Transcripts
1. Into Intense Sheet Watercolour Abstract: Hi guys. Welcome. My name is Dolores now aspirin and I'm coming to you from sunny, Manitoba, Canada. Today I'm taking you on a bit of a detour from what I usually teach. You know that I mainly teach digital art. Well, today I'm going to take you into a completely different thing. We're going to be doing some watercolor and we're going to be trying to produce a really nice abstract piece. So you might be wondering what motivated me to make this change. Having taught in the public school system for over 30 years, I can tell you that I was approached many, many times by all kinds of different art suppliers to have you try out their products and possibly happening, used them in the classroom. Now, I was approached recently by this company that evil watercolors. And they sent me out a really cool little kit of products to try it. Now I'm not making any money at all from this. I'm just going to be using these products because of their really amazing portability. And you know that I'm all about being able to carry my art supplies with me. So I'm going to be showing you their products and talking to you a little bit about that. But really it's all wrapped up in this challenge to try something different. Another thing that happened to me recently was that I was signed by another agent. And this agent is having me do all kinds of different sort of work compared to what I normally do. So I've been doing a lot of experimenting with watercolor, and I've been painting a lot of watercolor flowers and those I've been making into artwork that of course I'm going to sell through art licensing. So here's a few of the examples of the kind of work that I've done using the viva colors. I can tell you right now that they are actually really great for this sort of thing. They're really intense and like I said, they're very portable. So I can grab my little palette and take it with me and look how small this. So you can see that these are very, very thin and you don't need a lot of the paint to really get an intense color. So I've been really enjoying it for the watercolors. I've produced a lot of really nice flowers with it, but I want to really experiment with the watercolor for making abstract paintings. So that's what this class is going to mainly focus on. So we're going to start out by doing some color studies and we're going to move through and do a bunch of mark making. And then from that mark-making, we're going to experiment with doing some abstract compositions. Of course, at the very end, I'm going to be taking these illustrations and scanning them and then using them to do the art like I always do. Compositing them in Photoshop and yeah, finish them off and getting them ready for our life and thing. So are you ready to give us a bit of a shot with me? All right. Let's get started.
2. Discussing the Supplies for Class: Hi guys, welcome to lesson 1. And less than one here I want to show you how I carry my art supplies when I'm traveling or why I want to just work outside. I haven't kit that I always carry with me and yeah, I'm going to show you how these products actually fit into that kids. Let's get started. First thing I wanna do is show you this kit that I got from the viva. And it was really pretty to get this. Don't you think? Really nice little sketch book premium. And taking a look at it. I've actually used this a little bit array, but it's got really nice heavy paper. And with the way it's constructed, you can open these flat and work on them. So I really quite like that. I might not be using this to the eggs. I think I want to use loose sheets so that I can scan it more easily. I wanna kinda keep that sketchbook for travel. So the patient came in little packages like this. So I got both a spring set and then this one here, super vivid, transparent. I think today I'm going to concentrate on one or the other, probably this one here. And the person I want to do is create a bunch of swatches. So one of the things that I did with research these paints online just to see what I could find about them. And there's tons of stuff that you can take a look at. Tons of videos. People who have tried all the stats, people have mixed and done a bunch of work with them. Lots of lots of buzz around these paints. I would say they're a company that started not that long ago and they were on IndieGoGo crowdfunding companies, So they started out that way and I thought that was really neat. Know I always love to support small businesses or businesses. There are just starting out and I really do think the product is really cool because the size is amazing, like it's so small. And you know, you've got 16 colors in this little palette. These little separators hear me Kit nice portable set because you can, you don't have to worry that the colors are going to mix even if you're using both sides. So that's kind of a neat thing and there's a really nice variety here. So I do want to swatch them out because I'm not really sure about these. Our colors. They don't look like colors that I'm normally using. What I use, I usually have is this little pan set that I travel with. And you can see that this is well used. A lot of them a lot of the pans are actually all the way down and I don't you can see that there, but it may have been used and used and used. And usually it has a little brush here. But in this little trough, I had added a peacock blue and this is actually a wash I think, and then magenta. So this is a couple of additional things. These are colors that I guess I was using a lot are needed a lot at the time. So I've stuck them in there. This blue here wasn't quite as bright. So I had added that in there and this has really served me well. I travel a lot and I'll show you the traveling Arctic that is used. So this is a bag that I thought, I think at a dollar store. And you can see in here I've got like anything you could imagine. So everything from a pencil sharpener to use. I have scissors and here I have an exacto knife. Every kind of marker that you can imagine, I've got lots of these water brushes. And one of the, this one here actually came with the set from BBVA. So I have been using that a little bit. And I may use some of these in class as well. I have a bunch of brushes over here that will be, well, I don't know which ones will use, but you'll see, I guess as we go through the class, this is a really free form class because I haven't super plan this. And I just really wanted to start doing some abstract kinda work with watercolors, which is something I haven't super explored before, but I really want to try out and yeah, so I'll be possibly even using some of these thing. I do have some water-soluble pencil crayons that I often