Doodle Art Meets Watercolor: Paint an Abstract Net Design

1. Intro: [MUSIC] Hi, my name is Karen, and I like to doodle, and paint, and draw. I'm self-taught and I'm the top teacher here on Skillshare. I started doodling a few years back. There was something about the crisp black lines and the abstract shapes emerging on the page and that flowy, meditative state you get when doodling, that got me to keep going and keep trying new media and new techniques. Water color is a beautiful medium for adding color and interests to do to art and it's actually quite easy to do and a lot of fun. In this class, we'll combine this doodle art net design with watercolor. Painting these net designs gives you the opportunity to play around with your pens and paints, find color combinations that appeal to you, and gain better control, and confidence with your line work and your paint brushes. This is a step-by-step class, and so it's suitable for absolute beginners and also for anyone who just wants to relax and enjoy making some doodle art. It's also a great way to improve your watercolor skills. We will start by drawing different variations of this net design. Then we'll paint a watercolor background and draw net design on top of it, in black and in gold. Then we'll switch it up by first drawing the net design on watercolor paper, and then adding color in several methods. Stained glass, gradient, and drops color. We will trout a few embellishments that can be added to the net designs and apply those embellishments to our paintings. I've included a troubleshooting lesson where I share tips for how you can deal with mistakes and I'm always here to help if you need me. You can use these paintings to make greeting cards, frame them and decorate your home, or print them on to products through websites like Society6. Or you can do what I do and just make them for fun because they really are a lot of fun to paint. Let's jump right in. [MUSIC] 2. Supplies: I'm going to go over the supplies that I used for this class, you can improvise with alternatives that you have on hand. So I use a micron pen size 08, and it gives a nice bold black line, and it's also waterproof when dry. So when I paint over in watercolor, it won't bleed. Instead of a micron pen, I often use a fountain pen. Just make sure if you are using a fountain pen that the ink that you're using is waterproof. This is the ink I use and it's a waterproof ink. I also like to use a finer tip of a micron pen. So this is a size 03 micron pen for embellishments, for making them a little bit more delicate than the lines of the net designs. I also use gold and silver gel pens, which add a little bit of sparkle and a different quality to the black lines and the watercolor. You'll need some watercolor paper, so I recommend using cold press 300 gsm watercolor paper. You could also use hot press, but I find that hot press watercolor paper dries faster, so it's a little bit harder to work with, and also the cold press helps and gives you a bit more texture to your watercolor. I like to have some backing to take my watercolor paper too. So I save the back of used up sketch pads or you could also use a foam core which is pretty inexpensive, and I put down my watercolor paper onto it and tape it down using masking tape. You could also tape your water color paper down using painter's tape. Watercolor paper sometimes buckles as it gets wet. So it's going to be easier to paint on your watercolor paper when it's taped down. By having my watercolor paper taped down to a hard surface, I can easily turn it around if I need to, to reach different area more easily and I can put it away to dry without touching the paper. You're going to need watercolor paints. It really doesn't matter which brand or which type if they're pan watercolors, or two watercolors, or liquid water colors, a jar of clean water, and a paper towel to remove excess moisture from your watercolor brush, and you're going to need some brushes. I use a variety of synthetic round watercolor brushes. I use the larger ones for painting the whole background and the smaller ones for painting inside smaller shapes. So I have a size eight, a size six, and a size three here, but you can use whatever you have on hand. In the next lesson, we'll fill in our worksheets. So you don't need your watercolors just yet, just your pen and your printed out worksheets or a blank piece of paper. 3. Net Designs: In this lesson, we're going to be practicing some of the basic ways that you can draw this net pattern. We're going to be filling in this worksheet. You can find and download the worksheet down below on their projects and resources. It's on the right where it says resources. Print out your worksheet and follow along with me, or if you'd like, you can just follow along on a blank piece of paper. In this worksheet, I have a schematic of how the pattern is created, then an example of how I created the pattern, and then an empty box where you can fill in the pattern yourself. I'm going be using a 08 micron pen, which gives a pretty wide line and is pretty convenient to use, but you can use any pen you like. Let's start with this first one. The gray arrows or the direction that I do first. I'm following this direction, but I'm adding some waviness to my lines. I make my first line more or less along the diagonal. I make it sort of meandering, not to wavy, but not too straight. The second line also meanders and it doesn't follow the way that the first line meander. That creates a sense of movement in the drawing. I keep going drawing line after line and trying to mix it up a bit so that the lines come closer together than the drift apart a little bit. Once you're done making the lines in this direction, we're going to make the lines in the opposite direction, just like these black arrows. The purpose of doing this is that we'll have an intersection between the first lines we made and this next set of lines. Then we're going to draw circles in the