Experience Watercolours: Tricks and Tips

1. Tricks and Tips for Watercolours: Hi and Melinda Wild. Welcome to another session of experience watercolors In today's lessons. I'm going to show you some tricks and tips that I've learned along my watercolor journey, and I'm hoping they'll make your watercolor experience easier. Each class will have maybe just one little piece of information, But it's things that I found really invaluable over my years of painting. Okay, let's get to the studio and get start. 2. Try Scratching!: Hi and Melinda Wild Welcome to experience watercolors. So this isn't really a class. I'm gonna call it just a mini splash because I want to show you a couple cool things you can do if you end up creating a section of your painting that you know you're pretty happy with. Overall for us, shape and design goes, but it's kind of got a big flat area where nothing's really going on, and it's all painted homogeneous Lee the same color. So a couple things you could do. First off, you can drop in some extra color while it's down. Just grab, say, maybe in this case, a bit of yellow and drop it in. Now here's a little word of caution. If you do this, don't futz around with it. Once you get it on there, just leave it alone. It will find its own way if you start fooling around with it. Trying to move around too much what'll happen is it'll just get homogeneous all over again and you'll end up with a slightly later but boring section. Okay, another thing you can do. If you have a brush with a handy, dandy, chiseled edge, you can use. That is your scraper. You can buy these funds scrapers at almost any art store or even a dollar store or my favorite go to tool. Probably the best thing you could do with your credit card is cut up credit card, and you can do some scratching. So if you scratch while it's damp, you're actually scoring the paper and you're creating a little different. And the pigments gonna run into that little David. And that's gonna give you some interesting shapes you can make maybe some extra trees in this deep, dark force, which is kind of a fun thing to do. Then the other thing is exactly the same, except you have to wait a minute. And as the shine is just leaving, it's at that point where if you scrape, it will actually separate the pigment. Okay, not dry enough yet. Here. I'm gonna take this to the dryer just so that we don't waste too much time waiting for paint to dry. There we go. I think that's gonna be dry enough now. See how now it will actually separate the pigment, and that's gonna leave a white spots which can give you more interesting shapes, maybe some tree trunks. And there there we go. So the time to do this one is right as the shyness, leaving in certain areas where it's a little too damp yet were dropped in that Yellow Sea. It didn't really work. It's gonna go dark. That's fine, too. It's a lovely technique. Here we go get some lights, and some darks kind of gives you the idea of the sun shining through a definite forest. Okay, so there's something you can do. If you create a blob on your painting that has kind of nothing exciting going on. Have a go at dropping in some color while it's damp, grabbing you chisel edged brush or you've got a card or any kind of scraper and having a scrape earlier. You get a dark line. Later, you get a light line. Okay, have fun 3. Tree Trunks: Let's talk about how to make a tree trunk look around. Okay. Well, the first thing to do is to moisten the area where your tree trunk is. Then I'm gonna grab a little burnt sienna just because it's there. I'm just gonna drop it down one side of that tree truck. Hey, see how that pulls beautifully into the wet and I'm gonna drop some down the other side. So you may notice I'm making sure that my brushes onto the dry here, So I'm getting a nice, sharp edge and on to the dry on the other side as well as we get a nice, sharp edge. And then we have a little bit of soft edges in the center so that I'm gonna grab my brush, clean it off, make it thirsty. That means dabbing it on my rag and then just run down that center area there. So what happens is Well, I guess we could take that right off. We started to get a trunk that looks round and plump. There's a little added thing you could do throughout a little bit of ultra Marine to mix in there, maybe add a little more depth down to this one side. Make it look even rounder. Then let's dry that we'll talk about putting some texture on. Okay, let's add a little texture to that. So I'm just taking a little bit of ultra marine and burnt sienna mixed together again. Makes a nice, rich blackie color super dry on your brush. See how dry that is. The brush wants to not even come back together. And then I'm gonna just If you hear that noise, you know you're on the right track. Well, just scrape on some bark, make it look even around There you go. Have fun making round trees. 