Elements of Cityscapes and Urban Landscapes

1. Welcome to the Class: Every one of us dream of traveling the world, exploring new places and cities, and capturing those spectacular moments in our memories. Ever since I picked up my brush and ventured into the world of watercolors, painting cityscapes, urban landscapes, and the places from my travel photographs were my passion. The massive architectural elements in different cities intrigued me, and I knew that eventually, I wanted to be that watercolor artists who could travel the world and paint the different cities that I visited or to even paint cityscapes and urban landscapes, at least from the photographs. Hello everyone. Welcome back to my class. If you are new here, I'm Geethu, a full-time aerospace engineer based out of the UK, with a passion to paint and teach art. I have been practicing with watercolors regularly for over two years now, and you can find all my work in my Instagram profile as Colourfulmystique. Welcome to the first of a series of classes on painting, cityscapes and urban landscapes. You are going to tread on an exceptional journey into painting the places in your dreams. We start the series with learning all the elements that make up a cityscape or urban landscape, such as buildings, cars, street lamps, lights, people, and anything and everything that you can think of. This class is ideal and perfect even if you are a beginner who is just starting out with watercolors, because right from sketching and brush exercises to get muscle memory and hand control, understanding color theory, light, shadow and perspective in detail, and handpicking the colors for each painting. You will be even deciding your own color palette and curating your own colors for the future. We are going to create our own urban landscape study journal featuring your own notes, my notes, our learnings, color swatches from various studies, our own color palettes, and our important observations with various architectural landscapes, alongside the painting projects in this class. You will learn to create a nice contrast between the shadow and light elements, which techniques to use to make your watercolor paintings shine, and how to approach any cityscape or urban landscape painting in detail. Packed with all the information to get you started into every aspect and element of painting a cityscape with ease, this class, the beginning of a series, is going to create a new world of watercolors around you. Each of the class projects cover the elements in detail and each day you will get to explore a new element with tips and tricks on how to incorporate them in your paintings. Without any further ado, let us get into the lessons of this class. 2. About This Class: This class is going to be the first of a series of classes where we will learn to paint cityscapes and urban landscapes in detail. Understanding the individual elements that constitute a complete painting will give us the confidence and knowledge needed to paint huge cityscapes in general. Hence we are starting this class with trying to understand these individual components. There are a lot more than these, not just these. Following this class will be larger cityscape and urban landscaping. Things that you will be able to paint with ease, accumulated with all the knowledge from this class. We will venture into different cityscapes such as perspective paintings. Understand how to include weather and seasonal elements, street views from various cities around the world, old cities with beautiful sea view, Wonders of the World, medieval towns, and even abstract cityscapes. The basics of all of these requires the knowledge of perspective in detail, light and shadow theory, color theory, as well as getting color harmony in a painting. For this reason, I'll be teaching you all of these lessons in greater detail with helpful examples for you to understand these concepts clearly. Throughout the whole of this class and the classes that will follow, I will be sharing tips and tricks in general, as well as color theory tips, which will go a long way for you. Here is a quick view of the tips and tricks icons to help you distinguish between each and which you can look out for throughout this class. General tips and tricks, color theory tips or helpful information on colors, alternative colors that you can mix. I hope this class adds a greater value to your painting journey and that you will be able to paint all of the cityscape classes that are coming up with so much ease after taking this class. 3. Materials Needed: Let us have a look at all the art supplies that you would need for this class. We would need 100 percent cotton, minimum 300 gsm, cold-pressed or rough surface paper to get the best result. I would always recommend to go with a paper that has all of these, that is 100 percent cotton, 300 gsm. It can be either cold-pressed or rough, it doesn't matter. But don't go for hot-pressed paper because it does not have the texture on the paper surface to help us achieve the watercolor effects that we want to do. You can either go for this Canson Heritage series or this is Saunders Waterford. This is also a 100 percent cotton, 300 gsm, and this is cold-pressed. Here I have Arches. This is rough. You can also go for the cold-pressed like I said, and all of these, as you can see, are 300 gsm, which is the weight of the paper. We need the paper to be thick in order to withstand the watercolor washes that we are going to do. If you prefer to paint in sketchbooks, you can also go for a sketchbook option if you want. Next, you need watercolor paints, of course. You can either use the watercolors in tubes, pans, or ready-made watercolor sets, whichever you have with you. I will be using watercolor tubes like these from various brands, mostly White Nights, Daniel Smith, Schmincke, Sennelier, and Rembrandt. I just have a collection of all of these different brands and I have chosen the best colors out of them and added them to this box here. I will also be showing you the process of how I have chosen the colors and the making of my palette so that you can make and decide on your own as well. Next, we need watercolor brushes. You don't need a lot of brushes for this class. Typically, I would recommend having a flat brush so that it can apply some water, either a small flat brush or a large flat brush, whichever you have. Then a medium-sized pointed-round brush, such as a size eight or a size 6 brush. A brush which can hold a lot of water and paint. Typically, a nice natural hair brush would be ideal, and then maybe a liner or detailer brush. If you don't have a liner brush, you can go for like a size 0 or a size 1 pointed-round brush. We need the point, so make sure you have such a nice pointed-round brush. Then I would also recommend having a synthetic brush so that we can use it for the lifting as well as where we want to apply the paint and the water onto the paper without the brush having to absorb a lot of water or releasing a lot of water. Don't worry about these synthetic brushes in general. This is mainly because most of the brushes that we own from the beginning are synthetic brushes. They are the cheapest of the brushes, so what you may have with you may already be the synthetic brush. These are the brushes that I would suggest for this class. You can also try and get a Chinese brush like this. These are called Chinese calligraphy brushes. I use them mainly for achieving some texture on my paintings, mainly because of the hairs. But you don't necessarily need the same Chinese brush. All you need is probably a brush that you can handle without caring, like not care about the bristles and handle it roughly. You can see that is the reason why I use this Chinese calligraphy brush. If you have an older brush in which you can handle the bristles without any care for your rough use, then you can go ahead and use that as well. Of course, you'll need an eraser, a ruler, and a pencil. I will be using a mechanical pencil like this one because it is easy for me to use. I don't have to sharpen it at times and all I have is to change the lead in it. This is a 0.5 millimeters mechanical pencil. Then an eraser, of course. I will also be using this kneaded eraser. This is very useful when you want