Creative Colour Plays - Fitting Creativity into a Busy Lifestyle

1. Intro: We all struggle to fit creativity into our busy lifestyles. How often have you come to the end of your day, frustrated and annoyed because you wanted to paint and you didn't? Your creativity is such an important coping mechanism. It teaches us to be present in the moment, and helps us to release stress and anxiety. Hi there. I'm Jo-Marie, full-time mom of two little ones and a passionate watercolor artist. Today I'll be guiding you through how to use creative color plays to fit creativity into your busy lifestyle. What is a creative color play you ask? This is something that has helped me to paint consistently every single day for the past 150 days and I'm still counting. It's something that I started doing when I could get a hold of a snippet of time to myself, with a five minutes here or 15 minutes there. It's a way to practice different techniques, new brushstrokes or new color combinations, without the added pressure of to having to create the perfect masterpiece. What seems like the same old boring practice strokes, then become transformed when we cut them into small cards. Whether you're new to watercolors and looking to learn some basic techniques, inexperienced artists struggling to fit creativity into your daily lifestyle, whether with watercolors or other mediums such as acrylic, wash, pascals, or even pen and ink sketching, this class will have something for you. By the end of this class, you'll not only have learned more about watercolors, you'll also have uncovered techniques to help you to make this a consistent daily habit. Have your 15 minutes ready, and let's get started. 2. Project Overview: Let's quickly chat a few details about our class project. The main thing here is I want you to start painting as quickly as possible. You don't have to have the exact supplies that I do. Just use whatever you have on hand and what you feel like playing with. The reason I chose this for a project, is I just discovered that A4 is such a great size, it's not too much that we feel overwhelmed and that takes too much time. But it's enough space that we can play with different brush strokes and different colors without the page filling up too quickly. The beautiful thing as well is even if you feel that you make mistakes while you're going along, you can put that voice aside once again and just say, "I'm just playing, I've got my timer going", and when we cut it up, you're going to see how what seemed like a mistake becomes a beautiful texture or a beautiful shape on those finished cards. The best thing you can do for your success with this project is to know that there is no right or wrong, you can follow along with what I'm doing, you can just use the same timer and paint whatever you feel like painting. But I want you to leave that perfectionism, and that critical voice in our head that wants to tell us we don't know what we're doing and then curb it and lock the door. If you're stuck for inspiration and not sure what you want to paint today, I've included a handy resource file for you with some ideas, so you can paint your favorite flower, use your favorite color scheme, draw out a new brush, and remember, this isn't about perfection, it's about playing. Please share everything that you create in the Project Gallery, whether you finished to play or whether you only got halfway. I would love to see what you've created. 3. Supplies: Let's quickly chat about supplies. If you don't have any watercolors on hand, I'm quickly going to guide you through the absolute minimum that you need for this class. Make sure that it is a nice thick 300 GSM watercolor paper whether it's cold press, hot press which is really smooth or even rough, that doesn't matter. It depends on what you're trying out today. I'm using the Canson XL watercolor which is a cold press 300 GSM paper and very affordable. Next up, watercolors. We'll be using a mid-range type of set, something like Winsor & Newton, Cotman colors or your St. Petersburgs White Nights, is a nice way to get a feel for your colors. But whatever you have, really, that is fine. We want to get to know our seek to use what you have and what you're going to continue using. They are so many brushes. You can use whatever you have. I like working with a size 12 [inaudible] , but comes to the firm point. 