Goldfoil and Watercolor Mandala Design

1. Intro: Hi, everyone. And welcome to my skill. She class on gold foil on watercolor. In this class, I'm going to cover how you can combine gold foiling with your water colors. You can eat the abstract watercolor splash pieces like this, or you can use gold foil and other creative ways to add highlights and details. I'm just going to cover how you used to in combination and what or that they should be done , how they work together and so forth. So I really hope you join me in this class. 2. Materials: materials will need for this class. Mixed media paper is the best you could use watercolor paper, but if it's too textured, you're going to have a problem with your gold foil. We're going to need ink pain That's not water salable. When we get to that part, I'll show you how to determine that. A pencil watercolor paint whatever you like. If you prefer to have a pan, that's fine. We have to border color. That's fine. Too fresh is you just need a smallish one and a large one to have a large areas with to do the gold. Foil the painting in gold foil sheets and leafing size, which is like the glue you need optionally. You could use masking fluid just to Moscow. It's on areas, depending on the design you're doing, which I do you need for my design and then also a wide gel pain. If you want to add some highlights at the end 3. Drawing the design: Firstly, I just planned on where my design elements were going to go. I'm using mixed media paper. After I decided where I wanted every element to go, I also decided which parts I want to have gold foiled. So I have this whole bitten the middle. That's mostly Mandela, that I went to gold foil and then I have some flowers on the edges that I'm going to do in pen. Um, I would like to change what I'm doing quite often. So I am just putting in all my detail in pencil first so that I just have to outline it with pain. And I don't have to add details with pain. So I'm just going in and adding all the details I want in there. I'm going to add all my details in the area where I want the gold foil to be as well. You won't see any of the pants alliance under the gold foils. You can make it as Dhaka's you want it to be. It doesn't matter. It wont be seen at all. So once you've finished stitching in all of the details you need for your piece, you can move on to the next part. If you like free handing it with your watercolors or with pain, you can completely skipped the step. This is just my process. 4. Inking: Firstly, I need to determine if the pain I'm using can be dissolved with water. You need to make sure it's dry, but just waiting until it's dry to the touch is not enough. Might still be weight enough inside the paper that it'll smear. So give it a good five minutes to dry. Before you test this, I'm going to be tasting a bunch of different pins. I have. So I'm using my co pick multi. Lina, I'm using some ink pains. I have. I'm using some gel pins. I have just use whatever black pain do you have. Just give them a test. So you have to do is make eagle scribble on the paper. Um, in afterward, you go over. It was a little bit of water, but wait about five minutes for it to dry before you go in with the water. Yeah, I start applying some water and you can see the ink is still smudging, even if often had some time to dry. So this pain is not a good idea. Same with the second pin. It's also smudging, so not a good idea. Also, make sure to wash your brush in between you can see this one, which is the same one I did earlier, is not smudging because it's had time to dry, adding one more water. But you can see that slightly discoloring the paper because the papers wait because I've added so much water now, not because I think it's smudging. You can just likely run your finger over to dry up the paper, but that'll just take that last little bit of color away. Now I'm going to use the spin and go in and outlined my hopes. So this fist square I'm growing everything inside that square is going to be gold foiled. So I'm only going to be thinking outside of this square. So I'm just thinking in all my base designs. And then I'm going to add a lot the details and shading because I'm not going to be detailed watercolor painting. So I need all my shading to be done with the pain. When shading flowers and use, I put more shading in the middle off the flower. So where the flowers based starts on putting more shading as it goes out instead of putting it at the edge of the flower, but believes on putting more the edge of the flower just so that they're a little bit darker because I'm not adding any color to it. My mandala designs. I'm not doing any shading on them. I'm just making them flatlines been doing feathers. I'm also going to do some shading. I'm doing shading from the base where the feathers would could make to do that little burn . And then also from the tips, leaving some blank space in the middle off those two so that it gives sort of our highlight effect and make them look rounded, a technique I use as I keep turning the page that I flick my pain towards me. This means the start of the lioness thick and then the end of the line sort of feathers out , becomes thinner. And I use this in, although shading I'm doing so that we don't have very harsh lines. I'm just continually taking the line and flicking it towards me so that the the line gets lighter, the closer it is to me, and I just repeat this for a little shading, and it gives a nice, soft, affecting your shading with the pain. Last year I'm just going to do some final details on certain areas. So I'm just going in and during a few more lines of shading, just making sure my outlines all perfect. And then I'm done with everything. Everything is not inked except for the middle with a gold foil will be. 5. Goldfoil: Now we're going to be taking the leafing size, which is essentially the glue you used