Transcripts
1. Intro: I'm Amarilys Henderson and I do love me some Christmas. If you are like me, it's that time, most of the year, doing Christmas art, which is 50 percent of the surface design market. When I've worked for clients, they have asked for nativity pieces, and it seems to be a bit of a shortage in the holiday surface design market. You don't have to be intimidated by creating nativity art, things that are complex, doing people, doing animals. I'll show you my process and I'm going to show you tips and outline them in each segment. We're going to lay it out. We're going to simplify and stylize it and add some magic. When you see the process, you'll be able to apply this process everywhere. I think that's going to be the strength of this class, besides the fact that it's so fun to illustrate for Christmas. At least, I think so.
2. Figures: Santa: All right, let's try the Santa guy out. Obviously, Santa is a person, so we're dealing with a head. I'm going to have him be looking down at a puppy. Lets do a puppy. This is not part of the class. I'm just making a puppy, chubby one. He's got shoulders just like anyone else. I'm sure you've seen, whether with animation or in some drawing class at some point, people being reduced to these wire frames, and they're very helpful. Beyond that, I'm going to give him his tummy, rounded legs, give him tubes basically, for his body shape. I want to make him a little more lively. I'm going to put away the drawing I've done so far. I'm not going to draw on top of it, but I am going to use it as a reference. Now I'm referencing my own work. I had the face like this. I remember I had the bell sleeves. Let's do the bell sleeves again. This is all looking very wavy this way. I'm going to make Santa one toe. Just to add more fun to it. Tapering the legs more. I like to use this brush marker a lot. It adds some different line weights to it. This is a Pentel art brush. I squeeze and ink falls into this well here, the ink is in here, and now is when I get to really have fun, and stop worrying about the form because I've already done that work. I think these black boots really ground him well. He's got a black belt. My dog receiving a gift from Santa. Now as I'm doing my final Santa, I'm actually not going to draw him on a sheet of paper. I'm going straight to paint. The reason why I do that is I want to create work that's shape-based. The shape of the art is what defines it. Not so much the line work. Now it does make things a little tricky when you don't have those lines to rely on, and so you do need to rely on working very lightly in watercolor. That's why I'm using this wet on wet technique. It's when I put down water with my brush on the paper, maybe with a very light color, a lot of water, and then I dip my brush into the paint once again to grab paint and then drop it into those wet areas on my painting. I've drawn Santa now at least three times before painting in this day. I was pretty familiar with what I wanted to do and what I didn't want to do. I didn't like how my sketches gloves weren't really on the present. I wasn't keeping that in mind ahead of time as I was drawing him. I wanted him to be chubbier. I wanted his boots to be chunkier as well, and I wanted to simplify his legs so they might not be bending so much. They're really just flaring out as if they were sticks. If you're new to watercolor, I do recommend that you watch any other beginner classes. I didn't consider this to be a beginner class. Mine is called Watercolor story here on skill share, and I will put a link in the notes. This final step is basically using a smaller brush. This is a two point round brush. I always use synthetic stables and I'm just creating outlines with the very watercolor brush with a lot more paint to it. I'll do my dog down here quickly. I'm not as confident with dogs, so I went to the pencil to outline his shapes. Especially with [inaudible] , I actually really like those, but they're difficult to draw. I think because they are so simple. Sometimes things work that way. You'll notice that I used a bluish color for the dog, a little bit of black. I don't like to use straight black and then add a dab of red on the cheeks when the water is not so saturating the paper. Something that I'll use a lot in this class are Posca pens and Santa Claus is no exception. They come highly recommended and I find that it's a great, quick last step to add a punch of magic. Don't despair. I'm going through this pretty quickly with the markers, but I will give you tips that are very much better defined in the last segment of the nativity scene, where I'll be using a lot of Posca pen markers. Now beginning on a similar track with a different look or theme, we're going to look at nativity.
