Transcripts
1. Introduction To This Class: watercolor is a versatile and flexible media. It can yield a variety of beautiful results, but it is strictly to master. I always try to explore different possibilities with it. It's quite easy to get started if you don't worry about the mess and the results from the very beginning to get started, you just have to get a range of brush and get some quality paints. Learn the basics, and in no time you'll be having fun trying new stuff. One of such things that I was trying is silhouette painting, and I thought I would share it with you and see if it's something that you would like to try. Silhouettes are easy as they just represent solid portrait's of objects, animals or anything. But once you try doing it with water colors, it can get messy and tough to gain great results in this class. I will teach you all about it, and we will start with the tools and supplies you need and some of the very basic techniques that you should know before starting any such watercolor paintings. Then we will look into how to paint silhouette with watercolors, and we will also try experimenting few things like color and washes. I will introduce you how to do white ain't calligraphy on watercolor painting. It can be daunting, but with practice it gets better silhouette. Paintings are everywhere and you confined them available for sale on etc. And but covers and prints, too. And a lot of the time they're pushed one step ahead from just a mere painting. Post processing watercolor paintings in Adobe Photo Shop is one of the ways there are ways you can do tweaks corrections and change color tone, adjust different settings or even add typographic contents. There are endless possibilities with this technique multiplied by flexibility of watercolors. If you could go ahead and continue watching this class, I can't wait to see you in this quick session.
2. Tools and Supplies You Need: in this class, I'm going to start with basics of watercolor painting, how to sketch and paint a silhouette, which is a beautiful bear in my case. And finally, I'll teach you how to write a lovely quote with white calligraphy ink on the top of the silhouette form. I have divided the whole process into different sections so that it is easy for you to understand and follow each step. In this first section. I am talking about all the tools required to complete this class, and first of all, you'll need a pencil and an eraser to sketch the silhouette. Any pointed tip pencil is fine for this purpose. Don't choose pencil, which is meant for doing shades and the one which has a blunt tip in terms of erasers. Any erasure is fine as long as it won't make the artwork dirty. I use my cute eraser and it works fine for me. After these all use two types of brushes. One is a large size and the others medium. Make sure you are using a good quality rush and the brushes in a workable condition that the hair is not distorted and keep eye on various types of brushes. There are a few good brands for watercolor brushes in the market. These are ex passion, grace, art, Mary, WinDix and DaVinci, and a few more for this class. Calligraphy pen with good Nibs is really important. I like this opaque holder because with this holder, you can draw any simple or a complex form pretty easy. Try different types of calligraphy pen in terms of style and Nibs a few good brands for calligraphy. Panzar Pilots Co. Waco ends law Me, Joy even wrote Rings air. Also good ones you could try. The next important supply you will need is the watercolor itself. You can have several colors in tubes or pants. These were the fundamentals tools all artists use for their watercolor artwork. A few good watercolor brands. You can look for our Cinelli, A. I M. Graham Windsor and Newton and Daniel Smith. To keep your artwork clean, you'll need a tissue as well and too little glasses of Clearwater. A palette to mix the colors easily. Next, I'm going to use whites calligraphy ink for the writing part, and I recommend this one from Windsor and Newton because I'm really satisfied with the quality, and it completely covers the color in the background. You'll need a little plastic or glass bottle cap where you can easily mix water and the white ink because we can't use it right from the bottle. It's too dense. This cap belonged to have her fame bottle, for example, so if you find a little jar that you don't use, that would be perfect. You can use any cap, which is a scrap for you. We have to fix our watercolor paper, so you'll need a good type for the fixing these air required to keep the paper stable on the art board. Next, you will need a paper toe work on you also need a watercolor paper, which should be around 300 GSM and use the water color are also watercolor might start to bleed, and the paper will get wavy. A good watercolor paper is essential to get finished result. Few brands, I would suggest are Skansen, Reeves, Windsor and Newton and Arches. You should explore more brands, which are available in your local art store. I'm just suggesting some good brands that I know, but you are free to explore and you should enjoy the freedom of choosing them as the artist . Finally, you have a simple copy paper to sketch the silhouette, so these are a few tools that you will be needing for this class.
