. You know what? I got some even over here, but I think it looks cool. Just for fancies, let's do another one. I'm going to keep adding a little bit of water, I really, really want this to be nice and wet so that the paint has that opportunity to spread out and to move once you've put it down. How about some green? This is a very vibrant green, mostly unnatural color. Maybe we want some blue. This is the technique we're going to be using to color or to paint our fruit. We're just going to be dropping vibrant pigments into a wet wash, and we're just going to do one layer of paint. We could make it more complicated, the more layers you add, the more complicated it gets. I'm not going to do that, I'm going to try and keep this as simple as possible. I just wanted to give you a quick peak, this is what those earlier wet-in-went circles look like dry. The pigment has faded a little bit, but it's so very vibrant, very bright, and you can see these beautiful balloons and textures throughout each color slouch. 6. Lesson 5: Painting: Already on to painting. I'm going to use what I learned from the warm-up to select my colors, to paint my fruit and I'm going to try to be careful and leave a highlight, and just leave the white of the paper as the highlight. I would like to make another note, again above a paper at this point, if you are not using a 140 pound paper, you probably need to tape your paper down to something so that it doesn't wobble. I'm not going to be painting a large area of this paper, so I'm not really worried about it and I'm just going to go forward without taping anything down. Again, we're going to start the same way we did with our warm up and I'm going to wet the shape of the fruit with clean water and a clean brush. Then I'm going to try to leave this area here as a highlight, sometimes I forget and I paint over it but we're going to try. Because I'm being more careful, and it's taking me a little bit longer, I'm going to get some more water and come back and re-wet it just to make sure that the surface has got a good sheen on it. You can see that if I tilt the paper that there's a sheen already. I'm going to start with the colors that I chose last time, and one thing I do want to mention that I didn't say before was that, I am not mixing colors for this, I am taking colors straight for my palette and not mixing them. If you want to get into color mixing, that makes this a little bit more complicated and a longer process and because we're just working quickly, I'm not going to get into doing that. The first color I've put down is a lemon yellow and then I'm going to come back in and add a color called the green gold. I feel like it's overpowering my yellow, I'm just going to rinse my brush, dry it, and then come back and use my relatively dry brush now as a sponge and suck up some of that pigment. You can do that at any point as long as it's still wet and hasn't dried. I'm happy with that, it's blending out pretty well but I need to work quickly because I'm losing the sheen on my paper. Now I'm going to come back with an olive green and I'm just dotting it in because pairs have a lovely kind of textured surface. I can go back and later with my pen, and add some more dots. I'm going to add a little bit of darker pigment at the bottom of the fruit and around the side here, just to give it some contouring. You don't need to do that and you don't need to go crazy with it either. It's more just hinting at it. Then last but not least, I'm going to come in with a very orange red. Again, my brush is loaded with water and very moist so that it has the ability to come on to the paper and blend out with those other colors. I did exactly what I told you I was going to do, I painted over my highlight. I'm just coming back in and trying to soak that up. You can also use the corner of a paper towel to dab that. I don't think that this is dark enough, I'm not happy with this, so I'm going to come back in with some stronger pigment and my paper is drying. It's fairly breezy, I've got the window open and it's making my paint dry a little bit faster than would be ideal. But I'm still getting some really nice balloons. I've got a little too much pigment on my brush, so I'm going to dab that on the paper towel because I want to spot this in to some of these other areas. Then for fun, just because I can, because I like the color, I'm going to add some super bright magenta. Now this does not match the fruit that's sitting in front of me. By any means, but I just think it's fun. I'm going to do it and probably overdid it. I'm going to add some more of that orange back to blend that out. Rinsing my brush, drying my brush, then just coming in here and picking up a little bit. That was at the top that I felt like was bit much. I'm going to do the stem real quick and just an easy brown. Again, loaded brush, wet, dropping in the color and leaving it at that. I think what I'm going to do is some splatter in another green kind of a color. I'm just going to drop that in. I'm tapping the brush against my finger and where it's really wet, it's immediately dispersing and where the paper is drier, you can see those dots forming. I think I've probably got a little carried away, I could've covered up my paper before I started, but I'm just going to dab up some of these. Sometimes you can get them to come up and sometimes not. I think I'm going to do orange split or too, because I just really like this color. Well, and you can see I've gone out of the lines, I've got splatter, I've got a mess but it's beautiful. It's a beautiful mess and it was really, really fun and that's what we're going for. We're going for fun, and that's it. You can also see here where the stem color has bled into the top of the pair and it's totally fine, I like that it did that on its own. Just a couple quick notes, we do not want to get caught up in detail here, we're just trying to capture the feeling or the energy or the impression I should say, of a pair. We're not trying to make something photo-realistic, you are not a robot, you are not a machine, you are not a camera. This is an expression of you. The things that you like and things you notice should come out in your painting. For me, the biggest thing that I'm looking at this pair and noticing is the color. Then I'm taking that color one step further and enhancing it and really making it pop. In the next lesson, I'm going to be demoing two more pieces of fruit rendered in the same manner using this wet in wet technique, then after that, I'm going to show you a fourth example, where we get a little bit more complicated, where we add multiple layers of paint using the wet in wet technique. 