Calligraphy x Watercolor: Brush Techniques For Colorful Lettering

1. Class Preview: Looking for a way to add color and dimension to your brush calligraphy, look no further than watercolor. I'm can track the calligrapher behind flaw letters. In this intermediate course, I'm going to teach you how to create some seriously stunning script using watercolors. In this class, you'll learn what to look for in supplies, how to control your brush using pressure, angle, grip, movement, and water, how to script the ten basic strokes and lower case alphabet, different watercolor blending techniques, ways to use your new found watercolor calligraphy skills, and so much more. Because this is an intermediate class, I highly recommend you first take my introduction to modern brush calligraphy course. If you're ready to give your brush calligraphy a very colorful makeover, grab your brushes, your favorite watercolor set, and I'll meet you in class. 2. Intro & Supplies: Before we get started, you're going to want to gather up all of your supplies. First, you'll need watercolor paper. I am using canson watercolor paper. I love this for practice because it's relatively inexpensive. It's also pretty good for calligraphy because it's relatively smooth for a watercolor paper. Watercolor paper is always going to have some tooth to it, but this is pretty smooth and we don't want super textured paper when we're doing watercolor calligraphy. This is the son Excel. Seven by ten is just a cold pressed paper, you could get this at Michael's or most art supply stores. But again, what you want to look for is that it's watercolor paper and that it doesn't have a heavy textured tooth. You're also going to want some round brushes. Now, some watercolor calligraphers use liner brushes. That's totally fine. But for this class, I'm going to use round brushes just because that's what I prefer. I have a bunch of different sizes here. But honestly, the ones I use the most often are the number one and the number is zero. Let me find the zero here. Yeah, the one and the zero or sometimes the two are mostly what I use, but I have a few bigger ones and a few smaller ones here as well. Now, another option for a brush and this is totally optional is the quash water brush. Something like this, again, it's a round brush and that it comes to a point there, so it acts like a round brush rather than a liner brush, and you can see the bottom screws off and you can fill this with water. I can also fill it with pigment as well, if that's what you want to do. Again, this is totally optional. I don't typically use these, but there are a couple techniques that this can be really fun in. Beyond the paper and the brushes. Of course, you're going to need watercolor. I have a couple different types of watercolor I'll be using for this class. First, this is a traditional pan set, and this is actually a guash. Guash is a very opaque watercolor works really well for watercolor calligraphy. I'm also going to be using some tube calligraphy, tube water colors. These tube watercolors, you can see just like they sound like they come in a tube, you're going to add some water to them. This is Faber Castle, but there's lots of different brands out there. If you're using the tubes, you'll also want a palette. You can use the palette to for any of the water colors, but it's especially important when you're using the tube watercolors. My other favorite watercolor to use watercolor calligraphy is this concentrated liquid watercolor. My favorite brand is doctor P H Martins, but there's two different kinds. I want to explain to you what the difference between the two is. The one that's just called radiant concentrated watercolor, It's not as light fast. That's not great for a finished work of art. This works really well for envelopes or cards or things that don't necessarily need to stand the test of time. If you're doing a finished art piece, especially one that'll be hanging in a room near a window where it will receive a lot of light, you want to use the doctor PH Martin's hydrous version. The hydrous version is much more light fast, so it won't fade in the sunshine. You'll also want some water. I put mine in a mug. You can see this one is well worn, but be warned. Make sure you don't put it next to a coffee mug or a tea mug. I have definitely put my brush in a cup of coffee before. Just be careful there. I also like to use a spritzer. This is actually a plant spritz, but I don't really have much of a green thumb, so I use it for water color. This is really great when you're using the pans. You can see these are really dried out. I give it a little bit of spritz and that helps loosen it up a bit. Okay. You'll also want to have on hand just a little towel or a paper towel or a rag to wash your brushes off with. As always in calligraphy classes, a pencil and eraser and ruler are also great to have on hand, especially if you want to sketch out some guidelines. But again, not necessary. Now, one last thing you're going to need for this class that I can't exactly hold in my hand and show you is you really need to have taken my introduction to modern brush calligraphy course. I highly recommend you take that before you take this class. The truth is watercolor calligraphy is very similar. To the brush pen Cligraphy but it is a much more intermediate technique. These brushes are a little trickier to use. If you have the foundation of brush Cligraphy with the markers, it's going to help you tremendously. Now, we will go over some calligraphy basics in this class, but not in as great of detail as we do in the introductory class. If you haven't taken that class yet or you don't have any background knowledge of brush Cliigraphy, I highly recommend you take that. If, however, you've taken that class or you have a background and brush calligraphy, then go ahead and gather your supplies, and I'll meet you in the next video. 