use. I think it's here, Darwin's. I often use these with my watercolors. Add additional depth or whatever these ink tents ones are amongst my favorites. They're super bright. And then I've got watercolor markers that I used to. These tumbles are really nice. I don't know if you use these at all, but they have kind of a brush tip. So that's something that I use when I'm in the car, we're driving somewhere distance. So this little kit is usually sitting on the floor of the car down at my feet. And so I can dig in and do my drawings and paintings, whatever it is I want. So that's why that little watercolor set was great with a water pan. And now I'm thinking while these are even smaller, so that's going to be really needs. So the first thing I want to do, like I said, is to swatch it out. And here in the book itself, they do leave a little section for swatching your paints. So let's just say I was using this water pen here and I could make it's wet enough. I could just use that area and I put very little paint on there and you can see how vivid it is. But the one thing I want to echo is how these thin out. So I think I'm going to be actually using a watercolor pad for that. The one that I like using that I have on hand is this one here. So this is a Strathmore watercolor paper and it's about a 190 pounds. So it's a 90 pound paper, which will be okay for what I'm doing. I am not planning on selling piece as original piety means. And if they do wrinkle up a little bit, so be it. If I didn't want any wrinkling at all, then I would likely use much heavier paper. But I think this is going to work adequately for what I wanted. Another thing I always have on hand is some paper towel, so kitchen towel. And the reason you'd want to have this and to be able to block any extra paints that you don't want or to pull off some water in areas that you don't want. So I've got 16 colors here. You can start by drawing out a quick grid for your 16 colors. So I've got enough squares here from 2016, but a little bit of extra here. And I'm going to swatch out the colors from heavy water to light water just so that you can see once we, once it's dry, you'll be able to see how they look when they're really transparent.
3. Making Our Color Chart: Hi guys, welcome to Lesson 2. So with these particular paints, you'll see you that the colors are kinda weird. It's hard to really tell what the color is when you look at these little pallets. So we're going to do a bit of a color study. We're going to make a color chart based on the spring sets. Let's get started. So for this part of the exercise, I'm not going to be using the water pan because I find it's a little bit harder to control for this particular type of exercise that I'm doing. So what I would do here is I would happily coat my brush. It will get quite a bit of pigment on there and quite a bit of water and put a lot of color on the one side, the swatch, then I would clean off my brush a little bit. So I'm going to actually keep a fair bit of water on it and I'm going to take some of that water off, but I'm going to go from light over here so it's quite transparent and kinda wish I had done more water. But whatever, this is going to show me quite well how that mixes in. And I don't mind getting some of these little florets happening here because that will give me a lot of information about the paint as well. So as I'm going through, I'm also going to hit that little swatch at the bottom just so that I can I wouldn't have to necessarily carry this big swatch with me if I'm going somewhere. So let's start again. We're going to put a lot of color on this side. Then I clean out my brush really well. And I've got a pretty big container of water here so that it doesn't get dirty too quickly. It already I really like how this performs as far as bleeding. So that's really nice. Now if I was using a lot of the colors here and I had to flip a lot. I might find that frustrating, so I'm not sure if I would possibly cut these apart to use them in a different way, but well, I won't go there at this moment. This is one of the ones that's really cool in that the swatch doesn't at all look like Burgundy, does it? So look at that. That's a nice rich color, least some of that down in here. And I'm going to clean my brush a little bit and then really clean my brush. And this is where that paper towel comes in handy so I can lift off water. I can draw my brush onto the paper towel to absorb it. And you can see that I've looked at off water and I wanted to kind of gradients on these as well in my little books so that I can have a better sense of it when I go to use it. I mean, not use this again for months. I may be using it tomorrow. I don't know, but it's nice to plan ahead and have that already worked out. So now I really like this color already. I've actually, I'm going to use this color in my piece that I do. And I really like being able to experiment with it when I'm doing these swatches. I never, I never skip this step. If I get a new set of paints, I always swatch them out because it's amazing how different they can look once they're actually painted on and allowed to dry. And I loved that saffron. I think that's going to be differently when I go back to, so now we're onto happy yellow. Clean my brush and draw that out a little. And I'll do that over here as well. So I'm going to time-lapse this because you're going to see me on camera for way too long. If I do all these 16, if there's anything interesting that I want to mentioned, I will stop and do that, but otherwise I'm going to time-lapse this out really quickly. All right, so I've got my 16 swatches here. And what I would likely do here is to take and cut and glue them into my sketchbook, maybe inside the front cover in and then label each of these. I always do them in order based on what they, how they appear within the book or within the palette. And then that way, I'm also keeping a pretty clear in my head. Another thing I've seen done is that set of swatches is cut and made big enough to go into the book or on the back of the book with a little bit larger of a sample than what you see just below the label. So I was really impressed with these colors, the colors I think I might work with. I really, really want to use that color there. Possibly this one, maybe this one, and maybe this one. So I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with these, but those are the colors that are really appealing to me right now and are colors that there's a demand for in the licensed arch that I supply for. So, so yeah, I think I've accomplished the goals for these first couple of lessons. And in the next lesson, what I want to do is experiment with making marks. Alright? So I'll see you there.