intersections. So just like you did, the first lines follow the diagonal direction more or less and make your lines wavy. Anyway, like moving closer together and moving further apart to create a sense of movement. You can space your lines apart a little bit closer or a little bit further apart, it's all going work. Just make sure that you have enough room to comfortably draw the circles at the intersections. Now, we're going fill in little circles at the intersections of the lines. I think it adds a little bit of interest. You can leave it like this, but I really like the way that the circles look at the intersections. At every intersection fill in a little circle, you can decide how big or small you want these circles to be. It's up to you and it's all going work. Usually with doodling, the basic designs are so simple. What makes the doodle impressive or interesting or creative is the overall page or the overall look of the pattern or the doodle that you're making. The design elements are really simple to do. All you have to do is just make a bunch of them before it comes together. I noticed that I put my hand on wet ink, which is something I do a lot. Here's one thing you can do to avoid that you can put a piece of paper underneath your hand. That way the moisture from your hand won't pick up the ink and you won't get as much smearing. But you can also rotate the paper or just wait for the into dry or be a little bit more careful than I was in this case. That's our first pattern done. Now, let's move on to the second. Again, we start by following the gray arrows in the schematic. You can see that there are sort of radiating from the top left corner. At the top left corner the lines are close together, and then they spread further apart from each other. Just like in the first example, the lines are going to be wavy and meandering. They're not going to be two straight or stiff to create that sense of movement and waviness and softness. You can see that they're close together over here and further apart over here, starting close together, and then ending far apart. Again, like the first example, I'd like to switch it up so that the lines move closer to each other than further away from each other. They're not just following the waviness of the previous line. Now, we're going to follow the black lines. Again, our purpose is to create an intersection or crossing between the first set of lines and the second set of lines. That will have a place to draw our circles. We're just going to make curved lines that cross these radiating lines that we made before. Even though some of the lines are pretty close together, I don't want to make them too close together because then it's going to be hard to draw the circles when we get to them. You can see that I'm rotating the paper to make it easier for me to draw the lines. I think I left a little bit too much space between these two lines here. I'm just going to add another line in between them. We're done with the lines and onto the circles. Again, just like before, fill in a little circle in the intersections between the lines. Where the lines are close together, I'd like to make the circles a little bit smaller, and then they get a little bit bigger as the lines are more spaced apart, but not too big. I really like this design. It looks like someone through a blanket out into the air, and it has a sense of depth as if we're, the lines are close together. It's further away from us and where the lines are further apart, it's closer to us. You can always add lines wherever you like, even after you've finished adding the circles, and then add circles on top of that in the intersections. This next pattern looks a lot like a spiderweb. We start in the center and radiate out. Again, in the center of the lines are going to be very close together, and as we radiate out, the lines are moving further apart from each other. I started more or less in the center of the square, but you can start at any point in the square. It's okay if the lines don't exactly start at the center, sometimes it gets a little bit crowded in the center. So you can start a line from the middle of another line that works just fine. Now for the black arrows in the schematic, so we're just going draw circles, one circle around the center with the line a little bit meandering, and then larger and larger circles around it. We're creating a crossing point between the first set of lines and the second set of lines. Even though we're just switching up our patterns, the idea is the same to create an intersection between the first set of lines and the second set of lines. I draw circle in the center point and again in each of the intersections between the lines. Now, we're going start somewhere at the top and radiate out. This pattern is pretty similar to this pattern, except instead of starting at the top left corner, we're starting at the top edge of the square. Meandering lines that are close together at the top and further apart at the bottom. Remember, you can always turn the paper around to make it more convenient for you and without your hand doesn't smear any wet ink. For second set of lines, the ones indicated by the black arrows in the schematic. We're just going to cross these other lines using curved lines similar to what we did in the second pattern. So I am just thinking how I can cross those first set of lines and create a nice crossing point almost 90 degrees from the first set of lines so that I can draw my circles and they show up nice and crisp. Now, onto the second page of the worksheet. I'm starting at the center. The next line is going to be close to the first line, move away from it, and then end up close to where the first fine ended. So it's close, far and close. That creates a belly in the design like a pumpkin. Be sure to take a break whenever you feel like it, you don't have to do all of these at once or you can even do just the ones that you feel like doing. Where I'm reaching the edge of