Expressive Watercolour Cheetah: Gesture, Light and Flow

1. Welcome To The Class!: Hello, everyone. My name's Will Elliston. And today, we'll be painting an expressive cheetah rather than tight realism, we will chase gesture, light, and character. We will suggest fur with broken edges and dry brush. Let pools of color bloom into soft transitions, and drop in inky darks for those distinctive spots. We'll explore timing from juicy wet on wet passages to crisp finishing accents and practice leaving purposeful whites so the paper does part of the work. This relaxed approach invites playfulness and ease. I've been a professional artist for many years, exploring lots of different subjects from wildlife and portraits to cityscapes and countryside scenes. I've always been entranced by the possibilities of watercolor, but when I started, I had no idea where to begin or how to improve. I didn't know what supplies I needed, how to create the effects I wanted, or which colors to mix. Now I've taken part in many worldwide exhibitions, been featured in magazines, and been lucky enough to win awards from well respected organizations such as the International Watercolor Society, the Masters of Watercolor Alliance, Windsor and Newton, and the SAA. Watercolor can be overwhelming for those starting out, which is why my goal is to help you feel relaxed and enjoy this medium in a step by step manner. Today, I'll be guiding you through a complete painting, demonstrating a variety of techniques and explaining how I use all my supplies and materials. Whether you're just starting out or already have some experience, you'll be able to follow along at your own pace and improve your watercolor skills. If this class is too challenging or too easy for you, I have a variety of classes available at different skill levels. I like to start off with a free expressive approach with no fear of making mistakes as we create exciting textures for the underlayer. As the painting progresses, we'll add more details to bring it to life and make it stand out. I strive to simplify complex subjects into easier shapes that encourage playfulness. Throughout this class, I'll be sharing plenty of tips and tricks. I'll show you how to turn mistakes into opportunities, taking the stress out of painting in order to have fun. I'll also provide you with my watercolor mixing charts, which are an invaluable tool when it comes to choosing and mixing colors. If you have any questions, you can post them in the discussion thread down below. I'll be sure to read and respond to everything you post. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking the follow button at the top. This means you'll be the first to know when I launch a new class or post giveaways. You can also follow me on Instagram at Will Elliston to see my latest works. So let's get started painting this loose letter that celebrates freedom in watercolor. 2. Your Project: Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm thrilled to be guiding you through this calm and expressive process. We'll begin with simple shapes to place the head, back, and tail using warm earth tones and cool neutrals. Next, we'll float soft mid tones, then build pattern by painting around spots and dropping color into wet passages for natural edges. We'll shape shadows, reserve highlights, and add a few confident calligraphic marks, keeping the background minimal to celebrate white space. This project is forgiving and playful, inviting confidence rather than control. To let the water create beautiful, spontaneous surprises. In the resource section, I've added a high resolution image of my finished painting to help guide you. You're welcome to follow my painting exactly or experiment with your own composition. As we're going to be focusing on the painting aspect of watercolor, I've provided templates you can use to help transfer or trace the sketch before you paint. It's fine to trace when using it as a guide for learning how to paint. It's important to have the underdrawing correct so that you can relax and have fun learning the watercolor medium itself. Whichever direction you take this class, it would be great to see your results and the paintings you create through it. I love giving my students feedback, so please take a photo afterwards and share it in the student project gallery under the Project and resource tab. I'm always intrigued to see how many students have different approaches and how they progress with each class. I'd love to hear about your process and what you learned along the way, or if you had any difficulties. I strongly recommend that you take a look at each other's work in the student Project Gallery. It's so inspiring to see each other's work and extremely comforting to get the support of your fellow students. So don't forget to like and comment on each other's work. 3. Materials & Supplies: Before we get started with the painting, let's go over all the materials and supplies you'll need to paint along. Having the right materials can greatly impact the outcome of your artwork. So I'll go over all the supplies I use for this class and beyond. They're very useful to have at your disposal and will make it easier for you to follow along. Let's start with the paints themselves. And like most of the materials we'll be using today, it's a lot to do with preference. I have 12 stable colours in my palette that I fill up from tubes. They are cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, cadmium red, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, serlean blue, lavender, purple, viridian, black. And at the end of the painting, I often use white gouache for tiny highlights. I don't use any particular brand. These colors you can get from any brand, although I personally use Daniel Smith, Winsor and Newton for Holbein paints. So let's move on to brushes. The brush I use the most is a synthetic round brush like this Escoda Purl brush or this Van Gogh brush. They're very versatile because not only can you use them for detailed work with their fine tip, but as they can hold a lot of water, they are good for washers as well. They're also quite affordable, so I have quite a few in different sizes. Next are the mop brushes. Mop brushes are good for broad brush strokes, filling in large areas and creating smooth transitions or washes. They also have a nice tip that can be used for smaller details. But for really small details, highlights or anything that needs more precision, I use a synthetic size zero brush. All brands have them, and they're super cheap. Another useful brush to have is a Chinese calligraphic brush. They tend to have long bristles and a very pointy tip. They're perfect for adding texture or creating dynamic lines in your paintings. You can even fan them out like this to achieve fur or feather textures as well. And that's it for brushes onto paper. The better quality of your paper, the easier it will be to paint. Cheap paper cuinkles easily and is very unforgiving, not allowing you to rework mistakes. It's harder to create appealing effects and apply useful techniques like rubbing away pigment. Good