Begin Creative Watercoloring

1. Begin Creative Watercoloring Intro: Welcome to begin creative water coloring. I'm Ron Murphy and I'll be showing you how to start water coloring the easiest way and the most successful way. The key is small and manageable. Being able to use your brush, just like you use a felt pen. Lots of control. We have some little pictures here. These are small pictures that you can draw with a pen and then will be washing on and controlling the paints so that every time you do it, it's a success. We don't need to spend a lot of time on a picture, we just need to get a couple techniques and get the job done. Water coloring is fun. Welcome to the class. 2. Good Materials Make Great Pictures: Water coloring is not hard. That's something that people say when they've experienced difficulty with it, walked away with it, crumpled up their paper, thrown everything out, said something like, "I'll never touch it again." The only reason that we have trouble with water coloring is we don't know what we're doing. Let me explain some things you'll need for success. Here is a synthetic brush, here's a fine brush. I like the Rigger brush because of it's long hairs. That's an option for you if you want find work done, and you probably will not need a medium sized flat brush. So one of these, pencil and eraser, razor blade, not quite yet, tape, definitely, blue or green, and your choice of a permanent black marker. Both of these are excellent papers. This is a Winsor &Newton water color paper. It's a 90 pounds. This is a Saunders English water paper. It's a 140 pounds cold press. This paper, it's a little different. This is a Fabriano paper from Italy. Notice the different shades of white, white, very white, little bit ivory, little whiter, little darker. They all respond differently. Now here is what you don't want. I'm not putting down daily routing but this is mixed media is not what you wanted to buy. It really doesn't work well for water colored. Put that out here. You notice how wide it is. The reason why it's so white is it's been bleached and it has no sizing in it. All the watercolor papers, not the mat board or this, they have sizing. It's alum, and the alum stops the water from penetrating too quickly. Two choices for watercolors, you can have pan paints. Those are a little paints that come in little sections here and they're usually 12 or 6 or 24 and the colors are all ready in there. They have glycerin in them, but not very much. These paints have more glycerin, so they're always fluid and very easily watered down. Now, you can use the well paints. Nothing wrong with them as long as you get a good brand. Cheap paints tend to dry and look pasty. I usually have a pallet of maybe two blues and two reds and two yellows. I find with that, I can't get into too much trouble. These are the earth tones, you can get black and you can get burnt sienna, you can get raw umber, all the earth tones, yellow ocherhe, they all tend to sit on top of the paper a little bit. They're what we call surface paints. These paints, except for ultra marine, which is in-between, but the Thalo, the Alizarin and the Azo yellow, those go right into the paper. So the really red reds and yellows ocher will sit on top. So these two really belong up in this category. So we have our staining paints, and you will get to know your staining paints by the end of this class. A rag is good as opposed to a paper towel. Paper towels have their place, but generally speaking, a rag is great because you can wash it and reuse it. I'll use these for special things like lifting. Some paper towel or Kleenex and a rag. So here's our basic kit. I like a big jug of water because then I don't have to change it too often. However, I need to get some water into my paints. So what I'll be doing is moving the jug over here to the side. This is where you may need your big brush, you see it comes in handy for all kinds of things. I make sure it's clean. Even though as brushed looks dirty, it's not, it's just stained. The thalo tends to stain brushes, so it's clean. So there is a drop of water in that one and a drop in this one and my blue is here, and my yellow is here. I have now added water to my paint. If you have some paint here, you can thin all this down just by tapping it and you can put some here for what you need to use. Now, paint can be thick and paint can be thin. I don't want to get my water dirty so I might have a couple of these little containers to clean the brush and add clean water. So you'll notice my first blue, and then I clean it a little water to this blue little water here. Now I can get dark, medium and light just by piling up. If you want your watercolors to work really well in the beginning, just think of coloring. When you color, you only use one color at a time. I don't think anyone takes five pencil crayons or crayons or felts and colors five colors at once, unless you're doing some rainbow thing. So what I'm trying to do here is get a dark and a medium. Dark, meaning less water, medium, more water and light, lots of water. So there I have mixed three tones, dark, medium, light. Perfect. 