Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hello, I'm Isa Down. I'm an artist, and an author at the base of the
Rocky Mountains. Back in the spring of 2017, I sat down one night, and drew my very first flowers. But I had no idea
what I was doing. I still don't know
what I'm doing, but I got to know
more than I did then. What I did know was that drawing
these flowers brought me so much joy that I kept
painting, and I kept drawing. After a lot of practice, and practice eventually, I got good enough
to write a book. No pressure [LAUGHTER]. That's where you come in because I'm writing this
class for that girl. I want to make a class where
I can accompany my old, self and teach others like
me in the same position who are teaching
themselves how to paint or just wanting to have a bit of a mental health
break from the world, how do I approach something that can be super intimidating, which is watercolor. Come, and learn with me the
fundamental techniques, and tools that you need
to paint with watercolor. We're going to go over
the basic foundations, and how to actually
use watercolor. Then we're going to apply those techniques over the course of painting different flowers
together step-by-step. You leave this class
confident with a strong foundation for how to use watercolor
moving forward. With open arms, I say
welcome to my studio. Welcome to my class, and pull up a chair, a cup of tea, and
let's get started. Let's go. [MUSIC]
2. Materials: [MUSIC] Materials for this class
are very straightforward. You will want to have
watercolor paper. I'm just using Canson
watercolor paper. It's very accessible
and rather affordable. If you don't need
anything fancy, you can get it at
most art stores, Target, Walmart,
places like that. You will also need
a watercolor brush. I'm going to be
using a round brush, and for being able to follow along with me and the tips that I
supply in this class, I would recommend
that you also have a round brush because we'll
be talking about pressure and angle and creating different
widths of lines based on the size of the brush and based on the roundness of the brush. There are, of course, a bunch of other types of
watercolor brushes. You can have a filbert, you
can have smaller sizes, bigger sizes, [NOISE]
what have you. But I will be using a
round watercolor brush, and then you will need
some watercolors. I have a couple of different types of
watercolors here and we'll be exploring what they are and how you might use them
throughout this class. I have a watercolor palette that I have been adding to and personalizing for the
last several years with cured watercolor
paints in it, and we'll go over
what that means. [NOISE] I also have some
tubes of watercolor paint. Then sometimes I
like to add them onto little ceramic
dishes [NOISE] or what have you that I have specifically for
painting if I'm wanting to. Mostly, if I'm wanting to
get a lot of a color and mix it outside of
[NOISE] my palette where I will mix a lot of colors. [NOISE] Then of course, you're going to need some
water to rinse your brush, and you will need either a
paper towel or a cloth so that you can control how much
water is on your brush and be able to clean that
off a little bit. Then optionally, you might
want to have a pencil. We will explore [inaudible]
and how you can add other elements to your
watercolor painting as we practice the
different techniques. Just to give you a little feel of where you can take
your watercolor practice. Without further ado,
let's go ahead and get started with learning our paint. [MUSIC]
3. Learn Your Paints: [MUSIC] Let's understand
what watercolor is. Watercolor is just a
pigment and binder. That pigment is being bound together so that when
we put it on the page, we have control
over where it goes. Watercolor comes in two
different modes or modalities. Watercolor can be found
in two different ways. You can purchase tubes
of watercolor where they will come out as
wet, goopy paint. These can be really fun. I will use these tubes
if I'm wanting to create more of a specific color and if I want maybe a little bit more
intense color because even combining with some
water you can see that I can pull from this
main blob here. I can create [NOISE] different saturations based
on how much pigment I'm adding in and how
much water I have. You have a little
bit more control over how much you're having
in your brush that way. You can increase and decrease
the hue or the value of your watercolor just
by adding more water. The more water you
add to your color, the less saturated it becomes. The less water you have, or the more pigment you have, the more saturated it becomes. Now when this paint
is exposed to air, it dries, and that paint is
cured watercolor [NOISE]. I have cured watercolor
in my palette that I use the most and [NOISE] in other little ceramic trays where I have taken my two
paint and I put it out. I've let it out
and it has dried. To activate this paint, you just bring in clean water on your brush and just add water on top and just start agitating the paint
and it reactivates it. Then you can let that
dry again and reuse it. Never throw away or wash your palate if you
have a bunch of paint left on it unless you're
never going to use it again because you can reactivate it and use it over and over again. In the beginning, I
mostly just mixed color on my palette here, and I still do that,
especially for greens. As you can see, almost
this whole side is dedicated to green [LAUGHTER]. I'm also not very specific about what colors I add to
create my color mixing. For me it just having
an all-blob here together and the palette
works really well. It doesn't work really
well for some people, but for me, it does [LAUGHTER]. If I'm starting a painting, if I know what colors are in it, I will just go ahead and get that paint wet and just start it activating while I'm
painting another part so that when I get to that point,
it's ready for me. You can do the same control
of pigment over here as well, just with a little less control. I might have a bunch of
pigment on my brush, and instead of being
able to add more water, I might just dip my
brush in my water and then I control
I can rub it along the edge of my jar just to get off excess
water or a dab it on my cloth or my paper towel and have more control over that. If I have a lot of
pigment on my brush, I'm not going to wipe it off on the cloth that I have
or the paper towel, I'm going to brush
or hold my brush down or tap it against the base where it's going to
be able to pick up extra water without taking
the pigment cut off my brush. I will always have a
paper towel or a cloth on hand to help me control
how much water is in my bristle and how much water or ink or pigment I'm
applying to the page. Also to help me correct
any mistakes along the way which we will go
over in our next section. Now you know what
watercolor is and you know how to
agitate it to get it re-wet if it's cured
watercolor.One One the most useful things I learned once upon a time when
I first started out was, it's watercolor, make sure
you are actually using water. When I first started, I was
using such a little amount of water that the Pete
was going on to page almost opaque
and chalky and I had no control over it and it just looks absolutely awful. The nice thing about watercolor is that it is transparent. You can create a really
thin wash on the page. Once that dries, you can add
more color on top of it. I can go ahead and do a background wash on
my page that's really, really thin and light and pale. I can build shapes on top
of this over and over. I'm sure you've seen those
foggy forest scenes with the gradation of the
leaves as they go back. That just took a process of building more and
more layers up. In watercolor, you're
painting from light to dark. That's an important distinction, especially if you come from
a different medium like say, acrylic, where you paint
from dark to light. By that I mean, that when you're
creating a painting, you need to take note of the lightest part
of your painting. If there is a highlight
that's white, if there's a white flower, but you want it more and
more blue background wash, whatever it is you're creating, you have to leave the lightest
part of your painting, light from the beginning. Adding a second layer
makes it darker. The more layers you add, the darker it gets using
the exact same paint. Now, in something like acrylic, you're painting from dark
to light because acrylic is an opaque paint
and you are adding paint colors on top
of other layers. So you can wait until
the very end to add your white highlights
or whatever it is that you're wanting to create that's brighter your lighter yellows, your lighter greens
are accents like that. But in watercolor, you really have to [MUSIC]
think ahead because your lightest part comes first.
