Essential Watercolor Painting Techniques: A Beginner's Guide

1. Welcome to Class!: Learning and practicing Waco painting has never been easier. And as amazing as this is, having access to so much information can quickly become overwhelming and make it difficult to create finished artworks. But I think I can help you with that. Hi, I'm Zaza. I'm an artist from Southern France and even though I love all the mediums, my favorites are watercolor and Waco pencils. I love to research, practice, document, and teach. I learn and ever since I've started painting four years ago, I created many painting classes here on skillshare and I managed to grow and engage community of fellow art enthusiasts on Youtube and Patriot. I also host workshops and classes in my town. When I notice a pattern that I know will help others learn and improve quicker, I'm going to share it. And that's why in this class, not only will I teach you essential modoc techniques I always use in my art, but most importantly, I will also show you how to piece them all together so you can start painting on your own. Specifically, you will experience firsthand how easy it is to create simple yet realistic artworks with watercolor paints. Because each lesson builds on top of the previous one, you will be able to reuse your new knowledge every time and understand how to combine various techniques in one simple painting. This approach will make it easy and fun to paint the class project, a very cute sleeping fox. This class is for anyone who wants to learn a simple way to paint realistic watercolors and figures. We need a structure to lean up during and after the class. It's time to get started, so I'll see you next to learn more about the class project. 2. Class Project: Your project for today will be to paint a fox using the techniques demonstrated in the class. But first, we'll practice eight different techniques that built on top of each other to learn something new every time. And also understand how to combine essential watercolor techniques to go from blank page to finished piece of art. This will give you a structure that will make the painting process easier, especially if you're a beginner, remember to check out the resources section to download the line art for each exercise for the project, and also a list of the supplies. And when you're ready, you can take a photo of your artwork and share with us in the project tab. I'll be happy to help and give you some feedback. So see you next for a quick tour of the supplies we'll be using. 3. Useful Supplies: Let's talk about the supplies and you'll see they'll be very basic. First, you're going to need some water coat of paper and any kind that you have will do for the class I prefer. And I recommend the 100% cotton water Cota papers cold press because that's what absorbs water. If that's not what you're going to be using today, don't worry anything will do as long as it's watercolor paper and to practice all the techniques, you'll need 105 by 5 " squares like these. You'll need a six by 8 " sheet for the final project. You can also grab some spear sheets if you want to practice a little bit for watercolor paints, you can use any basic set of 12 or 24 colors. Whatever you have, whether it is half pans, pants, or tubes, it doesn't matter. I'm going to be using very simple colors like blue, pink, red, yellow, brown, and black. And you can even stick to just blue, red, and yellow. That'll be enough. I'd like to have a selection of paintbrushes, but a minimum of two would be enough for the class. I would recommend a round paintbrush like these. I have a large one and a smaller one because that makes it easier for me to paint on various sizes of paper. But I recommend that you use what you have. I also like round and pointed pain brushes like these ones. Don't forget to check out the supplies list in the resources section for the exact references of what I'm using. I like these in particular because they're pointing at the end and they help me get into the little nooks and crannies of the paper and paint small details. A flat pain brush like this one is completely optional. It's just helpful sometimes to wet a sheet pretty fast. Remember that two round pain brushes are going to be really all you need to complete the projects because I find that it really helps to avoid and get stuck on getting the exact supplies that the instructor has not what's going to affect the painting, the most really masking tape is going to be really useful to tape the sheet all around so that it doesn't move when we paint, I really recommend that you try and find something like this. This, for example, is construction tape. It's pretty affordable in water painting. Two water jars are also very useful. One to wet the paint marshes and one to rinse them. Can grab a few paper towels as well. They all come in handy during the painting process. A mixing tray, and I love these built in mixing trays in those palettes and you'll find very basic beginner palette with only 12 colors or 24 colors with the mixing tray, then that's optional. But for those of us who are not very patient to dry a wet sheet with a heat gun or a hair dryer is very useful if you have wine and grab it. Finally, to draw the sketches that you can download from the resources section, by the way, you'll need a pencil and an eraser. 4. Watercolor Washes: In this lesson, we're going to talk about watercolor washes. And first of all, what is a watercolor wash? Because that's the term we hear over and over again, It's actually pretty simple. Think of a watercolor wash as a series of brush chokes. We need several brush to paint something that is going to serve as a background sky. Any large area of paints that we need to cover, we know what a watercolor wash looks like. There are also several types of watercolor washes. The most common ones are a flat wash, it's a solid, smooth color like this. Then you have the graded wash. So you can make a graded wash with one color and create a gradient between that color and paper. You can also use two or more colors and create a gradient between two or three or four colors, no matter how many you choose. Then you also have the wet and wet wash. In this lesson, we're going to practice the flat and the graded wash. In the next one, we'll talk about the wet and wet wash. Let's start with the flat wash first. To paint a flat wash, you'll need a watercolor paper. You can refer back to the supplies lesson using this small five by 5 " paper just for the exercise. Then we'll need some masking tape that's going to be very useful that sheet doesn't move around and that we can paint without worrying about it. I'm just going to take this now. You just need a little bit to tape the edges all around. I would recommend to do this all around because if you leave the sides untouched, then the water is going to creep underneath and paint as well. If you take all four sides, the paint and water will be contained within the limits of the masking tape. You will need a round paintbrush and you really want to pick a pain brush that's going to make it easy to paint all over your sheet. If the pain brush is very small, it's going to take a longer. If it's very big, it might not help with the little control you might need to apply. Just make sure it just fits well, like this one. Then you're going to need your water jars. You want to wet your paint brush like this. Then you want to go get some paint. Any color will do. I'm just going to keep going with blue. I'm adding paint into my mixing tray and then I'm going to add a little bit of water. I want to make a creamy mix because I want it to be easy to paint with this mix. It's too thick with paint, it will take longer for me to apply the paint, and the paint will drive fast. Then if it's too watery, it will dry very light. Because as you might already know, water colors tend to look darker when they're still wet. You really want something creamy like this that looks pigmented. But still, that's easy to move around. You're going to start applying paint to paper and we're not going to take too much time to do this, we're just going to go back and forth like so pick up more paint when we feel like we need try to cover up