to remove the graphite marks from the pencil. This is called kneaded eraser. As you can see, it's easy for us to knead it. I will be explaining the use of this kneaded eraser in the coming lesson. But you don't necessarily need this. You can go with your normal eraser as well, so please don't stress about that. You would also need a sketchbook, but it needn't be 300 gsm, 100 percent cotton, or any watercolor-specific sketchbook itself because we're going to be writing a lot of notes and a lot of sketches in this one. This is for your journal. Just make sure that it can withstand some small strokes and color marks and it doesn't tear off. Make sure it's not like a simple notebook. It would be ideal if it's 150 gsm at least so that it got a little bit of thickness. This is separate from the watercolor papers that I had mentioned that you will need for this class. This sketchbook is not for painting. This is for your journaling purpose if you would like to do that with me. Some colored pencils or pens or sketch pens or whatever if you would like to decorate your journal. If you would just prefer to go on writing simple notes, then that is fine as well. I'll be just using this red, blue, and this black pen to add things into my journal. You would need two jars of water. You obviously know by now if you've taken my previous classes, one clean jar for taking freshwater to take fresh paints, as well as to apply the water on your paper, and the other is to wash off the dirty paint from your brushes. It is just because imagine that once this gets a lot of muddy and cloudy, we do not want to use this muddy water to be applying on a paper for wet-on-wet method. This is the reason why you would need two jars of water. Next, you can go for masking tape if you would like to tape the edges of the paper onto a board or surface. For this class in particular, we are not going to need any masking tape because I'm just going to be teaching you all the elements at first before we can move into fully-fledged cityscapes, landscapes. Just keep in mind that if you want to tape down your edges, you can go for a masking tape like this. This is no specific brand masking tape that I have been using for a while. Just observe that if you find your masking tape to be ripping the paper, it is not the masking tape that is the culprit but rather it is the paper. A good paper will not rip off even if you use any kind of masking tape. Although I have heard that artists recommend this Tesa Perfect masking tape for their paintings because it is very good and withstand a lot of washes. As you can see this is brand new. I haven't used it yet. This is the one that I use mostly. You'll need some white gouache paint as well. This is a white gouache that I will be using. This is permanent white from Winsor & Newton. If you don't have white gouache, you can also go for the white watercolors in your pans or in tubes. It doesn't really matter. All we need is a nice opaque white color to add some highlights and other details in our painting. You'll also need some tissues or paper towels to remove the excess water and paint from your brush and for any extra techniques that we want to achieve, so just keep some paper towels in your hand ready. We might also need some cling film or some plastic wrapping paper in order to achieve some of the textures that we are trying to achieve for some of the paintings. Just keep that in mind. It's okay if you don't have this because we can achieve this using other methods as well. I obviously forgot this. You need a watercolor palette to be mixing your paints in your palette. A nice plastic or metallic or whatever watercolor palette that you have is absolutely fine. Lastly, try getting hold of an old credit card if you can. This is ideal for some scratching techniques that we can do on the paper. This is one of my old cards which is outdated, so that's why I'm using this. But don't worry if you don't have such a card, what you can use is a palette knife, or you can even use the end of your ruler if it's as flat as this one. Now that you know all the materials that we need for this class, without any further ado, let's jump into the next lesson. 4. Creating Your Own Journal: How would you like to create your own of landscape journal featuring all your important learnings from this class and future being things? Would you like to have all of this info curated into a single place so that you can refer to it whenever you want and come back to the journal when you need to refer to some fundamentals? It is going to help you in your journey and I'm sure that this journal will also be a motivation and of course, proof of your achievement. You're going to do this on your own. I'm merely going to start it for you in this class with the initial ideas. You are the person who going to complete it and execute it. As I said, I'm just merely the initial driver. Consider this as your personal study journal. Some of you may already have something similar or even like a swatch journal or a technique journal so you might already have some of these. But in this class, this is going to be a huge experience. I'm going to be teaching you how to create a beautiful journal and how you're going to incorporate your ideas and your learnings into that journal. I have this journal for swatching all the colors that I own from various brands. It is really helpful when I'm looking to pick up some new colors, are working on a new project and I want to check the shapes that I own and you can also see there are some little color mixing exercises in here as well. Obviously, this is incomplete as well. These is all the colors I own for this and earlier one, but I still haven't swatched them yet. That's because I have actually swatched them onto a bigger sheet of paper and I've stuck them on the ball here in my studio so that is the reason. This is my swatch journal. Our sketchbook or a journal is going to be much more than just a swatch journal. Every tiny bit of our learnings is going to go in here. It is absolutely your choice what to add in and whatnot. I'll be showing you the process of how I do it and what are the things that I'm going to be adding in my journal and over the course of this class, you're going to find lots of tips, tricks, techniques, so anything that you think is useful to you can add them on to journal and there may be elements are important tips or tricks that I will not probably add to my journal while I'm explaining I'm painting because I might already know that and it's something that comes naturally to me. But if it's something new and you find it as a really useful tip and you want to note it down, then you can go ahead and add it to your journals. It's going to be complete lead lots of ideas, lots of technique, lot of swatches, your color balance, everything, and anything that you're going to learn in this class. What sketchbook are we looking for? This time I wouldn't say a 100 percent cotton watercolor paper because it is just basically going to be some swatches and some simple techniques and a lot of handwritten notes highlighted and it's like a journaling of tips and tricks for watercolors. Basically, you don't need 100 percent cotton paper for that. Any sketchbook would be fine. You are going to be writing, sketching, drawing, painting, highlighting, decorating, every possible journaling method that you can actually think of. You can even paste you know the different pictures that you're using there. It's find take out those stationary pens, pencils, highlighters, colored pencils or whatever you own, and just, pour your heart out into this class and lesson because we're going to have a lot of fun. Any sketchbook would suffice and I'm trying to have it at least 150 GSM or 120 at least. Because otherwise, when you're swatching the colors, that is when you're doing simple colors swatches, your paper will start to buckle and might tear off. This is the reason why I recommend at least a 150 GSM. Any basic sketchbooks that as you know drawing sketchbooks out there are also 150 minimum, so that would really be fine. Anything with a fairly good thickness to withstand some basic watercolor strokes. That is what you need. I have this from BBVA Colors. This is a hot-pressed sketchbook. Ideally, if