Exploring Watercolor Ground

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Jennifer and I'm an artist in the Pacific Northwest. I'm here to teach you how to transform any surface into a paint double watercolor surface. The secret is using watercolor ground. And by the end of the class, you'll have all the necessary skills to take any paint double surface, and transform it into a watercolor surface. In this class, I'm going to introduce watercolor ground and its unique properties. You'll learn the importance of prepping and different ways that you can apply the watercolor brown to create new textures. In this class, I showed you how to prepare metal surface, a wood surface, and a canvas surface. But all of these techniques would work on any page table surface. Watercolor ground has unique properties that make it slightly different than working on watercolor paper. I'll cover what some of these properties are and tips and tricks that you can use to get best piece of artwork. I've prepared two projects for you to choose from. The first project is a beginner project, and it explores the different properties of watercolor ground. The second project is an intermediate project for somebody who's already familiar with working with watercolor. You can follow along or you can create your own. I can't wait to see how you use this new skill. What you transform using watercolor ground. So it's your watercolors ready? And let's create something new. 2. Materials: Materials and supplies. First, choose the surface you want to transform. I have chosen metal, wood, and campus to demonstrate for you to prep your surface. You're going to want to gather your watercolor ground, rubbing alcohol, your surface of choice, gesso, rag, sandpaper, paint, brush in water, and tape. Remember, prep work is important for the best piece of artwork. Once you have properly prepped your service, gather up a pencil and eraser, your watercolors, colored pencils, paint brush in water, and your watercolor ground. 3. Prep Part 1: Gesso: We have our three signs here that we are going to up cycle and paint on. This one is I never would sign here. This one is pretty beat up Canvas. This is a metal sign. So the first thing that we want to do when we are doing our prep work is we're going to need to clean these and what I like to do with it, I like to clean with some just rubbing alcohol to get all the grime off. And then we're gonna go ahead and get these all nice and clean. We have everything clean here. What we're gonna be doing, we're going to just be scuffing these up a little bit so that when we do our Justo was going to stick. This is what it looks like. I got this from my goals, but you can buy this online or anywhere. It's just basically going to prep your surface so that when we put our watercolor ground down, it's going to stick well. I have the sandpaper here. It's a 150 grit. It's pretty fine and I'm really going to be very lightly on the surface like that. Now that we have these, we're going to actually clean them again. We're gonna give them one final wiped down with our rubbing alcohol just to get that duct off. We don't want that on there. Then these are going to be ready. If you decide, say you pick something up and you liked the sides, we can just take that off. I'll show you how to do that. Then these are going to be ready. Ready for our first application of jasmine. You're really primes your surface for what's happening next. You can just paint it on like paint the trick to this is really the thinner the better. This was quite a bit that I put on here. Because any ridges that are here are most likely going to be showing up later on at least to some degree. Sometimes when it dries. It was ridges do come down a bit. Just really spread this out. It doesn't matter what it's really going to like. Hey, turns dry so I got to stop. If you have a piece of upcycled work that you want to save a portion of. You're definitely going to want to be taping the sides so that the gesso and the watercolor ground don't cover it. You can use painter's tape. I have found that washy tape pretty well. We're just going to tape sides here. Just to protect that from any little bit of paint. I'm going to keep just going alone. Going to come check on it and a little bit. 4. Prep Part 2: Watercolor Ground: Here we are in the next day. I let these dry for about 24 hours. This one had a piece of paper or we're going to talk so you can kind of see where it was wrinkled. This doesn't bother me, but if it does, you end up finding out that you don't like it. You can stand it down. But a lot of things you can do to cover this up once we get our watercolor on here, it's not, you're not gonna see that that much. Here's our test piece. And I'm actually going to show you because watercolor ground and gesso are similarly absorbent but not quite the same. What we're gonna do is actually just take this off a little bit. First thing though, is we are going to sand just lightly sand these one more time before we go ahead and put that Jess, I want in there just to get the surface exactly the way. You can also get any bumps or anything in there. You can sand. Not always. Sandra Bem give him one more wiped down. Don't be alarmed if one of your jobs or wants to come off, don't spend overly long. You could also just use a damp rag. Just