3. Figures: Animals: As I think of a donkey, we've got body, very stocky, rectangle. Don't make it too long. I think I might have already made it too long. Legs. A little trapezoid action. Actually, a more curved snout than your average horse. Now, if I were to simplify this guy even more, I could just trace the outline. But let's take it a step further and make him a curvy donkey. Now, when I think of donkeys are kind of like the bulldogs of dogs. They have more broad shoulders, a massive head, the beautiful eyes, and that's what I want to accentuate, not really the rest of the body so much. Per my usual, I'm going to focus more on this side then this end. I'm going to exaggerate that ear. There's a thin line between salization and caricature, and when you cross that line, you will know. I'm going to give him a short haircut. Oh, my, his looking like a Dala horse, which is okay with me. Let's try that again. I'm just going to do a donkey side profile, maybe looking down more. There's something about that jagged hair that just sprints out. Very folksy donkey. There's one approach. I'm going to just keep sketching. How about a rooster?
4. Prep Work: I'm going to show you a nativity piece that I did literally piece by piece, and then I compiled it together in Photoshop. To walk you through the process of how I started, I started with references. I knew that I wanted this native to have a bit of a vintage feel because I love the whimsy of that, taking something that has such a serious image in tone and adding this whimsical, childlike feel in the nostalgia of mid-century art, just pushes that. Here are the images that I googled up. Nativity, a la mid-century. This is actually by Mary Blair who I've done a class about. Most of these are by her. I loved how she did these angels very simply in a way I hadn't seen them done before, which is why I go to her for. This darling little scene I loved. When I'm looking at images, I'm trying to look at what it is that I love about him. Warm, color scheme. I like how the donkey is looking at him. Obviously, everybody is looking in, but the animals are framing. Look at it, look at that, so gorgeous, look at that. Cute little angels, maybe not very true to the Christmas story that's something that you have to push and pull with. As I think about composition, I look at this, man I love that composition. Why do I like it? Well, it's because the shapes of Joseph are feeding into the shapes of Mary, who is scooping into Jesus who is almost dead center. I noticed how different things are working into this composition, and I realized, what's the nativity, how important composition is. Here are my sketches of Mary and Joseph and shepherd. Very simple, baby Jesus. What I had the hardest time with, not because it's necessarily more difficult, but just because my experience is not there, is with the animals. Who gave me the most amount of work was the cow, who I am most proud of is the donkey. Those are the awards I would give them. You see how I'm trying to break down the cow by making a half circle and then extending the legs, making sure I got that trapezoid head that's narrower at the mouth and has a very wide head, particularly as it's looking down. In [inaudible] is like, how do I know it's a cow? How do I define it? This is just a little too short. This schedule is too saggy. Now I am going to show you the finished pieces. Here is Jesus in the manger, it's just a circle of a head in a bundle of hay in a box. Here is the shepherd and I did his staff separately. I think I did it with the lamb. I did all this separately thinking that each of these could be framed separately. I also wanted to play with a lot of different background options, which was wonderful in the end for all the ways that I did end up using this art. Very simple figures in order to keep the proportions. All I needed to worry about was making sure that this leg was anatomically long enough with their glowing tunic. It wasn't too hard to then focus on the face, which is great for me because that's my favorite part. The cow ended up sitting her down. I did that for two reasons, because the way I was fitting things together in the composition I needed someone just to be sitting down, and if I had the cow, I would have this odd shape to fill with art and it's a little awkward, essentially a rectangle with crouched legs within it. There you have it. Then I put it out together to create the finished piece. That did take almost as long as it took to paint these pieces. That's why this is not included in this class. I'm going to show you a very simple way to approach composition so that you don't get bogged down by all the details.