quality paper, however, such as cotton base paper, not only allows you to rework mistakes multiple times, but because the pigment reacts much better on it, the chances of mistakes are a lot lower and you'll be more likely to create better paintings. I use archers paper because that's what's available in my local art shop. A water spray is absolutely essential. By using this, it gives you more time to paint the areas you want before it dries. It also allows you to reactivate the paint if you want to add a smooth line or remove some paint. I also have an old rag or t shirt which I use to clean my brush. Cleaning off the paint before dipping it in the water will make the water last a lot longer. It's always useful to have a tissue at hand whilst painting to lift off excess paint. Also, you never know when an unwanted splash or drip might occur that needs wiping away quickly. I also have a water dropper to keep the paints wet. When you paint, it's important to have them a similar consistency to what they're like in the tubes. This way, it's easier to pick up sufficient pigment. A hair dryer is useful to have for speeding up the drying time and controlling the dampness of the paper. And lastly, masking tape. And this, of course, is just to hold the paper down still onto the surface to stop it sliding around whilst painting. Also, if you plan on painting to the edge, it'll allow you to create a very crisp, clean border. And that's everything you need to paint along with me today and even beyond this class. Now, let's get the drawing ready to start the painting. 4. Preparing The Composition: So let's start with the sketch, and the whole idea of any composition, is to take all the complexity and simplify it into a nice visual language that's easily readable and accessible to the viewer. So starting off with the head there, just to have a circle. Adding a kind of oblong rectangle where the jaw is and then connecting the shapes, with a kind of gesture marking. I'm not looking for accuracy. I'm looking for gesture because gesture has emotion, has feeling, has a sense of movement. Even though this cheetah is sitting down or lying down, by using a soft lead pencil like this, we can be a bit more expressive, and then when we want to refine the details, we can move to a finer lead pencil to really create the structure and highlight which areas we want to detail. But at the moment, we're just laying everything out. The good thing about this gestorial kind of technique this way of drawing in a free, liberating way is that we don't have to have 100% perfection. We're not looking for realism. We're just trying to carry the message of what it is. So we can do a bit of refining later on, but at this stage, I need to convey that it's a cheetah. And we can rearrange or use the rubber to correct the proportions. But we're just mapping everything out in a general way at the moment. Looking at where the front legs are how it connects. Because a lot of this painting that we're going to do, this painting in particular, we're going to be using a lot of implied shapes. We're not going to paint in a lot of details. We're going to suggest things. And that means this pencil line has to give us a structure to work with because what we leave out is just as important as what we put in. And when we do a sketch like this, we're building our mind's eye about how we're going to approach it with the paint. We're not just doing it to help the painting process. We're doing it for our own sake to plan it in our mind. So it's a useful tool drawing. We're going to use the white of the paper a lot, but we have to have an idea of the space and the form of the creature, the cheetah in order to make it convincing. So that's what this sketch is all about. So we've mapped it all out now, and now I can go with a finer pencil. 5. A Gentle Start: Now we have it all sketched out. For the sake of the template, I went into quite excessive detail with all these spots in case someone wanted to have a complete guide. But actually, if I were to do this by myself and the way I suggest you to do it is to not actually draw out every single one of these spots because it's not like we have to count each and every spot and make sure we have every single one there. We're going to use these spots more for our visual language, for our compositional approach rather than being loyal to the actual subject realistically or scientifically. So we're going to use these spots to kind of create that illusion of form because you can see how the cheetah curves around. And depending on the angle that we're looking at this cheetah, it's either going to be a perfect circle or from our perspective, it's going to be skewed a bit or shortened. So that gives it a feeling of form later on. And we don't really want to limit ourselves by drawing all of it because it'll take longer to draw than to actually dab it with a brush later on. So that's just a little side note for the sketch before starting or before approaching the painting. We start off nice and simple by just pre wetting the paper in the background, where that line, that contour line where the cheetah meets the background. We're not wetting any of the cheetah. We're just wetting the background, and we're dabbing in very light paint and making it fade out. We're wetting an area larger than we're actually planning to add paint just so that when we add these dabs, it can gradually fade out into nothing. This is a very subtle thing because even when it's dried, it'll look lighter. We're not trying to do anything bold at the moment, trying to be a bit more subtle, just to loosen up, get into the flow of painting because even for me sometimes, just the white piece of paper without paint on it can feel a bit overwhelming, and you can feel the pressure to paint. So this eases into the painting process nice and slowly and subtly. I'm using gold colors, so and by that, I don't actually mean I'm using gold paint. What's going through my mind is I want to convey this kind of feeling of gold. So then I take that and I look at my palette, and I think, Okay, well, yellow ochre has that kind of gold and feeling, and so does burnt sienna, so I'll use those colors, and those are the colors that I just use, burnt sienna and yellow ochre. And very subtly, I've actually mixed a bit of cobot blue or you can use ultramarine blue as well into this burnt sienna because burnt sienna is quite a vibrant brown, actually, and I don't want it too vibrant. I want it to be quite subtle. So using its complimentary color blue, you can use any blue you want, it will make it a bit more subdue, make it a bit more gray, so to speak. So it's very subtle. You can see it's wet on wet as well, so there's no hard edges going on. This is because I don't want the subject, cheetah to just be a flat silhouette on a white background. So adding these little splats and these little marks that fade out softly convey that feeling of depth. We don't know what these things are in the background. It could be anything a bush it really doesn't matter. It just gives a feeling of depth because if you imagine photo or a camera, the main subject is highly detailed, and then the background, it's a bit more blurred. And wherever I select a color, such as burnt sienna or yellow ochre, I automatically think about it's complimentary. I just talked about burnt sienna and incorporating with a blue. But with the yellow ochre I've used on the right hand side by the pores, I've mixed a bit of a kind of purplish blue because purple and yellow ochre are lovely colors together. Just subtle little touches. On the white of the paper, it makes it look a bit gray because, of course, they neutralize each other. 