to stick at the gold foil to the paper. So I just put a little bit of my brush, and then I'm just going to paint it only in places where you want the gold foil to be. I'm taking it nice and slow, so it's see through So you can't really see me painting anything. Um, I can see it because I can see the light glinting off of it so I can see way. It's Wait, there's a bit of a shine to it, so you'll be able to see it when you're doing it yourself. But you can't really see it on the video. I'm not going to spend too much time when you're looking at the painting Invisible stuff. So I'm just going Teoh, quickly outline all the bets on. Then I'm going to skip to where we're actually going to be using the gold foil so you let a dry for about an hour and then we'll feel tacky, and then you just need to take a sheet of gold foil. Just lie it on top. So mine got stuck on the corners A as I had to put it down so I didn't miss a little bit of the top solo. I'll just take some extra pieces from the bottom, teared off and then put them over on the top piece of blue. I'm taking a really soft brush to just flatten it down and make sure that all my gold foil is sticking to my leafing size. So the soft brush is just really pushing it down onto the glue or leaving size whatever you want to call it, just to make sure it is stuck down everywhere inside and have bets with basically where the gold fall isn't sticking to properly. Once I'm sure that all the exposed Lewis covered in gold leaf understanding to take the excess around the edges, just tear it off and put it away for a future project, you could just save all the little scrap that's regardless of size and just use it for future projects. I just put mine back in the booklet. It comes in, I just go over. It was myself. Brush one more time to make sure that it's stuck down on the glue everywhere and moving a little bits of scrap off from the sides to more exposed bits of glue. If there are any and then I'm going to take my brush and start brushing harder onto the gold leaf, this will start picking it up everywhere. It's not glued down, so it's just sort of tearing off the bits that's not glued down on lifting it up that this brush was too soft to pick up anything except the biggest pieces. So I moved to a slightly harder brush, which helped to dislodge some of the other pieces off the paper. You want to keep brushing until your whole design is revealed. You know what your design looked like. So, you know, we they supposed to be gold leaf and isn't if you didn't may some glue some way. Obviously, that will make a difference. But if you didn't, then you can just make sure to brush around your design and make sure you sort of scratch off all the excess gold leaf that's not supposed to be there. Then scratch too hard on your actual design. Don't want bits to come off. That shouldn't, but you can be reasonably rough with it. at the animals are quickly going to go in with my eraser just year as any pencil marks that wasn't covered with gold leaf. Just be careful with the razor, so you don't pick up any of the gold leaf and remove it so just to raise softly. 6. Optional: masking fluid: for this quick, optional step. I'm taking some art masking fluid, so I have this little border around my gold foil where I don't want any water color to come into. And rather than trying to keep in which colors out of it, I just paint on some masking fluid so that the water color can't go on to that part of the paper once again, a see through. So I'm not going to spend too much time focusing on painting it on. But just know that it's an option if you want to keep your water color away from certain parts of your paper if you want to keep parts of your paper white. 7. Watercolor: I'm going to do the weight on weight watercolor technique. So I'm going to be painting a massive water color splash all around that square that I've marked at the gold foil and the masking fluid. So for the weight on where technique, I'm going to place a color splash shape onto my paper with water, just water at the beginning. So I'm not going to do the whole splash at a time. I'm going to sort of split it into quarters. So I'm going to do the stop quarter first. I'm just placing some water and then I'm going to go in with my watercolors and drop splashes of color onto that. So you take some of your color on your is on your palate, or you put some of your two border color into a palette. You waited up, get nice and wet, and then you drop drops off that onto the weight paper Petaling spread out of the paper and I dropped a bunch of different colors. So my color palette is dark blue to you, pink and purple. So I'm just going to be dropping splashes of all of these colors onto the page and then if they're not met, meeting up together by themselves, they're going to take my brush and sort of just push the colors until they're touching each other so that I don't have any empty space. I'm going to make paint the edges sort of ragged, so it looks more like a splash, and I'm also going to do some small splashes just off the edge of the big splash. I'm then going to take this big brush. First I'm going to dip it in water, and then I'm going to dip it in paint and then just use my finger to flick that paint over the page That is going to create even smallest splashes, so that would call big water color. Splash sort of blends into the background beta. It makes the edge feel less harsh. I'm just going to take some different colors as well and splash that as well. May I have the first quarter of my water color splash done? I'm not going to repeat this step for a while. Four parts off my big splash. I'm going to mix it up with color, so it's not the exact same amount of colors niche areas, some areas will have more purple, Some areas will have more pinks, and then that's pretty much the watercolor technique done. It's super easy and a really