3. Applying Pressure: Before we begin actually scripting with our brushes, I first want to share how you can best control your brush and get it to do exactly what you want it to do. If you've taken my brush pen class, which, again, I hope you have, then lots of this is going to seem familiar. The truth is the rules for brush pen and watercolor calligraphy are pretty much the same. But it's just a little bit different in practice, since a watercolor brush is so much more flexible and fluid than a brush pen. Let's chat first about pressure. Just like in standard calligraphy, the hallmark of watercolor calligraphy is the presence of thin and thick lines. The way that we achieve this variation in line thickness is by adjusting the amount of pressure that we apply while we're scripting. Anytime we're moving the brush up and away from us or anytime we're moving the brush horizontally, we are going to be applying a very light amount of pressure. When we apply a light amount of pressure, we have a thinner line. Conversely, anytime we're bringing the brush down and toward us, we're going to apply some pressure and get a thicker line. Now notice I have said, apply some pressure. Not as much pressure as we can, and I'll talk about that a bit in a minute. Now, the reason for these changes, it's not magic. It's not that somehow magically pressing lighter results in a thinner line. The reason that pressure changes the thickness is because it changes how much of the brush is touching the paper at one time. I'm using a liquid concentrated water color here. Now, if I use a very light amount of pressure, then the only thing that's touching the paper, the only part of the brush touching the paper is the very tip of the brush. Since only the tip of the brush is touching, we get a thinner line, see? No magic. Now conversely, if we apply a little bit of pressure that brush bends and when that brush bends, more of it is touching the paper because more of it is touching the paper, we get that thicker line. Now, you notice that I said, we're not going to push as hard as we can. In the brush pen classes, I always say, push as hard as you can to get that really thick line. Well, because this brush is so much more flexible, if I push as hard as I can, I'm going to get something like this. We don't want that. We don't want that. You need a much lighter touch. Again, this is one of those things that's easy in theory. Less pressure, fin line, more pressure thick line. But it's a little bit trickier in practice, especially if you're used to a brush pen because this brush is more flexible. You're going to want to use a much lighter touch than you would use for your brush pen. What that means is any flinching can adjust your pressure and give you a thicker line. It does require a little bit of a light touch and I'm going to be honest, a lot more patients. You need a lighter touch to get the thin line and you don't need as heavy pressure to get that thick line. Go ahead and give this a try. See how it feels. Do a few thin upstrokes, making sure you're using the lightest amount of pressure possible. Only the tip of that brush is touching, and then do some thicker downstrokes applying just a little bit of pressure. You can adjust that pressure, try different thicknesses, see how it feels. This is a time for experimenting. Go ahead and experiment, play around with the pressure, and I'll see you in the next video. 4. Angle & Grip: Like I said in the last video, whether you get a thin line or a thick line isn't magic. It's all about how much of the brush is touching the paper at one time. You get those changes by pressure. Yes, but angle and grip are also important. Now by angle, I don't mean the angle of your letters, I mean the angle at which your brush hits the paper. For best practice is you want your brush to hit the paper at about a 45 degree angle. That's not straight up and down or totally horizontal, instead that is right in the middle. How do you know if you're at 45 degrees. Do you need to bust out the protractor? I'm happy to report. No, you do not because I don't even think I would know where to get a protractor. No, you don't need a protractor. Instead, it's all about where you grip your brush. To get that 45 degree angle, you're actually going to grip your brush about an inch and a half to 2 " from where the bristles meet the brush. You're going to hold it back a little bit further than you would hold back a regular pen or anything like that. By holding it back at this angle, it allows you to be able to make both the thin lines and the thick lines without adjusting the position of your brush. With my grip back an inch and a half to 2 ", I can get those thin lines and with just a little bit of pressure adjustment, get those thick lines. Well, now, there's a caveat here. In brush pen, when we're talking about a brush pen, that 45 degree angle is extremely important because the brush pen is not as flexible and so we need to push as hard as we can in order to get that thicker line to have enough line variation. But because these are so flexible, we don't actually need to push that hard to get the change in line thickness if you recall. You can definitely hold it back at a half to 2 " to get that 45 degree angle, or you can fudge those numbers a bit and scoot your grip up so that I've seen it as high as 20 degrees. I have seen some very scaled watercolor calligraphers hold their brush much closer to the bottom. That's because we don't need to push as hard as we can to get that thicker line. Let's give it a shot. I'm going to hold my grip a little bit lower actually a lot lower, my brush touches the paper at about 20 degrees instead of 45. I'm going to do my thin upstrokes. Now you'll notice as you do this, you might feel like, Hey, I have a lot more I have a lot more control over this brush, making those thin lines a whole lot easier. Then when you apply pressure to get the thick line, because we don't need to apply as much as we possibly can. Those are still beautiful thick lines, even though our angle is pretty high up. This is going to come down to personal preference. For me, I much prefer to hold my brush back at 1.5 to 2 " back to get the 45 degree angle. That is just more comfortable for me, but maybe for you. It's more comfortable to hold it lower. Try both. There I just tried 45 degrees, and I'm going to lower it, and I'm going to try 20 degrees. Okay. Both work. It's really just comes down to a personal preference. You'll notice I get a little bit finer point here. If I'm doing really detailed work, that is a time when I do lower my grip a little bit to make my angle just a bit higher. Experiment with this. See what works best for you. Try it at 45 degrees first and then slowly lower your grip bit by bit by bit until you get as high as 20 degrees. That would be gripping it pretty close to where the brushes meet the barrel. Experiment, give it a shot, see what works best for you and I'll see you in the next video. 