Exploring Complementary Colours with Watercolour

1. Main Intro: Welcome to this class. This is a class where we will dip our toes into the wonderous world of color theory. We're going to look at one little elements and build on that to make lots and lots of wonderful art and element we're going to look at is complimentary colors. Giving, compliments are receiving them is really good for us. It's also good for our art. So we can, if we learn about complimentary colors, we can learn to make our art much better. We can find out how to make color zing and chime together to give our work harmony and vibrancy and coordination. Join me and we'll explore these things. We're going to look at making a color wheel using your own materials and things you have around the house. You don't need any special equipment. And we're also going to look at painting a triptych using your favorite complimentary color combination. Join me in the next session. We'll look at what materials you need, and then we'll start making some color magic together. Hello, I'm Vicki Jeffrey. I'm an artist and a teacher, and I live in the northwest of England with my family. We're all creative and we love to work together. I live in a cottage very close to lots of open Moreland and woodland and parklands. So it's very inspiring and that's where I get a lot of my ideas from. I'd like to share that with you in these Skillshare classes. Join me and we'll make some beautiful art together. 2. Projects, there's 2!: Project time. In this class, we've got two projects. You don't have to do both of them, but it would be fantastic if you did. Our first project is in case you don't have one of these. This is a professionally made commercial color wheel, incredibly useful and very helpful. But maybe not quite as helpful as having one that's made with the colors you already own. So we will look at making a color wheel like this one. You don't need any special equipment. Just a few things that you will have readily available around the house and your own paints. Then the second project is to paint a triptych a little bit like this one. You'll make your color, we'll choose your favorite color combination from your complimentary colors. And then we'll paint a decorative triptych like this. Join me in the next session. We'll look at what materials you need to gather. 3. Colour Wheel Intro: Welcome to this class. This is a class where we will dip our toes into the wonderous world of color theory. We're going to look at one little element and build on that to make lots and lots of wonderful art and element we're going to look at is complimentary colors. Giving compliments and receiving them is really good for us. It's also really good for our art. So we can learn about complementary colors. We can learn to make our art much better. We can find out how to make color zing and chime together to give our work harmony and vibrancy and coordination. Join me and we'll explore these things. We're going to look at making a color wheel using your own materials and things you have around the house. You don't need any special equipment. And we're also going to look at painting a triptych using your favorite complimentary color combination. Join me in the next session and we'll look at what materials you need. And then we'll start making some color magic together. 4. Let"s spin a colour wheel: What is a color wheel? And how do we locate which colors are complimentary to each other? Here is a simple color wheel. Color wheel is a visual representation that shows us how colors relate to each other. We start with three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. These colors cannot be made by mixing any others together. If we combine equal amounts of our primaries together, we can create secondary colors. Red and yellow make orange, red and blue make purple, and blue and yellow make green. If we combine a primary and a secondary color, we can create a tertiary color. These are made again by mixing equal amounts of each. We end up with yellow, orange and red, orange, red, purple, and blue, purple, blue green, and yellow green. To discover which colors compliment each other, we have to locate those which are opposite each other on the wheel. Red lies opposite green. Blue lies opposite orange. Yellow, green lies opposite red, purple. We could go on all day. But these are just a few examples. To get you started. There are many other classes here on Skillshare or out there on the Internet that go into a lot of depth about how to use the color wheel. But I'm just touching the basics of complimentary colors here with you today. As your understanding of the color wheel and complementary colors grows, you will find many examples in the art world, from old masters to contemporary artists, from Vermeer to Andy Warhol. The impressionists were particularly passionate about using complimentary colors. They use them next to each other to create luminous, striking paintings. Monet said, color makes its impact from contrasts rather than from its inherent qualities. Van Gough, who considered himself an impressionist. But his view today as an expressionist, said that he loved to express a marriage of two complimentary colors. They're mingling and their opposition. They're mysterious vibrations of kindred tones. I think that's really beautiful. 