4. Your Paintbrush: As we're painting, we are thinking about how we're
holding our paintbrush. The closer to the
bristles you hold, the more control you will
have over your paintbrush. The farther away near
the end that you hold, the less control you
have over your brush. Depending on what
you're creating and the marks you are wanting
to make on the page, that will be a big
distinction for you and you might use
all aspects of it. I very rarely go all
the way to the end, but I will often if I'm
wanting a looser feel paint from the center of my
brush and I am often rather close to the bristles
at the end here when I'm really wanting to have very
specific lines on my page. As you're painting
with your brush, you're also
considering the angle that you're painting with, and the pressure that you
are applying to your brush. As I'm holding my brush, I'm making sure I'm not
holding on really tight. I'm not way knuckling it. I'm not like
loosey-goosey holding it. I want to hold it softly
but firmly so that I have control over my brush
without getting too tense. Because the more tense you get, the less control you have. The looser you've got the
less control you have. You have to find
that happy medium. It's like holding a pencil. Then maybe you grip your pencils too hard
though so pay attention. [LAUGHTER] Then we can look at angles that
we're holding our brush. I can come in at a really sharp angle
with my round brush, and get a really fine line, or I can come in at a really shallow angle and with the same amount of
pressure I'm applying. But at a shallow angle, I get a much wider line on
the page because I'm using the body of the brush as opposed to just the tip of the brush. You can also control
this very similarly, using the exact same angle
and just basing it off of how hard you're pushing
down on the page. Coming in with a
moderate angle here, I can have a thin line
or with the same angle, I can have a really thick line. That is going to be really important for you
to fill out and see because you're going to be
able to make different shapes based on the angle that
you are painting with. As an example, a very basic fundamental leaf would be coming in
with a lighter touch, pushing down harder for
that added pressure, and then loosening
up on the pressure as you pull the
brush off the page. Then you've got that
very quintessential long leaf look to it. If you're wanting
a rounder leaf, it's the exact same
motion or feel. You're just coming in and
completing that circle by doing the exact same motion on the other side and having
them connect in the middle. You can create all kinds of
different shapes just with pressure and angle
with your brush. I could come in and create a really squat pedal and
that's just by going harder first and not having
a longer time with lighter pressure
and just lifting up, so I then don't also
have this narrower edge. I can just smoosh it
down onto the page, or I can very lightly create different shapes as I go along. Again, the further away you are, the less control you have
over what you're painting. Part of why I like to hold it closer down or in the middle is because I get to rest my hand more easily next to the page, and that makes it a
lot easier for me to have control over
what I'm painting. If I'm painting something
a little bit more specific with a very specific shape, or I'm coming in on top of some dried paint
and I'm wanting to create some detailing, I want to get down really close so that I have control
over what it is, the marks I'm
making on the page, and being able to
stabilize my hand allows me to really control the pressure and the shape
that I'm putting on the page. When you have your paintbrush, your brush will be either
synthetic or animal fur just depending on
what kind you got. I tend to go for vegan brushes just because of animal
cruelty reasons. But to each their their own. I think I've been
gifted a couple of boar's hair or squirrel's
hair brushes as well, and I still have them. But when you are taking
care of your brush, never leave it sitting
in your water, never leave it upside
down like this, sitting in a jar. [LAUGHTER] I can't even pretend to do it because
it hurts me so much. When you're done painting, you want to rinse
your brush really well and dry it off a
little on your paper towel, and then when you're
letting it dry, I like to leave it lying flat on a towel or somewhere
where it's safe. Then when it's completely dry, I can keep it in
my paintbrush jar. I don't like to
leave it lying in here when it's still wet because the water will pool and it just decreases the longevity
of your paintbrush. As long as it's clean and you're not storing it on its bristles, you can do with
it what you will. [MUSIC]
5. Techniques: Wet-on-Wet + Wet on Dry: [MUSIC] Now, when we're painting with
watercolor there are a couple of different ways that we really apply the paint to the page. [NOISE] The first way that L22 now is called
wet-on-dry technique, and that is when you
have the wet brush with the pigment on the brush and you're applying it
onto a dry page. When you do this you have
a lot of control over the shape of the paint
that you're applying and what that mark is
going to look like on the page and how it's going to dry and it
evenly disperses the paint. If you want to add a secondary color into
this while it's still wet, that's called
wet-on-wet technique. You can just drop
in a second color or brush in a second color, and that's going to really have that more watercolor
effect as they mixed together within the
shape that you've created. You can also do this where you apply just
water on the page. My water is going to look
a little bit colorful here because I need to change
my water [LAUGHTER]. But you would apply translucent hopefully water on the page and then you can
start dropping in pigment, and that is another wet-on-wet
technique that you can do. You can also do what's called
a wash on the page where you can come in with your
pigment and a lot of water. Sometimes you might at
this point when to use a bigger brush or
a flatter brush, and you can just apply
it all the way across your page and add more
water to help move it. [NOISE] Then if you want
to add another secret, doing a sky and he wants to
say the bottom it's a sunset, but it's getting dark. You can add some orange
on top of the water, wet paint that's
already there and it will spread out
and disperse as it dries or you can do a similar thing where you
just have water on the page. Again, might your water
should not be this yellow. [LAUGHTER] You can come in
with a pink color and just add splotches to create different shapes and
see how they interact with each other or you can do lines and create some
really cool textures. [NOISE] That
technique of allowing the paint to touch each
other can be really useful and cool sometimes depending on what
you're creating. For instance, I can come
in and say I do red, here a little darker. I have some red on the page. I want to see how my paints
interact with each other so while it's still wet, I'm going to come
in with orange. I'm going to have my
orange just barely touch along the side
of that wet paint. That's going to allow them
to merge [NOISE] together. Let's do that with yellow
and you can really see, and so I'm going to barely
touch along the orange. You can see they start to
merge and unclothed together. [NOISE] Let's do green up here. How does that yellowy
green mixed with orange? You want them to touch so the water can mix the
pigments together. You'll notice that some paints push into other colors
more than others and that has to do with the
weight of the pigment of the color that you're using. You'll get to know that as you experiment more
and go along more. It's a really beautiful
way of combining these two colors on the page. You can also come in on
top of dried watercolor and do a wet-on-dry technique of adding details or patterns or whatever it is on top
of the dried watercolor. Even though you're
adding on top of watercolor because it's dry, it's going to be the same as adding on top of a
dry piece of paper. It'll still has that
translucence to it or that transparency to
it as you're creating that. You can create some really neat like veiled
flower it looks to it. That's basically you're just using accumulation of wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry as you create
your different paintings. We will go through all of these techniques in
the videos below. We'll do that by looking at five different flowers where we will experiment with using these different
techniques and see the different effects
and looks that you can get as you create. As we go through
these tutorials, I'll keep reminding
you through there. I do want you to take note of the techniques that
you really like doing. Maybe the wet-on-wet is just too much lack of control [LAUGHTER] and you
don't like that at all. Maybe you only like it
in specific places. Maybe you really like doing a background wash on your page. Maybe you only like to do wet-on-dry because you'd
like to have that control. Whatever it is, I want you to take
note of what you like. In our class project
you're going to combine all of the
elements that you liked and the
techniques that you liked in creating
your final project. Keep in mind, take note of the techniques that you
like as we go through the tutorials below on these five different flowers
where we will look at different aspects of how we use these
watercolor techniques. [MUSIC]
6. Correcting Mistakes: [MUSIC] Let's talk about a
couple of things here. One is controlling water
and fixing mistakes. You're going to have
an old rag or cloth or paper towel with you, that you are going to be able to use to control paint
as you're painting. If I have painted
something and say I have just too much pigment in one area or it's just too wet, I will rinse my brush off and dry it off on my
paper towel or my cloth. You can come in and
actually pick up both the pigment and the water, then just brush it off
on your cloth there. Similarly, if you
make a mistake, you didn't mean to splat that. I drop my brush all the time, I make mistakes all the time. There's a couple of
things you can do. One is to come in with
a clean brush and just wet that area before it dries and then you
can dab it up. The other is if you have a part of your brush that
is clean and dry, or your cloth that
is clean and dry, you can start by just tapping on them and then coming in
with a wet clean brush and doing very gentle circles almost you're just
agitating the pigment on the page and then
you're able to tap with a clean dry cloth
and pick up that paint. If it's still quite wet, I prefer to just come in
straight with a cloth and pick it up so I don't
risk spreading it around. It's like spilled wine. You don't want to come
in and wrap it around. You want to dab, dab. But if say you don't want
it to come down this far, you can come in with a clean brush that's just a little bit wet and just start agitating it and activating that paint. Then you can either come
in and pick it up with your brush or dab, dab if you're really
wanting to get rid of it. The more dry it becomes, the harder it is for you to fully erase or remove the paint, so keep that in mind as well. There's also a couple of
other things we can do. Say we have put down
all this pigment on a petal and then
we realize there is a large area up here that is actually a
highlight and I forgot that watercolor is light to dark
or the pigment just went everywhere or I wasn't
paying attention or I've changed my mind after,
whatever it is. Same deal, clean
brush, dry it off. You're going to
come in and you're going to pull the paint out of that area. Just wipe it on your cloth, and you can actually
remove quite a bit of it. You have a lot of control over
that while it's still wet. Of course, if it's on
top of layers of things, it'll get a little bit harder, but you can still remove quite a bit of pigment
if you need to. You can also pull
and push paint. By pulling paint, I
mean coming in with either a brush that's wet with pigments or just a
brush that's wet with water. In this case all that's
on here is water. I'm going to touch against where it is already wet and I'm going to pull the pigment. You can see it
follows the water. The pigment of molecules really like to bind to
water, they're hydrophilic. They're going to follow
that water and bind to it. You can just keep doing that, if it stops just keep pulling
it where you want it to go. Which can be nice
if say you want to add some color that
comes down here but you don't want as much to
go up into the top petal. As you're adding pigment, you can pull it down and
tell it where to go. Similarly, if say I
decided to come over here and put some red next to it and I didn't mean to get any red
up against there, I can come in while it's
still wet and I can push the pigment out
while it's still wet. You may need to push
it out and then let this area dry before
you come in and correct the pigmentation or how saturated you want this
area to be with yellow. Because of course if you add
more paint in there now, it's going to start pulling the other pink color back again. But that's a really nice way of pushing and
pulling and having a little control over
where the pigment is going particularly with two
different colors side-by-side. One last thing is if I have too much water
on my paintbrush, I can just happen on my cloth. But if I have too much water and I have pigment on my brush, I don't want to lose pigment
or have to start over. I will take my brush
and I will hold it against or tap it