4. Experiments in Mark Making: Hi guys, welcome to lesson 3. So in less than three here we're going to do a bunch of experimenting with making marks. Let's get started. Okay, So off-camera I went and bought myself a little color chart here. So that's all my swatches and I've got it now glued into the front of my sketchbook is some glue on that so they can label this as spring. And voila, I've got myself all set up for future use to know just by a glance what is in this beautiful spring set. So now comes the fun part. We're going to be doing some mark making. So I'm going to keep this book County, in fact, under my paints onto the way to here. I've still got my water over here in the corner and my little towel. But if we keep my if I don't run out of space here, I'm going to keep my swatches up here. I'm going to grab another sheet of watercolor paper. Now normally if I was doing a finished painting, finished art piece here, I would keep this all gallons to reduce the likelihood of getting all warping. But what I'm going to do is mark making here, this is more of an exercise, even though I may end up using some of the stuff, this piece itself is not going to be the finished piece. Like I said at the beginning of the class, I am going to be actually taking some of this mark-making and scanning it in and then using it to compose some final sort of abstract art for art licensing. So I am just at this point going to focus on using the paints, seeing how they work. I've got no plan in mind. I just know that the colors that I think I want to use are the saffron, midnight blue, and probably that brown. But let's just start with the midnight oil. Now, like I said, I think I might probably using a bunch of the colors, I might find it a little frustrating to have to flip the pages, but maybe just limiting my palette like this is going to mitigate that problem, at least for this lesson. Now, I probably should go change my water. It's getting a little bit dirty. It's not the worst. So maybe just do a couple here without going to change it. But you can see there's a little bit of color in my water already. So I'm going to try to lift a lot of color here and a wet the area on my paper so that I can just kind of experiment with how these will flower spread. So that's wet on wet. I'm going to do maybe a dry section here. And like I said, I'm going to be playing with these after and compositing them in Photoshop. So this is kind of freewheeling practice. And yeah, I don't even know if a lot of these would be usable. Iliad, but they, they usually are. So when I did my flowers the other day, I kind of went through and did the same thing. So I just went and experimented with the paints and painted a bunch of flowers, some with a lot of water, some with not so much water. I was really trying to just understand how this paint would work. So for example, this flower here, that one was done with a very wet surface and then the deep tissue for the most amount of paint would have been dropped into the middle here and then allow it to spread out. Most of these were just kind of experiments by I was able to use a lot of them. So that's how I'm thinking about this particular exercise right now, is that even though these aren't going to be a finished art piece, at least the house, something usable at the end. So let's get into that center front as well. Now, I usually recommend that you do have a limited palette when you first start working on a project like this. One of the reasons is that it a really good way to work in what would be considered trending colors at the moment. Or just to keep your head straight and not be focusing too much on the color mixing. But just knowing that you can work with these pieces after and the colors are limited. So the design challenges are not as great. So, so far I'm really liking how spreadable it is. I'm feeling like there's going to be a lot of potential there to do some interesting motifs. And at some point here I'm going to stop talking and actually just focus on what I'm doing is I'm finding, describing or to messes with my my flow. So not the best way for me when I'm working on something like this. I usually kinda just get into the zone and focus on the painting. Just be, just be in the moment. Try not to overthink things and just experiment. And talking kind of makes me not think that way. Now, amongst the other techniques that I use when I'm just doing this basic mark-making is to use a squeegee. And basically I just grabbed old credit cards or old bank cards. And I use those sometimes to just do some scraping and experimenting with trying to find some different techniques and different looks to incorporate into my composites that I do in Photoshop. So I'm gonna do a little bit of that right now. Now, you can use just the plain card like I just did. Or you can use one that has been cut up a little bit. So this on this one here, I've cut the edges. Can you see that? And a lot of times that gives you some really nice and very different looks. You can put the paint onto the paper first. Or you can also get a really thick coat of it on the edge of your card and gets the marks that way. Well, that's a really interesting set of lines and marks there. The other thing I do is I just do strange marks with the brushes and then sometimes take those and to smear them as cross. It could also be a good time to experiment with different types of brushes. So I'm gonna take us fan brush and see what I can come up with for marks with it. Now that's something I can really see myself using. I use a lot of these kind of textures in my work. So it makes sense to me to be using this brush to do that. Anything that you have that can make marks. Definitely experiment and don't limit yourself. Shoot straight watercolor brushes. Sometimes he's really cheap. School quality brushes can give you some really nice marks as well. So I like looking back at some of these earlier marks and seeing just how some of the mixing ended up, some of the little plumes that are formed here as it dries. So that's something to also remember as you're going through and doing this experimentation is that you can go back and add bits of color at different stages of dryness so far are really dry piece is going to come out looking quite different than something that is still quite wet. But I do like this. Can you see how beautifully that just works? That was just adding water to a semi dry area. So let's say in this area here, putting a little bit of water in there, it's giving me some very, very nice marks in there. So when you're doing your mark making, make sure that you take a look at some