6. Soft Background: Now I'm going to do a bit of a light wash inside the body. Using the same colors that we used, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and a bit of blue to bring down the vibrancy, just to touch. Again, keeping it subtle bit by bit building up layers. I'm purposely leaving a few gaps of the white of the paper to come through. This is because I'm trying to even at this stage, build a bit of form and shape and these white little gaps follow the direction, the curvature of the body, even if they're quite subtle. Just for the sake of variety, I'm making this little area at the back a bit more yellow ochre, a little warmer. Again, that's just for variety. You don't need to follow exactly. You can make it any color you want, any influence you want, you can make it a bit more bluer, a bit gray. I'm just making some areas off white. For example, here in the face, it's not an essential thing, or at least it's not obvious thing, but when we come over the next layer, it will mean that it's not too jarring. Breaking the pure white allows the viewer to understand the form a bit better. Builds the silhouette of the cheetah a bit better. And you can see on the left hand side, we've got the dark background against at the moment, the light of the cheetah and then on the other side where the head is, the head is darker than the background. So already we have some dynamics going on light on dark and dark on light. Even if we're still keeping it subtle, a few slats I've actually figured out that using natural hair brushes, instead of synthetic brushes are the best for splats because natural hairs are bit softer, and they flick the paint off in a much more controlled way, it goes where you want it to go. But synthetics hairs, when you want to splat, the hairs are too rigid, so they're a bit more random and they go everywhere on the table on the desk. Using a tissue just to dab away some of them because I don't want it to come off too strong, just a subtle depth. 7. Mixing The Colours: So that's the base layer done, and we can let it dry off completely now. We can even use a hair dryer to make sure it's absolutely dry before the next stage. So let's mix the colors we want to use for the spots because I'm going to only use about three colors, but I'm going to use them in a lot of varieties. So we've got burnt sienna at the bottom, and in the next panel along, we've got black or neutral tint. And then the one above, we've got cobalt blue. And my idea with these spots and the rest of the tonal areas of the body in simple terms, we're going to use brown, blue and black. And we're going to create a whole variation of these three pigments to keep it interesting. But those are the core kind of colors, the simple terms. Of course, we'll go into what kind of browns we'll make. Maybe we'll use burnt sienna. Maybe we'll use a bit of yellow ochre to create variations within those browns and blues and blacks. But to keep things simple in your mind when you're painting this, we're basically going to create a range out of brown, blue and black. And this fourth one, again, it's a brown, but a bit more vibrant. So you can see I'm mixing yellow ochre and even a bit of cadmium yellow into there rather than burnt sienna. And then when I mix black into that, it makes it a bit more subdued. So it's still brown, but you can see it's a cooler brown. It's not as red as the burnt sienna. Those our base colors, basically, and we can keep on mixing to them and adding them if we run out. But I have them at my disposal now because we're going to be doing a lot of wet on wet technique, and we want to make sure the paints are pre prepared on our palette ready to drop in at the right time. So I'm starting off by adding a bit more water. 8. Brown Underlayer: Diluting some of these just to start off the wash from left to right, using pure water to begin with, just to pre wet it. This whole class is real time. I haven't actually sped up any of the footage. I've cut off the bits where I'm using the hair dryer, but other than that, you can get a sense of my timing. We have wet on wet. Of course, your climate might be different or the temperature of your room affects the drying time. So really the best bet is to build a kind of perception. You can see with the light against your paper how wet surfaces. And after a while, you can feel and get a sense of how the pigment will react, depending on the wetness of your paper. If it's very glossy wet, then you know the pigment will just run out and spread across merging all the pigments. But if it's kind of more matted, you can still see that it's wet, but it doesn't have that sheen anymore. That's the sweet spot where it'll hold its shape, but the edges will be soft. And that's the kind of area that we're looking for today. At the moment, it's very wet, so you can see I'm dropping this in and these pigments are just going to spread out there'll be a slight bit of texture there. It's not going to be a flat wash, but no clear shape is going to be held when it's this wet on wet at this stage. Just roughly filling out that back area where the tail connects to the body. And then there's some areas that we can pre wet and we can carry on painting in different sections. And then I'm always looking at my painting at an angle to judge how wet or how dry it is waiting for that sweet spot. And you can actually use a practice sheet to determine when that spot is just to get a feeling for it if you don't want to risk it on your actual piece of art, you're painting. As I'm working my way up, I'm getting a bit more saturated, a bit more vibrant. So this brown has a bit more color to it, so to speak, than down below where it's a bit more muted. Using pure water to spread it down and soften that edge. I'm using this pure water over the spots where I plan to go a bit later, but I have to pre wet them to make sure I get that right timing. With some of these areas, I want a bit more of a base layer, so I'm dropping in a bit more pigment, wet on wet to add to that feeling of form because I can't do it afterwards. I want the dark spots to go on top. If I were to paint on top of the dark spots, it would be difficult to control. 