against the base of the bristles because it
will be able to soak up the extra water but still leave me with a
pigment on my brush. I don't lose the pigment
but I am still able to control how much water I'm
putting down onto the page. All right. I think
you know everything now so we can move on
to our next lesson. [MUSIC]
7. Black-Eyed-Susan: Practice Wet-on-Wet: [MUSIC] We are going to start exploring
our first flower, which is the Black-Eyed
Susan and for this, we are going to
experiment with a wet on wet technique and explore shapes and the dynamic of working with watercolor wet on wet
in a variety of ways. In the class, there is
a downloadable packet called reference photos and it has all of the reference photos
we're going to be using for this class. If you want to go ahead
and download that, you can have it
either up next to you on your desktop screen. You can do it like
me where you have it on a phone or a tablet next to you just as reference or if you prefer, you
can print it out. The first flower we're going to be looking at
is the Black-Eyed Susan. The Black-Eyed Susan is I think
a fun flower because it's like a lot of your cone flower
shapes just in general. Things like daisies,
Black-Eyed Susans, and even to some extent
something like a sunflower. It really informs you and
teaches you how to paint something that wraps around
a larger prominent center. When I am painting, I always start with the center of any flower
that I'm painting. The center is where
everything stems off of and by starting
in the center, we are really grounding our
painting and really allowing for perspective and just proper
alignment of everything. I'm going to grab a ceramic tray that I have with a
bunch of yellows in it. I'm going to use cadmium
yellow and I'm just going to squeeze them out of the tube here because the cadmium in my
palette is running low. You may have seen there I also squeeze some into my palette and that is for this
to dry and cure. That's how I just refill my
palate when it's running low. We're going to use some yellows
and we're also going to use some brown for the center. One of my absolute
favorite colors to also incorporate is
this Payne's gray. It's like a dark navy blue gray almost and
it is my absolute favorite one to add into
any other colors to create shadow effects or just really
add something more dynamic. I'm going to go
ahead and start with using a little bit
of Payne's gray, but I could also just
as easily start with a dark brown to
create the center. As we do this
wet-on-wet technique, we're going to do a
couple of things. First, I'm just going
to come in with a wet brush and
I'm going to paint that dome-like shape that is in the center of
our Black-Eyed Susan. Then I'm going to grab
some of that Payne's gray, or brown, or whatever color it is you
want to use for this center. Honestly, it has a little
bit of a purple hue to it, so you could even mix a
little bit of that in. I'm just going to
start by just dropping it into the water and the pigment on
the brush is going to only go within the confines
of the water that you have put onto the page unless you
physically move it around. By that I mean, if
I drop water here, it's not going to just
keep spreading forever. It is very hydrophilic, so it's very water-loving
and it's going to stick with the water and follow
where the water goes. I have dropped some wet
pigment into some water on the page and now I'm
just refining the shape by pulling that water
around with me. I'm going to leave this top part just a little bit lighter. You can see it's darker along the bottom and a
little lighter in the center and I'm going to lean into that as I
start this painting. Now, I've done this
foundational color and it's incredibly wet because we put water
on the page and then dropped wet
paint into that. I could keep adding color to it, but I'm not going to
have as much control over where the
pigment is falling. I know it's going to fall
within where the water is, or where the wet paint is but I won't have
as much control. I might just come
in and tap along the bottom with just a little
bit of paint and dab that in there just to promote the bottom area
being a little bit darker. But ultimately any refining
I'm going to want to do, I'm going to do after, it's dried a little bit. Maybe not dried all the
way but at least dried a little bit because
right now it's quite pooled in there. From here, I'm going
to start creating the shapes of the petals. As you will recall, we looked at this exact shape of this petal when we were
talking about pressure and angle of our brush in one of our last
lessons on technique. Make sure that you
are practicing that technique as
we go along and I'll talk you through
it here as well. Just coming into where I
put my cadmium yellow, but you can use any
yellows you want to I just grabbed cadmium. I'm just coming in with
water and I'm pulling right at the very edge of this. I don't want to just dab right into the middle
because I really want to be able to control
how much paint I have. I'm going to then rinse my brush off and come in here with
a clean brush that's damp but not overly saturated and I'm going to touch right near the base of this to start
creating these petals. But I'm not going to touch
completely up against here, especially where all
of the ink is pooled because it will turn my petals just completely that color. I don't want them quite
completely that color. Over on the other
side over here, I may touch a little
bit where there's less pigment and you can see it really pulls the
pigment in with it. Then if you have too much, you can just go in and
pull some out there. As I'm creating these water
areas for the petals, I am doing the exact same shapes that we talked about here. Depending on where
the petal is falling, is it further in the
back or in the front, I'm going to change
whether it's long, or whether it's this more
squat position or shape. I'm going to do that based
on the pressure that I'm applying to my brush. I've only done three, or four petals here, but I'm going to come in
with ink before they dry and also so that you can see
what I'm doing here. [LAUGHTER] Now I'm just going to start bringing in
some of the pigment. Because I want to
maintain the shape, I'm going to be making
sure it's coming along at least on
one edge and then I'll tap it and elsewhere and it will disperse itself over the length of the
water as it's drying. One tip I usually like
to give is as you are applying your pigment inside of where you have placed
your water shapes, is that you can just
dab it in and just let it dry in whatever shape it ends up drawing in but if you're
wanting a very specific shape such as the center
or along a petal, you are going to pull your paint down the length of your water. By which I mean, I'm
going to start up here, but I'm going to pull it down and along and you
can see I'm pulling the pigment down so that even if not every part of this petal is going to
be full or as saturated, it might be a different value
depending on where it is. At least it will
be in the shape, or in the suggestion of
the shape that I want it to be in which is important when we're creating a very specific thing
because we want it to be in the shape of what it is so that our audience
knows generally what it is. Just coming in, dropping in some water and pigment in to where I had
placed the water. You can see which ones touch
the center and which ones didn't and if you
change your mind afterwards since it's still wet, just happen there and it will go ahead and
pull that pigment in. How they mix with
each other depends on the way of the pigment, but also, is there a
buckle in the paper? Is it on an angle,
anything like that? Too as I'm working, particularly with this
wet on wet style, keep in mind that while
you are using water, you are still in
control of the water. A lot of times, especially with beginning
watercolor artists, we either use too much
or too little water. Once we start using
too much water, it just starts to get soggy and we lose control
and we end up with just areas that aren't
what we wanted them to be. As I'm dipping my
brush in my water, I am rubbing up against
the side and you can see it squeezes out some
of the water back in there. As I am picking up more paint, if I feel like my
brush is too wet, once I have the pigment on it, I'm tapping it along the
base of my bristles. I'm not going to rub it on
my cloth or my paper towel. I'm tapping or holding it along the base
and that sucks out the extra water without
losing the pigment. Realized I didn't have
a water area down here. I'm just going to do a couple
other, just really short, almost suggestions of petals in the back to give the idea that there are
in fact petals back here, without necessarily
doing full-on petals. I put too much water down here. I'm just pulling the
water out by drying off my clean brush and dabbing it in until it
soaks up the water. While everything is still wet, I'm going to come in with
maybe a light orange. If you don't have a light
orange but you have red, you can add a little
bit of red to yellow and mix that up. This is just to add
a little bit of saturation and a little
bit of dynamic in there. Because I don't want that
much black pulled in, I'm just coming in
here and picking up extra water and
the extra pigment, and you can almost
push it back too. I don't know if
you can see that, but there was enough water
and pigment in there that I could actually almost push the dark pigment back
into the center. Like, hey, get back to
where you came from. The ability to push and pull pigments based on the
water that you're using and how much
water you're using is a very unique part of
painting with watercolor. While this is still going on, I'm going to come in
and start with my stem. The stem on the Black-Eyed Susan is just very straightforward. It starts in the middle, and then comes out
down the bottom here. There are two things I
didn't like about that. One is, I lost the
definition between the stem and the petals. I'm just going to come
in with a dry brush, and try to pull that
out a little bit and help define it
a little bit more. Because we won't be
able to see the stem, otherwise, I might just
not even put it there. The Black-Eyed Susan leaves
that we don't have them in this reference or that shape
that I've been teaching you. That's partially why we
are doing this one first, so you guys can
practice your shapes with just changing the pressure of your bristles on the page. We will come in with
slightly different color. Because I never liked to have just one flat color on the page. Adding a second color adds
dimension and shadow, and it really helps the
eye move across the page. I'm going to come in for this
one with the blunt end of my brush and just do a
center line just to add a little bit of movement
and detail in there to help guide the eye
as it goes along. It's still quite wet. I'm going to let it
dry just a little bit, and then we can come
back and finish this up. It has mostly dried, at least dried where
I want it to dry. There are a few things about
this that we can look at. When we're doing wet on wet, we end up with these very fluid
lines in a lot of places. Sometimes we end up with these
sharp lines within that. That's where there may
have been a pool of water and the pigment settled right
around the edges of that. You can just come
in with a clean, wet brush but more damped
than wet, not saturated. Just move the paint around if you want to
get rid of those lines. At this point, I can now use that extra paint from
that just to fill in this top area because I don't
want it to be fully white. That's also a really nice way to blend two colors together, it's just with a damp
brush that's clean. I don't want it to be too wet. But say over here, I don't
really want these to be quite so blunt. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to come in and just start blending
out these colors. In the same way that we
would come in to lift paint, we can use that same
agitation technique to blend our paints together. At this point, I am going to come in
with a little bit of dark brown to start building
that dome shape. Simultaneously, because now I'm using brown and not black, I can start working on this
darker area of my petal by coming in with a light
brownish red if I want to, and start to bring that
color down a little bit. If you're wanting to
make sure that you are maintaining a wet on wet style, you can come in with
water first over that, and then start adding
that darker color on top. Or you can come in and do
a little bit of wet on dry technique where you're putting that wet paint
on top of the dry paint, although some of this
paint is still quite wet. It will be a
combination of the two. If you end up with some
lines that are just too liny for you, especially for doing
something looser, you can just come in and move it around with some
water on your brush. You really have quite
a bit of control over watercolor once you get to know it and understand
it a little better. Now I'm going to come in with
the blunt end of my brush and just add some
of these lines, these striations in the petals. You can also come
in and do like wet on dry and get more
details that way. You can come in and use ink
or graphite on top of this. This is just a fun way to add a little bit in without making it very detailed because we're trying to be a
little looser here. I'm also going to come and
do some paint splatters. Coming in with a
saturated brush, I'm going to pick up
some pollen light color and holding it about an inch above the page horizontally, I'm just going to tap.