5. Composition: If you're like me compositions make me a little nervous. Reason being that you have to think about so many components, especially with an activity. A way that I got past this was actually not by sketching, because then I get really tied to my sketch and I just like it so much without looking at really if this is working, but actually making cutouts. I just grabbed some colored paper and I made these people in several silhouettes and several positions. They're super blobby, they don't look accurate at all, these are supposed to be shepherds, but it helps me play around a little bit with different ways that I could put them. By doing this, I didn't focus on anatomy and well, maybe it's these guys were represented better than I could better express how awesome this composition is. But instead, it put me in a position of play and not stress, and it made me simplify the shapes which will be something that comes in handy over and over again in this process. I set the tone by doing that. These are Joseph and Mary's put together, and we have them crouched down, kneeling, standing, and then there is the challenge of creating a border, creating this atmosphere of this stable, which could get in the way who's inside and who's outside. I wanted to figure that out too. This is one layout that I liked, we've got Joseph and Mary crouched down, we've got two shepherds, always Baby Jesus in the front and I was happy with it. Then I thought, okay, I need to make myself try this again. I did. I tried it in a different layout, maybe something more centered where it's centered with that star, and we're all looking down. I saw while looking at other children's books of nativity, is that this was a neat way to draw the viewer just to look straight at Jesus making him the central point. I landed somewhere in between where I wanted a centered layout, but a little more space between the figures.
6. Nativity: Sketch: Now the fun part. We're going to take the composition that we did with the cut paper and put it on this watercolor paper very lightly with the pencil. First, I'm going to start with the foreground, which would be Jesus in the manger right here. I'm going to make it just as rough as it was in the paper cut out. We've got the Angel, Mary, Jesus, Joseph, Shepherd, sheep, star up here. They're all just as rugged as they were in cut paper because I want to make this simple. Let's start with this guy. I'm going to make his face a little more complicated, I guess. With a beard. They did have headdresses. Let's do like a band there, I don't know what that's called. Okay, I did some of the face there. All right, let's get to the mechanics of this shepherd. They had loose clothing, which is great for us as we endeavor to draw bodies. I'm going to make his hand be holding a staff on the other side. I'm thinking, "Okay, if this is his body, let's give him a neck." There's his covering, then his hand if I want it to be here is like this. I'll often times take pictures of myself, doing things as his staff is like this. His thumbs are always greater to indicate which direction the hand is going in. What's going to be a little tricky is the foreshortening of this arm. What we see is basically this long shape from the elbow to the hand. Again since the garments were free flowing, we can take a little liberty with that. Here, I'm just going to keep his tunic flowing, but I want to show that he is curved over and that this is posture. The nose just like we did with the Nutcracker, is very simple. I am doing the eyes and nose as I usually do. I don't believe that this ear would be showing, there's our shepherd. Here's Joseph, give him a little perspective, when someone is looking down, you see a lot of the forehead here, and the nose is foreshortened. This is actually not as scary as you're usually foreshortened face because you get to use a beard to help paint the picture. Feet kind of hunched over. We're going to make Joseph a little more involved than he usually is in these nativities, and he'll be cradling Jesus' head. I'm going to give Joseph a sash that leads our eye towards Mary, who's here also looking down because she's looking down, and her forehead is also larger, you can have more fun with the lips, and then this mantle that she has over here does work with the shapes we have going on here. Now, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to just continue this kind of cradling action that there was over here with the arm. With this position it is little complicated because she is kneeling down means that we're compressing body parts. It's a lot easier to draw a body standing up, than hunched over, looking down, and making sure that that is all proportion. We're going to try to imagine her body if she were hunched over, it would be turning this shape and this leg in this way. It works. That means I need her back to be more hunched over than I had originally drawn it. I'm just going to give a hint of her body and move on. Now we've got Baby Jesus, so babies are very minimal. We really don't want to do too much to depict the baby shape, and that is okay. Swaddling clothes, manger, pedestal, and we're already done with four of the figures. All we need is a lamb, I think I made him too tall, I'm going to go with that as if that were just all part of my master plan. Yeah, that's good enough. Angel, you don't find female angels in the Bible, but they make for pretty pictures, so I'm going to go with that. Plus we need some more girls in this. We'll, have Angel praying, solemnly, worshiping, and that's about it. What I'm going to do with this stable, I'm just going to use it as a frame. I'm actually not going to draw a stable. I'm just going to use it as the outline of the painting. I'm going to use my kneaded eraser and erase just a little bit just so that my pencil ends don't show. A little trick I like to use is to roll my kneaded eraser, and then roll it on the page. It's just faster.
