Watercolor Mixed Media Collage Sea Creatures

1. Introduction: Have you been wanting to learn how to incorporate mixed media techniques into your watercolor paintings and going beyond abstract artworks. Hi, I'm Elizabeth and welcome to my class, mixed media collage, Sea Creatures. I'm a professionally trained artist and art educator, as well as a published author, Illustrator. And in 2020, I began teaching for Skillshare, developing classes that explore a wide range of materials, techniques, and art making approaches. As I share my creative journey and artistic practices with my students, I love exploring mixed media techniques and finding new ways to work those materials and techniques into my artwork. My love of watercolor techniques has led me to create many decorative papers. Then came a desire to do something with all of those papers. Collage provides a great creative vehicle for me to take those pages further and turn them into beautiful mixed media collage artworks. I'm also fascinated by the amazing features that live in the ocean. So it made sense to combine all of these things into a fun class project. In this class, we'll explore a few watercolor techniques. But if you're new to creating your own decorative papers or want to learn more techniques, I have a few other classes on skill share that focus on decorative paper and watercolor technique application that you might find helpful as you begin. This class can explore those by going to my skillshare profile page. This class is intended for creatives of all skill levels. As a fun way to use watercolor decorative papers as collage elements. By the end of this class, you'll have created some fun decorative watercolor papers. Learned how to incorporate them into a collage, as well as what mixed media techniques you can add to further enhance your secreature art and beyond. I hope you'll join me in this fun class as we create our mixed media collage secreature artworks. 2. Class Project: Thanks for joining me for our class project. We'll be creating some fun watercolor technique papers, transferring our sea creature drawing to the back of those papers, cutting out our creature, and then begin assembling our collage. After the glue dries, we'll go back in with a variety of mixed media techniques to help our sea creatures start to come to life. You can find several sea creature and line drawings in the projects and resources section of our class. Choose whichever one looks the most fun to you. You're also welcome to use your own reference images sketches to create your class project. I find the website to be a very helpful site when I'm looking for reference images. In order to access the resources that I have put together for this class, you'll need to make sure that you're on the Skillshare website rather than the Skillshare app. The first step is to gather up your supplies. Let's send it over to the next lesson to take a look at what art supplies we're going to want to have on hand for this class. See there. 3. Materials: Welcome back. Now let's talk about what art supplies you will want to have on hand for our class. Our final project will be 12, 18 ". But you are welcome to work smaller if you like. I prefer to keep this project pretty large so that it's easier to cut out the sea creature and it allows me to have more fun adding mixed media techniques later on. These are the supplies that we are going to need for our class. We have some watercolor paper. I'm going to start with 12 18 inch watercolor paper. I really like Hanson watercolor paper. That is this is 140 pounds. You could go thinner, but I wouldn't go much thicker because you're going to end up having trouble collaging it later on. All of the decorative watercolor papers that I'm going to create for our class project are going to start as 12, 18 ". But you could always go smaller. And then you'll end up with a smaller piece in the end. But because we're going to be cutting our sea creature out of the paper, I want to start with a nice big sheet. So I'm going to have papers like this. And then from this I'm going to have a page like this. It's going to be my background. And then I'm going to have a page this size that is going to be where my creature, my sea creature, comes out of watercolor paper. Watercolor brushes, I have a really large brush, something like this. This is a size 24. You could go all the way down to a size ten. We want a nice big round watercolor brush, and then you need your watercolor paints. Basic colors are great. This is from a set of Windsor Newton paints that I really enjoy using. Ideally, like you'd have a rater of magenta, a yellow, and a cyan. And then you can make any other colors that you want. You can make all of your oranges. You can make your greens. You can make your violets. And then you might want to have kind of a neutral. I really like burnt sienna as a neutral brown. Because then between that and the cyan or a blue, I can get any dark value that I want. Then we're going to need a cup for water. I really like these containers that lemonade comes in because then I can take the powder out and then I have a cap on it, which is really great. But any large cup of water will be great. You're going to want a cloth or paper towel, or kitchen cloth, kitchen rag to use to wipe off your brush. We're going to need tape to tape it down. I use washi tape. You could also use Blue Painter's tape. Or if you need to, you could use masking tape. But if you're going to use masking tape, it's very sticky. So you're going to want to stick it down to your sleeve or your pant leg so that you can take some of the sticky factor out of it. And then for our water coloring techniques, we're going to need some plastic wrap, some rubbing alcohol, it doesn't matter what percentage it is, as well as some table salt. You could also use fine sea salt if you wanted to, or you could use larger ground sea salt. The different salts will have a little variation in how they react to the water color and the crystallization texture that it creates. But my go to is always just table salt because we always have some on hand. Then to cut out our sea creatures, you're going to want either scissors or an exactor knife, or both. Depending on which sea creature you choose and how intricate its design is. Then you're going to need a ruler. Probably at some point, potentially, I use the ruler to cut down my 18 by 24 in sheets of watercolor paper. If you're working from large paper and you want to cut it down to 12 by 18, you may want a ruler on hand to wet my watercolors. Rather you could just wet your brush and squeeze it into your paint. I really like spray bottles. This is from the travel section of our local store. It's really great because I can just easily split my paints and then they're ready to go to transfer our images. We're going to need a graphite pencil for the graphite on the back of the reference image to transfer it to glue down our sea creature to our background. I am going to be painting on with an old paint brush, my PVA glue. You could also use a glut. Gluicks may not stick as well as you need them to. If you happen to have any white liquid glue is great. I do a lot of bookmaking, so I have PVA glue on hand. Then to drop our rubbing alcohol onto our paper, onto our watercolored paper. We're going to have another watercolor brush. We're going to make sure we keep this separate from our watercolor paint brush. This what I'm only going to use to get the rubbing alcohol down onto my paper later. Then we're going to go back in with some mixed media techniques. I have a fine liner. I've got a variety of brush pens. I have some Posca pens also in white and black, just to add some pops, depending on how I want to bring my sea creature to life. I've also got some colored pencils on hand. It just to add some more layers in depth and dimension as we really take our sea creatures from a flat cut out watercolor sheet to a mixed media collage. That should be it. You can add any other additional mixed media materials that you like. But this is all that you need to be successful in creating our class project. Take some time to gather your materials and I'll meet you in the next lesson where we will start exploring watercolor techniques to create our sea creature textures and ocean skates see in the next lesson. 