4. Interlude: The story of the artist who thought she couldn't: 5. Created to be creative: Have you ever looked at nature around you or anything that you enjoy doing and further yearning to create something of it, whether you capture it in a dish that inspires you, on a photograph, on a story that you write, on paper with paint or paintbrush. We've been created to be creative and we each have our own creative voice. Whether it's been created before, you haven't made it before, and that's what's important. Creativity is something that just makes us feel good when we leave a couple of things at the door. Here's my tips for giving your creativity free reign and discovering that inner child that really wants to be let loose. The first thing is, let go of guilt. How often do we feel guilty for just taking a bit of meal time, 15 minutes to paint, which is the moment of quiet with a cup of coffee. I know I've got a toddler in a baby constantly asking for my attention. But I know that we now take that 15 minutes, I'm a better person afterwards to see to their needs. Number two, let go of self-doubt. How often do we look at what we're painting or drawing or creating and that's not good enough. This doesn't look right, this looks like a child's drawing, whatever we've got a voice in our head. I can promise you how often I've struggled with that voice, just trying to create this class. That's why we have to fight against it. Our creativity matters. Every time would create something, putting something out into the world, we're adding something that the world didn't have before. Leave your self-doubt and allow yourself to just create. That's why we leave our expectations at the door, we leave a lot of things at the door, that's why we can have fun. They go off perfections. This goes hand in hand with self-doubt. Perfectionism tells us that I need to reach a level way up here, and self-doubt tells me that no, I'm no better than a level down here. Why should I even try? You know why? Because no one else can do what you do. Don't let anyone tell you differently. Now that we've gotten rid of a few elephants in the room like self-doubt and perfectionism. Your next question might be, but how on earth do I find the time to create? Well, let me share with you a few tips that have helped me along the way. Number one, we're going to set a specific time-frame so we know what to plan for. Figure out what fits into your schedule, and even if you don't do it every single day, that's still a few more days than you were creating before. Number two, we're going to have a set work space. So we know we have a sized space to go and sit down and create the moment that we have a chance. If you have this space really, you can just go and sit down and create. Number three, we're going to create something that will give someone else joy, not just ourselves. The moment I knew that my practice strokes can create something that I can give to someone else, whether to write a word of encouragement or to give a beautiful birthday card. This made it worthwhile. Isn't it funny how we need that kind of permission? But there you have it. You're not just going to be doing something for yourself. You'll be doing something that you can share it with someone else as well. 6. Let's paint! Phase 1 - Wet on Wet: All right, let's paint. No, we're not doing a separate lesson on techniques. We are going to learn techniques as we have fun and paint. The other colors that are used in this following color play, you're welcome to try and pick the same colors, or just use whatever you've decided you want to play with. Just a last note before we really jump into it, you really don't have to copy exactly what I'm doing. In fact, I want you to use my color play as guidelines and inspiration to create your own unique version. No one painting, whatever, be exactly the same. Before we start, I usually like to spray my palette with clean water that reactivates the pigment and it makes it easier to pick up more intense colors I got along. I also like using two jars of water you'll have seen in the supplies video. I just want to point out that I use the one to rinse off most of the color on my brush, and then the second jar to become clean water. Lastly, it's always useful to have kitchen towel handy. Remember to start your timer. Use your cellphone, use an egg timer, use whatever you have on hand. 15 minutes, starting now. Firstly, we start with a wet on wet phase. This creates softer color and it creates a nice background for us to edit on. I'm spraying my paper with clean water or you can use your brush. We're going to mix up a puddle of paint. What I'm doing now is mixing up my colors. You'll hear me talking about the word gouache. This refers to two things, it refers to the puddle of paint that I'm mixing on my palette and it also applies to the paint that I've applied to the paper. A gouache of color is any form of paint with on your palette or on your paper. You'll see how I start right off the bat, exploring brush strokes. You'll see me using the various parts of my brush, from the very tip to the belly, which is the bottom part of the brush. Let's quickly talk about the consistency of your paint. If you feel that your point is not moving enough on the page, if it's just sitting there, it means that you haven't added enough water when mixing up your gouache. If you feel that your paint is moving too much and your paper is getting flooded, it means that you added too much water to your paint. This really is a process of exploration and experimenting to get to that perfect consistency. Here around MLK is the typical consistency that we'll use and you'll be mixing up premium mixes to drop into a white with gouache to create different textures. To create texture, we can use a tissue or paper towel to pick up some excess water and you'll see that that picks up the colors. That's