9. Wet on Wet Spots: So now at the back of the cheetah we've given it a bit more time to dry. I've looked at it from an angle, and I can see if I drop in this pigment, it's going to hold its shape a bit more. And of course, the thickness of the pigment on your brush affects that, too. If you've got a very diluted wet brush, then it's going to spill out and cauliflower on the paper. But if you've got thicker pigment with less water on your brush, then it's going to hold its shape a bit more just because of the thicker consistency of it. See how those little dots their shape a bit more. And I'm mixing a bit of blue now. These marks that I'm doing now are still spots, but because they're on the back following the spine and we're seeing them at an angle, they look a bit more like short lines. That creates that feeling of depth because they're skewed, we're seeing them at the angle. If we were looking at this cheetah from bird's eye view from straight above, they too will look rounder. But because we're seeing at angle, it helps that feeling of depth and perspective that feeling of form. So I've mixed in these blue dots now with the brown dots. And you can choose where you want to place the blue ones or the brown ones. There's no rule. This aspect of the painting is open for interpretation. It's not like I'm following a rigid structure, just trying to think of a variety. If there's too much brown, I'll add a bit of blue. If there's a bit too much blue, I'll add a bit more brown. That subtle contrast. And it's not a vibrant blue either. It's a subdue. There's not much vibrancy going on this painting. Those soft dots on the tail at the bottom, on the left are quite important because I want this tail to fade from wet on wet spots to harder lines once it reaches the tip on the other side. So we're going to we've started off on the left using wet on wet spots, and we're gradually going to go to harder edge spots as we go along. And that's a good practice as a student to work on that timing. But it's not essential for the painting. It's just an opportunity to practice. I'm pre wetting a lot of these spots now because I want some of them to be wet on wet. But I don't yet know which ones I want to be wet on wet, so I'm just wetting all of them and then when the time comes to paint them in about 5 minutes, I can choose which ones to dab. Likewise, with a tail, I'm pre wetting that bit now. And because it's pure water and there's no pigment in it stage, we have a lot of freedom. So even if we forget to come back, it'll just dry off and nothing will change. That has happened a lot to me. I pre wetted an area with water to come back to it and forgotten about it. 10. Neck Underlayer: If you think about how light and shadow works, the shadow areas are where the light can't get to. So of course, around the neck, where it goes in a bit, there's a bit more obscured from the light. It's going to be darker. So that's why I'm adding a bit more shading where the neck area is wet on wet again, pre wetting the area, or adding a stroke of pigment and then extending it with pure water like I am now. I want there to be a hard edge on the left hand side of this shape where the arm comes across because the shoulder or the leg kind of overlaps the neck area. So there's going to be a hard edge there, and I'm using a tissue just to clean up that edge because the wash was lending into the shoulder area. But I want there to be a clean distinction on that edge there. So I'm planning and thinking about which areas I want to have a soft edge and which areas I want to have a hard edge. Using a mix of that burnt sienna and yellow ochre brown. It's quite difficult to think about these colors in a logical way because it's so spontaneous and I'm trying to think about feeling my way through it rather than logically putting it into words in my mind. I have a warm brown and I have a cool brown. The warm brown is at the bottom of my palette almost looks red. And the cool brown, even though brown is a warm color, you can still get warm and cool within those colors. So I'm mixing warm browns and cool browns. Going back to this tail now, adding a bit of a harder edge now that it's had more time to dry. 11. The Tail: Now for painting the tip of the tail, we've already added a bit of brown, and now I'm mixing a kind of dark, muted blue. Of course, in reality, it's black, but because we've got a brown there already, mixing this blue on top will neutralize it anyway. And even if we still detect the blue there, it aesthetically looks nice. It's pleasing for the viewer because they're complimentary colors. We're trying to plan out the wetness of the paper. I made sure it wasn't so wet that the blue would completely mix and spread out. These stripes still have their shape and form. And if we want to add even more details, we'll have to wait even longer or use the tissue to dry it out even quicker. I'm going back and forth a bit trying to feel what's right, whether I want it to be a softer edge and adding more water or wherever I want it to be a bit more detailed and harder edges. Because sometimes in your mind eye, it can feel right, but when you actually see it on the paper, it doesn't look the same. It doesn't have the same result that you wanted. So that's perfectly fine to edit or change the vision or the plan. I rarely goes smoothly painting process. The whole idea of watercolor in particular is to be comfortable with these mishaps and the problem solving aspect of it. How to tweak things. And there's usually a checklist you can go by and comes down to the elements, whether it's tonal, whether it's color, whether it's texture, edges, shapes, you can go through all of them as a kind of checklist to see what is off and what can be changed to possibly correct it or make it better. And 12. Abstract Spots: So whilst we were painting that tail, the neck area had some time to dry. So now it's time to add some wet or wet dots on there that they're going to spread out nicely with a soft edge but not completely disappear. Again, I checked the paper at an angle against the light, and I could see that it wasn't shimmeringly wet. It was just damp. I could see there was still moisture there, but it wasn't soaking wet. So those dots are going to hold their form quite nicely. Likewise, the body that we pre wetted with water before, pure water has had enough time to absorb into the paper, and it's at the sweet spot now where we can achieve nice spots with soft edges. And I can choose and decide which areas I want these to be. I don't want to paint all of them wet on wet. So I'm not sticking to one area. I'm kind of jumping about back and forth, starting with the brown. Burnt sienna with a bit of black or blue to subdue it a bit. I don't want it to be fully vibrant. Again, if you're finding this wet on wet technique a bit difficult. If you're applying a brush stroke and it's bleeding out too fast, it's either because the paper is too wet or the pigment is too thin on your brush. It's too diluted. If you're painting from pans rather than tube paint, it can be even more difficult because pans are usually rock hard dry. They're solid, they're not wet at all. So when we try and get color from a pan, we use a lot of water to activate it, because we use a lot of water, only the surface of that pan is diluted and it's diluted a lot, it's actually quite thin. You really got to mix the water in maybe even a couple of hours before