Insect Painting: Realistic Butterfly with Watercolor

1. Welcome to the Class!: Are you an artist passionate about wildlife painting? Maybe you're searching for ways of painting your favorite natural subjects, maybe insects or butterflies. But feel frustrated by the overwhelm that it brings you when you think about picturing all of these complicated textures and color transitions. If that's your case, this class is for you. In this step by step process, I will show you how to paint this beautiful butterfly with watercolors in very simple steps. In this class, you will learn one main secret of watercolor that you will use in your whole creative career. You will learn how to approach insect painting and what to start from so that you avoid overwhelm and never question yourself if you're doing something wrong. And lastly, I will teach you how to add realism to your illustrations and add textures that will really make your paintings pop. I'm a nastasia, an artist, book illustrator and pattern designer inspired by nature. And in this step by step class, I will walk you through my whole process of creating a realistic and vibrant illustration. Swallowtail butterfly. So next time when you're outside and you took lots of pictures of your favorite insects or butterflies, you'll be able to paint them on your own using the techniques I will be showing you in this master class. This class is open to all skill levels and I will provide you with a reference picture, but that's not it. You will also get a ready to transfer drawing that you can easily transfer to your watercolor paper and start painting right away. This will be especially helpful if you're a beginner. Are you ready to start expressing your love for nature on a whole new level and create incredibly vibrant and realistic insect paintings? Then I will see you in the class. 2. Art Supplies: As for the art supplies, I'm using cotton, watercolor paper, so my favorite paper is arches. I receive a lot of questions about my favorite paper, so this is the one. It's cotton paper, so as you can see, pure cotton and it's 300 gram satin finish paper, so it's hot pressed. So this is a very personal choice. I think all of the artists have probably different favorite brands of paper. Some prefer cold press, some prefer hot pressed. This is just my personal preference. If you wonder what paper I will be using, this is the one. This is just the sheet from this block that I separated from the block. As for the brushes, I use synthetic brushes with a sharp tip round synthetic brushes, not flat ones. These are the brushes I will be using today. Probably I will end up using only two of them, Maybe these two or these two. But basically, you need one small brush, for example. This one is number zero, I believe. And this one is number two, so something small. And then one medium brush. So it can be a number eight, number six, depending on what you have on hand. The important thing is that the tip should be quite sharp to be able to do all the details. Then, as for a watercolor paint, I will be using some of these in tubes. These are by Nevsky Palidra. I also have these in pants, but I think today it's just going to be easier to squeeze some here so that you can see what colors I'm using. That's why I will be using watercolor in tubes. The quality of water color is exactly the same in tubes or pants. Don't worry about it. Then of course I have my water here. There you go. I also have paper towels. Paper towels is something I usually use when I paint. If I need to take off the excess of water from my brush, I do it with my paper towel. That's what I'm going to use as well. I guess that 3. Important Watercolor Rule: I have my reference spectre here. This is the drawing. So see, it's the same, just moved differently then. This is the image I created with my procreate program. Basically what I did, I just deleted the background so that we can see only the butterfly. We will not be painting all of this beautiful background here. We will be painting just the butterfly. That's why I like using these images on white background so that I can get really concentrated on the image and not on all of the rest. First, before starting to paint, I wanted to show you this scheme. Before we start the painting process, I wanted to explain you this important concept in watercolor painting. In classical watercolor painting, we always go from light to dark. It means that before starting to paint, we need to analyze our reference picture and see what is the lightest tone on our reference and what is the darkest tone. I found three main tones on our butterfly. This yellow color here on the wings, we have these blue spots, and then we have this black pattern here. What I did, I actually transformed this colored image, this color image, into a gray scale image just on my ipad. But you have other programs that you can do it with or even on your phone. Now we can clearly see which one is the lightest color. You see that this yellow is the lightest color on our reference. Then the blue one is the second one. And then of course, the black one is the darkest color. Which means that we will be starting from yellow, then blue, then black. The black color will be added at the end. In the beginning, we're not thinking about all of these textures here, all of the black details. We will be adding them after we've created this yellow color in the blue color. A couple of more things. I wanted to say that I chose this reference for this reason because I can explain you here, this process of working from light to dark. First of all, then I thought it's going to be fun to create these textures here. I always receive questions about how do I create textures on my images. Here's a perfect example of this, a dot pattern that we will be creating without using gas or acrylics or something else. We will not be using white color today. And I will show you how you can obtain this result without using any white. That's going to be fun. I will put my reference aside. I will start squeezing my colors. What colors should we have ready? We're going to use just a few colors. Basically, we will need yellow. I will be using cadmium yellow, or you can use lemon yellow. I prefer cadmium. You can also use Akra if you wish. We will be using a blue color that we see here on our butterfly. Any kind of blue will work. It depends on you what you have on hand. I have this blue here. I don't see the name because it's quite dirty. But it says bright blue. So it's just a regular blue. But you can use cobalt oil or ultramarine if you like. Just a blue that seems close to this one you see here. We will need just a touch of orange or red for these spots here. Then I will actually show you how you can create this very dark color without using the black. I will explain you this concept later on during this session, but my principle is that I don't like using pure black. Just a simple flat black, right of the tube in my paintings, because I think it's not the best solution. And we can create dark colors without the use of black. To be able to create this black, we can use some green, red, purple. These kind of things prepare these ones. I would suggest you to use green. This is like a sub green, A purple which can be different in any sets depending on your set. Then a dark blue would be nice as well. Maybe something like indigo will be nice. I have my indigo here, which is a dark blue. It's great for creating dark colors like this one. That's all about colors. 