Explore Your Brushes - Paint Five Kinds of Feathers with Just One Brush!

1. What's This Class About?: Do you need all of these brushes to make your art? Or do you maybe just need a few brushes? Well, what if you just needed one brush? Hi, I'm Turpti Karjjini a watercolor artist, instructor and owner Blue Pine Arts. A Company that makes handmade watercolors and other art supplies. Joining me in today's class where we will discover the true powers of a single brush. We will do this by exercising a brushstrokes and to mark making. We will then learn how to paint this beautiful spread of colorful feathers using just one brush. Trust me, my friends, after this class, you will never see your brushes in the same way again. Maybe, just maybe, this class will help you save a bunch of money the next time you go shopping for brushes. Are you curious and excited? Well, so am I. Let's jump onto the next segment where we will take a look at all the art supplies will need for today's class, and then we'll get started. 2. Materials: Let's go over the materials that we'll need in today's class. You don't need a lot of it, but stick with me because some of them are really important. Obviously since the class is about brushes, you will need a variety of different brushes. I have a lot of brushes with me frankly but don't be alarmed, you don't need these many brushes. For this class you can just use the one brush that you have, maybe you have a round brush or maybe you just have a flat brush. You can apply this class to any size and any kind of brush that you have. In the next segment, I will be going over the different kinds of brushes and how they're used, all of the stuff in the next segment, so stick with me. You're going to need the brushes for the class. Next, we're going to need some paper and I have different varieties of paper, so you can either get loose sheets of paper, this is Saunders Waterford, and I've already painted a few feathers on this just for fun. I recently received this pad of Clairefontaine paper It's 300 GSM and it is cooled fast and you can see that the people comes in the form of pad like this. You can either use a pad of paper or you can use little sketchbooks or little journals, I especially like this one, this is my Blue Fine Arts tiny journal and it's just so perfect to just to practice little things like I have over here and it's made of a 100% cotton cold press paper and it's 200 GSM, so it's thick enough to try different techniques on. This one would work really well. You would also need like some kind of lose normal paper to make some sketches. I have just this simple journal with normal paper, this is not watercolor paper. You can just use a simple sheet of paper for this as well. We're going to do some exercises to sketch the different shapes of feathers. Next, of course you're going to need paints today, we're going to use watercolors. I have my big box of Blue Fine Arts handmade watercolors. I love this selection. This is a tin which holds 48 pans and all of these are the handmade paints that we make under my Blue Fine Arts. I'm very excited to use all of these colors to show you the quality of the handmade pins and how vibrant they are and how beautiful they look into feathers. I have my selection of watercolors. Don't worry, you can go through this class with any kind of paints. They don't even have to be artist create paints, but I always prefer to work with artist create paints because they're so vibrant and they move so beautifully on the paper and they mix so well. There's always an advantage to use artist create paints over the student create paints. We're done with paint. Next, you're going to need a normal pencil and an eraser to make the sketches of the feather shapes in the book, like I showed you before. What else? You're also going to need a jar of water. I always prefer using a glass jar of water because the transparency it shows me if my mixes are muddy or if they're vibrant. If my water starts turning green and brown and muddy, I know that I'm mixing a lot of colors in a not so pleasant way. I always prefer using like a big jar of water because you just have so much water in it, you need to keep going back and forth to change the contaminated water so a big jar of water and the bigger the better. Let's not forget the paper towels. You always need to have some kind of like an absorbent surface next to you when you're painting with watercolors, I prefer paper towels and I use them multiple times, so I'm not wasting paper. You can see that these are already used. I use them, I just leave them to be dry then re-use them again. Here's one tip that you can use or you can use a cloth towel, that works really well as well. These are all the materials that we are going to be using today. Let's move on to the next segment where we are going to look at all the different kinds of brushes and we'll talk more about them over there. See you in the next segment. 