A Beginner's Guide To Watercolor Painting

1. Introduction: Hi, Welcome to a beginner's guide to watercolor painting. My name's Nikki. I'm a watercolor artist. I do a lot of work in the wedding industry, so I do custom wedding invitations. I also sell art prints and I do custom commissions, such as pet portraits and house paintings. I love painting with watercolor, but it was not always that way. I actually hated it when I learned, when I was in high school because nobody ever taught me how to do it. I just thought it was o you add water to paint and then you just have at it. Well, no, there's a lot of different techniques and a lot of tools that I wasn't told about. My goal for this course was to really help, you know, all the tools and all the techniques to get started with water, watercolor painting. I find watercolor painting to be really meditative. You might be taking this course because you want to add an offering in your business or you might be taking this course just to learn painting as a hobby. Anybody is welcome here. This is all about just learning how to watercolor paint. If you are brand new, you've never picked up a brush before. You're in the right place. If you're somebody who's maybe dabbled a little bit in watercolor painting, but you're still struggling a bit. This is also a great course for you because I'm gonna walk you through everything. I really dive into the materials section here because it's so, so important and not a lot of people take the time to figure out what supplies are best to use. So we're going to go through that. I'm gonna show you some different techniques for watercolor painting. There's gonna be a portion where we paint a couple of items together, but feel free to pick up your paint brush. Anytime I pick up my paintbrush, I'm the kind of person that learns as I like to do things and I learned as I go, I know everybody's different. So if you are that same type of person, feel free to paint with me. If you'd rather just watch, you can totally do that too. I wanted to mention that you will need some supplies to get started. Of course, we're gonna talk more in depth about supplies, but just so you know, straight off the bat, you're going to need watercolor, paper, watercolor paint. Please make sure it's watercolor paint. The paint is very different from other kinds of paint like oil and acrylic. You do need watercolor paint brushes. I recommend a size six and also a details brush if you have it, which is like a size two or o size 12 cups for water. If you're not using a watercolor block masking tape so you can tape down your watercolor paper. We'll talk more about why you need to do that later. And a paper towel. I'm so excited you're here and I cannot wait to paint with you and teach you all about watercolor painting. 2. Paper: Your watercolor paper matters so much. I have used probably about six or seven different brands. And I finally landed on my favorite one which is Arches. But I'm gonna go through a couple of different papers for you today. It has really changed the way I paint because you need a high-quality paper, something with a little bit of tooth because it needs to soak in the water when you're using a lesser quality paper, it's not soaking in the water enough. What happens is when you use layer upon layer upon layer, the paper is just so saturated that you're not getting the brilliance that you need from the paint and the paper. Explaining watercolor paper a little bit. I'm not going to go super in-depth with this. I'm just gonna give you the knowledge that you need as a beginner. So the first thing you always want to look for when you're purchasing watercolor paper is you want it to be a 140 pounds. Now this is standard in the US that this is how we talk about watercolor paper. I have worked on watercolor paper that was 300 pounds. That is very, very toothy and can be a little bit difficult to work with. But 140 is the sweet spot. You do not want anything less than this and the quality will be really bad. And then I heard that the UK and other countries, they referred to it as 300 GSM. These mean the same thing, but whichever however your country and talks about it, just go by that. We always make sure that it's a 140 pound paper. And there is a difference between there's, there's cold press watercolor paper. There's hot press watercolor paper. This is cold press. And as you can see, hopefully you can see that there's some texture to those paper. The texture allows the paint to really soak in. Essentially what happens when they make watercolor paper. I believe watercolor paper is made out of cotton. They take all the fibers together and they smash it down with these rollers. And for the cold press paper, It's literally done cold. And that's why you get this texture to it. Whereas the hot press paper, this is a piece of hot press paper. It's super smooth. It's done the same way with the different fibers press down, but it's heated up so it gets super smooth. And I'll explain a little bit more about hot press on a second. We're making sure we have a, a 140 pound paper. And I want to go through a couple of different paper brands that I have used in the past and I'll talk to you about their level of how expensive they are. Probably your most expensive paper or at least in my experience, it is the arches. I think I paid about $40 for this. This is a watercolor block. As you can see. It has this black on the outside is essentially just glue that is taping down a bunch of pieces of it. I believe there's about there was originally about 12 to 15 pieces and it's on here. So I love to use watercolor box because when I'm painting, I don't have to worry about the paper warping because it's glued down to this block. And then when I'm done, I just stick a little knife in here and go around and peel off the top paper. It is, this is how I like to work. It took me a long time to get here, but at the same time I am a watercolor artist and I sell my artwork. So I'm able to kind of offset the cost of this expensive water color block by pushing that costs onto my clients. Now if you're just starting as a hobby, you might not want to spend a ton of money, but if you can get one of these, I highly, highly suggest it even if asked for it for your birthday or just splurge a little bit for yourself because it does make a world of difference to have amazing paper. Now if you don't buy a watercolor block, what you need to do is tape your paper down. I'll go into that in a little more depth in a little bit. But because watercolor paper has water all over it, it gets really saturated. And when it starts getting saturated, it can start to bend. And you don't want that warp and you don't want it to have all these little dips in it because in your water, in your paint will just sit in there and make things that are not so pretty. That is why we like the watercolor block, but to get around that you can save your paper down and I'll explain that alone later. This is my top paper. And then from here, I like the Stonehenge lesion paper. This is a great paper as well. It has really good texture. I believe it's a little less expensive than the arches. Again, this is a watercolor block, so I do the same thing, I paint on it and then I stick a little knife in this side, go around and pull off the top sheet. There's also, I have found that this paper when I use the masking fluid, which I'll explain masking fluid in just a few minutes. It does tend to tear up a little of the texture. I don't know why. For some reason I feel like arches is just a slightly a slight bit more durable than the Stonehenge. Still both are amazing papers. These are high-quality watercolor papers. So now we're gonna go down, down the quality a little bit and talk about papers that are more affordable. Something that you'll find maybe at your local Michael's, That's the craft store in the US. Both of these papers are relatively inexpensive. They both do say that they are a 140 pounds, but I will say I see a huge difference between this paper and the ones that I just showed you. This is a paper that I started learning on when I just started. I was a little bit frustrated. But if you are just starting out, it's okay to use these papers. I do recommend. If I'm recommending one over the other, I believe they're very similar in price. I recommend the Strathmore over the Canson. The Canson is really in my opinion, the lowest quality watercolor paper. You can use it, but it's not going to allow you to use lots of layers in your painting and we'll talk about layering later. But layering is what makes your paintings look more realistic, give them more interest, and you're just really not able to do that too much with this paper. I'll show you guys examples when we get into that part of the course. The Strathmore paper is a little bit better. It has a little more texture to it. Honestly, it feels a little more thicker to me. And I think you can get away with using this one. I know a couple of artists that do, but once you get to a certain point, please try out the other watercolor papers if you can, because it really makes a huge difference. Here's a quick demonstration for you. The two watercolor papers. This is the Canson cold press here, and this is the Arches cold press. This is a much more high-quality paper. And this was the lower end that I described to you. But as you can see, the water really soaked in and the pigments soaked in really well