4. Plastic Wrap Ocean Background: Welcome back. Let's create our first watercolor texture paper. I'm going to be showing you three watercolor techniques in total that you can combine to create your sea creatures body or you separately. For this class and all three techniques, we will be using a wet on wet application. When working with watercolor, it's all about controlling how much water you use versus how much color you pick up on your brush. We're going to be working with really pigmented watercolor applications. So to get the boldest colors out of my watercolor tubes, I'm going to go ahead and set up a new tray, put a variety of blues down, because I'm going to start with my ocean first. Most of my watercolors are Windsor and Newton. Cut my watercolors. I really love the colors they have. The quality is great, but whatever watercolor you happen to have on hand will be fine. I'm going to do a little test sheet to see how they all look on the page. And then I'll get set up to do my big paper. If you have a watercolor tube where you just can't get the lid off, no matter how hard you try. One thing you can do because water color can be reactivated. You can pinch the end of your tube, cut off the bottom. I got to squish the paint back down. Then I can take a little bit of plastic wrap, I can wrap up the end. I'm not wrapping up the end to keep it from drying out, it's going to dry out on the end. Eventually, I'm wrapping up the end to minimize the mess that is created by having an open tube of water color. I just tear off a little bit of this, then wrap it around the end. It's going to keep the majority of the paint that's still on the tube wet, but it's also going to keep this from squirting everywhere, all over my heart table. Like I said, I want to do a test sheet. I'm going to set my larger sheets off to the side, and I'm going to grab a smaller one of the same kind of paper. I'm just going to quickly tear off a strip like that. I want to see what these blues look like on my watercolor paper. I'm going to go ahead and grab my brush. I'm going to wet it. I've got my cloth off to the side and I'm just going to pick up some color that is a really beautiful, it's really in blue. That could be really lovely. I'm going to wash my brush off, grab some of my next blue that is also really nice. You can also see what happens if you add more water to it, because we are going to be adding a lot of water at this stage. I can see what happens when I pull that lighter blue out. What happens when I pull out this blue? And if I was being really wise, I would have lined up my tubes in the same order so that I could keep track. But this is all we're going to need. We're only doing one project in this class, so I'm not going to worry about keeping track of it and you could sort it out later. This would be, this I know is my Prussian Blue, which is one of my favorite blues. It's just such a beautiful dark blue, there's that one. And I have ultramarine, I think is my last. Altramarine is very similar to thalo blue, which is interesting. I've never compared those two before. Pull that out a little bit. I might end up using all four of them. I really love them. They give a nice variety, especially if I considered the Prussian blue with either of these, either the Altraine blue or the thalo blue with the seralan blue gives me a nice variation of blues. The more color you put into your abstract backgrounds, the more interesting they become. Now that's not to say you can't just work with one color or one color in black, which we're going to be doing. We're going to get some really intense black with our India ink. Just in general, when you're doing textured watercolor applications, it's really nice to have a variety of colors and values to work with. This is great. I'm going to set this off to the side. I've got an idea of what I want to do now so we can jump into the big one. I like taping my paper down to plexiglass or to mason sheets. This works really great because our paper is going to be getting so wet. You're going to want to be able to tape it down now. I could tape it to my art table, that would be totally fine. But I want to be able to do more than one in this session, so I'm going to use my plexiglass and then some masonite sheets so that I can do a background and then move it aside and do another one. I'm going to take my paper and then I'm going to use my washi tape it down. You can also use painter's tape, which is the blue tape. You can use masking tape. Masking tape may tear, so just be careful when putting that down. Washi tape works great because it's fun to look at which is just a bonus. It sticks down really well and it peels up pretty great. I'm going to tape this down so it's nice and secure on my plexiglass sheet. We want really, really juicy colors to get the effects that are going to work the best with the techniques that we're using. The first thing we're going to do is do a wet application to our paper. I'm going to take my largest brush and some water. I'm going to go ahead and just wet the whole surface. I am going for the water color to move, so I'm not going to be too concerned about too wet. I don't want any big petal areas though. Move it around on your paper until everything is nice and wet. Because our paints are already wet, we can go ahead and dive right into those. I like to start with the water color first and then I'm going to go in with the ink. The black is so powerful that it's going to take over anywhere that it goes. We're going to go ahead and do water paint. Then we'll start dropping in the black to really add some intensity to our ocean background. The other thing that that black is going to do is going to help our creature pop even more. If we just had a really bold ocean and we had a really bold, any other colored creature, they would be fighting with each other for space on the page as far as depth goes. But the black is going to just push that blue background back and pop our creature off of there. Which is going to be super great for visual interest. But this is my all time favorite technique in general, but it's also my all time favorite technique for creating an ocean scene. Let's go ahead and super loosely drop in our color, knowing that we're going to go dark. I'm going to come in with this later. I think I might start with my second blue which I believe was my thalo blue. Yeah, this is Alter Maine, so I'm going to start with my thalo blue. You can use any blue you have. And if it's okay if you only have one, that's fine. Then I'm going to pop in my cerillan in a couple of places. Then I'm going to drop in my compression blue. And then we'll get ready to put some ink in there too. I'm going to go ahead and grab my second blue and just start dropping it down. The water is going to do what the water does. It's going to move that paint around. This does not have to be planned out. The more spontaneous and splashy the better. Do not fill your whole page in though, leave some white, because we're really going for variation and dimension in this. Then I'm going to go ahead and grab some Cerrillan. Remember, it doesn't matter if you don't have it, but if you have a light blue, why not try adding it in once that thaleoblue fades out a little bit. It's not doing a ton of exciting things there. So I'm going to move on. I'm going to go ahead and grab some of my pression blue. So pretty. Oh my gosh. I just love it. I'm going to drop that in. I don't want to over mix. I want to let the color stand on its own. But anywhere that there's white isn't going to do the saran wrap technique. I need the paint down in a way that fills the page. Without filling the page, we're not doing a wash, we're dropping color. If you're at all curious about more of this technique, check out my Youtube channel. I have water color Wednesdays. Every Wednesday, I drop a new video that features a different application of water color. Sometimes it's abstract, like this, it's more representational. It's watercolor something