3. Quick Intro: Different Washes & Techniques: Let's learn about different water color washes and how to create them. So first I'm going to show you some basic watercolor techniques, the more common ones. I painted a few examples in advance so you could see how they look when dried. I will demonstrate eight different techniques, so I'll try to paint them slowly so you can learn and follow these techniques easily. You can practice along with me and compare the results. If you'd like to practice the comparison, the first thing you will have to do is to create six small square or rectangular boxes. First, paint them with plain water by wedding, the paper and the paper gets ready for water coloring process. The surface will absorb less color, and it will bleed less. I will paint a little square for wet on wet, a dry on wet and a wet on dry dry on dry alias, dry brush, flat wash ingredient wash and an example for lifting off and dropping in these air. A few of the different techniques that I'm showing you here I'm using the larger brush to paint the first layer than finalize it with the medium ones. When you are practicing this, you make sure that the boxes painted carefully, so let's start from left to right. The 1st 1 will be the wet. On what technique? The point is to what the paper first with clear water. And while it's still wet, just drop some What pain onto it. With your brush, you could put more water on the paper. It needs to be wet so that when you drop the water color, you can see that it is blended beautifully. This is perfect for creating backgrounds, and this skill here is to control the flow of the color and how you want them to blend. How you create a different kind of blends is the key here. Always make sure you clear the brushes with water before you start painting the next one and keep tissue paper with you always. So if it is not okay, just try it with the tissue. The 2nd 1 will be the dry on wet technique. This is a bit different from the previous one. In this technique, you have toe wet the paper with watercolor and then grab this smaller brush and paint thin lines onto the wet square. For this technique. There is no need to use much water for the second layer because the point here is toe wet the background and then paint the surface with the dryer brush. Creating a thin line is just an example. You can create any kind of shapes, or you can even add dry brush texture to the top of it. The art is all about exploring and new possibilities, so keep your eyes open to new possibilities, and you can create many new variations of these techniques now moving to the next. The third technique is wet on dry. This is the most common and known painting technique for beginners. To achieve this technique, simply wet your brush and drop some water color onto the dry paper. It won't blend because the watercolor stays where you put it. It's not moist enough to bleed. You can create different variations of these techniques now moving along to the next. This is the simplest one. It's the dry on dry technique. To achieve this, you can just put your brush into the water color pan with a little water and then just draw awesome little lines into the square. You can see that it won't blend together stays where you put it. This is perfect for creating textures. For example, the grass or a field leave, or just as a background. Many artists use this technique in their artwork, although the way they use its can to be different. Make sure you keep on cleaning the brush whenever you find it necessary. This is very important, moving to the next technique, which is the flat wash. It's super easy. Just wet the paper and with clear water, then paying it with your water color. It'll be a solid surface with one color. It's perfect. If you would like to Fillon area. You can mix one or more colors, and it will give you a different Grady in effect, and you can also add different layers to the surface or in some part of the surface. The last one here will be the Grady Int Wash. It's a wonderful method. If you like to paint a summer sky or just a greedy in background for your picture, for example, it creates a beautiful linear Grady in, and it can be from any angle. First what the brush with clear water then, while it's still wet. Dip your brush deeply into the watercolor pan and start painting lines from top to bottom. You can see that the color will slightly disappear and become Grady Int. You can help and raise the technique. If you tip your board and it becomes even more Grady int, you could add more color to create multicolored radiance. Let's just check thes squares again. So here's how it will look. When it's dried, you can see the beautiful blending and how the colors are mixing with the different techniques. So these were the 1st 6 techniques. You should experiment with them and makes them and create many different variations. That way, you will be able to master the washes technique. There's two more techniques I would like to show. I painted them in advance to be able to show what will be the result. Once the watercolor is dried. First, create too small square and rectangular boxes, as I did earlier and stick them with tape. Now we can begin the technique, so the first technique will be the lifting off method. For that, I'm going to add a darker watercolor background because you will be able to see it much clearly and understand the technique more. Let's make the first watercolor layer. Fill the whole box smoothly and take your time. Once it's complete, grab the medium sized brush that is clean and start to lift off the wet color from the paper in a circle form. You can see that the water color starts to disappear, and the form that you would like to remove will become clear and you can make beautiful stains in your painting. This is the technique I used to practice in many different our projects when I was a child , when I had no idea about watercolors and illustrations. This technique is great to create negative space artwork. This is an interesting technique to explore. And finally I'm going to show you the dropping and technique, which is the opposite of the previous one. In this technique with the square with a lot of water, paint the base, then start to drop some spotters and I you can see that it starts to spread because of the Web base. Finally, the dots will be blended and will add up for a full effect, So these air a few the techniques I use for my designs in watercolor. There's so much possibility you can master these different wash techniques to get hold of the tools and how they behave personal or client projects. They will both help you learn these techniques more. After everything is bonded properly and left to dry, they will look something like these.
