Coffee Break Art: Brush Marker Watercolor Hollies

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Charlotte DeMolay, welcome to Coffee Break Art: Brush Marker Watercolor Hollies, My coffee break art series are designed for anyone from beginners, non-artists, crafters or seasoned artist. It's short, fun projects that don't take a lot of time or expensive art materials. I've been an artist and instructor for over 25 years. I work in a variety of media, including acrylic, pastel, watercolor, and multimedia. I love taking art materials and seeing what I can do with them. One of my favorites is water brush markers. I bought them to learn how to letter and I use them in scrapbooking in different things. But lately I've learned they are fantastic for watercolor paintings. In this class, I'll show you how to use your water brush markers to create watercolor hollies. We'll go over several techniques, including blending with a marker, blending with water, painting over pen, and finishing with gel pens. I'll show you two different styles, neat and loose. And if you paint along with me during the demonstrations, you'll have several paintings at the end. So grab a cup of coffee or something else and join me for Brush Marker Watercolor Hollies. 2. Supplies: Let's get our supplies handy. First. You're going to need any type of watercolor paper. It doesn't matter what kind. Inexpensive, expensive watercolor sketch book, as long as it is paper designed for watercolor, Next you'll need some pencils to do some initial drawings with, as well as pens. I use a variety of waterproof pens such as Sakura, Pigma Micron, Staedtler, Prismacolor. And you can even just use a basic Sharpie if you'd like, and definitely some water brush pens or markers. I use Tombow markers for this class, but any water-based marker set will do. I've started using some of my old Stampin' Up sets recently and those work fine. Any sort of water-based brush pen marker will work. When we get to blending, we will do some blending with the blender pen that came with the markers if you don't have that, don't worry. I think the best watercolor effects come with blending just straight from water. A regular paintbrush and water works just fine if you have any of these Aqua brushes or water brushes where you put the water in the handle and then it comes out through the brush. Those work great. That's actually what I used in these demonstrations. And I did some finishing on these with gel pens. If you have gel pens, give it a try. It's optional though. To turn your art into a finished product. You can create some notecards with them or even matte and then put them in frames. So any kind of colored craft paper or card stock or folded notecards. And finally, you want some sort of inspiration images. I use Pixabay.com and Unsplash.com for copyright-free images. Or you can just watch what I'm drawing in the demonstrations and use that as your inspiration. Okay, let's create some water brush hollies. Let's start with drawing our hollies. 3. Drawing Your Hollies: For all the demonstrations except this one, I'm using a watercolor sketchbook meant specifically for watercolor projects, and it can handle the water I add to the paper. For the drawing demonstration. I'm just using a regular sketchbook. You may want to use a sketchbook or regular copy paper just to do some practice sketches of hollies before you get started painting them. So watercolor holly leaves are a series of curved points A very, very simple one just has a few curves and a couple of berries and a line in the middle. To make a more complex leaf, just keep adding curves. As long it comes together in the end at a point than your holly looks like a very classic winter holly. I've got my drawing sped up. I don't actually draw this fast. So take all the time you need in this part just to practice a few hollies. As you can see I'll keep adding the number of points, keep adding leaves, stacking leaves on top and each of them has that holly look. If you want, add a little branch in there and put your leaves off of that. You can practice the same technique with a pen as you get more confident. If you need to do a pencil drawing first and then do pen or marker on top. That's fine. It produces a little bit cleaner of a look, if you can practice it and do it without doing the pencil first. And last, we can do the exact same thing with our water brush markers. The water brush markers is going to supply the pigment we need for our watercolor paintings. I love the fact that these markers have a brush tip on one end and a fine point on the other. I'm using the brush for my holly leaves and then I use a fine point for the berries. One thing I want to point out is none of my two leaves look alike. Hollies are such an easy stylistic look. You don't have to draw every little point on every little leaf and get the curves or anything just right. They're just fun to do quick and easy. Whether you do a slow, accurate drawing with a lot of points or a quick loose one with just a few. Either way it's still looks like a holly. And try your different colors to see which look like better. Now we'll go on to our first technique, marker blending. 4. Using the Blender Marker: In this demonstration, we'll be using the blender pen that comes with the Tombow set to blend our markers. So first we need a drawing. Pick a green that you like, do the outline, the center. I'm just doing a simple three-point holly for this demonstration. I'm using a lighter green is kind of a highlight color on one side of my leaf. And then the same with my berries. They're red a little extra pigment on the darker side. Use a little bit lighter of a red. And then put a little yellow in for a highlight. This paper towels to clean the tip off with Tombow blender markers or the 00 markers, their self-cleaning. Even though the tip might look stained, it'll still produce a clear blend, but it does help to have something to clear the tip off if you're moving from one color to the next. And we're going to start on my darker side, start on either one. Use the blender pen to pull the marker that you've laid down cross like you would paint, as you can see, I'm rubbing several times to bring it in towards the center. I kind of also go over the edge to lighten it up and give it