every Wednesday. So, so fun. I love watercolor so so much. If you're working with stuff straight out of the tube and you get a couple of globs on there, that's okay. Just add some water to kind of get those to move around. Now we're done with the water color, so I'm going to go ahead and wash my brush off. I'm going to dry it off. And now I'm going to get my ink ready. This is going to stay wet for a while. I'm going to take my India ink. This is just Blick, Black Cat waterproof India ink. Any India ink is great in it's great. I'm going to grab a little cup. So I'm going to go ahead and put the Indie in. Indie Ink will stain watercolor stains to India ink stains more. I've got a little bit in here. I'm going to grab a small brush and I'm going to just start going in. See how bold that is. It just pushes that water color out of its way, so you've got to be careful how much you drop in. You can splatter it. I can let it go down and splatter swoops. But we want that contrast. We want to really create a moody, beautiful ocean here. Now, I don't want to lose my blues too much, so I'm going to try not to go overboard. I'm going to let that be fine. Now you have a choice. You can leave it like this and let it dry, or you can use the seran wrap, or you can do two. You can do one where you let it be like this. Then one where you do this Ran wrap. We're going to do this Ran wrap because I really want to show you a really beautiful texture for your ocean. I'm going to quick rinse off my brush because I don't want to let that ink dry on there. Once your ink brush is rinsed off, then you're going to want to take your plastic wrap out. We're going to want nice big sheets. I'm actually going to scooch some things out of the way, just so I don't bump anything. I'm going to pull really, really big sheets a little longer than my paper. The traditional way to use it is to bunch it up and put it down. For this one, I really want you to explore pulling it lengthwise. Fold it up a little bit. We're going to pull it, we're going to stretch it. And then we're going to put it down on the page. And then we're going to use our fingernails or even a paintbrush handle to really reinforce those horizontal lines and then squash. We're going to do the same thing until we have the whole thing filled. We're going to have the texture that we created with our wet on wet water color and our ink. Then we're also going to have areas where the plastic wrap is going to add its own texture, scrinch it up, pull it nice and tight. This one went down ahead of time, But I'm going to make it work. I can sprint it up again, pull the lines, really get them to create those really beautiful horizontals. One more section should do it now. Our ocean creatures tend to be more vertical. We're going, this is going to be the whole background. I really wanted to go horizontal this way. Because whatever sea creature you choose is going to be a more vertical creature than it is a horizontal creature. Unless you're choosing a different sea creature. If you decided to do a lobster or, I don't know, a regular fish instead of the octopus or the sea horse, then you could think, you could think about changing the directions of your seran. But I would still encourage you to go horizontal because if we think about currents in the ocean, they're moving horizontally. This now has to dry. Do not take it off before it is dry. This is such a wet page. I would let this sit overnight, if at all possible. But you can peel it up and check it, but if you peel it up too soon, you're going to have less of an effect than you would. Otherwise, you're going to want the effect. It's so fabulous. So we're going to go ahead and set this off to the side. And then we're going to do a couple more sheets with a couple other techniques to have as options for our sea creatures. Now we are going to set this very wet paper aside and move on to our second watercolor technique I'll see in the next lesson. 5. Salt Technique: Now let's shift our focus to salt. In this second technique, we are going to be approaching it the same way that we did our plastic wrap. By doing a wet surface, wet application of water color paint, and then sprinkling the salt on for a really cool texture. For this one, I'm going to play with yellow, yellow greens. Yellow, these are Van go water colors. I have acquired a weird smattering of colors in my time. I'm going to go ahead and use that. One is permanent yellow, green. It's beautiful and throw down some yellow. I really enjoy working with warm colors, cool colors, analogous color schemes. The warm colors, obviously you've got your reds, your yellows, your oranges, the cool colors. We have, our violets, our blues, and our greens. Analogous colors are colors that are next to each other on the color wheel, if you started with, say, yellow, a primary color, I could go yellow, yellow, green, green, blue, green. That would be an analogous color family. Or if I did, or maybe if I started with blue, I could do blue, blue, violet, violet, red violet, and go that way. They are colors that are always going to mix well together because they're close to each other. On the color wheel, they like to play together, which is wonderful. I want contrast, so I'm going to go ahead and grab a dark green. Also, you can use any colors you want for this, I highly recommend either going warm or cool. Now keep in mind we have a cool background for our ocean. We're going for blues for the ocean water. I recommend going color contrast either go light and bright with like yellows, pinks, pale blues if you want to get a blue in there. Or go red, oranges. It depends on the creature you're choosing to do, but we also don't have to live in the land of reality. Have some fun with it, really just play. I'm also going to, for fun, throw some turquoise on my palette. Just like our last step, we're going to go ahead and wet the water. I have gotten some clean water so that I don't get a weird contamination between the water color, the water color that is in there from the last painting and what I'm doing for this one, it doesn't totally matter, but I like to change my water between doing big pages like this. All right. Again, we're going to get it super, super wet for the salt effect to work. We're going to be using salt for this one. You can use table salt, sea salt, you can experiment and try other salt. Rice does a whole other thing. I'm just using table salt because that's what I had on hand in the studio and it works great. It's one I really love. Again, I'm not quite sure what animal, what sea creature this is going to become. I'm leaning towards, I'm going to do them all, but I'm not sure what color I'm going to use for which one. I'm going to go ahead and put down this beautiful limey green, giving me dragon leafy dragon vibes. We want it super saturated. In the end, we don't want to have white. Well, I say that you can have some white, but the more white you have, the less of the watercolor texture effect you're going to have. I recommend just just going for it with the color. We can always put some white back in when we do the mixed media. All right. I'm going to go ahead and wash my brush. I'm going to grab some of the yellow. I'm also realizing I didn't wet my water colors. I was so excited to jump into this. But my brush is so wet, it doesn't matter. Maybe wet your water colors that for good measure. All right, that's super fun. I'm going to pop in some of that contrast, That darker green, you can splatter with it. It doesn't have to just be a brush application. Dabbing is fun. However you want to get it on there is up to you, is fine. I do want to keep some of the brightness because I was talking about contrast. I want to have that pop of light color against the ocean. All right, I'm going to pop a little bit more of that yellow, which is contaminated by my other green because I'm painting so fast. But that's okay. It's made another new, pretty color. All right, great. Now, just for fun, I'm going to grab a little bit use. The turquoise is going to go really nice to add some more depth to my darker green sections and just pull those colors even more. In an