How to Draw and Paint a Sea Turtle in Watercolors and Ink

1. Introduction: Hi everyone. My name is Felicia per run, and I'm so happy that you're joining me today for my Skillshare class. How to draw and paint a sea turtle in watercolors that ink. I'm an artist who works primarily in watercolor and ink, and I simply love drawing and painting animals. To me, animals are such fascinating subjects to do because they are so beautiful, diverse of character. And even though I loved drawing and painting all animals, I have to admit sea turtles hold a special place in my heart. To me, sea turtles are beautiful, graceful, and peaceful animals. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to draw and paint a sea turtle in watercolors and ink step-by-step. First, I will list all the materials that you need to undertake this project. Next, we are going to simplify the complex shape of a sea turtle by sketching and above and side profile so that you get a better understanding of the sea turtle structure and features. Next, we're going to do a detailed sketch of a sea turtle based on a reference photograph. After that, I will take you through some simple watercolor exercises to practice, such as how to lay a flat wash, a graded wash, a very lush, and how to do wet on dry and wet on wet techniques. Then we're going to paint our detailed sea turtles sketch by laying in a base wash subsequent layers, and finally adding touches of ink. This class is designed for beginners and intermediate artists, but advanced artists are more than welcome to join in and adapt the project to your skill level. I can't wait to see all the beautiful sea turtle paintings that you're going to create. So if you're ready, let's begin. 2. Materials: Hello. In this video, I'm going to show you all the materials that you're going to need to do. The sketching of the sea turtle, as well as the watercolor exercises. And to do our final class project, which is to sketch and paint a sea turtle. So without further delay, I'd like to start first with the watercolor paper that I like to use. I just discovered this brand, Canson very recently. And what I love about this paper and this format of having a, all the papers bound together in this book is that it's just great for when you want to flip through your book and keep all your paintings in here. But it's also has these little dotted lines that you can see here, which makes it easy to tear the paper out. For instance, if you really like a painting you've done, you can tear it out and frame it. Or if not, you can just have it in here all bound together. So they're not just loose papers every way. So one of the reasons I really love this brand of paper is not only is it 300 g/m square, which is what I would highly recommend for doing watercolor work. I just think the quality of the paper, this is cold pressed by the way. I've painted a few times with it and I just loved the results. It just holds water and paint. Ready, ready. Well, it doesn't buckle and I have applied many, many layers on top of each other. It doesn't rip so you don't have to buy the same brand that I use. There are a lot of great brands of paper out there and I've used many. So it really depends on you. The only thing that I ask for you to use is paper that is 300 g/m squared. Next, I want to just show you the pencils phrases that I like to use for sketching. Once more. This is also up to you and your preference, but I love using these pilots super grip pencils, which are 0.5, that's the thickness of the lead that I use. I tend to use lead. That's either to be or HBI. That just means the darkness of the lead. These days I prefer using HB lead. It's just easier for me to erase because HBI is lighter than to be, but I love these pencils. They've got this nice grip that makes it comfortable to hold. And besides these pencils, I would use a normal eraser. Any brand is ready, okay, this one just happens to be Faber-Castell, but with any eraser as long as it's soft and I would highly recommend you test it out first before you start using it on your final drawing just to check that it actually erase as well. And this is something that I also probably only purchased a couple of years ago. So the brand of this handy pen eraser is a Tombow, and this is a mono zero. And what's wonderful about this eraser, is it what's kinda like a mechanical pencil? You push it out from the top and it lets me erase those tiny little lines are tiny areas that you want to keep clean that your large eraser might end up erasing the whole boundary of these tiny areas. So this is so handy to have and now I honestly just can't live without it. I can sketch without them. One small, every artist has their own preference of brushes. And I also only discovered this brand recently of silver black velvet. So these are three different silver black velvet brushes that I purchase which are round. And I bought one in a size four and a size 81 and a size 12. Obviously, the larger the number, the larger the width of your brush. You will need a palette for this project if you are starting out and you can only afford a plastic palette for now, that's absolutely fine. For this project. I chose these particular colors of cobalt turquoise light, and this is by Winsor and Newton brand. I have added Spectrum brand. Ad is quality, watercolor, sap, green, permanent. I have Winsor and Newton, watercolor as well of Parisian blue. And I have this spectrum. Ad is water color, indigo, blue. And as you can see, this one's missing a bottom because it got quite dried up in the tube over the years, but I still use it by cutting it out and scraping it out, putting it onto my palette. I would highly recommend, even if you're a beginner, please, by artist quality watercolors. The cheaper watercolors that our student quality just don't, in my experience, they don't mix as well. Because they are cheaper, they might not be highly pigmented. So if you want to start getting the feel of being a watercolor artists, I would highly recommend you do by artist quality paints. I'm now going to talk about the pens that I like to use as the final touches for my painting. I'm somebody who loves to use pens, and I have a whole variety of colored pens of ink pens. So the pens for this project that I'm going to use, my fabric, Estelle Pitt, Artist Pen, fine liner black. This is a small nib, so it's only 0.3 nm. And then I have these by the brand art studio in both green and blue. And as you can see that 0.5 and M2, and these are all water waterproof. Meaning once I laid them down on the paper, they're not going to move around when I wet the ink. When I put paint on top or paint next to it, it will not bleed. So these I tend to use only after I've laid down my final washes of watercolor. And just, I want to add finishing touches to it. And contrasting with those are these white gel pens that I have. And the brand is Jelly Roll by Sakura. And they are really great. I've got them in different sizes as well as 0.50 point 8.10. And then these are wonderful pens that I love to add highlights with. Because sometimes in watercolor, you can save all the white spots are the spots of paper. When you're painting, you might paint over them by accident. If you're like me, I don't love using masking fluid all the time. For me, masking fluid can be a bit of a hassle. When you put it on. It can just it takes a while to dry. And sometimes even after you paint over it, there's always a risk that when you're removing your masking fluid, it might take some of the paper with it, and that has happened to me before. So what I love about these white gel pens or they are not waterproof by the way. So if you do lay down quite, I can just demonstrate over here this paper. This is almost dry. So what I love about these white gel pens are that as you can see, they, they really stand out against a dark background. So if I wanted to add a few spots or patterns like that, I think my pen is a little stuck here. But if I wanted to add a few spots and stuff, like I could do that with this with this ink pen. So I really do love them. I find them really, really handy. And the best part is as well, if I lay them down and I don't like the white mark that they leave. I could always lift them or blend them more with water. As you can see, I can blend it away if I find that it's too white. So that's also just really, really handy. So these are basically all the materials that you're going to need for your project. So thank you for watching. 3. First Sketch - Above View: Hello. And we're just about to start drawing a total from it's above view. So first I'm going to start with the shell of the title. So for the shell of the total, we're going to do something with. It's a cross between an oval and a teardrop shape. So I'm just using some very broken lines because you don't have to use full lines when you draw. Because I feel like it lets you adapt and change direction easier when you're using broken drawings like broken lines like that. Now wait a turtle shell. What's the difference is it gets a little, when I say it's a cross between an oval and a teardrop, it gets a little pointed at each end. Especially when we're doing the a green turtle. So I'm just trying to get the pointy parts above and below are the same. So I'm just going to take an above you and see if that's like it doesn't have to be perfectly symmetrical. Because this is just like the study guide for us to understand the shape of a total better. Remember withdrawing. You're free to change your mind and to adapt it. Okay? I like the way that's looking. So I'm just going to get my eraser. And I'm just going to erase this now. Erasing the extra lines just so it looks cleaner. So that's looking pretty symmetrical. I think it should just come out a little bit more here. I think it's looking pretty good. I think we can actually move on to the head. So the head of our total, we're going to start where the neck is. So we're just gonna do two little lines that are just slightly curved and they shouldn't be too wide. Actually, I'm just going to make them a bit narrower because the title is neck is not actually very wide. But I'm now going to draw the head. So we're going to start with, I'm going a little bit like flat here. It's kind of like a bit of a teardrop shape, but a little bit more squarish or rectangular. And it will eventually get pointy up here where that's the totals beak, so to speak. So we're gonna make that pointy. And it can even go a little pointier. And I'm just going to one small, just erase the little lines just so we can see that clearly. Right now. I'm not gonna do details right now. I just wanted to get the shape of the total right? So what we can do now is add the eyes and the eyes are going to, total eyes actually bulge out. So even from the above you, you would see it like this on the sides. Which is cool. Okay, so our total is looking quite good. And now I'm just going to do the big flippers at the front. So for the flipper shape, it can seem a bit complicated, but I'm going to slow it down. So what we have here is a curved line that goes up here at an angle. So at this angle, it's suddenly going to go straight. As you can see, there's a sharp angle here where it goes straight and then it's going to curve a little. These flippers are really big because the total uses them to propel itself through the water, so they are pretty powerful. And over here, we've got this. But we're also going to have a curve line that meets it here in our total. And you'll see it a lot clearer when I do a more detailed sketch, but that's the general shape that we want to keep. And in fact, you could even make it a little bit bigger. Remember, this is drawing. You're allowed to change your mind, you're allowed to correct it if you feel the need to, you don't have to keep the lines that you put down. N It then goes back like that in the cuff. So that is a pretty nice big fin that you've got that. And I'm going to repeat the same process over here. Try and do it at the same distance. So what we do is we go up the curve because here then we have the sharp angle where it goes down as a straight line. Almost straight. It curves just slightly towards the end. And you then have this, this going in here like that, this 0 shape. And then it goes like that again and back. So those are, that's the general shape of its fin. Now I'm going to do its back legs, which are really cute as well. I just want to make this, it doesn't have to be exactly symmetrical to this, but I'm just gonna do it anyway just to try and keep it easy for you to follow and for you to have as a reference later on. So now we're gonna do the legs, the back legs. I might start over here because I don't want to do the shell. Don't want it to go too close to the tip of the shelves. So the back legs are gonna be a lot shorter. And they also have these interesting shapes. So it's, it's not, it's kinda jag it a little bit. But that's a very simplified version of it. And also try and start at the same distance away from the tip of the show. So I'm gonna go down again. And it's going to connect like that. So let me just erase these little lines here. Now, if you have got this shape, then you have done really well because that is basically the shape of a total broken down from its top view. Now that we've sketched the outline of our total, we are going to just define the shell and the fin markings just a little bit more for our total. So first I want to do the head. So the head has a series of shapes and we have like this kind of how's it looking shape over here at the top of our titles head. And this is going to connect to two segments over here. Now, rarely you don't have to do this. So precisely, it really does depend on the kind of art you want to do, but at the same time, you don't have to follow every single like mocking of a turtle because we are suggesting that this is a turtle by just highlighting some of the main markings. I usually go for the bigger ones. So it's really okay if you don't do this in a lot of detail, but for those of you who want to just have like a reference like of what the markings of a total or like, you know, I guess I'm doing this view. So we have these markings that like I said before, they don't have to be so perfect. So some of these I can, I can say, Oh, this is like a hexagon, this is a pentagon, but some of these markings are a bit strange and curved. So I wouldn't say that they are precise. Hexagon are pentagons, are octagon or anything like that. So this is kind of like what you would see on the head of the total. Alright, like a rough guideline of what you would see and then the mode shapes further on there. But I really don't think you really need to get really hung up on all this for now. And where you have the neck over here. It's cool to put in a few lines because the total does have a bit of a wrinkly neck, which is very cute in my opinion. So you've got these wrinkles. And if you want, you can even add a few lines here to just show emphasized that he has a scaly skin. And with this show, I just want to curve it a bit here. Now. I want to, I want to do the fins first actually. So the title does have some markings that are more defined than others. So with this fin, like you do get a few of these markings that look kind of A rectangular kind of blocky. Once more, you really don't have to accurately replicate every single shape that