I IV or something bigger is better I also have this smaller one from our design so this is 5.5 inches square sketchbook. You can see that. This is also fine. But I think that this is too small for me. Maybe you might not even fill these whole pages in this class, but then I want mine to be a little bit most likely bigger and can cover a lot of things in it. But this is just some sketchbooks that I'm showing you. The one that I am going to be using is this one. This was made by a very good friend of mine. She is a kaleidoscope artist. She made this for me as an, I bought this from her. She was designing these sketchbooks and I really loved it and this is how work actually on the cover she designed all of this so you can see, it's a kaleidoscope arts, an image kanji. This is my zodiac sign Gemini and then she's written my name in the front and so and this paper is really thick and good. You can see that. This is what I'm going to be using. You can see this is A5 as well. Just similar to this. Just that it's in the portrait mode. This is what I'm going to be using, my sketchbook and I'm so eager to fill it out. You've already seen how it looks after filling it out, obviously. But then you are going to design your own and make your own. You don't need a fancy sketchbook like this, so don't worry about that. If you're in the calligraphy, you can write down the name of your journal in calligraphy writing as well. It's up to you how you want to decorate your sketchbook. You don't have to follow the exact lines that I am doing. You don't have to follow the decorations that I'm doing in my sketchbook. Just go with your own instinct and think creative ideas that you can do and you can also share them in the project section, everybody would love to see what creations that you have made or what are the nodes that you have done in your sketchbook. Then alternatively, if you do not want to create this sketchbook, but would still like to preserve some of the lessons covered in this class, you can have them done on a good watercolor paper and take them to the wall of your table or studio. Trust me, those concepts that we're going to learn in this class are very important and you needed forever. If you already have some things like the color wheel, you can ignore that part and not create it. But then there are lots of other things covered in this class that you need forever. You can have those techniques are done on a large sheet of paper and stick to your wall. But trust me on this, this sketchbook is going to be one of the most satisfying part of this class about from the paintings. Because it is a reflection of your learnings and what you will probably need for all of your future as an artist or as whatever you want to learn from painting watercolors. During the course of this class, I'll be telling you some tips and tricks that you can put into your journal. It is totally up to you to do so. You can create one and try similar to the one that I'm making or you can customize and decide on your own. It's totally up to you. 5. Creating Your Own Colour Palette: Whether you're painting from a reference or in real, you need a palette of colors, a set of colors curated for yourself. Every artist has a set of color combinations or a custom palette of shades or colors which they don't do always, or which are their favorite. These color combinations are clearly visible across their artworks. For example, there are artist who prefer to paint completely monochrome or with cool colors such as blue or warm colors such as yellow and orange, or they may even prefer a certain color for their backgrounds, like turquoise blue. If you check across their works, all of their artworks is going to be like in bluish tone or greenish tone, or maybe lavender or violet. It all depends from person to person and how they like to depict or showcase their work. Hence deciding and finalizing on a color palette is absolutely necessary for us to be able to travel the world with our palette or to create a unique identity for our paintings. But this process of choosing the colors is not easy, it requires a vast amount of knowledge in color theory, in the pigments, in each of the colors and their properties. Imagine having to dig through all the colors you own to paint something. But wouldn't you rather prefer to paint a specific scene with your own palette, with your own perception of the picture of the scene in front of you without getting influenced by the original colors as such? Wouldn't you want to create an original identity of your own? How about I help you to kick start this process? I wouldn't want to choose the colors for you myself, that's up to you. But I would definitely want to help build to choose your own and curate your own. I will tell you the main things that you need to consider and also the major factors that influence your decision while choosing a color palette. This was my palette for my 100 day project class. I had tried to stick to this palette for the entire duration of the class. I think there was only one time that I might have additionally used a tail green light and a cadmium yellow light. Apart from that, for the 100 days, I had stuck to this palette and was using all the colors in this one. This is the reason why I said that creating a palette of your own is absolutely helpful and essential, and it also teaches you a lot about color mixing because then you try to paint from the colors in your limited palette and you're trying to create your own. I am going to help you today with creating your own, and I have also curated another palette for this class specifically. This one was for my 100 day project class, I still love all the colors you can see. I've not cleaned this palette, so I still use it at times. But for today's class, like I had shown you, I will be using this palette and I will be showing you exactly how I have chosen the colors or what are the colors that I have chosen. This is what I will be using in this class. Before we start with ideas into creating our own palette, let us first dive into the understanding of the color will and a little bit about color theory. This is the fundamental and the most basic thing that you would need to understand about colors. Let us dive into that. 6. Colour Theory Part I: Let us now have a look at the color wheel and some of the most important properties of color mixing. Here you can see a simple color wheel that I have made. This is actually composed of warm colors. There is also a cool color wheel option. I'll explain all that in a while, don't bother. The color wheel is the most basic fundamentals of color theory. Every artist, at least once in their lifetime, should have looked at the color wheel at least. But the best-case scenario would be to have this color wheel. By heart, in your mind, in your head, you should know where the colors are, what are the complimentary colors, what is the analogous colors, and everything. If you know it by heart, then consider half the job done. That is, you already know the color mixing part and all you need to learn is the brushstrokes. Let us have a look at that. Here is the color wheel that I have made. We know there are three primary colors, which are yellow, red, and blue. They are the triad, you can see they're like in the edges of our triangle here. The three colors, yellow, red, and blue. Then the next color is the secondary colors. I mean, the colors that come right in the middle, which is composed of mixing two primary colors. If we mix yellow and red, we get orange, which is the secondary color. You see that? That secondary color, there are three of them, obviously again. Yellow and blue, if you mix them together, you get a green. Blue and red, if you mix them together, you get a purple shade. Then the next part is tertiary colors. Tertiary colors are obtained by mixing a primary and a secondary together. The secondary was mixing two primaries, the tertiary is by mixing primary and the secondary together. We said that the secondary is orange, green, and purple. If we mix orange and yellow together, which is one of the secondary and the primary, we get a tertiary color, which is somewhere in between the yellow and the orange. You can see it's a lighter shade of orange, well closer to