Getting Started in Digital Watercolor Painting

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome. Thank you for coming to watch my digital watercolor mushroom class. So why are we painting a mushroom? Why is something so simple? Well, the reason is we want to keep the painting simple because we want to focus on the techniques that we're using. Not so much the painting itself. We're trying to learn the techniques so that we can then go on and paint more complex paintings such as this cardinal, for example. In this class, I'm using an Apple iPad Pro with the number two version two pencil. You can use any iPad and pencil combination that allows you to use procreate version five and higher. There are free brushes for you to download. You can find those in the projects and resources section along with a drawing of the mushroom, a reference photo of the mushroom, and a watercolor paper background to use. I strongly recommend you download my brushes that I've provided to you for free. It just makes things a lot easier, and it's really not possible to do all the techniques the same way without them. We start off our painting by adding the watercolor paper texture to the canvas. We then put on our drawing, and we import a reference photo that we can paint from, pull colors from, et cetera. We then add a very simple base layer, which is blocking in the color. Once we've done that, we can add our details into both the top of the mushroom and the stem. And lastly, we add in a little bits like the spores in the top and underneath in some shadows. Finally, we adjust the color, the saturation, et to make it pop. This class is suitable for all levels, regardless of your painting experience, whether or not you've painted in traditional watercolor painting or digital painting or never painted at all. Anyone can do this. It starts very simple. We go through every step all along the way. And again, this is just to teach you the techniques that we're using so that you can go on and paint more complex subjects later. Please be sure to post your project and you finished painting in the projects and resources section so that I can critique it and comment on it, perhaps offer some helpful suggestions, and maybe you can even inspire others. Thank you very much for watching and enjoy your painting. 2. Setting up the Canvas: I thought I should just clarify on how we get our images and reference pictures, sketches, drawings, the watercolor background paper, et cetera, into your file. So I did go through it in getting started and the initial start of video, but I just wanted to do one separately just on this, just in case people found it a bit confusing. I know I jumped around a little bit. So basically what we want to do when we're setting up our procreate, page. We're going to choose. Now, in this case here, I chose just the screen size for this. So you can choose the new art artwork here and it's going to give you some defaults. If you've made some before, it will remember them. The one that I used in the video is this one here untitled Canvas, 11 by 14. So that's a 300 pixel per inch. So a print size file that will print out 11 14 " that I use for my prints on, say EC and things like that. Now, What I am going to do here, so I just made one here that was the screen size just for this demonstration. So when you're starting your painting, this is a fine size to make. The smaller the screen size you have, the more layers you could make as well, so that's worth noting. The very first thing we're going to notice is when we start with a new document, we have a background color here. If you select this, it's going to ask you if you want to change it, which in this case, we do not. So we're going to ignore that. We can go right ahead and start on the first layer. And the first thing that we're going to do is put down the watercolor paper. So now, I put my files, the ones that you have available for download into my photos on my iPad. So that is the easiest way to go about it. If you're not if you say, your main computer or something where you download, these is not a mac, and you put the mint, you're not going to be able to access it from your iPad. So we're going to assume here that you've got your photos or your images that you've downloaded in your photos section, okay? Now, the first thing that we need to do is we need to add A, we're going to insert a photo because it's in photos. So if it was, say, in a file, like on your iCloud drive or somewhere else, you have a files folder files app that's default in the Apple iPad. But we're going to use the photo just because it's simple, and I've already put them there. So the very first one that I'm going to choose is not my eclipse photo or my boat photo, but I'm going to choose this one here, which is the watercolor paper, okay? And I'm going to import that. So now you can see it's right on my canvas, okay? So I'm going to shrink this down. It's because my canvas didn't have the outside edge around it when I shrunk it down, it went to shrink down the actual watercolor paper. So I'm going to make sure that that is over top covering. We don't want it to be like this. You can see the difference that would make. So this is going to be our texture. This is our watercolor paper. We're going to make sure that that is on top. It defaults by putting this little arrow on here, which is what is allowing us to move it around. Okay. So then if we click on that again, click on that again. That goes away, and now our watercolor paper is on there. We do not want to paint on top of our watercolor paper like we would traditionally. So I'm going to come here. I'm going to click the plus button, make a new layer. I want my watercolor paper layer to be on the top, and I'm going to change the blending mode to multiply. This allows it to show through the layers below and see that texture because that's really all we want is the texture. Once that's done, we are done with this layer, and we're going to lock it. That way we can't accidentally paint on top of it. Now, we have a sketch. If you want, of course, you can draw the mushroom yourself. It's very simple to draw. It's basically like a little mushroom, right? It's half circle and a stem. But for the sake of keeping