3. Getting Your Project Ready: Here's my paper, once again, I think I'll make this longer. What I've done is just cut up little pieces of watercolor paper here. Get used to drawing on the watercolor paper. I put a sail here, a line here, and then a smaller one behind with a line. You'll notice I'm really not being fussy. If I want to make it a little more realistic, I add another line here. Maybe another sail at the top. Couple of marks. I'm not a sailboat expert, but if you are, this might just be exactly what you want to do, and horizon line, probably up higher above the middle. Remember, the middle is not the best place for a horizon line. Let's say they're just going out to sea and there's a little bit of land showing over here, and I like the sun behind it. Now, to get the reflective quality of the sails, just a few lines down here and there. A couple of little marks in the water, a couple in little in the sky. Look at that, that's lovely. It's perfect. Next, a person. There's so many different ways to get a picture. Instead of making the square this time, I'm going to put the square in after I do it, there's my paper, and I just start with a head shape here and here and chin. You can even keep it simpler, if you want I'll do another one over here. Just do it simple what we call a pencil head. Like that. You'd be surprised when you get the features in the right place, how the picture will look pretty realistic, just throw some ears in here and here, and then we know that the eyes and everything are in the middle, we'll put a nose here and we'll put some lips, and we'll put a little eyebrow there, some eyes, let's get a little more on this one, smaller nose. Excellent. Now, we're going to put in some hair. I think I had somebody I was looking at when I drew this quick picture here. To get it looking more feminine, if that's what you want and put some hair over the ears. Remember, we're going to be chopping some of this off. I can always skinny it up here, and maybe this is your younger brother, that one of those new haircuts. Now we square it off, because squaring is off we're putting a rectangle behind it, gives us a little more composition. There's a shoulder there. Let's go dark in that whole side and see, and later we throw some color on this. I can bring it in, change it a little bit with the black. Usually feminine features are a little softer, not quite so rocky looking. See my black pen does a little bit of the work there. Let's put him right in the little square, and just a little bit on one side it's dark. Maybe he's got dark blue shirt on. Let's try another one with a little cat. Let's pretend this one's a cat. We need to get a little cat nose, accouple of little of this. The cat's eyes are a bit on an angle. Although the eyes are round, it looks like they've got little kitty eyes, ears up here, and we have four cats at one time, I'm pretty good with cats. Still have one, buttons. Baby buttons is our cat. Let's bring it down a little bit in the middle here. There we go, little whiskers, and check that out. These are our watercolor thumbnails. First we do it on cheap paper, and then we've moved to a little better paper. I have a Sharpie here. The interesting thing is to get what we call a model. This'll be a little short person. The features are a head, a body slightly turned out, center line for legs, arms and hands, and from there, of course, using a fine point pen, is interesting because you can start to change a few things. You can add some hair. The fine point pen lets you do searching lines. You're looking for something. Looking for lines. There we go. Here's a quick little sketch, it could be a person, small person. I like these little characters right here. They are are really simple to draw. Some of you might be into illustration, let's try this one. They start with a face line like that. That's the line right there. Then what I've done is added another line here and scoop this back, and then brought in this shape right here. Left a space for the arm, and immediately put the other arm on the other side before I put the other part of the head dress. You can bring this up a bit if you didn't, it looks a little low, and then add that into the design of the clothes. It could be striped here, striped arm whatever, then we're going to extend this a bit, but I'm going to put the hand in. I don't really care about hands, just going to put a little shape like that and this other, I'm going to do a little shading there. Now, this is where your ink comes in handy. You can start to add designs on the clothes, thicken the arm, make it wider there if you want, have the arm coming out. Usually you are going to do the same on both sides. Once again, [inaudible] simple hand. I like the baggy pants. It could be from a movie scene, you could be designing a costume for some type of play, and simple feet, keep things simple, if you need to complicate, do it later. I like that. Of course a little bit of shading on this side, and those shading on this side. As far as an eye, I just shake a little eye in right there, good enough. Now, you can put your straight across or you could put it on an angle. I think I'll go with an angle, and then I'll divide it straight down here, and a couple of [inaudible]. I just got back from the interior. I think what I'll do is I'll select this one right here, because it's a beautiful lake, and I'm going to go horizontal and tell you a little bit about design. First of all, don't put it in the middle. What I'm talking about is the horizon line. Put it below the middle or above the middle, in this case, we have a line that goes below the middle. With any lake there's always a little bit of variation in the lighting, and there's our beach, just going to add a little bit of a jog in the beach there, add little texture, remember, these are going to be creatively water colored. There we go. Now, we're going to put a big shape here. This was near Paul Lake in the interior of BC. I just put in a big shape there, a big mountain. I'm going to throw in some inked lines here. Just to add some variations. I'm using my finger here, I hit the pen against the finger. It's a great little technique when you're inking. There we go, and I've added a little bit of texture there. Two little lines here for the bottom of the cloud, and then I throw in my one cloud here, and then another land form in the distance. Like that. I'm looking at this picture over here. I need another cloud coming down here, and also, I added a bit of rain coming down. There we go, that's it, it's done. I actually put my name on before I even paint it. There's one done and it didn't take too long, that's one we're going to creatively a watercolor. 