4. Branches: you got you nice tree trunk. Now, maybe you want to add a few branches if you take it round brush and hold it perpendicular to the page rather than sideways. Perpendicular to the page just allows you to get some really interesting shapes. And then if you put it on your trunk and just press down a little bit and then just kind of wiggle along and flick, Here we go. I call it my wiggle wiggle flick. Really technical. All right, then we can just add if we want a little bit extra detail around that branch to make it look more like it's connected to the tree. Try one more. Appear a little more water on my brush. One. Here, Wait just a bit of detail around the edge of it again, so it looks connected. Some of your branches will be coming from the other side of the tree so you can start on the edge. Wiggle around. Don't hesitate to have your branches overlap one another. It's OK. It happens in real life. There we go. Have fun making branches. Don't forget wiggle wiggle flick 5. Stripe Excercise : So here's a cool little exercise you can try. Um, I'm gonna use a limited palette here. You can use all your colors if you want, but just for simplicity sake, I'm gonna show you with just these few these six colors, Okay? So make sure they're clean, which mine wasn't. I'm just gonna get that little. No kidding. They were gonna take a strip of each color. So starting with the gambo, she's putting a streak of it on there. A little bit. Sienna trying to keep them somewhat homogenous. A bit of Carmine, a little dog. Carmine there. I'll just pick that off some turquoise, beautiful color. Ultra Marine. You can certainly see the color differences in the blues when you lay them out like this. It's a great way of learning. Just even just doing this little streaky thing. Well, there you can see my urges. Watercolor paper. The best in the world. Okay, here we go. Now I have to drive that before I can carry on. All right, that I'm going to take this and just turn it this way just cause that's an easier way for me to stroke, and then we're gonna do the same thing all over again. So starting with her yellow on a way through, ideally, if you could do it in one stroke for this second layer, it's better because, no, I'm not gonna do that in one stroke, because if you stroke too much, you'll be lifting up the color of the first layer. Here we go. So get a decent amount on your brush without making it too. Puddle e. No, I gotta do a little bit more. And here comes the turquoise, ultra Marine depression. Okay, then we drive that. Now I highly recommend labelling these. So I'm just gonna go Jambos, Burnt Sienna, Carmine, turquoise, ultra Marine and oppression. And then we'll name them down the other side as well. Actually, let's turn that over. So we got booze, burnt Sienna, carmine turquoise, ultra Marine and oppression. All right, then we will take a little piece of paper, actually, a big piece of paper, like so just put in a little crimson, take my scissors. I'm gonna cut out very small. Well, actually, it's a square model. Here we go, square hole. And because all of these colors compete so much, it's really hard to see what's going on. So here you have this. You can lay it on top of your colors. Part of my fingernails. I have my chain fell off my bike and I can't get the grease off from underneath him anyway . So you look there and you see that oppression and burnt sienna when they're together, they make a very nice, rich, dark, deep three. Okay, so you can look for another combination maybe, uh, carmine and turquoise and give you kind of pinky purple thing. And let's have a look at How about ultra Marine and Burnt Sienna so ultra marine here and burnt sienna there and you get a thistle is really did for realizing how your blues mix with burnt sienna. So burnt Sienna impression gives you a greeny color Burnt sienna. An ultra marine gives you a grayish blue and you can add more CNN. Of course, if you wanted it to be less blue, but at any rate, it's just a really good little exercise. It helps you to realize what your colors do when you mix them together, and it helps you familiarize yourself with your colors. Better to have fewer colors that you're really familiar with that. A whole time of colors that you don't have a clue what they do when they're makes together . So I really recommend this exercise for you. And I hope you have some fun doing it. And then you could just keep this is a little reminder of what does what in case you forget . Thanks for watching. 6. Talk About Spray Bottles: Let's talk about spray bottles for a minute. Spray bottle, Zahra. Super Handy Artist Tool. Now you can go by and artists watercolor spray bottle like so, And it's what I call a blob. Er, In other words, the drops come out of it in drops rather than in a mist. Okay, and you can also get old perfume bottles. But usually these will be misters and the moisture comes up in a mist. So there's a really good reason for having a mister and blubber a Mr is great for re moistening an area. When you don't want to run the risk of putting your brush over it and moving what's underneath, you can just missed it with your Mr and then if you decided you need to go back in, you know, why would you do that? You would do it because you decide you want to go back into that area, but you don't want to disrupt what's already there. So you just would missed it, and then you can still get some nice soft edges. Or perhaps you missed it because he wanted to drop in a little more pigment here and there . But again, you wanted soft edges so you could use your Mr for that. All right, Now, why would you use the blubber while the lover is for texture? So let's just have a look and you'll see how we can create some texture here. We wanna wait till the shine leaves. I'm just gonna give that a quick puff with the blow dryer. Theo. Shyness just left. So then we can use our blubber and weaken sprints on there. You see how it creates really fun texture? Another way of doing the blow birthing without a blubber is grab your water bucket, stick your fingers in, shake them