you start your painting process to get that Marmite Belimte texture, that buttery thickness that you need. But I'm not saying this can't be done with pans. Every artist has their own strategies, their own way of working. And that's what makes the student galleries so interesting, seeing how different methods and approaches affects the final result. I know a lot of students and artists don't like using a palette. They prefer to go straight from the tube, and that's perfectly fine, too, because a lot of these browns can be bought direct from a tube. And although I've mixed some of these browns, you can use pure Sienna if you want to. You can use pure blue. In fact, my blue looks a lot like pain gray, I think, because Payne's gray is basically a very dark blue, desaturated blue. And in fact, there are strengths in using paints directly from the tube because it limits the palette and by limiting the palette, it makes the whole piece a bit more cohesive. It brings it together. It harmonizes everything, especially as a student. So don't be put off for the fact that I'm using a palette here because you don't actually have to use a palette if you don't want to. You can start to see now the way I'm generally distributing my colors. You can see that I've got some brown areas, some darker black areas, and some blue areas and it's not uniform. It's all balanced within each other and quite random. 13. The Head Underlayer: Now we can start painting the under layer of the face. I'm going to mix a bit of blue in the ear area. Not a pure blue, desaturated monotone kind of blue. And that's because we've got so much brown going on. I want something to counteract that brown using its complimentary color. Starting off with a nice strong dab and then cleaning my brush and using pure water to spread it out the area I want it in. I've left a little tiny gap between the edge of the year and the background. The tiniest little white of the paper. It's those tiny little subtle details that actually make it feel like it's got more finness than it actually does because there's a lot of abstract elements to this painting. This painting is more about suggestion and detail, but having little subtle things like that. Anchor it and hold it together and allow the viewer to understand what it is without having to explain every single detail because often by spelling everything out, ruins the feeling and the excitement. And it actually it's the way we see the world. We don't actually see most of things with full detail. A lot of it's peripheral, and a lot of things are naturally obscured anyway. The perfect lighting doesn't necessarily exist everywhere we look so this subtle background, this shading we're doing now, the underlayer. I glues and combines it is the structure. Particularly in the head area because we're not actually focusing on much of underlayer, the rest of the painting. We've got a bit on the body, but it's really, really subtle. This head is the focal area, and in every composition, there's a hierarchy. So we always begin with the end in mind, and our focal point is the head, the eyes, and the dark kind of tear like lines. And everything else supports that moment in the painting. So we need to keep that face sharper with a few more sharper details. And a bit more contrast. That's why we're using the blue. And the body's looser, so the eye naturally travels to the character of the eta. This whole composition has been broken down into larger shapes. So three shapes, basically, we've got the head, the back area, and the tail. The front pores, I'm going to completely abstract. I'm not going to spend much time thinking about that. Just a subtle gesture, suggestion of those pores at the front because if I were to add detail, then it's going to compete with other focal areas. If these read clearly in a simple kind of silhouette, the painting will hold together even when we keep the rest of the details relaxed and abstract. 14. The Head Midtones: So that's the initial layer done, and whilst it's still wet, we can actually move on to the mid tones, wet on wet by dropping in some of that same pigment, the brown burnt sienna, letting it bleed across I'd like to encourage you in this painting to explore warm tones and cool tones because it's not a vibrant painting, so it's a safe space to experiment with subtleties without extremes. Because we're keeping the fur warm with earthy colors, burnt sienna, yellow ochre. But there's so many other options you can have at your disposal. I'm sure you have plenty of pigments or tubes or colors that you could use to make this painting truly yours. For the shadows, we're leaning a bit cooler. Ultramarine, cobalt blue. And these neutralize those browns that we talk about. And you can explore these different blues and browns and how they make gray, your own unique grays, not a gray that you buy from a tube, your own personal mix yourself. That makes it truly unique. We used blue for the ear and a little bit where the jaw line is where the muzzle, the mouth reaches the neck. Then we use the warm brown. Now we're going to mix in a cooler brown where the muzzle is around the nose, underneath the eye. I'm not ging so dark here because on top of this, I'm going to be painting a few more spots. Gradually building detail. But if it comes to a point where the face feels stiff, then we move on to other parts of the painting, and we can even remove detail from the body rather than adding more detail to the head. Less details around the focal point often makes it feel sharper. Often, when we look at a painting and we think something is wrong, something needs more, it might feel strange, but actually taking away other elements that are competing with the focal point can actually make the image stronger, sometimes reducing the detail, taking out detail can build the illusion of detail in the focal point. Something to keep in mind whilst painting this whole composition, not just the face is the idea that we're not painting fur. That's not what I'm trying to think about. We're painting light on form, and the fur arrives as a side effect of edges and timing. Because, technically, even the face is fur just thinner fur. A. 15. Loosening Up: Let's take a step back and step away from the face now because often if we get stuck in an area, we overdo it and we forget the bigger message, the whole composition. It's easy to get caught up into it. And I felt myself getting into the tiny details there, which is usually a mistake because it wouldn't harmonize and look cohesive with the rest of the piece. So we can start thinking about different sections like the fur on the back and the neck. And then come back to it once the rest of the painting has a bit more detail, so we know how to balance it better. So we're jumping from the detailed section of the face to a very abstract, suggestive part of the composition where the tail meets the top leg in the shoulder area. And I don't want any clear defined details here. I'm just using broad strokes, a whole mishmash of colors. Not so that it's confusing, but we don't need any details here. It's not the message or the painting, it's not the highlighted area. Of course, we've got to paint it out. We don't want to leave it blank, but we want to paint it with the least amount of attention. That means abstracting it basically and having fun pressure free really. Having fun mixing these browns and blues and blacks, we drop a warm and cool into a larger spot while it's damp, feeling that breath of the blue on the shadow side, a touch of sienna on the light side, having these little temperature shifts. It keeps all these marks and washes from feeling flat. And all the dots are quite uniform. You can't have the whole of the cheetah just full of dots. We have to have some other element. You have to break up the unity. You have to have a bit of variation. So that's what this bit is because we don't really have a wash in this composition, this painting. 