things simple, I have provided that for you here in a sketch. So I'm going to click on this, and I'm going to import that. And we, there's my mushroom sketch. Again, Notice defaults to the move tool and the scale tool. So by holding two fingers, I can move it around. I can put it anywhere I like, okay? I could say duplicate this layer and have two mushrooms, if I want. You know anyways. So that's going to be our drawing, okay? And again, we don't want to draw we want to be able to keep this. We don't want to fill it in. So I'm going to leave it here and I'm going to lock it again. Okay. Now, we need our reference picture. What are we going to be painting, okay? So, now we're going to come over here and we're going to go to the Canvas button, and we're going to click on reference. It defaults by putting on what you have on your screen. You'll see here the Canvas, but we want to use an image. So when I click on image and I see import image, import image. There we go. It comes to our photo section, okay? Again, back to our photos page there. Now we have our reference picture that we can use two colors from. You can scale this window up if you like by dragging in the corners. We have that in there now. We've got our watercolor paper, and we have our line drawing. So that is all ready to go. 3. Getting Started: So, as I mentioned, today, we're going to paint this red mushroom here. It is a simple painting. It's not the most glamorous painting or anything else like that. It's simply meant, to teach you the foundations of digital watercolor painting, the way that I go about it. It's such a new thing. There's really no right or wrong way. It's kind of you know, make it up as you go. I've been struggling with this or trying to master this now for probably the better part of two years. And I've learned a lot along the way about both traditional watercolor painting and digital watercolor painting and making brushes and everything else. So anyways, let's make a long story short here, and let's get started. So essentially, these are the items that I provided you with here. I provided you with your reference picture, and I provided you with the drawing. So let's take a look at the drawing without that. So again, you could easily just draw this yourself. It's essentially a half dome shape and a stick, really. There's not a whole lot to it. But for simplicity's sake, I'm going to include that for you here. 4. Starting the painting: Before we choose what brush we're going to use, we should put down our watercolor paper first. As you can see, right now, we're just on the blank page right here. So we want to have some watercolor paper to have an actual texture there. So I'm going to go up here to a new layer, and I'm going to go to the little wrench icon up here in the corner. And in my case, now, you can either put this file in your photos folder or you can insert it as a file. I'll show you how you insert the reference photo later from a photo. But for now, we're going to go here and we're going to insert a file. I have mine in my iCloud drive here. You can start wherever you like. And I just chose the watercolor paper file that I provided for you. So I'm going to scroll down my image here, and I'm just going to make sure this goes over the edge of the canvas there. I want the whole thing to be covered by this watercolor paper. When I do that, it brings up this little arrow icon here that allows me to transform or shape or move. The green handle here can rotate. We're going to be using that later on as well. But for now, we're just going to put the paper on like that. Now, we don't want to paint on our watercolor paper ironically, I normally in traditional watercolor painting, that is exactly what we would do. This is giving us a texture. And the one thing, as I said, in the introduction, is that what we're trying to do is we're trying to paint dry paint. We're trying to make it look like the painting when it's done. So we're going to put this we're going to put this at the very top here of our layers. So we're going to hold down and now once I hold it down, I can move it around, okay? I let it go, and now it's over at the top. And you can see, because I moved it on top of my pencil drawing that made the pencil drawing disappear. So what I'm going to do now, I'm going to change the type of layer that it is. Remember, layers are basically things sitting on top of each other, okay? So right now, here is our watercolor paper layer, and here is our drawing layer. We want to be able to see through that watercolor paper layer, and we still want to see the texture. So we're going to change the layer style to multiply. And what that does is basically, it's going to allow that watercolor texture to show through on anything that we paint above below it, sorry? Okay. So again, we don't want to paint on this, so I'm going to lock it. Now, if I take my brush and I try to paint on that. I'm going to get this error that comes up and says layer lock selection. So I'm just going to hit cancel. Okay, I realized, whoops, I didn't mean to do that. So the only way, so all my layers are locked. So what I need to do is I need to make a new layer. I'm going to paint underneath my pencil layer because I want to keep the pencil layer there so that I can see. I don't want to paint over top of it and lose my lines. I want to know where those are. So I'm just going to click on the bottom layer here and I'm going to click the plus button. Okay. Now I've got a blank layer here, okay? So that blank layer is underneath my pencil drawing and underneath the watercolor paper layer that's been changed to multiply. You can see these here are grayed out because they are locked, okay? Now, here is my reference picture. So let me just show you quick, again, how you get the reference picture in here. We're going to go over here again to our little wrench button. And in this case, I put this picture in my photos. So I'm going to click on Insert Photo, and there's the mushroom and voila. There it is. Oops. Actually, that's not what I wanted to do. T finger tap will undo, and three finger tap we'll redo. Okay? So I didn't want to insert it there. What I want to do, sorry is put it in the reference picture. So let's go here to