5. Colour Wheel Supplies: To paint your color wheel, you'll need some watercolor paper, a piece of scrap paper, a pencil, and a small paintbrush, something circular to draw around. Tissue or a rag for cleaning your brushes. Your primary colored water colors, red, yellow, and blue. A pallet or plate, a ruler, a couple of coins in different sizes, plenty of clean water and some scissors. Let's get painting. 6. A Star to point the way: Hello. Let's make a color wheel. I'm going to show you how to make a beautiful, but ultimately very useful little color wheel with just some bits and bobs that you'll have around your house. You don't need any special equipment like protractors or campuses, anything like that. If you've got them, feel free to use them. But I'm going to show you how to do it with just some ordinary things from them that house. Right. Let's get started and I'll show you what to do. First of all, we need a circle. Don't worry about all the equipment. There'll be a list in the resources section of the class for you to refer to if you can't find what you need. So I've got a circle on my paper and I'm going to cut this out. This is a great activity to do with children. I used to use it when I was a teacher. You learn all sorts of things. There's a little bit of geometry and maths involved. Paper folding, paper cutting, and also color theory. And they won't even realize they're doing it. To start with. Here we go. We've got a circle. Now comes the folding. We need to fold this circle in half and give it a good strong crease. This won't be as accurate as using a compass or a protractor. But it will give us a really good angle for our making our star on our paper. I've gone, I've increased my paper there. I'm just going to zoom in so that you can see it a little clearer. Okay, So we have our semicircle. Now, I'm going to use the folded edge and I'm going to fold it over into the middle. And then a bit further over, same on the other side to make a cone shape. Give it a little tweak with your fingers. Try and make sure that the edges on the inside. Can you see the edge there and here match up? Once you think they're fairly level, crease it again, give it a good sharp crease. That way you'll be able to see your lines when you unfold it. So now we have our little pizza piece here. Let's open it up and we should have six pretty equal segments. There we go. And we're going to use those. Draw our star. Okay, I have my creased circle and I've got my paper ready here to draw an equilateral star on, which is going to be the center point of our color wheel. I'm going to do it onto this piece of paper because it makes it nice and easy for you to see. Normally I would draw my color wheels into a sketchbook. It's always good to keep all your color theory references. There's a tongue twister. Color theory references in one place, so they're handy for you to find when you need to look something up. This is 100% cotton paper. Good to use. The best quality paper you can, even though this isn't a final finished piece, it will maintain good color and it will last a long time. So it's a good tip to use the best paper you can when you making things like this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to line my creases. Hopefully you can see that up on my paper round about the center here. And I'm going to use my pencil and draw along the crease line. And then I'm going to carry on, off my circle onto my back paper and I'm going to make a little mark there. Hopefully you can see that. Do the same with this crease, follow the line and make a mark. This is going to help you get your angle's pretty accurate. If you see it's not going to be as accurate as it would be if you use a protractor or a campus. But it's not far off. There we go. And another one there. And the last one down here, follow the line and make a little mark. You can see these. I'm just going to make it go over them a little bit with my pencil so that they're nice and clear. We've got our six points. And these are going to be the six points of our triangles and stars. My ruler, and I'm going to join the first three together to make the first triangle. I'm joining the bottom of the dashes together. So I've got dash, miss one dash. And last line there. And that's our first equilateral triangle. Same again with the other points. Matching the bottoms of the dashes as best you can. You can always rub the dashes out afterwards if you don't want them. As part of your circle. I'm doing nice dark lines as well here so that you can see nice and clearly. You can always go over these lines once you're happy with it, with pen to make it more permanent. So there we have an equilateral star. I'm going to use coins to mark the circles around my wheel. I've got two coins here, a larger one and a smaller one. I've got a two pound coin under ten pence piece coin. Obviously use whatever you have, wherever you are and the size is entirely up to you. You could keep them all the same size or try them at various sizes to make it more decorative and informative. So the top one, It's going to be a large circle. These are our primary colors are first three colors. We know our primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. I always like to have my yellow at the top. Not quite sure why, but the yellow goes at the top. So I'm going to use a y to mark my yellow, to mark my red, and a b to mark my