everything and just not leave any specks of paper showing if you do it pretty quickly. And that the paint consistency like the one that I'm using now and that your paper makes it easy for you to paint like it's the case with mine, it's 100% cotton. Paper absorbs water really well. Then you get to end up with something that looks pretty smooth like it's the case here, this is a flat wasa see that? For me, it was easy to paint because the sheet wasn't too big and my paintbrush matched the sheet pretty well. Now we have this. We can either let it dry, or you can grab a hair dryer or a heat gun. And I'm going to show you how I dry mine. Basically, when I use my heat gun, I don't hold it too close to the sheet. And I try to go all over the artwork in circular motions so that it dries evenly. Because if I start drying one side and not the other, we're going to see some marks forming. So that's very important. You're going to see how I do it. I'm going to show you right now, and that's it. Most beginners make that mistake of drying their sheet very fast, and they think it's dry, but it's usually still a little bit damp, I can tell because I'm used to it. So watch out for this. Take your time and make sure your sheet really feels dry. That's very important with watercolor, especially when you want to layer more paint on top of a flat wash like this one. We're going to untape this. Now take a look at our flat wash. I know I don't need to be too careful when I pull that tape out of there, but yours might tear the sheet. Be careful if you're not used to it. There we go. We have a nice flat wash. You can see it's smooth, it's even. And that's what we might need for any watercolor painting for a background, for instance, for sky painting, can be very useful for many different things. Now I'd like to show you how to paint a graded wash. That's when we try and build a gradient into the background. Now we have this, we're going to work with the same mix of paints. It is going to make it easier. Let's just make a little bit more. I'm adding a little bit more paint, a tad more water. I always try to use the same water jar whenever I want to clean up my pain brush so that both of them don't end up very dirty. That's why you have to generally because you want to make sure that one is always clean. So you can use for a clean wash paint for instance. But most of the time when we get started with watercolor, we forget we're in a hurry. Don't worry. If you mix a pain brush in the two of them, then you have to change the water quite frequently. That's absolutely normal. I'm still working with my round pain brush and I'm actually going to use another one. You could also pick up a flat brush for this because we're going to use the second pain brush, wet the sheet first. I do this because it's going to be a lot easier in my experience, to make a graded wash when the paper is already wet. Paint dry less fast, it's a lot easier. Let's just wet this sheet with clear water. And that's why, again, clear water is so useful to have you just wet it pretty generously, especially if it's 100% cut in paper. The stylo papers will take a little bit of water but not near as much. I'm really rubbing the paint inside the fibers of the paper. That's really the secret to keep your sheet from drying too fast. I try not to leave any puddles on top, so I really try to get the paint to sink inside. Once that's done again, I just soak my other paint, brush into the paint. Then I'm going to start from the top once more with back and forth movement. Right now there's no gradient. It's just a solid color of blue. So what I'm going to do is just rinse my pain. Brush slightly, we don't want to remove all of the paint. Just rinse it and make sure there's still a little bit of paint on it, but not that much. It's more watery. Now, notice that I took some of the water off, so it's not dripping wet either. Now, I'm going to keep going, and if it's too dark I could repeat. You see it's still saturated with paint, so that means I should have taken more out again. I rinse my pain brush and I make sure to take the excess water off. I keep going and you can see it's a lot lighter now. This is a lot easier to do when the sheet is already wet. It gives you more time to work. I also find that the paint with just thinned in the water jar here is going to mix better with the original mixer paint. If we want, we can pick up a little bit more paint from our mix before it dries. We can add a little bit more on top with that back and forth movement, then make a few lines to really build that gradient into the sheet here that we can repeat as the paper dries. You can even add a little bit of paint to your mix that's a lot thicker and add a little bit on top like this. And here you can see we have a gradient between the top of the sheet here on the bottom, dark blue, light blue. I'm going to dry this. Now, let's remove the tape. Here you have a nice gradient and you can see the difference with the flat wash. Let's practice the graded wash with two colors. Now we're ready to paint, but before we even think about adding all the colors, it will be interesting to prepare the second color. I always do this for all of my paintings and that really takes the overwhelm out of having to mix the colors. I really recommend that you always take care of the colors before actually painting. I think with blue, pink would look very nice because pink and blue turned into a purple. Try to pick a combination that turns into a nice color. Like for example, blue and yellow would turn into green. But I really like the blue pink combination. It's one of the best ones for me. I'm just going to look for a pink color in my palette. I'm going to use a color called Rodon Magenta from Daniel Smith. But any pink would work again. See, this is a little bit thick. I'm going to add a little bit of water. I just hit my paint brush into the dirty water from before. That's all blue. Don't worry about that blue color disturbing your pink here, because this is just a little bit of blue diluted in a lot of water. So it's not really going to do anything. You just don't want to mix those two colors together here. This looks good. Here's a little trick that I used to make it so easy to paint with different colors without wasting time washing the pain brush in between color changes. Let's just use two paint brushes, one for blue here and one for pink. That means I'm going to use another pain brush to wet my sheet. Because remember, graded washes. Wetting the sheet first will make it a lot easier. I'm just sizing a flat pain brush right now. Whatever I have and whatever you have, wall work again, I make sure to push the water inside the fibers of the paper. Once this is done once more, I make sure my pain brush is full of paint. And I'm going to start from the top again with blue again, a little bit of back and forth. I'm going to stop in the middle. And then I'm going to pick up my other pain brush and do the same from the bottom. This time I keep up until both colors meet and I start overlapping a little bit because you can see the difference between both colors. The gradient is not that great yet. I'm just going to repeat this. I'm going again with blue, then I'm going to take a little bit of pink again. Going up here, you can see purple forming if you still don't like the way it looks. If you feel like the grading is not good enough, you just keep, the goal is to be able to mix both colors where they meet. Really create that gradients. You see I'm overlapping blue onto pink to really ease that transition here. Again, I think it looks pretty good. Now, I'm just going to dry this. Here we go now with our graded wash with two colors. My grade in here is not quite perfect just because a hair got stuck on the wet paint, I got a mark from it. That happens. And that's not a big deal. If you can see both colors really mixed nicely, you have a nice purple color in the middle. From now on, when you hear about watercolor washes, you'll know exactly what it is and how to achieve one. I hope that helped, and that was interesting. In the next lesson, we'll start studying the wet and wet technique, which is one of the most important watercolor techniques. 