There you have it. This is the foundational
part of this flower. If I wanted to, I would
let it dry all the way and then I could
come in and add detail. We might also come
in with some salt at this point because the center of the Black-Eyed Susan is quite textured. I'm going to come in. I always just have
some sea salt, just whatever salt
you have lying around and just tap it into the middle or
drop it into the middle. The salt will pick
up the texture, or will pick up the pigments. Then you end up with things like this where you have a
lot of texture in there. I added it to the wings of this chickadee just to
add some texture into the wings to pull out that
texture of feathers in there. That is it for wet on wet. We will keep exploring
this and we will explore different versions of this
as we move forward in class. Once your salt has dried,
if you've added that, you can just rub on
top of it and it comes loose and then you can
throw it in the trash. [MUSIC]
8. Aster I: Practice Wet-on-Dry: [MUSIC] Next up we are going to be looking
at the Aster flower. It's a very sweet little flower and we'll be using it to look at a wet on dry technique and experiment with that
a little bit further. To do a wet on dry, we have a dry piece of paper. The wet in this case is
going to be our paintbrush. We're going to just start by looking at the
color on the page. I've gathered a little bit
of pigment on my brush. I'm going to start
from the center of the flower and
work my way out. We're going to be using
a very similar technique that I taught you in the very beginning of this shape based on the pressure that we're
applying on the page. Because the Aster
has a rounder end, we're going to be starting
with a lighter touch, pushing down a little bit, but not all the way, depending on how
wide your brush is. Then we're going to just
lift when we're done, instead of easing up. That way, we get
that rounded end, like you see with this flower. I'm going to start
with the petals knowing that the
center makes a circle. But I don't quite want
to add the center yet. We're just going to go around. You can vary the
pressure depending on what angle it seems to be at. This one's a little more on
its side than the other ones. Just remembering that you
are painting what you see and not what
you know is there. You are, I don't know what that one was there [LAUGHTER]. You are painting based
on what you are seeing. Some of them might be
thinner than other ones, some of them might be thicker. But you can see with painting with this wet on dry
technique that you really have a lot more control over
where the paint is going on your page and the shapes
that you're creating and how it's going
to dry on the page. If I'm painting something that I really want a lot of detail in, such as this flower, I'm going to be
really wanting to consider painting wet on dry. If I'm using a wet-on-wet
technique, me personally, I like to use it with more
like a background wash, which we'll be exploring in one of our later
lessons here. But for me, I like to have a little
bit more control over what I'm painting. For you, since you're
taking note of what it is that you like about these different
techniques so that you can incorporate that into
your final painting, it might be a little
bit different for you. Just take note and notice
what it is that you like and we'll just
go from there. I've painted just wet on dry and then I'm just coming in
with a little bit more of the same color and I am adding a little
bit of water while my paint is still wet and I'm
using the exact same color. But this works almost the same way as adding a
different color in terms of adding dimension and shadow
effect in the flower. [NOISE] Now, while
it's still wet, I'm going to be coming
in to add a bit of this yellow center and
the center of this aster, if you're looking
at your reference, is quite detailed and I don't necessarily know that I want
to add that much detail, but what I do know is that I don't want to just
put like a blob in the center because that feels
more loose water color, wet on wet to me. I might do a couple
little marks. Some of them might
be blob together, but I might just dab, dab, dab in the center to give
the effect of texture. You could also use the salt technique
that you learned in the last lesson here as well. Then as we pull out here, you can see what the leaves and the stem look
like on this plant. While it is still wet, I'm just going to pull down
from the center and I'm going to pull a
little bit of ink, or a little bit of
pigment with me from the center of my flower here. When I'm doing a wet on dry, I like to add
components of it that have that wet on wet
effect so that it still looks really
water-colory and doesn't completely
pull away from that, because I still really
like that loose effect. For our petal, you can see it's that exact same shape
again that we've been practicing where we come
in with a lighter touch, push down for the body of our brush to really
go against the page, and then slowly lift
up our pressure and then you get that
nice point at the end, which these flowers do have. Then I'm coming in with just
a slightly darker green. Just by adding a little bit of Payne's gray to the
green I already used. But you can also just
grab a darker green. It doesn't have to be any
kind of color mixing. A little too much green up here so I'm going
to pull some of that out. Just coming in with
a dry clean brush and just pulling up
some of that pigment. I am going to let that area dry a little bit once I'm done pulling up this pigment and then I'll be able to go in
once that page has dried more and add in a little
more purple in here. It just got a little too
muddy looking for me. I'll add in a little
bit more purple and refine how that
looks in there for myself once I get this and
once the page has dried. Looking more at the flower, I can see they have different
sizes leaves just coming off haphazardly all
over the place. I'm going to do a
few more leaves. I'm trying to be careful not
to get into that wet spot [LAUGHTER] that I just
said I wanted to let dry. I'm just going to add
more leaves in here. I am also going to
recognize here that we have different
stems branching off. Between the leaves, I can start having other leaves
or stems, branching. Leaves and stems branching. The nice thing is that
you can really just make it what you want it to look
like in terms of the layout. Doesn't have to look
like anything specific. We don't have a great layout necessarily on this
reference photo, so I wouldn't want to
imitate the layout here. Then once I have some
of these stems down, I am going to come in and start painting
some more flowers. I can see different shapes and angles of the flowers
in this reference. Some of them might be, maybe some are just coming
little bit more haphazard. I'm looking at it
maybe from the side. Maybe this one is looking
at it from the side. You can see that these get really curly cue
around each other. I feel like we have
the ability to really play around with the
shapes that we're creating. But still just using that same general shape that we learned in
the first lesson. Making our ends more blunt by lifting up sooner or if we don't do that like I didn't, you can just go
in and just round them out with your brush. [NOISE] Then we will come in here
and just start tap tapping. I do want it to touch the purple a little
because I want it to blend just a little bit. But not necessarily as much as I would with a full
wet-on-wet technique. All right. At this point, we can be satisfied if we want to with what we've created. It is a perfectly acceptable
painting and I can just let it dry knowing
that I've taught you this wet on dry technique. This is Part 1 of Aster though. I am going to let this dry
and you can let yours dry. Then once it's dry,
go down to Part 2 in the next tutorial lesson
video here and I will show you how we can do
wet on dry on top of watercolor instead of
just on top of a white page. [MUSIC]
9. Aster II: Details with Wet-on-Dry: [MUSIC] The aster has almost
completely dried. You can see it dried pretty much the exact way I
applied the paint. That's the benefit of having
that wet on dry technique, is really having a lot of
control over how it dries. Now, I'm going to come
in with some purple. I might make it a darker purple. I might make it a pinker purple, whatever you prefer, and just with a
very light touch, I'm going to start coming
in from the center outward. You always want to
move your brush in the direction of the petal, like the grain of the
petal, if you will. If [LAUGHTER]
petals had a grain, you'd be going with the
grain like with woodworking. I'm just going to go
from the center and I'm going to start either, I might do some lines, you can start adding
details or I might just add maybe a shadow swath here, just adding more dimension and detail inside
of my painting. At this point, I'm
also going to correct this area down here
that I was letting dry because the page has now
completely dried down there. I'm not concerned about coming in and having any issues there. You can really choose to do
however much detail you want. You could even do some
shadow lines that you might do with a fine liner pen. If you've taken my
Shading 101 class, you can use that same
flicking technique from that class to create
some shadow lines just with the watercolor itself and not have to necessarily
even come in with the ink, if you're not wanting to have
this be ink and watercolor. Then I just added some
tiny little dots or lines of that purple inside
of my yellow center. I'm not going to come in and do this super detailed center that we have in our
reference photo. I could, and I would
if I was doing a really detailed piece and
if the piece is a lot bigger, but because of the size of the
piece that we're creating, I'm not really wanting to and I can't really
do such tiny detail. [NOISE] I guess I
shouldn't say I can't, I can do anything I want to. But I don't think it would
look very good to get such tiny detail in here
with just watercolor. I realized I have
another stem over here, so I'm actually going to
go ahead and add another. Oh, that one's a little less pink. Let's add
more pink in there. Another little guy over here. Maybe he's still
in that bud phase. Then we get to just
keep building this out. Now that this is dry,
I can come in and add the bottom parts of these
flowers that are more like buds or more on their side
and just make sure that everything is just looking
as it should here. As I'm coming and adding detail
if I'm using a reference, I definitely want to make sure I'm looking at all
parts of the reference. If I need to look at a different
photo, I would as well. Obviously, for the
purpose of this class, I've just provided you