blue. Mark them in however you feel comfortable, just so you know where you are putting your colors. The remaining triangular points are going to be our secondary colors. So we have one here. We know from looking at our color wheel, that yellow and blue make green. Here we've got yellow and red make orange. And the last of our secondary colors down here is going to be red plus blue is purple. I'm going to use the same coin to do my tertiary colors. And these sit in-between the points on the triangle. You could lower them down or you can have them at an equal height. It's entirely up to you. I'm going to have them at an equal height in-between green and yellow. We're going to have yellow, green in between yellow and orange. We're going to have yellow, orange in between red and orange. Red, orange down here. We've got red and purple. So he's going to be red, purple. Here. We've got blue purple. And then my favorite probably over here. The last one, blue-green. Feel free to mark them how you would like so that it's nice and clear for you when you are putting your colors in. I've just used initials. If you want to write the whole thing out, that's fine. Or if you feel confident to do it without any labeling, go for it. But we're now ready to gather our paints and get our brushes and fill in some colors. Join me in the next lesson and we'll start sloshing. 7. Colour Mixing for your Wheel: Are you ready? Here's less than two. Time for some color mixing Magic. We've got our paints and our bits and bobs already. And we're going to create our color wheel with just these three colors. I've got different brands here. I have Winsor yellow, Daniel Smith, parallel red, and again a Winsor, French ultramarine. It doesn't matter what brands you've got, just use your three truest primary colors that you can find. So a red, yellow, and a blue, nice and bright and true to primary. Later when you've done this first color wheel and you've got really good at creating the mixes. You'll be able to explore and experiment with all your other colors. Any variations of red, yellow, and blue, or even variations. Without that, the thing will be that you will learn an awful lot about the paints you already have and that information will help you with all your future painting. I'm going to use a daisy ceramic palette here for my colors. I've chosen this one specifically because it has the six wells and it's really useful for demonstrating to you how to mix your colors. Don't worry if you don't have anything like this, you can use something as simple as a saucer. The thing to remember is that it's white, as long as you've got a white surface to mix your colors on. That will help you see how the colors are combining together, ready to go on your color wheel? I've placed a small amount of each color into my palette. And the yellow, the red, and the blue. And I've placed them in a similar path, the same pattern, rather not similar, the same pattern as I did on my drawing of the color wheel. This will help when you're combining your secondary and tertiary colors. I've also got a little scrap piece of paper here to help me just test any colors in case I'm not quite sure that going to be accurate enough for my wheel. I'm going to use the two primaries and then mix in the empty pallet in-between. And that means that keeps all the colors nice and separate and clean and bright. Let's make a start, shall we? Let's move that over there. I have two pots of water, one for helping me mix and one for keeping my brush clean. Do want to keep your colors nice and clean and bright so that they are accurate for your color wheel. We go, Let's get that in the middle so you can see what we're doing. I like to start with the paler colors first, the lighter colors. So my first one is going to be the yellow. And of course, we just need some yellow. No mixing involved to start with small amount. The reason for a small amount is these areas that we're filling in are actually very tiny, so don't actually need very much pigment to cover them. This is Winsor yellow. And there we go. Now I'm going to work my way around the circle. So I'm going to put a little bit of the yellow in the middle here. Clean my brush. That's now going to be my dirty water. Clean water. Now the red is a much more, it's a stronger pigment than the yellow. So I'm only going to get a tiny amount of red on my brush to start with. It's better to have less than you think you need and then add more later if you need it. So I've got just a tiny little bit of red on my brush, and I'm going to add that to my yellow. We've got quite a strong orange there. I think I'm going to need a little bit more yellow. Clean my brush. Touch more yellow to make a more true orange. If I want. If I'm not sure, I can just test it on my paper. I'm quite happy with that one. So I'm going to put it here. So orange is my first secondary color. Now to create your tertiary colors, you mix your primary with your secondary. So to make this yellow orange, I need to add a little bit more yellow to it. A little bit more yellow makes it lighter, more of an egg yolk each color a little bit more. There we go. Again, you can test it if you're not confident before you add it to your wheel. And we put it in to our circle. Our next one is going to be the red, orange. So we will need to add some more red. Again, be careful. The