a little watercolor look as well. The natural lightness from blending in the color and the middle gives it the highlight look on the leaf. By pulling the tip out a little bit more lightens up the marker and again creates that watercolor look. One of the drawbacks to using the blender pen with the marker is you need to work quickly. The longer the marker has sat there, the harder it is for it to pick up the color and blend with it. The same technique works with the berries. You just bring the red into the yellow. The yellow doesn't really pull into the red because it's lighter. So I'm just going up to the edge and try not to pull too much over and I'm leaving a bit of the yellow as it is. This technique is where you dip into another color and pull it over. So I'm dipping into the red, pulling it into the green just a little bit. Because red and green are complimentary colors. So the red helps add just a little bit of shadow on that leaf. Okay, let's try another one. I'm grabbing a different color green this time. This time I'm using the darker as the shadow instead of going dark and then light. Again putting the thicker on the side I want to be the shadow color and the yellow on the highlight side. And doing the same with the leaf, you can use the yellow the same way to put highlight on the leaf. One thing I'm doing is I'm rubbing, I'm trying to erase that marker stroke in there, So I'm rubbing over the edge of it a little harder trying to pull, not only pull the color in, but to have it lose that thick marker stroke. By not coloring the entire leaf, that's how you get the watercolor look on this because, watercolors are translucent, essentially you're seeing some of the paper behind watercolors. So by not coloring the entire leaf or berry with the water-based markers, it's creating that illusion of water color by leaving some of the paper showing through as you use the markers to blend. As you see when I do the water blending techniques, I call the different styles, neat and loose. This marker blending is a definitely a very neat look, like a tight controlled watercolor look, marker blending is a good technique to use. It's not very wet, so it's hard to pull the pigment too far away from where it is. So it keeps a very controlled look. If you've taken any of my watercolor classes, you know, I like a very loose style. So I actually typically don't use the marker to do blending when I'm trying for the watercolor look. So let's move on to water blending, where you get a little more flexibility. And here are the finished paintings. 5. Blending with Water: To get ready for the water blending, have either a paintbrush and a small container of water nearby, or use one of the water brushes like I'm using in the demonstration. We'll start again with a quick sketch of the holly leaves. The marker that you're applying is the pigment for this painting. And I keep picking up different greens to do with this, to show you that you're not limited, you may even have a marker called Holly Green, but holly leaves are in a variety of colors. You can make them how dark or light that you like. We're going to do this just like the marker blending, except we're using water and be careful you don't need a lot of water for this. That's one reason why I like these water brushes is they control the water a little bit more than an actual paintbrush in water, but use what you have. So you're going to pull from the edges again, just like with the marker blending and pulled towards the center using the marker that you have put down as your actual paint. Again, to go over the edges to lighten it up to make it look like this was a watercolor painting. I think that's key to giving it a watercolor look, is to make sure you go over the edges and pull them out slightly. I'm doing the same sort of dipping or use a little red and pull it into the green as that complimentary color shadow. Now this was a very neat style mixing. Want to show you a much looser style with the water blending. Get our preliminary drawing, which is our pigment for this doesn't take a lot of the marker to give you the pigment you need. Now, I'm pulling this out much further. I'm diluting the paint. It's not nearly as dark because I'm pulling it out further, pulling past the edges. And I'm pulling it out to the point where the pigment actually lightens up and kind of rubbing it in between as well. And again, this is a loose dynamic sort of style here. I just switched over to a brush with a different tip to do the same. I'm pulling the red down into the leaves. Saturday I didn't have quite enough pigment here. So you can just take your pen and add it to it while you're working. You don't need to wait for it to dry. In fact, I'll show you a wet on wet technique in just a second. And to create a little more of that contrasting color shadow, I'm using the red marker itself to add some lines in there and using that pigment as a shadow color. There's a very loose holly style. And you can do the reverse and add a little green to your holly berries as shadow. And I keep dipping in and put in just little squiggles in the background and it just adds to that dynamic look. Okay, so you can also do a wet on wet technique as well. So I'm wetting down my paper. And again, this is a watercolor sketchbook I'm using now, not a regular sketchbook. This is designed for water applications. And then just draw right on top. You can see it already starts to pull the pigment, just like if you were doing regular watercolor wet on wet. And then you can go back with more water, and pull it out even more. I've got a few more examples of neat and loose water blending. And in these examples, I'm using a bit more of the pigment from the water brush marker, so that's a little bit heavier of a look. I don't have any additional instructions during these demonstrations. They are just to show you a different look with it. Now we'll move on to using pens with our water brush markers. 