Canvas and reference. And you can see here, if I turn that off, that goes away. So let's go again back here to Canvas. I'm going to turn on reference. And it automatically brought in my mushroom picture from the last time. But if I click on Import, I can go back to my photos. It'll go to my photos by default, and I can choose this mushroom picture. So that's where you're going to want to put in. You can put your watercolor paper in there and you can put your drawing in there that I provided you and you can put the reference photo in there, and you can bring all of those on. So the drawing picture, you can go to file, you can go to add and you can insert a photo, and then you're going to insert the drawing onto there. If for the reference picture, you want to do that in the reference window, and that will bring it into here. So why do we want to have the reference window in here? Well, because it's a really handy tool. One of the things we can do with this is, let's say, I want to paint this color red. So I can either go in here and I can slide my slider over, and I'm pretty good at the colors. I can find pretty close accurately what I'm looking for over here, and that's one way I can do it. But I could also go over here to my little mushroom, and I can hold my finger down. And as you can see, as I'm moving this around, it's changing the color to whatever I'm hovering over. So I want to paint that color red. Now, if you look over here in the window, it's chosen that color red. Isn't that cool. It is. Yeah, it's one of those things. Another nice thing that you can't do in traditional watercolor painting is you can't zoom in on your painting. You can zoom in and you can turn it around. I'm just basically holding my two fingers here, and I can zoom in, zoom out, move it around. Easy Paz. Okay? So now, you can start your bottom layer. I don't want to say you can start it with anything, but you can start it with anything, really. The more The brushes that I'm going to show you here have been set up to mimic watercolor painting, and I'm going to show you a couple of them here, and some of them have funny names and some of them are a bit, you know, whatever. But I've basically used different textures and different shapes to give different effects, more water, less water. So let's take a look here at the Pol primary two, okay? Now, what I normally do is, if I go over here to my brush size, I can see, okay, how big that brush is going to be. So I get an idea of what it's going to look like on the paper, right? I don't really know when I'm looking at it beforehand because until I touch the paper, what it's going to do, okay? So as I'm scrolling around, Now I can move this in and out, and I'm scrolling around. And this is putting inside this brush here. There's some grain and there's some other things. Okay? So now I've lifted my pencil, paint brush off the paper, Okay. Now, the problem is, once I put it back on, it goes over top, just like dried paint wood. So these brushes are meant to mimic dried paint. So imagine now you've gone on a regular traditional watercolor painting, and you put on a layer, the phone rings, you go answer it, you come back, your paints dry. Well, now you can't blend those colors anymore. So, unfortunately, remember, brushes are set up to mimic dried paint. So that's exactly what they're doing. I put that on, and then I come over top, and o I got another layer. So what I try to do my best, and it doesn't always work is I try hard to not lift my brush off the paper, okay? So I'm going to go around and I'm putting this on here. And again, so this is a very wet granular type of brush, you can see the grain in there. So these are made my brushes are made from actual water color paint swatches and things that I've made, and I've built the brushes up. So I'm basically putting on texture that I already painted. So you don't have to do this because I've already done this very tedious and frustrating work and provided to you. Now, again, the same thing, though, if I lift my brush off the paper and I come back, You know, you can see it's now doubling up on top of there. Okay. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to fast forward through this, I'm going to start over, and I'm going to paint around the whole base layer. I'm going to stop talking, and I'm going to do that. And I want you to do the same thing. I'm just going to do it here quick so that it gets done, and you'll see what I mean that we can do that. Now, again, I'm going to make my brush a little bit bigger first because I don't want to. And if you zoom in on this, you can see the texture on there, the shape on there in there that I've made. So that's about the size it is. So if I make that that big. Yes, it'll go faster, but I will also cover over top of all these. Now, I know because I've already painted this, that that's okay to do. So feel free to go over that. We're going to paint those little whatever they are, spore things. I'm not a mushroom expert. But whatever those things are, we're going to paint them on after it, so don't worry. We can go over top of this. And unlike traditional watercolor painting, we can erase it, or we can just undo it if we like. So let's go back here and fill that in. So this is essentially like a wet brush, lots of water with a very granular pigment, okay? I said I was not gonna talk, but I talked the whole time, didn't I? Okay. So there, step one, we've got our base layer. We can do the same thing now here on the mushroom stalk. Let's try to pick. And again, try to pick a lighter color. We're going to try to paint from light to dark. It's not as critical as it is, say in traditional watercolor painting because we can always change it. And you know what? You can always go back and undo it as well. That's a nice thing about that. So again, we're just going to get on our base layer here. This is a much lighter color. Whoops. I didn't want to do that. A, I had too many taps. So to get back what you've done, three finger tap. Okay, two fingertap does, three fingertapR does. So I didn't want to put all that on the same layer. We're going to be using layers a lot here, so bear with me here. Okay? So now, I'm going to go underneath my mushroom cap, and I'm going