16. The Message: You think about the curvature and the shape of this leg, there's going to be shading on the left hand side, and then as it curves around towards a light, that's where it's going to be lightest, and that's where we put the spots and dots. But then after this leg overlaps the shadow of the neck and the distant leg. So we're using negative painting to paint the rest of the leg by adding the shadows behind it. But it's still connected to that wash that we just painted before. We've just used water to make it lighter in some areas. But it's all connected. And we're going to keep this area very abstract. Just filling out the general shape. I'm not even being that loyal to my pencil sketch beneath it, creating a variety of color. Just a suggestion of shape and tone rather than anything fully described. We certainly don't need to paint every toe or joint. Because the viewer will understand what's happening. In fact, by keeping them loose and minimal, the attention stays on the head and the character feeling the vibe of the cheetah. Notice how just a few angled strokes, some warm shadows and a break in the edge are enough to hint at weight and grounding. It's more about creating a feeling of that silhouette. The legs dissolve into the background above. But there's a kind of clean rhythm at the bottom, like a wave, all the way from the tail back going up to the paw, the elbow. That ambiguity works in our favor because it keeps the painting expressive rather than rigid. It's a reminder that watercolor doesn't demand precision. Sometimes the best choice is to imply rather than explain and letting the viewers imagination fill in the rest. That was all done with a midton. But now we can add a few pops of dark to really set it off and give it the full tonal range using the visual language of shape and direction of rhythm. Squinting my eyes every now and again to see if the general form, the shapes a clear message. 17. Clean Spots: When I say message, I don't actually mean in words like a sentence or an actual story written on the paper. All it means is the feeling, the impression, the unspoken idea that I'm trying to bring across when someone looks at our work. And every painting carries a mood. Maybe it feels calm, peaceful, powerful, energetic. Maybe it can't be explained by actual words. It's just a subtle feeling, a fleeting kind of moment. With this cheetah maybe the message is about elegance, quiet, strength, peacefulness, but power at the same time, the fleeting pause of a fast animal, but at rest. These aren't things that I think about consciously and specifically. I don't write them down or even put them into words in my mind whilst I paint. But you can feel that message without having to specifically explain it to yourself. And it's usually that what guides your decisions intuitively. We don't need to spell it out. Instead, it comes through in how loose or tight our brushwork is, how much white space we leave, how we balance warm and cool colors, and then that emotional undercurrent is what I meant by the message. And it's the essence of the painting and what it communicates without having to use those words. Now I'm going back to the spot using almost pure black. And these particular spots are a bit more defined with a harder edge. When we paint the spots, it's important to remember that we're not just decorating the surface, we're describing the form, the gesture, and the rhythm, the pattern. If we simply just dot them out at random, they can look quite flat or pasted on or even out of place. Instead, in my mind's eye, I'm thinking about the angle of the surface. Thinking about spots as part of the design, and each one should really be contributing to the sense of volume or movement. I'm not putting it on without thinking why it needs to be there. At the back, here, they're quite large, the spots. But when we move closer to the head, the spots are smaller, darker maybe closer together, which naturally draws more attention to the face. And then as we move down the body across the rib cage, the spots open up and they follow the curves of the torso. And their spacing helps us describe the roundness and the perspective. On the limbs, we can let them taper fade, keep them looser so the eye doesn't get stuck in that unnecessary detail. 18. Softening Areas: Notice how so many of these dots aren't clean or uniform. They're quite abstract. They're not clean defined circles, especially the wet on wet ones. We've got a few nice clean ones, hard edged, just to anchor it. They're just anchor points to help the viewer understand the abstract parts of it. We only need a few anchor points, a bit of defined correct shapes and then the rest can be a bit more suggestive and less defined. So varying the color, the tone, the edge quality to make them feel more natural. Some we create by painting around the shape, letting the untouched paper form the light center. Others, we drop in while the wash is still damp, allowing it to feather softly. And that's what suggests that fur texture. And then like we're doing now, placing bold brush strokes on dry paper, crisp and dark, that gives it structure and contrast. And this variety makes the spots feel alive and integrated rather than mechanical. And the golden rule to keep in mind is that balance clarity with looseness. Too many identical marks can feel stiff, but too much softness can lose the pattern altogether. And we can use scale, spacing, and again, edge quality with purpose. We're not just painting spots, we're shaping the character and energy of the cheetah because see how much white space we're actually using in this composition. So much of these spots are required to give form. I just used old brush just to scrub out some that pigment because it was a bit too dark. That was just an old brush. I didn't want to damage it with one of my nice ones with a clean tip. I dried it off. I actually using a glaze right now going over some of these spots on the back. And this will again soften them. So even if you didn't time your wet on wet spots will and they've got a hard edge, you can go back over them later to soften them out a bit. And even within the spots, you can have some spots that are half hard edged and the other side of them is soft. Agitating some of them. Using brush strokes in the direction of the form of the gesture. You can even use pure water with no pigment for these strokes, and then the wet on wet will agitate the pigment already on the paper. 