here in evenly, but not so over here, I used the exact same technique for both of them. So just a great example of how much and how important watercolor paper is. 3. Water: A huge part of watercolor painting is using water. And it's really about how you control the water and utilizing it in the best way possible. But just the most, in the most simplest terms. What you really need to do is have two water cuts. I used to use one water cup and I noticed that my pigments were really murky. And that's because essentially you're mixing all the colors at once. And when you mix warm and cool tones, you get browns. So that's what happens to your water. To avoid that, I use two different water cups. You can go about this one of two ways. The first way is to do what both are filled with water. And one is where you rinse off your brush and the other one is where you pull water from. Then the second option, which is the option that I use, is having two cups. And one of them is for warm tones and one of them is for cool tones. So when I'm using yellows, reds, and oranges, I only pull from the warm tone cup. When I'm using blues and greens and purples, I only pull from the cool tone cup. It ensures that I'm not getting murky water, which makes your paint murky as well. 4. Brushes: The next thing I'm going to talk to you about is paint brushes. Paint brushes are also another important part of watercolor painting. I suggest if you're just starting out a size six is a fantastic size brush. You can do a lot of stuff with it if you are wanting to expand a little outside of just a size six, I suggest doing a size to a size four and a size six. That's a great starting point and we are going to be using those today when we do start to paint. I love the Princeton heritage brushes there, a synthetic fiber. There are some watercolor brushes that use animal for, I am a big proponent of no cruelty towards animals, so I choose not to use the ones that are real animal fur. It's pretty easy to find the synthetic ones and they work just as well, if not better. This is the Princeton heritage and then also the pigeon letters. So Peggy Dean has her own line of paint brushes. She's a really talented artist and I love her paint brushes and she's super no cruelty towards animals and wants everything to be environmentally friendly. So these are also great brushes all linked these all in the, the notes for the course. So it is good to have a variety of brushes. This filbert brush is great for washes. You don't want to have all round brushes. You want to have some square ones for washes and then having larger brushes as well will be super-helpful for you. Just a variety of them. But like I said, if you are just starting out a size six brush works great. Now some rules about taking care of your brushes. The first big, it is never, ever, ever leave your brushes in the water face down. What's going to happen if you do that is you're going to bend these tips and they're basically just going to be bent forever. And you don't want that because you're not gonna be able to paint while if you do that. Instead, what I do is I just rinse my brushes and then I grab a paper towel and I lay them on the paper towel until they dry out. Once they're dry. This is a little ghetto how I keep them. But I keep them just in a plastic bag like this. There are some really cool fabric little brush cases that people have and they roll them up. I need to get one of those for myself. But I like to keep my brushes flat. You can store them like this, but I don't recommend storing them up until they've dried because if they're still wet and you store them like this, the water is going to seep in here and create this expansion of the fabric or the fibers. And it's going to make your brushes kind of warped a little bit. So take good care of your brushes. There's no need to ever use soap on these watercolor paint is water-soluble and will obviously we'd, all we need is water to wash off the pigment. Then just let them dry flat. 5. Paints: Okay, Let's talk about something very exciting and that is paint. This is my paint palette. It's very robust. This watercolor, being a watercolor artist is my career, so I need something that has a lot of colors in it. Honestly, I suggest having this even if it's your hobby because it's really nice to have all this. But if you are wanting something smaller, I completely understand. And this is a version of smaller one. I got this at Michaels. When you first get your palate, you want to scuff it up a little bit. So if you have like maybe something you scrub the dishes with just to give it a little texture so the paint really sticks on there. Another option is there. These are all liquid paints, so I buy the tubes and then I pour them in. I like to do that because I get to set up my palette exactly how I want it. I don't have to buy a pre-made set, but there are, you can buy the little trays. So this is my little travel watercolor set. And who can buy these little trays? Because they're all labeled on here. But I bought this together. It was a set and I bring it with me when I travel. I can watercolor paint. But you can, some people do like to work with the TRE paints. To me once you get I'm missing one. Once you get this started, this is almost the exact same thing because these pigments are going to dry and then you just wake them up with water. And that's essentially what's happening here. These just come dry and these are going to be wet when you put them into the palette. Totally up to you. Some people think that these tray ones are more vibrant. That really hasn't been my experience with it. Again, I like to do the tube paint because I like to make my own palettes. Some questions that I get often are Do you ever washed your palate? No. I don't really wash it. The only instance when I do wash it is if, say I just worked on this huge bright floral piece, I would have a lot of bright colors which I have right now. But I need to transition into painting. A pet portrait, and pet portraits are typically more neutral colors like browns and blacks and grays. Sometimes in that case, I would rinse out these areas so I have a clean place to work. But typically I'm able to kind of blend in some of these other colors and it doesn't make too much of a difference with the color of my paint. Your palate is a big deal. And the way I like to set mine up is I do blues and greens and yellows. So I like to keep cool colors by each other and then my, my more warm tones by each other. It's kind of a mess in here, but it's, it's chaos, but it's organized chaos for my, the way I like to work. Another thing about watercolor paints, which is amazing and so different from acrylic paints is watercolor paints can dry and then you can wake them back up with water. So you're never going to have to throw away these paints. Whereas I don't know if anybody watching this has used acrylic paints before. I used to do acrylic painting. If I poured out too much, it would dry and it was like plastic and you could not wake it back up. I really enjoy about water. What I really enjoy about watercolor is that I can just wake up the paint again with water and I never have to worry about wasting paint. So that's a really cool added bonus to watercolor painting. 6. Additional Tools and Supplies: Now let's talk about a couple more tools that you'll need. You don't necessarily need all of these, but they are helpful to have. The first one is going to be tape. I like to use masking tape, That's this ivory color. You can use the blue painters tape. But to me, the blue painters tape can be really distracting because it's so bright compared to the white paper. And for some reason it just makes me not see my colors as well as I want to. I like to use this one because it's a little more neutral and get masking tape. This is Blick masking tape and I find it to be awesome. Some people like to use the actual watercolor, a tape. I find that it's not as strong as I'd like it to be. There's also washi tape. Washi tape works but it's in my opinion is not as good as the masking tape. Now, I mentioned this before, but you will need to, if you're not working on a watercolor block, you need to tape down all of your edges of your paper. If you don't tape down your paper, what's going to happen is it's going to fill with water and it's going to warp. And that sucks because then your paint is going to pull and it's just gonna be a big mess. So what you're gonna do is tape down all sides. And I'm gonna do that right now is to show you, I'm going to speed up the video. All right, our paper is completely taped down and this will make sure that when we paint on it, it won't buckle or warp or anything like that. So we had our masking tape. Another thing that's super helpful to have is a sand eraser. Sand erasers are fantastic. They have almost a sandpaper texture to them. And if you have a mark or say you cannot get a mistake off, usually you can use a sand eraser to get it off, but just be careful because this does start to pull some of the texture off of your paper. So if you sand it really, really deep, you could poke a hole in the paper. So just be really gentle with this. But this saves me from a lot of paintings that would be ruined if I wasn't able to erase it and fix it with this. Another tool is masking fluid. Masking fluid is really amazing if you need to protect a part of the paper when you're painting. This is the way to do