of the acts and you'll dilute some of your paints and then put it aside for a couple of minutes. Get yourself another sheet. And while that's sheet is kinda drying, start making some more. This is the fun part. I really enjoy this. I'm going to do some different colors just to really see the colors that, you know, once you're using them, how they really look and do some bigger areas of color here. One of the advantages to finalizing these sorts of things on the computer to do the compositing is that if this mark is really great, but I needed in teal, I can do it in steel. I can change it right in the program for that. Something that I don't know if you're interested in or not, but if you are, then you'll get a chance to see that towards the end of this class. So here I've switched to a much larger brush to do a few using that different profile. That makes a beautiful combination doesn't get some green mixed in with that metallic blue. I'm surprised that I'm not really getting to the bottom of any of these colors. There's a lot of color on each of those sheets. One of the things you can do if you get your paper good and went with your pigment is to also experiment with having some of it drift down. For that, I will use you use a little bit of a spray bottle. This is just an old perfume bottle with water in that field. I guess I should check that one out before starting. It doesn't really want to spray properly, but I just want you to get the idea. And I really liked how it's adding streets within these color areas. So that looks great. If you ever get too much water on your image. Like what's happening here, you can carefully blot it off with a paper towel or get your brush wet and dry, and use it to lift some of that extra off and then just keep squeezing it off into a paper towel. And then you can really lift. So you can see that adding all that extra water has really warped this particular piece of paper. But like I said, I think that's going to be okay because I'm going to be scanning these in for the final use. Now I see the spray has also done some really beautiful things here in the green and the blue here. It's almost like having added salts or alcohol. Maybe there was a little bit of something left in this follow-up because it is actually an old preview bottle. And I can smell it. It smells really pretty often. So basically you can see my process here. I'm going to do a couple more here. And then I'm going to meet you in the next lesson. And that lesson, we're going to try some little competitions, even though that's not really my intent for what I'm doing here. I just feel like I should show you some of that stuff too. So I'll meet you in that next lesson.
5. Making Simple Compositions: Hi guys, welcome to lesson 4. So in this lesson we're going to be doing a little bit of experimenting with composition. And it's going to really show you how these watercolors perform. Let's get started. Okay, I'm ready to go here in creating a couple of simple compositions. I've cut a couple of sheets of watercolor paper down in size. I may do two on each of these, you know, ultimately my goal is to have a ton of them to choose from when I'm trying to put together a collection for art licensing. Now, the other things that we did previously, I was really quite liking this color combination here. So this is, I think what I'm going to stick with. So that was the soft Braun, the midnight blue. I might use a little bit of that indigo. And of course there was the deep chocolate brown kind of a color. So I liked that in both of these, and I've got so many usable things on these two sheets. At the end, I'm going to be showing you some compositions that I do in Photoshop using these, but there's just some really delicious slots in there. Because I love this kind of fan brush bleeding into the saffron color. Spec thoughts are just beautiful balloons in here. So I've got a lot that I can work with, but I wanted to do a couple of compositions to, for any of you that might not be into doing the whole digital for shop finishing stuff that I'm gonna be showing. So I've put a few supplies here that I may also use. So I've got some of those intense pencil crayons, so-called her Darwin's. And I've got three colors I think might work. I also was looking for my, I know I have a really nice blue like this in the ink tents, but I couldn't find it. So we'll use this Staedtler one. It's okay, it'll work is just not as thoughts. So you can't put down as much as you can with these Darwin intense colors. And then of course about my fan brush and a couple of other sizes of brushes here. And I've got my whole raft of brushes nearby. I think I'm probably going to use that great big one for some of the stuff that I'm doing. So so let's get started. Oh yeah. I also wanted to show you this little brush here and I do have a better one of this. This isn't the best quality. Five, it's good liner brush, it'll hold a lot of ink, so it's good for making really large shapes. And I've also got my blow dryer here so that I can speed up the process. If we get a lot of wet areas here and we want to dry them off so that I can quickly move on to something else. So without further ado, let's go. So I'm going to start by laying down, oh boy, that presses dirty. Who just clean that out a bit. I'm usually pretty vigilant about cleaning my brushes. I guess I dropped the ball there at some point or I could blame my grandchildren because sometimes I let them use my supplies and yeah, it can happen that some of them are left a little bit less than desirably clean. So I've got some really super big areas wet here, so let me just grab some of that. We start with the midnight blue. And this is just to show you how actually really simple it is to produce some pretty decent abstract art and do it in such a way that it is fun for you and not to nerve wracking. So I'm kind of doing different shapes here because I really want to show you a variety. So we want to do quite a few things like dropping pigment onto wet areas of paint, dropping pigment onto clear areas of water. And then of course, the delicious mixing that can go on with colors. I can see this saffron being just one of my super go-to colors that I will use a lot. So whenever I'm doing something like this, I always keep in mind the whole composition as I'm putting something together. So we're going to have two rectangles here that our portrait and I always like to get some balance happening there. And it can happen with either the use of the colors or the use of the shapes. Always try to think in terms of the rule of thirds. So I never divide anything perfectly