4. Watercoloring Techniques That Work: We're going to take the brush and little water, which is always handy. Put your brush in the water and that primes the brush. Don't use a dry brush to start with. Prime the brush, the water goes up inside the ferrule the middle part so that the hairs are all wet. If you don't prime the brush, you'll get paint into the dry hairs and that it's harder to clean. Now I'm going to start with coloring. So I'm going to take some yellow. I will put a little bit over here and add just a drop more water to it. Now that I've added water to the paint and it's not too thick, its not too thin. I'm going to roll it on a piece of paper to get rid of the drips. I now have equivalent of a felt pen. The brush is going to be coloring. So I'll just hold it like a pencil. I'll even work it like a felt pen. Now what you will notice is that as the pink gets over to this side, it's dried out a bit and it's going to be lighter. Now I have less paint on my brush. The brush is dry. So I could put a dry brush on here, that's called dry brushing. That's when you have so little paint left on your brush it sounds scratchy. So this is your first exercise just with one loading of your brush. You are going to see how far you can go. If I think it's all gone. Now, it's gone. Now my brush is dry. I want to prime it again. Let's take another color. I'm going to take a little bit of the Alizarin crimson and my paint is a medium thickness. I can still see through it so it's transparent. We never want to use our watercolors so that you can't see through them. Not at least not in the beginning. Now, I have some red and it's full strength. This time what I'm going to do is I'm going to jab it on. The reason I'm jabbing it on is I want to show you a different kind of stroke. So just by padding the brush one direction like this, I'm just little jabs and that's called stippling. It's another way to get the paint on so that it's flat. Meaning a flat wash means that it's all the same. It's not dark in one area, and light in another. Now remember my brush is getting dryer on that side and I'll continue to this side using the little stroke, just one direction, just little, little strokes. You'll notice that one side of my paper is darker than the other. Now here comes your first secret to water coloring, let it dry. Now the brush still has some red on it. Now watch what I'm going to do here. I want a light color on the face. So I take just a little water on the brush to the drip. You'll see it, just there's a drip there. I just put the brush in the water and let the water absorb or wick into the brush. See how thin that is? Then I'm going to use the back and forth stroke from the side. See my fingers hand is stable. This is why we're working small pieces of paper. You will learn more about water colors using a small piece of paper. Now I'm going to leave the middle white. Second secret to water color, leave some white. What's that left a little white around the eyeball and this one? A little bit down here. Now that doesn't look like much. But that little bit of red has made a difference. That's to recap. We have the little pad stroke. We have the felt pen effect, that's using our finger like this and then we also have the stroking like that. Let's try another little trick. Let's move over to some blue. But this time, what we're going to do, is we're going to make sure our brushes clean. I'll go into big one. Let's learn another little secret, big space: big tool. Well I'm going to wet my big brush and I'm going to check and see if the brush is clean. Now, it doesn't look clean but that's from the phthalo blue, it always stains your brushes. But that brush is very clean. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put water on my painting, my little picture. Now what will happen is that the water will absorb into the paper. Notice I'm waiting a few minutes, a little more on. Now the water is going into the fibers of the paper and softening them. Because the fibers are soft, the effect will be soft. The paint will go in and spread very quickly. Now, wet my brush, I take a little phthalo blue. This is called phthalo blue. Phthalo is your most transparent blue. Meaning it will always look clean. It also makes your best greens. So watch, because this is wet and I'm keeping the paper flat. I'm going to get a little darker now, you will notice that all luck, see if more pigment, more dispersion. But look, it's not going everywhere. It's just coming in subtly on the side of the face. So I'm thinking that I will keep this part the dark side. There we go. Lets see how it's dispersing. Now, the longer you leave the wet paper, the less it will disperse. I am going to put one more little dot down here. I'm thinking, once you've done the white paper, you won't get it back. But I'm thinking I'll bring a little bit over his face as a shadow for the hair. Now I know we don't have blue skin, but we can change that. I'm going to go behind him also. There now it's spreading. Look at this spreading across lately. Now, how do I tell if it's dry? Take the back of your