it. Now I have to mention, do not use your regular brushes with this. You will be so sad because it will destroy the brushes. So make sure you purchase either use a crappy brush that you don't care about because it's gonna go in the trash afterwards. Or you can buy these silicone brushes. This is what I use. Hopefully you can see that it comes in different tip sizes, but this is silicone. It's really easy for me to just clean this off. After I'm done, I'm going to demonstrate really quick what it looks like to use masking fluid. I want to shake your masking fluid up really well. I don't know why, but they make these like the most difficult tops to get off. So I might be speeding this up. Now that we finally got this out, what I would typically do is pour a little bit of this and a little cup. But just because this is a simple demonstration, I'm just going to grab some of it. And I'm going to obviously, you would use this in a situation where we're trying to protect something. For example, if I'm painting a landscape painting and it has a lot of layers and say there's some flowers right here in the front, but then there's tons of buildings in the back. I might want to just protect those flowers with this masking fluid. Because once it dries, I'll be able to pull it up and what's underneath will just be the paper. We're going to let this dry and then I'll show you what it does once I've put paint over it. Now that it's dry, it doesn't take that long to dry. It's about, I would say like five or ten minutes, going to pick up some paint just so I can show you what's going to happen. You don't have to worry. You can use your regular brush over this because it's dry. And I'm just going to paint over it. As you can see. It's protecting the paper that's underneath it. We're just going to let it dry. And then I'll pull up the masking fluids so you can see a couple of other tools while we wait for this to dry. A high-quality pencil is super great to have this as an HB. I like it because it's pretty light and the graphite is really soft. You really want to make sure you're drawing lightly when you watercolor paint, because once you paint over that, you're not going to be able to take away the pencil marks. Another great tool is a kneaded gum eraser. This is the best eraser to have. Say, you just drew what you wanted to paint, but the lines are too dark. What you're going to do is just press this down. Here, I'll show you. Here's a lion. You're going to just press it down, like in this motion to pick it up, to pick up some of that graphite. Otherwise, when you're, if you draw and then you're trying to erase it and you're scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing, what's happening is you are tearing up the texture of your watercolor paper. And you don't want to do that because the texture is what helps your painting look so nice and helps the water soak in. A gum eraser is fantastic to make sure you keep your paper protected. Alright, now that the watercolor paint is dry, I will show you, you just lightly pull up with your finger. And you can either use tweezers to grab it. Just pulls right off. But again, be careful that you're not scrubbing too hard because you don't want to take up your paper. But as you can see, it protected the paper underneath. Now I can paint that whatever color I want and I don't have to worry about the blue getting into it. That's how you use a masking fluid. Sorry, there's a little bit more. It's a really great tool if you're doing a house with a lot of windows or there's a fence or something like that. You can block them out with masking fluid to keep them from getting messed up by all the other paints on your painting. So those are some extra tools that I recommend. You don't have to have them, but they do come in handy. The one thing that you do need to have though, is if you are not working on a watercolor block, you must tape down your paper. So you will need tape. 7. Wet On Wet: The first technique we're going to start with is wet on wet painting. And essentially wet on wet painting is you're going to have wet paper and then obviously the paint is wet. Really simple. I'm going to mix up, just get a little paint here. There's a little glow coming in from the sun. I hope that doesn't bother you guys. I'm just mixing up some paint. And then what I'm gonna do is I am going to grab water. I'm going to make a circle with water only. Now I'm going to grab my paint. I've paint on my brush. You never want your brush to be dripping with paint. You just want it to be saturated but not dripping. If it is dripping just lightly tapped down on your paper towel. As you can see, I'm just poking in the color here. I can move it around. The paint isn't going to go anywhere outside of where this paper is wet. Which is really cool. If you wanted to. If you want to make a cool effect here. Oh, I'm sorry. If you guys want to pick up your paint brushes and paint with me, that is totally fine. I like to. You can choose your own adventure. If you learn by doing, then pick up your paint brush. But if you rather just watch, that's totally fine too. I'm going to grab some water again. I just have water on my brush and I'm making this little circle. I am going to lightly add in, let's just do like really pink. And then I'm just going to make it touch. Usually. I don't know if it's going to work here because the colors are too similar, but they'll start to bleed into each other. And you can also assist them in bleeding. And together. Let's do another, we'll do another color. We'll do some green. Remember what I said about the water cuts? I like to keep one with cool tones and one with the warmer tones because it keeps your pigment pretty bold and vibrant. Instead of mucking it up. Again, a firm doing wet-on-wet. I'm working with wet paper already. And then I'm adding in my pigment. How this might work if you're painting because I know you're like, Okay, this is cool, but how do I apply this? How you would apply it? Or one way I really apply a lot is when I do pet portraits. For example, I might be working on for, and I really want to get this, see how smoothly it blends into itself and you want the fur to look really smooth. So what I'll do is I'll put water down. I'm like, Okay, well, this is the side of its cheek. Just bear with me for a circuit. And I want this to look really blended. So obviously I would have a drawing of a dog, but then I would add the water to the painting and then I'd come over here and get whatever color the dog is. Say, pick up this brown. Then I can just kind of lightly added in and it becomes really, really smooth and blended. Then say there's a little shadow right here. I could take something a little bit of darker brown and just add that in. Then you can come in with a clean brush, kind of move some stuff around. I really suggest just practice moving, practice controlling the water. That's one of the biggest things with watercolor. And I think it's the reason I hated it when I started. Because you really need to just get a feel for the water on the brush. And there's no like I can give you the techniques for watercolor, but nothing is going to be as great for you to learn as just doing it yourself. Obviously, you need these techniques and you need to know what to do. But you'll get used to using the brush. And you'll get used to how the water feels on the brush and whether it's like too much or too little, it just comes with time and practice. This is the wet on wet technique. Next, I'm gonna show you wet on dry. 8. Wet On Dry: Alright, now for wet-on-dry, and it's probably exactly what you think it is. I am going to be painting with wet paint on dry paper. This is, I use both techniques when I'm painting. And you really need to use both. But one, when you're doing wet on wet, it's really good for washes are like I showed you if you're doing first, something that needs to be really blended. Wet on dry is good for just about anything. I'm gonna show you if I was making a leaf, I'm just painting on here dry paper. But you see how different it is. It's really dry. If I don't put water on this area, it's going to dry like that, but I want to make it a little smoother so I just have a clean brush and I'm just gently touching it. You could also use a wet on wet technique here if you wanted to say I wanted the center to be a little more yellow, I'm going to grab some yellow. This is wet paper and this is what paint. And I could just tap it in here. When it dries, it's going to look really cool in blended. So really when your watercolor painting, you're always going to be using both the wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques. There's I mean, I don't think I know anybody who just does one over the other. Here's another example. Make a circle. Just add some water. You could just leave it like this. That would just be wet-on-dry. 9. Loose vs Layered Painting: Let's talk about loose style versus layering. Loose style. You guys might see it a lot, but a lot of floral combinations or sometimes even patterns that you see that our watercolor are a loose style and more detailed work such as pet paintings or house paintings. Anything that looks more realistic is usually heavily layered and it doesn't necessarily have to look more realistic, it just has a different depth. We're going to go over those two styles. Don't feel like you ever have to do only one style. That was my problem for awhile and