in half. I like varying the sizes of the components and the weight if that makes sense. So some areas might end up being darker. Therefore they're heavier. I want to balance that out on the other side was something else equally as weighty. Let's get some of this really nice dark brown in here. One thing I did notice with the brown is that it's dried with really great blooms and absolute you're able to build up areas and get them nice and wet and then drop in some paint or a lot of extra water. I'm doing here. Once they dry, you're going to have some really sweet looking blooms happening in that brown paint. And weren't really works with all of the colors that I just found it particularly noticeable with the brown. I think I'm going to switch to my fan hair and we're going to put a couple of sets of lines. One thing I didn't point out about this metallic sky blue. The blue is really great. It's a super saturated and rich, almost like a peacock blue. But I didn't really point out to you too much about the shimmer and that's something at the end. If I end up with that effect here, I will definitely show you. The shimmer was actually a very, very nice. So now I'm going into some of these areas that have had a chance to do a little bit of dry and that's going to give a completely different effect to these lines. It may not be noticeable now, but once this dries, you're going to see some really neat effects that have taken place with the colors mixing. So these two, for now, I think I'm just going to leave them and let them get a little bit drier. And with this one, I think I want to stick to some broader circles of color. So I'll just start with that peacock blue, since that's what I've got open here. Now with the one on this side here, I'm getting it a lot wetter and it's got a lot less pigment in it. Because I want you to see how that works. We're doing here really fascinating with watercolor, watching the process of drying. So I guess it's that old cliche about watching paint dry. Well, in this case, it can be super interesting because as time goes along, as these start to set and even simple things like the paper warping over on this side is giving me a little bit of a pool of paint. And that's going to be an interesting effect. And I think the same thing is going to happen over here. Got up at her water bottle today, better squirt bottle. So in a minute I'm going to do a little bit of stuff with that better square root ball so we can see some of that dripping and stuff that we can get happening. Now before these fully dry, I want to go back to that saffron color and add another circle of color here. You can see that I'm getting a little bit of dirt in here and I think it's because my pellets of gotten really saturated. So I think I'm picking up some of the substrates. So whatever the backing is, I'm just taking some drops of water on my brush so I'm really not offloading any of the wet on the brush. So none of the water is being offloaded onto my paper towel. And I want it super wet to get this kind of an effect here. And this side was already dry enough that that wasn't going to work in the same way. So I'm going to use just that very clean, clear water to create a different sort of an effect here. Now on this one, I'm going to add to some big dots of color. I'm always keeping in the back of my mind what the overall composition is going to be at the end of this. Now I'm going to take this lighter brush and we'll just another name for it. I've always called it a liner. And let's go back to that chocolate brown kind of a color. And I'll show you what's really cool about long brushes. You can tell here it holds a lot of paints because of the length of the bristles and you get it good and wet and you can use against quite a nice long line out of it. No, I like dragging it through those wet areas to get different effects and see how much paint that held and how long I was able to go. I could have gone even longer with that particular one. As she went. It picks up some color from a big pool of feet like that. Or like I said, with these sorts of composition, they're very spontaneous. Let your intuition guide you as you experiment and think of different things you can do to make marks and country your overall composition. This is a great time to experiment with wet on wet techniques, wet on dry techniques and everything in between. So I'm gonna put that one aside for a while to dry. Let's go back to these initial to that I did. So as they've dried, you can see some really sweet things happening in here. Lots of great blooms have formed. And I think these will be very usable. Now for your first try, they may not be frame ready watercolors, but you'll certainly have learned a lot from the experience. And for myself, I know that these are things that I can definitely use in my compositions that I do in Photoshop. Now on these two, I also want to make some colored dots. So I'm using very high-tech piece of equipment. Here are cotton buds. These are Q-tips. I use them often for doing this sort of additional texturing note, maybe you've never seen this before, but when you work in the public school system with limited budgets, sees Q tips, can be your friends. So I'm just going to load up. Got that tip good and wet. And I'm going to use it to put some really nice little dots in here. Now, this kind of thing really helps with the composition and getting some real balance in there. What I love about the cotton, cotton Q-tip and how it lays down the paint. And I know it'll be hard to see this at this point that when I get these fully dries little dots really come out looking variegated. So you've got some really dark areas and some really light areas in there. And I think what I will do, this is going to be very much of an experiment with you guys today. But it'll put a nice area of dark in here. And I think I'm going to add some of that blue. And then we're going to try a spray bottle. So this one works a lot better and I'm going to spray into those areas. And everything that's wet on my paper right now is going to run. Might not be super controllable, but I think we can make it look quite interesting. Alright, so between my two layouts here, I've got some very usable areas that I'm going to develop a little bit further. I'm going to probably do that off camera because there's less thans gone on quite far enough at, I may use some of the pencil crayons, and if I do, I will give you a little bit of information about that, as well as possibly using some paint markers to come in and putting in a little bit of detail. All right, so I guess I'll see you in that next lesson.