3. All of the Brushes!: I have a bunch of brushes over here, and I am just segregating them based on different categories that I'll explain in just a moment. In watercolors, you get brushes of all different kinds and it can get confusing and overwhelming, especially when you're starting at first. You just see all these different brushes and different brands, and you're like, "My God, I don't know which ones to buy." I'm not going to cover everything about these brushes extensively, perhaps this could be another Skillshare class. Let me know in the comments or message me on Instagram, and let me know if you want a Skillshare class based solely on the different kinds of brushes and watercolors. Today I'm just going to explain you in brief about these different kinds of brushes and what can they be used for. The first kind of brushes I have here are the flat brushes, and obviously they're called flat because they come to a flat edge. I have different sizes over here and different hairs. These two are synthetic brushes. This one is my favorite, my hockey brush. You must have seen this in the other Skillshare classes how I use this. This is made of goat hair and these are the flat brushes that I have. The next kind of brushes here are the round brushes, and these are the most popular brushes that you will find that watercolor artists use. Round brushes, they come to a fine point. You can see that this brush, it looks all frazzled. The hair isn't sticking together and people panic, "My God, my brush is dry and the hair is all around. Is my brush damaged?" Not really, doesn't have to be damaged, so what do you need to do is put your brush in the water, make it all wet. When you take most of the water out, when it's a little damp, let's bring a paper towel here. I'm just going to take the excess water out and you can see that my brush now suddenly is like all sleek and beautiful and pointy. It's because it's supposed to be like this when you're painting with water and colors. When it's wet, you brush is supposed to be nice and pointing like this. The round brushes are called round brushes because the circumference at the base of the brush here, it's a circle, it's round, and that's why these are called round brushes and I have them in different kinds. The next category I have of brushes here is the mop brushes. Now, there's a lot of confusion. People usually get confused a lot between the round brushes and the mop brushes because when you put them together, they look the same, don't they? But the mop brushes are styled differently. I would say they come in the category of round brushes, but they are a subcategory in themselves seeing that the hair is clumped together differently. It's far more thicker and fuller in mop brushes than it is in round brushes. You can see how this appears to be fatter, let me get this brush and I'll show you. You can see how it's fatter and bulges more than a round brush, for example. That's the difference between the mops and the rounds. Mops are usually made with really soft hair so usually like a pure squirrel hair brush like this is a beam mop, or synthetic hair which is an imitation of squirrel hair like this, Tintoretto mop brush. They're designed to hold a lot of water and pigment in them compared to round brushes, and they usually use to make really big shapes, big brush shocks, big washes, that sort of stuff. The mop brushes, we're done with that. Then the next brushes that we have are the liner brushes. Look at this, see how this all looks like frazzled and damaged, but if you just wet it, it's supposed to come to a nice beautiful point. Now, I have these two kind of rigger brushes, now rigger brushes are really long and thin. They're very petite, very slim. They were used to paint thin straight lines of the riggers on the master of the ships. Did I say that right? Let me rephrase this. Rigger rushes in the old times, the long hair, it affords a lot of control when you paint with this brush. They were used to paint the straight lines of the rigger ropes in the sales of ships. My god, I don't know why cannot put this. I hope you get the idea. Yeah, so these brushes are really useful because it's really easy to control them, and also in a way, they have their own control. You can make a lot of beautiful natural looking lines with these brushes better than the round brushes. I have the rigger brushes here. The last category of brushes that I have are the specialty brushes. These are the brushes that are just like crafted to just come to a different shape in their structure. They also give you very different kinds of brushstrokes when you use them. This one is a three-quarter inch oval brush. This is an oval wash brush. It's shaped like a cat's tongue oval shape. This one is called a dagger brush because you can see that it has a sword edge, like an edge over here, like a dagger and one straight edge here. It makes really interesting brushstrokes. Maybe I'll do a scale check class on how to use the specialty brushes. This one here is the beautiful Rosemary & Co triangle brush, also called as a pyramid brush. Even though it looks frazzled, I don't know if you can see this clearly, but this trash has a 3D shape. The cross-section is a 3D triangle, and the hair comes up and it's like chopped off towards one edge. It has a pyramidical 3D triangular shape. Also make some very interesting marks, but I won't be covering that in this class, maybe in another Skillshare class. I just wanted to show you the different kinds of brushes. Now, all these different brushes make different kinds of brushstrokes, but the whole purpose of today's class is that we are going to discover what marks one single kind of brush can do, so you don't have to spend a lot of money buying all of these different kinds of brushes in every shape that they come in. You don't have to do that. That's the whole point of today's class. Discovering maybe just one brush and seeing what you can do with that brush, so you can avoid buying different sizes of that brush or different kinds of brush for that matter. So I'm going to teach you the different marks that this mop brush can do today. It's also classified as a round brush, so I recommend most artists to start on with round brushes, and a lot of watercolor artists will definitely have a round brush. This