5. Wet-in-Wet: It's time to practice the wet in wet technique. And you will quickly notice when you water color, how useful that one is. Just like we did with the graded washes earlier. We'll need to wet the sheet first with clear water. Then we'll apply paint with a paint brush. That's why we call it wet and wet. This technique will be extremely helpful for backgrounds that look smooth colors, blend the dreamy water colors. What I'm doing now is just make a little bit more of that blue mix we prepared earlier because I would like to show you how to paint a sky with clouds. This is the most basic exercise, but also the one you'll get to re, use in almost every painting if you like backgrounds. Now I have a nice mix of paints that is creamy. Not too much water nor too much paint. Too much water will look like this. Here I'm adding water to my paint brush. This is very watery, very clear. That's not going to show much on paper. On the opposite, if you add too much paint, it's going to be a little thick here. When I add a lot of paint, you see it's a lot thicker, harder to move around, and that's going to dry quicker. You'll end up with more blotches, more marks. That's why we really want to go from something creamy. Actually, when I mix both of them, now I get back to a nice consistency of paint. It's about the same. First thing we want to do is dip a clean paint brush in clear water. Like we did with the graded washes and a flight on paper, we really want to push that water inside. My paintbrush is actually not quite clean. You can still see a little bit of the pinks I used earlier because it's so light, it's not really going to be a big deal. It happens a lot when I paint. You really want to try and be careful not to have a dirty paintbrush or dirty water. A little is okay. I prefer to leave all the little mistakes in so that you can really see what to pay attention to, what to avoid. Now let's pick up that blue mix. We're going to tap in on paper at this time to create a sky effect. And this is really the wet and wet effect. You see how the paint spreads all around, how soft and beautiful this looks. Let's say I'm painting a sky, going to create clouds. I'm going to add a little bit of water to my brush so that the blues inside are not as strong and I'm going to keep going. At the same time, I'm leveraging that knowledge and practice we got from the graded wash earlier, we can see a nice gradient forming. You see, how are we able to leave some of the white of the paper out. But still, because of that wet and wet technique, we're getting those soft edges that's very useful, especially for skies as you can see. Let's add a little bit more blue in places. I like to do it on top. For skies like these, it gives more depth to the painting because you have to imagine what's on top is closer to us, While what's at the bottom is in the much farther, much lighter here already, that's all we need. We have a wet and wet technique effect. Once again, you can let it dry or you can use a heat gun or a hair dryer in the same way that I showed you earlier Soc in the motions. And make sure to cover up all of the sheets. We're ready to remove the tape. When you see that the sheet buckles a little bit like this. First make sure it's really dry, then place it underneath a pile of books overnight or just for a few hours, and you'll see that it will flatten it really well. I want to show you how soft those edges look all around the clouds. And this is the magic of the wet and wet technique for anything that is meant to look blurry, where you don't want any harsh edges showing. This would be the technique to go for. I would use this in the skies, mostly galaxies, even the water, even painting the sand, at least a base layer. And then you can still add details over the top. Generally, when I paint landscapes, I'll start with a wet and wet wash. I'll let it dry, and then I'll add details over the top of that. Now you know how the wet and wet technique works and how to actually execute it. We're going to take a look at the wet on dry technique next. 6. Wet-on-Dry: In this lesson, we're going to practice another well known technique and it's called the wet on dry technique. What is the wet on dry technique? Is keeping the sheet dry and applying wet paint on the sheet, wet on dry. And you can see how it differs from wet and wet, where the sheet was and the paint was added onto a wet sheet. This technique is really useful when you want to paint some specific like for example, here we want to paint a leaf. We do not want to wet the background, otherwise colors are going to flow all around. Be no leaf. That's also because we're using the wet on dry here that I did not take the sheet all around. There's no need for this. I'm not planning for any background taping the sheet on top and at the bottom is enough. Remember the golden rule of preparing your paints before actually painting, I'm going to be mix a little bit of red. You can take any red that you have. I'm just going to pick this one. This is actually the center bright red, but anything will do. I'm just mixing a little bit and we want to make it a little bit creamy like, because once more it'll be easier to paint with it and it will also mix better to that second color. We'll go on to prepare. Here's the red mix. I'm just going to rinse the pain brush real quick. Now, we're going to pick up yellow. I'm just going to go with that. Daniel Smith hands are yellow. Anything you have is fine. I'm going for yellow here because I want to paint an autumn leaf with the white and technique. I know that yellow and red turn into orange and that's going to give us more variety in the paint. It's going to be nicer. Our mixes are ready. Now, the next thing I'd like to point out to you is that I'm using a smaller paint brush this time. Because imagine if I used this large paintbrush, it was great for painting background on this sheet. But here it's a little bit big. I could use it. It's just not as convenient as this one. That's why I'm going for that one. Just pick up anything that feels more convenient to you. Now remember we do not want to wet this sheet. I'm going to go with yellow first. I'm going to apply it on dry. And you can see that paint doesn't escape because the paper is dry. And that's where it's very convenient to create a shape. Let's just do this spontaneously, which is going to apply in places in the leaf. You don't have to do it exactly as I'm doing it. Just add yellow in several places in the leaf here, then we'll just switch over the red. I just print brush and now I'm just going to go pick up a little bit of red and I'm going to add it in those remaining areas. Feel free to overlap the colors a little bit. Look at how pretty it is now. We almost get a wet and wet effect because the paint we added, yellow, is wet. When you add red into it, it spreads out and it creates that new shade that's more like an orange color. You can see that we do get the benefits of wet and wet, but because we're painting on dry paper, we'll still get the benefits of the wet and dry technique, which is to keep our edges sharp and our leaf looking like a leaf. And that's it. If you want to, if you feel like there's too much red in there, you can reach a pain brush and add more yellow. You'll end up with more orange spots and so on. That just paints the stem. I'm keep it bread. I don't want to overcomplicate things but you could use brown if you wanted. There we go. I'm going to dry this with the same technique that I always used to dry all my paintings. Small circular motions and we try not linger in one single area but cover up the whole painting. This was a lot faster to dry just because the sheet wasn't wet. There was a lot less water overall on the sheet. I'll check this out. All those beautiful colors, you can see a little bit of red, yellow, and orange, and you can see the edges are perfectly shaped. Feel free to share your paintings with us in the project section. And next we'll study the lifting technique, which is going to be a very useful one to paint with water colors. 