interesting way, I've got some goofiness happening. So I'm going to go in with a wet brush and loosen those go the professional water color terms, the cooping effect. Oh my goodness. Okay, that's good. I'm going to leave it like that. I've got plenty of color. It's super saturated. It's definitely wet. Now with the salt, I recommend you put some in your palm and then pinch it. You don't want to put down a lot because what the crystals are going to do is like a straw or a sponge. They're going to absorb the color and they're going to pull it into themselves and off the paper, which is super cool. We really want to have this effect, these little surprises of texture. This is a more subtle texture. This will become, maybe this will end up being a sea turtle who knows what's happening here is I have the water color in the water and the different water colors are reacting to each other. Then the salt, anywhere that's gone down that is pulling up the pigment and absorbing it. Then I also have some buckling happening, which is giving me a whole other textural thing, pretty fun. Water color is amazing, but we have to let it dry. We're going to go ahead and set this aside. What's going to happen is the salt is going to absorb the color wherever it's been put down. And then once it's dry, you'll see the effect. You can see it a little bit earlier on, but it's so much cooler after it dries set. Set this aside, come back to it the next day if you can. It'll be worth the wait, I promise. Then you can either leave the salt on or we can brush it off, or you can do a combination of the two. Sometimes there's so much paint on there that it doesn't really want to release the salt crystals, but that adds a whole other layer of texture. Now we're going to set our salt texture paper aside and move on to technique number three. I'll see you there. 6. Rubbing Alcohol Technique: All right, technique number three. We're going to be working with rubbing alcohol. For this one it's going to begin the same way that we did as far as how we set up our plastic wrap and our salt. And then we will add the rubbing alcohol and you will see the amazing texture that is created by this really amazing liquid. For this one, I have taped down my watercolor paper and I actually taped it to the back of an empty mixed media sketchbook. I save my sketchbook back for cutting boards for different cutting and mixed media projects, but I have been really into watercolor textures lately. Big ones really wanting big ones, I started using them to paint on. Also, they don't have a long shelf life and this one is getting a little worked, but it's going to be great. I've gotten some fresh water. I want to get my colors out for this one. We're going to do the technique with rubbing alcohol in your health section, at your drugstore or big box stores here in the US. Have them. It, it doesn't matter the percentage. It's just that first aid, antiseptic alcohol. But it's fabulous for watercolor techniques. For this one, I'm thinking more pinks and purples. I'm going to go ahead and put down some pink, is my base color. I think I'm going to add in some dark purples for my contrast color. Then I've got this. This is Windsor Newton two, but this is cobalt violet squirts out. Oh yeah, that's pretty, that's very pretty. All right. We'll get those sailed up later. Okay. This time I'm going to remember to wet my water colors with me spray bottle. It's also activating the water color under it. I'm not worried about that. I'm going to go ahead and wet it a ton again. Or we don't want petals, but we do want it to be good and saturated. Then we really want to load it up with color. Because the more color we have, the more impact we're going to get with the techniques. The rubbing alcohol is going to require you to need a second paint brush that isn't being used for water color. Now, it doesn't have to be a brush that you can never use for watercolor again, but you might want to just mark it with some tape if you're going to be doing a lot of rubbing alcohol application in your watercolor journey. Just so you don't have to keep worrying about what brush is wet because I wouldn't want to dip this in the rubbing alcohol and then dip it in the water color. It might be weird we're going to let this be though of rubbing alcohol brush. Got my water down. I'm going to go ahead and start putting down the pink. It's going to be goopy because I took it straight out of the tube. That's okay. Again, I don't want to fill the whole area, but I do want to make sure that I've got lots and lots and lots of color. This technique is a little more forgiving if you're working a little less intensely, but it's still super cool because it's going to create light areas. The more dark you have in there, the more interesting that's all going to become. Dark versus water color, Color against water. White paper, goopy paint, I'm not quite sure how old, whatever this one was, this cobalt violet, it's a very pretty color but it doesn't want to go on very well. I could have swatched these out too, but I'm trusting the tubes to be pretty accurate. Okay. I'm not sure I'm going to be using that cobalt violet again. It's a little strange. I'm actually going to have to wipe my brush off because that paint is really sticking to my bristles. Okay, let's go for some of dioxazine violet. It's a gorgeous purple. I love it. It is darker than what I've got going on. I might use it in a more sparing way, also might play with how I get this on the page. We're not painting our sea creature, right? We're painting their skin. And who knows what part of the page we're going to end up using. It's okay if this is a little weird, you can always dab into the water some more to help move your color around. I'm going to go back to that pink and bring it back without having it mix too much With that purple weirdness is happening because of that violet cobalt situation. It's fine. It's going to be fine. It's making it hard to get, to get the paint to go down. I'm going to grab this brand is Phoenix. I have some magenta, I'm going to stick that down. Different watercolors behave in different ways. They also behave differently as they age. Let's see what grabbing a different. Yeah, there we go. I'm losing some of that rosiness but that's okay. There's like weird repelling things happening which I like, I just really wanted a certain paint situation to show you these techniques. It'll be fine. Some of it might be the paper too, just might be having one of those weird days. Okay, Now I've got a super saturated situation. As far as color and water. I'm going to go ahead and get, you can put this in a cup or you can just go straight out of here. I only use this bottle for this and then look at that. You just wrap it down and it just pushes it away. You can also put it in and touch it down. You can have more control over it. I like to let it be wild. It is going to smell sterilized in whatever room you're doing this in, but it does evaporate. So it's not going to be too crazy. Yeah. Okay. I don't want to wash this off in my water cup because my water cup is for my water color, just like the ink. I'm going to go ahead and rinse this off in the sink so that this brush is clean. Again, to wash my hands too, a little bit. Then we also have to let this one dry too. We're going to go ahead and let this dry overnight. Then we'll circle back to see what our textures look like. In the morning, we have explored plastic wrap salt, and rubbing alcohol In our previous three lessons, they each create really beautiful, very different texture for our watercolor papers, but we have to let them dry, go take a break, grab a cup of tea, and I will meet in the next lesson for our watercolor texture reveals. See soon. 7. Texture Reveal: Welcome back. Now let's take a look at how our textured watercolor papers turned out. This is the result from my rubbing alcohol page. You can see where the rubbing alcohol was splattered. It pushed the color aside and created a much more diluted version of those colors. I love this. This is such a great texture that you can use in so many fun ways and is perfect for a sea creature mixed media