is like the most common brush that you will find with every artist. I'm sure that you have one as well. We're going to discover what a round brush can do today. This is a hybrid between a mop and a round brush, so I can cover this entire category of brushes by showing you what this one brush can do, and I'll probably keep bringing in a smaller brush just to show you the comparison of what you can do with this brush compared to this brush, or maybe even this brush. The whole point of this class today is to not only discover all the awesome things that your brushes can do, but also to get comfortable with your brushes. So when I teach my classes, my workshops, I see that most students are just so scared of using their brushes because they're like, "My God, maybe I shouldn't press it like really hard, or if I just use it and if I press it, I might just end up destroying my brush." Don't worry about that. I'll teach you how to get comfortable with your brush. That's the whole point in today's class. Let's get to the next segment where we can finally start playing with some color and discovering what our brushes can do. 4. Break into a New Brush: Okay. Before we begin exploring the brush strips selected for us today, I wanted to give you a bonus lesson of how to exactly break into a brand new brush that you buy. I recently bought this silver black velvet round number eight brush. As you know, when you buy a new brush, it's all stiff and it doesn't bend. I wanted to tell you why is that and how do you actually make it soft and make it usable. The brush hair are usually very delicate and they usually get damaged when the company ships you the brushes or in transit, the brush hair might get bent and it can get damaged. So what they usually do is they take a solution of gum arabic, which is like a natural gummy binding agent that is also used to make watercolors, by the way, the thick gum arabic solution and they put it around the hair and like mold it and bring it to the shape that the brush is supposed to be in and let it dry. The gum arabic dries and it binds all the hair together and mix it into this hard shape, so that when they package the brushes and when they ship it to you, the brush doesn't get damaged in transit. I've seen a lot of new artists, especially beginner artists who get new brushes, they just dip the brush in the water and squish it at the bottom of the jar to break this bond of gum arabic. Doing that is my card. I can't even imagine the torture that the brush goes through when you do that, so I'm going to show you the correct way of breaking into a brand new brush. I'm going to dip it in the water and swirl it around. I'm going to resist the temptation to smash it against the side of the jar or smash it against the bottom to make it loose and soft. I have a soft paper towel here next to me or you can just use a soft cloth and I'm just going to start dabbing it. This loosens, it dissolves the gum arabic on the brush head and then you wipe the gum arabic solution off by doing that. You keep repeating this process. I know it requires a little bit more patience but trust me, if you take good care of your supplies, especially brushes because they're so expensive. I think my brush, all the gum arabic has been washed off. So what I usually do is, just dip my brush in the water and gently press it against the palm of my hand and start swirling it around and I can feel it on my palm that it's not hard and stiff anymore. It's really beautiful and soft. I've successfully broken into my brush and I can begin using it again. If you want to bring your brush to a point, you either shape it by dabbing it on a paper towel like this or you just dab the excess water off and then you gently shape it and bring it to a point like this with your fingers. This is how you break into a brush. I hope this bonus lesson was useful to you guys. 5. Color Palette: I'm going to start out by choosing a color palette for my birds. Of course I can use as many colors as I want, but today I want to combine a few colors in my feathers, just blend them with each other and make my feathers look more interesting. Obviously I have a lot of different colors to choose from this blue pinouts handmade watercolors palette. But I'm going to choose a few different kinds. I love matte kiss color, it's beautiful, soft, almost like a pastel pink color. I think it'll go beautifully with some other colors, for example this [inaudible]. You see how this pink pairs so well with this warm brown. It's always a good idea to explore the different colors that you have and see what are the different combinations you can make out of them. I'm also loving this turquoise. I think I can make a beautiful macaw feather, a vibrant tropical bird feathers. When a pair it with scarlet eye piece. They both look so vibrant with each other, perhaps I can drop in maybe a tiny bit of green with it. Making these color swatches helps me visualize the feathers a little bit, get some color coordination going on. I also want to paint some of these beautiful blue jay feathers. To do that, a blue Jays have cool blue color. I'm going use some of a Prussian blue. I love this dark moody blue that you have. It's beautiful blue jay. To get the dark stripes, I am going to use a special blue pine arts to this gray. I think both of these goes so well with each other because triptych gray also has a blue base and then I'm pairing it with a bright blue. Then you can see how beautiful this light stroke of this Prussian blue is contrasting with this blue-gray. That is triptych and I'm especially in love with this. I'm going to try and paint