you see here, because people are already going to be able to tell this is a total. So we're just gonna do a few of these markings that you see. And I'm looking at a reference photo, but you can also kind of wing it if you want as long as you just suggest, okay, over here, there are these markings over here, and it also starts to change a bit. So these are quite, quite complex markings that it has. So just like my advice for you is don't get so hung up over the little ones. If you will include reference photographs and I will give you a copy of what I'm doing here. But you really just should enjoy the process of creating. Like, please don't try to do every single shape, every single geometric shape that is, it's kind of crazy. It is quite complex. But with this turtle, there are certain sections I see like where there is a long part here. So we're just going to do a few of these markings here like that. Okay, So I've done quite a few of these like a big markings here. So I'm just, as you can see, it's just free handing this and I'm just having fun with it. Like not not taking it too seriously. Because we already know it's a total. Now for these, there are some sections over here where you can just keep adding these lines as I'm doing here. And you can also start adding smaller little shapes. Like I kinda go between doing geometric shapes and rounder shapes and something in-between because it has a scaly skin pattern. And we're just emphasizing that over here. So yeah, my advice is please don't get so hung up doing all these shapes accurately. So there is one thing over here. Now before I do the other thing, I just want to take you through. Its back fins do have markings as well, but that's the smallest surface area. So they're not as not as complex. And like I said before, I would just point out the main, the main huge shapes. And then I just fill in the other bits like that go on the inside if you notice with the total, they have larger shapes towards the outside. And on the inside of the thin, it kinda goes all small. N goes between being round and geometric. So that's cool too. So there's one fin done. Before I do the elephants actually want to take you through the shell. Now. With the shell, what I would do is I'm just going to add a bit of this border here. So there is a bit of a border. And the lines show the borders should get a little thinner at the top up here. But that's fine. So we have a rough border and I'm just going to do these little shapes up here. So the total has some unusual like they're almost like hexagon, but they're also like seashells sort of shapes is how I would describe it. So they are unusual shapes. So my advice to you is just try and capture the rough shape. You don't have to do this really accurately. So it has like a, a sort of like a cross between a seashell and a hexagon is what I said before. And if you want, you can actually draw a line down the middle, if that helps you to just try and do this as symmetrically as possible. But in my opinion, it looks better when you do it more like, you know, when you freehand it and you do it more organically rather than taking measurements and stuff like that. So there is another shape here that's almost flat at the bottom. So I'm just gonna go over it. So remember, this is a drawing. This is a process. So you can always, you can always change it later if you don't like it. So there we go. And I just wanted to clean it up a bit for you. I'll just use my pencil eraser to just clean up the shapes so that you can see it clearly. And now we're going to connect the shapes, so to speak. So this is where, like I said before, you really don't have to do this very accurately. But I will include this drawing as a reference for this class if you really want to do it accurately. So I'm just following my reference photograph now of a total. So as you notice, this is a curved shell. So the lines are not going to be like connecting to the edge of the shell in a very straight men are, they're gonna go up, they're going to go down. Gonna go like curved. They're gonna be curved lines. So we've got this one that goes up a bit and then it comes down. And over here we've got this that goes up a bit and comes down again. So this is already a rough, a very, as you can see, we have the total shape going on here. I think I would just make this part a little bigger, so it's looking good. And now I'm just going to divide. The shell in my reference photograph has a division in this part over here. This is where it gets quite fun for me. I would, first, before I do anything, I would start to divide. There are these little divisions on the shell and they don't really, like I said before, this is a curve shelf. So you're going to have to your lines are going to change direction. Sometimes they're rarely going to be straight. And personally, I'm not someone that's going to count every single number of divisions on the shell. You really don't have to can I please emphasize you really don't have to do that. Just my advice is just try and make it look natural. So I'm going to add another line here. I'm basically going to do a mirror image of these lines and the way they're curved. And I'm going to show you a trick to make it look. The reason I'm doing these lines is because we're going to make our our divisions look very real. Okay, and I think this line should be this shape because of the way it's curved. So now this is the fun part. We're going to erase that. And we're going to do each section. So this is going to go in a bit here. We're going to just use these as guidelines. So this is the shape we're going to follow. It sticks out a bit here, and then it goes back in words like that. So that's the trick. You just, you go back in this dips below our reference line and then it goes up over here. So as you can see, as I repeat this process, I'll show is starting to look more realistic. When I erase the lines later. They're going to stand out so beautifully. As you can see, I'll show is already starting to come alive. And I'm just going to repeat this process over here. And yeah, like this is looking really good, so I'm really happy about that. And if you have your eraser, you're going to just erase away these little lines. The reference line of the shell is what I would call it, or the perimeter that we drew, the circumference, whatever. Yeah. So there is our shell that looks a lot more realistic now that we've done. So there you go. And you're free to repeat the process with the other side as well. So same thing, but this time we're going to go above our reference line here. Just like a mirror image. You've got such a cool looking turtle shell already. So I might fill in the rest of the total. While I might even like time lapses pot later on in the video. So let's just finish out total it's markings. We're also just going to do these fins. I'm just going to add the main lines in. So I can see that long shape here. So remember we're just, so it looks much better if you freehand it and you don't think so much about it. So just try and do these shapes like this. And add some little scaly patents here. So there you have it. That's the basic shapes of our total and its shell pattern. So let's move on to the next video. 4. Second Sketch - Side View: Hi, welcome back. And since we did our Above view of our total, we're now going to do a side profile view. So grab your pencil. And I'm going to first start actually with the shell of the total. The total shell is very interesting here. So it goes up. Up here, an angle goes pretty much straight and then curves down. Yeah. So this is still a very, very rough sketch that I'm doing and we're going to have to refine it more. But so far, I'm quite happy with that shape. Clean it up a bit here. And now I'm going to draw the body of the title. But before I do that, I might just make a very rough outline. Just so I know where the shell, where the show ends. Okay, so now I'm going to draw the cute little head of our total. So we're going to start with a bit of a neck. But I just have to put a few guidelines here because this is actually the body of the total. So its neck is coming out here. And the mouth of the total, it kinda goes like that. But let's just do the head a bit better for us like. So I just want to clean this up a bit with my pencil eraser. And I just want to refine this a bit. So just said the head looks a little, a little bit more recognizable as a total was head. Then we've got a thin that's coming out here. So remember what our thin. It comes out at an angle like that. And it's gonna go down like this. And they have pretty big fins in proportion to their shells. They do, because they really do need all that power and down. So it's a bit of a triangular shape from the side profile. And it goes to, goes a little bit thinner here and then down here. So you don't have to do a lot of details at this point. We just want to get an idea of its shape. Actually, I think I'm making it jut out a little bit too much. I just want to take it back a bit. So I'm just going to erase this part here. So this is the fin when it's all stretched out. And I would actually take it back a little bit more as well. So this is all a process. You can adjust it the way you want as you look at it. And especially if you're looking at a reference photograph that's very useful. So the total spin doesn't have to. And then this fin is going to go under the shower here. It's going to connect with the body here. I just want a thin in it just a little bit more. So you adjusted the way you feel fit. And down here. Now, I also just want to, so I'm just going to erase these lines now that I'm happy with it. Remember drawing is a natural organic process and you can change it. The lines that you put down or not like permanent, which is the great thing about drawing with pencil. I'm just wanted to do this. I just saw we can see our totals face a little clearer. So with the total, we've got this line that connects up to its head over here, which acts as a It just helps us define the eye, the features better. So a turtles I actually bulges out as we saw with the with the above view profile. And over here is our eye. We're gonna do an eye lid. And it has. So remember, this is the very, very early stages. I just so that you can see it clearly, I'm just going to color the eye in there. And that's our total said, which looks very cute. I might actually just, I just wanted to take this line back a little bit here. So remember, drawing is an organic process. You don't have to. You can keep changing it as often as you want, actually. Alright, so the total has a lot more features on its face, but let's get back to that later. For, from this side view, we can see one thin coming out here. The back fin, which is a lot smaller than it is for unfun. So that's a little bit of a cut there. And then it goes around like that. So I just wanted to so we're going to have this same like little sections, but it's obviously just going to look a little bit different from this angle. So remember, the shell is a curved, it's a curved object. So it's very important that you put curved lines and straight lines. I'm starting out first with this with this with the outer rim this time. So I'm just going to put these markings. And later on we're going to really bring our shell to life when we do each section of it. And there we go. And I'm just going to now define this show even more. So this is where I'm going to now make each section of the shell stand out more. So just some kinda go outside the guidelines a little. And all the wild, this is helping you understand the shape of the total mole. There we go. And now you can use your eraser and just get rid of all these unnecessary lines. So that's looking really good. Now I think I might work on the face of the total. I'm actually kinda dying to do the face. So I did draw this little eye here and stuff and I just wanted to his nostril will be somewhere over here. So these are just main features that I want to point out now, like the nostril. Because they have lungs. They don't have gills. They do have to breathe just like us. They just can hold longer breaths underwater. And we've got this shape here. We've got a few like scaly. We're just gonna do a lot of scale patterns. And it has one small, these geometric patterns that you don't have to follow by the way, you really don't. So I'm just kinda doing a rough sketch now of these patterns that you will see on your turtle. Very interesting geometric shapes. Some of them yes, curved, some of them are straight. So I just want to add a few of these patterns here. Once more. I'm not doing accurate measurements here. I just want to pick out the really obvious big patterns that I see like. And then I'm going to just fill in the rest later on, just using my imagination, which is what I encourage you to do as well. So there is how turtle's head, although guy looking titles have a very grumpy look for some reason. Like the last one, I'm just going to add a bit of a curvy lines like this, these lines, because they just show that the skin is kind of like wrinkly. And a few more of these little spots over here to that you'll see a lot of these lines go up to here. I feel like that's enough detail for now. So what we're really doing while doing all this, we're really getting an understanding and an appreciation of the main features of the total. Like it's now it's skin is so scaly. And we can add like little, little circle, so-called light shapes to show that it's scaly instead of just the lines. So that shows you that, hey, our little guy is quite scaling. And over here we've got this fin now. And I just want to put so we had a bit of practice during the finches now from a different angle. So from this angle we still have these very like our rectangular looking patterns over here, geometric shapes that go a little, a little shorter, so to speak. Like as we get over here. As I said before, please don't go crazy trying to replicate the exact pattern of the total. Like I'm very sure your viewers won't really even care to count. Oh, did you do that many divisions over here, all markings. So there are a few like little lines that you can from this angle. You do see that there are like I can draw this line down here and I can then just like kinda divided up. Because these are like kind of like this pattern and this side's kind of piled on top of each other over here. And then we've got this huge shape over here. And then we got this long, long little marking here. We can just go up more. And over here, it starts to follow this outline a little. The shapes are like longer and more horizontal, so to speak in this section. And I'm just going to keep going up here while not like a accurately following every pattern. So once you get somewhere here, you can just kinda like connect the shapes, so to speak. Like I'm just making up my own geometric shapes as I go here. There's some long patterns here. So I'm just looking at my reference photo and just using it as a guideline. Like really, I'm not spending a lot of time doing this. We got more of these patents here and they get smaller. As you go into the center of the fin. Have you noticed that? That's the only thing that I'm really making an effort to really follow. But everything else to me is just winging it, winging it in the best possible way so that you're not spending a lot of time doing this and you're going to enjoy the creative process more than just like, Oh, making sure this looks really accurate. Because if you've got the proportions right, like that's the main thing I feel to make something look, you know, quite realistic if you get the proportions right. So I'm just going to fill in a bit more of this fin here. And one small really not, not being so accurate. So we've got a row. And over here in the middle of the fin, it gets very, very round and small. And that you have it like that is that is a good reference. Drawing of a side profile of a total, and so on. Next part of our class will be to actually do the detailed sketch of the total that we're going to paint. So stay tuned. 