the square, I just draw part of the line so that I don't have that empty space. Now, the second set of lines, so I draw one in the center and then I curve the lines away. I start with the one across the center, like the belt wrapped around the pumpkin. I gradually curve it away as I move up and down on the page. The line starts further away from the first line, comes a little bit closer to it, and then curves back down. There almost parallel, but a little bit curved. You can decide if you want it to be more curved or less curved, it's totally up to you. This pattern has the lines going a lot tighter at the center. It's as if you're synching the waste of this pumpkin, it's like a reverse pumpkin. The line start further apart, come close together at the center more or less, and then drift further apart. The curving is a lot more pronounced here than it was in the previous pattern. Now, for the second set of lines, I make a line across the center like a belt that cinching in those lines. Then i curve the lines in this direction. The line start close together, move further apart, and then end up close together. I'm trying to have my lines intersect in a way that when I draw my circles, I'm going to have a nice clean intersection between them. Now, this last example doesn't have a schematic because it's pretty erratic and chaotic and random. You can do this any way you like and start anyway like, let me just demonstrate one example. I'm just drawing a line, and then another meandering line pretty much parallel to it and another one. Then I start crossing those lines. You don't have to start the line at the edge of the page, you can start the line on another line, and you don't have to end the line at the end of the page, you can end the line on another line. Again, my thought is how can I draw a line that will intersect the lines I already have down on the page in a way that it'll look good when I draw the circles. You keep going until you've divided the page. Wherever you feel that the space left is too large, just add another line coming from somewhere and ending somewhere. As long as your lines are pretty meandering and wavy, it's all going to come together. It's up to you how small or how large the space in between the lines is. So play around with this and see what you come up with. As with all the other patterns, I finish it up by drawing a circle in each intersection between lines. We're done filling in our worksheet. I welcome you to create a project down below and upload a photo of your worksheets. This was just a practice run to get used to drawing this pattern, I think it's a lot of fun to draw this pattern just in black ink on regular paper, but it is so much more fun to add some color to it using watercolor. Let's hit onto the next lesson, where we create watercolor backgrounds, and then doodle on top of them using the patterns we practice in this lesson. 4. Watercolor Background: In this lesson, we're going to paint a watercolor background and then draw a net pattern on top of it in black and in gold. I'm using really small pieces of cold press watercolor paper. I like to work small because that way I get to experiment with lots of colors and lots of patterns in a short period of time. But you can use whatever size paper you prefer. I tape the paper down all around the edges using masking tape, and you can also use painter's tape for this. This will hold the paper down for us and it'll also give us a nice white border all the way around the painting. I'm going to be painting two backgrounds at once, so that I can experiment with different net patterns and different colors. You can make as many or as few as you like in one go. I also need a jar of clean water, a paintbrush. I'm using a size eight round synthetic watercolor brush. You don't want a brush that's too small because you want it to be easy to fill in the whole space. I've got a piece of paper towel for removing water from my brush. My watercolors, they can be pan watercolors or liquid watercolors it doesn't matter, and we're all set to start painting. Choose whichever colors you like for your backgrounds. For this first one I decided just to do a variety of blues. I start by loading my brush with water and bringing that water over to my blue, and I loosen up the dry watercolor paint into the water, and I just put some color down on the paper. Then I load my brush with water so it's almost clean and put the water on the paper. This gives me a bit of a variation in light and in dark. Now I'm using this other blue that I have, which is a bit of a green or blue, and placing some of it in another area of the paper. Again, going back to the water and adding some water in between. I like to have areas that are quite dark and intense in color, and areas that are lighter and paler in color. That's why I like to just pick up some almost clean water with my brush and have those pale areas where there isn't a lot of paint. You can always go back and pick up some concentrated paint and add that or drop that onto the page. If you squint your eyes, you can easily see the dark and light areas. I like to have a mixture of both. I'm using a little bit of this liquid watercolor. That's basically just three different blues. You can also add variety to your color by mixing your blue with a little bit of yellow to get more of a greenish blue. There really isn't much to it. I don't want to overwork this background so I'm just going to leave it the way it is, let it dry and I'm going to work on the second background now. For the second background, I'm just laying down some almost clean water, and then picking up some pink and dropping that into the water and also onto the dry paper. There really aren't any rules here. You decide which colors you like, you decide how intense they are, how much water you put down, and how much you mix the colors up. It's totally up to you and it's all going to work. In this case, I thought I'd play around with some pink, some