5. Brush Movement: So now we understand pressure, angle and grip when it comes to our brush. Now let's talk about movement. So when we move our brush, we are going to use our wrist and our fingers a little bit, but we don't want to totally rely on them. That's because if we do, we have a really small range of motion. I'm just using my wrist and my fingers, my range of motion is very small. Instead, I want to use my shoulder and my elbow to make these big movements. How do we do that? Well, first, you want to think of your hand, your wrist, your forearm is one solid unit that your elbow and shoulders are going to guide around. Now, to be able to glide across the page, your hand can't be super duper firmly planted. It needs to be able to glide, like an air hockey puck. With your hand on the paper, you don't want to float it. It does need to be on the paper. We start from one side. Use your shoulder and elbow to guide that forearm hand and wrist all the way across the page. Now, it might feel a little funny. We aren't used to handwriting like this. If you're like me and you're not used to scripting on a notebook and your hand falls off, you might be a little shaky at the end there, that's all. Keep that hand planted on the paper, but allow it to glide. You don't want it so firmly planted that you can't move it. Use that shoulder and elbow to really push across the page. Again, you will use your wrist, you will use your fingers, but those big movements really need to come from your shoulder and elbow. Keep practicing this. Like I said, this is one of those things that feels a little funny at first. Give it a shot. Once you feel comfortable with that movement, I'll see you in the next video to talk about water. 6. Water Control: Hand in hand with movement is water control. By water control, I mean the amount of water that you have in your paint, the amount of water that you have on your brush. The amount of water that you're using is really going to affect the flow of the paint. It's going to affect how long you can script for. It's going to affect texture. Water is super important. To demonstrate that, I'm actually going to move over to my pan guash. Remember, guash is the type of water color, but it's much more opaque. That makes it really great for calligraphy. So now, because the pan water colors start out dry or the pan wash in my case start out dry, you want to moisten it. I have used my spritzer here, and I have sprayed down my color. Then I'm going to add drop fools of water into it. It's always best to start with less water because it's easier to add more than it is to take some away. I've added some water here and now I'm going to see how it flows. You can see here, purposefully added not quite enough water. You can see how it's pretty textured here. Now that's not too bad. But that's not what I want. I want it to flow really nicely off my brush. I need to add a bit more water to help it flow to reduce the amount of texture textured there. There we go. That's what I wanted. It might be a little tricky to tell might be a little tricky to tell on the video, but these are much more texture. The first one more so, this one a little less, and this one flows nice and smooth. We have nice crisp edges here, no feathering. We have a really beautiful flow. You can see how I just had to experiment a little bit to get the right amount of water. Okay. Now, can you add too much water? Yes, you absolutely can add too much water. If you add too much water, your lines won't be maybe as fine as you want them to be because if you're using watercolor paper, you really shouldn't have an issue with bleeding, but it can happen. You'll know you have too much water. Again, if your lines aren't quite as fine as you are running them to be even though you're applying a very light amount of pressure or you have standing puddles on the page. Now, because we are moving horizontally here, we're not applying very much pressure. We're not expelling that much water or pigment. I'm going to show you an example of what it would look like if we were scripting with downstrokes as well. We'll just do some V shapes here. I want you to pay attention to the saturation, the tone of our color as we go. You can see as we move across the page here. It's becoming less and less saturated, but we still have enough water, so it's still it's still flowing. Now this is one of the beautiful things about water color, is that we get this lovely variation in tone. Now the more water that you add, the more diluted that pigment is going to be. Just keep that in mind. That's one of the reasons I love Guash because Guash is opaque. Even if you add plenty of water, it is still very opaque and easy to read and see, which is important when you're doing calligraphy. Experiment with this as well. See how adding different amounts of water affects the flow of this, affects how long your pigment lasts. How quickly it fades, how quickly you get that color change. Now, in this case, I didn't have quite enough water to keep going. You can see I run out of water a little bit. Now it's so flowing, but I have these textured edges. The water again, is very important for the flow, but also important in how pigmented you have there. Let me actually just add a ton of water so you can see what it would look like. If we were very