5. Detailed Sketch (to paint): Hello, and we're now going to do a very detailed sketch of our turtle. And I've chosen a picture, even though I had countless photographs to choose from of totals that I really loved and it was hard to decide. But I feel that this pose is very natural. And it also shows us a bit of the side profile as well as a bit of the frontal profile of the title. So I thought this was gonna be a very beautiful pose to draw. So I want to start first with the head. I'm going to do, there are many different ways of drawing. But for me, I just want to get the rough shape of the head for us. This is just very rough now and we can adjust it later. So for me right now, I just really want to get the shape of the head and we can refine it a lot more later. I might just just so I can get a very clear view of where everything is on the head. I'm just going to draw this line which represents the totals mouth. And this line then goes down over here and up here. Now that I have a better idea of where the mouth is, I can just adjust the head thing. It should go down here a bit. I just want to do like just mark the position of the eye. So even though I said I don't want to do a lot of detail. This is something that I tend to do a lot of like Just because I've got that I just marked out here. And this will help me actually just to do the the whole body rarely because the head is very important. This is where the eye is going to be. So as you can see, it's already looking like a total. And I will add the other details in, but it's just good that I've marked this out. And that is our sea turtles I, and we can do the pattern later, but right now we're all about doing the shape. And now I'm going to do, so. The shell is going to start somewhere up here. And it's going to go and an angle down here, there's a change in angle. So this is gonna be a bit hard to do, but I think that it should actually come down here. I think I might have gone a bit high. So it's going to go down like this. So I'm just trying to free hand this right now. Trying to see where that totals, where the show ends. So we can see that the shell is gonna come over here. This is a rough idea now of what it's supposed to look like, the shell. And we can fix that as we go along. But I just wanted to try and fill in as much as I can right now. So what I can do if I'm happy with, let me just clean this up a bit. So using my eraser, I'm just going to, so I think there's a more natural transition here. I think it actually goes a bit up like that. Rather than these are all things that we can correct it and make it more accurate as we go along. Now that I've got and I can still change the shell if I'm not happy with it. So now that we've got this, I'm going to start sketching the fin that's in the background. So we've got total fins, this angle here where it comes out a bit. And then it goes down here. There are a few of these roundish grooves that we see. I'm now starting to do this under shell area. So the total has like a hard covering on its belly. Totals are pretty fascinating creatures on the like. This goes under the total here. And now I'm going to do this huge fin that we see over here. From the picture I can see there is a bit of space here. I may have done this a little bit sharp, so I'm just gonna kinda take it back a bit, which you're allowed to do at this stage, okay? You're allowed to change the drawing as much as you want before you lay colors down. In fact, there are times where I'm still changing the drawing as I'm painting. But yeah. So I can see this fin coming out here. And this angle is this fin is going to appear a lot larger because it's in the foreground. There is a bit of an angle there. That's an angle here. And then it changes direction again over here. So even though this looks really massive from this angle, believe it or not, this is very accurate to the reference picture that we're using. So we've got this part of the thin, it's going to, it's going to have like a pointy. So remember, you can change this if you don't like it the first time you draw it because I do feel that it is good to get the shape of the turtles fins like to be as accurate as you can. So I'm just gonna go slow. So there are these bits here that stick out. So there is one massive fin, which is actually pretty accurate. So I just want to make sure that I've got these angles right, because I do feel that they're important. I think this can come down a little bit like that. So I might just take it back a bit here. And I just wanted to make this a bit narrower here. And I just wanted to adjust the shape of the fin a little bit more. I think it should be like this. And then once we got this shape, I am going to just have a look at it from above. So that's looking good to me. This is a massive fan, by the way. So it should be a lot bigger than this. Alright, the one in the background. And it should dip in. So we've altered. We have the underbelly and it's going to connect down here. And just from looking at this now, I can, from once I connect this, I can see that the AI can do the back leg over here. But before I do that, I just want to look at the shell one more time. Because now that I have a clearer picture of my total, I can just make little adjustments to see if I did the the shell right? And in fact, I might actually take it a little higher here. So I'm going to just erase the other lines and just take a step back and have a look. And yeah, I'm happy with that shell now. And I'm now going to do this leg over here. At the back here. This leg is going to be it is kind of long from this angle, as you can see from the reference photograph that I will include. It comes down at this sharp angle, then it makes a little dip here. So that is one leg. It's a little hard to see this part because in the photograph, the there is a fish right where, right where the leg is. But from here, we can also draw the other leg, which is very much in the background and is going to appear a lot smaller. So total total legs are fins, whatever you want to call them, they are a very strange shape, but they're very beautiful. And so this one looks kinda like this. Just taking a step back to have a look at my title. And I feel that yeah, It's the shape of the total is very clearly here. And next, we can start adding in a few more details. So now that we have the positions roughly of everything that we need, we can now add in some more details to make our total much clearer before we start painting it. So what I wanna do is maybe start with, you can start anywhere you want, but I want to start with the head. I want to start defining our totals, lip, so to speak, doing this line. And I want to start doing the eye. So the eye of a turtle is very pretty and let me just try and get the shape better. So they've got very, very dark eyes, which are very beautiful. Now at this stage, it really depends on how much detail you want to put on your total. So there is an eyelid here and we don't have to draw every line that we see now because we can also paint this. So I'm just one to mark the stuff that I think is important. Now let's do a really fun part, which is the face, the markings here. So there are a lot of different geometric shapes here that really don't even have a name because some of them are roundish, some of them quite sharp edges. So my advice for this part is you don't have to do each shape. You don't have to replicate every shape that you see from the photograph really accurately. This one's a smaller one. But I do think it's good to try and just practice doing these shapes. They are very odd shapes. And just try and squeezing. Every time I do a total though, I do find that, oh, I've run out of space to put this shape in and stuff. So my advice is don't try and replicate it exactly as it is, the shapes. As we are suggesting that this is a turtle. And anyone that looks at your art after you put a few of these shapes in can definitely tell it's a total, there's no doubt about it. And so my advice is just try and replicate the shapes as best as you can, but don't go crazy trying to do it exactly the way you see it. Or you can end up spending a lot of time doing this and not really enjoying the process itself of creating your total. Oh, my advice is try not to make these shapes touch each other because you do want to leave a space in-between them for them to look good. So try not to let them touch each other. Okay? Now, okay. So we've done the face which looks great. There are some patterns here which are kind of blurry in the background of the reference photograph so we can actually add them on later. We don't really need to to lay them down. Now, what I would like to do now though, is to take this time just to, I just want to define little lines and things like that. So we can now suggest the wrinkly nature of the of the total. And I can see a few spots here. I'm just going to go along now at this point, just adding little things that I see like now's a great time to lay down the main, the main lines that you may see like creases of skin on the turtle. And once again, you don't have to do this with ridiculous accuracy. As long as we are suggesting that there are wrinkles. So this process might take awhile, but I just I would say don't get too hung up on it. Just try and replicate what you see down here, what I'm doing now, I'm below the neck and above this hard shell is there are a few scaly patterns. And you can suggest that by drawing these these lines and then filling them in later, that's a helpful way of doing it. But once more, don't, don't try and copy everything. It's meant to be a fun project, alright, It should be loose. You can add details in later if you want, but I just really want to get you to enjoy the process. So we've got these wrinkles here. And I'm just going to one small just try and fill in these little shapes here. So they act as a guideline for when we want to paint later. So the lines change here and I definitely see some of these shapes. But I think that will be enough for now. And now, I just want to try and do the shell a little bit more. With the shell. I do feel like I want to just refine the shape a little bit more again. So for me I feel like I might have made the so I can use my pen. So as a guideline in the photograph, in the reference photograph, we can clearly see the head of the, the total is a lot higher than the so I just want to maybe take this down a little that was a bit high. So this is the time to do all this, make these little adjustments and stuff over here before. And it's always a good idea to take a step back and to just check your drawing from by standing up and having a look from a bit of a distance back. I think this is good right now. And to do the markings of our shell, I just want to do the border that we had before, like, uh, like what we did earlier with when we practiced with our top views and side profiles of our totals. So I can see this border here of the shell and this will help us to refine the shell. Again. We have the border that goes all the way down here like that. And now I just want to give us a rough guideline of where where everything, where the shell pattern is. So I can see a pattern up here. In fact, this pot kinda comes up here a little, so it's okay. I can see that our shell then remember this, use curved lines to really emphasize that this is a curved object. And I can see the pattern can change, yeah. And down here, it's going to come down here, curved as well. So thinking should Cove more actually. And we can see part of the pattern here. The shell pattern is not very obvious in this picture, which is fine. It's just a different angle of the total. So that's okay. So it's not very obvious, but that's okay. So I actually can't see it very clearly, but, you know, it's a different angle of the total. And that's fine. I my advice to you is just draw what you can see from the reference photograph. And what we're gonna do now is just divide up the border. And I can just see that this is a bit strange and actually I feel that this should be higher and I can, I can adjust all this now, it's really no problem. So this should be higher up here. Remember, drawing is an organic process and you are free to keep changing your mind before you lay your pins down. And even after that. If you feel like, oh, I can make this look more accurate. I don't like the way this looks. Feel free to just change it as you go along. So this is here now. And I might actually just bring this here. So we've got a very strange shape over here. This is actually the, a bit of the underside of our, of our shell over here that will be in shadow. So that will be in the shadow here. So we don't have to worry about it too much now because I I did that. I just want to adjust. I feel like this should come down here a bit. And so we're gonna have these little sections here. And what we're gonna do now is the fun part, in my opinion, it's where we just make it look more like a shell by just making a few. So we're just defining each little section now a little bit more accurately. With this picture. It's not very clear like but that's okay. So we're just making our outer shell look a little bit more realistic. And that's looking really good so far. And one small, I just wanted to put in a few more markings over here where the where the pattern whereas can see the pattern. It's not, it's not terribly clear, but just, just do markings to suggest. Alright. And we can go here, and this is pretty blurry here. And we can do, we can suggest the months later. So what I want to do now to focus on is this fin over here. Because this fin is in the foreground, my advice would be to try and do this. Try and actually add trend and do some of the details well, like the markings. So you don't have to copy everything, but it's a good idea to just look at the picture and do your best to really just try and get a few of those very defined markings in. Because total markings can be pretty complicated to replicate. So I can see like rose, like a column, so to speak of marks here. Have fun with this part and like please don't get stressed during these patterns. Like I'm just doing what I can see here. But our main rule is with the total. If you notice, the Finns seem to have DACA patterns, bigger, geometric patterns on the, on the outside, on the outer perimeter that seemed to go smaller on the inside. I'm just doing more of these shapes that I see here, but not really paying too much attention to what they look like. And I can see, so they're getting some appointees, some are upside down. Have fun with it. This might, might seem a bit time consuming, so it depends on how detailed you want your picture to be. It's perfectly fine. If you don't want to take the time to draw every single marking and you want to suggest it later with pain, that's fine. My advice would just be trying not to make the shapes touch because we do want to do a distinct white line later between the markings. But have fun. This is supposed to be fun, so please don't get stressed during these markings. And if they do take awhile to do suggest. Yeah, I'm i as you can see, I'm going pretty fast here. I'm just doing what I feel like doing and I'm just having fun. So when you are satisfied, we can stop. And I think we've done a really good job so far on our title, and now it is all ready for us to paint in the next video. So stay tuned. 