a way to undo something that you don't want or you can even just let your colors mix on the page by letting two washes of color blend into each other and moving your paper to see what it does. If you feel like you want to soften an edge with clean water, check your work on the edge and work the color away from the existing wash, bringing it into the rest of the paper. You can also do this using another color instead of just clean water. You'll see that this is a technique that I use in various stages of the color play. Blending up the edges of the color that I've added to blend it into the paper or into another color. What I'm doing here to create interest is contrasting the bigger blue shape with smaller darker shapes, the thin lines that I'm adding. Let's talk quickly a bit about color mixing, you'll see that I'm mixed blue and brown together to create my own gray. This usually creates a beautiful harmony because you're using the existing colors in your palette. It's a lot more dynamic than using a pre-mixed gray or black. Blacks are typically very thin watercolor but Payne's gray is a very nice, convenient gray that still has nice dynamic characteristics on paper. While you're doing your own color play, I want you to pay attention to what does it do on the paper as you go? Do you like what it's doing? Do you spot any interesting textures and textures, and they remember how you create a thing? These are nice things to keep in mind and it's also nice techniques that are going to pop out of your unconscious when you're doing another painting. Let's talk about mixing muted colors. We've talked about grays. If you want to mute down a color, so to bring it more to a neutral or mutant orange in which what I'm mixing here, you're going to be adding the primary color that hasn't been used within that color. If you think back to school days, you mix red and yellow to get orange and to turn that down from a bright fire truck orange, we're going to add a touch of blue because our primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. You can control how muted this color becomes by varying the amount of blue that you add. One tip is to just be careful, you don't want to do this accidentally on your palate. Once you're aware of how to mix muted colors, this is something you want to use intentionally and then you can avoid it by knowing why mud happens when you mix unexpected colors. Here are some more examples of harm creating contrasts, so a mixed up a bright pink coral color. I'm starting with a large abstract shape, almost thinking flowers in my head and then I'm going to add smaller marks for contrast. I'm also going to add darker finer lines of sipia on top of the pink to create further interest. If you want to add a new perspective onto your color plate, try turning your paper in different directions, this just makes shapes and textures pop out in different way. Quick tip is also just to remember to dab off excess water and paint on your kitchen towel so that you don't flood your paper. I showed you this section. I just wanted to tell you something behind the scenes. When I pick the colors for this class, I had cadmium yellow in mind with a blue and a pink because I always use cadmium yellow. Then when I started forming, I realize I picked lemon yellow, so instead of going back and putting it back and picking new supplies, I decided why not play with a different color? I was actually really stuck on my color combinations before I started this color play while I was painting, and especially in this section, I just loved how the CPI and the lemon yellow blended together and just the range of colors that I could get from that. I felt inspired. I was surprised, I enjoyed it and it's just something that inspired me again to try new color combinations. I hope that this will do the same for you. It's also an encouragement to go with what you have and don't be too upset if something goes differently than what you expected. Matters what happens when you get a toned or muted color that you really weren't expecting. If you mix too many of the different primary colors to get, they really do get an ugly mud color that can't even be discussed as just a neutral. This can happen easily on your palate as well if you're not careful, especially with an open plate like this. I recommend that you clean your palate every now and then. 7. Let's paint! Phase 2 - Wet on Dry: All right, our paper is starting to dry by itself, so we're moving over to phase two, which is going to be more wet on dry, which is when we add our wet paint to dry paper. This can be on a clean piece of white piece of paper or over existing color. Just to summarize what I've done so far, is I started with wet on wet, this creates big shapes and lose flowing textures. As the paper dries, I then start adding more finer details on top of these beautiful textures and washes. Just playing with what stands out to me and intuitively what I feel like doing. I also start to try and repeat some elements from the existing texture, so if I have blue and red on one part of the page, I'll try and repeat them on the other