that for the little insulation, tufty little feather over here. Let's see, I can probably pick a bright yellow. I'm going get some of this Alfonso yellow. It's coming out a little green. Let me clean that up. Some of these bright blue and maybe something dark to go with them. Maybe the Cyprus burnt umber. Wow. Look at that. I love the vibrancy of this stripe blue with a hint of this dark brown of the Cyprus burnt umber. I do love the idea of bringing in really popular rose amarine, which is a beautiful pink purple color. Then I could pair it with maybe this neuroroma, or I could pair it to fit to this gray. For today's class I'm going to use these color combinations, but you don't have to use these exact same colors. I love it when my students experiment with their own colors and this is such a fun exercise guys. You don't have to exactly follow the teacher when it comes to color combinations. Take your own colors out, experiment with all the different shapes that you have and paint feathers in the colors that make you happy. You don't have to follow the colors and I'm suggesting that's the beauty of taking this class with me. Go ahead and make your color combination, see what colors you like. If you'd like to add any of these colors to your palette or any of these 48 colors to your palette, you can find them on my arts store blue pine arts. These are all handmade artist grade paints. They just like some of the purest watercolor paints you'll find because they are just made of pigment and binder and nothing else, no fillers nor additives to take away from the vibrancy of the pure, experiencing pure color on your paper. Make sure you visit my art store and see if you'd like to add any of these colors to your palette. 6. Explore Your Brushes - Part 1: So the brush that I selected today to discover what it does is this round, number 10 is Escoda Ultimo synthetic brush. So I was mistaken earlier, I thought this was a mop brush but it's not. It's a round, number 10, Escoda Ultimo brush and it's made with synthetic hair and it's quite a big brush. So usually beginners are scared of using big brushes, I remember that I was, but a big brush can serve you in a lot more versatile ways than a smaller brush can. We're going to discover that today and we're going to see why am I saying this statement. So I'm going to be using this brush and we'll see what this brush does. But all the exercises that we're going to be doing today, you can also apply it to any other brush that you have. But mostly this class is less about the technical stuff and more about discovering of brushes in a fun, loose way because we need to do that sometimes. We need to just go crazy with some colors and some paper and just have fun all the while discovering what our tools can do for us. So I have a pad of the Clairefontaine watercolor paper. It's 300gsm, It's cold pressed. It doesn't say if this is 100 percent cotton or 25 percent cotton, but that doesn't matter today, you can use to student grade paper for this class. So I have this pile of paper and I have my blue pine artist-grade, handmade watercolors. I can't tell you how much joy I feel when I open a box of paints like this, It's just like opening a box of new possibilities, It just makes me really happy. I also have my other brushes by my side here. I'm going to keep these two brushes by my side especially to compare the brushstrokes. That this brushes make can also be made by this brush. So this is a Princeton Heritage size two, round brush; so this is a size two small, round brush. This is a silver-black, velvet, size eight, round brush. This is our Escoda Ultimato size 10. So if my size 10 brush can do everything that it is supposed to do and also do what my size eight and size two brushes can do, then I can potentially eliminate having to buy these two brushes and just work with just one brush. How do I discover what my brush can do? I can of course dip it into some color. Let's take this beautiful quinquennal which is pink, Quinacridone rose, and I can load it with color, and then I can just make a brushstroke and be like, "Okay, this is what my brush does." But there are so many different brushstroke exercises that you can do to discover how flexible your brush is, what are the different variety of brushstrokes can it actually give you? So one of the most popular brushstroke exercises is to get some color. Let's see. We're going to load my brush with this beautiful Spring New Leaf Green. I'm going to make these thin strokes with the tip of my brush and also make these thick strokes with my brush. Now what we're going to do is, combine both of these in one sweeping movement. I'm going to start out with a light pressure on the brush, barely even touching the paper so you get a thin line I'm going to press it. I'm going to bring it back up. I'm going to press it, and I'm going to bring it back up. So this exercises about your brush, not only do they teach you how much paint and water capacity your brush has, or how long your brush can go with one load of paint and water. It also teaches you the different imperfections or the perfection that your brush can can have. For example, you see how this brush has left these jagged edges, I can take my silver-black, velvet, round, number eight brush, get some of this quin pink on this. I can see what I can do with this brush with the same exercise. I'm going to bring this, press down, lightly come up, press down again, come up, press down. I'm going to keep doing this over and over again. You can see how long my brush keeps going. Now the reason why this brush is carrying a lot more water and paint