red is very strong and it will swamp the yellow if you put too much in. Here we go. My red orange. And as I'm coming down around my pay, my wheel here page, my wheel, I'm now going to paint the next circle, which is back to my primary colors. Just read and you'll see how different it looks compared to these. I'm just going to pause the film here because I want to tell you a little bit about the mixing. Don't panic if your colors don't seem to mix perfectly straight away. As you can imagine, I've been practicing with these three paints ready to produce this color wheel for you. So I have a good idea how these paints work with each other. I know that the red can be a bit of a bully. It's much, much stronger pigment than the yellow. Take your time. Mix up, test, mix-up, test until you are comfortable and happy with the color combination you've got. It's all part of the fun actually. All those wonderful colors that you can mix and create, you will learn something every time you dip your brush into the paint and combine it with another. Here we go. My next color combination is going to be the blue and the yellow. So I'm going to mix my green. Make sure your brush is nice and clean. Get some more yellow. Pop, it's in-between. Clean off your brush and get a little bit of blue. Strictly speaking, these secondary colors should be 5050 amounts of pigment, but depends on which paints you're using. You'll get a feel for it as you're mixing. I'm very pleased with that green. That looks lovely. So we've got yellow, yellow, green, green. So I know it's going to go in here. Depending on what your first primary or your first colors are. You might get a more vibrant green and this, you might get something that's a little more muted. It will depend on which colors that you have actually chosen to mix from your selection. I'm going to add some more yellow to it, again, keeping, keeping with the lighter colors first, to make an lovey, hopefully spring yellow, green. There we go. That's a lovely bright green. I'm going to add a bit more yellow. There we go. Paint that one in. We're going to add some more blue to our mix. Make a teal color or a forest degree. This is one of my favorite colors. Clean my brush, and then we're just going to use the blue back in our primary circles. So we don't have any more primary colors to do, but we've got three more colors to mix. And these will be our red and blue together and make purple, red, purple and a blue purple. Put some red in the middle. My brush. And some blue to try for 5050. Let's see if we get a nice purple. This one can be tricky because it's a dark color, so you might not see it very clearly in your pilot. Test it on your paper if you're not sure. I think that needs a little bit more red. So I'm going to add a little bit more red. There we go. Let's try that one. Yes, that will do. So this one is going to go in the middle, which is our secondary color. Clean my brush. I'm going to add some more red to it first to make my red purple. Keep tweaking it. If you're not sure, I need a tiny bit more blue. There we go. That's all. That's lovely. Look at that. And are very last one. We'll have lots more blue in it. There we go. Color of blueberries. We look around our color wheel. It's easy to see where our primary colors are. Those that come in between. So here's our color wheel. We've finished painting. And from these three simple colors, you can find out all sorts of amazing information on your color wheel. Lots of information that's pertinent to you and your paints, exactly what you've got to work with. Join me in the next lesson and we'll start sloshing. 8. Tryptic Supplies: Hello. For the triptych painting, you're going to need some watercolor paper to brushes and a pencil, gold watercolor paint, and a gold gel pen. Your favorite complimentary color combo in watercolors, a palette, tissue, or a rag for cleaning your brushes, your templates, plenty of clean water and washy or masking tape. Let's get painting. 9. What is a Tryptic?: Project time. This is a triptych and we're going to paint one like it. We are going to explore briefly what a triptych is and look through our complimentary colors and choose our favorites. We are then going to create a painting of three parts. So triptych, It's a lovely word. What is a triptych? Triptych is a painting that's divided into three pieces, like this one, where it's three parts on the same piece. Or you could have a triptych, which is three individual paintings that actually work together in harmony to create a piece as a whole. These are a simple decorative motif to really highlight our complimentary colors and show how beautifully they work together and make the colors zing. On this one, which have got in front of me, I decided to work with our three primaries, the red, the yellow, and the blue, and have their complementaries, green, purple, and orange for the motifs. Very straightforward. And as you can see, it's a really bold, bright, happy painting. I was going to do something completely different on the other half of this piece of paper. But when I'd finished this, I thought, I wonder what it looks like the other way round. So I repeated the motif. As you can see, I carried it on up onto the other half of the paper and swapped the background and foreground colors. And I think as a piece, it all together, it works really well. That