diluted from the beginning. So there you can see an example that's probably too diluted because it fades extremely quickly. That's maybe a little bit too much water. I'm just going to shift that water around a bit. There we go. Much better. Water is one of those things that you just really need to get a feel for, you need to play around with. You'll know you have enough water when your paint is flowing out smoothly. You don't have any textured edges. You'll know you have too much water if the pigment is super diluted in the beginning and doesn't last very long. That's an indication you probably have a little too much water. Experiment with that. All of those things together, our pressure, our angle, our grip, our movement, and our water control. That's what's going to help you control this brush and get it to do what you want. Now that we know how to control this brush, we're going to move on to the ten basic strokes. 7. 10 Basic Strokes: Now that we know how to control our brush with pressure, angle, grip, movement, and water. Now I'm going to show you the ten basic calligraphy strokes. Again, this will be familiar from my introduction to modern brush calligraphy course, but I do think it's important to practice this now with our newfound skills with this brush because just like the other things feel different, this feels different with the brush and water color as well. I've switched back to the concentrated watercolor. Concentrated liquid water color, simply because that requires less fiddling with water. You can just watch me do the script instead of watching me fiddle with getting the consistency. Let's start first with a thin upstroke. We are going to do the very lightest touch possible and push up in a thin hair line. Again, make sure just the very tip of the brush is touching the paper, very light touch and push up Now, this is tricky. Because it requires such a light touch, you might find yourself with some shaky lines. That's all. This all comes down to practice. You can see how slowly I'm moving there. Remember two, you can also lower your grip and see how that helps you. Perhaps this is more comfortable for you. Now, for me, like I said, I'm much more comfortable with my grip back here, as you can see from that one is a little bit wonky. But give it a try, see if maybe lowering that grip a little helps you out. Our next basic stroke is the thick do stroke. We're going to apply some pressure, not a lot, not as much as we can, just some and pull down. Now when we get to the baseline, we're going to pause and lift our brush up. We pause so we get that nice square bottom. Again, add some pressure, pull down. Square at the bottom. Now, it's really important to keep your pressure consistent as you are pulling down. If you adjust your pressure, you could end up with something like this. Probably not that dramatic. But the point is because this brush is so flexible, any flinch will adjust your pressure. Keep the pressure consistent and pull down. Okay. Next, we have our horseshoe. For the horseshoe, you're going to start with a thin hair line up and then gradually add pressure and square at the bottom. That gradual add of pressure is really important, so we get around the top outside, but also on the inside. If we move too quickly, we risk having a little stair step on the inside. The brush can do what I call snapping back where if you adjust it too quickly, it wants to go back to this original shape. When you're applying pressure, it's splayed, and if it snaps back too quickly, you can end up with this little stair step. That's more of a problem when you're going from heavy pressure to light pressure, but it can still happen here. Again, the light pressure up gradually add and pull down. The next basic stroke is the U shape. This is one where that snapback can happen. You're going to start with some pressure, when you get to the base sine gradually release that pressure and push up. Again, the gradual race is important, so you get that nice rounded bottom. I was a little thick there. Got a little excited. That's all right. Again, really slow release of pressure so you don't get a stairstep on the inside of your letter. Okay. Probably aging myself here, but I say snapback. The song I keep hearing in my head is snapbacks and tattoos, which it's a great song, but now it's stuck in my head. Now it's stuck in your head. I'm so sorry for that. Our next basic stroke is the V shape. For the V shape, you're going to start with a thin hair line up. Gradually add pressure. Gradually release it and sweep up. Then hair line up. Gradually add pressure, gradually release it and sweep up. One more time, Tin hair line up. Gradually add pressure, gradually release, and sweep up. Our next basic stroke is the S shape. Now, I'm not going to lie. This one has a little bit trickier with the bristles because you are push to the left. Whatever you are pushing horizontally to the left, you run the risk of those bristles splaying out. You want to make sure your touch here is very light. With a very light touch, you are going to move to the and then gradually add pressure and then gradually release it and move left. Now, this bottom move to the left is a little easier because again, our bristles are already splayed out and we're just letting them go back together. They want to go back together, so that's a little easier. This is a little trickier at the beginning. Again, the trick there is just to have an incredibly light touch. And then start adding pressure and pull down. You might have noticed there, it did snap a little bit. It was using a very light amount of pressure, but apparently not quite light enough. There we go. This is one of those strokes that I find to be a little trickier with the brush than it is with the brush pen. Our next basic stroke is the shape. For the shape, we're going to start on the on the right side, with a thin hair line up. Gradually add pressure, gradually release it, sweep up meet the hair line, but then keep moving. Why do I keep moving? Well, I keep moving to blend those edges. With