the yellow, but right in the middle. The same thing, if you mix orange and the red together, you get a different shade of red, which is like in the middle, which is a tertiary colors. The same way you would do for all of the others, and you'll see the varying purples and greens that you obtained, which are the tertiary colors. This is basically the color wheel. The position of the yellow, red, and blue doesn't matter so long as they are in the triad. What I mean to say is you can start with your yellow here at the bottom and you have it go in the normal. But if your yellow is here, and obviously your red should be here and your blue should be here. That's the only thing that you need to take care of. You don't necessarily have to put your yellow at the top, but mostly people do it like this because that's where you start with. This is the basics of color wheel. So long as you know this by heart, it is going to help you a lot. Now, the next thing that we need to know is complimentary colors. Complimentary colors are the colors opposite to each other in a color wheel. Yellow, what is directly opposite to it? That's violet. The complimentary color of yellow is violet, of red is green, and blue is orange. All of these colors definitely have complementary colors. For the primary, the main ones are a secondary color. The complementary color of a primary color is always a secondary color, which is like right in the middle. This is the main thing that you need to understand. Now next thing is how you can split your color wheel into warm and cool colors. Mostly the first section of the warm and cool colors are varying for different artists. Some artists prefer to split at the yellow, some artists prefer to split slightly one here next to the yellow because this looks warmer. Warm colors are basically those colors which is warm, looks more like yellows, fire, reddish, the sun, anything that you can relate to as warm. But cool colors are what you can relate to as cool and gold. That would be the sea, ocean, bluish things, those are cool colors. That is why I've split in my perception, the cool colors and the warm colors through this line here. All the colors towards the left of this line that has this semicircle is warm, and the right semicircle here is cool colors. You can see this is blue and the next colors. This was definitely obtained by mixing a blue with the yellow. Even though the yellow is warm, the blue is actually perceived as a cool color, so that is why you've got a cool version of the green here, I would say. This is definitely cooler because you added more blue into this one to get this color. That is why this whole range is cool and these are all mixed by adding yellows and reds. That is why this is known as the warmer side. Now, there is another thing that we need to understand. I said that actually this is a warm color wheel and this is a cool color wheel. What does that actually mean? If there is already warm colors and cool colors in this one, then why is this called as a warm color wheel? Every color, even though they are on the warmer side, for example, let us take yellow. Even though yellow is a warm color in one single color wheel, you can actually have a warmer yellow as well as a cooler yellow. Let us see how that goes. This yellow that I've used here is Indian yellow, and it's more towards the darker side of yellow or looks more like orange. If you look at it, it's got, just see, it's not at all looking like a blue, it looks more like a little bit of orange or a brownish touch, so that is why this yellow is warm. But there are some yellows that looks slightly greenish. [inaudible] or lemon yellow for example. Lemon yellow is the perfect example. If you try and swatch lemon yellow, you'll see that there is a slight greenish tint. That greenish tint is mainly because of it is a cool yellow. You can term it as a cool yellow because how do you get a greenish tint in a yellow? If you add one tiny drop of blue into this yellow, you'll see it gets a little greenish tint, even lighter than this. Somewhere in between this, you'll get a very lighter greenish tint to your yellow. Actually you can make lemon yellow. That is why lemon yellow is a cool yellow. It's found in real-time, it found in tubes, so you can say that lemon yellow is a cool yellow, whereas Indian yellow is a lighter warm yellow. But there are other yellows that are warmer than this because when you try and paint it, you'll see that it's more closer to orange or looks more like red. That's why it's a warmer yellow. Here are some important points. With yellow, when it looks more like orange or red, it is a warmer yellow. With yellows, if it looks more like greenish or bluish, it's a cool yellow. That's the case with yellows. The next thing is, how do we classify blues or reds as cool and warm? Let us look at that. Here, I've got some blues here. You'll see they're all different. A warm blue would be where it is leaning closer towards the reddish side. When you mix blue with red, you get dark, getting purples. Also, your blue starts getting darker. You can see this is dark. It's a purplish shade, but it still is dark. Red is the most ultimate of the warm colors, that is on the warm side. If your blue starts to lean towards the darker side because of the presence of red in its pigments, it is a warm blue. That's what makes a blue warmer. I'm not talking about this color wheel. I'm talking about colors, in general, just blues. Try and understand the difference. I know it's a lot confusing to understand this concept, but trust me, you'll get it in the end. This blue here is warmer, that I have used, because I actually used cobalt blue. Cobalt blue is a warm blue because it's more bluish rather than it is greenish or towards the yellow. What is a cool blue? A cool blue would be when it starts to tend towards the greenish side. If you start mixing blue with a little bit of green, you get phthalo blue or turquoise blue so that would be a cool blue. The cool blue is colors like phthalo blue, turquoise blue, green blue, and the sea green blues. Those blues, they are cooler because they look more like green, which is also on the cooler side. This is the reason why we have warm and cool blues. Here, I use cobalt blue. It's a warm blue. This whole thing is composed of warmer color palette. Wait, I still have to explain the reds though. Let us see the case of reds. Here are two reds. This is alizarin crimson, and this is quinacridone violet rose. It's the same as quinacridone rose in other brands. It's PV19. Alizarin crimson is what I have used in this color wheel, and it is warmer than this. I would say it's warmer because it looks more reddish, and more like the yellowish. There are other warmer reds than this alizarin crimson, in fact. For example, prominent red or fire red. All these I think are warmer reds than this quin rose. That's mainly because they tend more towards the yellow side. This is the red here. It looks more towards the yellow side. That's why it's warmer. Whereas, this quin rose, it's this one here, you can see it. It is rose in shade. What actually makes a color, a red shade, become like a rose? If you start adding blue to it, it will turn into the violet side, or it'll turn towards the bluish side, which is why it's called a cool red. This is the quin rose, and this is the alizarin crimson. Compare these two here, these two exactly. Which one looks like a yellow or an orange? This looks more like a yellow and an orange. This one. That is why this is a warmer red, whereas, this is a cooler red. This is the main thing that you need to understand about colors. When you're making a color wheel like this, you don't necessarily have to go and find all the warm colors and make it. When you're starting, just start with any three primary colors. That is yellow, red, and blue. Don't worry about whether it's a cool red or a warm red or warm yellow, cool yellow. Don't bother about that. Just try and make the color wheel first, and try to memorize that concept. I will be showing you a little process of how I am going to add this color wheel in my journal here. This is because this is a color wheel that I had made a long time ago. It was actually stuck on my wall here in my studio. I wanted to