was lots of fun to paint. And you can see as well on here, I've outlined my leaves with a little bit of gold gel pen to keep it nice and decorative, but also to highlight the shapes. Here are some more samples I painted to explore the complimentary colors and how they work together. This is a much more muted version of our primaries. With their complementaries. We've got the blue, the red, and the purple, yellow, the green and the orange. It's much more subtle and very pretty, but also still very decorative. This one was a leaf that I found in the garden. This is an ash leaf. It's a compound leaf. So although it looks like lots of leaves on one stem, it is actually just one big leaf. And I decided to explore orange and blue, but different versions of oranges and blues and put them all together to make my triptych. You can also see with this one, very obviously, my panels are not symmetrical and regular. I've actually made them slightly scruffy just to give it a different feel. In the background, you can see I've added some wiggly lines onto the plain background to give us a little bit more decoration. This one, I tried a slightly different approach. Again. We have the slightly wonky, uneven panels and I use just two colors. So I've got my pastel green and pastel pink, but I alternated them within my three panels. The background on these, I've added leaves using gel pen. And the edges of the petals were painted with gold watercolor, which is very, very bright and zingy as you can see, it sparkles beautifully when you move the paper. Then my final one here was experimenting with some slightly more unusual compliments. I decided to look at my own color wheel that I made, this one and try out different versions. So this particular panel is phthalo blue and scarlet lake. And we can see those here on my phthalo blue is opposite scarlet lake. This one is pyrrole, crimson, green gold. So here we have the pyrrole crimson and the green gold. And then our last panel is cobalt violet and transparent orange. I've got the cobalt violet and transparent orange. I think this works really well to show you how much variety you can bring to your painting with your complementary colors and also what fun it is to explore your favorites. Now, let's get our painting things together. I'm painting our own triptych. 10. Tryptic Set up: Lesson three. Okay, I've gathered my materials. The list of everything here is in our project resources. So if you need to double-check on getting things together, it's all there. I have my watercolors and freshwater, a cloth, my little bit of washi tape, my pens, pencils, and brushes. Let's get started. It's very exciting. Now, I've got some different motifs here to use as templates. You can choose whatever you want. I'm going to work with this one because it's very simple and clear for you to see, which is just a simple leaf template. You could use flowers like these. A combination of them would be very pretty. Or if you're more confident, you can freehand draw whatever you fancy or across your page. These will be available in the project resources as templates for you to download and copy if you would like to do that. First of all, we need to divide our page into three. I've measured across the top of my paper and put some little marks on the masking tape so that I know where approximately the third czar. I've also taped my paper down, even though I'm not going to be using a lot of water. The main reason for this is it will give us a nice bright frame around our triptych. First of all, we need to divide our paper up into its three parts for it to be a triptych. So I'm going to use some narrow washi tape. I've marked thirds along the top of my paper in the bottom so that I can see approximately where to put my tape. I'm not going to put mine in regular straight lines. I'm actually going to have them slightly wonky because I lie like that. Go with whatever you feel, whatever takes your mood, and you'll have something that you will love at the end. So I'm going to be slightly awry of either mark there. Rip that off, and then I'm going to do the same again here. So now I have my three sections marked on my paper, taped my motif. What I want is I want them to overlap into the three different areas. So my first leaf is going to be here. I'm going to mark this quite darkly with my pencil so that you can see clearly what I'm doing. It's up to you. If you use dark lines when you go round your motif. Because we will be covering a lot of that with our gold pen or watercolor later. But if you'd prefer, have your marks nice and pale so that they don't show through your watercolors too much. As two leaves. I'm going to have one across the bottom here, like this. Oops. There we go. I'd have one coming down over here. Let's where should we put him to put in there? Play with the composition. Look where you're laying your templates so that it's pleasing for you and you're having a pattern that sits well on the paper. Tough the bottom of the leaf here. I think we need something over here, don't worry. Go that way. So we're going in a different direction to that leaf. Yeah, I think that'll do nicely. To save some time with my paints rather than having to mix up the blue and red to make my purple continuously. I'm actually going to use a ready-made purple. This one is going up. Quinacridone, purple. And