the concentrated water color, it's not as big of an issue. Well, let me go ahead and add a little bit of water to this so you can see. What can happen is you can lose some of the pigment there and so as it fades, then you have a hard more pigmented edge meeting the faded edge, and it's not blended really well. So By continuing to sweep up, we can blend those edges together. There was an example where it was going to be a very sharp edge, but I kept moving and so I blended those edges together. Tin hair line, gradually add pressure, gradually release it, sweep, blend those edges together. Okay. Up next, we have the upward loop. For the upward loop, you're going to do a thin hair line up, gradually add pressure, gradually release. Thin hair line. Gradually add pressure. Gradually release. Do got one more time. Tin hair line. Gradually gradually release. Next, we have our downward loop. For the downward loop, we're going to start with heavy pressure and then gradually release the pressure, let that brush go back to a point and then sweep up. You can see I had a little bit of a textured edge here. My pressure was a little bit off. Tilt my paper just a little bit more. Again, we're going to start with a thick down stroke. Gradually release that pressure, let that brush get back to the fine point and then twist up or sweep up brother. By letting that brush go back together. Getting back to that fine point, we get that nice rounded bottom. Again, if you do it too quickly, I tried to get a stair step there. I didn't quite, but you can get a stair step in there if you do it too quickly. Okay. Our last basic stroke is the dot and whisker or the loop and whisker. For this stroke, you're just going to apply pressure and then release it as you sweep out to the right. Apply pressure, pull down and release it as you sweep to the right. You can try a loop and whisker. For the loop and whisker, you're going to do a thin hair line up. Gradually add pressure as you pull down into that loop and then release it as you sweep out. Tin hair line up, gradually add pressure as you make a loop and then sweep it out. And there you have it. Those are the ten basic strokes. Let's do them all together now. We have our thin hair line up using the lightest touch possible. Mine was a little shaky there. That's okay. Let's do it again. Tin hair line better. Now we'll do a thick down stroke. Remember, just a bit of pressure, not as much as you can do, just a bit square at the bottom. Horseshoe thin hair line up. Gradually add pressure, square the bottom. U shape thick downstroke, gradually release that pressure and push up. V shape, pin hair line up. Gradually, add pressure, gradually release, sweep up. My gradual added pressure was a little off there, so fudge it a little bit. That's okay. Nobody will know. Great thing about water color. It's wet and it blends. Then we have our shape, very light touch for that thin line moving left, gradually add pressure, gradually release it. Shape, thin hair line up, gradually add pressure, gradually release, sweep up when you meet the hair line, keep going through to blend the edges. Upward loop, thin hair line up. Gradually, add pressure, gradually release. Downward loop, we'll start with heavy pressure. Let that brush go back together as you lean off the pressure and sweep up. Then finally, a dot and whisker, apply pressure, sweep to the right while you release it, or loop and whisker, Tin hair line up, gradually add pressure and then release it as you sweep out to the right. Those are your ten basic strokes. Now remember, these are the building blocks of the lower case alphabet. By understanding these, it's going to help you create your lower case alphabet. Now, because this is an intermediate class, we are not going to do a stroke by stroke, breakdown of the lower case alphabet, but you can see a review of the alphabet in the next video. 8. Lowercase Alphabet Review: Like I said in the beginning, this is an intermediate skills level class. Because of that, we're not going to be doing a stroke by stroke breakdown of the lowercase alphabet. If you would like a stroke by stroke breakdown of each letter, you can go back to the introduction to modern brush Caligraphy course. That being said, a little recap is never a bad thing. I am going to script the lowercase alphabet now in watercolor. If there's any letter that you're struggling with, you're not quite sure how to get it, you could always come back to this and find the letter and give it a watch to see exactly how I do it. Because you probably don't want to hear me yammering on this whole time. I'm going to play a little music. I am going to keep the speed the same, I'm going to keep it natural. I'm not going to speed it up just so you can see exactly how it's done. Without any further ado, here is the lower case alphabet and watercolor calligraphy. 9. Blending Watercolors: Now we are going to talk about blending our water color. I've gone ahead and I'm using a tube water color for this. I've added a little bit of paint and then I've added water in to thin it out. I've just played around with the consistency until I've got it the way I want it. Now, in order for the watercolor to blend, it needs to be pretty watery and that looks good there. To blend the watercolor, when you're using the same color, it's pretty simple. The key is though that it needs to be very watery, because without that water, we're not going to get the blending. Let's just give this a try. I'm just going to do these V shapes. On my way up here, it's still plenty of water. I'm going to quickly pick up some more. The quickness is because we do want it to flow and you have to act while everything is still wet. If you wait too long and it's dry, it won't blend very well. Okay. So you can see, I just pick up some more paint. I like to start kind of in the middle of the upstroke there. Just sort of drag the paint up. Okay. And then keep going. Now, if it's not blending. This line here, you can see it's blending just a little bit slowly, same over here. When I first put it