Draw & Paint a Betta Fish: Watercolour & Colour Pencil Art in 5 Minutes

1. Welcome: Welcome to this mini class where we will learn how to draw and paint a better fish in just under 10 minutes. This class is perfect for practicing those free flow brush strokes and adding some details with color pencils. So let's get started. 2. Drawing: Drawing a better fish is quite simple. So for the face, we're going to make some conical or triangle kind of shape. And then for the body, we're going to make a elongated triangle kind of shape. The tail will be a little free flowing, but if you want, you can draw some lines to give you some guidelines. But the whole class is about free flow strokes, so you don't really need to draw, but you can draw the areas where you want to put the fins and the tail. Now let's try another one. So we have a conical face, and then elongated, a little bit more turned out conical body for this fish. And then, again, I'm just placing the fins and the tail just to show where it is going to be. But like I said, when we paint, we are going to be free flowing, and we'll just follow this as guidelines. Now, give it a try and practice some of this drawing. In the next lesson, we're going to start painting this fish. 3. First Layer: Alright. So before we start painting, I'll just draw out the fish. I'm using the same steps like we learned in the last lesson. I'm making the body, and I'm just putting some guidelines for the tails and the fins where I want to paste them. And once I have the body and the tails and the fins, I'll just place the eyes as well. When we get into the painting part, I am using a very bright orange color, which I have mixed with yellow and red. But if you have orange on your palette, you can directly use that. So first, I place the dark area. Um, on the paper, and then I'm clearing my brush and just using free flow strokes with wet brush so that I pull this paint to the rest of the fin. So the first layer is going to be super light. I don't want too much details in this layer. I'm just putting some blue for the shadows and very watery paint for the fins and the tail. Again, I've placed the dark paint, and then I'm using a clear watery brush to just pull this paint to the rest of the fin. I'm going to repeat this for the rest of the fin fins, as well, the smaller ones on top. Again, first, I put the dark area, and then I pull it with a wet brush. I call this technique pulling the paint, and I have another class which focuses on this technique. I'm using the same for the fins and the tail here. For the body, I'm using a bluish tinge to get that shadowy effect. So I'm not using the orange first. I'm using the blue for the underlying shadow, and then I'm using the orange for the tip of the face. If you wish the edge of the fish would be darker than the top, because it has a shine, so we want to show that. So on the edge you can drop darker shades, but keep the middle of the fish a bit 4. Details: So now the first layer is dried, so I'm using a little bit darker colors to add some details. So what I'm doing is just adding this darker orange shades to get more details onto the fin instead of having a plain first layer, and it gives a little bit more depth to the fins and tail. Then I'm using a very small brush to add some detailing lines to the tail as well as the fins. In the tail, I'm using my brush, but you can do the same technique with a color pencil as well, which I'll show you on the fin. So for the tail, I'm using a size one brush from my set of watercolor brushes, and I'm making these tiny detailing lines. First, I did it with the orange, now I'm doing it with blue colour to have that shadows to the end of the tail. Same thing I'm repeating on the fin, but I want to show you how I do the same thing with color pencils. So if you have color pencils, grab them and just make these nice strokes to add some detailing line to the fins. Um, I think it gives a good texture, the mixed media. I'm using both orange, white, as well as blue to get those same details that I did on the tail, but I'm using the color pencils for this. So in this blue, I'm getting that details to the edge of the fins. I'm also creating these little scales on the body of the fish with this blue colour. You can even use a pencil to create these scales on the body of the fish. Make sure the scales are at the edge of the fish and not on the top, because we want to show the shine on top and we don't want too much detailing on the middle of the fish. Next time just adding some detail for the eyes with a small brush. You can even use color pencil to do that detailing. And with this, we have the Beta fish ready to swim in the waters. I hope you enjoyed it. And don't forget to post your class projects in the projects gallery. I'm really eager to see what you've created.