4. Drawing & Painting Silhouette: After practicing these basics, we can now move on to the project for your artwork. According to your quote, you may choose any object, animal or bird to paint. Here. I will be painting the bear for that. I did some research based on various images to choose one. Then I sketched its silhouette on a paper. One more option is that you can search a silhouettes picture that you'd like to use and print it. This will ease your process. There are two ways that you can use for copying an image from your simple copy paper onto your watercolor paper. The first method is that if you have a tracing table, just copy the outline through the box, the other and easiest one. If you don't have this special table, just simply put the printed image in front of your window and copy the outlines through the glass. You can choose any of these methods to create a silhouette. It's not that stuff. So if you're ready with the silhouette than stabilizer paper and you could start painting the bear, I recommend you using the larger, even a larger brush to wet the watercolor paper. This is the preparation step beforehand, use a larger brush to cover more area. It will be much more even and a speedy process. Here I show which technical use which one looks better from those I painted earlier. I think the 1st 1 which is the wet on wet method, will be perfect for this. The wet on dry is also good, but I'm going to stay with the first technique. I will create Grady in effect here in a different direction. The colors I'm using are a darker blue and a purple red color for the bear. Don't forget to clean your brushes after you find an mixture perfect tones and always use a clean supply. Here you can see exactly why we need two glasses of water oneness for the coloring mix, and one is for making a clear base. First, we will prepare the paper. What you're watercolor paper. Intensely with your brush. Make sure every corner is filled with water color. You can use more if you see the paper is going to dry and you miss some parts. It's important to use totally wet base unless the results won't be what we expect. If you're working with a larger project, then more advanced preparation will be required. These air different ways to prepare the paper before getting into the creation process. It's just not this project, but for every water caller projects, keep these things in mind before creating an artwork. First thing is that the paper is properly soaked, soaked the paper at least 5 to 10 minutes in lukewarm water. After soaking about 5 to 10 minutes, grasp the corner and pull the paper out of the water. Lay the wet paper on a clean board and gently smooth the paper with a clean sponge and remove any access water. Now proceed to stretch the paper to your liking. You can also dampen the paper with a sponge and spray bottle. And on a clean board, you'll have to flip the paper a few times to adequately saturate the paper enough to stretch it. And second is that the paper should be wet enough to use watercolor on them. Practicing these two steps will drastically change your outcome, and you could also use textured watercolor paper to get advanced results. When you're ready, start coloring using the wet on wet technique. We have the water based Now. Now here come the water color. Apply very gently. Brush strokes. Ah, and big moves. When you are painting a bigger area, try not to use too much water for your colors. It will be too light then, and try to add color from different directions and angles. Try to blend all different colors together. You can dip your brush deeply into the watercolor pan. I'm using bright and intense colors. First, fill all the parts, then try to blend each other uniformly. Simply wash and mix the colors. Don't worry if the blue is becoming too purple. The point is to mix and to have a brand new tone from these two beautiful colors. That is the beauty of working with watercolor. And as watercolor is a thin medium, you will need to build up color gradually. This is another advantage of the medium, as you can do some color mixing right on the paper, take one color and lay it down and allow it to dry and then revisit with another shade. You'll notice where they overlap, the pigment mixes and you're left with a different color. This is great for building up the tone and This is the feature of watercolor that we're using here in water color. Layering technique is very easy, and it's useful. You can leak the rest of your watercolor by tipping your board. Take a break between these processes. Take all the time you need. Continuously working will make you tired and will have an effect on the artwork. Now, when you're happy with it, wait until it's dry and you could start the next move, where we will learn how to do white ink calligraphy.