7. Lesson 6: Additional Examples: I'm going to do some additional examples, use some other pieces of fruit, and just show you how this process works with more than one example. This time I'm going to be doing a lemon. Again, I just want to keep my pencil strokes super loose. I'm holding the pencil way down. I'm holding the side of it and using the edge of the pencil lead. I'm not holding it this way. I'm not holding it really tightly towards the end, which limits your motion. I can only move my fingers so far, but if I hold the pencil out here like this, I can use my whole arm and you get a much looser, freer line. You have a dramatically increased range of motion. If you're looking for something to really loosen up your work, try holding your pencil or your brush differently, and you'll see right away the impact and the difference that it makes. I'm using sketchy, quick strokes. Not getting caught up in the details. It's lumpy and bumpy on this edge. That's just one more reason to not make your linework perfect. It's mimicking life better by not being perfect. That going on and because this is a lemon, and I could have done this with the pear too, but I'm going to show it to you now is I'm going to just add some dots. I am not going to dot everywhere. I'm just going to dot in certain places to enhance contouring and almost add a shadow. All right. That's it. This is all I'm going to do for my sketch. Erase these pencil lines. Something I like to do sometimes just to help myself remember the highlight, is I come and I just really lightly put some marks in, and then I'm ready to get started painting. As always, start by wetting the entire shape. I've gone out of the lines in some places, which is totally fine. Coming back to my palette, I'm going to start with the lightest color and then work to my darker color. In this case, my lighter shade will be a bright lemon yellow. Now, I'm coming back in with a darker shade of yellow. I believe this is called Hansa yellow. I'm just going to get a little bit of green, blotting up the excess with a dry brush. Then I'm going to be a teensy bit daring and use a touch of orange. Lastly, I am going to use some yellow ocher to enhance my contours. I'm doing this while everything is still wet, so that the newly added color disperses into the wet pigment that's already resting on the page. To finish the piece, I'm adding some splatter. I will repeat this blotting technique if I feel that I've gotten too much of an intense color. That's all I'm going to do. In the second example, just to show you something a little bit different, I'm going to do my pencil line, and then I'm going to wait and do the pen last. This is for anyone who wants to do their pen as the final step or if you don't have a pen with waterproofing. Basically, I'm going to get it sketched out, and then erase most of what I did till I just have some very light marks on the paper to serve as a guide. You may not even be able to see that, but it's there. Again, just like every other example, we're going to start by wetting down our shape with some clean water. I think I'm going to get a little bit experimental with this one. Plums notoriously are a pretty dark fruit. I am going to take some artistic license on this one and try to lighten things up a bit. I'm just drawing my brush, pulling up some of that orange pigment. Then I'm going to come back with a dark-red kind of a color. You can see it really booming and moving into that orange, which is exactly what I want it to do. I don't really want there to be a ton of this orange color left, but because watercolor is a transparent medium, there will be indications of it. All right, now, I'm going to come back in with a purple. This is where we're going to start to see some shape developing. I'm going to place my purple along the bottom and on this side. I'm not seeing as much movement as I would like because the paper is drying really fast, but nonetheless, we're getting some movement. Then as the last layer, I am going to drop in some blue. Plums tend to have this really deep purple, almost chalky blue hue to them, and I feel like that will translate better if I build my colors like this. Splattering in some orange. I'm going to block that out of my highlight. I think I'm going to do the same with my purple if I can get it to sputter. You have to have enough water on the brush so that it will actually fly off. I'm happy with that. I think that it's going to translate once I put the lines down. I took a break and allowed this to dry completely. You can tell there's no sheen on the paper. Everything is completely dry. Now, I can come back in and add my linework. This should just help give a little bit more contour. It's okay if my lines don't perfectly match with what I painted. My ability to sketch, I would say with a pen, exceeds my ability to sketch with my paintbrush. That's probably because I've had just more practice, and I probably would have painted this differently had I done the lines first, but it's okay. Everything is an experiment, a work in progress. I'm just going to do a couple little dots, and I'm going to call that done. Again, for me, the emphasis is on the color and the bleeding of those colors and the natural beauty of wet-in-wet watercolor. I'm not trying to make a photorealistic representation of a plum. Another thing to keep in mind is that you could always come back and add more layers later. In the next example, I will show you a little bit more complicated implementation of this technique, where we do multiple layers of wet-in-wet. 8. Lesson 7: A More Complex Example: For lesson 7, we're going to take this technique and do something a little bit more complicated with it by layering multiple layers of wet-on-wet on top of one another. For this example, we're going to be using a nectarine. Just like all of the previous examples, we'll be starting with a very light pencil sketch. We're just going to try and capture the overall shape and just creating some really soft lines to get a likeness down on the page. Then we're going to get straight into inking. I'm