6. Using Pens: The pens that I'm using are water resistant or waterproof ink. One thing I found though, using the blenders that come with the markers, is there's a slight amount of alcohol in those blenders, so it actually pulls some of the ink in. So I definitely prefer using water blending with this technique. In fact, after this demonstration, there's another demonstration called Ink Test. I'll show you the effects of the marker blender on the different inks. For now, we'll just use water blending for this demonstration. So this time our base drawing will be with a pen. Be sure you're using and are waterproof pen and listed several different brands that I use in the supplies, including a normal household Sharpie. After you get the pen drawing, add a little bit of the colors that you want for the leaves. And you don't have to add much because it's part of the look to have the pen showing through so you don't want it super heavy with the marker. And I'm doing a very loose style with this. Again, I think this looks really good with the pen. You can also do it in neat style as well. The same technique, you just grab the pigment and spread it around, I'm moving well beyond the bounds of the ink drawing, since the ink is defining the shape of the leaf, the color is just part of the image, not defining the leaf itself. So your pen stays put, but your marker pigment gets pulled around and it's almost impossible to tell this apart from an actual watercolor. In fact you can even do blooms like you have in regular watercolor by dripping a little bit in. Let's try a neater version of this. I'm doing this a little differently this time. The darker marker is just towards the center. And then I'll pull the lighter green, the highlight color to the edge. I'm being careful as I paint to not to go outside the boundaries of the pen this time to keep this a neater more controlled look. And now you have loose and neat watercolor paintings with brush markers over a pen drawing. 7. A Quick Ink Test: For this test, I use a different pen for each part of the holly. The berries are one pen, each leaf has a different pen. I'll show you at the end which type I used. Down here in the bottom corner of each of the pens using the marker blender on the end to kinda show you how it's pulling out that ink. And up on the top with the plain water, it's not pulling out the ink. These inks are water resistant, but unfortunately they're not resistant to the small amount of alcohol that's in the blender marker. And these are the pens I use for each leaf. Now let's grab our blender and see how they work. I'm going to speed this up even just a little bit more because I'm using the same colors and the same marker blending technique for all three leaves. You can start to see some of the black coming into the leaves. What I found with this demonstration was the Sharpie performed the best if you don't want the black to bleed into your painting. The Sakura, the Staedtler, the Prismacolor, all of these water resistant markers weren't resistant to the alcohol in the blending pen. But I did learn this wasn't a complete negative. That's a little bit of dark cast that the black ink provides, gives it a little bit of a vintage look. So this isn't a total negative. If you like that look, if you want to create kind of a vintage look a little bit darker then by all means use the marker blender with your pens. Just be aware that there is some bleed and has this have an effect on the pens. 8. Finishing Touches with Gel Pens: Let's add some finishing touches to our drawing with gel pens. I use uni-ball, but any brand of gel pen will work. For the first one, I'll use a black gel pen and go around the edge. This kinda reverse of using the ink pens. If you do a painting and you think, this would have looked really great if I'd used the ink. Go on and do it afterwards. This can also tighten up a painting that you feel like it's just a little bit maybe too loose. Now for this one, I grabbed a gold pen, kinda doing more of a stylized look on this. So I'm going around the edge to the center and the berries with a gold gel pen. On this one, I'll do three different looks. I'll use a red pen along the edges for like a complimentary shadow. And then here's a white pen to give it sort of highlights. And then the gold again. And then I'll even add just a little bit of flair by putting some dots around it. Let's try kind of a wet on wet with the gel pen. You can do it as you are creating. You don't have to wait until it's completely dry and you're done. So I'll do a quick sketch and then use my water brush to blend it. I'm doing this one loose, but not too loose. I really like pulling some of the color back behind the leaves. So then they're not just sort of floating in space. You don't have to wait for the paper to dry, grab the gel pen and start drawing. It's sort of blends right in with the watercolor. This is giving it again, that watercolor over ink pen look. You can do the same with the white. Drop the highlight right in as it's wet. Now let's talk about what you can do with all these cute little paintings and your project. 9. Your Project: I hope you enjoyed watching Brush Marker Watercolor Hollies. If you painted along with me in the demonstrations, you probably have a lot of cute little holly paintings already. And I'm going to show you a few things you can do with these. First, you can turn them into your holiday cards. For this, I simply took a piece of colored paper. It's not even card stock it. It was some I had in my scrapbooking, cut it a little bit larger than a painting, but made sure it was smaller than the card. And use a little double-sided tape to assemble it. It's blank inside. You can stamp or write, whatever you'd like. The paper here is just a piece of card stock 8.5 by 11 card stop cut in half. You can also do the same sort of technique and frame your hollies to have some cute decorations around your house during the holiday season. And this isn't a mat board, this is just the colored paper that makes it look like a mat. You can use it to pick up whatever colors you use in your hollies, cute white frame. This makes an inexpensive and custom holiday decoration, or it would also make a great gift. So if you painted along and you have several paintings, please take a photo or scan them and upload them in the project area. And if you turn them into some sort of card or art, let me see. I'd love to see it. And I comment on every project that's uploaded. If you enjoyed this class, please follow me here on Skill Share and check out some of my other Coffee Break Art or watercolor classes. Thank you.