getting that dust off of there and making our surface really, really watercolor ground. Here is our watercolor ground. This is Daniel Smith, titanium white, and you can buy transparent white, pearlescent like this the best. When you open it up. It is very, very thick. I'm going to show you two methods for applying this. Wanted just your paintbrush. You will get the texture of your paintbrush on there. That's fine. The next technique that we're gonna be using, MS worry are still going to be brushing it on. But we're going to kind of make it a little bit about paper texture. It gives it something that's a little bit more similar to papers. Show you quick for it starts drying and gets to tacky. I'm going to take this roller and I pre damping this and then squeeze all the water out. And what I'm gonna do is just gently run this over to give it that texture. Like that. Give it the way I like it. Again, we'll go over this. Just creates that paper texture that we're used to seeing your watercolor. 5. Why is Prepping Important?: This is my test piece and this is where I'm going to show you the importance of preparing your Canvas. What I've done here is I have watercolor ground only on this side. I've only done Jess, so on this side, I've done gesso and I not cured it. On this side I have gesso and it's been cured for longer than 48 hours, so it should be good to go. What we're going to do is we're going to do a test swatch. And I'm going to just do the same lines across all of these. It's really important to let this dry. You can see how different these look. Might be subtle. You can already see the gesso is just less absorbent than the watercolor ground. The paint is going to sit up on top here. Not so again, it is not in cured. See here as it's drying, it's feathering out. This is, you're not gonna get any sharp lines if you don't let it cure. You still are gonna get some feathering with this cured, but it's not gonna be as much. We're gonna do a couple more shapes. Then we're going to let this dry. I'm gonna show you exactly what's happening, but you can already see here how it's feathering out and it is not getting, keeping that crisp line here. So this is, this right here is the most important thing you need to know about watercolor ground as you really have to let it cure for 2448 hours before you start painting on it, even though it looks dry, it's not you really have to let it dry. Let this dry for a little bit. And I wanted to show you how notice for these differences here between the not cured and cured watercolor ground. See these edges here and how extremely feathered they are. This can happen when it's not dry all the way can also happen if there's a little bit of extra texture in there that it just allows it to go. I want you to see the difference between these two. See how this one even has a little bit of bloom in here. It has this nice hard edge. This is as close to watercolor papers you're going to get using watercolor ground. This was the JSR only because of the way DSO is formulated. It doesn't absorb as much liquid. So you can see how the pigment is sitting up on top, almost beating up on here. And you get just a lesser than intense, vibrant look here. Here's the watercolor ground without dress, sewing underneath. And that was very surprised that it did just fine. They're just showing is really important for prepping your canvas. Covering up. If you're starting with a white background already, a blank background like this, it looks like one color of the watercolor ground would be just finding may be able to skip the Jess of stuff. Doesn't seem like it affected it at all. Addressing was really important for covering things up, cleaning things, getting it ready. But like I said, if it's already a blank piece of work like this, looks like you can just go ahead and watercolor grounded and you should be good to go. 6. Project 1: Rainbow Pattern: For this project, you'll need your watercolors and graphite pencil, kneaded eraser and your colored pencils. What I did is I divided this into four sections. You can decide how big a pattern you want it to be. They drew very lightly on here with my pencil. But again, actually I'm going to make this lighter, this kneadable eraser. It will pull up a good portion of this graph right here. I really want it to be as famous as possible. This is just my guidelines. This pencil that I was using is a water-soluble graphite. It doesn't completely disappear, but it does disappear more than a good. However, you can always use just a regular pencil. I always recommend you need erasers. They work the best for lifting up graphite. And you can, even on a firm surface than this, roll it out. You're not rubbing on the paper. What we're gonna do is we're just gonna be making simple shapes with our brush. Let's think about our color scheme ahead of time. And I'm gonna do something on this sample piece of paper. If we wanted to do pinks and warm colors, you could absolutely just stay in that range. What is a fun thing to do and to do 80%, 90 percent your warm colors. And then out of nowhere, you're going to grab a color that's opposite on the color wheel. Pop that in there. Go back to my brush. I'll go back. Let's think about what colors you want to be doing for a piece, I wouldn't be doing your cool colors with a pop of warm color. I love