than this brush, is that this brush is a blend of synthetic and natural squirrel hair. Natural animal hair tend to carry a lot more paint and water, and also they release and water equally on the paper whereas this brush is made of synthetic hair. While it is great for our environment, it also carries a lot less paint and water. So you can see that I'm able to get a fairly thin enough line as thin as my silver-black, velvet, round, number eight brush; but at the same time I'm getting a lot more area covered compared to this brush. So the bigger, round, number 10 brush does have an advantage over the round number eight. Now, let's see what it does when it comes to thin lines and detailing, where you would normally use a smaller brush. Now, if you're not understanding how to get this pattern, if you're not understanding how much pressure to exactly put on the paper, I always suggest my students to first try it on the palm of their hand, because that's how you understand about pressure and how it's supposed to be on the paper. If you do it on the palm of your hands, you get a larger understanding. So lightly to clean my palm, then pressing down. Then slowly lifting it up, coming to a point again, pressing down again and coming to a point again. So practice your brushstrokes once on your palm just get the feel of how it feels like. So I want to see this big brush with the fine pointy end. I want to see how the lines are when I paint with the tip of this brush. So let's test it in this patch of paper. So I'm going to use the brush and very lightly, put just a tip of the brush, run it across the paper and see what thin lines i get. I might even hold the brush towards the end just to make these motions and see how thin are the lines that you can get with this brush. So the thinnest that this brush can do is maybe here and here. Now let's compare it to the silver-black, velvet and tiny, round brush. So I'm going to see the Princeton brush first and see how thin the lines can go. So again in the same way, I'm going to start out by testing. This brush can make some really thin lines, small details. But when it comes to this exercise, you can see that the brush doesn't have a lot of coverage even though it can make really thin lines. But if I'm painting something like a big landscape where I don't need a super fine thin detailing line like this. If I just need lines as thick as this, and if I can get it done with this brush, I don't have to think about switching between different brushes to get different kinds of strokes. One advantage of discovering what a large brush can do when using a large brush in your art works is that, you can do a lot with this brush so you don't have to keep switching between different flushes and wasting your time. Because in water colors, we know the time is really important because once the layer is dried, it's dry. You can't keep adding and altering stuff over and over again. Let's see if the silver black, velvet brush. The different kinds of points and lines it can do compared to the Escoda, round, number 10 brush. I'm going to do the same exercise. Oh my goodness, you can see how thin and fine these lines are. I'm going to intersperse these lines with the Princeton, round, number two brush. You can see already that my round, number eight brush which is so much bigger than this round, number two brush can achieve as fine and thin lines as this really pitied, detailing, small brush can use. So I know that if I'm using this brush, I can get this much coverage when I'm painting something and I can also go to the really fine details while using just one brush. So it's great, it's superb how this brush can do so much. In the next part, I'll show you some more brush movements, where you can get different shapes, and different strokes with just one brush. 7. Explore Your Brushes - Part 2: When I teach my watercolor workshops, one of the things that I [inaudible] is that they're really scared of using the brush because brushes are so expensive and the hair is so soft and delicate. They're just really scared of actually pressing it down on the paper. But watercolor brushes are built in a way that you can use it in a lot of versatile ways especially if you press them down. The good quality brushes are built in such a way that they can take that abuse for the lack of better word. I'm going to demonstrate one brush stroke that is so important and most of my students, especially at the beginning they're just terrified of it. I have this beautiful bright red scarlet ibis from Blue Pine Arts and I'm going to load up my brush nicely, nice and wet with this beautiful paint and observe my brush movement where I am going to make a circular stroke, not by painting a circle like this, but by doing this. I love using my brush in this way because it saves me a lot of time and effort and it makes my strokes look really artistic and elegant and for that you really need to learn how to press your brush down, and press it, and swivel it around like this. You can see just how much coverage I got with this big jumbo size 8 brush. Earlier, if I wanted a smaller circle or if I wanted a smaller threshold, I would have just switched to a size 8 brush and switched to drown and gotten a smaller area covered. But I want to see if I can do the same thing with this brush, make some smaller circles. Let's get some of that red and I'm only going to load the front maybe one-third of the brush and that's how much I'm going to press the brush on the paper. I'm just going to press maybe just one-third of the brush and swish it around and you can see how I was able to get a smaller