Colourplay in your sketchbook

1. Intro and Trailer: Hey, guys, my name is Ramona MacLean and this class is all about color play. We're going to use watercolor and just do some really fun color mix in your sketchbook to get you playing with color, mixing with color, and just have something fun to do when you're not quite sure what to paint. In this class, you'll be using watercolor, a sketchbook of some kind or paper of some kind. Watercolor paper is best. You'll also need a black waterproof pen, brushes and water for your paint, and maybe some paper towel to wipe it all off on. Join me and let's play with color. 2. Supplies: So here we're just going to go over some supplies. If you have a watercolor kit of some sort, I just have these ones from art tool kit that are really handy. I've got a little bit of guash in there as well as some watercolor. I need some sort of watercolor. And then some brushes, some that are maybe a little bit larger and some that are a little bit smaller to get the nice details. And then you need a sketchbook or paper of some sort. I have a Midori sketchbook, which I just love for most things, but if you have watercolor paper, that would work really nice. And then I just have this old sock that I use to wipe my paintbrush off on. But if you have paper towel, that works great, too. And then, lastly, you just need a pen with some waterproof black ink. The one I have here is a fude nib in a fountain pen, but you can use something that just has black ink that is waterproof. 3. Eggs: First color activity I'm going to start with is filling in just a page of egg shapes. So I've just drawn these wonky looking eggs, and then we're going to fill them with different colors that we want to see how they blend together. So I'm sort of thinking about eggs here, but I'm also just kind of thinking, what would be a pretty combination. So in the first one, I use a pale purple and a teal and both of those have white mixed in. The second one was two types of browns, like a raw sienna and a more standard brown. Third one I'm doing has blues, different kinds of blues. And so I just want to use enough water on there so that it can really blend together and give a cool look. So anything that you're curious about, anything that you think would look really pretty as an egg, This top one I did kind of like a coral pink mixed with yellow, which makes that color a little even more cary, which I really love. And I'm keeping my colors not too dark because eggs to me, most of the time, they're not that dark. They're usually pale colors. Get some speckles on it. So here I'm going with sort of an olive green because I thought that would look very nice and natury adding some raciena in there and getting some nice brown mix. And then we're doing some ultramarine, again, keeping that pretty watery and adding in some raciena to that because I remember from past mixing that those two colors can look really cool together. Now I did pick up some of the color there, so it was a little bit less mixed than I hope, but it turned out nice in the end. Some of the colors I'm using have a bit of guh in them. If it looks thicker to you, that would be why. Some of them are watercolor and some of them are guash. Here I use very pale purple color as a base with water and then added a little bit of brown into that just letting that color really blend out so that it stays really pale. Then I decided to add a little bit of teal blue because I wanted the side to look a little bit mystical. Now we've got some pale green with, I believe that's buff titanium. If you've never heard of buff titanium, watercolor, it's kind of like a cream color, and it adds some really nice mixes when you use it. And then this last one here, I'm just doing two kinds of blue, and, yeah, just seeing how they mix together. Adding a bit more water so that it mixes. So eggs in general have speckles. You can add speckles. You don't have to, but I like to add the speckles, and some people will use some paper on either side of their egg just to make sure that the speckle doesn't go too far, but I don't really care. I like the look of speckles in general. So I'm just changing up the color of the speckles, usually using a darker mix to what I'm putting on the egg, but sometimes going with a totally different color in general. I just adding some splatters there. Yeah. Get some cool fun texture going on. So try it out and see how you like it. 4. Triads: So the next activity we're doing is a triad. So if you haven't heard of a triad before, basically what you're doing is you're taking three primary colors, a red, blue, and a yellow, and seeing what mixes you get from those specific colors. I have a stencil that I use for this, but you can use any round object and then sort of just sketch in where the different areas are equidistant from each other. I used a pale coral pink, a pale teal blue, and then also a pale lemon yellow. You can choose whatever colors you like. They can be non primary if you like, but if the colors aren't very far away from each other on the color wheel, you won't get much of a difference. Here in this mixing area, I'm adding pink, the most pigmented on the side closest to the pink and adding water so that gets less and less towards the blue side. Then I'm going to add blue on the other side, closest to the Teoblue. Then use the most pigment and then use less and less as you go to the middle. The paper that I'm using here is not amazing for colour mixing on the page. I probably should have just done the mixed it on a palette and then put them in the spaces that they should have been, but that's okay. It was fun to do, and I do love my matori paper. So you see a bit of that mixing there. You should get a nice purple mix in the middle, and then the other side, you should get a green, and then on the bottom, you should get sort of an orange color. So up to you what you want to use. You could use a magenta. You could use a ultramarine, you could use a yellow ochre, something more muted. I like to do this for lots of different combinations. I've tried it with neon colors. I've tried it with just my basic colors, with a really red, really blue blue and yellow, and then I've tried sort of the off colors. Cyan magenta and yellow and they'll give you some really bright mixes. But some of them, if you use a yellow ochre or an ultramarine or something that's a little bit more muted, the colors you get are really cool. And sometimes you come up with some colors that are not so cool, and that's good to know, too. So while you're using colors for a painting, this can be very helpful to try out because it will give you different moods. Now, my husband wanted to try it out as well, so I drew him up a triad. And so you can see on this paper, it actually mixes quite a bit better because this is watercolor paper. So he was adding in he did a magenta cyan and yellow, and then a red ultramarine and yellow ochre. So you can see the difference in the brightness of these two triads. 