6. Adding Details and Textures: Hi guys, welcome to lesson five. In this lesson I'm going to continue adding details so that we can kind of flesh out this piece. Let's get started. Okay, so here's where I let it with these compositions. I went through with marker and page and added a bunch of these little details here. Some of these are combination of painting marker. So with this one I thought was pretty, I'm going to actually of course be scanning this sand and using it in further compositional studies with either Procreate or Photoshop or maybe even both. Here's that other circle one. And again, it's a little bit of marker in here, done some additional mark making. And I didn't really like the way this corner turned out. But one of the beauties of being able to do this in either Photoshop or Procreate is that I'll be able to crop off some sections because there's definitely some really great sections in there that I could work with as well. Maybe with blending modes or additional layers. I can build this up into a very nice design. Now the other one, I ended up just cutting out sections that I thought would be useful. The whole spatter thing didn't really turn out quite as well as I wanted. So it's no big deal because I always feel like there's something very usable in everything. So I've taken little sections of it. And so that's one of the sections I've seen. I saved this one here because I really liked the lines in here. I think this is going to be something that would be really great for layering. This piece, of course, that lined kind of a texture and a little brown dots that we created with the Q-tips, I thought would be really great because they have some really nice, really deep edges. So the edges came out very dark and same with constrict here. So this was one of the drugs from the spray bottle. And I think it's going to be usable component in some of our layering in Photoshop. And even this piece here which was kind of on the backside is something else height grab because of the lines and over the brown here, I had added a really heavy weight marker that I have. So it's given us a really nice cloudy effect in there that I think might be nice when it's composited are well, a lot of really useful components. Now you're gonna laugh at this one, but this is one of the paper towels that I was using. When you look at it. I mean, it's got some really great stuff happening in here too. And I've been known to go back and use some of these and it's got a really nice texture. So who knows? I mean, it's something that could be used somewhere in our design. And this one as well, just the texture that's here. So with the power of blending modes, even if it's too dark of the colors aren't exactly right. We can blend with another layer to make it look really good. Or we can recolor it so it can just be a textural piece with some really neat dark and light areas. What I've done is I've taken pictures of all of those. I've got them loaded on Creative Cloud so I can open them either here in Procreate and we just find it here. Here, the class assets. And there it is. So let's go into Procreate. And I'm going to add that into this group here. And now these are all those other marks that I had done at the beginning of class. Remember, we went through and created a bunch of assets that we could use. So I'm going to create a new document here. Let's see. I'm going to add one because I don't have a portrait layout there that I can choose from my presets. So this time I'm going to make it 12 inches wide by 16 inches tall. And I'm going to place that file. So that's going to be here. Now, before I start working on this, I'm probably going to crop it a little bit. Once I have it approximately the way I like it, I'll just hit that selection tool and that will be selected, right? So here I can go ahead and do some fun and funky additions right here in Procreate. So my markers weren't working that great when I was doing these circles. I'm going to go back and redo those. And I think I'm going to use the dry ink sample, one of the colors, add a layer and go in and just add these as if I was working with markers directly on my layout correction there on the other layer, back to this layer, I'm going to an inner line here in white. Now I used to do a lot of this kinda stuff in my art journals. So I'm pretty confident with these kind of experiments and mark making and so on. But doing it on a separate layer is a great way for you to be able to just decide afterwards whether you want it or not. I'm going to add a new layer again and this time sample some of this brown and just kinda add a couple of thinner lines in here. And you don't really, you could go on and on with this right here in Procreate, you could do things like adding glitter texture or gold. I've got several classes at talking about how to do that right here in Procreate. But really, looking at the VHA page, it's come out beautifully intense here. And I really love how that really opens doors for doing a multitude of different finishes to make your art piece look even more amazing. And I do love with procreate how you could easily go in and add textures. Let's take a look at some textures here by Lisa glance. I'm going to just grab one of these really neat textures that she has. Outer layer, sample a color. Let's sample this darker, midnight blue from the viva background on there and add a little bit of really cool texture in here. Down here, I'll sample some of that saffron and do the same thing. So imagine all the possibilities with just bringing in that beautiful, the viva painted scan into procreate. And then going nuts. Using all of these really neat paints and effects that you have here in Procreate. These are some of my own brushes here. I'm going to try that crazy dots because I've always really liked to help. That looks as a texture and check that out and how nicely it stands out with that vivid color in the background. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to switch into Photoshop. So in the next lesson we're going to take a look at some of the really great compositing we can do with something like this. Alright, so I will meet you there.