collage. Then this is the salt one. This is also really fun. The salt crystals, some of them got bled, really great, absorbed a lot more of the pigment that was on the paper. Then I've also got areas where the salt, you can remove the salt if you want to or you can let it be. This one has a really neat that's really built up there. I sprinkled the salt when I was doing it, initially while the paint was wet, but then I had a couple puddles depending on the warping of my paper. I really wanted to make sure that I got some more in those areas. I dropped more salt in, I ended up putting quite a bit of salt down in an area like this. And then also in this puddle, this section, I have a whole other texture thing happening there. But you can see where the salt pulls the pigment and some of it as it dissolved creates a whole other thing that's happening in some of these areas. But salt gives you a really fun texture. This could be for a sea creatures body, but this could also be for some seaweed growing in the ocean. You can add as many elements to your sea creature mixed media collage as you want to. I think I'm going to stick with ocean creature, keep it simple, but who knows? I really love the idea of using this in more ways than and adding more elements to the clutch. Maybe that'll become something I do in a bonus video, I'm not sure, but it's very fun and I'm excited to have it on hand as an option. Then the other one we did was the plastic wrap. This one I wanted to save the reveal for now. What you do is you peel back the paper. This gorgeous, almost crystallizing feel to it. Because I pulled the paper really tight. I have the stretch marks here. If I had crumpled it and squashed it, would be a whole other thing, be more like this texture. Anywhere the plastic wrap touched it, created it, moved the pigment a bit. You can also play around with painting your paper with the pigment, putting the plastic wrap down, and then switching it up with your fingers and having it move the pigment that way. That's a whole other approach that I just learned. I'd never thought to do it that way before, I've never seen it done that way before. A whole new thing happening in a recent workshop that I took. I'm going to go ahead and take off the tape. When you remove the tape from your paper, you really want to pull it back gently. Want to pull it back on itself? If I pull it up, the chances of it ripping my paper are much greater. I always want to make sure that these dry all the way, so go ahead and carefully remove your paper. If it rips your paper, it's not a big deal because we're not going to be using the white edges. We get all of that out of the way off to the side. I'm going to remove my plexiglass board. Then what I like to do is I like to trim off the white in this case, oftentimes with water colors, if you can get that white border to stay clean and not have that bleed like I have here, It's really sharp to have that white crisp to it. But in this case, we don't need it and we don't want it when it comes to our sea creature. I'm going to go ahead and trim the border off of all of my decorative papers that we created. Then we can move on to the next step. Before you move on, make sure you trim off your borders. You can just do it with the scissors. You can do it with a ruler and exacto knife. Again, this doesn't have to be perfect. If I had any little white extra, I could always go in with some more paint and clean that up if it was a problem if I didn't want to trim it up. This is also a great thing if your paper rips, when you're taking your tape off, just trim it down. If you're going for the 12, 18, you have plenty of paper to work with. So go ahead and do that for your other papers. Now that we have three beautiful watercolor texture papers, it is time to work on our sea creature. So let's head over to the next lesson to learn how to draw and trace to transfer our sea creature image to the back of our watercolor paper. I'll see in the next lesson. 8. Trace and Cut Out Sea Creature: Welcome back. Now is time to choose which sea creature you want to create. In the projects and resources section, I have shared reference line drawings and photographs for a sea horse and an octopus, But you're welcome to use any sea creature you like. Remember, you can go to Unsplash.com or any other image resource site to find some great reference images to work from. Think about the papers you've created, the colors you've chosen to work with, and what might best fit the sea creature you're interested in creating for your class project. This time I'm going to go with a sea horse. I love sea horses and I'm super excited to create a mixed media collage sea horse artwork. The first step in turning our watercolor texture papers into beautiful sea creatures is to transfer our drawing to the back of our watercolor paper. So I'm going to go ahead and choose my pink paper. And then I have printed out a drawing that I created of a sea horse. This is one of the two reference images that you are welcome to use in the projects and resources section of class. You can free hand it onto your watercolor paper or you can transfer it in a way that I'm going to show you it's going to be a mirror image because we're putting it on the back, we flip it over. If the sea horse transferred like this, looking that direction to my left, then when I flip it over, it's going to be looking to my right. It's going to be a mirror image of what it is going down on this, But it doesn't matter how it goes down. But if you are someone who is something that's important to you, I want you to know that up front. Transfer it in the opposite direction you want it to face. To transfer a print out picture like this, we are going to first flip it over. I'm going to use a number two pencil. I'm going to take my pencil. And where the line is, I'm going to scribble, nice and dark. I want to get as much graphite over that line as possible because then you don't want to just trace it. Because the odds of missing your line and having a frustrating transfer experience, it's possible if you just go wider than that line, you want to make sure it's a nice solid block of graphite. We don't really want any spots where it's missing. You're going to do that around all of the edges. All right. I have graphite over all of the lines of my drawing. Now I'm going to put down my paper, my watercolor paper face down. I'm going to flip over my picture. Then I'm going to grab some tape and tape it down so that it doesn't slide on me. I've just got some washy tape on hand. I'm just going to care off a couple pieces there, one on the other side. That's all you need. I'm going to use my graphite pencil to trace over my lines. Anywhere I press down with the pencil, it's going to be transferring that line to the watercolor paper You want to press down nice and dark to really make sure that graphite is transferring on the back side. Just trace over your marks. Now, before you get too far into the process, you do want to check this because you don't want to get all the way done and then find out you didn't push hard enough or you didn't have enough graphite. I can go ahead and peek, and I can see my graphite line is transferring just fine. I can keep going all the way around. This is also an opportune time to add any additional details if you want to change the outline, the outside edge of your sea creature. The step after this is to cut it out. If there's any extra flare you want to add as far as the basic shape. Now's the time. You're relatively neat with this because we did make a very thick graphite line, graphite bold step on the back side. All right? Everything should be traced. I'm going to open up. I'm going to take up one piece of my tape. They both came off. That's okay there. I have traced my sea horse. Now what we're going to do is we're going to cut this out. We have a lot of extra paper here. If you're working 12, 18, you have a lot of extra paper. Don't throw the extra away, save it for collaging. And who knows, maybe you could be two sea horses or some other creature, or shells, or rocks, whatever you want. I'm going to carefully cut this out. This is our