7. Lifting: In this lesson, we're going to talk about the lifting technique and practice it in two different ways. In the lifting technique is actually the act of lifting wet paint or dry paint of the paper. The side effect of that, why we use it, is because it allows us to get some of the whites of the paper back. That's going to be very useful for highlights. I want to demonstrate that with a simple apple painting, for which we're going to use the two colors we had previously. For the leaf, we're going to be adding a brown color for shadows. And you also get to see how we can start building a little bit of contrast in our painting. A little bit of realism, in a very easy way. Pick up any brown color that you have. If you don't have brown, you could use gray like paints gray or any gray or even black, but just a tiny bit of black. The purpose is just to make our red and yellow paint a little darker by adding brown. That's it. That's why you can use another color. You could even use blue. Blue is a great color for darkening another one once more. We're going to use the wet on dry technique because we have a shape to paint, we want to make sure it stays as it is and actually looks like an apple at the end, no wetting the background here, I'm still using that small paint brush is more convenient for me to paint. Just pick whatever fits you. So you want to make sure your paint brush is clean to start with. If you just mixed a dirt color with it, make sure to clean it up. Now I'm going to start with yellow again. I'm just going to apply a little bit of paint. I'm really not overthinking it, just applying it in places. Let's say I want the site to be more yellow than red. I'll add more yellow here, maybe a little bit here. Then I'll start adding some red. I'm to do this quickly because the paint dries pretty fast when the sheet is dry. I still want those colors to mix together. Well, now, once this is done, you can see it's not very pretty. When we add yellow on one side and red on the other side, you want to overlap colors like this. You can tap your paint brush will make it easier. You just do it wherever you want the paint to be before this dry. Again, I'm going to add a little bit of brown for the shadows, shadows on this side. Then I'm going to paint them. We can see it very clearly here. On dry, the stem is sharp, but as soon as I touch the wet paint inside of the shape, it just spreads everywhere. That clearly means that if we want the stem to be sharp, we'll need to make sure this is dry first and then painted afterwards. I'm still going to add a little bit of shadow over here. This will be enough. Now, this is the part that interests us. We're going to lift the paint. Make sure to clean your pain brush really well. Needs to be clean. I want to a little highlight here, I want to do this before the paint dries. It's easier to do it when the paint is still wet. Now my pain brush is clean, I'm going to dam on the paper towel. It's 30 almost dry. That's like this. I'm going to press it hard onto the area I want to lift paint on. The paint actually comes off, Not all of it comes off. You can still see a little bit, but it really helps with creating natural highlights, especially if you're into realistic watercolor. That'll be useful because what you could do would also be to avoid this area altogether when you paint. But the apple will look more cartoony. The lifting techniques allows us to really create a soft highlight. I'm repeating this again to lift more paint. Here I have my little highlight. There's another way we can lift color, but first, we need to dry this. Before I show you how to lift the paint on dry paper, this time we're going to add a little bit of round here to finish the stem. You can see now it gets a lot easier to paint. I'm even a little bit of a shadow down here. Now our apple is almost finished. I want to add a little bit of a highlight over here. But let's say I forgot to do it when the paint was still wet. When it was easier, well, there's still another way to do it on trying. It can be harder depending on the paints you're using. Some lift less easily than others. I found that for me, it always worked. I think it's worth trying and I'm pretty sure it will work in most cases. Again, we want to work with a clean pain brush. You want to make sure it's thirsty, almost dry, When all the water is gone. You just repeat what we did earlier. This time the paper is dry is the only difference. I'm going to press hard enough here, and I'm going to keep insisting a little bit until I see the pain come off, and I can already see it lift. Then I wash my pain brush and I repeat, you just have to do a little bit of back and forth and insist a little bit after insisting several times. Here I'm getting a highlight is almost as strong as this one, although not quite. You can see the benefit of doing this on wet. These two techniques for lifting really going to help you get some of the whites of the paper back whenever you forgot to preserve an area that's really a lifesaver. Now I'm going to tape this and show you what it looks like from up close here. You can clearly see the lifted paint on wet. There you can see there's a very subtle highlight that's lifted paint on dry. I hope this was helpful and informative. I'll see you in the next lesson for another essential technique to know. 8. Layering: We're going to practice a common technique called layering. And layering is really the act of overlapping several coats of paint in the same area. You paint, then you dry paint, and then you apply more paint on top. That is going to help us play with water color is transparency properties, but also build up some contrast and realism in paintings. That's very convenient since we're just painting the book and not the background. We'll be using the wet on dry technique. Again, this time I went for a smaller paint brush, one that is actually point. This is convenient because it will help me get into the little nooks and crannies of the pages and make the painting more precise. Try and find a paintbrush that is pointy. If you can't, you'll still be able to paint with a round paintbrush like this one. Or you could make this sketch a little bit bigger if you want. I'm going to be using only two colors to make it very simple. Once more, we don't need any more than that. I want to use yellow and brown. I'm just going to reactivate the paint that I previously used. You just need to dip your paintbrush and water. Just reactivate right in the palette. I'm going to do the same here for Brown. Remember, you can use any color that you have. If it's another yellow, another brown, that's fine. Again, you can use black, or blue or gray in place of brown. With layering, you really want to make sure to start light and go darker as you paint. That's my mixes, again, are creamy on the watery side. Not too thick, not too watery either. For now, all we're going to do is pick up some yellow paint, paint our pages. If it's a little too saturated, we might want to dip our paint brush in water and just thin the paint directly on paper to make it a little lighter. As you can see now I managed to get something that's a lot lighter. I'm going to keep going, paint all pages. You can see that this very fine pain brush is really helpful to paint pages. Then it's just a matter of you experimenting with several supplies and really finding what you like best and what fits your style best as well. All detailed works, realistic works. That's very convenient for me to use, but other people would prefer larger paint brushes. The paint is going to dry pretty fast because I'm only covering small areas and I'm not adding a whole lot of water. I'm just going to add a little bit of brown in those darker areas of the book, just so we're able to see a little bit of shadows are still, I insist, I'm not using dark paints yet. They are still pretty light as you can see. If you find the watercolor washes hard to do. This type of exercise might be easier for you to start with watercolors. You pick a small subject, something more detailed, and then you can focus on just adding tropes in tiny areas without really brushing. We're going to add a few lines for the tip of my paint brush. So we're just suggesting the shoes. I think that's pretty good. Just want to add a little bit more brown over here. That's