7. Preparing for Digitizing: Hi guys, welcome to lesson 6. So as always, we're going to finish this off digitally. I'm going to take you into Photoshop where we're going to do a bunch of compositing with these layers that we've created. Let's get started. I promise you I will be going into Photoshop at some point, but I enjoyed that class yesterday towards the end of the day. And so during the evening I had time to kind of play around on my iPad while we were watching TV. And so here are a couple of things I wanted to show you right here in Procreate, you can do all of your compositing and procreate if that's your choice as opposed to Photoshop. These were the two that I had done where I eventually did the water drip. But through the power of digital, I was able to isolate a frame back before I added all kinds of detail. So I brought those two into Procreate here and then started to experiment this one here. The second layer, layer two is actually a copy of this and it's placed over top of that one with a blending mode. So this is soft light. And so you can see just some of the detail that's coming through from the impression of that original on proc. So that's a very simple composite. And then I went and grabbed this. I'll show it to you. This is just another artwork I had kicking around in my gallery here. And with blending modes, I thought I could stop right here and have two very feasible artworks that I could submit for art licensing, but I didn't stop there with my experimentation. I also brought in this artwork, which was one that I had already existing as well. And I just really love how that looks. So this gave me food for thought and I can experiment with this particular look and technique. I'll show you that in a sec because I already did. Go ahead and do that. And yet, this is just adding a little bit more detail artworks so that it would be even more interesting scene through the leaves like this. So then I just went through and did that with a bunch of different artwork. So I did some experimentation. And this is sometimes a way for you to discover a really new look. Something just kind of happens. And there you go, you've got an idea for other artworks. So I'll show you the breakdown on this one. So that was the original, that was one of our marks from our mark-making session. I added another one. So that was part of what we did in that session as well. And the blending mode, I used his darker color here. Then I added a bunch of small detail. You can see as it's coming together here. This could be a very feasible piece of artwork here that I could use for art licensing, which is a little bit of adjustment may be on the colors, but I wanted to experiment with that sort of a look of peekaboo layer. Everything that you see here, all of those different things that I'm using here for compositing are all things that I have already in my gallery. So I think I just went into flowers and leaves and I grabbed a couple of things and I went into these textural components and grab things. So that's the one that I just showed you a second ago. A lot of the ones that I create here. This is stuff that I do create for use in compositing and Photoshop. So I've got multilayers here that I could experiment with. So I just did a quick tour of my artwork and grab some stuff so that I can quickly experiments. And all of these are experiments that I've done by compositing layers. Let's take a quick look at this one so I add a little bit more detail here, even more, this is just with some kind of an inking pen. This was something that I grabbed from one of those other documents and other experiments. Turn those two off. I really feel like this is something that I'm going to explore with. This peekaboo layer is showing through to the textures that are underneath. Five. There's an example with the beautiful peony, and you can decide what works, whether to have that on or off, whether to move this layer, whether to rotate, all that kinda stuff. It's part of the exploration that you can do once you've got all the components. So I can walk you through each of these documents. They all have something like that. The possibilities are endless, I think pay. So let's switch over to Photoshop so I can show you what I've done in there. So I've taken and cropped a lot of these components that we had done in the first lesson. And I've added additional detail in here, and this is all done here in Photoshop. So for example, something like this. I've got this texture here that was just brought in. And I've used the darken blending mode to integrate it into the design. And that's basically the kinda thing that I do as I progress to a finished piece. So this piece, you can see that I added this small detail on this circle over here. I've added some white over here to kind of balance it out. I've got some nice abstract squiggles going on here. And I really love how clear and detailed we are here. You can see the texture of the paper even and the blooms that are formed are absolutely gorgeous. So I think this is a piece that could be quite successful with art licensing. Now. And some of them I've actually gone and done some adjustments to the color. So for this one, That's exactly what I did. I just went in and I pick on this one as well and just adjusted the hue and saturation. So you can go to hue and saturation, which is Command U or Command Option Command U. And here I just slid the hue slider a little bit and adjusted the color. So that's something you can do a little bit more easily here in Photoshop, I think. So depending on the color that you're looking for. And what I do when I'm doing that collection is I'll do probably five, at least in that similar color scheme just so that the buyer has the opportunity to purchase more than one piece in a particular color scheme. So here you can see