with one reference photo, but you can certainly go look at other reference photos too. This flower also comes
in different colors, so that could be another fun thing for you
guys to look into as well. Then I'm going to add wet on dry second color into my leaves. Wet on dry because I want to be able to really control it. I'm adding a lighter green, so I want to almost
add highlights where the light is hitting
it and so I want to have a little bit more
control over where that lands cause if I
did it wet-on-wet, I'm not sure that it
would only stay on one side or what have you. Just to have a little
more control over it. [NOISE] Now, you can do this step of the process as many
times as you want to. This might be
detailed layer number 2 and then you come in and
add even more detail on top. What I wanted to show you
is that you can come in on top of your dried paint and
start adding more details. You can do many, many, many layers
within a flower, taking into account all
the different highlights and shadows and tones
within that flower, and knowing that because you're working lightest to darkest, the more layers
of paint you add, the darker it is
going to become. Adding more and more layers
is not only adding detail or shadow effects or
more dynamic into it, or making sure you get all
the colors inside of it, but it's also adding
that depth and saturation so that you have those areas that are lighter and those
areas that are darker. I'm not going to
take you through 90 steps of an aster flower, but it is certainly
something that you can be doing and that a lot
of watercolor artists do do. I'm not going to make
a joke about saying do do, but I really wanted to. [LAUGHTER] At this point, I'm going to let this dry, stop having kindergarten
humor here. Can you blame me? My
child's in kindergarten so, sorry. Gosh. Moving on. We are now going to move
on to starting to combine wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry
and we're going to have two different ways
of exploring that. One with a lavender and
one with buttercup. Let's move on to
the next lesson, which is combining that
wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry. [MUSIC]
10. Lavender: Combining Techniques: [MUSIC] For this class, we're going to be
looking at lavender. We're going to start combining our wet on wet and wet on
dry techniques together. For this one, I want to talk
about taping your page down. If you have some masking tape, you might want to tape your paper down
because we're going to be using a little
bit more water for this and your page
can start to buckle. I never remember to
tape my page down, so if in [LAUGHTER] the next few tutorials where we're really
exploring a lot of water, I don't do that, don't necessarily follow my lead if you'd like to take them down. There's a couple of
ways you can do it; you can tape along
the whole top edge, along all four edges
of your painting, along the whole edge. If you're doing that, I just calculate that I'm covering
the same amount of tape all the way around or the same around of the paper
all the way around, so when I pull it
off in the end, I have a very crisp border that's even all the way around. For the purposes of this class, I will just probably
tape the corners, or I might not tape at all. However big your tape is, masking tape or painter's tape, whatever you end up using, it's usually too
tacky for me anyway to first just take it off of the roll and put
it directly on the paper. Too tacky because when
after everything is dry, as I'm pulling it off, you're going to get some
paper that gets pulled up. As you can see here on
this watercolor painting, part of the page was pulled
up when I untaped it. If you don't want
that to happen, you can do a couple of things. After you've pulled
it off the role, I sometimes just against my
jeans or against the table. We'll just put it down and
pull it up a few times, just to get rid of
that extra tackiness. Then it can still
stick to the paper and it can still
hold your page down, but it doesn't affect the paper itself and it's
not going to rip it as much. Go ahead and tape your page if you want to for this class. I'm not going to because
I don't want to. [LAUGHTER] It's not something
that I generally do. If you paint something that
is full of color and you realize at the end
that your page is all buckled after your painting
has completely dried, this is what I do, I come with a
mister spray bottle and I just mist the back of it until it's just barely damp. Not the front where I've
painted but the back, and I wait until it's dry, and then I just dry
it under a book, and then it dries super
flat again, no problem. I tend to not tape my paper. To combine a wet on
wet and wet on dry, we are going to experiment
with this lavender. I am going to use a really
big brush right now, but you don't have to. You can still do this with a
wet or with a round brush. I just don't want to take the time away from
the class to do that. You're just going to come
in with your wet brush, and water, and just paint
water across your whole page. This is the wet on
wet technique part that we're going to be
experimenting with here. Make sure your page
is nice and wet. It doesn't have to be sopping, but certainly make sure
it has moisture on it. Some parts can be
more wet than others. It doesn't have to
be very uniform. You can see it start to buckle,
which I don't care about. But I know some people
do and that's okay. [LAUGHTER] Then you're
going to come in with some purple paint and you're just going to start
applying that wet on wet. I am using a bigger brush
for the sake of time. I can also come in
with a round brush. This is a slightly bigger one. Once I get that initial
first layer down, then I come in and just start adding other places while
everything is still wet. I know it's really buckling, and you think I'm nuts for
not taping my page down. But just [LAUGHTER] going to add a little additional
purple here and there, to add a little bit of
dimension in the background. Now, we are going to let
this dry completely, and then we will come
back and do wet on dry, after we've done that initial wet on wet wash in
the background. Now our wash is almost
completely dried. It is not all the way dry, but it is quite dry, and you can see
how buckled it was before when I was applying the paint and struggling
with you guys here, has gone away as it's dried. That's why I don't tend
to tape my paintings. But were I to use that
much water across the whole page through more of the process of
painting, I might tape it. In fact, we'll probably
tape in the next lesson where we'll explore even more of this wet on wet combination with the wet on
dry, so stay tuned. I am going to start
creating my lavender here. The little lavender
buds are so sweet, and they're really nice
flower to learn as beginners in watercolor
because they're just these little oval shapes, and it's really nice to be able to create them on the page. I'm going to do three
little sprigs together, and I'm going to do
them a couple of ways, or creating the little flowers
here a couple of ways. One is I can just paint
a tiny little circle. Then I can paint a tiny little circle
next to it if I want to. Or, I could come in and do just an outline that's
not really filled in. I can also just smudge them together with maybe
an outline here, and just start building, combining all of
these different ways. They're obviously very circular, one on top of the other. You can be really
specific like that, where you can create your own interpretation of
lavender, like I'm doing. I will leave that up
to you depending on [LAUGHTER] your comfort level with making up your own flowers. In the beginning, I was not comfortable
with that at all, so if you just want to paint exactly like you see
it, you go right ahead. As you can see here, I'm
just going to continue building out these
little buds of lavender, and with the idea of
the general shape of the lavender sprigs itself, while also maintaining or
continuing that same shaping of the little buds with
little flowers inside of that bigger shape and just building them on
top of each other. While this is still wet, I'm going to come
in with my green. I'm going to make
sure it's not super wet on my brush because
I don't want to overwhelm these little
baby circles here. I'm going to come down
just so lightly down the center so that there can be some
mixing of these colors. If it looks overwhelming
in any areas, I'm just going to come
in with a dry brush and pull up some of
that green paint. Because I'm just
wanting to create any kind of shape I
want to and make up my own version of
this little lavender. I'm going to go with the flow on this color mixing on the page and just create maybe a
second lavender behind it, almost using this combination
on the page here. Picking up some of that
green that I used, that mix with the
yellow and using that with this other flower
that I have behind. Sometimes when lavender
start blooming, they almost get these little wispies coming out at the end. I'm going to add a
couple of those. Just a very light touch. I'm just touching
just the very tip of my round brush here and just doing little lines almost
out of this lavender. Again coming in, just really
making sure I don't have a super saturated brush. It was a little
oversaturated over here, although the end result
was quite lovely. I might start doing some leaves which is just that same
shape we've been practicing. Where you're just
changing the pressure of your brush without
necessarily changing the angle and changing how
quickly you pull it up. To change whether
it's a more blunt, rounded end or this
more pointy end. [NOISE] Now these
are definitely very off-center and I don't
really want that. I'm going to do another one over here
that's maybe a little bit shorter and apparently
a little thicker. You can see I'm holding
a little higher on my brush as I am
wanting to lose. I like this feeling of it giving the idea of
being lavender without necessarily having every
single little bud in there. It holds the same shape,
generally speaking. I'm going to lean into that
and so to lean into that, I'm just holding
higher on my brush. But I'm going to go closer to the bristles for my stem
because I want to have a little bit more control over how much pressure and
what the line looks like. Sometimes when I'm
pushing to lightly, I skip across the page. Then I need to go
back and fix that. I also should have
warned you earlier in class that I am terrible about starting my paintings
or starting filling in my paintings on
the right side of the page and then moving left, which is totally fine except that I'm right-handed
and I always smudge because I'm impatient and I
don't wait until this side is done trying to move
on to the other side. Keep that in mind.