cool colors, greens and blues. And I'm thinking that this palette here that I haven't mixed up from some of my previous paintings. It's gonna be a good starting point for me. I use this as a guide for my pop of color that's gonna be warm, which means at some point I'm gonna need some purple in here because purple is the direct opposite of different variations. Hanna, different permutations of blue. Burnt umber since May secret trick to almost all of these colors. Burnt umber has a very yellow undertone. Can really mute and just bring down some of these colors, but also kind of brings them all together. Again. If you go ahead and do this project and you end up in Hunan and I can just go over it and start over this watercolor ground will last forever. That it's a lot. We're gonna be making little rainbow shapes. We're gonna start where our guideline is here. And we're just going to come up and we're gonna make this into a pattern. Then while that's still wet, I'm going to pick your next color. I want to make sure even if these top ones, the top of this doesn't match up with, the bottom matches up. Let's see how that's all kind of more running together. To make a cohesive whole. Gonna do this. True in squashing that, that's okay. What I'm gonna do now that I have kind of squashed that site in a little bit. I'm going to go in with my one little bit of I'm gonna make this one really narrow. Very similar to that. I'm gonna try to give these a variety. I'm sizes to make that little squished gouache their intention. We're going to let this dry and then we can decide what we want to do next after this, now that our pieces dry, we're going to add some color variation, textures, and patterns to this. If you haven't done so already, go ahead and spray your watercolors to wake them up. I'm gonna be using the same colors from before. And I'm going to be adding some extra paint to some of these shapes. Not only do we want a wide variety of colors, we want a wide variety. Light and dark. When I'm choosing things to go dark, I like to think of the ratio 8020, 80% of my Canvas to be lighter, maybe 20% to be a little bit darker. Because darkness is heavier, more noticeable to the eye. You don't need as much of it to balance the whole canvas out. And I'm going to let this dry before we add our finishing touches with our colored pencil. Right? This is strong enough that we can start adding our details, some fun details that you can add to these paintings with your colored pencils. Or you can just add simple lines. Just adds texture and interests. You could add circles. As you can see, it doesn't want to come up a little bit sometimes, right? Control back over it. You could draw lines going this way. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's really fun to have that organic look to it. No stressing. If you really wanted an extra bit of white or there's a piece part of the painting that you're not happy with. Don't forget, you can always go back and maybe clean up some edges. With this watercolor ground. It might take one or two applications. But this is a great way to add some more depth to your piece. 7. Project 2: Abstract Landscape: For this project, you'll need your pencil and eraser, watercolors and paintbrush. And your colored pencils. Haven't done so already. Go ahead and give your paint a nice little wake up squirt of water. We're gonna take our pencil, sketch in assist going to be an abstract type of landscape. It's not going to have very many details. We're just going to use some of the colors that we see from our reference photo in here. And it's not even going to be really all that accurate. You can do kind of however you want. I am keeping the land part down really in this 1 third is a little bit higher than 1 third here. Portion of this mountains back here. And then sky here is going to kind of go like this. I'm just going to do this to remind myself to leave something right in here. Very light. This is really all I'm going to be doing here. My guidelines, We're gonna start doing our sky because that really is the easiest. I'm going to use this big flat brush just to get some water on this space very quickly. We're putting pigment in. You're going to want to make sure that the pigment down here is not as heavy as theorem. We're gonna start off here. I've just used a light, civilian blue and I accidentally dip my brush into a darker blue. It doesn't matter how this just putting it in like this has given such a wonderful amount of movement. They're going to take my little painting towel that I use is clean. It just doesn't look clean. And I'm actually going to go down one horizon. I'm going to just pick up a lot this paint just to make sure that that horizon line there doesn't have as much in men. I'm gonna just because some of these areas and I'm using my finger and I'm making that guy. The next step is going to be, I'm going to start here at the bottom. I don't want to do the mountains or anything that's touching the sky until that is absolutely dry. Absolutely dry and it might still bleed into it. But the longer you let it dry, cleaner and crisper, the lines are going to be doing some of this green down here. I'm not pre wedding this because I'm just going to take some of this green. I am just dragging it over with lots of water. And then once it's kinda have