7. Nativity: Painting: In this segment, you'll watch me paint this nativity scene, but I want to highlight four strategies. The first thing I do is always skin tones. These are my favorite colors to use for skin tones, the magenta or a bright pink, a yellow ocher, a little bit of orange, and sometimes a little brown depending on how dark the skin tone is. By starting with painting skin tones, I'm already defining the characters. I have a little bit of a diversity in color range here from one person to another. It also helps me feel endeared to the painting. The second strategy I want to show you is working on your negative space before you work on your main figures. Now, for someone like me who really likes to get infatuated with the main figure. Then stops and realizes, "Oh, no there's this whole background I've got to deal with." This is a great tool to get my feet moving on a part that I don't find as thrilling. If I do it first, it also helps me be excited about it in the first place. Here I'm using the common technique of outlining in watercolor and then filling in. But I'm using all kinds of different colors. I'm using a wet on wet technique and I'll show you more in detail how to do that. Another thing that I'm doing, which we'll segway into the third aspect that I wanted to point your attention to, is in working your color theory. I am putting in a lot of cool colors. Cool colors being green, blue, violets. I'm making them be such a big mass that it helps me understand what I need to do with the color onward. If I updated the figures first, they would be wildly colorful and maybe have some of these dark tones in them and make it difficult to see the difference between the background and the foreground. That's why I chose to make the background so important. It's also a night-time theme. That dark is going to be overpowering and I want to treat my painting by order of priority. I first went with the skin tones, now going with the background, working that negative space, working that color theory, bringing in more warm tones to the bottom so that my figures don't seem like they're floating on air. They're standing on hay. Already by doing the skin tones and the background, you're really getting a sense of this piece. It's a much more confident place to move from start working on the subject matter itself. The fourth principle I want to highlight is what I'm calling define and unify. I'm using the same paint that I used for the skin tones before with just less water. It gives me more control so that I can create more thinner lines and define where those facial features are. I'm using more saturated paints because I like to really play and push with bright colors. Now if anything about watercolors, it always dries darker than you see it on the page. If you're working this wet, something that's fun is you can also use your brush to absorb what is on your paper. It'll blot out the color just kind of liftoff. What might be excessive. A bonus component is and it actually puts more paint and water back onto your brush so you can keep working. Now I'm going to fill in these puzzle pieces, as I call them, of color. It feels a little bit like a coloring book. I'm just using about a medium amount of paint and water because later I'm going to keep defining with more darker lines. Now not everything gets filled in, say these angel wings, which I want to leave as white. I'm just using a very light blue. I mixed some blue with a lot of water and anything. Then I'm trying to leave as bright white or light. I am using that watery color for. Again, I'm working throughout the page, so we're using the same colors throughout. Sometimes it can be hard to re-mix the same colors in watercolor. It's good to just go ahead and use them up all over the page. Now I combine defining and unifying together because the lines that I'll be creating are with similar colors. I'm using a red violet to unify this piece. I'm also using turquoise, so I'm drawing from the colors in the background. I'm not only using those to create a difference between the background and the foreground. But I also want to return to those colors to unify the piece. Have more fun with the parts that don't need to be so exact. I'm doing a little mark making on the manger. I'm pushing my brush up to the edges of the hay in the manger and added a lot of water, a safe pink, but then I added a darker brown once I felt like those lines were correct. You'll follow this principle over and over in watercolor where you start light and you go darker and darker. We did our light-colored fill-ins like a coloring book, light to medium, and then did some darker medium tones in the faces and some outlines of the clothing. Now we're going in with much more defining lines with a lot of paint on our brush and not much water to create those very delicate lines with a smaller brush. Now not everything needs to be treated with line work. You might want to do a little bit of shading. In order to do that, all you need to do is find a middle ground. If you have a light color, go in a little darker, just setting in a light layer and letting it dry and see how it works. I basically work in watercolor in a layered fashion, rather than smudging in too much, I want to watch what the paint does itself. You might be surprised at how well it blends itself. Maybe you've found yourself in a position where you get too fussy about a piece and lose all control and all faith in your work. I think with watercolor there is this wonderful, happy place between lack of control and control. We can fix many mistakes. We'd certainly direct where the paint goes. But there is something that the paint itself will contribute, which is what we enjoy from these hand made arts.