out, really, really wealth, and then just flick with your fingers and you will get exactly the same thing. You might get a few larger blobs. That's okay. Sometimes that's what you want. So you have to just decide what picture, what texture it is you're after. And you can use your Mr or your blubber or your fingers. Um, if you don't want to buy an artist spray bottle, you can go to I don't know, dollar store, drug store, and you can get these cheap little misters. Take a pin stick it in the hole and then just wriggle it around. And basically you can kind of wreck your Mr into being a blubber. So it's just people that blob. Yeah, that'll blob. There we go could use a little bit more. The downside to these is the pumps are a little harder to push, so it's hard to be more accurate. The pumps on the artist spray bottles are very smooth and easy, so you don't have toe push, push, pushing and get a big blob. Where's this one? You might have that trouble. It's a bit harder to press, so it might be a little more challenging to work with. So here's another little thing about texture. We convention. You can get this with salt, putting a little bit of salt on your page while it stamp. The downside is the salt will de nature, your paper and bidi nature ring. I mean years and years later it's possible it will go a little bit yellow. It changes the pH balance on your so bottom line. Yes, you can use salt. Yes, it's a lot of fun, but if you're worried about the integrity of your work many, many years down the road. Perhaps just using water is a better choice. So why do we want to create texture? Well, it's a great thing to do where areas of flatness occur. You want to just make something happening where there isn't much going on? Another thing is, it's kind of fun to, uh, create some foliage. I'm just going to show you here will take my blubber, get this paper a little squirt and I'm gonna take some carmine on my brush I'm gonna hold my hand quite close to the base of my paper and holding my brush this way Not this way Taking a bit of moisture out of my brush on my rags so that it doesn't fly back in my face I'm just gonna flick. This is kind of a fun thing to do and you'll notice if it hits an area where the blubber had left some moisture You get soft edges. If it hits other areas where there is no moisture, you get hard edges. If you decide you need more soft edges, you just go back with your blubber. You get these a little squirt. Here we go. Okay. Let's, uh, he had another color a little tiny, that yellow to that again holding my brush quite close to the page. The reason you hold it close to the pages. If you hold it way up here, you tend to get a little too much whiplash effect and you'll end up splattering all over your own face. Here we go. Okay. And then you think, Well, what is that? I'll show you. You can then take here smaller brush, endless. We create about a little trunk here. I'm putting this on. Wow, this is still damp. You could wait for it to dry if you want it, but I kind of like doing it well, it's damn because I don't mind if the branches were running fuzz a little bit. I think that looks kind of nice. You just want to make sure you have your pigment fairly heavy on the brush. So that him what stays put. Here we go particular brushes really best for doing branches. And generally if you do them the way they grow. I was trying to go backwards because I wanted you to be able to see. But then you just end up with a mess. If you do it the way that grow works a lot better. Here we go kind of pretty, and that is another fun thing you can do with your spray bottles. 7. The Good the Bad and the Obvious: This is a pretty basic bit of information, but you'd be surprised how many people do not organize their workspace Very well. So here's what I'm going to suggest is if you're right handed everything on your right, you've got your board. Your paints are gonna be over there on your right, and your water buckets gonna be over there on your right. And I tell you, as I said before, it seems pretty basic. But let me tell you a story about why this is important. My dad was a very fine artist, was doing a wonderful demonstration painting for a group of students of mine. And he, being ambidextrous, had his paints on the rate and his water bucket on the left. So he reached over into his water bucket to clean his brush. And then he went back to reach for some paint. And as he was running across his page, huge painting, the water dripped off his brush drip, drip drip right across his beautiful sky wash. Now, thankfully, my dad was very easy going and a fine painter, so he made something wonderful. Love it anyway. But my point is, if it was your beautiful painting, and you had just finish something so perfect and then dropped water on it at the wrong time , and it made backgrounds and balloons all over the place. You might not be too impressed, so please try toe. Keep this in mind if you're right handed everything on your right from water, bucket, paint and rag. And if you're left handed everything on your left. Another thing I'd like to share with you that I like to do is I like to put a towel underneath my board. It's not only stops everything from sliding around when I'm moving quickly, but it's just a great rag. It's right there for you, so you don't have to worry about finding your rag or wiping it off on your other hand or whatever. So, uh, give that a try. Take a nice little hand how place it underneath your board and underneath