19. Hairs On the Back: I pre wetted the area where the hairs are on the back at the top of the back, and I'm going to with a thick pigment so that they hold their shape, paint in these hairs, wet on wet. So they hold their shape, but they've got a soft edge to them. But I'm not too strict on myself with this. I don't mind if they're too hard edged. As long as they're conveying that feeling of hair on the back at the top. I don't want it to be so wet on wet that it all just dissolves and fades out into a blurry mess. I still want there to be defined lines. Now we can wait a bit longer before we go back to those hairs to add more strokes, more definition. Take a moment to see how much white space there is in this painting. It's actually one of the elements I like most about it because it almost feels like cheat is camouflaged into the background. It seems quite unusual, even quite risky to leave so much of the paper untouched within the main subject. But rather than weakening the painting, I think it makes it a bit more unique. Watercolor is quite interesting in that the untouched paper is also part of the medium. In oil or acrylic, you usually have to apply white paint onto the canvas. But here it acts as our light source, the cleanest light and the atmosphere. It connects it to the background as well. It's odd because at some aspect, it feels like parts of the cheetah is missing because it's just the white of the paper. But I think it adds a sense of mystery. Almost as if the animal is lending into its surroundings. And also, it allows the viewers imagination to fill in what isn't there, which makes the painting a bit more engaging because we're not again, spelling out every single detail. The spots and the shadow shapes and a few confident lines are enough to suggest the form, and our eyes automatically complete the rest. And restraint is such an important thing, and it keeps the painting expressive and avoids the heaviness that might come if we try to cover every single inch of the painting. Every single space with pigment. 20. Flow and Rhythm: Moving back to the legs, I'm just going to imply a few dark strokes following the curvature of the legs. Almost like I'm picturing them as kind of tubes. I'm thinking about the rotation. Of course, they're spots, but if you stretch them out and wrap them around, they look a bit more like stripes in this context. One of the greatest strengths of watercolor is that even after we've laid down color, we still have room to adjust and refine it through lifting or softening corrections. For example, right here, if the wash or the edges have dried a little heavier than we intended, we can go back to it with a clean damp brush and gently soften the edge and encourage the pigment to spread out even more to become less harsh. This also avoids the risk of overpainting or layering too much color because that could flatten the sense of light. We can also lift out highlights directly from larger shapes. Creating a thirsty brush by washing your brush and then dabbing it on a towel or a tissue, and then lightly dragging it across the damp passage, we'll pull back up pigment to create soft textures that resemble the light coming through the hair right now. This is quite effective in this area along the back where the sunlight might be glancing across through those hairs. If we painted too much, we can scrape away as well. It gives it a kind of shimmer and variety to the surface and it stops things from looking a bit too uniform. I'm adding now a few guiding lines, subtle little lines that they're not spots. They're not even actually part of the cheetah. They're subtle little lines that give the eye direction and flow, adding to that feeling of gesture. We are filling in this area with a few more spots to give it form. And what I really mean by form is giving a flat shape, a sense of turning in space. And with watercolor, we don't do this by drawing every detail, but managing the edges, the value and the temperature. The variation in the angle is subtle, but our eyes read it quite instinctively. And this is why we don't need to overmodel or specifically paint out all the different strands of fur with shading. If the spots follow the form, the volume reveals itself, really. This is a great example of how pattern can serve as structure in a painting and can give depth and dimensiality without heavy moduling. That's why we didn't put that much other underlayer into most of the painting. 21. The Ears: So we're going to start painting the face now, and this is where we want to slow down and be deliberate. The head is the focal point of this painting. So a few carefully placed details can carry all the character. And any small shifts in placement value or edge can quite dramatically change the expression or the sense of life in the cheetah. So we begin by reserving the brightest highlights. We've already done that a bit. We've mapped that out. You can see the reference image as you paint along or the completed painting to help guide you of that. But starting off with a nice thick black, I've changed to a very thin brush, by the way, with a nice tip. Just simplifying the shadow shape inside the ear. A dark black, trying to keep the shape organic and connecting it. It's almost like a strange stretched pine tree. And then I'm going to add a quick thin line on the other side of the ear just to signify that's the end of the year. Nothing much more than that. Now we can move to the air on the other side using the same brown color that we've been using burnt sienna. This is basically a pure burnt sienna. It's a nice mid tone, not too thick, and not too diluted. Nice rich, confident color and tone just to simplify and state the shape of the ear. I'm trying to break it down into a very simple shape with the least amount of strokes. It's just a simple shape because one confident shape is so much more powerful than 20 overworked lines. And that's all this ear is. It's a very weird shape, but it is a shape. It's not a normal shape like a triangle or a circle, but it's all connected. 