blues, and some purples. Again, I'm trying to have a variation of both pinks and blues and also variation of lighter areas, paler areas, and the darker or more concentrated areas of color. Once I'm happy with it, I rinse off and dry off my brush and I put this aside to dry. You have to wait until this dries completely. This is how the watercolor looked before it dried and this is how it looks after it's dry. So you can touch it with the back of your hand and if it's still cool to the touch, it's not completely dry. You can also see these cauliflower or cloudy effects that happen when areas with more water meet with areas with less water. This will just happen on its own as you're painting you don't have to try and control it. Now for the lines, you can use a micron pen for this, but I feel that the micron pen is a bit too dry on watercolor paper because watercolor paper is absorbent. So the micron pen will work, but I personally prefer to use a fountain pen because it's a lot more liquidy. For this blue background I decided to do the simplest net pattern, the one that we did first in the worksheet. Have your worksheet handy if you want to reference it for drawing the net pattern onto your watercolor background. As we did with the worksheet, I'm meandering the lines, making them nice and curvy and soft. Since I'm going to be adding lines in gold in-between the black lines, I'm making sure to leave enough space in-between them for adding those gold lines. Once I've finished the lines in this direction, I turn the paper over and I work in the other direction to make those crossing points where I can draw the circles. Remember that your ink is still wet, so be careful not to smear it. I try and rest my hand outside of the little square. You could also let your ink dry and then come back to it to make the lines in the other direction, and then add circles in the intersections. I think it looks really nice just with the black lines, but I think it looks even better when you add lines in gold. I'm using a Gelly Roll metallic gold pen. You can use whatever metallic pen you like. You could also try a pen that isn't gold but I think the gold adds something or the metallic adds something to the drawing. I'm just drawing gold lines in-between every pair of black lines, and then in the other direction, and finally I'm adding gold circles in the intersections between the gold lines. Now for the fun part of removing the tape, do this carefully and slowly so you don't tear the edges of your paper. Here is our finished net pattern on top of the background. You might be able to see why I like to have darker areas and lighter areas. I think it looks a little bit better than when you have just pretty much of a flat looking background. But it's totally up to you how you make your background. Now onto this pink and purple one. For this one, I'm using this net pattern from the worksheet. At the top right corner, the lines are going to be close together and then they end up further apart. Now for the lines in the other direction, just like we did in the worksheet, and finally the circles in the intersections. Now, I'm going to add the gold lines in between the black lines. Now for the circles. Watercolor contains very fine ground pigment, so sometimes that clogs the tip of my pen. I just use a paper towel or even scribble on my finger to clean the tip of the pen before I continue. Now we can take off the masking tape, and we are done with this pattern. Here are our two finished watercolor background net patterns, with black ink and gold. I'd love to see your creations, so please do upload a photo of them to your project down below and let me know how this went and what you learned along the way. In the next lesson, we're also going to be working with watercolor, but this time we're going to start with a net pattern in black and then paint watercolor on top of it. 5. Stained Glass: In this lesson, we're going to be drawing a net pattern on watercolor paper. Then we're going to paint each of the shapes using watercolor in a way that looks a little bit like stained glass. I really love painting these designs. They're just so relaxing to do and I think they come out really pretty in the end. Since we are going to be using water on top of ink, we need for our ink to be waterproof. A micron pen will work for this, it's waterproof when dry. If you're using a fountain pen like I am, make sure that your ink is waterproof. This is the ink I'm using and it's a waterproof ink. Choose whichever net pattern you like. I chose to use the one that's a bit random and chaotic. Just make sure to have your squares not too small so that you can paint each one of them individually, comfortably with watercolor at the next step. I'm drawing the lines just as before, and then adding circles in the intersections between the lines. Once you're done drawing your net pattern, make sure to let your ink dry completely. This can take a few minutes, because if your ink isn't dry, it's not waterproof yet and you don't want your watercolor smearing your ink. Now it's time to choose a color scheme. It can be just as easy as saying to yourself, blues or greens or blues and greens or pinks, and then just choosing whichever colors from your palette that match the color scheme that you chose. Or if you'd prefer, you can create little swatches like I'm doing here and testing out your color schemes to make sure that you like them. Colors that are close together on the color wheel such as blues, greens and yellows, will work. Blues and reds or pinks or purples, will all work together. You can be a bit more adventurous in your color choices. It depends on how experimental you want this to be or if you want to have a color scheme that you're sure you're going to love at the end. You really don't have to be precise with your colors. Your color scheme is just a general guideline of what you want to use in your painting. I ended up choosing earth tones and also adding a little twist