have this in my journal here. Here is the journal, and I've just made a rough sketch of what I need to add in. You can see, I've made the sketch of the color wheel. I'm very bad at calligraphy, so you can see my writing is bad, but this is just how I wanted to decorate it. But you can just go on, and add so much more to it. This is how I'm going to be doing. What I've done is I've just drawn two concentric circles, and I've divided this into 12. I wanted to add the cooler version as well. The cool version here that I have added, here you can see this. This one, I've only made the primary and the secondary. I didn't do it as because this one, and add the tertiary. If you want, you can go ahead, and do the cool color wheel exactly similar to this one, with the big tertiary colors in between. Actually, I think I went for one shade of tertiary. I didn't do it exactly like a secondary color. I did a mix of a secondary and a tertiary. You can see this, this, this, this. That is a yellow, the red, and the blue. Here is my primary. What I did is I tried to get the two colors in between. These aren't actually secondary colors, and these aren't actually tertiary colors because they're right in the middle. If I was looking for the secondary color, I should have gone for exactly just six shapes, rather than nine. This is what I have divided into nine. That's what I want you to understand. Don't try to pique your mind that it has to be exactly this primary, secondary, tertiary or a combination of all of these. You can see here that this is just obtained by mixing the yellow and the red here together, but I just added more yellow to this one and more red to this one so that I got the two colors in between. That is the magic of the primary colors. You can mix it in such a way and get a variety of shades. I'll be showing you the process of how I do this, and how I'm going to start doing all of the things that I'm explaining here in my journal. You can see, I've just made it simpler, and just added these in my journal for now. I'll show it to you. I will also be attaching pages from this journal as a PDF, so you can refer to it anytime, and you can make your own. Don't worry about that. 7. Colour Theory Part II: Once we have familiarized ourselves with the color wheel, now what we need to understand is the color temperature. The warm and cool colors that I just defined is exactly what is known as the temperature. That's because it's warm or either cool. Like this yellow that I explained, this is a cool yellow and this is a warmer yellow. Now it looks similar. But let's see if you can spot the difference by looking at the two. Which of these looks more greenish than the other? This definitely doesn't look green. But you can look at here. This is somewhat lighter and you can say that maybe there's a tint of green in that, in this shade. This is why this is cooler and this is warmer. There can be warmer yellows than this one. Maple yellow. Just look at this. If you were to look at both of these, now, which one is warmer? The warmer one is this one because it looks more towards the orange than this. If you were to just look at both of these and define cool and warm, this is warmer and this is cooler, although this is not entirely cool when you just say the name, but in comparison to these two, this is cooler and this is warmer. Did you get that concept, what I'm trying to say? When you add these, so what is the order of the warm to cool? Warm, warm, warm. The line of warm to cool would be from here to here. This is the most warmer, and this is the most cooler, and this is in the middle. Can you see that difference in the tubes? That's what we are trying to understand here. The color temperature is basically how you can actually make one color warmer or cooler. Aureolin, for example, this is aureolin. I said that it is cooler, but don't think of it as a cooler warm yellow right now, just think of it as a yellow. This is just a yellow now. Here is the yellow aureolin here. Now, you want to make this warmer. How do you make it more warm? In order to make it warm, add something that looks more like reddish or orange tone, and that would be adding orange itself or adding red, any red, alizarin crimson, or adding burnt sienna. Anything that looks towards the reddish or brownish tone. If you add that to your yellow, your yellow becomes more warmer, and that is how you increase the temperature of it. So here, I've mixed alizarin crimson with aureolin here. I hope you can see it. See you can look at it closer. Aureolin with alizarin crimson and you can see it's got warmer and warmer and warmer until it looks more like a dark or orange-ish burnt sienna kind of look. That's how you make a yellow warmer. Now, how do you make it cooler? In order to make it cooler, add a blue to it. It's as simple as that. Here, I have added cobalt blue to this side. You can see this one actually looks a bit like lemon yellow. Lemon yellow is a bit more lighter than this. But I think if I had reduced the amount of blue that I mixed into this, I would have got lemon yellow, so that's why I said lemon yellow is on the cooler side. Here is lemon yellowish yellow. If you keep on adding more blue, you can see that you've made this yellow into more cooler color. This is how you actually make a color warm or cool. That tip is for yellow. In the case of red, I haven't done it here. This color temperature box here that I have done, you can do it exactly the same way for the other two [inaudible] as well. Pick any red shade, and place it in the middle, and think of how you can make it warmer and cooler. So a red, how do you make it warmer? Here is the red. This is why the knowledge of the color wheel comes into play. Here is the red. How would you make it warmer? If you look at this line, the warmer side is here, that is this. In order to make a red more warmer, you need to add yellow. Into a red, the more yellows you'll add, you'll make it warmer, and into a red, the more blues you add, because this is the cooler side, you'll make it into a cool red. That's the case with red. Note this and you can actually have this in your journal. I'm only going to do one color because I know this. But if there's something in a new information or you actually like to do the swatches, trust me, I enjoy this process and that's why I'm going to do it again. That's with the red. Then for the blue, that is either blue as well so that you can swatch it out like this. Color temperature for the three main colors. Every color has a color temperature and you'll be able to jot it out. I'll explain after the blue. Here is the blue. Here is the blue. How would you make it look warmer? In order to make it with the case of blue, because it's like right in the middle of the cooler side, it has both perceptions, you can add more yellows to it and make it get warmer and warmer, or you can add reds to it. How do we differentiate whether it's a warm or weather yellow or the red is what do you need to add? Let us just understand that. In my perception, blue, green is definitely a cool color, I would say. This is because it is obtained by mixing blue itself. Green was obtained by mixing yellow and blue together, so we obtained green. Green already has a blue in it, isn't that right? Because green has blue in it, that means that it is cooler. This is the reason why when you mix a blue and green, this tone, again, I think it tends more towards the cooler side. Whereas red on the other hand, if you look at it in the perception that it's a normal red color, don't think of cool and warm here. Red does not have a blue in it. It's a primary color and it does not have blue in it. I know we were talking about yellow and reds here but just listen to me. Red does not have any blue in it. The more reds you add into your blue, it's going to turn purple, darker. Eventually, it will turn to red, which is the most warmest color. This is the reason why I believe that if you add reds to your blue, it would turn warmer, and if you add yellows or greens to your blue, it would turn to the cooler side. I hope you understood that. Then from the example, green. So if you had green for example. Here's green, how would you make this warmer? In order to make this warmer, obviously, you can