to just click on this one, just so that the layer goes in the right place. Again, I can always move it by holding down and I can move whoops. I can hold down and I can move my layer above or below wherever I like. In this case, I want it below. So now I'm going to paint on a lighter color in there, fill it in. You can see I'm not being overly cautious or careful. Just try not to leave. We're going to need to put a shadow on the stem. So try to make sure that you go right up because it's underneath, you can go right underneath there, S. So I'm painting right underneath, and it's not going to show. Again, that's the beauty of the layers thing. If you want to have some more interesting like water water type color effects, try leaving some spaces when you're painting in there, like a little bit of areas where the water didn't go and, you know, I just add some more realistic. In this one up here, you can see there are some in the upsp. If you keep your brush and start talking while you're filming, too long, it will let you change the shape of it. So now you can see, I'm going to start over because I don't want to have that overlap in there on my base layer. And I will show you in a second, what I meant by the brush allows you to move it around after. So because I haven't lifted my brush off yet. Imagine if I was drawing, like, a straight line or something, one of the tools that Procreate has is it allows you to change that. So that layers on there. Now, I'm just going to do one over here on the side to show you what I mean what I was talking about. So I'm going to put this on. I haven't lifted my brush off. Okay. Now I'm going to stop. And now see because I didn't lift my brush off, I can move that around and change that shape around, okay? To get rid of that, double tap. And so now we've got our base layer on there. We'll do the little spores later in the end, but we've got our base layer on. Now, we need to add some depth to it because if we turn off our pencil layer here, basically, that's all we've got, right? And that's not what our mushroom looks like. We still have you can see there's some more stuff in here. And this, again, you know, again, isn't the best mushroom painting. This is more about just learning the techniques that we're going to apply in more complicated paintings later. And I kept it simple for that reason because there's a lot of things to cover here. So now we're next we're going to come back and I was about to say when the paint dries, but it's already dry. We're going to come back and we're going to add some texture and have some fun with this. 5. Adding Details Part One: Okay. Let's look at our reference picture here. We can zoom in. This was probably taken with a flash of some kind or something like that, but you can see there's some specular highlights here in the mushroom. Anyway, basically everything that has a three dimensional shape is going to have lighter areas and darker areas like shadows that give it that roundness. So we can see there's a shadow here. The light is coming in from this direction. So there's a bit of a shadow around the edge or some shadow under here, and there's some shadow around there. You can basically this is your mushroom. If you want to make the light area over here, you can you can make the light area where you want. It doesn't really matter. This is more about using the techniques. Again, on how I go about making digital watercolor paintings. And I keep saying how I go about because it's just that new. This is a new thing. No one's really come out with a official rule book on watercolor painting digitally or what even to call it. So again, bear with me in my explanations there. I'm trying to choose a lighter color. Okay. And we're going to work we're going to now come back here to our layers palette. So here we are in the layers, okay? So we're going to go to our mushroom cap layer. And I'm going to put a layer over top of it because I want to preserve this. It's already done. I've done all my hard work on there. And I'm going to put a layer over top of it. And I want to add some texture. I want to see some more water colored stuff. I want it to look like watercolor painting, right? So there's a lot of ways I can do that, right? I can take some of my other brushes here, my big wet and granular brush, for example, one of my favorites. Look at the size on there, and I can plop that on and nothing happens because, I've got the opacity turned way down here. So that's the other thing down here. We can see the opacity. On this brush here, I can adjust the opacity on there, and I can put that on. So now you can see I'm painting over top. And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, look at that whoops. I went way over here, and whoops. Okay. So This is one of my favorite brushes because I think it's about as close to watercolor painting as I've ever gotten. Like you can see, it actually looks like watercolor paint. But this doesn't. So it doesn't blend the same way that it does traditionally, right? So what do we do? How do we get those watercolor effects? And the other thing I didn't want to do is I didn't want to go way off the edge here. So this is a nice safety feature that we don't have a traditional watercolor painting, and we call it a clipping mass. So to get that, all I've done is I've clicked on the little window here, and you can see all these different options on here. We're going to ignore all of them right now. And we're only going to focus on this one here, clipping mask. Okay? So when you see what happened there is this little arrow beside it is pointing to the layer below it. Okay? So, you remember before, we took our big wet and granular brush or whatever it's called. And I started painting over here, right? And then I thought, Whoops, I went over here to the edge and Hey, wait a minute. Where did that go? Something must be wrong. Let me try that again. Whoops, nothing. No, there's nothing wrong. What's actually happening is the clipping mask will only paint where you have paint. See that, and it stops on the edge there. So why do we care? Why do we care about that? Let's go over here to our reference picture. Let's find that shadow color. Okay, you can see that down. I'm going to take