6. Methods - Exercises & Techniques: Hello, and welcome back to the class. In this lesson, we are going to practice a few watercolor techniques that we will be using for our final painting. And this includes the flat wash, the graded wash of varied wash, wet on dry and wet on wet techniques. So if you remember, we sketched a side profile of a turtle earlier. And I thought this would be a great, a great way to practice some of the skills that we need. So first of all, I want to do a flat wash. And to do a flat wash, I'm just going to pick a certain section of the turtle and I think I'll use this little shell area over here. So before I do the flat wash, we fired Drop painting. I just like to wet the area. Not too much water just like until you see a nice glossy sheen to it. Because this just helps our paint to spread, especially if it's a hot day. So to do this flat wash, I've decided to use one of the colors that we're going to use later, which is a turquoise, to paint a flat wash. You lay down a stroke of it. And the water does help it to spread. So the whole point of the flat washes. So right after that we put down another stroke of pain and you try and get your brush to touch the last area that had paint on it. The whole point of a flat wash is you're spreading the pain as evenly as possible. So we want this and you can even go over it if you'd like, because this is a small section and I just want it to all the pain pigments to just spread evenly. So what you have here is a flat wash and I'm just going to let that dry and you'll see that a flat wash just has a uniform amount of paint in the area that you paint it. Now, I want to do a graded wash. And to do a graded wash, I'm going to use I think I'll use Parisian blue so that you can see that quite clearly. One small, I just want to wet the area just to help the pain spread. Just an even layer of water. Just make sure if you're doing this, don't put too much water down because you don't want the water to pull and collect. So I'm just going to get my Parisian blue now. I'm going to start at the top here. So as you can see, Prison Blues, a very strong color. And I'm just going to do the top section here. And before I continue, I'm actually going to add a bit of water to my paint. I'm going to continue from the bottom where I left off. And as you can see, my paint is already looking a little bit lighter. And now I'm going to add a bit more water to my paint in the palette. And now I'm going to continue down here. And finally, I'm just going to use water to make the bottom-most layer. And I'm just going to let that dry. And something that I like to do is if you see a bit of water pooling here, you can use a dry damp brush to just collect the water. And I sometimes also use I tilt my paper a bit to help the pain spread. So that is a graded wash. And now I'm going to do a varied wash. Now, I don't really want to do it in any sections where it's going to bleed into. So I think I might do my varied wash on on this little section over here to tell you the truth. This little thin here would be a great place to do this with a varied wash. What it simply is is you're going to use more than one color in an area. A varied wash doesn't just have to be two colors, it can be 34. But for the purpose of demonstrating that, I think I would only want to use one color here. So far, varied wash, I decided to use, I'm going to mix green, some sap green. So I'm going to drop in some sap green over here at the bottom, just so you can see this clearly, I'm going to actually use some indigo. And I'm just going to work it up here. Until the two colors merge. So I'm just encouraging them to mix, but I don't want to, I just really want you to be able to see what color this producers like the effect. I mean, so what we have here is a varied wash where I started with sap green one on the top, I have an indigo at the bottom. And what happened is the two colors meet and they start to blend in the middle here. So that is an effect that I use a lot in my painting because it's a beautiful effect and it's a very natural effect. And that's one of the advantages of watercolors over other media. They can blend very beautifully together, like on their own, with just with the water as a media. So we have done our different types of washes. So now I want to demonstrate something called wet on dry. So basically wet on dry simply means we are going to add paint on a dry surface. And the surface could be whitepaper, a white section of paper, or it can even be a flat wash or another wash that you've laid down and it's dry. So I'm just going to touch this. This is pretty dry. So it's not going to blend. So why would we use wet on dry? I just want to demonstrate so far our total shell. Once we have a dry surface like that, we can actually use the wet on dry technique to create maybe a bit of texture on the shelves. So I'm just going to, maybe you can see this very clearly. I'm going to use some indigo with my very small brush. And since this area is dry, I can do things like now. Add a few lines in here to add to make the shell look more realistic, to make it look more natural. So I'm just putting little strokes down here like that just to make our shell look like this total has, has lived a life. It's, you know, has a few scratches on it. So also, I'm doing things like just adding detail to the shell. And you can add in as much detail as you want. So this is just to demonstrate what you can do with wet on dry. So there we go. If you want, you can even add, we can make it darker here. So that is an example of wet on dry. Now, if I want to do wet on wet, like which is something that you're going to use as well? Yeah. So how about to see this very clearly, how about I use this fin as to demonstrate wet on wet simply means that if the surface is wet, whether it is with water or paint, I'm going to also use my brush and drop in some paint. So this is a wet area that we have now as you can see. And to use the wet on wet technique, I'm going to put in some some turquoise. This is wet on wet that I'm doing here. I'm, I'm just dropping in some turquoise. And even while this is going on here, I've decided that I'm going to drop in a bit of Parisian blue. My Parisian blue is a little bit diluted from that last exercise I'm going to drop in. So what I'm doing now is wet on wet. So I'm just going to drop this in here. And even while this is still going on, I can also drop in other colors like I can drop in indigo, for instance, in the pots that are very dark over here. And as you can see, wet on wet, it just spreads very beautifully. The pain spreads wherever I drop it in. And this is a wonderful effect. And I can even go ahead and drop in like some sap green over here. Wet on wet is a great technique that you can incorporate colors in. And it's also great for incorporating textures in which we'll be using for our total. While this is still drying, like as you can see, this area is really, really wet. I can even drop in somewhat indigo where I can see the very distinct markings of the total. So this adds a more blended effect. If you don't want very harsh edges. That's what I'm wet on wet techniques do and I can just add a little bit in here. And it doesn't give you a lot of detail while it's wet. But when it dries, you will see some beautiful effects it has created. And if you want to do more detail after that, you can simply use wet on dry on the surface to add that in. But it is a beautiful effect that we can do with wet on wet. And while it's wet here, I might just use my indigo to define the edges more of the turtles fin. As you can see, it is looking very beautiful with these colors. So we have just practiced all the techniques that we're going to use to do our total. Oh, except there is one last technique that I almost forgot about. So I am a watercolor is who loves using white gel pen to add little highlights, to add a little definition. So this, this thing that we did, the varied wash on is almost completely dry. What I like to do with my white gel pen is I can go over, I can use it to highlight certain things. Sorry, my white gel pen is not working so great now, so I'm going to just swap to another white gel pen. I have quite a few of these. So what it does is it you can single out little areas that I usually dark light dark areas. And the white gel pen helps to add some definition to areas like that. So I can do that over here with the white gel pen. I hope you can see that this area is not particularly very dark. So I don't know whether the white gel pen is really standing out here, but I can show you that I will also be using a dark color, a dark pen, like I love to use, sepia and black. So I'm going to use some black as well. So this black pen is great for doing things like, for instance, if I have. So the thing that I want to really define, I can use the black gel pen. The black pen, sorry, not black gel pen. This is just black ink. So it can I can do that. Oh, patterns like stuff like that. That will add some, some realism to it. So these are just little things that we can do to really define our total. I'm not going to try and use any ink right now. And this area as it's still drying and it's still looking very beautiful. Yeah. For me, using gel pens and ink pens, they just compliment watercolors so beautifully. So that's just an example of what we can do. So if you practice these exercises, I am very sure that you're going to feel a lot more confident before we do our final total. So have fun practicing and I will see you for our final project. 7. First coat - Part 1: Hello and welcome back. So after all the practice that we've done and all the sketching exercises, it's led up to this moment that we are finally going to paint our beautiful sea turtle with the techniques that we've learned. Now, all I've done since sketching this total is just clean up the lines a little like yeah, I advise you to do so. Just so you know, you've got a nice clean picture to work with. And my advice is before you start, have all your paints ready in your palette, or at least on standby next to it. Like I've got my little pallet full of colors here that I'm going to use. And I've also put some in my palette just to be already, have your brushes already. Have your jars of water ready, because you don't want to suddenly realize you've run out of pain for instance. And you have a section that's drying and you want to drop some paint in e.g. so it pays to be already. So if you are ready, let's start. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I1 two, work on the shelf us. I feel let's work on the shell. Because the shell is a segment of its own. I would advise you to work on each section rather than paying the entire total first in one go, which I understand like did people have different methods? You could choose to start laying in colors, like starting at the head, going down. But then you have to bear in mind that some areas that you started with earlier are going to dry by the time you get down to this area and sunny if you decide I wanted to drop in a wet on wet technique here, you may not be able to do it anymore because the head has been dried. So my advice is I would probably start on one section so I choose to do the shell. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use my big brush and I'm going to apply some water to the shadow area just so this also helps the paint to stay in the area that you wet. So you don't have to be very careful at this point about oh, I have to make sure that pain doesn't go out towards the body. Do try and stay within the shell, especially for the outside of your total. But it's really fine if you don't as well because this is art and you know, I've seen some beautiful effects like a total where we can even take the pin outside it. So there are lots of different things that we can do and I will do different techniques in different videos in the future. But for this one, I want to just keep it simple and just try and do this technique so I've wet the area. It's really nice and I'm going to start dropping in some turquoise. So I'm using the wet on wet technique and I'm not I'm not making sure that I cover every single area. In fact, I'm leaving a few gaps here and there. The reason I'm doing this is because I liked the effect of some parts being lighter than others because I wanna give the impression that hey, there is some like speckled light falling on the surface of this Toto and also so I can let other colors shine through, like the greens and there's a good bit of pain there, but don't worry about it. It's really fine. I'm not covering every single part of the shell. Okay. Sorry, I'm using a pretty big brush here, the biggest in my range. But once I've done this, I'm just going to switch brushes to a size eight that's a bit smaller. And I'm going to have fun now just dotting in like I'm using the show as a guideline, but it is rarely. I'm just having fun spreading the color where I feel I want to. Now we're using wet on wet again, just to drop in some color, different colors here. And I invite you to use the reference picture as a guideline, but not try to emulate every single drop of pain that you see them do. So this is just meant to be a guideline. So I've got my palette, like my panes right here in case I need more. And I've noticed that this part of the shell is darker. So I'm going to drop in more pain over here. Once again, this is a very organic process, so you don't have to follow it exactly the way you see it. It's it's fine to, as I said, use it as a guideline. So I can see that there is a lot of dark markings around where we see the the, the big divisions on the shell. So I'm just adding that in. Keep in mind that your pain is drying. Ok. So just keep that in mind as you work. So I'm just kinda doing a bit of an outline here. As you can see, the panes already spreading, it's drying. So I want to drop in another color dye, see very clearly which is the sap green here. I'm letting that spread as well. Yeah, just freely. Like I can see a lot of it here. Yeah. Total shells are not just gonna be one flat color that they are going to see a lot of beautiful colors in this. So I can see the greens here. This is going to look so beautiful when it dries. I can already tell like we've got some greens here. I'm just going to get some more paint from my little palette that I have there. I can see greens down here. And yeah, so there is a lot of greens going on here and it's starting to dry. So I'm now going to drop in my darkest color, which is indigo. So I can see a lot of indigo here on these parts. I might need a bit more, make it a bit darker. So while this is wet, you