5. Patterns: This exercise, we are going to be playing around with colour palettes. So what I did was I went online and I just kind of found inspiration for different patterns. Sophie McPike has the most beautiful pattern arrangements, so I chose most of mine based on hers, and then a couple. I just came up with myself. So yeah, while adding the colors here, Think of a pattern. Do you want to use all kinds of greens? Do you want to use complimentary colors, ones that are across from each other on the color wheel? Do you want to go totally random and just see if it works out? Do you want to use pale colors? So for this first pattern, I went with some blue and green for the main hearts and then also some sort of red and pink. So I alternated the different colors there. You can choose whatever you like if there's certain colors that gravitate towards you. But try filling in those colors and waiting a little bit so that the outside can dry before you add the color touching the last one. I made the mistake of doing that for the first one, and I had to be very careful not to touch those colors as they wouldn't blend into each other. That's why I'm doing the three hearts together, letting them dry, and then I'm moving on to another Now, you don't have to do this many. This took a long time because there's a lot of sections to fill out. But for this next area, I'm switching the colors and doing the two of the same diagonal from each other and sticking kind of two pastel colors. So I'm adding a little bit of white to some of my mixes so that there's a little bit of cohesive color to them. So you can try whatever you like and see if it gives you something you like, something you don't if you come up with something you don't like, that's good to know because if you're doing a painting or putting together a palette, you know, Okay, don't do these colors together because they do not look that nice. So I'm just going back up here and I'm adding a lighter pink to the pink square and a darker green that's a little bit different outside that green heart. Same with the red. I'm just adding a pale version just to offset that color. But green and red on the color wheel are complimentary colors. That's why I wanted to use those. I'm just going back to that first one because I used two different colors there and I wanted it all to look pretty cohesive. I like that one. Here it is finished. I just tried out a pink one and different things. Then my husband, I drew him some heart patterns, and he actually didn't finish his, but he went with a random color approach. In the end, he didn't like the result because the colors didn't really match up. To be fair, my husband is not a painter. This was maybe the first time he had done this, but it was a cool exercise for him to see what he liked, what he doesn't like, maybe what he would do next time and what he wouldn't So try it out yourself and see what colour palettes you can come up with. 6. Rainbow Ribbon: This exercise is called a rainbow ribbon. You can do this as a rainbow worm, if you like, without lines and just connect one color to the next, or you can draw this ribbon. The main thing to think about when drawing it out is just draw a main line first and then have the line follow parallel and then go towards that line and touch it, and then come back out from that line to make it look like the ribbon is sort of bending in on itself. So here's my husband trying his out, and I just told him, try out different colors, and you want to make sure that in the middle of those two colors, you really mix them together. So the trick is to paint the colors long enough that you can see the original color, the mixed color, and then the end color. So here's mine. I'm trying a lot of, like, pastel colors and then some more vibrant ones. Some of the mixes I like, some of them I don't. Another thing you can do is just circle the colors at the end, the mixes that you made that you really like, because that will give you an idea of which ones to come back to when you're looking to mix colors later. So the top one was just kind of a free for all try, whatever. The middle one, I used pastel colors. And then the bottom one, I think I use a little bit more bright colors, yeah. So here we go, just adding some bright reds and I was trying to do a little bit rainbow. So if you go in the rainbow order, your mixes are going to work out for the most part, depending what colors you use. But if you're using bright colors, rainbow order is a nice way to make sure those mixes will blend really nicely into each other. So here I'm just adding some hot pink to the end, mixing that into that purple and kind of starting that rainbow all over again. And when you're done, it looks pretty fun. You get this nice colorful ribbon. So try it out yourself. 7. Conclusion: Thanks so much for taking this class, guys. I hope you had a really fun time, found some color mixes that you like, and just enjoyed playing in your sketchbook. Please take photos of what you've done and post a blow because I would love to see all your colour mixing. If you'd like to follow me on Instagram, I have all that information down below. And if you're interested in taking other classes, I have classes on watercolor drawing, needle-felting, you name it, and it's there. Hope to see you again.