hand and if it's warm, it's dry, if it feels cool, it's still wet. Now this is very close to being bone dry. So I can use my little coloring, water coloring, stroke, see. Because the paper is just slightly damp, I have a hard edge here. How do I get rid of the hard edge? Here's another little trick. You won't get rid of that hard edge until you take another brush, a dry brush, and just helps it a little on the edge. By pouncing the edge, you'll be softening that hard edge. Now, depends on how dry the paper is. Another way to do it is come across, let's say, we come from this end, notice the hard edge here because the papers dry see and the brushes really dry. Now, if I want to. We'll, just dip into the water quickly, pat it, see how much blue is there and then just keep going across. Notice I'm just using flat paper. My paper is not tilted. So I'm not using gravity to make the water flow. Now you see that edge there, that was the hard edge because I've softened it with a little water. Just stipple, get some texture. This little stippled stroke is great for making smooth washes. Look how darker it is here now. Because that's wet I'm thinking, I'll take a little bit of this thicker paint and thin it a little. I think I'll drop a little bit in here. There we go. Now it's gone a little darker and then clean my brush off because the paper is wet. Now I've cleaned the paint off the brush. I can boss it over here a little bit. There we go. Now we have a dark to light, cool to warm. That's good. Our friend over here and look at how it's spread. 5. Developing Your Sketch: Let's make some brown for the cat. Then what we're going to do is we're going to learn a dry brush. I'll take a little yellow and I'll put it here. Now, one of the things I really think is very important is thinking a little bit when you're painting; red, yellow, blue. If we mix these two, it's obvious what we get. We get another color. That's why it's called a secondary color. The first colors were red, yellow, and blue, the secondary color is green. That's one of them. Clean the brush off. Now at the other end, I had blue and yellow and red. I'm going to bring a little red into the yellow, and you'll see I'm getting another secondary color which is orange. Now, I don't want to disturb these yet. Blue, green, yellow, orange. I'm going to keep the orange first. The brown is going to happen here in a minute. But I have orange here, and I'm going to give the cat a flat wash, leaving this for pink, these may be green, but the bulk of the cat is going to get a light orange. Now, listen to the sound of the dry paper. The brush is getting dry. Listen to that. Now my brush is dry. I'm going to show you the stroke. You have two fingers here and a thumb. Hey, you can do three, it doesn't matter, but the trick is to flick it very quickly but not push it down. That gives you a dry brush. It gives you texture for a fur, hair, grass, there. Look, nicely done. Look, pure orange, not so pure. Now my brush is all dried up. Here's the beginning of the dry brush. Let's mix the green and the orange, and the red, and there we are, we have a brown. Notice I didn't over mix. I just very carefully brought them together and let them mingle. Now, that would be called a green-brown. To make it more red-brown, we add little more red to the green, and now I have more of a red-brown. If I wanted it darker, I would pull more blue into it. So you're adjusting the three colors. Now, this one is going to start down here now, and we're coloring. It's getting drier, listen to it. Now, if you have a very cheap paper, you can't rub it like this very long. The paper will start to ball up in little balls, but we're doing pretty good with this so far. I'm going to take some of this orange or brown for the faces on to my people. There's my brown, and I want just a little bit so I'm going to dry my brush up on the paper. It is very important to have a little piece of paper. Now, I've loaded my brush and then I discharged most of the brush so that only a little paint is left. But the trick is very soft strokes. Leave that white section there. Look at that. They leave just a little bit of white there. See the little bit of white? Now, each time I go from the side to the front, it's going to get a little darker on the sides. Let's go with more of pink on this fellow. That would be my heritage, Scottish, Irish, little French. This time I just took lots of water and just tapped it in the red and I want to be careful we don't give them a sunburn. I'll check and see if it is. Remember, we put a lot of water on this. The reason I use the back of my hand is it doesn't have oil on it. It's pretty cool. I think we'll probably get a nice little spread here. Let's see. No, it's staying put and leave the white around the eyes. Those are very very thin. Now because that's wet, I can drop again now. This is called dropping in the paint. It might be a little stronger. There we go, yeah. I'll just tap it because the paper is wet. It'll stay in one place. Let's go over here and give some purple skin. Don't be afraid of colors, just use them. There is a painting by Matisse of his wife, who he loved dearly, and there's big green straight right down the middle of her nose. He was not afraid of color. Liberate your color by using it. Let's that dried now. Now, we're back to this one. Now, you can see that the orange would be good here. I'm going to make a cleaner world, just about that. Always clean your brush before you go into your paints. Then pull the paints from the wells or your cakes and put them up here to mix it. Here's my orange. I'm going to give this another coat of orange. Now, notice