You might not want to be as impatient as me in your creative
career with watercolor. Somebody inevitably and
every class has said that to me or in a
tutorial saying, why are you painting from
the right to the left? Shouldn't you paint from
the left to the right? Yes, I should. Have
I learned my lesson? No. Well, I've learned
it but I don't remember it in the moment
when I'm already. I think I want one more
little guy over here. Maybe one of those ones that is missing a few of the buds. I'm going to skip a space there and here's just going
to be a little fellow. Then while my brush or while my ink's pigment is still wet, I'm going to come
in with my brush. Not too full of water, but full enough that
I can paint with it and bring down
my last stem here. Honestly, I could keep playing with this
for a long time, but I will stop for
the sake of the class. I'm going to come in with
some splatter though. Just filling my brush with
some of this pink or purple, just going to hold it a couple of inches horizontally above the page and just
splatter a little bit. I don't have a lot of
water on my brush and have a smaller round brush, so the splatter will
be rather small. If I were using a
really big brush and I had a lot of water and
pigment on the page, it would be really big
splatters. There you go. Here's our example
of our lavender using a combination of wet
on wet and wet on dry. You can see how it differs
from our Aster flower. Though we did wet on dry, it has a very different
feel to it because we also have that wash
in the background. It's starting to mix
that more specific, precise painting with
something a little looser. In the next video, we're going to explore
that looseness and that combination of wet on wet and wet on dry a
little bit more. Then in the very last tutorial, we're just going to go bananas and have a
little bit of fun. But remember that you are taking note throughout this class at the things that you really like, the techniques you
really enjoy doing. Because I want you to
be able to combine that into your final project. [MUSIC]
11. Buttercups I: Building Layers: Next step, we are going to
be doing the buttercup. For this, though I'm terrible
at replacing my water, I do want you to replace your
water and get freshwater if you have any color
in your water. That is because yellow is such a bright and
translucent color that it gets muddied
really easily. If I were doing a darker color, a dark brown or dark
green or dark blue, I wouldn't necessarily care as much about changing my water, but I am a little
bit more precise and conscientious about changing my water when I'm using yellow. Get new water now
if you need it. Then we are going to be
creating something like this. This is combining wet on
wet and wet on dry in a slightly more nuanced
way than we did with our lavender
in the last lesson. If you want to tape it
down, I would do that. I'm going to do that now. When I did this as a practice, I messed up the paper, so let's tape it down
together the proper way. [MUSIC]. I am going to be using
a cadmium yellow and probably a lemon yellow primarily as the
yellows in my page. I'm going to start this the same way that I
started the last one. Again, I apologize, I'm
using a really big brush. If you don't have
one, that's okay. It'll just take you a
little bit longer to fill the page and I don't want to take that time
out of class to do mine. I'm just going to wet my page. You can see it's a lot easier
when you tape it down. I don't know why I don't just
tape it down religiously, but we all have our strange habits as
artists and creatives. I want to have lemon yellow as the way background,
that first layer. Applying that in the
wet on wet technique. Then I'm going to come in with my round brush and grab
some cadmium yellow, which is this more
warm golden yellow that you see here on my dish. I'm just going to
start laying that in different areas on the page
while the paint is still wet. We're going to have a
couple of different hues, a couple of different
colors here on the page and start varying how things
are saturated on the page. Then I mix in with
some little more lemon yellow just to add
it here and there. Now, at this point, I may also come in with
a very light green, and I have a yellowy green that I'm going to use and
I might just start doing a couple lines for where some
of my buttercups might be. I'm just doing, just on the
tip, just really loose, holding it up higher on my brush so I have
less control over my paint lines just to create those lines
that are going to be the stems of my buttercups. They do not have to
be very precise. They do not have to be specific. If you feel like you put
down too much paint, you can just come in
and blend it in with the background because
everything is still wet. It is also going to, as they dry, these lines that you've created on top of the wet paint and the wet paper are going to ooze out a little and
spread out a little. It'll still be very
dreamy in the background. You can see here some of the lines in the
background are very light as we start building
up this combination, wet on wet, wet on dry painting. Then I'm going to come in
with a lighter yellow, like a lemon yellow. If you don't have multiple
colors of yellow, that's okay because you could add a dash of green to
whatever yellow you have, like just the smidgest
amount of green if it's a lighter green
and mix that together, or you can just not come in
with as much on your brush. You can really water
it down with water. It really is not imperative that you use
two different yellows. I just want two to demonstrate this more easily to you all. Now, I'm going to come in
while it's still quite wet and I'm just going to start creating general shapes of the buttercups in
the background. Buttercups, they have five
petals that come around, and some of them might
be on their side. Some of them are going to be, maybe we don't see them all. But you can just come in and make sure you
have a good amount of water on your brush
because you don't want to come in and do it
really detailed. We're just going to
create certain areas that we might have buttercups
in the background. The idea with this is
that the whole page gets to be filled
with this buttercup. It's like a buttercup field. It's like you're lying
on your stomach on the grass and looking
forward through this dense field of
buttercups before you. Some of them will be up higher, some of them will be down lower. I'm really just very loosely holding my brush up
higher and coming midway up in the body of this
round brush to get a little bit more mark on the page as opposed
to coming in with just the tips for the stems. I might just start doing
a couple little leaves. Again, I can add more
water to my brush, and that's going to help with that dreamy ethereal background feel that we're building. It's way too much. I'm just coming in with some
water. Get rid of that. As we're painting these layers, it's also drying in-between
our painting time. Now, if you want it to dry a little bit more as
we're going along, if you decide, hey,
you know what, I think I'm ready to start doing more specific detailed flowers, then by all means stop, pause the video and go ahead
and start adding those in. After your page has
dried a little bit more. I'm going to come and start
doing some cadmium yellow, which is a slightly darker yellow if you only
have one yellow. This is when, if it's
more about lemony yellow, this is when you could add
maybe a little dash of orange or a tiny little bit of red just to warm it
up a little bit. You can see some areas are still much wetter
than other areas. That's when you're going
to get these areas that are just a lot more dreamy throughout. Then as things dry, you're going to be able to
add much more detailed look. Let me show you on
this page here. I'm taking the body
of my brush and just blooming it in a circle. I know blooming here is
not a technical term, but that's what I'm doing
as opposed to coming in from sharper angle and
just doing the tip of it. I'm just coming down
a little shallow and just still very light pressure, and just doing it in
almost like a C to create this shape
of the buttercup, which is very round. Then I'm just going
to start building it and just keep painting
these circle areas. The flowers in the background, in real life perspective, what's in front
of us is going to be bigger than what's behind us. In this instant, I was making the background
flowers bigger than I actually want the
foreground flowers to be. Because they were
still really wet and I know they're
going to disperse, so I was facilitating
their dispersion. You see here they
all melded together, and I wanted to make sure I
can still get the shapes. I'm going to make it a little
bigger so as it disburses, it's still maintaining
its shape. Then since it's all mixed
together in the background, we can't really tell as we come forward that our perspective
is maybe off a little bit. In here, you can't
really tell that this flower is twice
the size of this one. It just adds to
that look that we have and helps add
to our perspective. At this point, I'm
just coming in with my warmer yellow,
my cadmium yellow, and I'm just adding
some flowers. Some of them, maybe
they're on their side, so we don't see all
of it like this one. They don't all have to be
round with five around it. You can imitate this
shape if you want. Pick a shape in your reference, look up another reference, and just start looking at the shapes of the
different flowers. At this point, my
page is quite full of yellow flowers and I
want to start bringing in a green for the
stems and the leaves. But I still want
to be very light. I'm coming in with
a brighter green than I had before or
less of a yellowy green. That just depends on how you mix all the colors that you have. I want you to feel like
you can use what you have. But I'm just going to
come and just very loose, start finding areas where I can put some of these stems. I want them to have some
nice curves to them. I'm coming from the center, base of most of these flowers, and then I'm just
pulling down whether it's going directly through something or stopping
and going around. I will also start doing
that with some leaves, but I want my leaves to
still be pretty loose. I'm going to come in with
quite a bit of water. Then it'll just start making those shapes that we've been working on with
the lighter touch, pushing down and
then lifting up. If you're not putting
things exactly where I'm putting things,
that's great. I want you to get into
the feel of this. This is one of the
most fun ways I think there is to create. This is the zone where I start getting really
happy about painting, where I can start adding
different elements together. Some of them are going
to be really clear, some of them are going
to be less clear, and how do I make that happen. For me, this is almost like
a meditative thing here. Take your time if you
need to pause the video, if I'm distracting, go ahead and pause the
video and just create. When you get to this point
where the pages pretty full, then we're going to let it dry. At this point we have blobby, ethereal areas, we have more specific outline
starting to appear. From here we're going to really make the foreground flowers pop. [MUSIC] Once you
get to this point, we will rejoin after
this has dried.