that shadow color. Now I'm going to lower the opacity on this a little bit. And I know there was a shadow there. So I'm going to take my big wet and granular brush and I'm going to come along here and I'm going to go up to this, and I'm just going to put that along the bottom there. Look at that. It only goes on the bottom. Look at that. Isn't that cool? Okay, so great. Now I've got this big dumb line, Paul. Okay, so now, Remember, what I said, we can do with our brush that we can't do in traditions, we can erase. So which one are we going to use for this? Let's go down here and we're going to choose beautiful watercolor blends, okay? And this brush here, again, one of my favorites. I use it a lot like for erasing and whatnot. I'm going to come up here to the very edge, and you can see what it's doing. It's actually like pouring water almost, you know, pushing that back, right? On there. But again, it's staying. I'm on that clipping mass layer. So again, I'm only touching that layer. I don't have to worry about going on other layers. And it's already. I've got some neat little textures here and some other bits there. You know, we're not going to worry too much about, you know, whether or not, you know, this looks perfect in the end or whatever. This is, again, I keep stressing this is more about learning how to do this, right? Versus, I mean, to lower the opacity on that. Okay, I'm going to bring that up there. I make that as big as I can. I should probably make this brush larger. Now, I am I'm painting on 1114300 pixel per inch canvas. So that's pretty big, right? So these brushes on a smaller canvas would be quite large. So make sure you're checking the brush size before you start doing your stuff. 6. Adding Details Part Two: We can also use the same brushes here. Again, for blending, I can push this this way. Okay? So I've got my blending brush here. Now, Okay, now we're starting to kind of look more like watercolor painting. Like, you can see those there's some hard edges in there. And all I'm doing is I'm basically taking my blending brush, just like I would take water, and I'm pushing that water in the same way I would when I'm lifting and pushing water and stuff that you've seen me do in my traditional watercolor painting classes, okay? Now, Okay, so we've got our clipping mask there. So now, if I make another layer on top of that, it's just going to make a plane layer, okay? I don't want to do that. I want another clipping mask. And I want that clipping mask the simplest way I can do instead of keep pressing clipping mask. If I come back here and I clip on my mushroom cap layer and I click another layer, it automatically because it's underneath this one and this one is a clipping mask, it automatically makes this one a clipping mask. Easy Psy, right? Okay. So now, I want to put some more texture in, but I don't want to paint it. So what are these funny looking things down here? We've got all these different brushes and weird shapes down here. So let's take, for example, let's just click on this one, and we're going to change this to a lighter color here, and we're going to go back to our brush. Now, I have mine set up to only paint with the brush that I don't accidentally draw with my finger. So you can sometimes I like using the stamp brushes at 100%. So I take that off I do to use my finger. But for now, just use them like normal. Okay? So we've got another clipping mask. And we chose this funny looking watercolor stain here, and we're going to see how big that is. That's pretty big, right? Whatever. Let's say it's that big. We're gonna come along and we're just gonna go plunk. And look at that. It puts the watercolor stain right there in the middle of the painting, okay? Now, that's great. But what if I don't want it there? What if I don't want that to look like that? Well, I'm gonna come over here and I'm going to click on my little arrow button. Remember that arrow button that we used to adjust the watercolor paper. It's the same one. I want a little high light in the middle, and I may or may not want it to look like this, so I can scroll it in, I can do whatever. If I come down here and I click on Free Form, well, now I can adjust it however I like, right? I can take that watercolor stain and I can move it wherever I want to move it to, okay? And I don't have to leave it like that because, you know, it's darker at the top. I don't necessarily want it to be light at the top. So I'm going to come back here. I'm going to change my eraser button. My eraser brush, sorry. Just something that I have more control over. I'm gonna I've got my big wet and granular brush here, and I can lower the opacity on this one. And I can just basically, oh, no, I can't. I'm sorry. That one does not allow me to lower the opacity. Which one allows me to lower the opacity? Let's say this one does. I think, yes. It does. And, yep. There we go. So I can basically just shade this in or out, and I can control exactly where that water color stain starts and finishes. Okay. I can do the same thing all the way around on the edges too. So I'm going to come back here. Click on my little mushroom cap. Click the plus button. Come back here, we need to make this a darker color now. Oh just come over here and choose that color. And let's see what else we got here. Let's see what this one does. Okay. Paul Trine, water color stay number nine. Got old number nine. Okay, now, that's pretty funky looking. I love the big wash of color there, right? Let's take that put it down there. And I'm going to stick this over here in this corner because there is a dark shadow there. So if I move this along like that, you can see this little transparent object there. It's darker on the bottom here, it's darker on the bottom here. So I'm going to rotate that like that. And I don't have to worry about going too far because the clipping mask automatically keeps it in the right place. Now, if we were using more selective colors, this might not know, this is a red on red. You know, mushroom it's a pretty simple color, we would see a more drastic effect on that, okay? So, for example, let's just leave that there for now, and let's go up here, make a new layer right on the top. I just want to show you what I mean by