how I'm leaving a very light area around here. I don't want to cover everything. I'm going to go with a little darker orange down here. Oh yeah, that's looking nice. Now right underneath her pink mouth, I'm going to go a little darker. There we go. Let's give him an orange shirt. The little white showing there. Let's give her a little bit, or him on the side. Water coloring. It's just like coloring like watercolors can be used just like coloring pencils or felts. Now, I can continue this and put in green eyes. How would it put it in a really good green eyes? Well, if you want your eyes to really shine, leave a little bit of white. Notice, I've put in a little yellow. Clean my brush. Take a drop of blue, touch the green, the yellow with the blue. There we go. Clean off the brush. A little bit pink for the nose, little pink for the tongue. That's a good start for water coloring. You can easily be creative by not doing some big picture, getting frustrated. Because if I'm doing all these and just coloring them up, having a good time on a clipboard, I'm not so serious and I'm not so tense, and I can handle small areas. I'm just adding some dark accents now. Dark accents just bring your picture more into focus. They give your audience a little more to look at. A little bit of dark here and there will always bring your picture more into focus and create interest. So little dark. You can see I'm using this just like a felt pen. Playing around with my little drawings, I'm bound to come up with something I like. Just playing it or here's cowboy bill here. Just being really bold, not being afraid to add some color and see how did these watercolors work. 6. How To Transfer Your Drawing: These are just little landscape scenes I've memorized from traveling non-ferrous up in the mountains to the prairies. The landscapes just grow on you and you know what they looked like. This one here is my favorite, right here. I'll darken that with my pencil. Make sure you put something underneath or it will show right through. I can really see this one because it was done with a Sharpie. There's my pencil over the bottom, go to the back. Now, I've definitely covered the back of this. Now I'll just move it so it's in place. There we go. I'm just duplicating exactly what's here. I'm not changing anything. Once you start changing, you might as well do another one. It's totally different. I'm going over my drawing. I don't want to push the pencil too hard because it does mark the paper underneath. But I want a firm line. I don't want a bunch of little lines like this, little feathery lines. Don't draw feathery lots. Really just hold your breath and push it right across. That's the advantage of small, also is you can do finger drawing. You don't have to move your arm. You can aim from one end to the other. Now I'm going to check it just to make sure I got everything. I did. Mind you, I didn't leave a little place for the sailboat, but that's not a big deal. I have a proper eraser here. This is a Staedtler and the sailboat is going to be just peaking up here. So I just very gently erase a little spot. Now, some people blow on it. You can also have a brush. You can have a brush handy and just sweep it off like that. I'll just go and put in a little light triangle like that with a little mark underneath it. That's it. One boat in the right place. Now I'm going to ink my initial sketch. Remember to make your lines go from one place to another without stopping. That one dug into the paper there and made little dot which I like. So if you just let your sharpie sit for a minute, it will put a nice little accent line on it. Every time I do it I just put my hand away to take a look at it. Here's my three steam lines. These are my oblique lines, we call them. They are pointing into the picture. Now, you might want to put designs on the cup. I'm just going to leave it the way it is. Now, I know most sailboats probably have more than one little sail, but it's just a design. Notice I'm holding the pencil up straight. If I want to correct one of the lines of a field, maybe I could use a little bit of something there. I'll do that. But the pan is up straight, not on an angle. It tends to work better like that. Now here comes your mountains. It could be jagged If you wanted. This is the farther away mountain. I'm going to put five in there. Five is better than four. I want to make sure my horizon line goes through the little sailboat so that it looks like it's in perspective. Got little bumpy on that one. I'll just straighten it out with that second line. Across here, add a little bit of something there. I love dots. Dots are a great way to add texture to your picture, especially if you're doing something small. Don't do it too hard because if you do, you'll rough the watercolor paper up too much. But we're just getting rid of the pencil lines, so only the ink is staying. 