keep on adding yellow, orange, reds, and this would make it warmer and you can make this cooler by adding blues, darker blues, purples and it would turn tint to the cooler side. This is as simple as that and as I said, the whole basics lies in this color wheel and the positioning of the warm and cool colors. If in your head, you can actually visualize, I know you can't see, but I've got my eyes closed and if you actually try to picturize in your head, so I've got the yellow, I've got the red, I've got the blue. So yellow and red, in the middle comes the orange, then here comes the green and here comes the purple. If you can visualize this and then think of this line, that separates the color wheel into two, into the warmer and cooler sides. This side here, starting from the yellow to the red is the warmer side, and starting from the slightly lighter green to the purple side is the cooler side. If you can just imagine this and try and memorize the color wheel, trust me, everything is going to be just simple for you. I know this is a lot of information to process and it takes time to understand. This is where our journal comes into play. Over the length of this specific lesson, you might have seen a lot of points come up. You could add them all into your journal as steps tricks. You can note them down. You can swatch your colors. You can learn so much about colors and it's so much fun. When you're into an art blog or something, what I usually do, although it's not when I get an art plot. Whenever I'm sitting simply, I love to just go and read about colors. Just read whatever you can. Find out about colors, about color theory. It'll just improve your knowledge so much and help you in painting. We just don't want to be using the colors that someone else is teaching us. We want to be inventing our own colors. This is what I wanted to convey through this class. That is, I wanted you to go ahead and create something of your own, create your own pallet, and follow me with the techniques to learn the cityscapes and urban landscapes but on your own. Unless and until you learn on your own and define a composition, I don't think that we can progress ourselves into the next stage. That is why the main aim of this class was to help you understand all of these concepts and to help you in your learning process into journaling all of these things. The next thing is about color saturation. When you look at an object in real time, it doesn't actually look exactly red in its whole. It's got a lot of colors on that specific object itself because of the way that light is falling on it and how our eyes see it. That is why you probably have to mute down a color. It is absolutely necessary to mute down a color in real life when you're painting, because you cannot actually find an object in a single color saturation by looking with our naked eyes. There will be always varying tones of it in different saturation levels, and as I said its mainly because of how the light falls on that object. If I were to show you, maybe this red brush here. If we look at this brush closely, you can see some lighter tones, you can see middle tones of red, and then you can see darker tones of red at the bottom. Can you see that? As I said, this is not a single red shade, it's got different shades of red. Although this is just one color, but the different tones that we see is mainly because of how light falls on it and how our eyes perceive it. That's why. How do we mute down a color? Easiest way to mute down a color is to add the complementary color to it. There are two options, you can either add a complimentary color to it, or you can add a gray or a black tone to it to mute down the color. But artist mostly prefer to use the complimentary color to mute it down. Because when you add black to it, it gets darker and darker towards black, whereas when you add a complimentary color, the saturation level of that color starts coming down and then you see it get darker and darker. You might have heard of saturation in photography or when you're editing, when you increase the saturation, you know what happens. It becomes more vibrant and the color gets saturated. That's what you're trying to do when you're adding a complementary color, you're trying to reduce the saturation of that color. Here is, for example, this is the Alizarin crimson here, and what I have added is I've added sap green. Why green? Because here is the red and the opposite color to that red is green, so it looks more like a sap green. I added sap green to red very gradually until I obtain the dark brown color here. You can see in the first column itself what has happened? When I reduced the saturation of it by adding a little bit of green. I just added a very little amount of green here to this red, and you can see it's already done and it's slightly lighter, or you can't say it lighter, but essentially the saturation level has gone down. Don't you agree? Here, the saturation level has gone down and it's decreasing until further turns towards the grayish brownish scale. This is how you would mute down a color or decrease the saturation of a color. The same thing can be done with all the other colors. Every color you can have opposite color added to it to decrease the saturation level. Same here cobalt blue, the complimentary color is orange, right in the opposite, so I added orange to it. You can see its saturation decreased until it turns to the brownish scale. That's the main thing about color saturation. Now, let us try and understand tonal value or color tone. These are different terms that we need to understand the difference between the temperature was whether it's in the warmer side or the cooler side or how to make it warm, cool. Saturation is to decrease the saturation levels or to mute down that color, and tone is how light or dark a color is. One single color or shade, how light or dark that is, that's what is the tone is. Here I've used Payne's gray. Payne's gray in its darkest form is like black, you can see here. This is the Payne's gray that I have used and in its darkest form, it looks like black. Then if I keep adding water to it. There are different ways to obtain the color tone again, you can either add white to your color or you can just keep on adding water and then swatching it. With white, it is not the perfect scenario, it is the water method that most artists go for because adding white tends to make it lighter, but also tends to make it towards the grayish side in case of this Payne's gray. Also for other colors, it would make it lighter and lighter, but not the exact light that we want. Payne's gray here, it looks like black, and then I added a little more water into that mixture and you can see it turned lighter. I added more water each time until at the end, I had almost nil of the pigment, but more of the water. It doesn't actually mean that you're now dropping water and you end up with a large puddle. No, it just means that, in this mixture here, it is probably like five percent of the pigment and more water. I'll show you how the tonal process is. I think I've already actually shown this in my ultimate guide to watercolors class about color tone, so these are important concepts, which is why I wanted to cover again. That was with the Payne's gray. But there are certain colors no matter how much you try, you won't be able to get a darkest tone of it because it is actually lighter. One main example is a yellow. This is the Indian yellow that I have used here. This Indian yellow, this is the yellow. You can not get any darker side than this, but the more water you add to your yellow, you will be able to make it lighter and get your tonal scale. Here is the initial tonal scale, and you can see this mode looks almost similar, while as this has a little bit of Payne's gray and this has a little bit of yellow. How do you make a color such as yellow end towards the darker side? It's very simple, all you have to do is add a darker version of this to it. That would be either you can go for this Alizarin crimson option or you can go for Burnt Sienna. Here I have done this, Indian yellow plus Burnt Sienna. I added Burnt Sienna to this Indian yellow, and now you can see I've made my yellow darker and darker. Here again, this is