actual piece. You want to take it slow, nice, clean cut. You can use an Exacta knife if you prefer. That might be good, especially if you have a really detailed creature that you've created that has lots of nuanced areas to its body. I'm just going to take it nice and slow. I'm going to go ahead and cut across, then I'll get this part when I'm done. The same thing down here. I'm going to cut across to the bottom of the tail. All right? And then this extra goes in my collaging pile or, oh no, I screwed up, I need a second sea creature pile I never get rid of. Less are very small. I never get rid of my scrap decorative watercolor pages, especially the textured ones, because there's so many fun ways to use them, you just never know. Go back in and I'm going to cut out the rest of the head. There I go. Then the tail might get a little tricky, but if it goes slow, it should be all right. You can always bring in an exacto knife or modify the design if you need to. I'm going to do that side and then I'm going to come over to get this site round and round and around the Pretend you didn't see that, then let's reveal our sea horse. So fun. What I love about doing it on the back side is that I'm not fretting or stressing over what part of the decorative paper I, I am letting chance decide. So I'm going ahead and I know I have a giant sheet of paper that is really fun. I know that any part of this would make a really fun texture for my sea creature, but by just randomly flipping it over, randomly placing it down, and letting the art fates decide, if you will, you end up with some really fun results. Once you've transferred your drawing, carefully, cut it out with scissors or an exacto knife, Then head over to our next lesson, where we will move our sea creature into its ocean environment. See you there. 9. Collage Sea Creature: Welcome back. The first step is to decide where we want to place our sea creature on our ocean paper. You really want to play around with it and consider the background. The sea horse is a very vertical sea creature. When the ocean is horizontal, I get the horizontal texture that I really wanted to feel like, the currents, but he feels very squashed. He feels very boxed in here. I'm actually thinking about turning it vertically and putting him in here somewhere in a different way. Take all sorts of different shapes as they're floating through the ocean. I want to think about where I want my sea horse to go. I really strongly encourage you to avoid centering it depending on your art experience and your understanding of possible compositions or layouts for your artwork. Centering it works really well for some commercial purposes to have it right smack in the middle, But this is just a really fun mixed media collage. This could become something more depending on how you decide to use your art in the end. But I would encourage you to play around, have it swim through your ocean and see what makes sense. My sea horse is facing to the right. I wouldn't want to necessarily put him on the right because then that feels closed in too. It just feels like there's too much open space here. That helps me figure out that I want him to be more left of center or left. But then he can also be at any angle I want him to upside down doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense, but he doesn't have to be straight up and down either. He could be leaning forward, which I like I like that leaning forward look and then trust your intuition. Whatever you aesthetically like is the right answer and only you know that for you. So I'm going to go ahead and put mine on the bottom left. I'm going to have him angled so he's looking down. Now I'm going to get a scrap sheet paper and I'm going to glue him down to this section. I like using just regular old printer paper or copy paper for my scrap paper because it's fairly inexpensive and we tend to have a bunch of it around because my kids love drawing on it and then obviously printing purposes. So I'm going to flip my sea horse over. I'm going to be using PVA glue. The only reason is I do a lot of bookbinding and bookmaking, so I have PVA glue on hand. But any white glue is great. We also always have a lot of Elmer's all purpose in multipurpose glue. It again, small kids, lots of art happening here. But any sort of white liquid glue is perfect for this. I'm going to go ahead and put it in a cup. And then I've got an old paint brush, not a watercolor brush. I'm using an older acrylic brush and I'm going to make sure I wash my brush out really, really well. Because I would like to still be able to use it, crilly paint. I'm going to go ahead and dab it in and start panting in the whole area. I want to make sure that I don't put too much toward the outside, but I do want to make sure I go right up to those edges that I know that my sea creature is going to stick very well. If I go over the edge, it's okay because it's on a scrap paper. Nothing bad is going to happen to the paper underneath, and nothing bad is going to happen to my art table or wherever you happen to be working on this project. Again, we don't need a ton, a ton, a ton of glue. But we do want this to be very secure when we put it down. The paint brush does a really great job of helping ensure even coverage. You do have to work a little bit quickly. I'm going to move that off to the side, bring my ocean back in. Just going to double check that, that's the way I want to put it, doesn't really matter. All right. And then I'm going to take my sea creature, move it over, get it where I want it up a little bit, then I'm going to squash it down. Now, at this point, you want to make sure you have clean hands. You're going to start to smooth down your sea creature that every part of it is getting attached to the ocean beneath. The glue will make it a little bit softer and more easy to rip. So be careful if you have lots of tentacles or thin parts. Now at this stage, we could keep going, but I really want to make sure this is attached. Well, I'm going to grab another sheet of paper. I'm going to put it over my sea horse, and I'm going to put a couple of heavy books down. I'm going to weigh it down. I'm going to let it dry for about 30 minutes. And then I'm going to come back, take all that off, and then we can start talking about mixed media techniques. Now, the glue on our sea creature needs to dry a little bit, so I'm going to go grab a cup of tea. And I'll meet you in the next lesson to start learning about what mixed media techniques you might want to incorporate into your sea creature artwork. I'll see you there. 10. Mixed Media: Brush Pen: Welcome back. Now let's begin to use mixed media techniques to bring our sea creatures to life. I love working back into my textured watercolor papers to further enhance those textures, as well as adding details and create an illusion of depth. First up, I'm going to be adding some color and shading with brush pens. You could do this with water color if you don't have brush pens. And gradually work back in building up some color and some value and really starting to define your sea creature. Beyond the flat to be cut out, we have the outline of a sea creature alluding to an ocean background. This could be it, This could be all that we do. But let's take our sea creature and really start turning it into something magical and something that comes alive in a really fun way. I have my dual brush pens. These are number one, go to art supply for working in mixed media pieces, especially working back into watercolor papers. I've also got my travel art set, which has some white pastas. I've got some sharpies. I've got some of my other brush pens. I've got some metallics because who doesn't love adding metallic? I also have some different calligraphy lettering pens. I really like the line quality of this Hand to Fly brand. In particular, this one is the extra small and it's waterproof pigment which is just great. Some might go to brush pen colors. I've got some fountain pens, May get the black fountain pen out. That seems like something I might want for this, as well as rest of my brush pen colors that I've been using a lot. I really like having