7. Creative Effects With Watercoloring: Wet technique on one and the dry technique on the other. Now, notice I'm wetting all around the cup. All around it. This is good watercolor paper, so it's not going to buckle. I'm going to take what's called gray, now to get gray, all you need to do is mix the three colors together. There's a greenish gray, and I'm going to just call it this. Leave the steam white. There we go. I only put a little bit into the cup. There have given it a light gray wash. On white paper, I'm going to let that dry. Here's where subtlety is key. First thing you want to do is wet one side with water. After you've wet that side, wet this side, and leave the middle dry. Now, you can tell where it's dry by putting your head down on an angle and you can see it's reflecting in the light. One-half of the mug is wet, the other half is dry. Dry, wet. I guess the third. While that's just soaking in for a second, I'm going to put a little bit of wet up here for steam and I'm going to pull it right down into the wet part of the mug. This is dry, and this is dry, but it's wet coming right up to here. As I want that steam to come down beside the mug, it looks like steaming hot coffee. I take a little bit yellow, put it over here. A bit of a red, now touch it here so it doesn't get too wet. Touch it in here, and here. Now it won't be apparent right away. You have to wait for a moment while it sits in for a second. Let that sit in spreading a little bit here see. To get that smoky look, I need a bit of gray, and gray is easy. Little blue, little red, little bit yellow, so that just the dirty little colors in here. We'll do it. Now, it's green, so I don't want to green, so I'll add a little orange. Check it on here. It's still too green, add little red. Check it on here. Too brown, add little blue. Too green, add more red. Just keep adjusting until you find a light gray and there it is, a light gray. I might add a drop, a blue to it. There we go, turn this over. Add lots of water. Oh, look there we are, and I just rub it into there. Then take my water, soften the edge all around. Here's where you can do what's called a blot. Want to get rid of some of this here, just take the side of a paper towel, press it down. Add little blot up, the extra paint there. There we go. I think I'll drop a little more in. Now I get the paint, the little sides of the cup shiny. There's still a little bit wet, so I clean off my brush. Now it's wet, just wet, and I tap the edges, and leave just one little tiny white stripe in the middle. I suppose, I should get some nice dark brown coffee in there. I'll take some of the orange and add little blue to it. The rich color it in here. Oops. Now, if it bleeds like that, take a little towel, tap it, get rid of some of the water. Of course, it's all about waiting for the right time. I liked that little bleed there. I'm going to leave that. I'm going to take a blue background here, right there, so a little blue there. I'm going to come in with my brush. I see the puddle there. If I want to get rid of it, just tap piece of paper, and then coming up beside this team, there's a white mark there. I don't want to touch that, I'm going to leave that white. Inside the mug, a little touching blue over on this side are too close. There's the steam coming up, dry brush over there. I'm going to darken it just one more touching blue in here to make it quite darks, see the tapping stroke. Here we go. Let it dry. Then come underneath and a little bit of water, let that blue bleed down to make a light gray at the bottom. Well, you notice the mug is starting to stand out now. Depending on how long you want to be here, the orange has come down into the blue of it for a reflection. I might even wet that little more. You see this white section here, take my rug, and lift just tap it off a bit, add a little more blue and make a reflective surface here. Of course, the edge is soft, so soften with water. This principle of softening and painting with watercoloring, you can do it with flowers, anything you want. Now, the reflection in here, let's get a little more orange into the cup. Just tap it in the bottom seen, and just a little bit in there. There we go. Think that blue, I'll bring it over a little more. I could keep going adding more darkening and lightening and darkening and enlightening. See, there's the thicker blue. I might even get my fine brush in here to get in the handle, see. I'm sure it has a point on it, touch it. There we go. Then I use the tapping here. Then I get a little bit tapped in, and I'll clean off my brush, so is just water on it. Then faded up, so it's graded wash. Now, you see my steam is starting to show up more. Just tapping it up there. Now, obviously I need a little pinch over here, so I think I'll use my little brush over here. Put in a small. Hey, let me just put in one good dark spot in here. Look how dark we can get. You just tapping it in. If you want really dark, just keep adding the color and letting it dry. Once again, now, I'm going to just keep going and going here. I'm going to add some more to the mug, a little bit in here. With the little brush, clean it off, and then just use the brush to move it up. Soften the edge, it's all about softening edges. I can get this mug looking quite shiny, just by following this little rule. Add a little paint on, let it dry. My coffee darker here, like [inaudible] nice and dark, dark and rich. Here's coming along. You just keep going back and forth this little paintings, and you just coloring with the pencil or felt, that's why we call it watercoloring. I have blue on this brush and nothing on this brush. I'm just bringing that steam in. I've only done this is the first little drawing of this. I might leave these black marks out next time, so I can really get a good steam coming up from the cup. Just because you've tried something once and you get a fairly good idea, these are small little pictures. You can see that I probably could develop this into a fine little picture, that brown probably not exactly what I want there, so I'm going to lift it. Let's think our watercolor since they do lift, since you wet it. Take your paper towel, touch it. There it's starting to look more like steam coming up. But literally dark spot in there this time. Get a little bolder now, maybe I'll go over those marks, there we go. See how it's starting to show up, put a couple more in here. Couple of strokes down here. When that's dry, I could add yellow over it to turn it green. There we go. We're getting some nice effect in here, a steam effect. 