your paint palette and your water bucket, and it's just right there for you. Great for making your brush thirsty when you need it. Now, regarding water buckets, when I recommend you get one of a decent size. Sometimes students come with these little tiny things, and they have to keep running to the bathroom or to the kitchen to change the water in their bucket. But really, I call that a painting displacement activity. And I get that because, you know, we're all fearful to take the next step. Sometimes in our painting, and I'm gonna if you listen to the next lesson, you'll get some information about how to get over that. But anyway, just bearing in mind to keep a decent size water bucket and the other end, fill it up, Don't feel it. You know, an inch off the bottom, you know, fill it halfway or more. The other thing I want to mention is blow dryers are great because watching paint dry is no fun at all. But don't start painting on your paper until after it has cooled from being worked at with the blow dryer. The paint will dry Really funny if you do that, so just let it cool down before you start to paint on it. Another neat little tip for the water bucket. These, uh, soap holders, they work really great. You can sink them into the bottom of your water bucket. Some of them come with little suction cups on the bottom to make them stay down. But this one's heavy and it stays down. This just saves you having to swirl and swirl and pound and pound. You brush because every time you swirl and touch this thing on the bottom, you're brushing against these, which is gonna clean out your brush twice as fast. Is it just having a smooth base on the bottom of your water bucket so you can get thes anywhere? Drugstore Dollar Store. You might even have one kicking around somewhere in your bathroom, but that's kind of a nice, easy thing to do is go so another quick little tip. If you have to do any racing on your page rather than rubbing with your fingers, which gets the oils from your fingers onto your watercolor paper, just have a clean watercolor brush and sweep off all the bits with that much better than rubbing and getting your paper greasy, because then it will not accept the paint as well 8. Blank Paper Anxiety!: So if you suffer a little bit of a white page phobia that anxiety of putting the first brushstroke on your pure white piece of paper, here's an idea. I think about trying this sharp, sharp pencil. Yeah, there we go. Okay, Now you've trashed your paper. So what it allows you to do is relax because it's wrecked already, and maybe it will allow you to move forward with the idea of process rather than product being important. It'll help you to relax because you're not gonna sell this painting. Nobody's gonna wanna have it even as a gift, because it's got a hole in the middle of it. But what it will allow you to do is to move forward and enjoy the idea of creating rather than worrying about the finished product. The idea is, process is so much more important than product. And if this helps you to relax and maybe experiment a little bit more, I highly recommend you give it a try. 9. Speed Sew...Really?: So here's another little tidbit I like to share with you. You can actually use this as masking fluid. OK, first, what is masking fluid In case you're new to watercolors. Masking fluid is something you would paint on your watercolor page before you begin your painting and it resists the paint. Therefore, when you're finished, you can erase it off and you have a white place that is just paper. No paint to the idea with watercolors is we don't use white paint. Traditionally, we don't use white paint, so we want the white of our paper to be the whites and are painting. Sometimes painting around those whites is just way too much of a pain. And to give you an example, here's a little piece. So if I wanted to make this painting, I would mask wrote this hand in these dandy lion bits because I don't wanna have to paint around those with my nice dark wash. So once I've masked, um, I can paint my background in, let it dry, remove the masking fluid and then detail those things that were masked. All right, Now, what is this Speed? So this is actually fabric mender so you can get this in a grocery store or in a sewing shop and what it does. It's the kind of thing that lazy sewers used to him their pants when they don't want to get out the needle and threat however it smells, boy, does it ever just like masking fluid. And I've been using it for boat 40 years and my paintings still look perfect. Well, okay, is perfect is my painting skin be? But they still are. Finally, it has not eroded the integrity of the paper or anything like that. So here's what I do with it, though. You want to get your speed, so and then you're gonna take a little bit of it and stick it into a bottle, squeeze it out, and then you're gonna add a little bit of water in there. And my ratio is about 50 50 water and speed. So and then, speed, so was white. So what I want to do then, is take my burnt sienna and add a little bit of burnt sienna to it. Okay, here we go, because the burnt sienna will tent it so I can see it better on my page. when I'm working with it, then these little plastic containers, you can get it almost any drug store, dollar store, a plastic shop. And then I know you're not supposed to shake masking fluid because it gets bubbles in it. But in this case, I would shake it and not use it for a day or so. So the bubbles will disappear. So shake that