good. This is the base layer, the first layer. And I'm going to try it completely and then apply a second layer. This step is very important. You really want to make sure your paint is completely dry. I'm padding the sheets just to make sure that this is dry. Then we're going to start adding more shadow if you want. Actually also add a more color. In this case, you would add a little bit of paint into your mix like this. You can see it's a little thicker. Now, this is actually layering. You're just layering some paint on top of a previous layer. We're able to see, for example here, the brown paint underneath, because watercolors are transparent, it's really a nice property to leverage with this layering technique. Here, I'm adding more of the yellow, gives a little more color to this book. We could call that second layer, dry it once more, and then add those final. So this is our third layer. Now I want once more to add more pigment into the paint to make sure that it actually shows on top of those lighter layers. Remember, you start with light paint, more water in the paint, and gradually go darker by adding more paint into your mixes. And you make sure to dry everything in between. Now we have something that's a lot darker and th now we're going to be able to layer here. I want to make sure this hollow area shows here. We also have a very dark part in between the pages. I'm just going to add a few lines. I'm adding a little more shadow over here because the sheets are stacked together in that area. And notice how this book is getting more realistic every time. That's the beauty of the layering technique here. I'm going to add a little bit more shadow a few lines there. And as we move up, I'm just going to leave more of the yellow areas visible. Just add a little bit of shadow. And a suggestion for you is to use this pain bars that is full of brown paint, dip it in water as a way to thin that paint. Now you can paint a little shadow underneath the book to make it even more realistic. I don't find a light enough, so I'm just going to add more water. And that's it. Here, finished book. You can see how realistic this looks, even though we didn't take forever to paint it and we didn't take great care in painting all the wines and doing everything perfectly. But it's the act of overlapping paints on top of each other and going darker each time. In other words, building contrast that really helps make this book more realistic. I hope you enjoyed this lesson, and I'll see you in the next one for another very convenient technique to use. 9. Softening Edges : In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to soften an edge to improve your watercolor paintings even more. What is an edge? But look at this book that we painted earlier, we added a shadow underneath. The edge of the shadow is really hard. And what's great with watercolor painting is that we're going to be able to soften edges to make them look more natural and make them blend into the layer beneath. In this case, if we had softened that edge, it would have blended into the white background. I'm going to show you exactly what that looks like on this pumpkin and how to execute the technique. First, you want to use colors we have used to perform red, yellow, and brown. I'm going to start out with this brown paint brush. It will be very convenient to paint my pumpkin. I'm going to start remixing a little bit of yellow with a tad more pigment in them. Just again, it's a little bit creamy, easy to paint with at the same time. And I want the paint to show some water in it, but not too much water. Same with the red color. Now we have this. We're going to start painting just like we did when we painted the apple earlier. I'm just going to apply a little bit of yellow. And I'm doing this quickly and you can see I'm painting wet on dry. Again, my goal is just to cover up the whole pumpkin. I'm not really overthinking anything here before this dry, I'm going to add a little bit of red to give a nice orange tone to this pumpkin. I like to leave some of the yellowish areas visible still to build up a variety of tones in this pumpkin and makes it look more interesting, there we go. And add a little bit of brown towards bottom, maybe over here on top. And now I'm going to switch over to this smaller papers that I had earlier just to paint the stem here. And that's it for our base layer. So now we're going to try this layer and add another one, in which I'll show you how to soften an edge. This is completely dry and that's exactly what we want to apply our second layer for softening an edge. In that second layer, you want to make sure to have two paint brushes. One then you're going to use to paint, and another one you're going to use to soften the edge. I'm just going to pick the tiny one to paint. I just want to add a few touches of paint. Just going to make sure it's clean. Fame for the second pain brush, that's going to help us soften the edge. Let's make sure it's clean. Once your pain brush is clean, you want to dab it on a paper towel so it's not dripping wet. If you want to check you're doing it right, just brush the paintbrush on your finger like this. If you managed to get your finger wet without getting a little water on it, it's fine. You need it to be wet a little bit. Now we're going to add another layer of paint and soften edges. In that layer, I'm going to mix a little bit of red with yellow to make orange. I just added pigment to my yellow mix because I want to make sure it shows on top of this previous layer. Now I got a nice orange tone. I'm going to take it. I'm just going to paint in this area here. I notice that if I don't do anything else, I'm going to end up with a very harsh edge and might not be pretty, especially if you want to go for a realistic painting here. I'm taking my other paint brush, the one that's clean and that I just dab on the paper towel. And I'm going to start outside of the painted area and move towards it and gently brush that. Edge to make it soft here. And now we do have a soft edge that melts into the previous letter. We're going to repeat over here. What I like about this technique is that it helps us define the wedges in the pumpkin a lot better. Here we go again. I was make sure to wet the area I didn't paint first and then move towards that harsh edge. And you see here, I might have added a little bit too much water on my pain brush because the water is actually pushing the pigment. So that's okay. We're just going to add more pigment, more paint with my other pain brush. And since we wet this area here, the paint gently melts into the wedge. Let's do it again here and again. Let's clean up our pain brush. Make sure it's ping wet because remember otherwise the pigment will get pushed out and we'll have a balloon. I'm gently brushing the edge that I want to soften. You can repeat on top here. Add a little bit of brown to our mix. Make this part a little darker right there, and then gently melt that paint into the previous. We could also add a darker version of our brown color onto the stem here, just on one side of it, that we're going to soften. And now it's melting into the whole stem and it looks natural. What I love about that technique is that the layering becomes very subtle. I want to show you what this looks like. Also for a shadow, remember to make sure that papers that you're using to soften your edge is clean and just damp. I'm going to add brown paint on your knees. Again, I don't soften the edge, it's going to look so harsh, but if I soften the edge, it's going to start melting into the paper. It's going to look a lot more natural. I can't repeat clean my paintbrush, Diving on the paper towel and soften that lighter edge here until we have a nice gradient. Let's try this up, and here we have a beautiful pumpkin. Look at those edges and really melt into the previous layer. That's exactly why this technique is so useful. I'll meet you in the next lesson to practice the splattering technique. 