you don't have to do one style. You can use both styles if you want to. Practicing a loose style here. I'm gonna show you, we're just gonna do some flowers. Just making. If you guys want to paint with me, you can really loose. I am using wet-on-dry technique, but I'm not making multiple layers because this is the, this is how it's gonna look by itself. I'm not going to go back over it, but I could come in here and use that wet on wet technique right now and add in a little yellow. Just lightly touch it. There we go. And then maybe I want to do a leaf. A little thing I want to teach you guys is pulling a highlight. I'm gonna do that by rinsing off my brush. Make sure my brush is totally clean. Then I dry off my brush on the paper or sorry, the paper towel. Now my brush is pretty dry and I'm gonna come over here and press it down. And when I do that, I'm pulling up some of the pigment. I'm getting this nice little highlight here. This is a great way if you accidentally put too much pigment or you just want to make it look a little more interesting. You can just pull up pigment by using a clean dry brush. It doesn't have to be completely dry. Just make sure you pat it off on the paper towel. This is a example of loose painting. So it would be, I would be done with this right now because I'm not going to go in and do a bunch of layers. But an example of more layered, we can use a leaf as an example. Just making a line and then pressing down with my brush and pulling up. Pressing down, pulling up. So when you press down and you're going to fan out your brush and it's gonna make the lines thicker. And if you don't fan it out, you're gonna get thinner lines. So just a little technique there. Then I'm just using clean water to come in here and move around my pigment so that this whole leaf will be green. Now, the thing with layering is I now have to wait for this to completely dry before I come back to it. If I start painting on it right now, I'm going to get that loose. Look. I'll also give you an example. Say I'm wanting to come in here with a little bit darker green. Well, if I do that, oops, it's going to start blending all over the place. That might be the look that you want. But if it's not the look you want, what we need to do is we need to wait for this to dry. So obviously I'm not gonna make you sit here and wait for 20 minutes. Drive, speed it up for you guys. And then we can put on our next layer and our next layer. Now we're ready for our second layer. This has dried completely and you can test it by lightly touching it, but be careful because of it's really wet. You're going to pull up pigment and you do not want to do that. See, basically what I just did there is I reactivated the paint because water touched it, so be careful about that. Now what I'm gonna do this is completely dry. Grab some pigment, some green, a little darker. I'm layering so that was too much pain. Politely top. I'm just going to make a line kind of like a thick line right here, going up here. And then I'm going to get rinse off my brush and just get water. I'm going to tap it just a little bit so it's not dripping water. And I'm just lightly moving it around. Maybe I want to add a little yellow. That is our second layer. As you can already see, you're getting more depth here than this because this is very loose and it's only one note. There's a time and a place for the style of artwork. And also if that's what you love to do, you can do that too. But as you can see, this one is starting to really draw your eye in because there's different depths in different colors here. So we're going to let this dry and we're gonna do one more layer. This is all dry and are ready for our last and final layer. Of course, when you paint, sometimes there'll be projects where you use a ton of layers. For a leaf, I probably use about four or five layers, but we're just going to use three here. I have a lot of pigment on my brush and you're going to want to make that pigment slightly darker than what you already have so you get some depth. And essentially what I'm trying to create is that the sun is hitting the leaf up here, so it's gonna be lighter. But down here it's going to be darker because that's how the sun works. Rinsing off my brush and then I have a wet brush with water and just lightly tapping this side so it kind of blends. In. There. You have it, you let it dry and it's all done. But look how much. Look at the depth of this compared to this. It's pretty incredible. I loved layering. It's what I use for almost all of my paintings. Of course, I do love the loose style every once in awhile, but this is my jam. 10. Mixing Colors: In this section we are going to talk about mixing paint colors and also about values. Something really important to understand about watercolor paint is the more water you add, the more light the color is going to get. We'll get into mixing colors in a second. But first I want to just work with values. And when you're painting, you need to use various values. If you just use one color, if you use green and use it with the same amount of water every time you're painting is going to be pretty boring. It's important to use a pink that's really light and a pink that's dark. And I'm gonna show you how you can get different values of color in your paint. This is a great time if you guys want to pick up your paint brushes and paint along with me, I have a roller right here and I'm just going to make four little squares. If you want to just paint your squares, you don't need this structured about this, but if you want to, you can. I want to use it to look really good for you guys. So I'm just going to make these little squares that are an inch wide. So I'm going to do one inch align and then I'm going to make a half an inch of the space. And then another line that's an inch. You just want four little squares. This is kind of extra, but I like the way it looks. Just make your little squares go across the top. Now, you're going to grab a color. You can grab any color you want. I am grabbing opera rose here. You're going to grab it at a 100% opacity, or basically the truest version of what that color is. The paint should be pretty thick on your paintbrush. You don't want too much water, but you also like, it shouldn't look like that. That's way too much, but it should be pretty thick on there. Once you have that, come over to your square and you're just going to paint in that square. So this is your a 100%, basically like a 100% of value. It's the darkest, most saturated version. I'm going to put 100% right here. Now we're going to go down a little bit and we're going to add water. So if you added just 25% of water, you should be getting it to be a little lighter here. Still pretty vibrant and saturated, but lighter. Going to add a little bit more because that looks like more like 50%. This is 50, 75%. I'm just going to write 50% and then 25% here, since we're gonna be doing that anyways, now I'm gonna go back to that same color and I'm going to add about 50% water. So half water, half paint. I should be getting it to be even lighter. Now I'm going to add a seventy-five percent water and twenty-five percent pigments or paint? I use pigment and paint interchangeably if you guys haven't noticed, but they're the same thing. This one, I'm actually going to pull a highlight a little bit. So just my very lightest version. As you can see, the more water we add, the different variations we get, the hue. The hue doesn't change, I'm sorry, the saturation changes. You could paint a flower with just all these different, very different saturations and get a lot of depth in your artwork. So definitely something to practice. If you guys want to practice with more colors, I really encourage it. It's a great way to kind of explore with your paints and see what kind of colors you can make and what kind of value variations. The next thing I want to do is a small study of just mixing paints. And I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to make the little squares with my ruler. I'm going to speed it up though, because it is a little bit time-consuming. So feel free to pause this video and make the squares if you want, but you can also just make little swashes with your paintbrush too. All right, now are the R-squares are all set. We're going to do is we are going to take two colors. You can take any, you can use any colors you want. I'm going to be using opera rose, which is one of my very favorite pink colors. It's really bright and fun. And then I'm going to be using yellow, yellow, lemon, deep. Whatever two colors you choose. You're going to make the first one up here at 100% saturation. And then you're going to make the second one down here at 100% saturated illustration, and then we're going to slowly mix them. Now. You know what, I'm sorry, I need one more square. That way. The middle is perfect. One more square. So you should have 123467. That way the one in the middle is going to be a perfect mix. You could do this with a lot more squares if you really wanted to take your time getting down to the perfect mix in the middle. But for time purposes, we're going to do it this way, right? What your color is up here. This is a great way to study colors, just like the last lesson about the different saturations. This is a great way to see how different colors blend together, especially if you're working on a painting. I really recommend doing this. I just