I'm going to pop some of that into my pallets up here. And I'm going to use that one with the Winsor yellow that I used in our color wheel production. Because the yellow is the paler color and more easily tainted. I'm actually going to do all the yellow painting first. And then when that's dry, we'll do the purple. I'm going to do yellow background, yellow motif, yellow background. This is a really nice activity to just spend some time. Have a little bit of color therapy, enjoying your colors and enjoying the process of painting. There's no fuss and worry. You're just painting and taking some time for you. Here we go. Purple is one of my favorite colors. So painting this one for me is particularly pleasing. More yellow in there. And what I'm hoping is, by the time I've done the background here, the motif in the middle and the background over there. This side will be dry enough for us to start all ready painting with the purple paper is taped down. It shouldn't buckle because we're not using huge amount of water. But just in case it is a good idea to have your paper taped down onto some sort of surface. Or if you prefer, using a watercolor block. We go nice and quick. That's our first background done. Now on this one, I'm going to be painting the motif in a different class. I would refer to this as being the negative space, the things that aren't our subject. And in this, we are now going to be painting the positive space, which is our subject, the leaves. Here we go. When we've finished painting. Our blocks of color in will then explore using either the metallic watercolor or gold pen, gel pen to create some embellishment to our painting. At the moment is very, um, just simple blocks of color. We want it to be a little bit more decorative than that. If you would prefer not to do that, That's fine. If you like the look of your painting as it is. Just simple blocks of strong bold color or soft, gentle colors or muted autumnal shades, whatever it is you've decided to use, then that's fine. You paint. What makes you happy? That's what this is all about. Learning about colors. But as much as anything about creating something that makes you happy, we've got our final leaf motif almost done. Now I switch back to the background or the negative space on this panel. These shapes are nice and simple. I've done that on purpose. So there's nice and clear for you to see what I'm doing and how I'm painting. Obviously, if you choose a more complex motif, it will take you longer. And you will have to be a little bit more mindful about how you're painting. Almost done. He's don't have to be completely flat, smooth washes either. As long as you've got a good amount of color down to show the contrast between your two complements. That doesn't matter if they're not entirely smooth. There we go. Looking at this, my first panel isn't quite dry yet. So I think what I might do is add a little bit up there, which I missed, and then get my hairdryer and give it a blast so we can carry on painting. 11. Tryptic Colour Combo: Let's go listen for my yellow is dry. I gave it a quick whiz over with the hairdryer. If you haven't got one or a heat tool, you could always go and make a group and let it dry on its own and come back when you're feeling refreshed. Okay, time to use our complimentary color to go with the yellow. So I've got my Quinacridone, purple here, which is a lovely rich color. Some water. There we go. And I'm going to paint in my motif on this side, my leaves. And as you can see, it sits next to the yellow. How beautifully they compliment each other. Often, while I'm painting, I listened to stories. I find it difficult to listen to music, I think is because I end up jiggling and I want to dance, but I'm listening to audio books is my preferred background noise while I'm painting. I listened to all sorts of different genres of story. And I go off in my imagination in one direction and with the story and off in another direction with my painting. What do you do? Do you listen to music? Do you have the television going in the background so that it's like having somebody chattering company for you. Do you listened to the radio or podcasts? You fans of different sorts of information. You might be listening to something that's very informative. Natural history or science or any of those things are worried you'd like listening to fantasy stories or something like a biography. Somebody famous, retelling their life story while you paint. My preferred stories or science fiction and fantasy. But I will listen to almost anything if it grabs my interests. Here we go. So now we've painted the motifs on this side and the background in the middle. I'm going to paint the motifs on this side again, I don't know whether you've noticed over here where I added some water. This Quinacridone purple has bloomed in the middle there of the leaf. I'm going to leave it because I actually quite like it. Don't worry if something like that happens for you while you're painting. Let it dry, and then just put another layer of your paint over the top and it will disguise that partner. I rather like blooms and things. It's one of the things I love about watercolor is it's slightly unpredictable nature. You can't quite always predict what it will do. So that's half the fun for me, is watching it move and spread and all the exciting patterns and things