Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello. My name is Lucy Diclo and I live in Victoria, British Columbia. I'm a graphic and surface pattern designer and illustrator and a mixed media artist. My experience is in publishing, packaging and textile design and I published two coloring books and I also illustrated the large coloring walls. Color technique I'm going to show you is a little less traditional because I like to mix it up with other medias. Since I usually end up painting imaginary plants or animals or flowers, it doesn't really matter because you're just making it up as you go. In this class, you're going to learn how to play with watercolor and mixed media and add a little whimsical fill to your illustrations. First we are going to gather inspiration and explore different shapes and textures. Then I will teach you my own masking technique and walk you through all the steps from applying colors to adding highlights, textures stamping and line work. This class is all about experimenting and letting go and watching what happens. As a bonus project, you can download my field guide PDF and I will show you how to make your very own sketchbook and use your class project as the cover. This class is for everybody. You don't need to know how to draw or paint because we're breaking it down to simple shapes and do things really. You just need to be willing to experiment and have fun. I'm excited to share my techniques with you and I hope you'll join me on a watercolor field trip. See you soon.
2. Materials: I'm going to walk you through the supplies we're using in this workshop. First, we're going to need some watercolors. I love to use this little set by Sakura. It's called Koi Water Color Pocket Field Sketch Box. It comes with its own little palette in here and also comes with its own little water brush which is great. All you have to do is fill up the reservoir in here with water and then screw this on and then remove the cap. The cap is great later to do some texture, you'll see. Then you squeeze a little too much here, but you squeeze some water and then you're ready to go. You're ready to paint anywhere on the go. It's great for traveling and it's great because there's really nice colors in there. It's beautiful palette. Then you also need some white acrylic paint. You can use any paint. You can use Gesso. You can use house paint, anything that you can find. Then you'll need some clear matte contact paper. It's the removable kind that you can find in the supermarket. No, actually the hardware store, sorry. Maybe they have in the supermarket, but in the hardware store you can get a whole roll for under $10 and its a roll, nine feet by 18 inches. You'll have enough for a little while. Then you'll need a marker. I love to use this brand by Marvy Uchida and I use 0.5. You also will need a little brush, a little sponge. These are little makeup sponge like wedge sponge. They are really great. Then you'll need cutex and white crayon. Any white crayon, a pencil, some scissors. You'll need a little sketch book. This one is great if you're going to use watercolor, because it's a little thicker. If you're just going to be drawing in it, you can just use any paper. Then you'll need some watercolor paper, two sheets of nine by 12 watercolor paper. You can use hot press or cold press, whatever, if you like texture or not. This brand is actually pretty inexpensive. You can get a pad with 12 sheets and works pretty well. You will also need a variety of items of found objects and you can print with. This is just a piece of foam with a texture on it. This is a spool. Bristle blocks are great. [inaudible] ,a shell, leaves, piece of cardboard, anything you can find around the house that could create texture. Everything I just told you about is all in the downloadable material list in your class projects. If you have any questions, you can look on there or you can send me a little message, okay? Let's get started.
3. Looking for Inspiration: Inspiration is everywhere. It's all around you and in the stuff you already have. It's outside if you go for a walk, in the city, or on the beach, or in a park. You can gather little leaves, and shells, and rocks, and drift wood, anything that you could use to draw and pick up shapes from. A great source also is buttons. I love to go through this box of buttons and find some really cool, interesting texture that I can use, shapes, and things in designs. Books are an amazing source of inspiration. These field guides are really amazing because you can get all these incredible shapes in there. I love field guides for that. I have a bunch of them. The other thing that is really great is these little information booklets. They are vintage. My mom doesn't throw anything, so when I go to her house I steal some of that stuff. This one is from Expo '67. That's old but I love these illustrations on the top. This whole design is just really cool, and simple, and bold. Same with these linear design. A lot of interesting texture, line work. This is funny because it's about a fraud, but it's actually pretty cool, little illustrations in there. These are postcards and stuff that I gather when I travel. I buy them thinking I'm going to send them away to people and I don't, so they're still here. Maybe one day, you'll get a postcard. This is a great book that I found in a thrift shop. It's about using simple shapes and turning them into animals. That's actually really cool. Again, a great source of inspiration. Kid's book are great for that because all their shapes are usually pretty simple. This is a great place for another great source of inspiration. This one is by Ann and Paul Rand. Fabric is great, like fabric design. You can go to the fabric store or you can just look into old fabric books. This is a vintage. Look at these shapes in really bold design and line work, and everything. That is a great place to pick up some great inspiration. Rex Ray is one of my favorite artists. If you like shapes in bold and graphic stuff, this is it. This is the book. It's really awesome. I love this book. This guy is doing a lot of collage stuff. This is a really good one. The other thing that I do is I go through magazines and I look for shapes that are interesting to me, and then I just pull the page out and I end up throwing away the magazine. I pull the page out and I keep it to use in my art work and just use to draw, to outline the shape, and use it just as inspiration. I'll show you how we do that in a few videos.