recently painted a black dog. It was her dog was Pitbull and golden retriever mix which doesn't eat. I don't know how it got such black fur. But I never use black in the whole painting. I made my own color palette with Sienna, brown and indigo and a little bit of red. This is a great way to explore that when you're starting and painting. This one right here is going to be opera rose. I'm just going to write opera rose here. And it's gonna be at 100%. You don't have to write a 100%, but you can if you want, then this is yellow lemon, Deep lemon. The first thing we're gonna do is we're going to put in the opera rose. Here. We're at full saturation. I'm going to rinse off my brush, make sure it's nice and clean. Get my clean water and grab my yellow because we don't want it to be tinted at all. I'm going to paint that one down here. We're going to start mixing. We're just going to add the tiniest bit of yellow to this opera rose. Mix it up on your palette. Just make sure you're not getting your yellow dirty. I'm just adding the tiny tiniest bit. We're going to see maybe a slight variation. Don't be too worried about, I mean, try to keep the same saturation all the way down but don't be overly concerned about it. We just added the tiniest bit of yellow and you can already see that it is changing it. Then we just keep going. So now I'm going to add a little more yellow. The pink. Pray a little too much. Needed more. And you can tell if you need more because if it doesn't look different than what it was above, Yeah, I need more yellow, orange under this palette, so I think that's what's happening. It's coming through. Now this is our 5050 color here. So if you can, I know it's hard to get it perfect. 5050, but just do the best you can. We're going to get a much more orangey color. Now we're going to add even more yellow to that. Really almost like a tangerine color. I really like this palette. Now we're literally having just the tiniest bit of pink in it. It's really close, so that yellow, but there's still a difference. This is a little bit golden or this is more sunshine yellow. There you have it. You can people make huge diagrams with these. You could do a giant version of this and like I said, is a great way to explore color and see how certain colors mixed together. I didn't want to chat a little bit about when you're mixing colors. If you say they're really, really vibrant and you want to bring it down a little bit. I'll show you how to do that. So let's take this crazy pink color. So it's super, super bright. But maybe I don't want it that I want it to look more like a dusty rose. I'm going to take the opposite of that color on the color wheel. So let's say there's pink isn't really on the color wheel. Or if you're doing just the main colors. So red, the opposite of red is green. So if I just add a touch of green to this, it's going to mute it down. See how much more muted at is. Another way that you can do it is adding black. But personally, I don't like to add the block because I always feel like it kind of gets it kind of muddy and I don't like that. I don't know. I just think that it looks so much better when you use the opposite of the color wheel. So I'll give you another example. Yellow. If we're using yellow, the opposite of yellow, It's opposing color or contrasting color, I think you would say is blue. If I just add a little blue there. I mean, essentially you're going to get green. You have to be careful how much you put in there. But at neutral. Okay. That was a terrible example. Oh, you know why? Okay. I used the wrong color. The opposing color to yellow is actually purple. That's why I have this yellow. I'm adding just a little tiny bit of purple. Now. I feel a lot better because I knew this was a rule that was true. Now you can see it's more muted. If you wanted to do orange. Well, that one's kind of already muted. Let me get it a little brighter. If you wanted to do orange, you would add just a little bit of blue. There it goes, It's getting muted. Use the opposing color. If you are the contrasting color, if you want to mute it down, you can use black, but I think that meeting it down with the contrast color really makes it still bright and doesn't take away the actual color. 11. Time to Practice!: Now that you know all of your supplies and tools to use and you've gone through some different techniques. I thought it would be nice to just paint together. And of course I will be getting some instruction along the way. If you don't want to do this, There's no pressure to do this part. You do have the supplies you need. You have listened to how to paint, so you are good to go if you want to, but if you want to stay with me, we're gonna do a couple of small paintings just to apply the things that we just learned to artwork. So we're going to paint two items and avocado and a Cosmo flower. And I picked these items because they both require layering. And that is, that is a style of painting that I typically paint in. I am going to focus on that here. We will not be focusing on a loose style, but more of that layered, realistic look. The first thing we're gonna do is we want to sketch it out with our pencil. I am going to draw a little darker so that you guys are able to see it, but try to make your pencil lines as light as possible. For an avocado. Kind of has that not hourglass shape, but there's a big circle down here. And you might want to just start by drawing that circle, then little circle up here. Then we're just going to kind of come down like this. We're doing a half of an avocado. It's going to be open. Feel free to pull up a photo of an avocado on your phone or your computer if you need to see what one looks like. I would normally erase this, but I'm just sketching it for you guys. So you can see. I put a little teeny stem up here. Here's a tip about avocados. If you guys don't know, always buy them when there's a little stem or people call a hat because it makes no bacteria can get into the avocado. My grandfather was an avocado grower. So lots and lots of years of learning or avocados, then you're gonna make the seed. And the seed is pretty big in here. Again, I'm drawing dark because I want you guys to be able to see, but please draw as light as possible. Then just draw a little outline so there's just this thin layer along the edge or border. That's the skin of the avocado like that. So that's pretty dark, but that's okay. Then the further cosmo, you can draw a flower however you want a Cosmo almost like a daisy, but the petals are a little thicker. I love cosmos and butterflies loved cosmos. Their OEMs and my garden. I'm going to start by drawing the almost like a C-shape. This is that center area where all the pollen is. Then I want this petal to be cut into the side. So I'm doing another long C-shape. And then just kind of a ragged edge to connect it. Drawing a straight line here, a ragged edge and feel free to pull up an image of a Cosmo far if you want. I think they normally have five or six leaves, but we're going to do five here. And maybe the little stem down here does not have to be perfect. We're just using our new skills that we learned. We have our basic drawings here. And now we're going to do is start the first layer. The first layer is going to be just green, almost like a really light green wash that we're going to put all over the avocado. I got a little bit of water here. Don't, don't paint over the seed. You could, but we don't need to paint over it. So I'm just painting all of this green, even this little stem, it's going to be more brown, but that's okay. Your pencil line should be nice and light. We have a really light wash down and this is just our base and we're going to build up on this, something that you can do. This. We just did the wet-on-dry technique, but something that you can do is you could grab a little bit of yellow and poke, poke in some yellow. So now we're using wet-on-wet technique. That'll just help to give even more variation in it when you go in and paint it. When you go in and paint the next layer, you could even add a little more darker green if you wanted to. There will be a shadow here. Because we're gonna say that the light is coming from this side on both items. You could make it a little darker too. While we wait for that to dry, we are going to paint the Cosmo. Cosmo. I'm gonna make it almost a bright red, orangey poppy color. But the first layer that we're going to start off with is going to be a really light wash. And we're just going to come in and paint all of these, all of these petals. When you're painting in this style where it's more layered, you'd really need to think about where the light is coming from in your painting and where shadows would be. Because we're definitely going to be utilizing shadows to give it a more realistic look. The more you paint with watercolor, the more you're going to discover what style you like. Maybe you don't like more realistic and like more abstract or you want to do a more loose style. That is all totally fine. You can still apply the basic principles that I taught it here today. But feel free to find your own style. Don't feel like you have to be adhering to somebody else's style or what they prefer. That's the cool thing about art, is that it's really open to what you want to do. Now we have to let this dry. A couple of things you can do here. You can grab a hairdryer and blow dry it and it will dry faster. I'm