I added some of these additional details that as well, some of these little dots of color, a few squiggles, some lines. And all of this just adds to how interesting the piece is. And these are, these watercolors and the background are the two or three pieces I've just showed you have not been layered. I've really simply just taken a section of that watercolor and used it and added some additional details. So there's a couple of other, a couple of other looks. And again, an adjustment in the hue and saturation to get more of richard teal and more of terracotta field to this whole piece. Now I wanted to show you this one because this is the 11 of the ones that we were using in Procreate. And this one, I have layered a bunch of the different parts that we had worked on. So these were the two big circles, as you recall, the two big blue circles. So this is one of them. And what I did is I isolated some other spots from the artwork and I have imported those to add as compositing layers here. So here's an example of one. And then with this one, I use soft light as the blending mode. I use soft light as well with this. And we're getting a very, very different look here. And I kinda like this odd sort of mixing that's going on here. Remember that one little piece that I had saved that is there. And again, that's adding quite a bit of interesting texture here. And I've used lighter color as my blending mode. And this kind of orangey stuff that's happening as it's mixing over the turquoise. This really made me think of foil. And so I grabbed some of the foil bits that I've done that I showed you there in Procreate and I've added them. So this is another way that you can really add a lot of interests to your layouts. So all in all, what I really wanted to share with you, the idea of taking the paints that we used, the BBVA pains and it could be really any paints. But I found that with the BBVA, it was just so nice that it was portable and I plan to be doing some painting outside in my yard hand. I may record another class at some point where I do that. And that really accentuates the affordability of it. But all in all, what I really wanted to share was just the idea that experimenting and exploring is a fabulous way to create a bunch of abstract pieces and to really learn the use of your watercolors, the use of either Procreate or Photoshop to composite and, and can really lead to a whole bunch of fun experimentation. Now I just landed on this piece here and I remembered. One thing I was going to tell you is that if you do a bunch of additions in Procreate or Photoshop and they don't quite match the background texture that you had from your original watercolors. You can import a paper texture. I've got one here as a pattern. Also have ones that I've just saved from procreate from one of the paint sets, watercolor paint sets that I had bought and sold. Just select it, copy it over into whatever piece. Let's just do it on this one. Paste it, fit it to your Canvas size, and then choose a blending mode. And I find that to Soft Light, Linear Burn. And there's a couple of ads that work. Just have to experiment really. But once I do that blending, I can make adjustments. At least now, everything has the same texture, even if I have created it in Procreate or here in Photoshop. So you can see here, all of these have the same texture. So yeah, I guess that's really the end of my presentation. And I just wanted to really pump you up and encourage you to experiment like this because it's one of the best ways to really learn what works. And it's a really, really good way to discover your own personal style and aesthetic. So, yeah, let's meet in the next lesson. And we're just going to do a little bit of a wrap up there. All right. I'll see you there.
8. Mockups, Conclusion and Wrap Up: Hey guys, walked to the wrap up. Thanks for sticking it out. So we've done a bunch of experimenting and it really, I wanted to share how it was going to go when I started this class. So I'm glad you were there with me and we did this together. Now of course, you know that you don't have to use these particular PDZ to achieve these results. But if you are interested in them, please check out the course materials and I'm going to give you some links there that you want to take a look at some of the finished products. I think they turned out great. So I've tried this out on a bunch of different mock-ups so that you can take a look and see how this could all apply for you. Now, I'm going to be submitting these for art licensing like I do with all of my work. I think some of these can be very successful as wall art pieces as far could be used on almost any sort of a product. Now if you haven't done so before, make sure you hit that ball button up there. That way you'll be informed about all my classes as they're released them. Also, if you've got a minute, you please leave me a review down. Their reviews and comments really helped students to figure out whether or not this is a course that they could use. Also, if you produce something for the class, please post it here. I'd love to see it and I always comment on whatever is there. If you have any questions, of course, please post those into the discussion area so that I can reply and everybody can see my response. Make sure you also take the time to sign up on my mailing list, which is on my website at shop, dot-dot-dot CAA. That's where I post any freebies. And anything else that I think will be of interest to you. Don't worry, I don't send out a lot of e-mails. If you have a chance check out my stores, it Sawzall.com and Arctic where in Canada as well as society six. And you can also check me out on Instagram and Facebook that Dolores art kinda. Thanks for hanging out with me today and I will see you next time. Bye for now.
Delores Naskrent, Creative Explorer