side, or smaller dots on the one side are added on another side. This just creates a little bit of unity. Trust your instinct, and just play. Varying the pressure of my brush using heavy pressure with [inaudible] brush for thick lines then a thin line using just the tip of my brush and this is a nice way to practice your brush strokes. We're going to layer this over our existing textures. Don't worry about it, just pretend this is an empty piece of paper. To make a thin line, try and keep the brush as upright as possible and keep the pressure light. But don't try and move too slowly, it almost makes it too difficult. Move at a medium pace. Then for a thick line, you're going to push the brush as flat onto the paper as possible, and to see how thick a line you can get out of your brush. For the very lines that you'll see, basically look knock leaves, we're going to alternate between having your brush upright with light pressure and then pushing down, pushing down, and then lifting the brush up again. Just to show you that from a different perspective. If you struggle creating the thin line, makes sure that your hand is supported on the pinky and to try and have a firm surface underneath it. In my case, my paint was still wet so I was trying to balance my hand on the paper. See I'm starting to focus on repeating some elements to bring it together, so I like how these lines cross, I'm using repeated colors that I've used in the brush strokes. You can think about repeating the same shape in different colors or the same shape, but smaller and bigger, repeating your lines and textures across various parts of the page. This isn't critical, it's just a nice way to think of something to paint as you go along. Quick question, if you're wondering whether your paper is way too dry, you can pick up your paper and tilt it slightly, and you'll notice that the areas that are so dry are wet. The areas that are wet will be shining or glistening, and the areas that have dried will have no shine to it. All right, we have five minutes to go and see how much we've done already. You'll see that my painting is slowing down a bit as I take more time to think about it and to think what I want to place where. Just quickly to recap, our definition of wet on dry, means that we are applying wet wash or wet color onto dry paper or an existing paint layer. This is a nice way to add details and it's also a nice way to build up layers of paint for greater contrast, and something that will really help you in normal paintings as well, that's not just playing like this. Here's a quick color mixed up. I've mixed mossy green by creating a base green with my blue and yellow, your normal school type color theory. Then I add sepia to tone it down to create a mossy green. Sepia is a nice way to add a vintage effect to your colors, and you can vary the type of mossy green by adding either more yellow or more blue, depending on what you want. As a bonus tip, you can always do a color play with entirely just variations of greens and see you can mix up and what effects that would create. This is a nice way to play with color mixing without getting too bogged down in swatches or feeling bored. Remember also if you want to lighten your color, to add water, darken your color, add more pigment. We're going to use the brush strokes that we practiced in earlier to create single leaves. We start with a light pressure on the tip of the brush to create the same. We press down to create the leaf of the body curving slightly before lifting the tip of the pressure at the end. You can repeat this process with a small white space in the middle between your two brush strokes to create a bigger leaf. You'll see me doing that later, this color play. Here I'm just creating the tip of my brush to create small leaves, playing on a floral leaf theme. You can see towards the end of this color play, I'm actually starting to overthink a little bit and I should have just carried on painting, so be careful that your brain doesn't jump up on you and release that inner perfectionism and make you wonder whether you're doing the right thing, just keep on playing and enjoying the textures on the paper. Some tips about adding details, I like using a darker color with a thicker consistency, so we're talking about our cream and sometimes even well actually honey or thick paste consistency, so you'll use those two and you keep your pressure light on your brush for fine details. Like I mentioned before, if you feel that the tip isn't staying nice and fine, occasionally use your fingers to reshape it or to brush it against your palette, just keep that fine tip back. Remember what I was saying about overthinking? Here I was taking a moment to try and think, what else should I do on this kind of play? There's a different pressure on it, if you think someone else is going to be looking at your work like this. I just want to remind you to just relax and play and if you're done, you're done, then you can stop. Just decided to go with the color theme, I felt I still wanted to add some fine details to my page, so I just went with little dots