actually going to let this dry naturally, but of course I'm going to edit the video so you don't have to watch it dry naturally. You don't have to watch paint dry. Then we're gonna come back once it's dry and do another layer. You can also, if you're working on a watercolor block, you can put it outside in the sun. One thing I want to say about the Sun though, is that it can fade your watercolor paints because they are light fast, meaning that they can be changed by the sun. But for this project is not that big of a deal, so you can do that as well. We're going to wait for this layer to dry and then we'll start painting the second layer. Now there are first layer has dried. We're going to come in here with our second layer. And we're going to leave the seat alone for now. We're just going to focus on the flesh of the avocado. I have a green here that's been, it's called sap green, but you can mix up any green that you think looks good. I'm going to add a little yellow to it. Again, our light is coming from this side, so I'm going to load up my brush with pigment, then come over here and just put a line. My brush, I'm using the side of it. Then the tip. When I'm getting closer down here, I'm going to rinse off my brush, grabbing only water, coming back in with that water and just touching the edge of the paint that I just put on there, you get this soft kind of bleed. You can move it around. That's definitely a part of learning how to paint with watercolor is moving your water around and learning how to control the water. I'm going to leave this edge. I'm happy with it being this light because the light's coming in from that side. So I'm actually not going to put another layer of paint over there. Over here. I might just add a little, something that's a little darker and just tap it in and down. Now we're going to wait for this to dry. So as you can see, watercolor painting can be a long process because you're waiting for your layers to dry. Which I never used to let my layers dry and just keep painting on top of it. But I was really frustrated because I wasn't getting the result that I wanted. So now that I know that things have to dry, it just, it makes a huge difference. We're gonna come over to this flower. We need to think about how would the saturation of the colors be closer to the pollen area. And Cameron wrote the name of that as right now. It's almost like a cup that's closed so there'll be some shadowing down here. This would probably be darker petal. This petal is definitely hitting the light and so is this one. So there'll be a little lighter and on the top of this one is probably hitting the light as well. So going back to that pinkish red color, I'm going to Let's paint in here. I have a lot of water on my brush, so I just tapped on my paper towel to get rid of some of that. When you feel like you're not able to control the paint on your brush, it's most likely due to there being too much water. So just tap your brush off and then I'm just grabbing water and moving it around. We're working on two small things right now. But if you're working on, for example, I do house paintings a lot. And when things have to dry between layers, it's not that big of a deal because say, I did this side of the house. Well, now I can work on this side of the household. That side dries. So don't feel like you're going to be having to stop and wait 20 minutes on every single piece when you're doing something that's larger and it has a lot more going on. You're working on something else while something else dries. I am going to pull a highlight here, so I'm going to rinse off my brush. I'm going to dry off my brush. Doesn't have to be completely dry, just the excess water. And then I just press my brush down and lift. I'm able to pull up some of that pigment so that it looks a little brighter. Now with this technique, since I just painted this petal, I can now paint this petal or what's going to happen is the paint is going to bleed into there. And then I'm going to lose that nice line that divides the two petals. So again, I have to wait until those are dry and then I can come back and paint it. But during that time we can paint the stem because the stems aren't touching anything that's wet. Again, I'm just putting some pigment on my brush and just painting with the tip of my brush because it's a little smaller. For the avocado, I'm gonna grab a little bit of brown and do the stem here. I'm okay if it bleeds a little bit in here because an avocado actually naturally has that little area there. Now this is still pretty wet, so I am not able to paint the avocado Sega, otherwise it's all going to blink together. So again, we're going to wait for our layers to dry. Now that these layers are dry, we can go in and do some more layers. Now we're going to paint the avocado seed. I'm going to grab a little bit of brown. I also want to mention that today we're only doing a couple of layers, but a lot of my artwork that is more detailed has maybe 1520, sometimes 25 layers. I'll explain it a little bit more. But first I wanted to just tell you, so grab brown paint and just you're putting just that color all over the seat at this point because we need to put several layers on. But like I was saying, some of my paintings have almost 25 layers or more. Those are paintings like pet portraits. I want to make sure to get a lot of depth into those. I am doing a lot of layers. So as you can imagine, it's time-consuming. But I love it because I love watercolor painting. I'm going to grab a slightly darker brown and just tap it in on the side here. Because again, we have that shadow coming in. And since this seed is round, There's definitely probably an extra light source hitting the top of it. Another thing that we can do here, so we're not really going to add anything else to the flash, but around the edge we want to put the skin of avocado. And the Skinner avocados is usually quite darker. So grab a green months That's a lot darker than what you have. And for this, we don't have to worry about layering because we are just going to be basically making a little border around the edge. Depending on your style. If you wanted to, you could grab water and kind of bleed it in if you want to. It's kind of a cool look. Just going along the edge. Now. This vitamin and makes slightly thinner. Just because of my mind, I imagine that there's a little bit more of the skin on this side. Just you could even skip some little parts in there to make sure that this side is nice and dark. And it is bleeding a little bit because I have that wet paint, but I'm okay with that because I think it looks good. I'm just going to put a tiny shadow on this stem just to give it a little more interest. Make it look a little bit more interesting to look at. I'm just putting a line on the left side. And then maybe there's a couple of little lines like that. All right, moving on to our beautiful little cosmo here. I'm going to paint the middle with some yellow. Just have some yellow on my brush and painting it in there. Nope, Nothing fancy. Are going to have to work on some of these other petals. This one, I'm going to grab. Another thing is you don't want to do the exact, remember when we learned about values and saturation, you don't want to do the exact same saturation on all of the petals or it's gonna be boring. I grabbed a little more red in this one. I'm just tapping in that paint along the edge and then I'm going to wash off my brush. Just move it around. This might be a little too different than that, so I'm going to add in a little yellow because it looks just a little too deep breath. Pull that color up a little bit. I'm gonna do the same thing over here. So that same dark red, darker red, it's not really dark, dark red. Touch the yellow. Some water and just move it around. I can't really do anything else right now because everything is going to touch that lives. I wanted that to bleed and if I was okay with having not believe that I could paint. But these are this one's white and this one is white and they're touching. So that would be another problem. Let's work on this stem, just grabbing a green that's slightly darker than what you have there. Just making an outline. Then coming in with only water and moving it around. I can see that this is drawing a little bit harsh, this line right here. That maybe for a couple of reasons. One, I might have put too much water down. Another thing is that I've taped down this paper and it's not on a watercolor block, so there's nothing underneath to soak up the water. There's only the sheet available for that and that might be why this is happening as well. So again, just use a little too much water. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab water on my brush but then slightly tap it off because I don't want too much and just see if I'm able to blend this in. So I'm using a scrubbing motion like brushing your teeth kind of circular and it looks like I am able to lightly move that line, this one as well. But something to mention, if it's almost dry and you start to do that, it might not be possible to take it off, or it might do something really funky to your paper. So make sure that that line is still wet before you try to do that. Or you can just try it and learn that's another thing, but I don't want you to ruin a painting that you've been working on forever. We're going to wait for this layer to dry. And then we'll paint, or it's player painting our next layer on the seed. We're done with the green. Going to grab, we're actually going to get my size four brush. Then grab a darker brown, maybe a brown with a little black in it. You could even add a little blue should darken it as well. Then just come in here. And I'm making that thick line, but the paint is nice and wet so that I'm able to move it around. Rinsing off my brush, getting only water on it. I'm going to tap off some of the excess, then come in here and just move it around until it goes in a direction that I think it looks good. I actually really like it like this because I feel like there would be this top area that would have a lot of light coming in, going to add a little shadow over here. Just because a seed comes up and out of the avocado. So there would be this kind of shadow down here. The more you paint. Promise you, you'll start noticing shadows in nature in real life, which is really cool because then it means you're really applying what you've learned. But now I see things like that so much and it's really interesting. The avocado is essentially done with how our painting today. As you can see, it's a lot more interesting than the way we first started when it was really flat. There's a lot of depth. There's also shadows. And I think it looks really good. I hope you guys enjoyed Dr. drying pillar painting, the avocado. But now we're going to move on to our flower and finish it up. I'm going to grab that color and come in here to the bottom, is actually a little too much water on my brush. But we're going to work with it. I just draw this, this is gonna be the darkest shadowed area, the cup of that petal. And then I'm just going to add in the water. And again, who you guys are gonna drive you nuts. We can't paint these two petals because I just put water right here and the paint is wet, it will bleed. We have to wait again and we really can't paint anything else because of the layers needing to dry. We're gonna let them dry and come back. It's nice and dry. And now I'm going to grab a green that's slightly darker and just put in one last little shadow here under the petal. Just like a little like to say to you guys from going crazy because I'm sure you don't want to go through another round of this being dried. We are just going to finish this up here. Let's add these petals need needle pink. Another little shadow here, because they would be shadowed with the center. Then just grabbing a brush without paint on it and moving it around. We might want to grab that same color. Just think, well, this would probably make sure you don't have too much paint, would have a slight shadow. With this. There's also veins in the flower. We can do just a couple of those. Actually don't like this. I'm just going to blend them in. If it's still wet, you can just grab water and blend it right in. That's an amazing part about watercolor. I love it. Maybe make this a little darker. Shadow there. More shadow here. That's about as far as we're going to go with that today, just so I can save you guys from all of the waiting. I'm going to put some little dots in here just to make it more interesting because it's not very, there's a lot going on in there. We didn't do a lot of layerings, so just some light little brown dots. If you feel like they're too harsh, just grab some water and that was way too much water. I'm gonna pick some up. You can just mix it around with some water a little bit. Alright, so those are two examples of working in layered painting. I hope you guys enjoyed painting those ugly. 12. Bonus Section: Digitizing Your Watercolor Artwork: Alright, I'm gonna show you how to digitize your watercolor artwork. Being able to digitize your artwork is key to bringing your designs to life. Whether you are creating wedding invitations or you want to make art prints, or you want to make a pattern, pattern design. There's lots of options and it's really cool to be able to digitize your artwork. So I'm going to show you how to do that. Again, this is a bonus. So if you don't want to learn this, you totally don't have to do this part of the lesson, but it's a great way to be able to bring your artwork to life in other mediums. The first thing we're gonna do is we're going to scan in our artwork. And I use an Epson Perfection V600E. It's a fantastic scanner, I love it. I put a link in the notes if you guys want to purchase it. You can also take a picture with your phone. That's another option. If you have a good phone, most smartphones take fantastic pictures now. But I love using a scanner. It's what I always use for my artwork. So a couple of things to note when you're scanning. I'm not going to bring up my little scanner software just because you might be using a different scanner. But I am going to tell you about a couple of key things to remember when you are scanning. The first thing is you want to be scanning and exporting as a tiff. They are compatible. A tiff is compatible across all editing softwares and these files can be saved uncompressed, which helps retain a lot of the details with a JPEG, which I use to scan as a JPEG, but I found that to be a lot better. Every time you save a JPEG, it loses some of its quality because JPEGs are compressed and the tests are not compressed, I highly recommend scanning it as a TIF. The second thing is your DPI is super, super important. If you, you cannot do less than 300 DPI if you want it to be high-quality. I usually do about 300 or 600 if you are making something that's going to be blown up, I mean, you're not gonna be able to do like a billboard, but say it's going to be a pattern for bed sheets or you're gonna be making it a little bit larger than you painted it. You might want to go up even to 1200. At the minimum, you're doing at least 300 DPI means dots per inch. It's just how many dots there are per inch. You're going to get higher-quality the higher DPI you have. But 300 is our minimum. And then if you have this option on your scanner, I actually couldn't find it on mine, but I know some some scanners do never have color restoration on that's going to mess up your colors and you want to keep your colors really true to how you painted them. So those are the key things when we're scanning in our artwork. And now we're going to bring our artwork into Photoshop. I am only going to show you you can digitize your artwork on other software programs, but I'm only going to be showing you Photoshop today. I loved the Adobe Creative Suite. I use it for my business. I've linked it in the notes if you guys want to purchase it. It's fantastic. I think it is one of the best software programs that you can have when you're doing this type of thing. So that's what we're gonna be working in today. Sorry if you have something else, but you will need Photoshop for this lesson. Now that I'm in Photoshop, I'm going to go up to File and Open and I've pre-screened in my work so you guys can see it. So I'm going to grab, I have two pieces. The first is this old fashion and then the second one are come quartz. And the reason I am choosing knees is because the contrast between the white paper and the composite is really high. When you have high contrast, it's a little easier to scan in, sorry to remove the background of your artwork and digitize it. But when the contrast is not so strong, so this is pretty light here. It's gonna be a little more challenging. So I wanted to show you both of those. We're going to start with a squats. I'm just zooming in here. What I like to do is I don't need this other stuff, I just need the conquest. So I'm gonna come up here on the left and I'm going to grab my lasso tool, just your regular lasso. And when you use Lasso, you click hold down your mouse. I'm on a Mac too, so things might look a little different if you're on a PC, I'm holding down my mouse and I'm just drawing around this. So don't unclick because if you unclick, it's going to snap command Z to undo that. And basically what I'm doing is I'm just cutting this out from the paper because I don't need the other stuff. Going around. And then I'm going to right-click and layer via cut. So essentially this is cutting this artwork out from this paper. If I unclick it, you can see I'm going to delete this bottom layer because I don't need it. I'm going to name this layer, come squats, whoops. I'm going to duplicate this layer. And the reason I duplicate it, I'm going to say original on this one is for some reason if we mess up this when we're digitizing it and we don't have any way of going back to the original. We don't have to worry because we have the original here. You don't need to see the original, so just unclick the icon. And we are going to specifically work on this one, but we have the original just in case something goes wrong, which I don't think something's gonna go wrong, but I always like to have it just in case I'm going to straighten this out a little bit because it would be like that. Now we want to get rid of this paper background because if we were digitizing it, say we're putting out on a wedding invitation or a t-shirt. We don't want this yucky paper around it because if we had this and it was on a white shirt, it would look so bad. We're gonna go over to the left-hand side and I'm gonna grab my magic eraser. And the magic eraser is very magical. I love it. You're gonna go up here to your tolerance. I like to have my tolerance pretty high because the contrast