8. Nativity: Magic Touch : I could call my painting done but I think it still needs some work. I want to rely on my Posca pens. These are great tools. They are paint markers and they're highly recommended by a lot of other illustrators that I admire. What I find that's great about them is that a lot of the issues that you have with paint markers, them going dry, them being sticky, or being difficult to punch in and pull out, make them go, hasn't been quite an issue with these. It's a chalky marker so it works really well on top of paintings. It's an opaque feel, which is such a contrast from watercolor. There's something that the eye does when it sees something with a ton of bleeds, a lot of color differentiation, and has little spots to take a rest. Some of the tricks that I'm using with this marker is one using a neutral gray to outline some of my figures. Since I am going crazy with color elsewhere, it helps define what's in the foreground and what is in the background. I'm also giving patterns to fabrics. Like I said, have fun with things that are either inconsequential or you don't need to be super precise about. I have found that adding a pattern is not only fun for me but it's fun for the viewer too. I love to add botanicals wherever I can and so I'll add those in the background. I brought in the blue as being the unifying color. Remember, I'm always looking for which colors are going to guide the eye throughout and are going to tie the piece in together. I'm not only unifying with the blue color in itself but it's also going to add a point of interest that unifies the piece to create a finished composition. It's going to be with this star and these rays that come from it. Just using a straight edge to make those lines straight and making a differentiation and then in the line so that they're broken, something that's trending right now. It's really bringing all the characters together into one nativity piece. Whereas before, they were feeling like static figures that happened to be together looking at the same little guy. As a decorative element, I like to add leaves and botanicals. It's a framework, something that's commonly done by illustrators, and it also gives the piece a little bit more of a ground. Remember that I did that background color with a lot of cool colors in the sky and some warmer tones on the ground but I never really did define what that hay floor looked like. I rely on design elements, whether it be filled in shapes, or silhouettes of shapes, contours. Those little design elements are really all you need to create an atmosphere. If I were to categorize this step, it would be furthering, defining, and unifying with color and in this case, with Posca pen markers.
9. Negative Space Background: I thought I was done with this class, but I realized that I really need to show you how to do a background. So we're going to use silhouette. This is based on a piece, which was pretty popular on my Instagram feed. So we're going to do a silhouette of a Christmas tree and a silhouette of the stable nativity scene. So it's something that you can apply it to either one of these avenues of looking at holiday design and it's a really simple technique that goes a long way and will look pretty great on your illustration. I want to show you how awesome this paper is. It's 300 pound, nice and thick by CANSON. Obviously, first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to sketch out, I'm not going to belabor this very long, but I just want a little bit of an outline. I'm doing the star, a little bit of a silhouette of a rugged tree. If you have trouble painting a tree or drawing a tree, start with a triangle and then get a little more textured from there. I'll be using a lot of water first, getting my brush wet with just a team see bit of paint relates to so that you can see what I'm doing, and then I'm going to drop a very bright red right into this shape. I'm starting at the edges because I do want it to bleed out from there. Since this is a silhouette, I want the crisp edges to be the outline of the form that we're creating, which is this Christmas tree and then I'm just going to put my brush, and extend that bleeding on. After that, I start adding different colors, adding more water, trying to drop in a different color altogether, just so that I have a differentiation of reds. There are lots of different reds. I don't know if you've ever tried to match or someone else. Whatever read they're wearing, but there are more bluish reds, more oranges reds, and everything in between. So, this is a great example, a great color to use that'll show some differentiation. Of course, another