22. Spots On The Head: Now we can start painting the forehead, I guess you'd call it. And there's almost a kind of direction, kind of flow from the eye going up to the back of the head. It's not exactly a line, but I'm going to add these dots in a kind of direction that implies a line. Et's take a slight little step away from all the refined details on the face and just start adding a few dots, small dots because they're on the face. They're still quite random, but I have to be aware, be a bit more careful on the phase because it's the focal point. And there's definitely a kind of structure to them. Even though I'm placing them fairly random, I still need to think about the form and the angle of them. Luckily, I can still see the pencil marks. I know roughly where I'm going to put them. The use of these dots can again define the shape, the jawline, adds to the flow. Even though they're not lines within themselves, if you add these dots next to each other, almost like stepping stones, then they give the illusion of lines even though they're not lines, implied lines. And I'm using brown, again, kind of darker muted brown. But there's no reason you can't make it blue, add a few blue dots in there. Now that most of the paintings done, you can see the balance of colors a bit better. You can see how it's probably 75%, maybe even 80% brown, and then 25% to 20% blue. But you could experiment and not put any blue in at all, keep it monotone, all brown. Maybe even do it black and white, or use a color like sepia, which when at full consistency and thickness is black. But when diluted, it's actually a brown. And the more I think about that, actually, the more I want to give it a go because I do like doing monotone paintings. For most of these classes, I do a monotone sketch with sepia. Or Pains gray, just to make sure that the tones make sense within the image itself, because a lot of time you can strip the color away from a painting, and it can read perfectly fine just with the tones. So you can see the placement of these dots. Although they're quite random, they fit a strategy. They're quite evenly spaced up here, and there's an implied direction with them. They're not absolutely random. I'm not having my eyes closed and just dabbing as they go further back, I'm also making them a bit darker as well. 23. The Eyes: Mixing a diluted brown and just going over some of these areas, help guide the eye a bit better, fill in some of the blank areas. You can see the direction that comes down from the ear right down to the jaw line using those hard edges on the washes below. Now we can start painting the eye, which is arguably the most important part of the painting because eyes tend to just capture the soul and invite people in. But even when it comes to this, we can do it step by step, taking our time, not going straight into the biggest part and most detailed part. As this brown shape comes up towards the eye, I'm transitioning it to a nice dark black, and then being very careful with the tip of my brush. Painting right towards the edge so that it just connects at the tip to the eye. Then we can start filling out the eye, but leaving a tiny bit of a white gap there, of course, if you go over it, you can come back with white wash at the end where the tear duct would be we're painting a kind of triangle shape with a curve where the eye is and work around the other side. At the top of the eye, there's a black strip Again, simplifying the shape. These are just two tones, basically, the brown and the black. Maybe indicate a few eyelids or eye lashes rather. Creating a nice point where that tear is. So we've got a nice feeling of rhythm and flow where that brown is at the bottom, then that reserved white, and then the black tear. And luckily, the other eye is on the other side, so we don't have to paint that. Following that tear all the way down to the nose, and then we can use the pencil lines to guide us. Connect it downwards to the area we painted before. It's all connected. 24. Scraping The Paint: It's quite important for your blacks and darks to be strong enough. You don't want them to be too weak in consistency or too diluted because even when black's wet, it can look pure black, but then when it dries, it turns to a pale gray. So there's a sweet spot where it's too thick and where it's too thin. But it's ultimately better to be on the thicker side because we need that strong contrast on the face and those sharp details where you've got these nice white lines and then brown lines and black lines. Same for the nose. Being careful to reserve some of those whites, rotating the brush so that the tip of the brush has a nice angle Start off with a nice thick black and if you feel that it's too thick, it'll be a dry brush mark, so you can just go back to your palette where I've already got some water, I'm not going to my water tub to get water. I'm getting the water that's already on my palette where the brown is and helping spread that paint along if it's too thick. Twirling the brush around so that the point of the brush comes together. Now I'm going to experiment with this tuff pick to scratch out some whiskers, but it was still too wet, so it didn't really work. I'm going to use my palette knife, but you can use your tuff pick or a pin or whatever or even straight to white guash to add a few strokes to indicate the fur on the back, the hair, the longer hairs. The whiskers. Sometimes I put a little white dot where their eyes to make it seem like it's glistening, but I don't think I'm going to risk it today. It's not essential, so I'm going to use the power of restraint. 25. Final Thoughts: Welcome back and congratulations on completing this watercolor class on painting a cheetah. We've explored gesture, timing, and negative painting, created soft fur with a dry brush and edges, and used simple shapes to hold the pose. We've practiced building spot patterns with variety and restraint, so the eye reads realism without detail. Remember how leaving whites, charging colour and gentle lifting can do so much for the work. Keep your brush moving, allow passages to merge, and finish with a few confident accents. Remember, watercolor painting is not just about technical skills, but also about expressing your creativity and personal style. I encourage you to continue exploring, experimenting, and pushing your boundaries to create your own unique watercolor masterpieces. As we come to the end of this class, I hope you feel more confident and comfortable with your watercolor painting abilities. Practice is key when it comes to improving your skills, so keep on painting and experimenting. I want to express my gratitude for each and every one of you. Your passion for watercolor painting is so inspiring and I'm honored to be your teacher. If you would like feedback on your painting, I'd love to give it. So please share your painting in the student projects gallery down below, and I'll be sure to respond. If you prefer, you can share it on Instagram, tagging me at Will Elliston, as I would love to see it. Skillshare also loves seeing my students work, so tag them as well at Skillshare. After putting so much effort into it, why not share your creation? If you have any questions or comments about today's class or want any specific advice related to watercolor, please reach out to me in the discussion section. You can also let me know about any subject, wildlife or scene you'd like me to do a class on. If you found this class useful, I'd really appreciate getting your feedback on it. Reading your reviews fills my heart with joy and helps me create the best experience for my students. Lastly, please click the follow button Utop so you can follow me on Skillshare. This means that you'll be the first to know when I launch a new class or post giveaways. I hope you feel inspired to paint more in this expressive style. I look forward to seeing you in future classes until then Happy painting.