up and then I've got my mask. Include that I could just squirt out and I would soap my brush and then dip it into masking fluid. In a way, I go with the painting. Now, why would you use this instead of commercial masking fluid? Well, for one thing, it's way cheaper. Another thing it seems to last longer in this tube than masking fluid does my In my experience, um, another really important thing for me is most masking fluid comes in bottles kind of shaped like this. So when you're dipping your brush in, you can't see how far you're dipping in. Your masking fluid might be up to here in your bottle. You dip your brush in and you can't see where you're dipping, and you might end up dipping way over the feral of your brush. This eventually erodes your brushes, so I prefer to be able to see what I'm dipping into. So I only did half way up the bristles and that preserves my brushes. So that's another reason why I really prefer to use speed. So instead of masking fluid, another reason I prefer this is you see how easy this is to get off traditional masking fluid. The lids are often difficult to get off, and my students are forever handing it to me, saying, Can you open this? And then I'm trying, then were passing it around the class. And everybody's trying to get the lid off the masking fluid. Whereas if you have your speed so set up like so in a bottle, you don't have that problem. You just click that up or back or have other ones that are like this, and that works well too. Anyway, just a preference of mine. Yes, there is one more thing. There are three items on the market, their speed. So there is so no more. And there is liquid stitch. Okay, One of those works, I know the speed. So works one of those works. I can't remember which one. So here's my recommendation. Don't use either of those two. Stick with speed. So Okay, there's my little tip about speed, so enjoy. 10. Yes You Can Paint a Dewdrop : So here's one of my favorite things to learn how to do. I'm gonna learn how to make a dewdrop. So here's a couple examples for you. There's dewdrops on the grass. There's some dewdrops soups. Okay, so I've created a rose here, and I think you can probably make a dewdrop on that. The first thing is to take, uh, a bit of a scrubber brush if you have one. Mine is an old acrylic brush. It's worn right down. If you don't have one, you can use your regular brush. These stiffer brushes just make it so much quicker. The first thing we have to do is remove some of the background color that's on this in order to create or do drop and a clean piece of paper towel. And then I'm cleaning my scrub brush often. Just make a couple of scrubs and then a lot of the clean paper tail and then clean your brush again, so it must be very clean. So you're not just pushing that background pigment back into your in your area that you're trying to lift out. Okay, that's probably lifted enough. Now I need to dry out, so just be a moment. So I'm going to use the background color that I've put painted this rose with, which is Carmine. And the first thing to do is take a smallish brush and re moist in that area that we just dried. I know it seems silly, but that is the best way. Then we want to consider light direction. So I'm gonna say my lights coming this way quite often. I like to take a little bit of paint and just remind myself by putting a little arrow up at the top of my page. That's where my light directions coming from. All right, So, having done that, now I'm gonna take the Carmine, which was my background color and my lights coming this way. So I want a place the Carmine on the sunny side. So this is gonna be the Sunnyside, my lights coming like this. This is the sunny side of my do drop. I'm gonna place the carmine. They're on a boat half of it or a little less than half of it, but because it's moist, it's gonna have a soft edge. And if it doesn't have a soft edge, I'm just gonna take my clean, thirsty brush and just soften that a little bit like that. There we go. Okay. And again, I have to drive That can zoomed in a bit here so you can see it a bit closer up. Um, I'm gonna take some ultra Marine, which is my favorite shadow color on my tiny little brush. And I'm gonna create a shadow cast by that dewdrop Light is coming this way. So the shadow is going to be on this side of it. It can't be any wider than the dew drop. It has to be the same width as the dew drop. I'm just gonna start right about here. Describe the shape of my dewdrop with my shadow, color and all. Maybe make it slightly longer. Here we go. That makes that pop up off the page. Once you get a shadow on there and then the very last thing we have to do is get our exacto knife. So be sure you're exactly knife is really good and sharp. And be sure you do. Drop is very good and dry, and you'll just take edge of your Exacto knife. And within the dark side of the do drop. Just give it a little tiny scratch. We're just gonna flick out a little bit of sunlight. There we go. That just gives the whole thing a bit of life. Maybe a little bit more. There we go. And that gives us our little sunny glow on that side. Congratulations. You just painted a dewdrop. 11. Thanks for Being Here!: so thanks for galloping through all these tricks and techniques with me. I hope they're helpful in your artistic journey. And remember, the process is just a important subject, so hope you have fun creating and enjoying your process. 12. Bloopers: just kidding. So thanks for tripping. That's all, folks.