need more of that. While as my pain is already starting to dry, as you can see, I'm just going to work reasonably quickly now to try and incorporate some of these Indigo shadows that I see here. That this is actually width still doing a base coat, believe it or not, we're using a lot of different colors, but this is still a base coat. You don't have to do all these patents. Now, I'm just dropping in these while it's still wet and we can always build the layers later. But I just want to see my Payne's already drawing. So I need to work quite quickly. But I'm not stressed about this because we can always drop it in later. So I'm just randomly now doing a bit of texturing and we're using wet on wet, even though this is starting to feel a bit like wet on dry because I'll pain is starting to dry and what you can do dip a bit of water just to re-wet like the area if you're still working on it and you feel that it's drying. I just wanted to try to drag some of this in here as well. So this is some sections are still a bit wet. But seriously, don't stress about it. Like this is supposed to be fun. Okay? I can see like little dots of textures here. And it's starting if you feel like it's starting to dry, just do that. And so we're starting to get quite dry now. I just I don't like this hard line here, so I'm just going to use a wet brush to try and blend it out. So still keeping it all pretty pretty wet. I would say I'm using very loose strokes. So I can see this line here. And my pain is the surface is starting to really dry. So I'm just going to try and lay down the very final final bits of pain before this like completely dries over. So I can see a bit of texturing here. And remember, if you don't like any hard lines that you've put down, you can always wet the area. So I'm just putting in a few loose strokes here and there with my brush. Not really thinking very hard about it. This is just like what comes naturally to me and I advise you to do the same. And I just think this line should be a bit darker here even though it's wet and it's spreading. But yeah, it's to me this is looking really good. It's a great base coat because we've already done a lot of a very varied wash, like what he talked about earlier. And I'm just right now just laying in a bit more deeper tones where I see it. But yeah, but like it it is drying. So just I'm just finishing this up. And I feel like this is already looking really good and we can just leave it for now to dry. And so we've done the base coat of our shell like just like that, which is pretty cool. So while this is drying, while the shelves drawing, the edges are pretty dry, but it really is not going to matter now, if I start on the totals body, if I start on his head and his, and his fins, his or her. So I'm going to do the same thing I did just now. I'm just going to wet the entire area here. If my water looks a bit looks a bit darker, It's just from the pigments from before. But at this point I really don't feel like you need to change the water. Like if you don't want to do this vignette, that's fine. We can just focus on this area. I would advise to maybe it stops over here. So why don't we just do this area of us. And there is a bit of the under shell here. So let's focus on the head for now. Just make sure it's all like wet. Okay, so now the main color here that we're using, then I'm going to use for the head is turquoise. Whoops, I might have gotten quite a thick. Remember, use some spare paper to test out your colors. If it's too thick, then dilute it down. So I've tested that out and I'm just going to do the same thing I did just now. I'm just going to drop in some beautiful turquoise. Without thinking too much, I'm leaving a few gaps here and there because I like that effect. And it also, like I said earlier, it lets the other colors like kinda shine through as well. So they can blend and part of them can be seen. So I'm just going to do the areas that I wet, right? Leaving a bit of space here. And I would say this pot, a pretty green. Next color I'm going to drop in is sap green. And it looks like we need a bit more here. And I can see some green tones like over here around the neck. And I'm also, I'm not following the picture really religiously. Like I said, I'm using it more as a guideline. So I just want to drop in some greens where I think they look great. And I think this part is looking pretty greenish. So I've got that going on here. And I'm really loving the fact and I like leaving a bit of white gaps. And now I'm going to use a smaller brush, a size four, while this is still wet. I want to drop in a bit of my Proustian blue. I hope you haven't forgotten about that color. So perusing blue is a strong color. So I would advise you to not put such a strong test it out for us. As you can see, it's already very strong here. So make sure your tone is good. So I'm just going to drop some in at the bottom of outlining it. And I can see where the mouth comes over here. Like I'm just going to try and use it in a way to just even though this so like wet on wet again, I'm like, I'm just trying to use the Parisian blue to highlight the creases in some of the patterns on our total. Even though I know this is spreading, right? But that's what I want. I want it to look like a natural sort of blend here. And don't forget about the top. So I'm going to drop in a bit of pain yet to look at our total looking really, really coming alive now that we're doing the head. So, so just be careful with the colors, like how much you lay down. But this should all be a loose and fun process. So please, as I said before, don't try and follow. Like try and accurately follow every month that you see on the total. You really don't have to. And so while this is all going on, I'm going to try and just do a few, like it gets pretty dark here. I'm going to try and do a few circles, sort of patents. And, um, yeah. Just like this is a dark area. Yeah. So but do try and preserve some of these nice patterns that we that we've drawn. Okay? Don't worry about doing this really accurately as you can see, I'm just using the brush quite loosely in this pot. Yeah. Alright. So you don't have to do this religiously, but before your paint dries, I would highly advise you to try and get the pain going down here. So I'm just going around the shell and I can see. So if it starts getting very dry, don't be afraid to just drop in some water. And this will help your pain to spread, to blend as well, like so it looks more natural. So in watercolors, water is your friend. Alright? You want to, it's normal to have to keep rewetting an area. Alright, especially if like me, you're in Australia, it gets quite dry and hot in summer. So one small just trying to do a bit more of those patents. But if you have something that looks like this, you should be happy. It's looking very good. And remember, watercolors about layering. Later on we're going to layer. And I can tell that i'll, I'll paint is getting quite dry already. So before that happens, I want to just drop in a touch of indigo. Wash your hands when you're when you're coming down here, you just want to make sure that you don't like you don't like put your hand on a wet area. I've done that before with my indigo. Indigo isn't too dark. If you want to. You can add it a bit in areas like I'm like I can see up here. Don't worry. Indigo is the color that even though I do like dropping it in, it's the color that I will use mainly in the fur details like for dark details. Once more, if you feel that pain is getting a bit dry. Alright. Just wet the area to help it blend. That's what I'm doing. See. And I'm just going to wet this area as well because it's starting to get quite dry. And I'm going to drop my indigo in here because this is a pretty dark this is a pretty dark area down here where the neck is because it's obviously in shadow from the sunlight above. Um, so yeah, we're still doing a base coat, believe it or not, just a beautiful very base coat. I'm going to add a bit more here. So yeah, this is actually fun. This is a fun, supposed to be fun if you're feeling very stressed, like Please don't. And I'm just going to mainly focus right now on dropping the indigo. Indigo, the color is very much like a very dark blue. It's a color that I love to use for night skies. And when you don't want to use black, you want to suggest shadow. I love indigo. I can see some over here. Alright, and so you might be wondering why I've left this area blank, but it's no problem at all. We can fill that in later. So just using some more indigo just to suggest some shadow there. And, and I can see that this area is already getting quite dry. But I still want to put some indigo in here, so I'm going to wet it. And I might wet this area too because I want to drop indigo in here. There are a lot of shadows going on here. So just try and suggest those round circles because that will suggests the, let me just use a stronger, stronger concentration of indigo. I can see a lot going on here. There are a lot of lines here. This is actually, this part is actually the shadow of the, of the shell. So I'm going to just bring that down here. And later on, don't worry if you feel like you've covered up a lot of the pattern here, of the scaly pattern because that's, we have our magic tool, which is the white gel pen Jai can live without. Now, this part is in shadow and detach or if I'm actually doing a lot right now, just so later on when we add the details and we won't have a lot of work to do them. I'm with the indigo, so these pods are already starting to dry as well. So remember, try and keep your scales if you can, don't worry about it. We've got a gel pen and I'm just going to drag drag some indigo. Think my indigo might have gotten a little bit contaminated with some blue over there. So I'm just going to make sure it really drop in some indigo, a stronger version over here. Now, I just want you to know if you ever feel like you've made a mistake while painting, please don't feel like, Oh, I've ruined it. Most mistakes can be corrected. I can say that what's comes to worse, you can always just paint over it or use a wet brush and remove colors. So in this process, if I do make mistakes, I will point them out to you. But today the truth, I don't even consider them mistakes because sometimes you can get some very beautiful effects from doing something that you didn't intend to do. So I don't want to I don't want to darken this andesite too much, but I will let a bit more flow in here because I feel like it looks a bit blue. But I do think that this is looking great already. I don't think we really need to do a lot more. So that was a bit of that. And I would just put in a few more strokes here. Wow, it's some wow. Total is looking so handsome. I feel this is still wet, so I'm just going to drop in a little bit of stuff here, but it's getting quite dry already. Alright? So we can stop here. But you've laid down, if you have something going on like this, you've laid down a pretty impressive base coat. Something I might do here is I'm going to just use a wet brush and just remove a bit of the color here. Because I just want I want this to show show through. So all I'm doing is using a clean wet brush that I did to my water jar. Just so we can see some color variation now. 8. First coat - Part 2: Once more, just wetting it because it helps the paint to flow and blend, which has exactly the effect. I want the wet on wet effect I want for this fin over here. I'm going to use my small brush and I'm gonna also lay down a turquoise base. This fin is very much in the shadows, so I don't really have to leave like white, white spaces. This is going to be quite a dark thin to do. And it's okay for all the colors to blend. And I'm going to use all my colors to tell you the truth. I'm going to use, I'm going to now drop in this. Now because this pin is in the background, we can really see the details very clearly of the pattern, which is fine. So what we're gonna do is we're going to suggest it by dropping in pain. So you see, I'm not even like really paying attention, I'm not, I'm not studying the patterns to, you know, I were doing this really fun thing where we're just dropping in wet on wet to suggests the pattern of the total. And this is really fun to do. It's shouldn't be stressing you out. You shouldn't be worried like, Oh, does this look accurate? Know, this is a fun part. And so that's what I'm doing here and I'm having a lot of fun doing this. But I do want to, before I get too carried away with that part, I do want to drop in a bit of green here for some color variation. Yeah, because the fins never going to look like one color. So that's fun during this. And I'm also a besides using the Parisian blue, which in itself is already a dark color. So we got some rough shapes over here for the Fin. And, um, yeah, so I'm, I'm really loving this effect. And while that's going on, I'm going to take my beautiful indigo color. Now I'm going to drop it in as well, like, wow, it's wet. And this creates this beautiful effect that we're seeing here. It's spreading and it's mixing with all the colors very beautifully. And yet you can still see the individual colors. So this is really fun. I might just might just use my brush to try and yeah, just define the boundaries a bit here. But I'm loving the effect here. And I want to put more, more indigo in these areas here where it's very dark. So up here there's some and in-between, there are all these random shapes. So you can suggest them. With, with your indigo, my indigo starting to get a bit dry. So I'm going to just, okay. So what we got is a pretty cool effect here. I know this is supposed to be a base coat, but it really looks almost complete. Yeah, like I actually really like the effect here. And I'm just going to use the indigo just to outline what's going on, but just the boundaries. I mean, but I love the fact that this has done here. So I love that it's looking really great. So I just wanted to finish up our base coat. In the areas that still need to we still need to do. So I might actually just do this little section here, which is my water has become quite, which is why I always have two jars of water. I'm just getting the new order from the other side. This to me looks kind of turquoise Sea and greenish yeah. This under shell. So I'm just going to drop some turquoise and rinse my brush. I'm going to add some green in. And I can clearly see indigo dye. If you feel you've got too much paint, don't be afraid to use a clean brush that's you dry on your little towel to soak up the excess water. And just drop this in so that we're doing another varied wash. So try and keep the shadow towards the bottom because, you know, just the way the light falls, it would end up in the bottom there. Okay. And now I want to move on to the Finns. So what we can do is I want to do, I might get a bigger brush. I'm going to do this fin over here. And this fin to me from my reference picture which I'm using as a guideline is kind of turquoise. See, so I'm doing another varied wash here. But it's also has a beautiful green tones, especially on this side. So I'm going to drop in the sap green. And I'm now going to drop in the indigo. While I do that, I might actually do these little shapes that are that I roughly drew in with the sketch. And I really don't mind if they like if they are blending out. I'm also