4. First Wash: Okay, so let's get started. The first thing I will do here is I will cover the whole surface of the butterfly with my yellow color. I need to mix a color that is close to this light yellow color here. I will take cadmium yellow. So this is just a warm yellow. I think it's quite close to what I see in my reference. I'm just squeezing a little bit. Now. I will take my water, I'll put it here. And just one more thing. I wanted to tell you. I will probably start to paint the whole butterfly, but I don't think we will have time to finish all the details on the whole butterfly just in case. I will probably get concentrate on one side of the butterflies for the details and then I will see if we have time to finish it all or not. But in any case, you will have the idea because one side of the butterfly will be finished. You see I'm adding a lot of water. I'm adding a lot of water to obtain a very light yellow color in water color. It's all about quantity of color and water. If you want a very light color, you need to add a lot of water to it. That's exactly what I'm doing here. First step, I will just cover everything uniformly with this light yellow color. The only important thing here is not to cross this line here. I need to remain within the area of my butterfly. Now, I don't care about the details and everything. I'm just going to cover everything. But these blue spots, I will this side of the wing, this one with yellow, this one. But I will not touch this area here where I see the blue, because blue and yellow are complementary colors and I don't want them to mix together and create a muddy effect. That's why I will just avoid touching this area here. But you can cover everything else with your yellow. For now, really, it doesn't matter a lot how beautiful your wash is. The only important thing is not to cross the line, but this is the first layer we're making. Again, don't forget to leave this area here white for now, because we will apply blue there. You see I have some spots of blue also on this side, somewhere here. I will probably leave this one without yellow as well. I will be using the principle of layering if you're not familiar with layering. Layering in water, color means I will not try to paint the whole butterfly as I see it on the reference. I will not start to add all the colors at once, but I will create these washes or layers that will allow me to obtain the volume and the saturation gradually and avoid overwhelming stress of messing something up. Because in water color, we cannot just use the white color and correct the mistakes. If you've covered the white, that's the white is gone. My goal is to preserve the areas I know are light as much as possible. That's why I not covered this area here as well. Now we need to leave this yellow dry here and I will use my light blue for the wings. 5. Applying Midtones: Let me open the color. Yeah, the only problem with the water color in tubes that sometimes it gets stuck and I cannot open the color, I will use another one. So you can actually use colors interchangeably. So I will use cobalt. It's going to be pretty much the same thing. I've put some cobalt on my palette here. There you go. I will do the same thing. I will dilute it with water to obtain a very light blue color. When you use water color in tubes, you can see that the color is very concentrate, very strong. You always need to add water there. You don't just take the color and paint with it, You always need water. And the intensity of your color will depend on the amount of water you put there. I'm quite happy with this light blue. What I will do, I will start to apply it here to these spots here. I don't care if it's pretty or not at this stage, I just need to put this color right there. One important thing is that I don't want it to touch the yellow color now, because my yellow color is still wet. If I accidentally go and touch the yellow with blue, they will start to mix together because water color goes where water is. That's why to avoid it. To prevent it, I will leave this small white line, the line of dry paper, between the yellow and the blue, that these two colors don't mix together. I hope it makes sense. Also, I have these white spots here that I will try to avoid, so I will not touch them with the blue. Actually, I did touch one of these, but I think it's not a big deal. It's not going to be visible. I'm just continued to do it on the other side of my butterfly. And you see I'm not even trying to remain within the area of the spots. Because anyway, we will be using black after like the very dark color. And we can fix all of it so we can make the nice outline and everything. Now just about putting the color where we see it and filling this area here. I will continue on this side as well. Again, I am very careful of not touching the yellow right now. If your yellow is dry, it's fine. You can actually go quite close to it because when the color is dry, they will not mix together. But if it's still wet, please be careful. You see this part was already dry. I just can go on top and paint. This is the first step. First layer is to add yellow and this blue color. Next thing, I will already paint these little touches of orange or red here. Just not to forget about them. I will mix a color. I will take some red. This is ruby, or you can use cadmium red. Actually, I think I will use cadmium red. It's just a normal basic warm red that is very common. I'm squeezing just a tiny bit on my palette because I know I will not be using a lot of it. I will just mix it with some of this cadmium yellow. I'm taking some from there, adding it here, and adding some water. I think my brush was a bit dirty. I will wash it and do it again. I obtained this orange color. Now what I will do, I will apply it to these spots that I actually covered already accidentally with my blue. But because it was only one layer of color, I don't think it will be visible. It's fine. Now, adding this orange already, I also see it here and I also see it on this side. I think that's pretty much it. 6. Creating Smooth Color Transitions: Next step, I need to dry this yellow layer here. The first layer, I can