great color scheme to use is a galaxy or nighttime color scheme, just like I did with the negativity. So I'm going to keep using very wet paint, sparking off different pieces of these different colors. In a patchwork and not really working out very well, not not blending it in, but since my paper is so thick, and my paint is so wet, it will blend itself and create its own texture, which will create interest in what we're looking at. I'll clean up some of the edges with the very tip of my brush. I see that's not quite a triangle there. It's becoming a bit lumpy and wanted to feel like it's flowing and yet that they're pine needles coming out from the edges. Creating this as my base, I'll fill in the bottom and here's how it looks when it's dry, just a little lighter. Now, this does look nice, but this is going to be the second phase now, watercolor painting. This time, I'm not doing a wet on what technique and doing the traditional wet on dry, meaning that my brushes wet but the paper that I'm painting on is not. So I always tell my students to use the pattern of water, brush, paint, paper. So you dip your brush in the water, get it wet, grab some color and then put it on your paper. I'm creating really simple circle ornaments. Some or maybe larger than they need to, but it's part of the part of the whimsy of it also alternating those colors just like I did in the background. While my ornaments dry, I'm going to work on the background. So I'm gonna do just really simple line work, to define a bit of an ambiance to where this tree is. Classic fireplace. I'm not using a reference. I'm totally, just imagining this fireplace. It would probably be better with a reference. The one that I've done before was, but I like to volume between having a reference and not. So that I challenged my mind to think through some of the things that I've already seen and remember them, and then sometimes I'll paint with a reference to create those details that I wouldn't otherwise think of on my own. I'm only using red, I'm using a bit of a darker reds and some needing to define on top of this painting, and I'm just doing a freestyle sketch. If this makes you feel a little nervous, of course, you can use pencil lines first or use lighter lines of watercolor as pencil line. I'll fill in a little bit of a sketch, but I'm not going to add too much detail. So want the focus to be right on the tree and not on the background. Next, I'm going to add more details to those ornaments to help draw the eye to the tree. We're going to rely on this pass code appends, this time using read. The great thing about this differences is using that what on what technique, where you have a lot of different watercolor bleeds as opposed to this very flat color of these lines, does show a contrast to the eye and draws the eye in, and another less expensive paper option is this watercolor pad. The master's touch line at Hobby Lobby is very textured. It's thick and it's small, so I find it less intimidating to work on a small sheet of paper. I'm going to do the stable background. Yet again, just taking it a little slower. That's the great thing about using a square as a guide.t little frame might look like. When I do paint, I'm planning on using warm colors inside because I want to get that sky blue in the outside to feel very dreamy. So I'm using a water at first, but a yellow ocher on the inside and some variations thereof. The frame of the actual entrance to the stable is going to be white. It's going to be, what actually becomes the negative space. It looks like I'm going to do a yellow background, but really my brushes just dirty and I know that these dark colors will blend that yellow and just fine. So to create a galaxy type color background, what you need is to work very wet. It sometimes helps too, to use different brands of watercolor paints because they'll begin to repel each other and you want a little bit of that. It ends up looking like clouds on most repelling each other in the galaxy. Went to my trusty pass code pens for details, and it's done.
10. Close: I hope you got out some paper, and started sketching, and simplifying some of those figures. Maybe got out some paints, and started doing some very deep bleeds, in these backgrounds. Sound to be excited, and eager to get to work, after watching the class, or to be excited that you are getting closer to creating your holiday work. Rate this class, share it. I always welcome feedback, and thanks for watching. If you want to watch more classes, check out my profile. You might want to check out faces, and watercolor wonderland.
Amarilys Henderson, Watercolor Illustrator, Design Thinker