10. Splattering: The splattering technique is fantastic. First of all because it's super fun to do. It also is going to give some texture to your paintings. Let's add some paint to this mushroom first, just like we did in the previous paintings. Wet on dry once more. I'll just go with the orange mix that we used earlier. I'm using again, that round paintbrush. I'm just going to add it on the mushroom. If you do splatter paint by accident, just pick up your paper towel and pick it up before it dries. So let's add a little bit of red just to make that emersion middle more fun. And a little bit of brown. Why don't we use the lifting technique. The paint is not quite dry. If yours is dry, that's fine. You know, you can use the lifting technique anyways. So I'm just wedding a paint brush, making sure it's clean. Then I try to remove as much water as I can out of it. I'm just going to add a little highlight over here. Repeating the step and adding a highlight over there. Now let's try this completely. Now, with a smaller paint brush, I'm going to add another layer of paint and I'm going to add pigment to this brown mix. I have another paint brush ready just in case I need to soften some edges. Let's clean that one up and make sure it's not dry, not dripping white. Now we're going to add a little bit of contrast through layering. I'm even drawing some lines here to suggest the part underneath the mushroom. Odd, a shadow over here. And Denise. And we're going to soften that. I'm adding a little bit more water because my pain ber seemed a little dry. It looks pretty nice. I want to add a shadow here too. Soften it. And then the shadow that once more, I'm going to soften to remember, we always start from the outside of the paint, which is added and move towards it and soften that edge. Now we have a nice space already. Let's try this completely. This is now our third layer, looking to add that a little bit of red. I still have that other paint brush, ready to fade those harsh edges and make them soft. So I'm just going to add a little bit of red here. Then again, you see how layering is convenient because we just get to keep some transparency in the painting while still adding color and vibrancy going to soften this edge here and add a little bit of color over there. And so now we're going to be ready to splatter. To splatter, it's best to use a round paintbrush like this one. I find that the ones that have a fine tip are not as easy to work with. Now, some people like to use a toothbrush. Instead, you might want to try a toothbrush or find another type of paint brush for oil painting. For instance, one with bristles that are a little bit more firm, you really have to experiment with different tools. For me, this one works very good. All you need to do is dip that paintbrush into your paint. The paint shouldn't be too thick, otherwise the splatters will have a hard time coming out. Once you have paint in your pain brush, want to make sure it's loaded with paint? You going to make sure the paintbrush is very close to the area you want to splatter paint on. Then with your finger to start flicking some paint at the paper. That can take a little bit of getting used to a little bit of practice. Don't worry if you don't manage to get it right away. I want to show you here. I'm getting splatters, They are different. These are actually fading into the previous layer because the paint is still wet here. I wet the paper earlier when I faded those harsh edges. Well, here, this is very dry, the splatters stay intact. So you really can produce different types of splatters if you want. You can even make water splatters. There are really a lot of different things to do. This really helps to add texture to a painting. If you've got some splatters outside of Mushroom, you can try and get them out before they're actually dry with a wet. Let's add some brown splatters. The more water you'll have in your paints, the bigger the splatters, the smaller they will be. For example, if I dip my pain rushing water right now and I make this mix, very watery spotters should come out a lot bigger. It's a lot easier to get them out. I'm going to try this and look at how beautiful this texture is on the mushroom. It really adds a lot to the painting. Don't get discouraged if you don't get this right away. You need to practice it. And I'll see you in the next lesson to study the driver's technique. 11. Dry Brush: In this lesson, we're going to look at another way to create beautiful texture on your paintings. And it's called the dry brush technique. It's a very well known watercolor technique. First we're going to paint a base with a wet on dry technique, and then I'll show you how to execute the dry brush technique. I'm going to start with yellow, so I'm just going to make another mix here. I'm going to add some water to it. Let's prepare a little bit of a brown mix with that smaller paint brush, because that's the one I used to add those darker parts and I really need it to get into the nooks and crannies here. Let's start painting our base layer. Once we have that, we can start adding brown. Notice that because this yellow area here still wets, the brown paint gets into it, which is completely normal. Let's try this first layer, now we're going to Mike yellow and brown together to make a honey color. And just apply that underneath to really suggest that hello area in the umbrella. There we go. Now I'm going to make sure I have another paint brush that is just clean and damp and I'm going to add some crash to the umbrella. Just soften some edges. And last, I want to add more contrast with a thicker version of our brown mix. That means we're adding more P to the mixed nest water. I noticed that because I got some water in those areas. You can see those lines here started melting into the previous Re, but that's okay. I'm just going to add a little definition there. Now, to execute the driver's technique properly, I want to make sure that the painting is completely dry, so we're going to use our heat gun or hair dryer once more. You get to the paintbrush that fits into these small parts of the umbrella. Well, this one is going to work well for me. Let's use a little bit of red. This time I'm making myself a little mix of red paint. I'm not going to add two too much water to it because I really want this texture to show through the driver's technique, I make sure that the paintbrush is loaded with paint. Now, this is what you want to do for this technique to work. Take your paint brush and get rid of the excess paint on a paper towel like this. I think here I got rid of most of it. Now if I brush the paint brush on my painting, it should create a driver's technique effect where you can see the grain of the paper. There's not a lot of water in the brush, but there's paint, we managed to have a texture showing and then do it here again. You can see it feels pretty dry, but because there's pain on it, we're able to create texture. And when you run out, you can repeat this. So you load your paint, brush with paint, then you make sure to dab it on the paper towel and then you can run it on top of your painting. This is it for the driver's technique. You can see how pretty this looks. You can, of course, post your projects to the project section and next we're going to paint a cute fox with all the techniques we learned about today. 