of color with turquoise. Choose a brush size that's appropriate for the size of your shapes. I started off with a size six brush and then I switched down to a size three because the smaller brush holds less water. It's easier to control and not have too much water in these small shapes. Also, it made it a little bit easier to reach into the corners of the shapes. I apply some water onto one of the colors for my color scheme and I just dropped down some of the watery paint into one of the shapes. It can always dab off some excess paint or excess water onto the paper towel. I don't fill the shape in completely with just one color. I stop, I pick up another color, and then fill in the rest of the shape using that different color. I'm painting the shapes that aren't adjacent to each other because I don't want the paint to bleed from one shape to the other. I want to have distinct and different colors in adjacent shapes. In this next shape, I started with a very pale brown, and then I switch to a turquoise. Then I added some water onto my brush and painted the rest of it with the pale turquoise. I keep going by painting shapes that are not adjacent to each other. I use one color to paint part of the shape, and then I add another color for the rest of the shape. Sometimes I even add a third color, and I keep going varying up my colors, using colors for my color scheme. It's a lot like we did in the previous lesson where we did a watercolor background, except each of our little shapes is like its own water color background. If you do end up accidentally painting two shapes that are adjacent to each other, it's really not a big deal. You can just keep going. Sometimes I go back and drop in another color into the wet paint that's already on the shape. Make sure to take a break if you need it. I personally really enjoy painting these square, so I usually just do them all in one go, but if your hand gets tired or if you need a break to set this aside and come back to it later. After painting a bunch of shapes that are spread apart, I go back and I paint shapes next to shapes that have already dried. Sometimes I need to wait for my shapes to dry, but in this case they've already dried and I can just go right back and paint next to them. Since the shapes are dry, the paint will run from one shape into the other, and that way I can paint a very pale shape next to a dark shape, or maybe a vibrant shape next to a muted shape, or vice versa. That way I get a contrast in between adjacent shapes, which I think adds a little bit of interest and pop to the painting. You can also paint your shapes in clear water or almost clear water, and then just drop in some other colors, and that way you retain some of the white of the paper. You're not just darkening all of the shapes, you're leaving some of them very pale and light. That way you get a good contrast between the darks and the lights. This is how it looks when it's done. I think it looks like a stained glass window, when light comes through it. I would love to see your creations, so please do upload a photo of your paintings to your project down below. 6. Gradient: I wanted to show you a few other variations you could try, in how you paint this net pattern using watercolor. One thing you can do is draw a net pattern and make sure that your shapes, the areas that you're going to paint in with watercolor are pretty small, and then paint the squares in a gradient. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to paint the top left corner in blues and purples, and slowly as I move down and to the right, I'm going to switch to greens, and then to yellows, and then to oranges and reds. I jump around the page and I paint a few squares here and there as my guides to what colors I'm going to be using, and then I vary up the colors a little bit. A little bit paler, a little bit darker, a little bit blue or greens, yellow or greens, and in the end, it comes together like a carpet with slight variations in between the colors. Each square is colored in a pretty much uniform color, there's no variation inside each square but because these squares are really small, then you get that movement and variation because the colors are a little bit different in between the shapes. That's one of the great things about watercolor. You can have just one blue color and you make it really pale and light, and really dark and intense, and if you have just a blue and a yellow, you can get a lot of greens in between, yellower greens, paler greens, darker greens, bluer greens, and if you have a red, you could already get a huge range of colors with very few watercolor paints. If you were to do this with markers, you need a bunch of markers to get this variation, but with watercolors, you can mix the colors, and get a variety of colors very easily. Here's another example where I used a little bit of a different pattern, and I went from purples to pinks to oranges. 7. Drops of Color: Here's something else you can try. Choose two colors, one of them pretty light and one of them pretty dark. I chose a golden yellow for my light and a purplish mauve color for my dark. You basically paint the whole shape using the light color and then just drop in the darker color at the bottom of each square. So with this net pattern, it's pretty clear where the bottom is, but in other net patterns it's going to be a little bit different. Choose in that pattern that you think will work best with this painting method. I think this simple net pattern is the easiest to do. If you want to have a consistent pale color, you can always just prepare a mixture of a lot of water and very little paint and then use that mixture instead of always going back to your concentrated paint, which sometimes creates some variation in how intense and how pale your color is. This really lets you play around with watercolor and control your color so that the dark doesn't spread all the way into the shape. Just as we did in the previous lesson