a small bag of art supplies like this is easily ready and not buried in the midst of all my other art supplies. So I can just grab it and go, I can anywhere. I said, that's very important to me. We might want to look at a reference image to get some ideas for ways that we can add more detail and dimension and even more texture and life to RC creatures. All right, I've listed a couple different images between splash and Google image searches just to see what I want to do now. Obviously the texture that we've created for R. C creature is not necessarily a realistic representation of that sea creature's skin, scales, fins, whatever. But that doesn't mean that we can't layer on some realism to really make this fun and really exciting. I'm going to go ahead and I realized I didn't put in the E. I'm going to go ahead and add the roughly where the eye goes. Sea horses in particular have a lot of fun details to them that are really great to capture. I think I'm going to go in with a brush pen first and start popping in some values as well as defining some areas of this creature a little bit more. One of my favorite parts to a sea horse is the fin on the back. When I layer in the brush pen, it's going to give me, it's going to merge with and change the water color underneath it. Don't be surprised if you're using brush pens that things change a bit. It's also going to have a couple of different stages to it. We have to be open to the fact that it may have some awkward stages as we work through this. The other arts apply. I want to have on hand are colored pencils. Let me actually, well, before I get those, I want to take my lighter pink and brush. Most brush pens you can blend them together if you do it quickly when they're still wet. Now, this is also an opportune time for you to add whatever other stylistic elements you want. You don't have to look at realistic images. You can make it fun. You can give it your own personality, your own art style can come into play here. There's no wrong way to go into mixed media when you're working back into your collages, a couple of colors that make sense with what I have in mind. Metallics are always fun. I'm using the colors that are in the sea horse as my inspiration for what I pull for adding in the mixed media stuff. I want to do the brush pen first before I do the colored pencil, because I think the waxiness of the colored pencil is going to keep the brush pen from going down. Unfortunately, my all time favorite pink is starting to go out, but that's okay. I can use some other stuff here. I'm going to pop in some purple just adding a little more texture to the fin area. And I also want to do a little bit more definition down in the tail. Ultimately, I just want you to have fun with this step. Mixed media art is such a fun process, especially when you're using collage. You're jumping off point. Be tight with it, just have fun. I'm going to jump back up here. I want to do some definition texture along part and then it's okay if it goes back onto the background. We're going to work on that too. I'm not trying to outline it, I'm just trying to give it some darker value there that I can then fade out a bit. Now, some of the texture that we created with the watercolor techniques may disappear. That's okay. It's still there. It's still going to have changed your piece in a really great way. The mixed media part of it wouldn't be what it is without that underneath Don't be so precious about the textured watercolor paper that you don't play and explore. I promise you won't regret it. Well, that's what I want to keep working back in. Yes, I am just scribbling because I'm creating new texture. I want to let this be playful and I want to see where it's going to go. The more color I put into it, the more interesting it's going to get. Trying to really, really love it more of this dark red. And it's getting on the dark side, that's okay. Might become a red sea horse in the end. That's all right. Some darker purple. You can go back and forth. You can really have some fun with how you play with the colors and textures. I use my later brush pens to do a lot of blending. They're all starting to dry out. Next up, we're going to add in some details and textures with black ink pen. I'm going to be doing this with my fountain pen, but you could use a fine liner or even a ballpoint pen. Whatever kind of ink you have on hand will be great. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Mixed Media: Ink: Now let's continue to add interest to our mixed media collage creature by adding in some ink details and texture. I love the mark in line quality that I get with my fountain pen, but you can do this step with a fine liner with a ballpoint pen. With a dip pen, it really is completely up to you, and I highly encourage you to explore and experiment to see what kind of effects you can create. You could even do a test run on your scrap watercolor paper from where you cut out your creature earlier. I'm going to do a little bit of definition with black ink, my fountain pen eye. I really like the sea horses that have a lot of the speckled texture. I'm going to go ahead and add that in because it's black over all of these layers of color. It's going to add another sense of dimension. I can just do some loose scribble lines to define that back fin will come in from both sides. A sense of rounding, just being super loose, and just following the curves of the sea horse and seeing what needs more definition. All right, Look at my reference images a little bit. There's a couple. A little bit of the speckling in the middle. I want to make sure that I'm very careful not to start creating a pattern with my marks. Their human tendency is to even everything out. I want to make sure that there's a feeling of randomness enhance the curve of the neck. A little more definition at the end of this out. Whatever part of the sea horse that might be, make these come in a little bit more dramatically. Create some feelings of lines, It really loose, it goes around. Now we're going to push our colors and our values even further by working back into our sea creature with colored pencils. I'll see in the next lesson. 12. Mixed Media: Colored Pencil: For our third mixed media lesson, we are going to be working with colored pencils. And continuing to go back into our sea creature as we further define it, add in details, bump up the color, create more value range, and really start adding in those details that we're going to bring our sea creatures to life. This is also going to make it pop off the ocean background in a really interesting way. Great, I want to go in with some lighter values with the colored pencils to help round out the shape of it and help pop some areas brighter. I could also do this with a white, but I really want to keep it subtle. I'm going to do a little highlight along its nose and around the eye, some super subtle shading. I'm going to pop some brightness back in. This will also create a translucent feeling on the belly. Put that in and fade it out, trying to make sure that I'm not creating lines. I just want to have a wash of brightness. I want to give him some highlight on the end of his tail that pops a little bit. This is a good time to check your reference image if you're using water. Just any image of a sea creature that's the same kind as yours. Sometimes it's nice to have some reference to go off of for adding in some shading to bring that brightness down a little bit to add a little bit of highlight went pretty dark up here. I might not be able to make it look as good with some brightness, but I'm going to try, if you go too far, describe a darker color and always pull it back. All right. I'm going to take a little bit of my dark and fade that into my light to help round the belly, some really dark purple. I'm pushing pretty hard at this point because I put this purple here. I need to put it other places to help unify the picture. That's one trick. It applies to any subject matter you're working with. If you're going to pop a color in somewhere, try to put other places in the picture to create a sense of unity. Pop a little bit of purple up here, a little down here. It doesn't have to go everywhere. As long as it's at least one other place, it'll help everything work a little bit better. Great, I think he is pretty close to n. I do want to give him a little highlight in this. It's going to be too big. It's a little too big. I'm going to go ahead and let that. This is Posca pen, it's a paint pen. It's great. I love having at least a white and black Posca pen on hand. It's a little big. I probably should have gotten my smaller one out, but I could let that dry and then I could go back in with my fountain pen, and I can kind of shrink up that circle. In our final mixed media lesson, we are going to add more values in depth to our ocean background. I'll see you there. 