12. Buttercups II: Building Layers: [MUSIC] At this point, your page to be
dry or mostly dry and mostly covered in yellow because we've done that
first initial [NOISE] wash with wet on wet and then we'd been coming in with wet on wet paint to start
creating shapes. Those things are drying. We
are getting a little closer to using that wet
on dry technique. At this point, I can start
coming in and really shaping very specific [NOISE]
flowers with my brush here. Now the shapes that I laid
down are going to have that more specific wet
on dry look that we can create where we have more control over
the shapes and can really start to bring forward those flowers that
are in the foreground. I'm leaving a little space
in the center so that I can add a little more detailing in the center
of these flowers. I'm going to make some of
them [NOISE] maybe sideways. I don't want them
all just facing me. If all five petals
showing some of them, I want to be a little
bit different. I'm just going to be adding some slightly different shapes of [NOISE] petals in
here as well so that I get a little bit
more diversity amongst the look of
these buttercups here. [NOISE] If while you're doing this, you
realize, you know what? I wish I had like
a looser one over here where maybe I want
another loose one up here. Just got more water
on your brush and just come in and shake that, create it yourself or
if you don't like that, there's more
whitespace in an area, you can just come in
and start filling that in rather easily. Even though you're now
doing the more wet on dry. [NOISE] I'm also going to come in with just
this lighter yellow. I'm just filling in the
background a little bit more. I'm keeping in mind that I
still have to add the green. That's going to certainly
take up some of the space. Then I will also of
course be adding the center parts of the flower
while they're still wet. I'm going to come in
with an orange yellow. Just by adding orange to my yellow [NOISE] for the center. The center in a buttercup obviously is the same
color as what's around it. But that would be
tricky to do in this specific instance because everything around it
is also that color. I'm just coming in
and I'm just tapping the very tip of my
brush into the center. That way it is going to be pulled out into the
petals around it, but it's still getting
that darker center area to help it have a bit of an accent to it and
help it pop a little. The more background flowers
[NOISE] won't have that. I accidentally just added a center to some of these
background flowers. I'm actually just going to go in and pull up some of that paint. It's okay if it's in there. [NOISE] I just don't want
it to be as strong as it is for these flowers
in the foreground. [NOISE] Now, while those leaves, and while those
petals are drying, I'm going to come in and
start putting in my leaves. [NOISE] I'm going to come in and barely touch it
on the base of the flower if it's facing the side
like this one so that it goes into the flower but
doesn't overwhelm it. Then I'm just going to
be careful not to bring my stems like directly over a really wet puddle
because if I did that, I would just really muddy it up. Like here. Don't do that. [LAUGHTER] For the ones that are not facing off to the side. I'm not touching it
to the petals of the flower because I don't
want them to mix that way. I also want to be sure
with buttercup that I am adding some stems coming
off from each other. They don't all have their
own individual stem. They branch off each
other in different areas. I don't want to just bring down this stem for every
single one of them. I want to make sure
that they're branching off of link here. They're all [NOISE]
branching off each other. Now you won't always,
necessarily see or be able to show where each one
is branching off too. Don't stress over where all of these stems are going and
if they have a home or not, if they have an ending
anywhere you don't really have to stress over that because
it's all just mixed together, especially with this style. I would not worry
about that at all. I'm also going to start adding these little buds that you see here of the butter
cups before they've bloomed. Which is just these
little round blobs. [NOISE] As I'm adding detail, if I want it to be more
specific and more detailed, I'm going to bring
in more pigment onto my brush if I want it
to be less detailed. Say it's in this more
like a ethereal area. I'm going to make
sure that I have enough water around it or on my brush to help it spread
out as it needs to. I am also at this
point going to be coming in and
adding some leaves. The leaves on the sweet
little buttercups are just those tiny little leaves that we've done a
100 times before. At this point and they're
just really small. They're like that shape
or, small like these. They have a pointy. I'm going to [NOISE]
get into the body of the leaf faster so that I can get that pointy end in there without making
my leaf really big. Then some of the leaves are
not just those pointy ones, but they branch
off of each other. They have these
little tricky ones coming off where it branches. Then near the base
of the buttercup, it has a longer leaf coming off, so it'll come, a whole bunch of these long strokes
can be added together. That's where you can really
start to fill your page. You can really start to fill
it in with these leaves. Don't be afraid of
going over on top of the flowers that
you've already laid down with leaves or with other flowers because
one it's translucent, so you'll see a little
bit of it behind. Two, because that's what
you're creating here anyway is this mishmash eye candy of [LAUGHTER] color and shape
and everything like that. [NOISE] Now at this point, I'm going to let
everything dry because at this point what I'm
going to do when I come back is at the center
details and any darkness to the leaves that I feel
I want to add to this. Once you get to this point, go ahead and let it dry. We'll meet back here to
do the final details. I let it dry completely
and then I finished my painting thinking I
was recording it and I did not actually record it. I'm going to talk you through
what I did at the end here. All I did since the last
time we saw this was I added a little bit more
of an orange, yellow. In this case I got
rather orange. They're much more
orange buttercups then you might see in the wild. I added just by
doing little dots of orange into the centers
and just by adding little orange areas
around each petal that I wanted to have be
more in the forefront. I then went in with a darker green just by adding
some Payne's gray to the green I last used and just came in and define some
of these lines. Some areas that were
a little muddier. I made sure I could put
a darker line on top of to really define what
is actually in the front. The muddy part gets
pushed to the background and it doesn't distract the eye. Then after I added those
additional petals and leaves, and I then went
in with that dark green and I did a
couple little dots in the center of the flowers. While the orange yellow
dots in the center, we're still wet in there. Just so it could
combine together. [NOISE] What I mean by little dots is I went
into the center of the flower and just quite literally did some
little dots into the center. Then just make little marks like this into each
of the petals. Then when I was done
with the green, I just came in and added some green dots
in there as well. You can see the green mixes
[NOISE] with golden center or the orange center creating
a little bit more depth. Then at this point, I would just let it dry. I might come back and add some more maybe after leaving
it for a couple of days. But I think if I keep
adding more to it now, it's just going to
get out of control. It's always good to
know when to stop. You can create similar
but very different look or feel or pattern on the page and just experiment and have fun with adding all of these incredibly
different layers, just one on top of the
other, on top of the other. You can just really see how much density and depth you can get by combining that wet on wet and wet on dry technique. [MUSIC]
13. Tea Rose: Shapes & Color: Welcome back to the last flower, so far we have practiced
on wet on wet, on wet on dry, adding
different layers, adding details in
different ways. Now, I want to go over creating
a flower just for fun, that doesn't necessarily look anything like what
we're painting. I know that sounds silly,
I'm just playing with color and with different
background effects, I want to create this
rose with you guys today. Go ahead and open up your
rose reference photo and we're going to be using
parts of this reference. We want to know the
general shapes of the flower and the general
shapes of the petals. If I get a scrap
piece of paper here, I can show you just looking at the different
shapes of petals. I'm going to use the
body of my brush to create these different shapes
that I'm seeing of petals. Then I can look at how
they relate to each other, etc and then we're
going to create a fun, differently
colored painting. It's not really going
to look like this, this is just one that was
similar that I've made. Let's start grab a
pink, yellow, red, whatever color rose
you want to create and we're going to make
just shapes on the page and know how they communicate with each other and the different shapes
that we can create. Just being very loose
about this rose. We're not trying to make an
exact perfect rose here, we're just trying to give
ourselves a few flowers in different shapes and different
angles to play with here. You can see that as I'm
creating these shapes, I'm really leaning
heavily on the body of this brush to be able to make these
different shapes and how they're touching and
where they're touching and how the shapes end up looking in the end is really
just mostly the body of my brush and the
pressure that I'm applying is what
is dictating that. Because I'm just
doing loose shapes, I'm also holding my
brush back further. Now, while this is still wet, I'm going to add a
slightly pinker pink to the middle just by tapping
it in near the center because you can see that it's pinker in
the center and so I want to imitate that just by tapping it in
while it's still wet. Again, I'm not
necessarily following this exact color scheme
and then while it's definitely wet I'm
coming in with a rather wet brush with some
pigment on it for the green. I'm going to be pulling
into and from the color, because I want the
colors to mix together. I don't want it to be
really uniform per se, I want them to really all
melt together if possible. Again, I'm keeping it really loose, while I was over there. Over here, I was less
loose and I really leaned heavily on the body of my brush and I don't
really like that. I'm coming in with
a wet brush and then my dry clean towel and I'm just going
to pick that up. Now, I know that I'm going to be adding something to
the background here. I'm not going to clean
it up all the way, I'm just going to clean
enough that little bit and then when it's
a little bit drier, I'll come in and
add the stem there. I know I'm going
to be adding some looser yellow in the background with this final
technique here that will be practicing or
having fun with. I'm not worried about
cleaning that part of the page perfectly. We know that leaves
of a arose tend to group together
in three or five. I'm just creating