circle compared to this one and also get some of the beautiful brush strokes towards the end. Let's try that again. There we go. Do you see how I can get. Not only can I get the maximum coverage that this brush can give me, but I can also size down. But you can't do the same thing with this brush. You can size down of course with this brush but you can't size up so a lot of advantage again in using a bigger brush. Another exercise that you can do to get acquainted with your brush and see the different range that it can give you is to thrust the brush down and move it in this direction and really relish this pressure and these big juicy brush strokes that you can get with this brush. Did you see just how much paint and water my brush was able to hold and just how much area I was able to cover by doing that exercise. Let's say if I'm painting a flower petal and I want to get a nice curved shape instead of flake. I'm just going to paint a singled rose petal, so instead of painting that rose petals like this and covering it up. Observe how my rose petal will look far more natural if I did this. Got out the excess water off. What if I made my rose petal like this? Do you see how one brush stroke resulted in this petal shape? I'm going to paint a petal that starts from here and flares up at the end. I know that by just using the tip of my brush at the beginning, I can form this triangular shape just by pressing it and just coming here on the side I can make a beautiful natural looking rose petal. Maybe we'll get some lovely yellow and just drop it in the edge have this created wash and you can see how I'm able to do so much with just one brush rather than just drawing the shape and filling it in and it doesn't look as natural as this does. This is how you exercise your brush to get to know it really well. When I'm teaching my loose flowers class, the biggest problem I find with students is that they have so much problem painting the leaves because they're just not comfortable with pressing their brushes. A leaf, the stem, press it down. I can even bring it here at the top. You see how I just started moving my brush, and then I can get some of this yellow-green then I'm just going to mix some pink in this, make it like a dull mutant green. Then I can just press some more and come on the top and I can get so many shapes and so much variation just by using one brush. Do you see how thin the stem got and how I was able to bring the leaf to this pointed shape by understanding how much pressure I need to put on the brush and when do I need to release it? Then you can just discover so many things that a single brush can do, and that my lovelies is one of the most powerful arsenal when it comes to watercolor painting is to get really comfortable with your brush. Just getting some oat like this beautiful maize burnt sienna here and let's say I want to paint a clump of grass. If I were not aware of what my brushes can do, what I would usually do is just paint this soil at the bottom. Maybe I can bring in some darker color, and for the grass I would take my smaller Princeton brush, get some green in there, make it a little sappy color with some brown and then I would go and then I would start painting the grass blades because grass blades are thin and of course there's nothing wrong in doing this. If this is what you're comfortable with, go ahead and do that, there's nothing wrong in it. But what if I can use just one brush to do the entire painting. I'm going get some old brown colors. Let's say I have this. See I'm using the side of the brush sometimes and the tip of the brush sometimes to get these organic shapes and I can get some of this green in. Maybe I'll get some of this lovely sap green from Blue Pine Arts and can dab some of the excess color off, load up my brush and start painting the blades of grass with the tip of my brush. What is the effect that I achieved here? I can very well use one brush and do the same thing here. I want to see what my brush does from the side. What's the maximum area I can cover with it? To see how I can cover so much area with this brush, the same thing that I can do with this flat brush. Don't just explore the tip of your brush, you can also explore the sides of your brush. I have the 1" Rose-Mary and co. flat brush and I can take some of this beautiful Taylor blue red shed and I can do the same thing with this flat brush and you can see that even if I didn't have a flat brush to cover large areas like this, I can still do it with my roll number 10 brush. You can see that although it looks like a round brush, this brush actually wears a couple of really talented hidden hats so multi-talented brush. Ten flat strokes, thick flat strokes. How else can I bring out the hidden magical powers of this brush? None of these are like fixed exercises guys, I mean, I didn't even plan these exercises in at once. I truly am genuinely discovering what this brush can do today along with you guys. Again, lot of thin strokes, a lot jagged strokes. What happens if I spread out the head a little bit and just get these marks. This is called mark making where you just make different kinds of marks and then you discover what your brush can do. No matter what brush you have, even if it's round brush, or a regal brush, just make different marks. Think of all the inventive ways that you can make different marks with any brush that you have and you can discover so many hidden powers of that one tool. We're done with discovering the brush. For example, you can see if I can make marks like this, I can meet a flower and then I can just continue doing this and then put like a dark center with yellow petals and make it look like a sunflower. I can probably have beautiful backgrounds with this one brush, I can paint details, circles, sushi areas, leaves, a lot of things that this one brush can do. Let's jump onto the next segment where I'll show you how I'll paint different shapes and different kinds of feathers all using just one brush and I think it's going to be a really fun thing to do. I hope I see you in the next segment. 