12. Fox Painting : Part 1: It is time to paint the final project. And please don't worry, You'll quickly realize that by putting every technique that we learned side by side and taking each one step by step, we'll be able to paint a finished piece of art that looks beautiful. This is a sketch. Remember that you can download it from the resources section if you need to trace it. For this, we'll just need some basic colors. I'm going to use yellow, red, brown, and black. You can substitute that with yellow, red, and black, or yellow, red and blue. Even if that's all you have, blue mixed to red can create a dirt shade and that will be your shadow color. Well, for me, I'll use brown and black as my shadow colors. I'll be using three paint brushes, this flat one just to wet this sheet. Then I have a round one here to paint the base layer. And then I have a round and pointed one for smaller details like the whiskers, for instance. Have some paper towels ready, your water jars, your mixing tray, your paints, a heat gun. If you find it useful, make sure that your sheet is taped all around with the masking tape and we're ready to go. The very first thing you want to do when you paint is mix your colors. Let's make this a little bit of yellow. We're going to make it a creamy mix once more, except this time I won't add as much water as I add it before in our technique exercises, because we're going to paint on the wet, and I do not want this paint to spread out too much. I don't want too much water in it in the first place. This will do, you can see it is not a thick mix, but it's not very watery either. Now, I'm going to rinse my pain brush and I'm going to do the same with red. Any red will do. Any yellow you have, that doesn't really matter. The techniques and how we execute them is what matters. I'm adding a little bit of water just so it's easy to paint with. There we go. Let's rinse our pain brush. I'm going to anticipate the next lesson by mixing my brown color. Remember, if you don't have brown, just use blue. You mix that blue to red. For instance, you'll notice it turns into a dark color. And that is all you need to paint the shadows. And now I want a little bit of black. Again, that's completely optional. That will help me paint those very dark areas, like the nose, the eyes, the whiskers. Here are our mixes and we're ready to get started. I suggest that first we grab an eraser and make sure to soften those lines up here, because we're going to paint on wet. I want to make sure those light areas in the Fox don't show, at least the sketch doesn't show. These areas here are a little bit darker, so it doesn't matter as much. Same for the top of the head. This is enough. Now, let's wet this sheet. I'm going to dip my pain brush in water. If you have a smaller pain brush to do this, it's fine. I'm just going to quickly wet that sheet, not very long because I just want to apply paint and I want it to spread out just a little bit. I don't want it to look like a sky effect, I just want effect. Just a little bit of water is enough in this case. Now, I'm going to grab my round paintbrush, make sure it's wet and clean. To get started, we can go with yellow first, and apply this on top of the fox's head. What I would recommend you to do, if you see that the paint escapes very much, that it looks like it's out of control. I would wait for a little bit until your paper starts drying slightly and then you'll notice the paint will stay in the right area a little bit better. You can see for me it's the case here because the paints are spreading out, but they're not getting out of control. And that's also why I had you mixed paints that were not too watery. So we want to apply this color on top of the ears over here, and on the back, we're going to add a little bit there on the bottom of the ears in this area. Now we can go for red. Now we're painting the red accents and they're going to be a little more present at the bottom. Tell here. Let's add some in this area once more. I'm really trying to have a variety of colors showing in the final piece. That's why I take each color separately. And that is why now I'm going to create an orange mix by mixing both colors together in the pallets. And I'm going to apply that elsewhere. Some areas in the fur are going to be wet here, for instance, we can do to highlight, you can also leave wood over here that already is looking pretty good. Now what we're going to do is use the lifting technique, and I'm going to show you that it's going to be useful for many things. Make sure to rinse your Pampers completely. I'm going to do this in the dirty water, actually. Then I'm going to make sure it's even more clean by using the clean water. Now that I think it's clean. With my paper towel, I just a, a pain brush and I get rid of all excess water. Now, my pain brush looks thirsty. What I can do is remove a little bit of the paint that overflowed too far. And don't forget to always rinse your pain brush in between each time that you go and lift some paint. And again dab it on the paper towel. Because if you don't do that, you'll create a bloom on your painting. We'll just add too much water. That excess water will push the pigment, you add it before, it will push it away and it will create a bloom. Some people call it col. Flower can be pretty sometimes, but in this case we're going to try and avoid it, and that's okay if it happens. Anyways, here at the bottom, I'm just going to remove a little bit of that excess paint. You can see how the wet and wet technique still plays a huge part here because we have those soft edges that are so beautiful. Now what you can use the lifting technique for is also get those highlights back in the fox that maybe you covered up with paint. For example, here I would like a wide apart or there in the tel, maybe get more of a high light back. Notice I always rinse my pain rush when I do that and dab it on the paper. I'm even going to make this area a little bit light with the technique. This looks great. So now we're going to dry this sheet completely. Now we have a nice soft base. The sheet is completely dry and we're going to be ready to move on to the next lesson. What will work wet on dry this time. See there. 13. Fox Painting : Part 2: We have a nice space to go from. And you can see we already blocked in the main colors in the fox. And that's really going to help us work wet on dry. Now that's why I wanted you to dry the sheet completely so that the strokes that we add now stay exactly where we added them. We're also going to soften some edges here, so you can go ahead and grab two paint brushes, one to paint and one to soften the edges. I'm going to paint for the pointy one, I think will be easier to get into those tiny areas here. And I'll use the round one to fade the edges. I wouldn't usually start with the darker colors, but here I want to make sure to outline the features in the fox really quickly. Eyes, the nose here, the mouth, the ears. Very important parts of the fox. And then we'll add more color. We're going to start with brown and black. I don't like to use black alone. I always add a little bit of brown into it. Now, it's going to look like a very dark brown color if it's too light to your taste. You can still add a little bit more black. Play with the colors until you get something that you like. I think this will do for me, very dark brown. I'm going to start with the ears. Use the tip of my pain brush to paint the detail. We don't have to soften all the edges. For instance, this one could stay very sharp, it doesn't really matter. But here, let's say I want to create a hollow area in the ear, but I don't want it to be too obvious here. I can wet my other pain brush. It needs to be clean, remember. Then we dab it on the paper towel so it's barely wet. Then we come and soften those edges here. It's going to 0, A lot more natural this way. I found I went a little bit too far here with the dark color. I'm going to lift at color with a dry brush. Now I'm going to repeat on the other side. Right now it looks a little weird because we're adding very dark colors on top of a very soft painting. Don't worry, the painting is going to improve as we go. This is just a start and it's completely normal that it looks a little bit odd at first. Again, I'm going to soften the edges here. Now let's take care of the eyes. You can see how the tip of the pain brush is so useful here. Now the nose, I like with the wet on dry technique that we can take our time. There's no rush. What I can suggest here is to the lifting technique. Remember the brush got to be clean and almost dry. And you can lift a little bit of color on top of the nose to create some high light That's going to make it more realistic. And now let's paint the mouth. I chose to give that fox at a little tomorrow. I also want to add some color here, there to make it more natural. I want to soften edges. I rinse my paintbrush every time and repeat it on a paper towel and go soften another edge with the paint that's on my pain brush right now. I'm just going to pull it over to those areas underneath the nose. I do have a very light brown paint, which is perfect. You can see now this fox is coming to life little by little. Now we want to add a shadow underneath this area that