the shapes of those, just with that exact same
motion that we've been doing. I know you're really tired
of hearing me say that, but it really is just that
simple of just creating that same shape over and over again and just building onto it until I get
the shape that I want, the shape of the leaf or the
petal that I'm looking for. I'm going to just try and
keep this really loose. My hand is loose, I'm holding it up high on the brush so I have less
control over it and I'm just creating whatever shapes come out and doing
that same motion. But because I'm
holding on loosely, I'm not going to
have as much control over the exact shape. There is absolutely no
rhyme or reason to where I'm putting these leaves, just putting them where I want to and where I feel
like they should go. I'm not basing it off
anything on here other than the fact that we can see that they come in groups of 3-5 and that they
come off a mainstem. Now, because I said I want to get a little weird with color. I'm going to come in
with like a bluey green , just for fun. Once I fix my [LAUGHTER], I didn't want
mistakes on this one, once I fix my mistake here. Again, I'm not overly
concerned about this white not being
perfectly white, I could just go over it
over and over again. But we're going to be
adding some background here in a different way than we've added
background before. It's just the same movement
over and over again. Where you're holding the brush and how much pressure
you're putting on it is what is changing
any of it and all of it. I'm just going to speed
the video up here for a second just as I add
these dark green leaves. [MUSIC]. Now, I'm going to come
in and do a little wet on dry with the same color that
I had initially laid down or very similar. Just to add a little bit more because they dried quite light. Just to add a little
bit more of a pop to these leaves because I don't really want them
to be quite that light, especially in comparison to this other color that
I ended up adding. I want to come in and
add some splatters, just filling my brush
with water and paint, I'm just going to do little splatters by
tapping my brush. Again, the size of your splatters is
dependent on how much water and how big your brush is. Then I'm going to
come in with water and I'm going to actually move these around a little bit. Smudging these splatters and
making it look more like, grab some green there,
making it look just more like yellow background. Be careful you don't grab a
bunch of green if you don't want to [LAUGHTER] have
it going everywhere. Those are going to be
really hard to fix, I'm just going to go with it. When it's dry, I can
come back in and maybe I can add some more
green leaves in there, or what have you and give it almost the same treatment
as with our butter cups. But just in terms of exploring, I think this is a fun way to see what you can do with
peace and how you can adapt with the
mistakes that you make. At this point it's mostly dry, so I am going to come in with some green here
and just wet on dry, I start to define some of these petals and
stems and leaves a little bit more within this painting because
it's so loose. I don't have to fill every single area that I
want to add definition to. I can just do like
half of a leaf or add a little shadow to a
petal just to help define the shape more. But I don't have to nest but
I'm not creating the shape, I'm just defining it,
if that makes sense. It's almost like a different way of creating that loose feel that we created
with the buttercup. Without adding all of the
layers on top of each other, on top like we did
with the buttercup. But you can still get that like ethereal background where maybe there's another plant behind it. Especially using these
different colors that you may not typically see in whatever it is
that you're painting. You can play with the background and play
with what it looks like. Now, is this my
favorite painting I've ever made, absolutely not. Do I feel like I learned
something from it, yes. I always feel like I learned
something when I paint. I always feel like there's something that I
can get from painting, even if it's absolutely
not my favorite at all. I like this background, I like the way of adding that background, I've
done that before. It was a mistake once
and I went with it and it's definitely
something where I want to keep experimenting. But at the end of the day, we have experimented with
adding different colors, we've experimented with
different backgrounds and how we can add
different backgrounds, to different paintings, depending on what it
is we are creating.
14. Planning Your Class Project: [MUSIC] I wanted to talk through designing
a final project. At this point we have learned how to paint wet
on wet and wet on dry. We've experimented with
very different types of paintings and figured out all these different modes of painting and all these
different techniques. At this point, now we want to see what were the
things that we really enjoyed about painting and how can we incorporate that
into our final project. For me, I know that I
really like loose painting. I like the effect
with the butter cups of having that wet wash in the background and
building up on the wash. Loose wash and building on it. I also like having just a
wild organic feel to my page. I don't want something that's necessarily just
one uniform thing. I wanted to just go
all over the place and interact with each other
more organically so organic. I really like the butter cups. Just in general, I
love butter cups, and I really like the pink
that we used in here, mixed with this yellowy
green that I used. This combination of that pink
and green I really like. This green works really well with the yellow butter cups as well because it carries
something similar. I also really like
this purple color and the shapes of these asters. I might include those in
my final painting as well. Now, when you're creating
your final project, you're not only looking at
the different techniques, but also different ways of
presenting some things. Do you want to have
one flower on a page, whether that's wet on
wet or wet on dry? Do you want one flower that has multiple buds stemming
off of the same stem? Do you want to go totally wild? How do you want to
present that on the page? Also, of course, you're going
to be thinking about size. Do you want to have a card
that you can give to somebody? Do you want a smaller piece? Do you want a full piece? I might do a full nine by
12 piece of paper for this, just because I've painted all these kind of smaller
versions and it would be fun to take it and
paint something bigger. I've been really into vases
lately so I might end up doing some kind of a vase and let's say I want a rose or two and maybe like a
bud if one over here. I want that really organic
feel so I'm going to have some of these butter
cups, drooping. Butter cups go all over. Have butter cups that
are more defined, maybe coming out the side and then maybe I'll make part
of it that wash look so maybe like this
whole center part of the bouquet is going to be more of a wash. Because
I really like that wash. Whether I'm doing it like
this or doing it like this, I'll have to see once am
drawing out the final. I feel like I'm
actually going to use this technique more. I feel like I'm going to paint the flowers and
then I can smudge them on the page and then maybe I can have a
few asters in here maybe. I want them. [NOISE] If I'm mixing it up in here that might get
a little too muddy, so we'll have to see. In the next video, I'm
going to be showing you my final project
as a time-lapse. It's not going to be
talked through but if you want to watch me
create and design it, that's where you would go. Then I will meet you in the final to talk about
what I ended up doing. [MUSIC]
15. Next Steps, Project Reveal + Thank You: [MUSIC] As a reminder, this was my rough
sketch of what I wanted to create for
my final project, based on the fact that
I like a loose feel. I like having that
background wash, but I maybe don't want
it all over the page. I like inorganic meandering
look to my flowers. Really loved the butter cups, I really liked this pink, and green combo happening here, and I just happen to
really like vases. I was considering throwing
in some asters in there. I decided in the end not to, and instead of adding the
asters because I felt like I needed something a
little bit more, but I didn't want to
necessarily bring in another color because of the wash that ended
up being on the page. Let me show you what
my final project is. Not terribly
different from what I was thinking through [LAUGHTER]. Let's pull this camera
up a little bit. It's a much bigger page. I did end up doing this vase, and in this area in
here it was very much, I painted some shapes
of the butter cups, and then I just went in, and smudge them around. You can see I did it along the edges of this as well in the same way
that we did in here, because I do really
like that technique. Because I didn't add the asters, I wanted to add something
else because it was just looking a little too loose, and I wanted something that
could still help it pop. I actually ended up going in, and adding some pencil
drawings in there. I hope you can see them. I
added some pencil drawings, and some pencil lines in there. Some of these pencil
lines were from my initial sketch before I started laying down the paint, and then I went in afterwards, and just added a few little guys popping out here, and there. Just to give it something else, and because me, and my style, I like to add pencil or graphite after I'm done
painting. Here we are. My final project at this point. Go forth into the world. I do want you to create
a final project. It's a very important part of coming full circle with
these skillshare classes, and if you can take photos of
your process along the way, like do you have a sketch? What does it look
like with the first layer of paint down? Second layer? What techniques are you using? Document what you're
doing for yourself, but also then come,
and upload that into your class projects
section of the class. Because it will really
help the other students in the class as well, see how other people
are doing it, and how they can start adapting
this for themselves too, and to see there are
really different projects we end up with at the end. Go to the class
projects section, upload as many process
photos as you took. Let us know the
techniques that you ended up using and
what you loved. I'm really excited to
see your class projects, and to see what flowers
you ended up doing. Is it a card? Is it a print? What is it? Big?
Small? Let us know. Then while you're in there, go, and comment on one of your
classmate's photos as well. There's nothing that
feels better than somebody commenting
on your project. Go ahead, and comment
something kind about what you love about somebody else's project that they've uploaded. Whether it's their colors, the techniques they used, the end layout of
it, whatever it is. Remember, you don't have to
make yours look like mine. You can have individual flowers. You can have a whole
mixes the flowers, and you can really just learn to combine all these techniques
that we practiced in class. Thank you so much for
making it this far. You all are the best, and
I will see you next time. [MUSIC]
Isa Down, Illustrator, Writer, Nature Lover