8. Sketch Feather Shapes: All right, now that we have discovered all the different kinds of marks that are brush can make, we can move ahead to paint different kinds of feathers. Now, I'm going to teach you how to paint three different kinds of feathers today. Before we start painting the actual feathers, I'm going to show you a sketch of the different shapes and sizes that the feathers come in. I have an ordinary notebook here with some novel paper and have an eraser and I have a pencil. I remember that when I first started painting feathers, about a year ago or something, I was trying to learn how to paint them and for some reason all occurred paint was at the beginning. Feathers that were in the shape of a leaf, which came to a point in the end. That's the cool part of it. This was all I could think of. You can see here that I have painted a variety of feathers on this paper. You can see how all of them are in different shapes. They're of different thickness, the bend in different ways. Some of them are like short and stout and more circular. Some of them are like tall and slender. This, kind is like think of it as a bonus lesson to give you a map to painting different types of feathers and different shapes. Let's go ahead and make some basic shapes. We of course have to normal leaf shaped feathers that we usually think of. But you also have feathers. Now these tiny feathers are circular. That's the quill of the feather and then the fluffy bit towards the end. You can deconstruct a feather in three different parts. One is the quill, which kind of extends up to form the backbone kind of structure to the feather. The next you have the feathery part of it. Then you have the fuzzy part at the bottom, which most feathers have. These feathers, the shorter fluffier ones are usually the installation feathers for birds. Then of course you have some bird feathers like the marabou feathers, they're just really tall and slender and form a blunt edge at the top. Different shapes, different thickness. Now if I want to paint a feather that's floating in the air, just coming towards the ground, you can make your feathers look natural by curving them in different directions. Instead of painting all my feathers pointing up, I can choose to curve it and make it point down. I know that this doesn't look like much, but it's going to look much better with brush strokes, with your paints and brush, but just wanted to give you a general idea. Then sometimes you can paint feathers with a smooth edge, and then a ruffled edge. The quill, it doesn't really have to always be in the center, like how I'm doing it here. You can also make it to the side a little bit. It gives your federal a little bit more character. Some feathers also come in these different shapes, like this one. These are just a few different kinds of feathers that you can paint. One of it is, of course, our typical leafy feather. But either you can just make them with ruffled edges or just smooth edges throughout. It depends on you. Feel free to make feathers and different shapes, different kinds of edges, different colors. That's what we are going to come to the next part. We're going to choose some of the beautiful colors from this blue palette. I'm going to make a color palette and choose a few colors and then I'm going to show you how to paint feathers in a few different kinds. 9. Feathers 1 and 2: I have my sketch of feathers in front of me. I have my color palette paper in front of me, and I have a trustee brush. Let's go ahead, and start learning how to paint the feathers using just this one brush. The first feather that I'm going to paint is our classic standard leaf-shaped feather. I'm actually going to grab this beautiful sky blue color that we have in blue fine arts, and it's a beautiful turquoise blue. Just using this one color and using a brushstrokes, I'm going to show you how to paint this feather. Here is the quill that I painted using just the tip of my brush, and I'm going to press it down, gently bring it up and there we go. We have our feather shape. Just to add some interest to it, I'm going to grab some of this [inaudible] purple color. It's a beautiful pinkish purple. I'm going to add it to the base using the tip of my brush, maybe I'm just going to add a pattern here and using a thicker concentration of the same blue, I'm going to paint the backbone. There we have a simple shape of our feather. You can see how I painted all the different elements of this feather using one brush. Let's paint this little fluffy round feather. I think the brown will pair with this even better than the yellow. I'm going to paint from this end, maybe give a brown tip to the end and there we go. I really love the look of this feather more than this. This one does not look as though it's come together really well. That's our second feather. Let's paint the feather drifting from the sky, gently swirling through the air, and falling to the ground. I'm using [inaudible] these gray for that. I'm going to bring in my swatch paper and then just test the concentration and I know that if I add a lot of water to this, I'm going to get different shades. It's going to be a monochrome feather and you guys know my love for painting anything monochrome. Let's paint the sky. Now I'm going to start with the quill, and I'm going to bring it down, and curve it as I come down, and using a lot of water on my brush, I'm going to paint these. See how I'm using the tip of my brush to paint these ruffled feather edges. I am going to keep these strokes fairly wet because I'm going to drop more concentrated version of the paint in it like so. You see how I'm using the side of my brush to get some more variety in the shapes. There we go. I can use the tip of my brush to bring this paint out a little bit, and make it look a little bit more ruffled, and paint the quill. 