4. Sketchbook Practice: Now that I have all my inspiration around me, I am going to start sketching in my sketchbook. I am going to try to expand my shape vocabulary and also build up a little bit of texture that I can use in my art.
5. Making a Mask: Now, I'm going to walk you through my technique to make a mask for your illustration. I like to use a roll of the clear mat contact paper that I get at the hardware store. I like it because you can see through and it's really easy to trace your shape. It's also easy to position it on your illustration when it's time to add watercolor. That's pretty inexpensive and like I said, you get a big roll of 18 inches by 9 feet so we're going to have enough for a lot's shapes. You take one of your illustration from your sketch book or you can take some of the inspiration that you collected somewhere else. I'll show you a few ways to do this. You take your Con.Tact paper. The nice thing about this is that there's those little grid in the back and you can actually use that to trace, so I usually line up my line here with the middle of my shape. I could say I want to recreate this shape so we line it up here in the middle and trace it like that. Then I would fold it right on the line like that and then I would cut it which is actually really easy to do. The hard thing to do is to actually separate the Con.Tact paper from the paper in the back what takes the longest. I figured out you can wiggle it a little bit and almost tear that back of it so that you can actually separate it and it'll appeal right off. Now, you have one of your mask and you might want to do a few more. When I'm done with my mask, I usually put it on a sheet of like a sheet protector and I just keeping them and later I file them in a folder so I can keep them for later use. I can show you another way by using some of your inspiration that you had and look at shapes and you find interesting and just trace them and create your own shape. I like this shape here so I'm going to go in here and I trace it like that, line up with your middle line here. I like this curve, so I'm going to fold it in half and I'm going to cut it same as the other way. Many of these really cool shape, it's like a drop. Again, you take the excess paper around and it'll be easier to move around and to paint with. What I would like you to do is to pick your favorite shape and then do a few version of it. If you want to do a leaf, maybe you do a tall leaf, a fat leaf, and a small leaf and then we'll play with that on the next video.
6. Watercolor: I'm going to show you how to make yourself a quick little colored chart with your sketch box. That is really going to help you get a feel that get a sense for how to use the water brush. Also it's much easier when you paint to look at this instead of looking at these colors. Some of them are so dark that you don't even know what they are. If you do it exactly in this configuration here, you'll know exactly which one is which and how to use them. I find that really helpful when I paint. You can take the piece of water color paper that you had the second piece of nine by 12 and cut it in four and use two of them for a little postcard that you can make later. The third one, I wanted to cut it in two pieces. One is going to be to put your white paint and this one is going to be to make some texture. Then the fourth one will be your color chart. You can draw a line if you want, about an inch squares on this. You can use water for this because you want to really clean your brush in between each. You don't really need to do white, but you can. Then you go down the rows. Now we're going to start our class project. You're going to need your sheet of watercolor paper. Q-tip, your crayon, your pencil, your watercolor brush, your water brush, and your water colors and your mask. Now we're going to take the mask that we just made and we're going to apply it anywhere on the piece of paper. What I would like you to do is once you decide what shape you're going to use, you don't have to do a leaf, you can do a circle, you can do any shape that you found in your research. But I want you to use that shape and fill the whole page and create a pattern with it, but use a different color, different technique for each of them. Put your mask in and make sure like the edge or right are really in and burnish them a little bit. Then let's start applying color. What I usually do is I just start with a color and I go in and add another color that I like, and add a little more water because I think this is not enough. Maybe a little more green. Now that's probably a little too much water, but that's okay because for this exercise we're going to use the Q-tips. We're going to remove some paint because we want to create texture. There you go. That's actually a cool texture. We're going to let this dry, and then we're going to move our mask, do another shape next to it. When this dry, we're going to remove the mask. Beautiful. We are going to move it to somewhere else, up or down or remember, we're trying to fill this whole page. For this one we're going to try something different. We're going to use our crayon and we are going to some lines and stuff in there. Maybe like this, you can't really see anything but when you put the paint, you'll see. I'm going to stay in the blues for this one. See what happens? So cool. Awesome. I have this, I can't fill it because there's some crayons. Where there's crayons, the watercolor is not going to take, we're going to get that, that effect, which is really awesome. Once this dries, you're going to do the same thing. Where you're going to remove your mask and then you're going to move it around somewhere else and try something else. Now it's almost dry, I'm going to take my mask again and move it somewhere else on the page, and burnish it shutdown. Don't worry if there's smudging and stuff like that, it will only add texture to your leaf. I like this. All right, and now we're going to use maybe some greenish. You can't even tell, looks cool though. Very subtle texture but neat. All right, for this one, we're going to use our pencil and we're going to use the actual eraser to try to make little texture with that. There you go. Voila. Again, let it dry, peel the mask and repeat until you fill the whole page.