how that would look with that stain, so you can see what that looks like, right? You can move this around and you can put it over top of other things as well. But because we don't have the clipping mask, we don't have that there. Okay. I'm just clicking undo. Get rid of that layer because I always end up with so many anyways. We'll come back here to this one. We're going to re select that. Oops, reselect that. And we will plop that guy right there. Okay. So we're starting to get somewhere. We've got a little bit of a light area in there. We need some more depth to this mushroom, I think. We could probably use some more colors. Let's some brighter, like, almost orange colors in there, I think. And let's go to Let's take this step here. Let's just see what we got here. We'll take this one up here. And let's just plop that. We're going to make a new layer. Go back down here, mushroom cap. Click the plus button. We got an automatic clipping layer right there, and bam Didn't do anything, did it. No. And that's, you know, pretty close to the original color, so I'm not surprised. If we made that, for example, a different color. Let's just say that in there, too much. Sometimes you end up doing things for the sake of doing them. Let's focus on getting some more depth in here, so we're going to add in. We're going to use this layer there, and we're going to add in dark edges. What the right actually. That was kind of cool, wasn't it? Let's put that over here. Yeah. Yeah. Now, let's stick with your original plan. Go back, back, back. I did look cool there. We're going to go back here to our original color. If you go back here to your history, you can see the colors that you've picked before, and you can just easily select that that was that dark color there that we selected. We're gonna put that on there. I'm going to move it over to the edge, lick my select button. Whoops. Did I put that on the wrong layer? I believe I did, didn't I? Yes, I did. Okay, let's try that now. P, still in the wrong layer. Did I? Okay. There we go. Put this over here on this side. I'm going to squish it up. Just that I want it to be on the edge, right? We're trying to make our shadow there. I think we'll do is I'll bring this down here, more. Now, we don't have to use these patterns for say, or stamps, I guess, is what they're really called. But, you know, it's kind of a fun way, and it actually gives a really quick and easy watercolor effect. But let's go back and let's do our big wet and granular brush, and let's just come along here. We're going to make one more clipping mask just to speed things up a bit. And we're going to come underneath here. And just gradually, we're going to darken these edges up here. We want to get some dark points in there to give this some depth. Okay. So you can see, like, I'm not, you know, I'm just kind of because of that clipping mask, I can really just kind of muck about. I could do however I want and then erase it after, too, right? So, I mean, it's pretty brilliant that way. So we'll come in here with our eraser button. We're just going to erase some of those edges, bring up the opacity a little bit. We just want to give it a little bit of depth. T about like putting a little bit of shadow around there, right? Now, Okay. So we've got all these layers in here, and now it's starting to get maybe out of control. It's not really. Sometimes I end up with the tons of them, but let's just assume that it is, okay? And I want to focus. I want to adjust this mushroom cap now. Now, to do that, I need to be able to I'm going to turn back on my drawing here so I can see those things again. I want to put them all back into one layer. So what I can do is put down my pencil here, and I can start with the bottom layer here. Take this layer here and you can see oop one done. A, I must hit the wrong button. Stop it. Okay. All right. Here we go. Get out of that, that. Okay. Let's start again, at my bottom layer here. Never hold your finger on anything for too long, okay? So, now we're going to go to take these and squish them together, and roll out. Now, these are all on one layer. So all those things that we made are now on that top layer. But it's kind of a dull red. It doesn't look like that red. So if I come over here to this little button up here, okay, adjustments. There's a couple of things I can do. Curves, for example, is something I used quite a bit. Curves will adjust the mid tone or basically the highlights, the darkness, the value, not the value, sorry, yes, the value. So here, if I put a little.in the middle. Now on this graph, I can move that up. And you can see that gets lighter. If I go this way, it gets darker, right? I bring it up. Over here is the highlights, over here is the shadows. But basically, bring that up a little bit like that. I bring in the shadows a little bit. You can see it's starting to get a bit more saturated and a bit brighter. If I go this way, it's going to give you even more so. If I go ten down here, it's going to get darker and muddier, right? I'm going to go with that. I like the look at that, right? I've got that nice, cool watercolor edge there. I've got some darks around the side there. I think that looks pretty good for now. 7. Finishing the Stem: So let's recap on what we've done so far. Okay? So far, what we did is we put down the drawing on the paper. We imported that in and we put down the drawing on the paper. Okay? Let's just turn all these other layers off here. So we can see that. We brought our drawing in, we put our drawing on the paper. And then we put our watercolor paper on. We converted that to multiply, a. We moved it up to the top over top of our drawing. Underneath our drawing, we made a new layer. Okay. Then on that new layer, we put our base color down. Then with that base color, we used a combination of stamps with the clipping paths and painting, essentially, to give our mushrooms some texture and shape. Then we closed all those layers, and then we adjusted those layers using curves, okay? We could also, if we wanted to say, add more saturation, we can do that here, okay? We can adjust the brightness and the hue. There's more than one way to skin a cat, as they say. So but for now, so we turned off our stock there. So