down, I was like, I don't know if that's going to work, but you have to trust the process. If as long as it's still wet, that water color will blend. Now you can help it along a little bit. I see here at the edge is just a little bit sharp. I'm just going to add a little water there, not too much, just to even it out, more water will help blend. You just have to be careful not to add too much. Now let's script out a word here. Okay. Since our color we're using is called Mav. Let's just write that out. You can see how I blend as I'm scripting. Like I said, I always like to do the upstroke and put the blending in there, the new start up in there just to help blend. I like to have it blend in there versus in the actual letter. But that's also just a personal preference. You can see I added it in there, right now, the line is pretty sharp. But it was still wet, so it shod, start to blend in there. But to help it along, I'm going to get my brush a little. Just a, not too much. Drag it along, same over here. Any edges that you see You can use a little bit of water to soften them. But you don't need to go too crazy. We're not expecting totally perfect here. But it can help smooth things out. Yes, you can tell I've definitely reloaded my brush. That's not a problem. We know we're going to be doing that with water color. But we don't really have any hard edges. We have it blended very nicely. That's how you blend with one color. 10. Blending Technique: Two Colors: Now that we have blended one color, let's try blending two. I have added another color here. It's the fabricsto ultra marine. It's very important when you're blending colors, two different colors to make sure they are close to one another on the color wheel, purple and blue, very close. They will blend really well. If you choose colors that are too far apart, say red and green, they will not blend well. You will end up with a muddy muddy mess. You want to make sure they are close together. You also want to make sure you have plenty of water. To help them blend. I'm going to really load my brush up here. Just like before, I'm going to make sure everything is really wet. I'm going to grab that blue. I'm going to start just a little bit before where it ends so that they can begin to blend. You see they already started blending to drag that pigment up my purple. Okay. And blue. You see, because it's so wet, they start blending together immediately. Because I'm not washing my brush off in between, I am getting some of the purple in the blue, a little bit of the blue in the purple. That's okay for me. I like that look, but if you want it really delineated, you can always wash it off in between. Now those actually look like they're blending really well. But if I wanted to soften some of the edges, I could get a little bit of water on my brush and just drag the pigment into one another just to soften the edges. But again, I think those look pretty good. Hi, so now, let's do a word. It reminds me very ocean, the purple and the blue. Let's just do the word ocean. Grab Purple blue. Start just a little bit before. You can see it's very watery. Go that purple start just a little bit before where I ended. You can see it immediately begins to blend so nicely. There you go. I could go in there and drag some of those colors, little bit of a sharper edge right here. I'm just going to blend it just a little bit, but the rest look good. I like the way they've blended. You can have a lot of fun blending the colors and you don't have to stop at blending too. You could blend more than that. In fact, you could create an entire rainbow, which is what we'll do in the next video. 11. Blending Technique: Rainbow: Another fun blending technique I'd like to show you is creating a rainbow blended rainbow with your water color. For this, I'm going to be using my pan guash. It might not be able to tell from the video, but everything is pretty wet. I spray it with my little spritzer. I'll give it another sprit. One thing that's really important about this is that everything is really wet beforehand because you're going to need to move quickly. I also have a clean glass of water hair, as well as grab it as well as a little towel. That's going to be important to clean between colors. Let's get started. We'll start with red. Because we're going to be blending, we want to make sure this is pretty wet. Okay. Okay. I'm ending it and it's nice and wet. Now I'm going to rinse off there and I'm going to move right over into the orange. Remember to get it blended, I'm going to start just a little bit before. I'm going to drag that pigment up. A bit more on here. Remember, we want it to be wet so it'll blend well. Okay. Now we move into the trickiest color. That's yellow because yellow is so light. This one gives me a little bit of headache sometime, but you'll see what I mean in a mite. Again, we're going to get that nice and wet. We're going to start over here. A bit more water on there we go. Then I'm going to that color up. We get some of that orange in there. Yes. Making sure that's really wet. Before this dries, as I said, you have to act quickly. I'm going to rinse my brush off there, so I don't get too much yellow in here and I'm going to drag some of that orange up and into there. Add a bit more yellow. Like I said, this yellow is a little finicky. You might need to play around with it. There we go. That's nice. Go ahead and do it while it's still yellow. Now we're going to add that green. I'm going to start in the middle here. I need a little bit more water on that green. There we go. You can see it's starting to blend. I'm going to drag it down. Before I move on with that. I'm going to blend this out a little more. I'm going to start with the yellow and push it up and over. A little bit more green there just to make it a bit more opaque, a bit more saturated. Be onto this really pretty blue. Again, we're going to start in the middle of this upstroke. You can see it started to blend really nicely. I'm just going to drag that color in. That one blended really well, so we don't need to do too much there. I'm going to add a little bit more water on that curve of the B. Okay. Now we're going to grab our indigo. Starting in the middle of that upstroke, a bit more water there. Okay. I'll blend it just a little bit better. So that blue took over. Normally, I will blend it up and into the next letter, but just because I want to get a little bit more of that blue in there. Okay now we'll do purple. Starting out in the middle of that. And Whisker. There you go. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to clean my brush off again, dry it off. I'm going to start while it's still wet. Now, unfortunately, these have dried pretty well. If we want to do any dragging over there, we need to add a little bit more water. I'm just going to add a little bit more of this indigo in here. There we go. That blends it much nicer. You just can go in here in Finesse we actually did a pretty good job blending that. You can see the yellow to the green. The yellow to the green could smooth out a little bit more. Smooth that out. But like I said, the yellow is a little tricky because it is so light. We can see we've got that orange. Maybe we need to add a little bit yellow. Little bit more yellow into that downstroke. There we go. Okay. Okay. That's how you do a blended rainbow water color. Again, you want to start. I recommend using the pan water color just because you'll have everything in front of you. If you want to use the palette and use a tube water color, you can definitely do that as well, but just because there are so many colors, I like to use the pan when I'm doing this technique. Again, it's super important to make sure everything is pre moistened because you need to have it wet while you blend. If you're spending a lot of time getting the color ready, the previous letter could dry before you have a chance to blend it in. Give that technique a try. I hope you enjoy it. 12. Blending Technique: Water Brush: Okay. I'm going to show you another way to blend your watercolor using in a quash brush. If you might remember from the supplies video, this brush allows you to do watercolor on the go. So you fill this barrel up with water, you can unscrew the top, fill it with water, and it allows you to do watercolor when you're out traveling or just don't have a cup of water on you. But what you can have a lot of fun with is filling this up with watercolor instead of just water. I put a little water in there, and then I also put in some of this doctor PH Martin's radiant concentrated watercolor. This color is moss rose. When you push on the barrel, you might be able to see in the video, that fills the brush up with pigment. Then I'm going to do is I'm going some of that purple that we were using earlier. I'm going to load my brush up with that. Okay. And then I'm going to start scripting. So you can see it starts out purple. But as that purple begins to wear off, that pink that's coming out of the barrel begins to show up. So pretty then by the end here, We have this beautiful bright pink and you can see it's really gradual and it looks really lovely. You might have noticed me struggling a little bit there. I struggle with the shape of this brush. I know once you get used to it, I'm sure it's much easier, but it's for me to grip it because I do grip mine a little bit farther back, but you might not have as much trouble. Let's try a word. I'm going to go ahead. Remember, it's important to start by squeezing that. The reason I'm not squeezing it over the paper is because sometimes it does drip out I'll just go and squeeze it over the paper. You can see it does drip out like that. You can see it's really pigmented and pretty. I'm going to add my purple. These colors really remind me of Barbie. I have two girls, so my house is a house of pink and purple. Let's go ahead and write out the word Barbie. We'll start with that purple. But as that purple starts to wear off. We'll make sure there's a little bit of pink in there. We'll see what blend from there. Blend up in that be. There we go. Who as that purple wears off, that pink really comes out to shine a little bit more purple. Blending this, remember, we'll start back a little bit so that we can drag that pigment. So. I love it. Because now I have the songs stuck in my head, we'll go ahead and just finish this out. Again, make sure you fill that barrel. That's more of a reminder to myself because they always forget to push that. But it's really important. Otherwise, you won't get the blending techniques that we get there. It's really important to start back a little bit here, pull that pigment. We get that purple, drag it up here. Okay. So pretty. I love it. If you do have an aquash brush on hand, this is a really fun technique to try. It's important though that you do put the lighter color in here. Just because it'll help you in the end. It just works a little bit better. I did want to give a shout out I found a creator on YouTube that's where I learned this technique. I cannot remember their name, but I am going to look it up and I'm going to put it at the bottom of the screen right now. Okay. Okay. So there they are. If you want to check them out, just wanted to give them a little bit of a little shout out because again, this is the technique I learned from them, watching YouTube a while back and I had so much fun with it, so I hope that you enjoy it as well. 13. Ways to Use Your Watercolor Calligraphy: Okay, now that we have learned all these super fun watercolor calligraphy techniques, I'm going to show you some ways that you could use them. The first and maybe most obvious way is to create pieces of artwork. This piece of artwork here was created using doctor PH Martin's concentrated watercolor. This is done in the hydras so that it's nice and light fast. But you can see it's a really beautiful, vibrant color, one of the things that I really love about watercolor and I hope you can see it here on the video is the difference in tone as you move along. You can see that the color is more saturated in some places, less saturated in others. It