nice way to do backgrounds for a lot of your watercolor pieces . So I like to apply the gold foil to the paper first, because all this war time applying does make the paper wrinkle on back up a bit, and I prefer plying the gold foil while the pages still perfectly flat. But there's no reason why you can't do it the other way around. If you want to put some of your gold foil on top of your water color, this absolutely no reason why you can't do that. It just with the bigger pieces. It's I prefer during the gold foil. First, I feel like I get more accuracy that way, but you want to do detail afterwards in gold foil like it'll but some of the eaves and gold foil on the flowers, some stripes on the feathers. There's no reason why you can't do that on top of the water color, doing the exact same techniques we did earlier, and we're just applying it to the plain paper. The only problem is if you mace up you pretty much mr upon your water color. So I also like to do the gold full first because I feel like it's easier to mess it up in the water colors. And then I don't wouldn't have wasted all that time doing my pretty watercolors. One thing that's very important that if you want to put your gold fall on top of your watercolors to make sure your water colors 100% dry, same with when you're doing your gold, your to come off to your gold foil is to just make sure that none of your gold foil still loose. Otherwise, you gained have bits that gets stuck in your water color. He also want to make sure your gold falls perfectly cleaned off. All those least little bits is off before you start in with your water. Keller says that you don't have contamination either way that you didn't want. Yes, that is pretty much our watercolor Sigmund Done, which is very much. Most of the piece done. They still some small details we're going to add, but you could stop here and have a very beautiful art piece 8. Optional: removing masking fluid: Removing the masking fluid is a super easy and uncomplicated step. You just hook the corner of the masking fluid with something your nail, a palette knife, anything like that. I think you just pull it off and it'll just come straight off the paper, sort of like stringing gooey stuff. But it all just comes off nice and easily, and then afterwards I just run my hands over the page, just double check that they aren't any left over. And it's is easy is that. And now those spots have absolutely no pain turn because all the pain got stuck on top of the masking fluid instead of on the page itself. 9. Fixing mistakes: if you made any mistakes, is what a color like these little splashes accidentally got into the area of my mandala that's supposed to be white. Just take a brush with some water and just with that area and blamed that color into the paper around it. So you're pretty much thinning it out so much that it pretty much become see through you. Just take some water and just brush it over the little mistakes and just pretty much erased them with water. So you don't want to get your gold foil to wet because it could loosen up the glue and the gold foil will come off. So don't paint straight the water straight onto the gold folder. Sort of brush it around the gold foil on the you go all your mistakes easily erased. 10. Finishing touches: we're now pretty much done with our design. I'm just doing a few more things, so I'm not going back in with ink and I'm going to outline the golden mandala design. So if you have any parts off, your design with gold foil isn't perfectly smooth on the edges. This will hide that and also feel I could just add some definition to this pot. Otherwise, it feels like there's not enough definition combined compared to how much definition is to the rest of my design. I feel like it's sort of fades into the background when I want this, but to be in the full ground. So I'm just going to take my pain and just outline every golden part of the mandala except for this little drops, because I want those to stay super fine. I just liked the definition it gives to my gold foil piece. This is once again totally optional, but just a nice, um, additional thing you can add that will just add another level to your piece. Next, I'm going to take my pain and outline some of my parts that are under a lot of water colors . It feels like some of the black Angus faded and all the watercolor layers, Um, so I'm literally just taking my pin in and outlining some of the parts in the water color splash area with these flowers, especially, I felt like a lot of lot of definition because of how dark the splashes were in this area. So these I differently just want to go over quickly with ink just to define them again, said that they stand out as much as the rest of the design. Last thing I'm going to do is add some detail with a white gel pain. You could also add this detail in more gold foil on top of the water color if you want. But I wanted my details to be settled, so I'm just adding a little bit of highlights here, and they on top off that darker watercolors. Just this some definition to some parts. And then I'm also going to be outlining some of my designs, bet all a part of the water color splashes and just adding some highlights. I think this just gives some nice definition to it just adds a small extra level of depth to the image and that is it? Our design is now complete. You now have a beautiful artwork featuring a love, different techniques that you can go and use in a bunch of different ways. 11. Final project: for your final project. Will you have to do is paint any watercolor piece that use gold foil in So your gold fall can be a main statement pieces and mine. Or you could just use them as little fine details. Or it can mainly be a gold for peace. That only has a few watercolor details. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. And thank you so much for joining me in this class.