will help us also shape the face better, but we don't want to leave it to be that harsh again. We're going to soften the edges. Same here, we're going to add a shadow. Underneath the Pam and soften the edge. We can even soften the edge in places over here, too, to keep that furry effect. Let's finish outlining the face and making the shadow here in that hollow area a little more visible. Then I soften that edge and I pull some paint over to other areas, which allows me to have very dark brown parts and lighter ones I'm looking at where else I could add a dark color. Maybe above the eyes where we're going to fade this. We really need the paint to be very light there in that area as well. So we're going to add a shadow here as well that helps us build contrast. Again, I'm softening the edge that the shadow melts into the previous layer. I'm adding a few brush strokes for the hair in the tail. I'm going to add a little bit of brown paint this time, less dark than what I was using until now. I'm going to add it over here and fade the edges on. When I say fade the edges, I mean soften the edges, the effect is the same. See how I'm pulling paint over to other areas to look at how cute this fox is looking already. I'm running out of a darker mix here. I'm just going to add more black, add more brown into it, because I think it would be nice to add a shadow underneath here and also make the tip of the tail darker. You can, even with your paint brush, start shaping the fur here, but how nice it looks, make little lines. I'm going to make sure to soften that edge there. Even soften some of the edges and pull the paint over here. Just again, because I like to leverage one color to create different shades of that color. Here, we're version of that brown by just pulling the paint. I think it'd be nice to outline this part in the fox a little more and the same over here. I'm adding more paint here because it's going to be a little darker in that area. And make sure to, again, soften this edge. Add a little bit of paint here mimicking the fur. And now pick up just brown. And I'm going to add some over here to create some gradients between the very dark color, very dark brown, and the lighter brown. I'm just softening some edges and others I leave sharp Up to you to decide. I'm going to add a little bit of brown in this area. This area a few lines over here and a little bit of a shadow there. I think this looks good. So now I'm going to rinse my paintbrush. I use the other water jar to make sure that the pain bush is even cleaner. Why not apply a little bit of yellow? Now I'm going to keep those yellowish areas for the top of the painting. Again, I have the other pain brush handy to execute that technique that allows me to soften edges. With the tip of the pain brush, I add some hair fur, soften those edges here so they melt into the rest of the head. You don't have to add the fur everywhere, just in places. We're just suggesting the fur. I want some color over here too, But through the layering, you can see a narrow building up contrast, really making this fox come to life. I leave some of those areas paper white. Now I want to add a little bit of yellow in this area. I think the top of the back would also benefit from the fur showing the mare in places. Again, for it to not look too weird, we're just softening. So this melts into the previous letter. We can repeat that there. And why not add a little bit over here. Now you can add a few more yellow accent if you wish. Think about the other color. We also have red. We don't want to cover up everything with yellow. We also don't want to soften all the edges. You can keep some of them sharp, like here, and soften others. It really brings some variety in your painting. I'm ready to pick up a little bit of red that I'm going to add in a few places. Some people will never really soften edges. Some cells just rely on harder edges everywhere. And it just depends really on what you like. I'm going to add some reddish accents over here. As you can see, you can layer colors. As long as the brown color below is dry, you shouldn't have any difficulty doing that. Of course, if it's not dry, and that was you can choose to dry your sheath at any time. Mine has already dried By the time I added the red on top, now I added red accents. I. Orange, so I'm mixing both colors. And this is when we add the most color on this fox. I want to access this area here, as well as this area. So take a look at your painting and see where you think it'd be nice to add some color. Again, I'm overlapping colors, layering one on top of the other. I, I want to add more color in the tail here. I think it'll be very nice. Don't forget, it's possible to overlap colors. You can see once more how overlapping colors, how applying layers actually helps with the vibrancy in your works. Before moving on to the final part, I want to add a stronger shadow underneath the fox. I just grabbed a lot of black. Then I'm going to soften that edge. It also helps in creating a ground effect, pulling the paint onto other places. Just going to add more brown now. And that's it for our second layer. So we're going to dry this now. We're now ready to move on to the last part in this painting and we're going to cover the last details. 14. Fox Painting : Part 3: In this part, we're going to take care of the final details in the painting. We'll be using this paint brush a lot, the one with a fine tip. This is the part where you can enhance the very important features in the fox. That will be the eyes, for instance, if you notice yours are not dark enough, this is the time to make them pop out a little. That is why I'm layering black paint on top. We can also fix areas that we don't like. For instance, here I find the ears need a little more definition. I'm adding just a little bit of black, but not a lot to get a brown color. We're going to use the dry brush technique here. I just soak my paintbrush into the paint and I'm going to dab it on the paper towel to get rid of most of the paint. Now I'm going to gently brush this pain brush on my painting to create some texture to really suggest a hair Paw. Notice I always try to do it in the direction the actual hair would be going. We can repeat that over here. And we can even do it in the ears just slightly. We don't want to add too much, just a little color to create additional for effects if you like. Of course you can do that with other colors. For example, yellow and stab this color on the paper Tl. And you can add some accents here or you can add some in the ground, Not the driver's technique there. I would also like to add some whiskers. Let's pick up a little bit of black and make very fine lines if we can. I'm barely touching the paper when I do this. We can also check on anything that you want to improve in this painting. Any shadow you want to add. And again, you can use the technique that helps us soften edges. That's it for the details. I still want to add a few splatters. You can pick the color of your choice. I'm going to add a few brown splatters again. I dip my pain brush in the mix and I'm going to add those splatters on the ground here. And I'm adding nice little splatters all around. Add a tiny accent here for the hair and a few lines here. And of course, we could keep working, but you get the idea. So I'm done with a fox. I'm going to tape it so you can take look. Remember that you can share your project to the project section. If you need any feedback or any help, let me know. I hope you enjoyed this painting and I'll see you in the very next part for some final thoughts. 15. Final Thoughts: I hope you had a fun time that you learned loads about essential techniques and how to leverage them easily in painting. Remember that you can share your art with me and other students in the project tab of the class. You can also leave a review that will help me with feedback and that will also help potential students decide if the class is the right fit for them for more art. You are welcome to follow me here on Skillshare and get notified every time I load a new class. You can also find me on Youtube and Patri every week. Thank you so much for taking this class with me today and the next one.