8. Dry Method Watercoloring: So I take my blue, role my brush in the blue, and I'm going to take a very easy way of doing it. Just try to pretend that this is like a felt pen. Have I lifted my brush yet? No. Coming over to this side. Now notice, I haven't lifted my brush. The paint is still going on, but it's getting a little dry. So I'll quickly tap into the water, and you'll see that it spreads again. Now I want to flat wash. So I started here, it's darker and it's lighter here, but the paper's wet. So I can once again put a little paint into the wet part of the paper. This is drying down here. So just add a little water into it you. So if you're quick enough, you can put the paint on quite thick like that without water underneath it and then add water to it, and you'll get a fairly flat wash. If you want to be more realistic, dark at the top, light at the bottom. The clouds, I'm going to leave them white, and my mountains, I'll do a little green on the mountains. Notice that I'm going to come up to this edge with the brush. Very difficult. It's easier if you point the edge, point your brush at the edge of your painting. So keeping the brush up high is a good way to do that. Now, I'm going to let that sky, got to stay away from it because it'll bleed. I'm going to put a little bit of the green in the water and hop over my boat. Notice, I'm not being fussy here at all. Clean off my brush. Leave that white spot there and a little bit of orange, brown for the beach. Leave the boat white and a little touch to the clouds. What I'll do is I'll take a little water on the clouds right there. Little water on this cloud, not everywhere. Just to. Oh, that's great. Look at that blue, see, happy accident. I think I'll do that again here. See if I can put, oh, look at that. That's nice. With one little drop of red, very light into the middle of the clouds and then let it dry. Pinch of blue in the water, just to cool it up. We're going to make this mountain darker than that one. That's just a small adjustment simply by tapping in. There's the tap stroke again, while the papers wet, tapping in a little texture. 9. Character illustration: This is card stock paper. You can get 100 sheets for about $9. It's okay to paint on it as long as you know what to do. So we're going to transfer this little drawing. So the first thing I want to do, like I said, is get the back of it totally covered with pencil. So there is my little person. I'm going to put on card stock paper and tape it. One of the things that I like are these old cartridge pens or fountain pens. This is a Shaffer, really simple. You just unscrew this and load it with permanent ink. These pens don't work too well when you're inking on watercolor paper because they get clogged up. So all I have to do is join my lines and that's the charm of this little drawing, is the simple shapes. Once I've done it with this ink, I can erase the pencil lines if I wish. Notice I haven't done anything very fancy on the face, I've kept it very simple. As I'm drawing, I'm moving my hand and I'm aiming from one place to another. So if you don't draw well on all the different angles, you might want to turn your paper like this. Just keep turning it and turning it. I find I can draw from different angles, so it's no problem for me. So here's the top of the shoulder and here's the arm. I'm going to flare out the arm a bit, like this. That will sort of match the legs also. Notice I don't get fussy with the hands. I keep them very simple. I'm doing each section with my ink. Now for this one, I might switch over to a Sharpie now. I think I'll get a ultra-fine tip Sharpie. Notice I'm not rubbing it, I'm just using lines to fill it in. I might put some on the bottom of the feet. Just doing a little black inking here and there adding a design. Now, this is a very simple character. I think I will leave this on [inaudible] here too. So I could do all things here. I'm going to add two lines here because this one matches up with the end of the sleeve. There. I like that. I think one at the top too. 10. Watercoloring Your Character: Well, this is dry now. I can take my staedtler eraser and take off any pencil lines I want. Brush it off. Now this is the card stock paper, the waterproof ink. Card stock paper isn't sized, which means there isn't any alum in it. The paint is just going to go exactly where we put it. Let's bring our little system together here. Small brush if you feel more comfortable, even smaller. So long as your brush has a good point on it. So always prime the brush, tap it so it doesn't drip. Let's take a little yellow here. It's a bright yellow, probably an AZO yellow, and we'll put some yellow one here. Notice the paper absorbs the paint right away and the ink isn't bleeding. Look out a little paint I've used and how it's going into the paper very quickly. Next, clean my brush. It'll take the yellow off. Let's take a little bit of the red or light pink. Now I'm going to put it on the face. The hands. Go. I'll take a little blue. You can use any color you want at home when you're doing. But notice, I'm not using very much water, just a little water holding the brush on the feral. That's the metal part. Now I'm going to clean the brush again and I'll take a little bit of the Alizarin and let's make some violet, or commonly known as purple. Remember it's a little droopy. So it's good to have your little piece of paper there. I'm going to go over this. I'm just not really being too fussy