for now, we're going to do the same thing that we did on the top of the mushroom, but we're going to do it on the stem, okay? So we're going to do both ways, okay? We'll make a new layer. By both ways, I mean, we're going to paint the actual painting, and we're going to use the stamps, just so that you get an idea. And you know, I really want to drill these techniques home. They're important, okay? So we've already got our base layer on there. We've made a new layer above the stem. We're going to click on this window. We're going to make it a clipping mask. We're going to choose the darkness over here, the dark color over there. So now that's put that up here in this window. We're going to come down here and let's grab because it's the shape, we'll grab this watercolor stain number four. Come on. There we go. And we've got a clipping mass. We're going to plop that on and blah, L here. Let's zoom in, and you can see, look at the water color. This is basically a watercolor stain is what it is, right? Okay. So we'll grab that. We're going to move that over. And we're going to make that warm watercolor stain on the edge there. That's our shadow. Okay, now, we can, if we want to make it more like it is here, we could erase some of the bottom there. So like we did before, we can come in here and we can erase some of the bottom. There we go. There we go. So we got a little bit less there, okay? Now we can also come on top of that. Now we can. Again, we can make another layer on top of that clipping mask and make this e clipping mask on top of that clipping mask. Crazy. I know. Crazy, crazy. Okay. Now, let's go to I am not going to include all these brushes because it gets too confusing. We more big and granular. It's really the only few you need. Okay. Okay, so we can go on here. And I'm just basically going over this a few times. I'm going to darken this up even a little bit more. A little bit less saturation, actually, a little bit less color. And I'm going to come in here and now hoops here a little bit. I want that to be nice and dark. Okay. That's too much. So I'm going to lower my capacity even more. There we go. Now, on the other side, you know, that's great. It actually looks pretty good, I think, so far. But what I want to do now is I want to keep the shape of that. And I don't necessarily want to affect this too much, but I want to lighten this. I think that's just too dull, too muddy. So I'm just going to come up here and I'm going to choose a lighter color here. And again, it usually looks visually lighter than it is. So we'll go big wet and granular or we can, it doesn't matter. We'll just keep using that one. And we're going to lighten this up a little bit. I think we're going to lighten this up, aren't we? Yes. We are going to lighten this up. No, we are not. Okay. Why are you not lightening up? I was trying again with pure white. Oh, enough There we go. I didn't have enough capacity. Okay. So now we're just lightening that up a little bit. Okay. And now if we come underneath, it's going to lighten up over there because remember that layers are underneath each other, right? Okay. So We've got our stem. We've got our clipping masks. We've got where we put our stamp on, and then we've got one where we painted over top of the stamp, and then we've got our lighter one there. So, we use these different layers again, the same way to get these watercolor painting effects. Now, you could you could. There's nothing stopping you from just taking sorry moving my pad around. We're just taking your stamps and doing this without the clipping masks. You do not need to do it. However, it's going to be a lot harder, you're going to do a lot of erasing, and it's a much easier way to go about it. So now, again, I'm going to put those layers together, okay? So we I. So basically, now, I've got a top layer, and I've got a bottom layer. Alright? So, now what we need is we need to add in these little fish spores, we're going to call them. 8. Adding Spores and Recap: So, are spores here? Okay. Spores So again, you can see they're kind of a yellow color, a little yellow lobby color. And I'm going to use a hard edge wash. So now again, imagine let's go up here. We're going to make a layer on top of this. Imagine now you've got a wash and you're just basically taking say maybe a flat brush, and you're painting on your flat brush. Where are you here? Why are you're not painting? Not enough opacity again. Not enough size? There we There we go. Okay. So now you can see this is sort of like making a wash and watercolor. Nice, even wash. Again. If I lift my brush and go over top, I lose out there, we don't want to do that. But we can undo. Yeah. Okay, let's zoom in here. I'm going to make this a bit smaller. And I'm essentially just going to fill in these little circles here. Just scribble them in. Easy. So much easier in this case than real watercolor painting. Okay. And we're just putting it again, think of this as a base color that we're doing, like a base layer. All right. Over top. I do realize they have highlights on them. Some of them stick up a little bit higher too than our mushroom edge here, you can put some up here if you want, like that. And da da da da, fill those in. And I'm not being overly careful. I'm just kind of doing it here. And there is like this what do you want to call it like a funky bit? What I'm going to do is I'm going to move this down. No, I'm not. I'm going to make another layer here and put it underneath. And then I b the reason why I did that is I want to be able to paint this color underneath here, some of these little funky bits, but I don't want to worry a whole bunch about, you know, getting up in there. So let's just You know, come along here like this. We're above the stem, but we're underneath the mushroom cap. So it's cool. We can basically just kind of paint what we want in there without worrying about it too much. Okay. Another handy little feature there. So we've got you can see that in there. We basically painted underneath, but not over top up there. Let's come back up top here to our little dot layer there. You can see it there. Now, it's a good idea sometimes to rename your layers there. I'll just so that if you have a whole bunch of