when we painted the stained glass design, it's best to wait for your shapes to dry before you paint the shape next to them so that the colors will be crisp and won't run from one shape to the other. You could also try this with three colors. Basically paint the shape in the light color and then drop in a medium color and then finally, just a little drop of the darkest color at the bottom. Here's one that I did with very pale green and a little bit of a darker green at the bottom and then a pale blue at the very tip of the bottom. This is one I made using the more chaotic and random that pattern. I use a very pale pink, almost clear water, or the lightest color, then a more intense pink for the medium color and then an ultramarine blue, which turned into a purple when I mixed with the pink for the darkest color. You can see that I tried to have the dark color leaning more or less to the bottom right, which you can play around with this any way you like. 8. Embellishments: In this lesson, I want to show you a few embellishments that you can add in pen, either in black pen or in gel pen inside the shapes between the black lines of your net pattern. I've prepared a worksheet with some examples of very simple embellishments that you can add inside the shapes. You can find the worksheet under Projects & Resources and then under Resources on the right and it's called the embellishments. For drawing your embellishments, you can use the same pen that you used for drawing the lines of your net pattern or you can use a finer tip pen. So I like to use the micron 03 pen which is very fine so that you can get really tiny embellishments that look more delicate than the bold lines of the net pattern. The first two pages in the worksheet have embellishments that I've come up with and we're going to draw them together in this lesson and then the last page is empty so that you can come up with your own embellishments if you'd like. So one very simple embellishment you can do is just draw a heart in the center of the shape or you could draw a heart nestled at the bottom corner of your shape. You could also draw a heart in each corner and you can rotate your paper to make it easier for you to draw the hearts in the right direction. Here's another way to draw a heart, just make it elongated and thin. You could also draw three hearts, one above the other or just scatter hearts all over the shape or draw three hearts horizontally. You can draw a very simplified flower shape or you can make the petals of the flower very long so that they almost reach the corners of the shape and optionally, you can add these lines in between the petals. So these are just really simple shapes just to add some interest to the drawing. You could also draw a flower with a stem and leaves. You can draw a flower with pointy petals that starts at the bottom and reaches all the way to the edge of the shape or you can draw a very tiny flower with just three petals nestled at the bottom corner and here's another version of a nestled flower at the bottom corner and this last one is a little bit like the second one we did in this row, except the petals don't meet in the center. Now for some embellishments using dots, so again these are really simple just to add an accent. They're not supposed to be overpowering or overwhelming or complex. So you can just scatter a few dots in the center or nestle the dots at the bottom corner or in one of the corners. You can add dots in a v-shape at the corner, either just in two opposite corners or in all corners or you can add a string of dots going along the edges like I did here. Another option is to have circles, so they're a little bit bigger than just dots and they have varying sizes. So you can do them just at the center or clustered close to one of the corners. You can also draw a large cross and then draw a smaller x shape inside. So it looks a little bit like a compass or maybe a snowflake, you can draw little v shapes in two corners or in four corners, you can draw a leaf, you can draw lots of hollow circles all over the shape, you can draw a meandering line from one corner to the opposite corner, and then a meandering line in the other direction and then a circle in the center. You can just draw a bunch of lines going across the shape or curled lines like I'm doing here. Draw a squiggly line across the shape. Could draw some lines that are following the outline of the shape, or just a bunch of parallel lines across the shape and then lines that cross them. You can draw a bunch of dots nestled at each corner or v shapes one above the other. You can fill the shape with teeny tiny flowers or with the bunch of dots, some of them larger, some of them smaller or with the bunch of leaves or you could use the v shape that we did before and alternate the direction of the vs and create columns of vs in alternating directions. You could add these curved lines close to each of the corners of the shape or at the edges of the shape and you can stop here or if you'd like, you can fill the whole shape with curved lines and you can also add squiggly lines that fill the whole shape. Those were just a few very basic and very simple embellishments that you can add inside your net patterns as you're painting them using watercolor. So you can always refer back to this worksheet and if you'd like, you're welcome to add some embellishments of your own in the empty page and the worksheet and upload your worksheets to your project down below. 