13. Mixed Media: Ocean Techniques: Now we have a beautiful sea creature that is detached from the ocean background. Now it's time to work back into the ocean with some mixed media techniques, very similar to what we did in our previous lessons for our sea creature. So that our sea creature and our ocean start to feel more unified and in sync with each other. Our ocean is pretty abstract. You can leave it this way or you could start to define this even more if you creature is one that would be dwelling on a shallower area or closer to the bottom of the sea. Could go in and put in some sand, put in some ground at the bottom. If you do that, I would make sure that your ground color is matches in value into darkness as far as your ocean. Otherwise, it's going to feel like sandy bottom plopped on top of ocean background. And you really want to have everything work together in a cohesive way. If you do a sandy bottom, make sure you do a leaning towards darker sandy bottom or whatever is going to match your ocean. If you did a really light, bright turquoise ocean, or just a very pale ocean background, then that's a different story. Mine's pretty dark because I went in with that black ink. It changes it a bit for me as far as what would make sense with this. Now I do have salt paper, but this is very bright and I feel like this is going to compete with the sea horse. So I don't think I want to do this for my environment. But what I am going to do is I'm going to play with putting more darkness into and boldness into my background to help it merge and become more cohesive with my. I'm just going to take some blue with my brush pens first and just start to play with what I've got going on in the ocean. This is the same approach that we just did with our sea creature. We're just adding some more mixed media elements to help you unify what's going on. Because I pulled my plastic wrap tight and ended up getting these bold lines that were going to be horizontal and then ended up vertical because of the animal I chose. I have to be careful, but I don't start creating a striped wallpaper effect in the background. I want to blend this out, not being afraid to go in with some other blues. I'm doing a little test run here in the corner. I can always make this more of a subtle effect. And it's going to get whatever I do here in some way. I have to treat the whole ocean that way. Now, I could also go back in with water color. If you don't have brush pens, you could do the same thing by painting back into your piece. That would also be totally fine. Actually, why don't we do that for the rest of it because they're all water colored. Vib, it's going to look great. Got my water. And I've got the leftover blue from when I created this. I'm going to go ahead and activate some of it, loosely paint back in. The great thing is I'm not going to lose my texture. It's, it might move around the water color that's on the page a little bit, but it's not going to do anything crazy to it. It is also going to activate the brush pen I put down, but that's a cool thing, just becomes another layer that makes it even richer in color, and texture, and value. I love that. Why am I doing this? Well, my sea horse went from very bright, let's compare it. My sea horse went from this to that. You can see the big difference between what I started with and what I ended with as far as how I treat them a sea horse. I love it. I am in love with the sea horse, but now I need to bring the ocean water up to the same level so that they're not in conflict with each other. I love mixed media. It's really a win win for me because it gives me an excuse to go back in and do even more mixed media work. I'm sticking to this vertical wash application of style. I think that looks pretty great. I do wish I had some of that brush pen texture in a couple of the places, even though it's wet, I can still go in a little bit. I'm scribbling. I'm racing. I'm blowing fast. It's going to be great. Now because we're painting behind around our creature. We want to make sure that we carry whatever we do up there, we carry it down, both color and line quality. Great. Now the darkness of our background. The sea horse is still brighter because it's a bright colored, brighter colors. But as far as color intensity and hue intensity, they're more on par with each other. It like the sea horse now fits its environment. And actually it's so funny because all of a sudden I'm starting to see jellyfish in the ink botches, which I love. I think that's so cool. Play around with mixed media techniques. I strongly encourage you to go back in with watercolor or brush pen to really start beefing up the colors and the values and starting to create a roundness in a life sea creature and then adding black ink is never a bad idea. Speaking of that, this is dry so we can shrink up that reflection piece and that's it. Or sea creature has come to life through a combination of watercolor textures, brush pen inching details, and subtle color, pencil shading. Feel free to add in any other mixed media techniques and materials that you like. Really, the sky is the limit. And I encourage you to explore and experiment and to push these as far as you want them to go. I am so excited to see how your sea creatures turned out. So join me in our final lesson as we wrap up the class. I'll see you there. 14. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me in this class and creating mixed media collage sea creatures. I hope you are feeling inspired and that you have added a new approach or two to your artistic practice. I would love to see your sea creatures. So please head over to the projects and resources page of class and please upload an image of your artwork to the student gallery. I would also love to see all of your watercolor texture papers that you may not have used in our project. Please include an image of those two because watercolor texture papers are one of my most favorite things in the universe. You can add text sharing your thoughts about how the project went as well as your reference image. If you chose to use one that wasn't one of the provided ones in the resources section, I greatly appreciate it if you took the time to left to review, student feedback is the best way for me to continue to grow as a teacher. And it also helps other students find the class. Because as a student skill share myself, I know that I often turn to reviews to give me a little inside information about what a teacher has to offer in each of the given classes that I check out. If you wouldn't mind taking a few moments, I really value your time and your thoughts about how the class went. I continue to grow and make even better classes in the future. So I hope you'll consider leaving a review. I love sharing my own art adventures, and my students work on my Instagram. And if you post your art to Instagram, please tag me at Elizabeth underscore Welfare so that I can find your art online and celebrate the amazing work that you were creating on your artistic journey. If you want to stay up to date on my newest classes, be sure to click the followup button below. You can also join me on Youtube where I post process videos, art techniques, sketchbook tours, share my art adventures. And every Wednesday, it's Watercolor Wednesday. So a brand new watercolor technique will be uploaded and published for everyone to enjoy. And I hope to see you in a future class real soon. Until next time.