sticking to this sketchy style almost scribbled lines so that the edge is not this perfectly defined line. That way I can keep it loose and not worry too much about having extra marks. I build the shape as I go, starting out with a lighter line and then going darker as I find the shape. As I'm doing this, I keep pausing and looking back at my reference. I look up at the reference, I sketch a little bit, look up at the reference, sketch a little bit more. I don't just look at it one time and then draw the whole thing out. I'm constantly looking back and forth between the drawing and the reference just to make sure that I've got and everything correct. Mainly just proportions and shape. Then you're going to go back in and erase those pencil lines and we should be ready to get started painting. As before, we start by wetting the shape down with clean water. It may take a couple brush loads worth of water to get the whole area evenly prepared. That's okay, that's normal. The bigger the brush you use, the less trips to the water jar you'll have to take. Just in general, as a rule of thumb with watercolor, you always start with the lightest tone or color. That's why I'm starting with this really pale yellow and then coming back in with a more vibrant orange. This time I am trying to match back to my fruit. Now for this example, I'm using a slightly smaller brush. It gives me a little bit more control over where I'm applying the paint. Coming back now with a really vibrant pinky red, which as you can see, matches back pretty well to the actual nectarine. I know that I can go over the darkest areas with this color because I'm going to go over it again with an even darker shade. As I said before, because I'm using a smaller brush, I'm able to get smaller blooms and smaller amounts of pigment into the previous wash. Another thing I should mention is that I'm doing this drier than some of the previous examples, especially like the first warm-up exercises. The paper is still wet. I'm still applying a layer of water before I start, but it's less water. Having a little bit less water gives me more control over how much the pigment spreads once I've put it down on the page. I'm just continuing to work while it's wet. You can tell already that this is reddish pink hue is not spreading as much as that first yellow or the orange that went down. I'm doing that intentionally so that I can build layers of color. I'm just adding a lot of small textural marks trying to match my piece back to the actual fruit. If you feel like you have too much pigment on your brush, you can always rinse it out, then dab it off on your paper towel and come back in and you'll be able to smudge without increasing how much pigment you actually have done on a paper. Now, you have to be careful as you're doing this because if it's not completely dry and you add a ton more water, you're going to get blooms. At that point it's an unwanted bloom because you're not going for that effect anymore. You have to make sure that the piece has dried before you add a super wet wash on top of what you've already done. If you're worried that it's starting to dry and you don't know if you're getting your blooms, just stop. Let it dry or get out your hairdryer and dry it and then come back in. Then you can put down clear water and start the whole wet-on-wet process over again. I would say at this point my paper is almost dry. At this point, I am no longer using the wet-on-wet technique as I demonstrated to you in the beginning. I'm coming back and it's not a drybrush technique, but the paper is mostly dry and my brush has pigment on it, but not a lot of water so that it's not going to spread a lot. It's almost like a wet on dry technique at this point. That's how I'm able to continue working and continue to add layers without my paint going everywhere. Really, what it comes down to with watercolor is controlling the amount of liquid that's on your brush and the ratio of water to pigment. If you can get that down, you really can do anything. It just comes from experience. You have to put the time in and play around with it and learn how the medium behaves and recognize that the way that it moves and flows is because of the water component. I could get into the physics behind that, but suffice it to say that water wants to fill whatever container it's in. When it's on the paper, if there is a pre-existing wet area, that becomes the container that the new water wants to fill. Which is why it disperses and balloons out as soon as you put the pigment down. The dryer it is, the less movement there's going to be when you're adding new paint. If the surface is completely dry, there will not be any movement unless there's a tremendous amount of water and pigment on your brush. I'm just going to come back and do another angle for you, just so you can see my process again. But basically, it's the same. It's the same as the previous examples, just I continue to add more layers and work through some more details as the piece is drying. Just have fun with it, there's absolutely no pressure to do a more complicated piece. This is just here for you if you want to see it taken a little bit further. I've added this in just to demonstrate the level of detail and the layering that you can achieve using wet-on-wet techniques and it works perfect for nectarines or peaches because they have that fuzzy texture already. As the water blooms a little bit and gives you a fuzzy edge, it really translates the texture of the actual fruit. 9. Lesson 8: Final Thoughts & Thank You!: That brings us to the end of the class. I hope you had fun. I hope you enjoyed painting. I hope that you learned something or at least inspired to get out your painting supplies and put brush to paper. I would like to add that if you know any watercolor texture techniques, feel free to add that to this, and I would strongly encourage everyone to experiment. Thank you for taking my class. Feel free to ask for feedback, ask me questions. Also I like to remind you that you can stop, pause the video, and re-watch it as many times as you need. Please do not hesitate to share your work in the project section below. There's a tremendous amount of learning and experience to be gained by sharing your work. I hope you enjoyed the class, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you create. Thanks so much. Take care. Bye bye.