that creates a cluster of flowers. Just quickly reminding you if you want to bring it together, things that you can repeat. There's that brushstroke I told you about, the very loose leaf, you'll see it's on the screen. Just now I'm creating two brush strokes next to each other. Adding a last bit of splatter and flicking the brush with my finger for final texture and details. Spatter is also a nice way to just break out of the right and create some fun on the page, if you feel like you're getting stuck. There we go our final color play, how beautiful is that? 8. Transformation time - Cutting it up: So now that we've had a lot of fun painting and learning some watercolor technique, we're going to cut up our artwork. Wait. What? Yes. We're going to cut it up. I promise you, you're not going to regret it. You're going to see how things you thought were mistakes or random strokes are transformed into beautiful patterns and textures, we're going to multiply this single artwork that only took us 15 minutes into multiple gift tags. These can be used to encourage a friend. Whether in the gift tags that I make here, or whether you transform them into greeting cards or bookmarks or whatever tickles your imagination. Now you're wondering where to start. Basically, you want to decide either whether you want to cut your cards to a very specific size. So then you'll pick one of the sizes that I've recommended here, or whatever you prefer. Or, what I've done is to decide more or less how many cards I want and how many sections we're going to divide my paper, and then I just divided according to that. It's really important that you remember that these cards really don't have to be an exact size. Personally, I prefer shifting the size a little bit if it better suits the pattern instead of trying to stick to a specific length or measurement. We're just cutting away the edges so that we don't have any unnecessary white space at the ages of our cards as these will already be quite small. We interrupt this podcast for some toddler art. So here's where we're going to split it up into what we feel like will make good cards. As I mentioned, if you see a nice pattern, shift your ruler or your paper cutter and see what looks nice, and just go with your gut feeling. We're just doing the same in the opposite direction. Again, taking note now of what shapes and sizes the cards and the patterns turn out. I know this is going to feel strange, but take a deep breath, have your scissors ready and start cutting. I just recommend if you don't have a paper cutter or guillotine, use the biggest scissors you have as this will go quite quickly, and it will help you to cut in a straight line. I just love seeing what happens if I rotate the cards to see the patterns in a different perspective. It's also beautiful to see the textures and the patterns just pop out as these little cards emerge. There we have it, all our cards individually cut up. Now it's time to convert them into give tags. So pick whatever card you would like to start with first, and then pay attention to what orientation you want your card to be. Rotate it around until you're happy with it, and then punch a hole at the top. It's important that you sign your work. I know you might feel that this was just playing, and it might just have been brush strokes, but it is still art that you created. Then do this for all your other cards as well. Here is a little bonus inspiration tip. It's fun to add some doodles now that we have a pen in hand. You can either just draw some of the elements that we've painted the same flower shapes, or you can draw something completely different on top of the beautiful textures that you've painted. Thank you for watching this class. I had so much fun painting these give tags and sharing with you, and I would love to see your progress and what you created. So please share it in the project gallery. 9. All done! For now...: Congratulations, you've just finished your first creative color play. It wasn't that fun. I know I enjoyed it. Did you know that I learned something new about my color palette today, using a cool luck lemon yellow instead of cadmium yellow. The whole idea is that you find 15 minutes every day, that works for you. Not to create pressure, but to create something that will make you feel better about yourself, your day, and your ability to make something beautiful. Play around, paint, whatever you feel like painting today. Remember that this 15 minute practice can apply to bigger works as well. I would love to see what you created, post it in the project gallery below, and remember that I'm also on Instagram and email. If you want to tag me on your work, I would love that, you can use my hashtag and please send me any questions or suggestions you might have. Either an email or by direct message. I love hearing from my students and answering whatever questions I can help with. If you have anything that inspired you in this class and that you'd love to learn more about in a new class, I'd love to hear about too. Until next time, happy creating and remember, leave that perfectionism in the cupboard.