is so high. I don't have to worry about this really. The higher the tolerance, the cleaner lines that you're gonna get when you erase the paper background. But if the contrast isn't really high, you're going to have issues. So for this specific instance, we're fine. A high tolerance of 75. And all I'm going to do, it makes sure your layer is selected. This is something that mess me up when I first started, is I wasn't on the right layer. So make sure you're on the correct layer. And then you're just going to click that white paper and it's like magic, it just gets rid of it. So easy. How I like to check to make sure it got rid of all the little pieces is I come over here and I make a new layer. I put that layer underneath my artwork layer. Then I grab my paint bucket. I make sure that I'm on a black paint. And I click and I can see that there's no paper left. Something I want to mention is water. The nature of watercolor artwork is that you're going to have some kind of jagged edges because the paper is textured. So if these jagged edges bother you, what you can do to clean it up is just scrub your regular eraser tool. You can make it smaller or bigger. Just hold down your brackets. Again, I'm on a Mac, so this thing would be different if you're on a PC. I'm just coming here and smooth it out. If it bothers you. To be honest, this would not bother me for us for artwork. I would probably leave it as is, I would clean this up because this was a mistake that I made when I was painting. But if it does bother you, you can come in and smooth all of this with your eraser tool. And with your eraser tool, if you come up here, click this down arrow. There's lots of different brushes. So you could do a soft brush. It's going to give it a softer edge. The hard brush, which is what we were just using, is going to make it a lot harder and cleaner. But since it's watercolor artwork, I recommend using the soft brush because you still want your artwork to look soft unless you have a different style. And that's cool too. Okay, so that was super easy. That was because we had a very high contrast between the watercolor artwork and the paper. Now we're going to go to something that's a little more complicated. Just so you know, when you want to export this, just make sure you turn off this black layer because you don't want to export that layer as well. And then just export, export as. And I like to export as a PNG because the background is transparent and then just export and save it wherever you want it. Keep in mind watercolor artwork files are large, especially when you are scanning them in at 300 or 600 DPI. They they need to be large. You want them to be high-quality, but just know that they'll take up some room on your computer. Mine is so stuffed. I'm over here and do the same thing. But this one's gonna be a little more challenging because the contrast is not as high. We're going to grab our Lasso tool. I'm sorry, let's label our layer first old-fashioned. If you label your layers, you will be a lot better off. I learned that lesson way too late, so just name them. Stay organized. We have our Lasso tool and we are just going around here. Oops. Going around, cutting this out. Remember when you're using your loss of total, you're just holding down. The click on your mouse that entire time until you come back to where you started. Then you get the marching ants. You're gonna right-click and layer via cut because I don't want this paper on the back. I'm going to delete this. Oops. That was the wrong layer of it. Delete that I accidentally did a new layer. Now I'm going to name this old fashioned, and I'm going to duplicate this layer just in case anything happens. We don't want anything to happen to the original in case we need to reference it. Put that underneath, turn it off and we're on our old-fashioned layer. As you can see, there is going to be some, it's pretty like almost white here. So if we went and did the same method as we used for the conquest watts 75 tolerance with the magic eraser watch what happens? It's taken away a lot of our artwork and we don't want that command Z, we're going to undo that. I'm going to straighten this out a little bit because it's driving me nuts. A couple of things we can do here. One, we can play with the tolerance. So the lower we go, the more it's going to not get rid of the lighter section. So let's go down to 15. If I go down to 15 tolerance, it's pretty good. I mean, it doesn't It's kept most of it, but it did get rid of this section right here. So I'm going to undo. I could go down to five tolerance. But when I go down to five, it's having a hard time deciding what is the artwork and what is the paper, because they're similar in colors. And what a magic eraser does is it just recognizes pixels that are different and it gets rid of those. So it's recognizing all the pixels that are this color and getting rid of it. But then at the same time, it might also get rid of some of the artwork. You can do it this way. And it looks like it's doing a pretty good job. But I have a feeling that it probably when we put in that black layer, it probably didn't get rid of everything that we needed. So let's add in that black layer. It's kind of our tests to see, we're going to paint it. This is a hot mess. You don't want to do this. If you took this and printed it, it would look kind of funky on your printed item and we want artwork that's really nice and clean. A few options here. You can come in with that eraser. You can just go in and erase it by hand. Sometimes I do this method. I am actually going to do the hard round eraser because I want it to be a little tighter. So you can do this method, come in and clean up all of this. That's one method. The other thing you could do, I'm gonna go all the way back to the original. Is use your Magnetic Lasso Tool. Taken a bit, sorry. My Magnetic Lasso Tool. Basically I'm gonna zoom in. What it's gonna do is it's going to hug the pixels. So it's kind of funky. When you start using this, you're going to click. I'm not holding down the click like the original lasso tool. I just clicked once. And as you can see, I'm just dragging my mouse over this section. And it's basically just following along this line, which is great if it can see it. But for example, right here, it can't tell that it needs to stay up because this is kind of like a little highlight. What I would do is click and I'm basically making anchor points to keep it going over this section until it can find the colors again and make its own line. Now, say I went too far and I want to get rid of these. Just hit Delete. And you'll delete the little anchor points until you get back to where you want it to be. Then what I what I am going to do is I want to get rid of this. So I'm just following background. I have to go just like the other lasso tool, all the way back to where I started, click, you're going to get the marching ants hit. You can see that the little magnetic tool it has that minus. You want that minus to be on, it should just automatically be on. Then hit Delete. This is a good way if you wanted to go all the way around with this, you can delete these sections and that usually leaves it pretty clean. If you want to stop the marching ants, you select Command D and I'll get rid of it. If I put on that black layer again, you can see that it's pretty smooth. But for the way I like to work, I would come in here. Oops. Make sure you're on your layer where you're correct, old-fashioned layer. I would come in here and just delete this with an eraser tool and smooth it over. That's what you do. And then I just go around and do that for this whole thing. So those are a couple of methods for digitizing your artwork. Keep in mind that it's going to be more challenging to digitize something that has less contrast as compared to something that's higher contrast. 13. Final Words and Class Project: Congratulations, you've finished this course. You should be very proud of yourself, and I hope that you found a new love for watercolor painting. I do want to say that it's so important to just be okay with where you're at right now. I'm a total perfectionist. And so whenever I try something and I'm not perfect audit, I get really frustrated. And maybe that's you. If it's not you, that's really good that you can just let yourself ease into things. But if you are a perfectionist, know that the more you practice, the better you'll get. This is a painting I did about four years ago of these two core keys that are used to fall on Instagram. And this is the painting that I did last year. Hugely different. And during that time I taught myself watercolor, but I learned different, different techniques that helped me to be able to get the layers that I wanted to produce the artwork I wanted. So be patient with practice comes skill. And before you know it, you'll be painting exactly how you want. For our class project. It's really simple. Just paint whatever you want, anything you want at all. Please post it in the class projects because I love to see what you guys create. Also, you can tag me on Instagram. I love to see what you guys create and I just want to say, thank you so much for watching this course. And if you liked this course and it helped you, I would love it if you could share it with your friends and families so that they can take the course as well. I hope that you have the most amazing day and thanks again for watching.