just going to randomly just dropping in a few little dots to suggest small scale effects. But I'm just have to make sure I don't get carried away doing that. I'm just going to drop this in as a shadow under the, under the shell. And for this fan that you see over here, this is going to be basically the same technique that we use for that fin, which is not it's drying, it's looking really cool to me. I love that effect. This fin is very much like in the shadow, even though I do see some green here. So I'm going to drop in quite a concentrated sap green. And I can also see some of the turquoise. And I guess I could also use some bruising blue. So Parisian blue when you put it on, on the green and the turquoise. And as you can see, my turquoise has mixed very beautifully in this varied wash with the sap green to become like a ready and even cooler color. And I'm just adding in a bit of like using some brushstrokes to suggest the pattern on its fin. So that's looking good to me too. And I feel that because that's the dark area, it does need some indigo. So I'm going to drop in, I think I need a more concentrated version of indigo, so I'm going to drop that in here. I'm just letting it spreads. So it's looking really beautiful. I might just outline this a bit with indigo, but I might just use a bit of water to blend this a bit because I feel like it's a bit light. Blending it a bit. Yeah, that's the effect that I want. And I would even drop more indigo in here to tell you the truth because it is a dark area. Just so these patterns can be seen. Alright, so the last thing we have to do for the base layer now is to do this fin in the foreground. So I'm going to use a bigger brush to wet this area. And you should be very proud of yourself if you've gotten this far. Because especially if you're a beginner, I tried to design this class for beginners and intermediate, and it's a loose class so that you have fun doing it. And I'm just going to start off with some turquoise again, because this Finn has a lot of turquoise. So as you all know by now we're using wet on wet technique to spread the turquoise. And I want to leave a bit of whitespace is here and that my running on a bit of turquoise, I might just put a bit more here. And, um, this, this area here, you can definitely see is Dhaka. Alright, so that's looking good to me. And now I'm going to drop in the beautiful sap green. So we can definitely see some sap green colors here looking very beautiful. I got a bit of green so that there's not a lot of green here, which is fine. And I want to drop in a bit of Parisian blue. And I'm going to just let the Parisian blue blend wet on wet from the very outer edge of the fin here. Because I can see that there is a bit of shadow on this side. So there I go. I'm not I'm really not caring so much about the patterns. Yeah. And now that I've painted that area, I can help it come out a bit by just doing very roughly, just painting a bit of this pattern. But that's something that we can do later on. But I just like I like laying down some I likely down a little bit of detail. I have to admit while I'm painting the base coat, just because I think it adds some effect and it makes it it makes it easier for you to do the, the details later on to it gives you something to work with. So I'm just going to, while this is still dry, I'm just dropping in a bit of color here and there, but not, not defining it terribly a lot. So now, while this is still drying, I'm going to switch brushes so that I can pick up some indigo and drop it in. I'm gonna, I'm gonna put indigo where the shadows off, which is where we just went over with peruse in blue because I do feel like it needs a bit more emphasis. And while I'm at it, I'm just very roughly just adding, dropping in indigo. I'm a very diluted indigo. May add into those those areas where you see those defined markings, but doing it very loosely. So I'm just going to, my indigo is getting quite, quite dry. And I'm just dropping it in. So we can we can add scanning quite dry, so I'm just going to dip it in water. Okay, but I think we've done enough here to suggest what's going on because later on we're going to fill in these little markings. But if you've if you've gotten, I might just drop in a bit of a bit more turquoise CEO because I feel like this part might be a little light. But if you've got something that looks like this, like one small, you should be very happy because you've done a great base coat then I think now would be a great time to stop before we continue with the details in our next step. But please be very, very happy with yourself if you've laid down a varied wash everywhere for your base coat of your total. So in the next part of this class, I'm going to take you through how to add the details that are going to make your total rarely pop. So thank you for watching. See you in the next class. 9. Second Coat - Part 1: Hello and welcome back. In our last video, we had already laid down the base coat. And I have to say, I'll titles looking pretty cool, looking quiet, realistic. Like you can see sort of like a bit of dimensions already taking place. In this stage. We are just going to keep adding to it. And soon Alto is going to start looking really, really realistic. I would like to start this time with the head of our total, even though we started with the shell last time because I just can't wait to tell you the truth to start painting him in. I think I'm going to start first with a bit of Parisian blue. So what I wanna do is just start painting this beautiful pattern that we mapped out. And the reason I'm using Parisian blue is that I wanted to still add a bit of color. Tell title, even though this is light. And later on we're going to so it's still wet now. We're doing wet on dry now. While it's still wet, I want to then drop in a bit of indigo. So we're going to create a bit of color variation to and for me, this kind of just, yeah, you're building layers of color. Rather than just paint this indigo straightaway, I just want to add more color, more layers of color, and I'm even gonna do the totals i in blue. Now. I'm going to drop in some indigo. Let's go. Yeah. So it's pretty dark. So as you can see, I'm doing wet on wet now. I'm just dropping in a bit of that indigo into the Parisian blue and just letting the colors mix. And it's okay if it doesn't go all the way. So that's created some color variation. I'm also going to do drop it in here. That's a bit light, so I'm going to drop it in here. I'll title has very dark eyes. So this is coming along quite, quite nicely. I think there's a spot here too. I miss. I can see a few more spots up here where the I is. I can see this part goes. So this is a bit of a time-consuming process, but I show you it's really worth it. And so we got a little nostril hear about total over here. So I'm going to put that in indigo. And we've laid down a layer, but I feel like the I is still very light, so I'm gonna go in with more indigo and I'm just going to let that blend in. So that's quite beautiful. And what else do I see? So now I'm going to use wet on dry for a little parts like here where it's a bit darker. But at anytime and over and over here too, I just want to and and I might just dilute this a little bit by just dipping it in a bit of water because I just wanted to do a bit of. So now I'm just looking at my reference photograph and adding in a bit more tones, so to speak, like where. To make it look more three-dimensional. And one small, I just want to say just take it as a guideline. You don't have to follow the reference photo exactly. So I'm just going to use my diluted my diluted paint just to add in some lines where I feel they should be. I'm just going to emphasize the scaly skin, one small darken areas where I feel I need to like, um, like up here. Maybe even use this opportunity to outline the title a little. And up here, I'll title is looking pretty good. And like I said, we're not going to copy the reference photo exactly. You don't have to do every crease that you see. That would be quite painstaking. But I do want to use a deeper shade of indigo to just do things like the mouth, for instance, over here, I think this could be DACA. Alright, so that's all still looking good. Um, I don't want to make this too dark. Alright, but the whole aim of this is just to build a bit of dimension. But we're going to move on now to the next area, which is, i'm, I'm gonna do these little these little scaly features that you see just to give our total like a very realistic skin texture so that you can see that I'm, I'm emphasizing that. And you don't have to do every, every little scale, we can start like skipping a bit. And I can see these lines here that I'm much more, that is curvy lines in indigo. The more of these that we add like the more, the more realistic out at all it's going to look. But please don't feel you have to do every marking. Alright. Okay, so I'm just going to start moving on. So I don't become too fixated on one particular area. And my advice to you as well when doing details is make sure you always take a step back and look from a little distance just to make sure that, you know, you're not overdoing a section, you're not making it too dark because sometimes when you're sitting very close to it, it can. You might not realize how much you're working in area until you take a step back. That's what I always encourage people to do. Take a step back and have a look, see if you still like it. If you've, if you feel that your data in from that angle. So there are also, okay, And I'm gonna need more indigo. And so before I become too fixated on a section, I'm just going to keep going, moving on. You can always come back to that area once it dries and assess it again. Okay, so I've got these little circles here. And I also want to just lay down a couple of dry strokes of the brush because I do feel like this area. Okay. So for me that's looking That's looking good. I think you could just use a bit more shadow under here too. It's right under these. So this is all going to add nice realistic tone. Alright? And I also want to do this area because I feel like it should be a bit shadowy. I can see that this area is a bit darker, but I might actually consider using a pen later for that. One thing that is bothering me though, that I want to touch up on is I do feel that these markings on the face, just watch your hand here and make sure you're not putting it down on a wet surface. So I just feel like these should be darker. So I'm just going over them again with some indigo and And there we go. I want to make the eye a bit darker again. All right. So taking a step back, assessing it. Yes, I'm happy with where that is. And this this fin that we've done is actually looking pretty good to me. So I might just outline it later. Like I'm a bit of shadow here, but it's actually looking quite, quite good already. I might just go down here. Napkin chin. I feel like I might just do something like I'm outlining because I love the effect that we did in the last video. So just outlining, just adding some definition. But to tell you the truth, I liked this effect so much that I really don't feel we need to add more to it. It's very beautiful on its own. So let's leave that pot that's looking very good to me. I mean, if you really wanted to, you could go over this part with just a bit of the main the main markings but to territory if I already liked it the way it was. But I can see from the reference photo that we can see a few marks. But if you don't want to, if you feel this is your painting, by the way, if you feel that you are satisfied with certain effects, you don't have to do what I'm doing. You can leave it the way you are because this is about your preference, Not mine. I'm merely here to guide you on how to do a total with these techniques. But right now, all I'm doing is just randomly filling in, darkening certain parts, but I'm going to leave some parts like untouched because I already love the effect that I see. So to me, that is already complete. I like it, so I'm going to leave it. Now. I want to paint this for foreground fin here. And I'm going to need quite a bit of indigo I feel, because I also think I want to use some green. I do want to use a bit of the colors because I feel like there are a few colors in here. So I might use another brush very quickly. And I'm just going to drop in a bit of the green. Does it? It does have a greenish tone to it. But once more, this is up to you. I just personally like I like color in my, in my animals that I paint. And I'm not going to overdo it with the green, but I just wanted to drop a bit in. So here's an example that even when you lay a base Washington, you can always add to it. You can always add another layer. And I just did that because I like seeing color. While that's drying. I'm going to start and doesn't even really matter if it's dry. I'm just going to put in these shapes with my indigo. And as you can see, I'll title is starting to come alive. And while that's happening, I might also just start defining the thinner a bit, the boundaries. I like leaving a little bit of white here and there as well. Like, and I do see some, you know, some spaces on our total. Once more, this step depends on how much detail you want to do. So because there is a lot to do. But personally I'm somebody who likes to do detail. But I'm going to leave it up to you about how much detail you want to do with our rough shapes that we've drawn. I'm just like filling them in. That's all I'm doing. And I can actually make my pain a little bit stronger. I feel too just like yeah. Because something that you should know about watercolor is it tends to dry lighter than when you apply it. I might just also just the gun that part because I just want to imply that that finishes DACA. This might seem like a tedious process, but I feel that at the end it will look very real. The more detail you add it. And obviously, if you take the time. So as you can see, our total was coming to life. So at this point I would take a step back to have a look at it. And I'm really loving the effect. I really am. Looking at the reference photo. I do feel that some of the markings in the middle should be darker because I can see it go dot from here and then go light over there. So I'm going to try and do that. Just darken it slightly. Just the ones that are really light to me. Not really even thinking about really like being very accurate with the shapes here. I'm just using my brush to imply these shadows going up. And this is looking quite good to me. I do feel like I need to add a bit of just a few brush strokes here to darken these areas. Yeah. So to me this is looking pretty good already. I might just use this moment to outline the thin a bit. And this is my preference because I like to, I like the fin to be defined. Alright, That's looking good. Take a step back. And I'm still happy with it, which is great. I also just wanted to use this time now that this area has dried, I can just see that I really do need to add some shadows in just because this side is definitely darker. Okay. Yeah. I'll total is looking pretty good. And I just wanted to touch up certain things like the mouth. I feel like the mouth has to be dark. It does have two. And since I have a few a bit of paint on my brush, I'm just going to do this area a little. 