you can make. Just by adding a little bit of water to the pigment. Just one more leaf in total, I guess, one there and a little bit there to paint. And then we'll need to let these dry. And we'll add our embellishment. Get some more water in there. I think to make this painting, give it some continuity, I'm actually going to try and recreate a bloom over here while this paint is still wet. So I'm going to put some clean water on my brush and just drop it on and see what happens. I'm going to put one on there. We are getting a little bit of a bloom here on this one. Final little bit, this tip of the leaf down here. While we're waiting to see if that bloom works on our bigger leaf. And you see it's here. Then you see the shine on the water there as that spreading through the paint. And then it'll creepy reveal its of the water pushing the pigment. So we will have a bloom there on that one too. Mr. little bit. There we go. Let's let it dry and we'll get to some embellishment. 12. Putting on the Glitz!: Almost done less than five. A little time later. Here we are. I've allowed my paper to dry completely. And as you can see, we have blooms on the purple. Even here on the background a little bit. I love them. I think they're really interesting things. We are now going to get to embellishment. I'm going to use a combination of both gold gel pen and metallic watercolor. I've got little dainty, cute little pan here of metallic gold watercolor. You can get your watercolors. Metallic watercolors rather, you can buy them in tubes. You can get sex of them and get big pounds, a little patterns. You could alternatively use a metallic gold rush or an acrylic. The opaqueness of those would be really useful to help it stand out against our watercolor background. But these suits my purposes for today. The other thing as well about using the paint with a paint brush like this one, which is I think it's a four zeros, so it's very, very tiny. With this one. You do require a reasonably steady hand. So if you're not feeling comfortable with that, gel pen is the way to go. It's much quicker to apply and you can get a really smooth line with it. Why put the embellishment on? Well, as a piece at the moment, it's very graphic and strong representation of how our complimentary colors work together. But we want to make it, or I want to make it look more pretty and decorative. So I'm going to highlight and patent my leaves and maybe even do a little bit in the background. It's entirely up to you how much of this you do or whether you do it at all. This is all about really enjoying the process and learning about complimentary colors while you're doing it. I'm going to use some clean water here. And I'm going to activate my metallic watercolor paint by adding some clean water on top. And I'm just going to let that sit for a minute and soak in so that the pigment is nice and loose and ready for us to pick up and paint. While I'm waiting for that, I'm going to start with my gold gel pen. I'm going to use the gel pen to create some wiggly lines in the background behind my central panel to start with anyway. And I'm just going to take the pen for a walk, cross it over, hide it behind the leaf, starts again. Little wiggly, wiggly lines. You could do this with straight lines. You could use circles. You could use parallel lines. Anything that takes your fancy. These little wiggly lines. One of my favorites. They're very forgiving and satisfying to do. And as you can see, they stand out really well against this lovely deep rich purple. Take it up here. Lots of these background patterns are very popular for doodling. So if you like doodling, you'll have lots of ideas for what you can put in the background behind. Now the gold isn't going to show up so well on the yellow. But it will depending on how you're looking at the piece. So what you can do is carry on your line over the masking tape and wiggle it around on here. Shall I zoom in a little bit and show you how it looks? Yes. Let's do that by crossing over the masking tape and continuing a line on to the other panel, where adding continuity and coherence to our piece. Couple of little wiggly bits up there. We can carry on down here. This is so relaxing to do. I remember when I was little at primary school. One of our teachers used to say, if we had time to fill, take a pencil for a walk. And you did squiggles like this all over a piece of paper. And then the idea was to fill in all the little gaps and cells that were made by your wiggly line with a different pattern. It was a lovely therapy type activity to do. And I actually preferred that to doing maths. Just this final panel here, not too much left to do. And by the time I finished squiggling around on here, my Metallic gold paint should be nice and ready to work with. Take your time and enjoy wiggling around on your paper. There we go. A couple of more wiggles up here. And that's how a background. Now I'm going to use my metallic paint and I'm going to outline my leaves. So here's my little pen, which I'm going to hold in my fingers while attained. Get plenty of pigment up on my brush. There we go. And start up here going around the outside edge of my leaf. The stalk. And the other side. This metallic paint will actually hide any little marks where maybe overlap slightly where you are painting like I've got just here. Or any little