makes a really some really beautiful tones along the way. This is a eight by ten piece of artwork. Here's another one. It's one of my favorite quotes by Madam CJ Walker. This one I created using that hydrous pen with the concentrated watercolor inside and then dipping it into some purple faber castle tube water color. Again, you don't have to use that hydrous pen. I had a lot of fun doing that and so I wanted to show you what a finished art piece might look like there. Another thing that you can use your watercolor Clography for. That's a lot of fun is cards. You can buy watercolor. These are just folded cards that are made out of watercolor paper. You can buy them like this, or you can just fold your own watercolor paper. There's nothing wrong with doing that as well. But you can make some really beautiful custom cards. You see this unfortunately I got a little smudge while I was moving things around. But again, you can see the beautiful tones that we get here with the watercolor. Now, along the same lines as the cards, you can also use watercolor calligraphy on envelope. You might be thinking, well, what happens when it rains? That's a really good question. If you were to send this out and it were to rain on it, it would bleed all over the place unless you use this guy here. This is micro glaze. It's actually a wax. I would take this Okay. And I rub it all over my envelope after I have done calligraphy, watercolor calligraphy on it. I didn't wait quite long enough for this one to dry so you can see it's smudged just a little bit. But once you wait for it to totally dry, you just put a very thin layer of this wax on the envelope. Now, what that will do is if it does get wet at all, that wax will repel the water. It's pretty neat. I have done lots of envelopes in water color. They've all made it to the person they're going to without bleeding, and that's because I have put this wax on it. Now, if you don't have this wax and you're not doing a ton of calligraphy envelopes and aren't keen to buy a whole tub. I have another little hack for you that you can try, but it doesn't work as well. I'm just going to do that caveat before you do 100 of these. If you're professionally, doing these doing calligraphy with watercolor, you should definitely use this. But in a pinch at home, you can take a white taper candle and just rub the taper candle over top. It'll cover it in wax and it will do the same thing. Those are just a few of the ways that you can use your watercolor calligraphy. 14. Class Project & Wrap Up: Congratulations. You did it. You finished class, you are now a watercolor calligraphy pro and I cannot wait to see your newfound skills. With that in mind, let's talk class project. I'm going to give you two options for this class project. Option one is to script a word or simple phrase in watercolor calligraphy, using at least one of the blending techniques we talked about in class today. That could be as simple as one word in one color that you blend along the way as we learned today. Or you could do that in two colors. Or you could do it in a rainbow of colors, or if you have a water brush like the Pentel a quash, you could do that really fun gradation technique that we learned there. That's option one, one word or a simple phrase using one of the blending techniques. Option two is kicking things up a notch and using your new found skills to create one of the projects that I showed you today. In the uses video. For example, you could create a finished art piece like this using your watercolor calligraphy. Now, if you're not sure where to start in terms of layout, I highly recommend you take my turn your calligraphy into artwork class here on Skillshare, that I'll give you the scoop on how to create a calligraphy layout. You could create a finished art piece like this. You could also do greeting cards. Oops, eyes are upside down. This is a thinking of card and a birthday card, but you could honestly get as creative as you want. You could do fun holidays. You could make them very personalized. Have fun with these, and you can use the watercolor calligraphy cards like I've got here, or honestly, you could just cut and fold your own watercolor paper. It's the same thing. I promise. You could also do an envelope of watercolor calligraphy. Now if you're going to go this route, as always, when we're doing envelopes, be sure to use a fake address. We don't want to share anyone's address online. You could do one of those. You could do all of those. You could do all of those 15 times. But whatever you do, be sure to take a picture and upload it to the class project section. If you've taken my classes before, you know I'm all up in the class project section. I love it. I love to go in there and see your work, comment on it, find out what pens you're using, learn more about your techniques. I just love it. It's also great for your other fellow students, to be able to see what they are doing. And there's nothing wrong with showing off a little showing us your new skills. Speaking of showing us our new skills, if you'd like to share on social media as well, I would love that. Be sure to tag me at Hoopa letters and tag Skillshare at Skillshare. So if you enjoyed this class, which I really hope you did and you'd like to take more, you'd like to see more of the space. You can head over to my profile and you can see all the classes that I teach here on Skillshare. They are all calligraphy classes and they run the gamut from just an introduction to modern brush calligraphy to digital calligraphy to how to decorate holiday cards, it really runs the gamut, so you can have a lot of fun there. And if you enjoyed this class, I also would ask that you rate and review that is super helpful for teachers and super duper helpful for other students because they can more easily find us and see what it's all about. Again, I want to thank you all so much for joining me today. I hope you had fun. I hope you learned a lot and I hope I get to see you soon in another class. Until then, happy scripting. That goes all my stuff.