10. Second Coat - Part 2: Okay. Now, this Vince also looking pretty good to me. It looks very done already. I don't feel like we really need to do much to it. But with this fin, I want to add some more color to it. I feel like the base coat might've gotten a bit. It looks a bit dull, so I'm going to add more green, more of the sap green just because like I said before, I love color and I want to see some of that. Yeah. Um, everything is looking pretty good. I also want to drop in. I can actually, I don't even have to wait for this to dry. I can just start dropping it in with the indigo just for these markings. So this is fun to do. And I might just add in, I can see these random like I'm marking. So I'm just using my brush very, very loosely applying, applying this just to imply that there is some mocking CIA. I can even, I can even drop in a bit of blue, a bit of turquoise. I mean, like to build up the color here and suggests that stuff going on with the thin. I feel that this area this has to be a bit darker this side of it. So I'm just going to drop in indigo outline at a bit more. So just keeping it very loose, not, not very not being very precise. And I think I might just want to outline the fin a bit just so it looks good and that looks great. Okay. And just maybe this shadow here. It was looking pretty complete already. It's looking really good. The only part for me that needs more work is the shell here. So far the shell, I wanted to I wanted to add certain. I'm going to use a few different colors actually, not just I feel like I'll show could is a bit light in certain areas. So I just want to add a bit more tone to it. So I'm just going to add a bit more of the of the turquoise and I might make that a bit lighter. So I'm just adding a bit more color. And I'm just building up a bit more color, even though I did love the fact that we have that, but I just want a bit more bolder colors. I'm also using the colors to add textures, so to speak, of the shell. So there is, I feel that this area should be lighter on the top. And we will get there. And I feel that this spot here needed a bit more, a bit more colors to it was a bit plane. So at this stage, feel free to add as much color as you want. Because as I said before, watercolors tend to dry, lighter. The great thing about it. You can always just layer on. I'm just going to add more color. So take a step back. Yep, I would say the shell is looking really good now. And I also want to use my sap green paint and just add a bit more color where we've got the green. That's looking very lovely. Yeah, and I can use a bit more green here. Alright, so that's looking really good. I can see a bit of green here. Feel free to add the color where you want to add it. You don't have to follow the reference photograph. So now I'm going to drop in all the shadows of our shell. And this part here is pretty dark. And I'm going to use some wet on dry and wet on wet techniques. I can see it's dark there and I can also see like i'm, I'm going to have it just be really just feeling what to do right now. Because I'm just going to now do what I see. So if I don't like if I don't mention everything I'm doing, you can just watch me doing it. Right now. I'm using this, this stage to just adding in a natural way like what I feel, what I see in the shell. So I see that this part is darker. Up here. There's some markings two. And over here I see these lines. Try and keep this process of, of adding, adding on details and textures. Try and keep it loose. With loose strokes. Don't, don't be too heavy handed at the stop. And just just look and see. What do you see that? And just try and try and capture more like the essence rather than the exact pattern. Because your viewer already knows this is a total. There'll be a few, I can see a few deep spots and say I'm not even directly like I'm not copying it exactly. I'm just kind of doing what I see. So you can use the brush. The way I'm using it now is I'm just dabbing it on to get those those patterns. Take a step back every now and then to make sure you're not overdoing it. So, so far, this is looking great. And we're just going to add this on over here. So this is just this, this should be fun. Don't get stressed over this, like loose, loose strokes. Just keep them loose and fun. And your total is really coming to life at this point. So I don't want to overdo this. I just want to now do these little divisions of the shell that we see over here that says as a bit of shadow under them. So let's try and capture that. And there are also these little like, you know, parts of the turtle shell that might be chipped away. So we can imply that by doing these little lines here underneath. And of course that shadow. And I also want to do these little segments of the mouth, the shell. So not, not trying to just leaving a few marks here and there. This is already looking very, very complete to me. And I don't actually want to go much darker, but they only had a few certain lines that I still want to emphasize at this point. So like this one here. Yeah. I actually feel like I'm ready to stop with these marks. That's looking very good to me. And I actually think I might just want to outline our guy with a very light. Let me just wash your hands where you've had wet pane. I just want to make sure that I'm using very diluted indigo at this point just to just to make the the boundaries of the show define. So I've left a few white marks here and there. I did that on purpose because I think it makes the, makes the total look more realistic, makes a shell look more realistic. So I'm just turning my arm at a strange angle. Hope I'm not blocking, but I'm actually really happy with how this is looking. So I think I want to stop at this point. And in the next section, we are going to add the very final touches to our total, and then we are done. So if you've gotten this far, please be very happy with your progress. And I'll see you in the next section. 11. Final Coat - Part 1: Hello and welcome back. We are finally at the last lap of doing. I'll see Toto. And if you have something that looks like my total right now, you should be very proud of yourself. You've done very well. At this point. I just wanted to do things like just emphasize lights and shadows and also add a bit of definition where I feel I need to. Now, I have a series of ink pens and I'll show them to you that I showed you in the materials section. So I have a couple of greens, dark blue or black. And of course I've got my white gel pens in different thicknesses of 0.50 point 8.10 MM. So at this point, I'm just going to look at our reference photograph. And I want to add little details, but I'm not going to get crazy carried away with. I'm highlighting every marking on the turtle because I feel at this point, all we really need to do is emphasize the shadows and lights just to make our total look even more three-dimensional, even though it's looking pretty good now, I feel like starting with the I because I do feel that a totals, I'm using a black pen right now. The totals i is very, very important. I just want to use actually extending the eye a little because I can see that in the picture and it's dark. So I just wanted to really emphasize it's beautiful. I, because to me it totals i is very soulful. And I'm just defining it a little the way I see it in the photograph. So I also notice that I'm not going to like totally color it in. I don't think I need to. I think I just want to emphasize that this is the where it stops. And perhaps the nostrils just want to do that. And now I might actually switched to a blue pen, a navy blue pen. Even though Yeah, I just feel that black would be too strong. And I'm just wanted to like do these little creases here. And using the blue pen also add some color to it. Because I'm somebody who loves to see color in the painting and not just like monochrome black. So as you can see, the blue is light on its own, but when you do layer it on top of the dark areas, it does, it does then look DACA. And I also see around the eye, we've got these little dots here. And the good thing about using a gel pen, this not gel pens or an ink pen, is that you have a lot more control over it then a brush, for instance, even if you are using a small brush, that's what I feel. And I'm just going to define the boundaries of some of these markings. Just giving it even more definition. I'm not I'm not taking a lot of caution to fully cover them. It's fine. Like I just want to define the boundaries and I'm still letting the color show through. And I think even if it's not as dark as it appears in the reference photograph. I'm I'm fine with that. And now I'm just going to use my pen again to just go over the main creases that I see. One smart, I'm not going to do every single detail. But it's nice to add, add some definition to these scales because the title does have these beautiful scales and I'm just letting the viewer, drawing the eye of the viewer to them. And once more, these, these were areas that I had previously saved. When I was. Painting. So as you can see, I'm making it stand out more, but doing it in a loose way. I've suggested that, hey, there are a lot of these little scaly markings. And you are welcome to do this as much as you like. Um, you know, you, you don't have to be as detailed as me if you don't want to. So as you can see, I've done that a lot over here. But I just, I'm somebody that likes adding detail in. There we go. That's, that's really pretty and also that's looking good. And there is this area where there is shadow here and it goes lighter here. So I'm going to not really defined this area as much. Okay? So I don't wanna do that too much. Okay. That's good for me. I see one big circle here that I just want to do. Okay? So I'm happy with that. And, uh, while I still have this pen, I see there are a few lines that that we can just trail a little. But I feel like we don't have to do a lot here. This is already looking quite good, but I wouldn't mind using this blue to add a bit of definition to the belly of the total. And I've used a lot of blue. I can even swap two, green just to like add a bit of color variation. So I'm just going to define the boundary of the head a little here. I think. I want to do that with green and I'm just also going to be quiet, light handed about it. You don't have to do what I'm doing, but I just like a bit of definition. And so I swapped to green just because I like seeing different colors on my turtle. So I'm not gonna be too heavy handed with the outlining. And also, I think I might do the green. I might use the green to just define the shower bit. So you can see these blues and green pen that I'm using. I hope I'm not blocking your view while I do this. Yeah, that's looking very pretty, the different colors. And I might actually just even use the greens to go around here. So I'm just making the boundaries of the shell more obvious. And so these little things that you do, they really do make your, um, your painting pop a bit more in and add like a realism to it. But one small, it depends on how much how much detail you want. So I have gone around the boundary of the shell bed, you're going out. You can also use your, your pen to add a bit of a few life. I call them like maybe a few battle scars, live scars, a bit of wear and tear on your turtle shell. So all this will add to the fact that this total has lived a long life. And I also would use the pen just to add a bit more definition to the boundaries of this shell. Like where it ends, where it begins. And fathers show as well. What I wanna do is a bit of, I might use the green pen to just not me, is this adding color? I'm just adding a bit of texture to my shell, especially where I see the the boundaries of the of each section of the shell. I'm really not thinking a lot about this. I'm not planning this. I'm just kind of feeling rarely. So you can even do dots like this. You don't have to do lines all the time. All this does is it adds to the realism of your total. So doing dots, lines, just keep it loose is what I would say. Don't don't be too uptight about this. Because at the end of the day, everyone can tell you've done a total. This is just really like the icing on the cake. You're just adding more texture, adding more color. And my only advice when you're doing steps like that is to make sure to stop and sit up from your chair if you're like me, like take a take a bit of a break, take some distance, and look at what you've done just so you're not overworking the area because it's easy to get carried away with steps like this. So I'm just also adding, adding some definition over here and the bottom of the shell here. I'm adding a bit more texturing color, a few dots in the reference photograph there is a huge a few huge marks here. So I do have to tell myself not to overdo this when I, when I start, it's very, very tempting to get carried away and add a lot of different markings, but take a step back occasionally to just have a look at what you're doing. I've done a lot of work here now with the green pen. I think I might just, before I move on to a different area, I'm just going to use my green pen as you can see, to just define this show and stuff That's looking beautiful. And subduct used a lot of green already on the shell. I can also swap back to blue and also repeat the process, but you don't, you don't have to go over every single line that you just did with the green pen. Just add, add definition where you feel like it. So this is quite, this may seem like a tedious step, but if you do add a bit more detail, it really does make your total come to life more like you can see the shell. It's just really coming to life. So don't, don't be too heavy handed doing this. Anyway. I have done a lot of work with the green pen, which was lighter than my blue pen. So I'm gonna just keep this quite, quite loose. I'm not going to overwork it. Overlooked the area. Alright. Alright. So what the pens I'm using are waterproof. So yeah, once you lay them down, they won't move. And I feel like I've done a lot of work here. I might just use this to just add a bit more texture to the shell down here. Okay, so please don't feel like you have to copy me exactly. Do as much detail as you want. I'm just giving you some ideas of what of how I would get these particular markings that you see? Yeah, don't overwork the area. So I honestly think that there is a lot going on here already. We don't There's a lot going on. So I'm going to reframe a little over here. Represent might have just gone out a little there. If you've just laid down your pen, there's a chance you might be able to get rid of this little mistakes that you make. But to territory if it really doesn't bother me, because we are going to actually, I'm just getting my green pen here just to go over this part. We are actually going to finish off with by doing some spattering. So our total is looking quite, quite finished in my opinion, but I just wanted to take my blue pen to just define the boundary of the total. You don't have to do this, but I just feel it makes my total pop out more. So very loosely, just going around it with this blue pen. And the great thing about the blue pen is it's not as dark as black, so it's not going to. Make your total the boundary of your total. Rarely hash. It blends in with the colors you've already used. So I've done that fin. Let me do this one now. So