not the darkest version of Burnt Sienna, I might get another box. But what if you want to make even darker and get towards the blackish side? Then to Burnt Sienna, you would add Payne's gray or black, or you can add a dark version of it, which would be like a dark burnt umber, and you'll keep on getting the darker version of it. You can extend this line until you get the black by adding more darker versions of this color. The darker versions of each color like yellow, it's Burnt Sienna, from Burnt Sienna, you can go for burnt umber, then burnt umber you think of Zapier after Zapier, you can go for black or Payne's gray, and then you would just keep on getting that darker shade. This is about color tone. These concepts that I have explained here are the main things that you need to remember about color theory. One is to familiarize yourself with the color wheel and the position of the colors. When I say the position, the position related to each other, not where they are situated. Relative to each that means yellow, then comes the greens, then comes the blues, then purples, then the reds, oranges and back to yellows That's what you need to buy heart, you don't need to remember that yellow is at the top. That's not the position I mean, the position relative to each other, the complementary colors then the theory about warm and cool colors of each other. Warm and cool color wheel, color temperature, color saturation, color tone. These concepts familiarize yourself, and trust me, now you are a pro if you actually know all of these things. 8. Colour Wheel in Journal: Now I'll roughly show you how to make this color real and everything into your journal. You can do exactly as I am doing. Or you can have your own creativity and find out ways to do it. Instead of these concentric circles, you can actually go for something similar to this with twelve sections. Or you can have small round circles in that position rather than drawing it like that. There are various ways, even if you Google and find out color wheel, you'll see a lot of options and a lot of ways that you can depict the color wheel. Just go ahead and try and find your creativity. Additionally, you repeat the process now the entire thing. Because otherwise, it's going to be a very lengthy process. But I think once you get the hack of it, you know how to go ahead. I'm going to we using this [inaudible] project pallet here because I think some of the colors are already in here. But also because I haven't actually set up the pallet yet. We're going to be doing it together in the next lesson. Let's just see. Let us start with the color wheel first. I had to actually paste another sheet of paper on the top because the one I made first I forgot to record and also I made a mistake, as in I dropped some pigment on the top, then the whole thing got ruined. I'll stack a paper on the top now to show you how it's done. Also, I like how it looks, it looks popping out the color wheel. It makes this one special. Let us start with yellow. I'm going to be using Indian yellow here. That's our first primary color. Let's fill one of the boxes. Then the next primary color that I'm going to use is red. In my case, I'm going for alizarin crimson. Leave three spaces, that is one for secondary and two tertiary colors. Then comes the next primary again, that's alizarin crimson that I'm using. You can use whatever red you have, for the initial color view, don't bother about warm cool or anything of that sort. Just try to familiarize yourself with the color wheel that you can obtain. That's red done. The next color that I'm going to be using is cobalt blue. Leaving three spaces again, here comes the blue and there is the three space left. Now we'll try and add the secondary colors. I'll show you the first one and after that, all the others, you're going to do it yourself. I'll just speed up the video and I'll just show you. The first one is going to be mixing these two primary colors, yellow and red. Here is yellow and here is red. There mixing those two colors, I have obtained orange. That's what I'm going to be painting. Now, the others, you can do it in a similar manner, just for secondary colors would be mixing the two primaries and would go in the middle. Now that you're done with the secondary colors, I show you how we can get the tertiary colors. To this orange, you're going to add more yellow. You'll get the first tertiary color, and then to the single orange, you can add a little bit of red to get the tertiary color. This is exactly the process that we're going to go through the whole circle that is to this bubble here. If you add more blue, you'll get this one, and if you add more red you'll get this one. The same to this green, if you add more blue, you get this one, and if you add more yellow, you get this one. That's what we're going to do now. Now that you're done making your color fill, you can actually go ahead and label things as you want. Let's first add the split between the warm and cool colors. This is the split in my perspective, there. Here on this side, the warm colors, and on this side, are the cool colors. Then let's just mark the complementary colors as well. Here I think I would go ahead and mark these two. My line is slightly bent anyways, that's all right. This blue here and this orange. That's because I was trying to draw the line because it is too wet, you can see that. Complimentary color and so is this and this, and this red and this green. Those are all complementary colors. Warm and cool. Let's mark here as well. This is cool and this is warm. This is one of the main color wheels. What I like to do is I like to mark the primaries separately just to know the exact colors that I used and the brand information as well, or the pigment information, if you would like to note that. This is the yellow that I used, then this is the red that I used. My blue is contaminated, we have yellow, let me just clean that up. This is the blue that I have used. I'd just like to mark those colors and know which yellow and which blue were used. Because if we come back to this after months or years, you might actually forget which was the yellow that you used if you have a lot of yellows, obviously. What I have used here is this one is Indian yellow, which is PY150 from White Nights. This is alizarin crimson, it's PR83. I know most of these pigments by art, that's why I don't have to look at the tube. This one is ultramarine blue, which is PB29. These are the three pigments that are used. Now when I come back to it later on, I'll know which one is it exactly. I don't need to write the brand information as such, because when I see it's PY150, I know which one it could be. It's either the Sennelier Yellow Lake or Indian Yellow from White Nights. Yellow Lake in Sennelier is PY150. Because I've written down Indian Yellow here, I know it's from White Nights. That's what they've named it. If you follow the lesson on ultimate guide to watercolors, you'll understand that the name seen on the tube of a watercolor paint, doesn't exactly mean the pigment being used. For example, different brands name differently. Indian Yellow is the name given to PY150 by White Nights, and Sennelier has named it Yellow Lake. Other companies might name it transparent yellow or whatever. Different names for the same pigment in fact. This is the reason why you need to look at the tube information, and see what pigment it is. I don't know if we can see clearly, this is too light. PY150, this tube is too thin, that you can't see the pigment information. I'll show you for another one, out of the tube. It's here on this side. Somewhere on your tube you'll have the paint vein. If it's the pan, you can actually check for the covering. The wrapper that came on the pan might have the pigment information. Or you might be able to find the pigment information of the color brand that you're using from online. They may have color charts, which describes the pigment information. It's really good to understand, because that is actually the pigment that's in that tube, and the names don't actually matter. Since I used the warmer versions of yellow, red, and blue, I'll just show you how the cool version of it works as well. I know that I asked you to not bother about the red, blue, and yellow that they're using, but now I just want to show you the difference of what are the colors that you can obtain in a color wheel when you're using the cool version of it. These are the colors, bright blue, Quin Rose, and Aurelion, which I have beckoning in my palette here. I'm just going to quickly show the process. It's again very simple. This one, as I said, it does not have a secondary, tertiary, but rather what I'm going to be doing is it's going to be yellow, rose or red, and blue. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to mix yellow and red together, but more of red. That goes here. Then more of the yellow, so that goes here. Then yellow and blue together, but with more of blue, so that will go here and more of the yellow here. The same way with the red and the blue. This is what I'm going to be doing. Just observe. You can do the same if you have cool versions of each other. All you have to do is look at your tubes and try to perceive which one you see as cool and which one you see as warm, and then just use those. Here is the cool color wheel that we have made. Here we have used Aurelion, Quin Rose, Phthalo Blue. These are the three colors that we have used here. If you observe this color wheel and this color wheel, you'll see that these colors are more vibrant. In fact, if you actually mix a cool color with each other, they're more vibrant mainly because of the vibrancy of the cool reds and the cool blues. But that is something that we're missing here. We used warm colors here and we used cool colors here. What are we missing? We're missing the mix of a warm and a cool version. That would mean, if we mix this yellow, there's this Indian Yellow with these other two colors, that is the cool version of the reds and the blues, we already mixed with these two, and that's how we got this, but we do not mix it with this. Then what do we get? I'm just going to quickly show you the art. Don't have Indian Yellow. Let me show you how that would be. I'm just going to quickly show you without mixing, on my paper there. That is the Indian Yellow. Then we're going to mix it with this and this, rather than these two. If I were to mix it with this Quin Rose, there, you see we obtained a nice red shade, there. This Quin Rose extending towards the blue side. The blue and the Quin Rose mix, we already know about it. We've already seen it here, that's that. That's all right. But then we haven't seen the mix of this Phthalo Blue or dried blue with the green, there. You can see how vibrant that greenness. I accidentally touched that blue here and there. See what we have obtained. We were trying out the mix of this Indian Yellow with these two colors. Similarly, there's again, the water spending is, the mix of this with the other two warm colors. This with the other two warm colors. The same way with this with the other two warm colors. These cool colors, sorry. Anyways, but you get the point. We have agreed, because we have six colors in total, we have a lot of possibilities that we have to do. Now what we have done is, we have done here the combination of these three and the combination of these three and one combination of intermixing these two. But then there's what's left, is we have to mix Alizarin Crimson with these three. We have to mix Ultramarine Blue with, not these three, you don't need to mix it with red, obviously, for the Alizarin Crimson and the blue with the blue, but then this with this two. Then this yellow with these two, this red with these two, and this blue with these two. There is a lot of possibilities that you can obtain. If you want in your next page, you can try out those mixes as well and see. This is the reason why artist would not use greens in their palette, but rather resolve to using yellows, reds, and blues. If you have a cool and warm versions of all the three primary colors, that's all you'll ever need. You can clearly see the vibrancy here. I used Indian Yellow here on purpose and I used Aurelion here. You can clearly see the orange and the green that I have obtained. This green is slightly different than this green. That's because of the Indian yellow. That is a warm yellow. This is not actually entirely a cool color wheel, but rather this is a mix of cool and warm color wheel, because I've used Indian Yellow, Phthalo blue, and Quin Rose. This is like one color is warm and the other two colors are cool, but you still obtain a cool version of the color wheel. That's mainly, because yellow is not such a dominant color, but blue and the red shades are. That's why it dominates the coolers of the entire color wheel and gives you a cool color wheel. That's that. Now we can go ahead and label the things if you want. This would be the warmer side in here, so it would not be exactly in the middle, I would say. This is still in the cooler or warmer side. This can actually be considered as cool. This is only because I haven't split it as 12 sections, but rather made it only nine, and did not split it into secondary and tertiary. If you want, you can go for the cool color wheel, exactly like this one, and get the secondary and tertiary colors. That's warm, that's cool, and the color I have used here is Aurelion. This is Quin rose, this is Phthalo Blue. Phthalo blue is PB15. Quin Rose is PV19. I need to check this one, because this is a new tube that I just got, and from Shmincke, Aurelion is PY 151. You could also use lemon yellow. That would be fine as well. Here is the three main colors that I've used for this one. You can see how it's turned out. This is the major color wheel that we have made into our sketchbooks. 9. Colour Theory in Journal : I have already explained about color temperature, so I'm just going to show you the initial process of how we can get that color temperature scale. Here is aurelion, which I'm going to start with, so I'm going to paste it in the middle. This book is shorter, which is why I went for this option. Otherwise, you could make a lengthy one like this with aurelion in the middle. What I've done is aurelion in the middle and then warmer side this side, and cooler side this side. You can do the same thing, but because the space was limited, I did it this way. Aurelion, and towards the top I'm going to go for the warmer side and towards the bottom I'm going to go for the cooler side. That's aurelion, and to that, I'm going to add a little bit of blue. That's a very little amount of blue and you can already see that color has turned into the cooler version. It's more towards the yellowish-greenish side. Then, if I apply more green, you can see how it's turning, our green blue. This is how you can mute it. Now, why am I saying mute it down, make it cooler, more and more cooler? What I'm going to do is I'll paint the whole thing with this color and then we're just going to add a little drops of blue on the top. You'll see how it gets cooler and cooler. This is the easier way to do it, or you could mix it in the palette as well so it doesn't really matter. If I drag it all the way here, let's see. Taking a little bit of blue each time, and here I've taken a little bit more blue, and I will add it. Now, a little bit more blue and adding it. That's the wrong blue, that's Taylor blue. Now you can see how I made this yellow cooler and cooler until it reached a darker green. Now we're going to make it warmer, that is towards the warmer side. You can do it initially just like I said, first, just go ahead and apply the whole thing with yellow and then just keep adding red on the top, lighter and lighter and lighter and towards the darker side. Then you'll see how the red affects the yellow and changes it into warmer yellow. Here you can see I've made that the yellow into a warmer tone. You can get actually more tone standards if you extend it and if you have the intermediate tones in between. Let's just mark on this. This is aurelion PY151, and this one was the cooler side, and this one was the warmer side. Here we added less ultramarine blue and here we added less alizarin crimson. That's what we did and how we got the cooler and warmer versions of one color. You can go ahead and do the same for the other yellows and other reds and blues and try to get the cooler and warmer versions of each other. I c