7. Painting and Stamping: I filled up my page with my shape, and now I'm going to add some texture. I brought a whole bunch of different texture when a stamp in there. But are we going to start by just putting some white paint on a piece of cardboard. One of the easiest thing to do is to just take your pencil and dip it in and just add that little dots. That's actually really fun. You can add that anywhere, just a little accent. Another thing you could do is use this pool. Then I'm going to stamp it in and then add it like that. Another thing you could do is to take your shape. Let's say I'm going to put it over this one here. Then I'm going to bring in some texture with that. So that's what little sponges for. You can basically you dip it in the paint. Then you stamp it right on top. That's cool. Then your little mask protects you from going all over the place. The other thing he could do also with your mask is let's say here I want to add these bristle block. That's cool. I want to add some of that white texture. It gives you a little math to add texture like that. The other thing you could do with your pen is use the eraser as a stamp tool. This is a foam that I've found that the [inaudible] store. But you can put some paint on there. Again, you can stamp it, can stamp here. That's cool. Then you can use or you can also use your cover from your water brush and then use it as a stamping. I'm going to use it here. That's cool. Then one last thing you can do is found is seashell. And I wanted to see if I can stamp with maybe the edge of that and anything really to take a leaf, you can take anything you can find our third piece of wood, you just need to experiment. But what I'd like you to do is to use a different technique on each leaf, so they're all different. I'm going to try this here, see what it does. Another thing you could do is use a piece of watercolor paper and then add some lines or straight. So keep going and we'll see you in the next video.
8. Pen and Ink: Now it's time to add some line work with your marker. Look at your shapes and figure out what they could be. Or you can keep it really abstract. But sometimes I like to figure out, what can this be? Can this be a flower? I just add some lines. Sometimes it's just really abstract but I would say just do it all and see what happens. Because here, if I turn this around, so this is a cool fish and this too. I think these guys are facing each other.
9. Final Thoughts: So now that you've been experimenting and with shapes and colors and textures, now you have this really interesting piece of artwork that you might like that but you might want to do other things with it. You might want to crop it and make postcards. I could totally crop this and cut it out and make it a cool postcard and send to somebody at anywhere. The other thing is I really do like these two fish here. What I might want to do is I'm using this as a reference but remembering how I did that and recreating just those two fish on a postcard or maybe just scanned it that time what I do for my fabric design. I'll just do experiment with a bunch of different things and I end up to scanning everything and then just creating maybe used two of these items that I really like and I'm just creating a repeat with that. One last thing you can do with it is turning into your journal cover and I'm going to show you how to do that in our next video.
10. Bonus Project: Field Guide: As a bonus project, we're going to put together our own Field Guide. You to need to download the field guide PDF in a class project section and you're going to add a couple of pages of blank paper. You need a 4-bar envelope, a glue stick, a pencil, a ruler, about 22 inches of round elastic cord and your illustration. Start with folding our pages. After you're done printing everything, you just take everything and fold it. All your pages, even the blank ones. All right, these are our pages. You're going take your illustration and turn it to the other side and then measure, its a nine by 12 inch peace so you are going to measure six inches and trace a line and you probably want to score it. If you don't have a burnish rule you can use a skewer or a plain marker and then you just go on your line here, and then you press it down so it's easier to fold. We call it scoring. There you go. Fold this in a half. I've done perfectly, but it's okay. All right. Now you have your cover. It looks pretty cool and we're going to put our pages. Open it up, then first you are going to add your first page which is the inside cover and leave it like this. You're going to bring in your two blank pages, put them in one of your sample worksheet, then your other sample worksheet, you want to actually put it like this, like that and your last sample which is this just goes right in the middle, like that. A really easy way to put this together and you can put more pages if you want. But we can start with that. The nice thing about the way that you're going to bind us together is that you can add pages later. All I do is, I just take my elastic cord and I just tie it in the back. Voila, you'll have your little journal. Very cool looking. You can also staple it if you want, but i like this. You might have to press it under heavy books so that this doesn't open like that. The other thing you could do that I think is really cool, is to add in the back. You can add a little envelope, which is glue stick. So this is a four-bar envelope and if you can't find one on the house or provided a little template to make your own. All you do is to take this and glue the back over the glue stick is going to back. Glue it here and you have a little pocket to gather your stuff in the field, maybe find some cool leaves or something. So then you can actually put your little colored chart. You can put some sample that you find or anything that you gather in the field. You happen to have a little sketch book.
11. Thank You: Thank you for joining me on this watercolor field trip. I hope you had fun experimenting with watercolor and mixed media and make sure to follow me on Skillshare, so you'll be the first one to know when I put a new class out there. I have a lot of fun techniques to share with you. So I'll see you soon.
Lucie Duclos, Design + Mixed Media