white gaps where you missed while you are painting? We go. You could, if you were if you have one, use a rigger brush for something like this, it would be quicker and you'll get a long thin line very easily with that. But I want to do a little bit more detail with this one. A rigger brush is a very fine brush like this, but it has very long bristles. And the reason it's called a rigor is because it was created to paint the rigging on ships in paintings. And you needed to be able to draw a long, thin, straight line in one go with no lumpy bits. And wonderful for painting things like grasses and foliage and the stems on, on flowers and anything straight lines you might need if you were painting something architectural. Often, Randy, outside of my purple leaf here and you can see in the lights from the camera, It's sparkling and shining quite a lot more than the gold metallic gel pen. Let's have a look at it on this side with the purple background. So I'm going to leave that one for a minute and just come across here. More water stem. If you had or sorry if you have more metallic watercolors or goulash colors, would be interesting to try using the metallic version of your complimentary colors to do this with. So for my painting here, if I had a metallic purple, I would be outlining on my yellow background. And I suppose gold is the nearest you would get to a metallic yellow, but perhaps a more yellowy color, gold than this one. How's that looking in the lights and we just have a little we see that if I tip it slightly, Let's have a look. A bit of sparkle going on there. Definitely, That's lovely. Right? I'm going to carry on painting this in gently. You can watch and follow along. So I've done a background pattern and I'm now going around the outside edges of my leaves. Should I decorate the internal parts of the leaves with veins, lines? Because I've got these wonderful blooms. Shall I leave them? Just paint this time. Not sure. I shall finish painting. Around the edges and review. See what I think will look best. Last little bit. Here we are. This is the all know, Look, I've missed a bit of just realized I missed this leaf here. Best paint that in It's difficult to chatter and concentrate on thin, smooth lines. So please forgive me if I'm not talking to you too much here. Here we go up round. This is our final bit. Here we are. Our finished painting. I'll give that a few minutes to dry. It shouldn't take very long because there's very little paint been applied. And then we can do the magical tape peeling. Let's have a look. If this is washi tape, which isn't particularly tacky and it should peel off nice and easily. If you're not certain, it's always a good plan to give your paper tape rather a little warm-up with something like a hairdryer or a heat tool that will melt the warm, the glue that's holding the washi tape or masking tape to the paper and make it easier to peel off. I noticed that there's lots of people online have videos dedicated, just appealing the tape off their paintings. And because it's a very satisfying thing. Here we go. Lift there, yes. Sticky bit there. And the last bit, and it's done. Can appeal it. Here we go. I've got the edge. Along the bottom. Hello, there we have it. This is our finished piece. I'm super pleased with how this has turned out, and I really hope you are with yours. Thank you so much for painting along with me. I have helped you to learn about complimentary colors, decorative patterns, and triptychs. Join me in the next video, where we'll have some final thoughts and I'll even share with you what I learned in the process of creating this class. See you soon. 13. Thank you & Final Thoughts: Thank you for joining me in this Skillshare class. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. It was wonderful to paint along with you. In this class, we learned a little bit of color theory. We also learned that it's a huge subject with so much potential to help us in the future. We looked at art history and it rekindled my love of art history too, which is a wonderful thing. We've demonstrated how easy it is to make a really good color wheel using your own materials. So that enhances your knowledge of what you actually have to hand every day. We also learned what a triptych is and how decorative and beautiful they can be as a way to showcase our favorite complimentary colors. Just to say, this, this particular color wheel is probably the best one I've produced. I'm super pleased. The colors have come out just as I wanted them to. As you know, I've practiced a lot before I've done this and some of the color wheels, colors just weren't as good as this. I can show you this one, which you can see it's a bit darker. But the purples, particularly down here, a much harder to define than the ones I've got on this. So I'm super pleased with how well this one came out. When you've painted your projects are major color wheel. Please take some photos and post them in the project. But down below, I would love to see all your work and it's always a joy. I always make sure I try and comment on everybody's pieces as well. It's great to get a conversation going. If you've enjoyed this class, I really hope you'll join me in the upcoming one, which is another look at complimentary colors, but in a slightly different way. And we'll paint some whimsical toadstools like these.