5. Writing Over Watercolor: Intro To White Ink: before his show. You how to finalize the silhouette and write a lovely phrase on top of the watercolor painting ID like to show you some common mistakes that pop up while using a white ink. So, as I showed earlier, here's my calligraphy pen. I'm going to use it for the writing and these air water color samples to work on. You also need a little glass of water, a cap and your white ink. It's a bit different than a simple calligraphy ink, because the base is much thicker and you have to dissolve it with a little water. You can't use it right from the bottle, so important to mix it with water before you start using it. That's why we needed that little plastic or glass caps, because you can mix them in that, and you could easily dip your nib onto the white calligraphy ink. I painted a little squares in Advanced waited to dry because we can't use them and wet. I will show you here that you can't put your pen into the bottle because it won't fit in. But that is just one thing. The biggest problem is you can't use it right from the bottle. Very important to remember this information. This is the first common problem if you use White Inc for the first time, you dip your nib into the cap simply where INC is already mixed with water, and you don't dip it into the glass of water in advance. Your nib is too dry, so you can't write a letter, even if you dip it once more in the clearer water. Next problem. If the ink is too much on your NEB, try to leave the rest of the white ink on the edge of the bottle. You can also use a small amount of ink and keep adding after every few strokes. The third problem is when there's too much water on your native and the ankle dissolve, it will be intense. You have to take care of that fact that it will not work if it is dry or wet. You should keep cleaning the brush with tissue and use less ink. Don't keep it too dry or too wet. Now I will show you the right way of using a telegraphic pen. First, dip your nib in the water and clean it properly with tissue paper, then into the little cap and start writing your text right after that. You can clearly see that there's enough ink on your nib, and you could easily form the letters one by another. So once again, use the water first, then the white ink that is dissolved. You'll have to keep on repeating this step after every few steps. That is why Kala graphic lettering is very skilled job. It requires lots of hard work and patients to create a masterwork. Let's continue with the next problem, and this is important for silhouette calligraphy. I'm not going to sketch my phrase with a pencil in advance because it's totally visible and you can't remove it. I'm going to rewrite it with the ink, the white ink, and you can see that if you don't write exactly the sketch lines, then it'll be ugly and stay visible, so you have to write the text directly on the water color. Basic. This is not like any other artistic work. Pencil on watercolor is always visible, and the strokes will be ugly. I am demonstrating all these so that you can understand what to do and what not to dio you should always be open about experimenting on the last example. I used too little ink with enough water, but I have to dip the net more times because of this problem. So always make sure there's enough of both water and ink on your name and these air, some common mistakes that beginner artists usually dio The best way to learn is to work on different projects, whatever is commercial or just for practice, create your own custom projects and work on him. Now I will show you the right way or use it with white ink. So here is the ready bear silhouette. Wait until it'll totally dry. I'm going to write this sentence. All good things are wild and free. I'm not going to sketch the text with a pencil. I have to find some important points that I can use as a lead line. And that's why I picked four words that will be a bit bigger than the rest. It's the all things, the wild and the free. So here is the silhouette of a bear that I will be drawn earlier. Now I will write the quote on top of the bear as we learn how to prepare the calligraphy pen. First, dip into the water, then straight into the little cap. You can start from any side. I will start from the left corner and I'll try to write the first word big and then I'll see and compare the other ones to it. So now I will see where to start the next word. I'm going to put good a bit higher and make it a bit smaller. There can be a different approach for different design projects. This is a way I decided to go for this project. Your vision can be different. You can always create some small thumbnail concepts before moving on to this step, and you could see that there's enough space for one more word in this row. So all right things next to good. Try to write it slowly, very slowly, with full control. Otherwise, your artwork might be ugly, and you'll have to