with what colors are used. I'm putting on flat washes. So I'm just putting on flat colors, meaning they're not dark at one end and light at the other. They're just flat. But because it's a little wet now, I can tap in using a little tap stroke. I can darken areas. This is great if you're doing flowers or fashion design. You can do small pictures. Now I can go through the entire picture using little bits of paint, just a little thicker see. But not to wet. The wetness, there we go. It's less water. When you use less water, you will get darker paint. So when your water coloring, less water means darker paint. But you never want the paint to be pasty. It has to still flow. So there's my first coat. Now remember I'm using a very inexpensive card stock paper. You don't always have to use very expensive watercolor paper. You may not have any near you. You're going to suit the technique to the type of paper you have. If you have inexpensive paper like this, then just do small pictures. Be careful that you don't rub the paper too much. Okay, so I'm going to just keep doing that over and over. Let's just add a little effect here. I want to show you what happens when you put a lot of water on this type of paper. Here's my fairly large brush. What I wanna do is take one side. Notice I'm not wedding the actual drawing. I'm just whetting beside it. Now this paper is heavy enough so that I can do maybe this one time. I'll take a little bit of, oh I don't know let's see. Let's do red. I have a little dirty red here. I just go like this. Just drop it in. C. I don't want to rub with the paper. If I rub the paper, it's going to damage the surface. That's why this paper, just be very gentle with it. See how it went right in. Once you've touched it. It will not change. The paper, absorbs it. You know, if you're doing, let's say pansies. This is a perfect type of paper file. Papers starting to buckle a little. I'm going to add a little bit on this side and some water and fan it out. There we go. I would like it a little darker at one end, so I'm going to darken a little word there. You see with unsized paper, it just soaks in, keeps soaking in. Asian papers will do this. They're unsized and if you can get your hands on some great for this technique. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you soon. 11. 7 Minute Watercoloring: So many ways to get feeling artistic. This is with a regular Sharpie. I'm going to actually do exactly what I did there. I like these little making a frame which you can cut off later if you want, and then I've put in my hole and my circle. Take a minute and put in my pears, which is an interesting shape. I like drawing pears. Put little thing at the top there. Couple little shadings on here. Something down in the hole maybe showing their dark mark there. Another one on the edge, and I'm just having a good time, not getting too serious with it. Leaving some edges. Putting in a table and I think a few little marks like that, I like this vertical, throwing a few vertical lines down like that. There we go, and some darker areas here. Shade a little down there, there we go, little bowl of fruit. Let's follow the procedure. We got our water, our brush, we have our paints. It's a matter of fully watercoloring. Put on some yellow onto my brush. It's not too thick, it's not too thin. Put a little bit on here, a little bit on here, we'll make that a plumber something to go with the yellow, and leave a little white spots somewhere. See, we are now using a little water to move it around. Asking myself, well, I'll just put a little yellow here and yellow there, and I'm coloring with my watercolors. Then I take a little bit of blue and I'm going to put that on my plum, leave a little white mark. Always leave a little white. Even if it touches this, like a little green into the plum, into the pair is fine. Now anywhere where it's going to be green make it blue, anywhere where it's going to be violet make it blue, might be another plumbed down in there, and let's take the bowl dark on one side, make it halfway, clean off the brush and add water so that you get dark on one side, white on the other. Now, there's two things you can do here. You can let the blue dry or you can select a little bit of this alizarin crimson and drop it in there and see. You'll get a different color effect when you drop color in, if you let it dry and then glaze over it. It won't look like that when it's dry. We'll just let it sit for a while and see what happens. Let's get some orange going. How are we going to get some orange going, take a little bit of red and make sure it's not too wet, and we're going over this, which is going to be my orange. Once it dries and then I just add more yellow, I'm going to put some of the red on here for my bowl, and let it just mix right into the blue a little bit, put down here. It's not really difficult when doing, I'm keeping things clean, drop a little in there for the green and I'm gradually darkening colors. I think we'll go with another color yellow on the background, coloring yellow here. Little bit of purple getting in there, nothing wrong with that. A little bit more to see, that's called the bleed. Bleeding is good because it gives a little accidents here and there. Don't be afraid of a little bleeding on your picture. See the tab stroke. Nice. Look, that it's. Let that sit for a while, and I could just code it, give it more yellow, put the orange, and I haven't even started shaping or modeling things All I've done is put in a few colors here in there. Watercoloring. Make some little pictures. Pretend it's like a felt pen or colored pencil and just color it in.