this base of green and I'm going to add, this is my pre wedding right now. So what I'm saying, let me get some lighter green. Down here. Just this bottom corner here. You can see it was not wet and I drag the brush over it. Dry brushing technique is cool. I like it. This needs to dry completely before I move on to the next deck because the next edge is going to be a brown. And then there's gonna be yellow here in the middle, really bright ocher, yellow. We want these lines to be as crisp as possible. We're going to let this dry before I move on to the extent the sky is dry here, and you can see that there was some feathering up along the edge here, if that's okay. Watercolor ground, we'll do this. One thing I do want to show you is this fun trick. When you're working with watercolor ground, you can use code of pencils or watercolor pencils to kinda help retain some of these crisper edges. So I have an indigo blue here. And I just am going to go ahead and indicate these mountains that are up here so I can visually remember where the edges here indicate. Along the edge here. This is again colored pencil. Dark brown. This edge here. Where I'm gonna be going in. There's this very light swatch trees there. Then I'm going to bring some of this green background over here. Along this edge here. Use this dry brush technique. We're just dragging it. Look at that. So cool. We're going to let this one dry. This piece has dried quite a bit. We can go in and start working on these darker sections that are here. I'm just adding in his really dark bits that I see in the photograph that are kind of really darkest part horizon. They're mostly going to be going in and I'm gonna be adding a little bit more into the sky because it is quite a bit darker. And that's gonna be keeping this swoopy feeling here. Really points it down back into the composition. I'm gonna go in width. I'm going to mix my Payne's gray, burnt umber. Kind of get this section a little bit more. There's a road or something here. Wanting to bleed a little bit because the underpainting is still pretty **** puts. Okay. I just wanted to get this just a little bit darker here. On out. If my brush probably wearing gonna leave the watercolor part. Can I come in with a little bit of pencil to indicate some of these trees. Then this one's going to be done. This has had ample time to dry, and I'm ready to add my finishing touches. We can be using colored pencil to add in some final details of the trees. Maybe some marks back here. Because this has really dark. I'm using indigo blue. I'm going to be very conscious of the fact that darkness holds a lot of weight within a composition. And I need to really limited maybe 10%, maybe less than that of this composition. We're going to start with these guys here. I might actually black for these back here like that. Then the rest of that, I'm going to leave. All right. I have this olive green color as well as this kind of silver. Silvery gray color. I'm going to use these for trees section. So we have some little sections here because you're going to just be scribbles. I didn't want them darker than the background. Tongue pushing pretty hard. Kind of replicating. Where some of these a little bit of darkness to some of these, these ones are actually watercolor pencils. You can leave it like this. Or if you happen to have watercolor pencils, see what happens when you add a little bit of water to, I'm going to get my brush wet and then I'm actually going to dry it off. So it's just it's damp to the touch but not dripping because I really want to control where that water goes. Really wanted to just manage this around. I don't want to go in everywhere. The extra pigment on my brush. I'm just going to dot in some of these little tiny bushes here. Now, if you wanted to go ahead and add in the sunspot, that was right here and we didn't remember to leave that spot. And you can use your ISO. You can use your watercolor ground again. I'll show you what that looks like. You can use this to fix mistakes on watercolor paper as well. That the leave a little bit of a texture. But if there's a little bit of bleeding or something that you would like to fix. This was really helpful. We're putting this white. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take some water all the way around it. I'm just going to lightly feather this out into the water. And we're gonna let that dry and come back and just add the very final touch there once that is ready. Okay, as you can see, this has dried and that's it. We're done. 8. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on finishing the class. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope that you learned something new that you can apply to your art. I can't wait to see all of your unique projects and what you choose to transform using watercolor ground. If you'd like to share your artwork on social media. Tag me at Jennifer rice studio on Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok. I'd love to share your artwork with my followers. I'm always excited to see what my students are making and how they're growing. If you liked this class, please leave a review. It helps other students find it and you may help someone else on their artistic journey as well. Thank you again for taking this class. And I hope you had as much fun as I did.