do it all over again. So stay focused and be patient. Keep your hands strong so it won't be wavy. You can shape it any way you want. You should also take a break if her hands were tired. If the ink is dried or not enough, you can easily continue from the point where you bossed. Just dip the Nevin, the water, then into the white ink. It looks nice, so continue with the next row, and the word are it'll be smaller than the other ones, and that is how you can lay out your design in your way. Here comes the last sentence. For that, I'll start from the new row, and I can see that it'll look nice if I try to write wild of it. Irregular. You can refine the lines by going back and just redraw them with the white ink. And I'll continue with the and I decided to put a and sign instead of the word so it makes a phrase more playful. I finished with the last free word and put the quotation marks in the right place. So that's how the first part of the design is completed. Now, as a phrase is ready, there empty spaces where I should draw some, flourishing and finalize the whole picture with some decoration lines. It's all about visual elegance and functionality. You could work out on a design that you feel is right for the message that you're trying to convey. That is how you create good looking artwork by adding the blend between calligraphy and flourishes. You could check my other classes to learn more about different kind of lettering, XYZ and calligraphy. I have covered many different topics and techniques, which will be useful for you coming back to the artwork. Now there's a larger space on the foot and on the but part, so I'm going to try to draw some thick and elegant lines. There's no role for this. You can just use your imagination and try to use simple types of design elements and flourishes. It's up to you how you want to decorate your artwork. It can be with something related to the topic you are working on or any flourishes. You can be creative, and you should be the decision maker for your artwork. One more tip to avoid making some mistakes. Start with very thin lines so you'll see and feel how to finish that drawing. If you feel like you mists lines or you don't like them, you can correct in the photo shop, and you could fix all the little issues of photo shop which I will cover in the next video . So if you're happy with the results and you feel like there's enough flourish ings, just wait until it dries and you can continue with the final step where you can adjust and refine the image with photo shop.
6. Finalizing & Tweaking In Adobe Photoshop: in this video, I'm going to show you how to correct your files in photo shop after you've scanned your silhouette. Art Adobe Photo Shop is a very handy tool for designers like us. They can fix almost anything, and it goes beyond that. If you're planning to sell your artwork, then you might want to scan and showcase it in multiple forms. Or you might want to create mock ups for your designs, from minor adjustments to big design changes. You can do everything here. It's very easy to get started. If you haven't tried Adobe Photo Shop before, I have scanned my artwork and imported it in Adobe Photo Shop. Scan your artwork in very high. DP I somewhere around 600 to 1200 it will capture very detailed scan, which is very important. So this is what my scanned document looks like, and you could see that it's too bright and the saturation is too low. So I have to make it alive. Here on the white background, you can see darker stains because of the scanning process, and the paper wasn't straight. We have to remove these and the pencil lines as well. So in order to fix this. First, we have to refine the exposure. You can find this option from image menu, then choose adjustments than exposure. And there'll be a pop up menu where you can use the slider and see the results at the same time. And now you can see that if I raised the exposure level, the background will be more white and those ugly, darker spots will disappear. It's too bright, so I'm going to refine the offset, and the gamma correction to this option will address the exposure of the whole document. And if you want to enhance exposure of a certain area, you can also select that part and then apply exposure. And this supplies for every option in Adobe Photo Shop. When you're happy with the results, let's move forward to the curves option where we can set the deepness. You can find it also at image menu and then choose adjustments and curves. It's right above exposure. I think we should make it darker. So for that I'm going to set the slider lower, and there are many options inside curves and many available presets. You can play with all of them and see which looks best for your artwork. I think it's looking good and movie to the next step. When you think the colors are deep enough, you can refine the saturation of the artwork you confined hue saturation option from image , menu and