9. Bringing it All Together: In this lesson, I'm going to show you some of the ways that you can apply the embellishments that we practiced in the previous lesson onto your painted watercolor net pattern. In this example, I first painted the net pattern in the stained glass method. I painted each square individually and the colors that I chose to use were pinks, reds, purples, and blues. Then I added this embellishment in silver gel pen and then I chose a few other squares to add that same embellishment using a black pen. I didn't fill in all of the shapes, just added this embellishment as an accent in some of the shapes. In this example, I added this embellishment inside each and every shape using a thin black pen. It's up to you whether you want to put your embellishments in each and every shape or just scattered across some of the shapes. In this one, I also used the same embellishment in each and every shape, but this time using a silver gel pen. In this example, I decided ahead that I would have some of my squares painted in a light golden yellow, and the rest of the squares painted in a variety of blues. I'm painting these in the stained glass methods so each square is painted individually. Some of them are lighter, some are darker, some are more intense, and some are more muted and gray. I also went back to the shapes before they were completely dry, but when they weren't too wet and dropped in a little bit of water using my paintbrush and this creates these lovely blooms which give a bit of texture and interest to the watercolor. Then I chose this embellishment to add just to the yellow shapes. In this example, I thought I'd try the random and chaotic net pattern, and again I chose just a few of the squares to color in a golden yellow with purple corners. I'm applying the purple just at the corners, just like we did when we practiced the drops of color method. It's really easy to muddy up your yellow. I thought I would use one brush for the yellow, and one brush for the purple and that way, I don't have to clean my brush in between switching from yellow and purple. I painted the rest of the page in one go, just as we did when we did a watercolor background and painted the whole page without filling in each shape individually and this gives a more fluid look to the background and you don't have those crisp borders in between each shape. Since you're painting around the yellow and purple shapes, you don't want to have any harder drawing lines in the blue area. You do need to use enough water and paint quickly enough, so that you have that fluid background and you don't have any hard edges inside your blue background. This is a really good exercise to do with watercolor, to paint around some of the shapes. Then I was wondering which embellishment I should add here, and there are so many choices but I ended up going with these dots all the way around the yellow shapes, and these circles inside some of the blue background shapes. In this example, I was thinking of the flower embellishments. I was thinking I would add a spot of pink onto these shapes that are painted in light green and that way later when I embellish, I can add the center of the flower on top of the pink spot. Then I would paint the rest of the shapes in the stained-glass method. Then I embellished those pink spots using flowers and added another embellishment in silver gel pen onto the blue background. Here I did something similar, but I put the pink spot near the corner using the drops of color method and I added a flower embellishment over the pink spots and my blue background is also made using the drops of color method so I painted each square individually first and a pale blue, then in a darker blue at the corner, and then in the darkest blue at the bottom corner. These are just some of the examples of how you can combine different net patterns with different watercolor painting methods and also with different color choices, and also with different embellishments, in black pen or in gel pen. It's really fun to experiment with these, especially when they're super small. They don't take long time to do and then you have a lot of opportunity for trial and error and for learning about your watercolors and about your color preferences. I'd love to see your creations, so please upload a photo of your work in your project down below. 10. Troubleshooting: In this lesson, I want to talk a little bit about dealing with mistakes. For example, here I painted outside the shape, or here I didn't paint all the way to the line so I have this white gap in between my paint and the black line. Another thing you might consider a mistake, is maybe I made this color too dark and it's standing out compared to the rest of the colors and I regret making it so dark. Or maybe my color scheme is greens and blues and this was maybe a yellow that just didn't match with the rest of the colors. Another maybe mistake is when your paint is blotchy. This would happen if you painted using a very dry brush and your paint dried before you finished painting the whole shape, so the texture becomes a little bit blotchy. Another mistake that happens to me very often is ink smears. As I was drawing these lines, my hand smeared some wet ink. There are many, many ways to fix these mistakes, or deal with them, or approach them. I wanted to cover that in this video. One thing that will fix many, many watercolor mistakes, is to just reactivate the paint. What that means is you pick up some clean water with your brush, it doesn't have to be clean water, it can be watery paint, and you go back and paint inside the shape. The watercolor that is inside the shape will be reactivated or lifted back into the water. By reactivating the paint and maybe scrubbing a little bit very gently at the drying lines, you will get the paint to fill the whole shape without having any drying lines inside the shape. You can always go back while this is still wet, and drop in some more color if you want to. That'll fix the problem of painting not enough, and of painting too much. Here I can just repaint this whole shape with water. I can't stop here because if I do, I'll get a drying line over here. I need to fill this whole shape all the way, and now there's no more drying line over here. Regarding the unfortunate ink smears that happen often, what I would recommend is well, being careful next time and turning around your paper so that you don't put your hand on wet ink, which you can see that I