10. Feathers 3, 4 and 5: Let's paint on my co-feathers I'm getting this nice cheerful turquoise color and I'm going to start at the tip, come down making sure that I'm not applying too much pressure and at the same time I'm going to clean my brush. Looking nice and clean over there. We'll get some scarlet ibis. Nice dry beautiful red with a beautiful pink undertone actually, when you tint it down, you can see that it's a lovely pink color and just going to press lightly and continue this plant down and I'm going to bring in, soak this gray again because it's a nice dark color and I'm using a very concentrated thicker version of turquoise gray and using the tip of my brush, again, I'm going to paint turquoise part of it, but, my brushstroke was to hurried and you can see that it's gone towards the side. I can actually repair this and maybe put some patterns here and make this feather look like as though it has some patterns. There's a lot of ways that you can cover your mistakes and watercolors too and I'm glad I like did this mistake, this, moment while shooting the class and then I'm glad I was able to show you how you can recover from shoddy mistakes. I'm going to show you how to paint a Blue Jay feather using this glorious combination of this lovely Prussian blue and turquoise green. The last feather, I'm going to get a nice brush load of this Prussian blue. We're going to start with the weil at the bottom. See how I'm giving whether a sculpture over here and I am taking care to leave the center vein here. At the same time, I'm going to grab a thicker darker version of turquoise gray and then start dropping in this pattern that Blue jay feathers have and you can take a lot of creative liberties when you're painting feathers. My friends, because it's your world you can even make up imaginary birds and then make new feather shapes. I really love how this blue Jay feather turned out. I'm going to be one last feather with you guys and then we wrap this up. I want to bring in my rules matte, my matte kiss from blue pin arts and I'm going to show you how to paint this feather over here. See how I'm using the tip of my brush to create this flared edge and I'm going to bring in this lovely, Kaldor and VR , which is R warm Brown and using the tip of my brush, see how I can make it look flared. I even vary the color tone of this feather, I can even use the sight of my brush to get this brushstroke. As I come down, I can just use the jugged edge of this to draw this tufty end to this feather. Now, because I can see that my feather isn't cohesive, I'm going to bring in a darker version of this warm brown. Really thick and concentrated, just on the tip of my brush. Give these separations to the feather. See how I can just use like a dry brush edge to create the texture to this feather. I am so loving this. Then I can use the same thing here at the bottom. Even if you have brushes with like flared or damaged edges, you can use them to create these textured edges here. There we go, we have a lovely spread of different feathers and it was all painted, all the tiny strokes, all the broad strokes of this platters, all the texture, the slender feather, everything was painted with just one brush. Now would you call that amazing? 11. Epilogue: I hope that in today's class, not only did you learn how to paint beautiful, colorful feathers with all the different marks that one single brush can make. But I also hope that you learned how to be more comfortable with your brush. So when you're painting, let it be oils, acrylics, or watercolors. You have to be so comfortable with your brush that it should feel like an extension of your arm. That's the comfort level that you should have with your brush. It should feel like it's an extension of your arm, so that whatever motivates you, wherever comes from your heart to paint, it should go right from your heart through your arm, through your brush and onto the paper. That being said, please go ahead and upload all of your class projects in the project section because nothing makes me more happier than seeing my students' work. If you do have some time, please leave a feedback for the class. It means so much for me. Not only does it give me words of encouragement so I can come up with more classes for you, it also helps me as a teacher on Skillshare. Make sure you leave class review. If you find that there is something that I need to improve on, please be honest in your reviews. If you upload your class projects to Instagram, don't forget to tag me. My Instagram handle is @truptikarjinni you need. If you don't know how to spell that, you can find it in the class description or in my screenshot profile. Also, if you want to buy the Blue Pine Arts, handmade watercolors and at sketchbooks and all the other different products that we have, please do visit our Etsy store, Blue Pine Arts. That's it my love's. Until the next class, happy painting and have a great day.