adjustment and then hue saturation. And the short cut is control and you in PC and Command and U and uh, in Mac, there will be a pop up menu to where you can modify the hue so you can change the colors completely or just refined the colors with saturation and make it more bright and beautiful . You have slider controls for hue, saturation and lightness, and several presets as well. Try them all and see which works well for your painting, and you can change the color of the whole artwork by playing with you slider. And I think I'm not going to raise it too much just a little bit. It's because I don't want to change the color of the artwork now, moving to the next step. I think the colors of the image is looking very bright, and this what I was looking for. We just need to remove those darker lines on the top of the image. It's because of the scanning process. You can be easily remove by clicking on the erase tool under the tools on the left side and make sure the background is white, not black. If it is black, it will erase in it in the block, and you also have a different brush for erasers. They could be useful. Many different projects. All you need to do is think creativity. Our last move to cover those pencil lines. That was the sketches of the bear silhouette. I'm doing this project to demonstrate thes steps, so it's kind of rough, but you should take your time and always try to come up with best results. If the project is not constrained, we're going to use the most simple method. Cut some parts and copy them and cover the lines with these parts. I will do this for all parts and then blend them a little so that it should look like a part of the family you could take. You could use the lasso for this and cut a random shape, and when it selected, go back to the move Tool V and copy that part by pressing the altar key and your mouth at the same time. Then move it a bit up and you could use the selected shape more than once. So just move and copy it. More times change the patch. If it is different, you could see that the edges are totally visible so you can blend or cover it in the clone stamp tool s and select the size of the stand. You and you could pick parts with pressing the all key and click on the part you'd like to cover and use the same method on every part where you see the pencil ones and you could pick vigor parts with the last. So just copy and move over the pencil lines. When they're thin spaces, it's better to use the clone stamp tool. It'll beautifully cover the ugly parts, and as you can see in photo shop, you have tools to fix any simple or complex shapes. All you need to do is use the right tool at the right time. As an artist, it is really important to understand and use these Softwares. They are very useful and to learn these Softwares, just try exploring different classes and resource is, and they're taught by professionals who are using the software for a very long time so you can learn the ends and outs of the software's. And after your artwork is ready, you can save it as PSD raw file. And it is important to keep one so that you can edit it whenever you want, and you can export it as a J bake or any other format according to your requirement. As you can see, it is ready for exports and print if necessary.
7. Thanks For Watching!: That's it for this class. I hope you liked it. And once you're ready to work on a project, make sure to post it in the Project gallery as a project for this class, you will choose a quote that you like, and she's an object, and you could go ahead and painted silhouette. It can be according to the quote or anything you want to represent. And then with all these learnings, apply them and create a beautiful artwork in the project galleries. Submit your chosen object and quote then a few thumbnail sketches to show your exploration , along with the final painting. Lastly, finished paintings. After tweaking it in Adobe Photoshopped, you could sell these artworks as a license to company. Or you can sell them in different marketplaces like society six and etc. Thread lis and there's many more, and you can also create your own e commerce platform to sell them on your own Web store. And this is a great way to build your brand and earn something along the way. If you want to learn more about hand lettering, XYZ and calligraphy, you should enroll in my other classes where I have covered different areas and techniques. I prefer the practical application of these techniques rather than mere knowledge. And that's why I advise you to follow a practice routine. Try to be much more focused in these areas. And if you enjoy this class, please share your testimonials and give this class of thumbs up, and it helps in reaching this class. Two more students and they could also get benefits of this class. I will try to do some advanced classes on these two, and if you have any suggestions, then you can share them with me.
Sheila B, Letterer + Maker