them, that way you can tell what they are. I just call that dots. There we go. You don't have to do that. I don't normally do it. I'm just doing it to show you that you can do it. Okay. So make my brush a little bit smaller now. I selected pure white by just clicking and holding on the canvas to get the white there because I want to put in some white highlights on these dots here. A little bit of depth. Think about if we're painting a bird, which we're going to do next. That's what comes next. That's why we're doing this. We're going to paint the cardinal, and this will be like when we're painting in the eyeballs of the cardinal. Okay. All right. There we go. We'll call that. Good enough for now. You know? Keep it loose, just like watercolor painting, right? We're going to pick our dark color here now. Come on dark color. Are you? There we go. And we're going to go down here onto our layer. So now we're underneath our dots. Remember, layers work from top down. So whatever we paint on this layer around the dots, we'll be underneath the dots. And this is crap. Whatever variable wash this one here makes the colors come and go a little bit. Oops, too much, too much. Or it doesn't b we could have done that. It would've been fine. What we're trying to do now is we're going to paint a little bit of a shadow on here. You can see around on a reference picture, these little spores. They have a bit of a shadow on there. We don't have to do this. This is a watercolor painting. It's interpretive. It's, you know, representative. It's not an exact replica of painting there. Just increase the opacity a little bit. Because it wasn't showing up. And you can see, I'm putting it on underneath here or at the bottom, keeping them all kind of in the same place. Just to kind of you want to keep in line wherever your shadows are originally. Remember, there's only one suns and the light only comes from one place. I mean, unless you've got artificial lighting on your mushrooms, which Well, then that's a whole different thing, isn't it? You're probably growing mushrooms. And if you're using artificial lighting, well, you're probably up to no good. Okay, so now we've got our little spores. Our spores have shadows. What else do we need to do here? I think we need a bit more shadow on the bottom of our stem. Let's go back here to our stem. How, we'll just put another layer there just for the fun of it. And why do we want to put another layer there? Well, this way, if we make a mistake because I really like how my stem looks, I can just delete that layer, you know? I mean, of course, I can also hit undone, but I'm just going to pretend that I can't. And I'm now just coming in very lightly. The pressure, you know, on some of the brushes. You know, if you hold it down, more, you're going to see more pressure. That was too much. So I hit on D. I just want a bit more. There we go. And we'll put a little bit up here on this layer. Again, we're going to put a little shadow underneath our mushroom cap. Give it a little bit of depth, just so it's not a solid white line underneath there and make it a little bit darker. And there we go. There is our mushroom. Okay, so let's recap one more time. Okay, so we put down our watercolor paper layer. We have our pencil layer. We have, well, our dot layer, which isn't really that important. But here, we've got our mushroom cap layer where we build that up by starting with a base, we put down our base color paint. Then we added watercolor textures to it. Then we added the stock, and we did the same thing there. Then we came back and then we added the dots by putting in, again, a base layer, then we added a high light, and then we added some shadow. So the whole process, essentially what we're doing to simplify it is, we are adding a color. You know, saying, this is the color that we want this to be generally. We can always change it later. Remember here, we change, we can change our color balance, our hue or saturation, we can do all kinds of crazy things to it. But essentially, we chose the color that we wanted, we put it on. Then we've made some water color marks and some stains in here using the the stamps, I guess, we'll call them that I've made, and we put those on here. We've given our mushroom depth by adding a darker value around the edges and the lighter in the center. We did the same thing here on the stem by using another stamp to give it a dark shadow along the edge. We had the little fungus bits or what do we call them spores underneath there. And, yeah. So I hope that you like this. I hope that you know, this has been a long time for me trying to figure out what kind of class or how am I going to show people how to do this? There are so many steps that I often forget them myself sometimes. And I find the more I do it, the better I'm getting at it, And you know, it's just like regular watercolor painting, not overdoing stuff, not overworking it. Try to keep it simple. The next one the next class, the cardinal will be much more complicated, but it is all the same stuff. So don't be intimidated by it. It's just more of the same stuff because there's more going on. It's a more complex subject. But essentially, we break it down. This is all there is to it so far. Again, this is something that's new. Digital watercolor painting wasn't a thing when I started watercolor painting. There just two things didn't go together. There was no chance that there would ever be a digital watercolor painting. But here we are. It's 2024, and I'm painting with an Apple pencil. I still love traditional watercolor painting, I think it's a lot easier than doing this. But again, I'm getting more and more comfortable with this to the point where I feel that, hey, this is really starting to work. This is really starting to look like watercolor painting. And I hope that you get as much out of it as I do. I find this actually helps me a lot with traditional watercolor painting, the more that I do it. And let me know what you think, please. I appreciate your comments. If you have some ideas or suggestions on maybe what we could do better or differently or how to you know, some more different techniques or anything, I be thrilled to hear them. Thanks again for watching and enjoy your painting.