I'm just gonna go out, but this boundary here is already quite dark because we did use some strong layers of indigo there just now. Little things like this. They really don't bother me as an artist. Like a little bit of pain coming out of the boundaries to tell you the truth, I find them very beautiful. I feel like it, it shows you some insight into the process of making this. Now with the blue pen though, I just want to define certain things like these beautiful these beautiful markings that you have here. Like I'm not going to outline the entire the entire like ovalis shape. I just like adding a bit of a bit of definition. So so just very loosely doing this, rarely not aiming to do it perfectly. Just. So we got a bit of more definition. One small how detailed you want to go really depends on you. So I finish, I'm going to finish up over here. You can even do like little lines like this to add texture. It blends in very well. So you don't have to coloring the whole thing. This may seem very tedious, but I do feel that it adds to the, it does add to the effect. Alright, I think we can wrap it up here. I think that's looking very beautiful already. And this is pretty much, I don't even really have to do these. This is already pretty dark from what we did last time. In fact, I might just do these little shapes here, just emphasize them. I think, I think it's quite complete already. Like, I like these little markings that we've left here. So let's just like, Yeah, we can leave them the way they are. I mean, you can add a bit of dots if you'd like, but personally, I think it's quite complete. And I'm going to take a step back to look at it. And I'm loving how it looks. And there's just one more little thing that I'd like to do now, before we start the spattering, I'm going to take my white gel pen. I have these in different thicknesses because obviously, the thinner you go, the better it is for more detail. What I'd like to do now is the 0.5. I just wanted to save some white areas with the pen. So I'm looking at my reference photograph and I'm seeing this area. Could use a bit of white and white highlights. If I could make the lip, for instance, a bit brighter and stand out more by adding a bit more of this white gel pen over it. It really blends in very well to tell you the truth, if I want to use the white gel pen to add a bit of distance between these two little like a markings. It's just such a handy tool to have it. It allows you to add highlights to areas that you might have painted over. One thing I love to do with my animals is add a tiny white dots in their eyes. I just feel like it makes your animal look look more like alive. And besides this, I just wanted to see what other areas would need it. The white gel pen is such a valuable tool because it allows you to bring areas back that you've painted. Like what I'm doing here, sorry. It's just using my white gel pen to add to bring some attention to these scales. So I'm not going to overdo this, but I am showing the viewer that, Hey, look, this areas a bit lighter. It has all these cool markings. I can see this area could could be lighter here. And the great thing about these white gel pens, they're not waterproof. So if you do a mocking, you can actually blend it a little with, with white, with water so that it's not too defined. Amanda blend that out a little bit too much. So anyway, I really wanted to emphasize some of the scales here because I feel that this area ended up a bit dark. So as you can see, it lightens beautifully. From the reference photograph. You can see some lines that are wider. So that's where I'm, a white gel pen is so valuable. So that's letting very, very nice to me. Actually. I don't want to overdo it. This area is supposed to be darker, so I'm just adding my whites over here. What else I can do is I'm going to, I feel like there is a bit of white here, but I'm going to swap pens to a 0.8 just because it's thicker rather than using the tiny 0.5. So I'm just going to go over this part now. I don't feel like I need to put much white here at all. This has already been done. And with your white gel pen, you can also add definition to certain areas like here where there was a bit of white that we might have gone over. But I'm just going to let you do this to your own preference. You'd really don't have to use it everywhere. You don't have to use it. But I just wanted to add a bit of white here. Just because it, it defines these it's separates these sections a little bit more. That's already looking. I might actually extend this down here because I can see that in the picture. It doesn't go all the way down though, but it does go down there. So I just want to that's a bit of white here on the tip here. So it's looking quite beautiful. It's like yeah, I can see it so clearly. Yeah, I think the total is looking very complete to tell you the truth. And I will just add a bit more white lines on this leg. I might just try and define these lines of the shell a little bit more around here. So you see a white gel pen works so beautifully. Against a dark on a dark background, against the dark background like the markings we had put earlier. So I'm using a series of broken lines to make it look natural. It doesn't have to be one continuous line. And what I might just add a little bit here. Okay? I also might just do a few dots here and there, just because it adds one small, adds texture or just randomly doing this, not thinking about it much. And take a step back. I think our total is looking so good. And I really don't want to overdo this anymore. So I'm just going to sorry, I couldn't help myself that I just wanted to make the shine even though it's looking so good already. 12. Final Coat - Part 2: If I really had to nitpick, I would use the black just to this area is very much in shadow. So I would just use the black in this area here. Because I feel like the dark blue might not be enough, but just for a few scales. That's it. Because this is the very pot of the total that is not going to be in direct sunlight. So I've darken that area. Maybe over here. Even though I feel like the mouth already has a lot of definition, I might just go over this very lightly with the black pen. I feel like we could use the black pen and some dots here, but bear in mind, black is very, very strong. So if you do want to add a bit of texture with black, I would highly advise you to be quite careful, be quite restrained, don't. It is strong. It will look quite strong. So maybe in corners if you're going to use it, but I wouldn't use it very liberally. As you can see, I'm just going to blend that a bit while it's wet. I'm going to take a step back. And I really loved the way my total looks. So I want to actually, and this now with AI, we might just actually, I can see some shadow here. So I might just very lightly go over this, a bit of indigo. So even though we did finish the painting section in the last video, please feel free to still add on if you want to. You can always add more paint on. That's the point of watercolor. You can always just layered on. After assessing the area. This is looking very, very good. And so now I want to just finish up with the very final step, which I like to do in some of my paintings, which is spattering. You don't have to do this, but this is just something your titles very much complete now. So this is really a matter of preference for you. If you like to spatter, I'd like to show you how to do it for spattering. What I like to do is I don't like to spread around the entire animal. What I'd like to do with spattering is to suggest movement. So from this picture, it looks like our total is propelling itself forward in this direction. So I would like to keep the splattering to a minimum here and more of a large area over here of spattering for it to have it more concentrated here. With spattering, I would recommend to spatter with the colors you've already used, even though there are no rules to this, I just feel that if you start out with a whole new range of rainbow colors, for instance, like we'd reds, pinks, stuff like that. I mean, it could still work. But for me, my preference is I would like to use the colors that I've already used for the animal because I feel that it complements the painting more. But it depends on what you're going for. The basic procedure of spattering is to get your pain to the right consistency. So now I'm going to spend a first with a bit of turquoise. And I simply wet my brush with the pain. Whoa, my brush this way. And I'm going to split up by I hope you can see this. I'm just giving my brush and tap. If you're doing what I'm doing and you notice that your paint is not really coming off your brush. It could mean that your paint is just to dry. When you do be prepared that some pain will go and your total. If you don't want that to happen, you can always cover your total with what I like to do is cover it with some spare watercolor paper that I have that it's for testing out pains. So as you can see, I'm using the turquoise and I'm spattering it such that it's more behind the turtle. I personally don't mind a bit of it going onto the turtle's body doesn't really bother me. And another thing to note is the size of the brush that you spattering with effects the size of the drops. Okay? So if you want bigger size drops, you would use a bigger brush. So I've done this section and as you can see, I'm concentrating it behind the total. I've done turquoise already and I don't have to go all around the total. That's not what I'm gonna do. So if you feel you need more pain, just put some more on your palette and keep going. But one small, just like everything else in watercolor. Always step back and assess first. Like if you're overdoing it a little, you know, it's good to just keep assessing. I feel like I've used a lot of of turquoise here already. I've concentrated it more to the back of the turtle. And I think I'm ready to move on to another color, another color that I've already used, which was Parisian blue. So as you can see, I'm putting Parisian blue. Remember this should be fun. It shouldn't be a stressful process. If you have to make up more paint. And as you can see the two, This is not ready flowing sign to add a bit more water that the two blues I'm mixing quite beautifully. You can still see the separate colors though. So I'm gonna go a little bit so that it's, it's looking very pretty to me. Maybe a bit up here, just surrounding alto a little. And I think I'm also ready now to move on to a different color. So remember, if you feel that after this, you want to add some of the colors you previously used, It's completely fine. Another color that we use that I love was the sap green. Let's make up some of that here. I'm standing up as I'm doing this by the way, just so I get a bird's-eye view of what I'm doing. As you can see, some of that beautiful green is coming through and I think I need to wet it more. It's not really coming off my brushes easily. So that's looking very pretty to me. So as you can see, it kind of gives the total a bit of, a bit of framing, but we're not framing the entire turtle, but just like it gives it for me some movements, some context to it. And a bit more green up here, a little bit down here, but I'm not, I'm not really focused so much done on down. Maybe a little bit between those two fins in the front. And love this green and I love the effect it has on at this point. I'm just looking and I don't mind a bit more paint going between the two pins at the front. That's looking very nice and ocean needs to me. And finally, I do have our last color, which is indigo. So bear in mind, indigo is a strong color. So it depends on your discretion in how much you want to use. Indigo, as you can see, it does, it does give beautiful, beautiful drops, but just depends on how strong you want to go to wet this a bit more. Wow, I'm standing back assessing. Look at this area. It's gorgeous. It's so and a little bit between the legs here, between the fins, I mean. So as you can see, a very clear concentration of color behind the total. And I don't feel like I need to go all around the title because I'm already loving this effect. And I'm standing back and I'm having a look. And I think at this point, if you want to revisit another color that you used previously, like the turquoise. I was thinking of adding a bit of turquoise in here because I couldn't quite see it in this area earlier. Wow, I'm really loving it. And what I love about this process as well is it's very spontaneous. I'm not planning like Oh, where each drop off pain is going to land. I'm just doing it. And a little bit on the top. This is all up to you. This is all your own preference of how you want the pain. How many how much does the density of paint dots that you want? I'm quite happy with what I'm seeing right now. Actually. I think I'm actually willing to stop because I I'm very happy with the effect. Once more. Even though I just said I want to stop, I actually think I might do a bit more of the indigo because the indigo is pretty strong definition, but it also just looks great. So there we go. And one small something that you should note for the future is if you want to do dots of different sizes, you can take another brush that's bigger than my brush that I'm using right now, which is the four silver black velvet. But personally, I like the way it looks. I don't really need bigger drops. You can experiment if you want, feel free to do that. But I just want to leave it as like this because I'm really loving the effect. So if you're happy with what you've got, you have just completed doing our C total project and you should be very, very happy with yourself. You should be very proud of yourself because I feel that this project was not, was not ridiculously easy. And I do feel that it was challenging at times, but especially for beginners. And I just want to say that you should be so proud of yourself if you've gotten this far. So this is my finished total. And in fact, because I'm finished with it, I'm actually going to sign, add my little signature that I like to do, which is I'm doing this in green this time. I like to use one of the colors that I've painted with for the picture. So as artists, I would encourage you guys to that's the date. I would encourage you guys to come up with your own signature, but I can't wait to see all your completed projects, so please put them up for me. And thank you so much again for taking on this project with me. And I really do hope that you've enjoyed the process. You felt that you were challenged. But more importantly, after completing the Sito, DO YOU love the total that you've painted and that you continue to do more watercolor paintings. That would be my dream. So I hope that I've given you some handy tips and inspire you to take this further. But for now, congratulations on finishing your theta2. 13. Final Thoughts & Thankyou: I just want to thank you for watching my Skillshare class. And I hope that you have enjoyed the process of drawing and painting a sea turtle step-by-step. I hope that you have learned a few helpful tips from me in this class. And I also hope that this has sparked your interest to continue on your watercolor journey. Please look out for more of my classes in the future. And one small, thank you so much again for joining me. I wish you all the best in your watercolor journey.