still make this mistake. What I would do, is conveniently choose a dark color and use that to disguise that stain. Another thing you can do with things that you don't like in your painting, is fix it digitally. After you scan it or take a photo, you can go into Photoshop, and touch up that area. Obviously that doesn't fix the actual painting, but it's something you can do with a digital representation of your painting. In the same way that we fixed the hard drying lines, we can go back and fix any blotchy areas like I have here. But I want you to consider that I didn't go back and fix this, and I'm still happy with this painting. I have lots and lots of places where I painted outside the lines and I didn't paint far enough into my shapes and I'm still happy with this painting. Be careful that you don't nitpick at your painting too much, and overwork it, and overcriticize it. Just take a look at the whole thing and if it's pretty, it doesn't matter if you've painted outside the lines. Another thing that can help you if you find it hard to paint inside the lines, and you do want to paint inside the lines, is to check whether the brush you're using is appropriate. Whether it has a nice sharp tip, whether it's small enough, and whether it's good quality brush. Another thing is you can scale up. I like to work small. I don't know why, I just feel comfortable in a small space, but you might feel confined in a small space. Scale up. Use a larger piece of paper, make your shapes larger and paint them in with a larger brush maybe, and see if that works better for you. Another thing you can do, and this is I think really important to do, is to just accept your mistakes, and finish your painting, put it aside, grab a new piece of paper and paint a new painting. I think it would be better if you spend your time painting more paintings, rather than nitpicking at one painting and trying to get it perfect. Your next painting will be much better, if you spent that time painting more paintings, than if you fiddled with the same painting over and over. Actually I find that if I'm too fiddly and too critical of my mistakes, then I get exhausted, and then I don't want to paint anymore, and what's the point in that? Another thing in addition to changing the size of your paper and the size of your shapes, is changing the thickness of your lines. Maybe you're working with a line that's too thin, and it's just too hard to paint inside the lines. For me, this line thickness is as thin as I'd like to go. Any thinner than that, it would be really a pain to paint all the way up to it and not go outside the shapes. Let's take a look at this shape which is a little bit too dark. I would do the exact same thing and reactivate the paint using water. I load my brush with water, and repaint the shape with water. What this does is it picks up the pigment that's settled on the page and the pigment is now floating in the water. Now I take my paper towel and dry off my brush, and now it's going to be like a sponge and I pick up that water with the paint. I have less paint leftover on the page, and I can do that again. I can clean off my brush, dry it off, and pick up more of that watery repaint. I can also go back with clean water, and lift some more of the paint. But don't overdo this because scrubbing at the paper is not a good way to go. You're going to damage the paper and it's not going to look the same as the places where you didn't scrub at the paper too much. Again, you can always go back into this water and add some more colors to it. Now this shape doesn't stand out as much as it did before when it was too dark. Use this sparingly and fix the shapes where it really bugs you, but don't overdo it and don't worry about it too much. Another thing you can do, is actually really embrace that. Who says you need to paint inside the lines? You can totally go crazy with this and intentionally paint outside the lines, or imprecisely like this. You can try that and see if you like the way it looks on an entire painting. In a way, mistakes can sometimes lead to new ideas and new directions for experimentation. I showed you how to fix some shapes after they dried, but you can also fix them when they're still wet. It's a little bit different. Let's say I painted inside this shape, and I went over the line and painted into this shape, if I want, I can fix the adjacent shape when this shape is still wet, and do the same thing by just painting this whole shape with water. That reactivates the paint and lifts it a little bit. Now what this does is it allows paint to move freely from this shape to this shape. You're not going to have that contrast of colors, like you have, for example over here, where the colors are completely different in this shape and this shape, but that's fine too. Keep painting and don't be discouraged by mistakes. If there's anything else I can do to help you in overcoming mistakes, please leave me a message in the discussions group or in your project, and I'll be happy to help in any way that I can. 11. Conclusion: I hope you've been having fun trying different net designs and combining them with watercolor. You can always refer back to your worksheets for ideas and use the blank rectangles on the worksheets to try out some ideas of your own. Your project for this class is to combine any of the net patterns with watercolor using the techniques shown in the lessons. You're free to experiment with other designs and other techniques if you'd like. Share a photo of your work and write a few words about your process and what you learned along the way. If you have any questions or requests, post them in the discussion section of the class, and I'll get back to you. I'm happy to help in any way that I can. If you're interested in doodle art or in watercolor, you're welcome to check out other classes that I teach here on Skillshare. You can find them by clicking on my profile down below. Thank you for taking this class and happy painting.