wait until it dries naturally or I can use my hair dryer. I think I will wait for now. And I will use this time to mix more colors. I want to add to these wings volume some color graduation. I want to a different yellow, a darker yellow. To be able to do so, I will just add some yellow. My cadmium yellow, I will obtain this slightly darker yellow color. One thing I wanted to tell you about this is something I actually never thought of. Because maybe when you paint for such a long time, you forget these things. But during the course that I was holding during the last months, working with my students was interesting because they brought up some questions that I think are very important and that I didn't even think of. They were asking me, Some people were asking me, how do you darken your colors? I realize that a lot of people use black to darken their colors because it seems very obvious. You just add a little bit of black and that's it, you got a darker color. I don't suggest you doing that for different reasons. First of all, it will make your illustrations or your paintings more dirty. Just simple. Black will always leave colors dirty, dirty, and more dull. If you want your paintings look nice and saturated, don't do that, because black will kill this saturation. The other reason is that you will obtain a more flat and poor looking color. That's why when you want to darken the color, do use different colors to do that. For example, I wanted to obtain a different yellow. So a darker yellow what I did, I added some okra to it and you see I obtain a darker yellow. Same thing with blue, same thing with red. So you don't have to use black color to darken your colors. You can try to use the other colors to do that. Of course, I will show you this process here in this session. Even for the black, as I said, I will not be using the pure black. I will show you that you can use this method even with very dark colors, thanks to my students. Now I'm aware of this challenge of this problem because it is a pretty straightforward solution, I think, to use black, but it's not the best one. Well, at least for me, like I was trained this way, I have a classical art education, and my teachers were always saying me not to use black or white in watercolor. And this is what I always did, and this is what I teach to my students. And this is the classical watercolor approach, I would say, let me just tell you what I'm doing here. I'm mixed this darker yellow. And I'm now trying to separate these wings from one another, the upper wings from the lower wings. And to be able to do so, I apply this color on the, on the lower wing where I see these two wings touch together. And then near the body as well. Then to be able to make this color look smooth and create a smooth transition, I smooth the edge by washing my brush, cleaning it with my paper towel, drying it with the paper towel, and smoothing the edge. This is the method I use all the time. I think it's very handy because you see that I was able to introduce this new color seamlessly. I will demonstrate this on this side as well. All you need to do is to put this color here. First of all, make sure that this layer is already dry. This is very important, mine is already dry. But if your layer is still wet, you need to dry it first using your hair dryer. Maybe because otherwise it's just going to mix with the previous layer and we will not have the desired effect. This is very important. We're using different techniques here today. First technique was making a wash, basically wet on wet technique. Now we're using the wet on dry technique. It means we're painting with wet color on dry surface. Oops, you see only by adding just a touch of this darker yellow, I was able to create some depth. I will actually do the same thing on this wing. I want the viewer to get the idea that these wings are not flat, but that there is like this little fold here. And I want the body to be lighter than this part of the wing. That's what will give me this illusion of something three dimensional. I put this color and again I'm smoothing the edge with the method I just showed you. So you can actually use it this way as well, but I think this way you can clearly see the brush strokes, you know, you can see that this is one color, this is the other color. So to be able to give this like more of an organic look and create a more seamless transition, you can use this method I just showed you. See there's really, you don't need to do a lot to be able to do it. Just don't forget to dry your brush with your paper towel. This is very important. This is the beginning of our painting. Now, next stage, I will start to mix the darker colors already. 7. Better Alternative to Black Color: First of all, I want to point your attention to the fact that there are different kinds of dark tones here. We have some really black colors, then we have these more grayish tones like on the body. And maybe here, that's why I will mix probably two or three different dark colors. Then here as well, we see that this blue is not a uniform. We have very light blue color here, almost white. And then we have this darker color on the lower side of these sections. So that's why I will also mix one more blue, just a darker blue. And it's very easy. As I said, you don't have to add any other blue. Sorry, you don't have to add black color to it. All you can do to darken your blue, you see me doing here. You can just add more of the same color. So use the more concentrated version of the same color. Or what you can do is add some purple to it, just a touch of purple to make it a touch of red or a different, darker blue. For example, this indigo. Indigo is one of the darkest blues available. And it's amazing for creating dark colors. As you can see, it's dark from the tube. It comes like almost like a black color. But when you dilute it with water, you see it's blue. But it's a dark blue darker than this one. When you mix them together, you see I obtained a different blue, dark blue, than this one. This is how you can darken your blue without using black. You will obtain a much more rich and saturated color if you would mix it with black. My advice, don't use the black. This is just my personal opinion. Now let me mix these colors here. I see that on my reference, this is something grayish. So it looks like a dark gray to me. So that is what I'm going to mix here. There are a lot of ways you can mix a gray. I will show you one of the ways you can use some Okra or any kind of brown color. See, I've just used some of this old color. I had on my palette some red. And I'm mixing it with Okra to obtain this brown color, I would call it. Then I'm adding some indigo to this color, and I think I added too much indigo. Now it looks like just blue. I will take some of this color away with my paper towel. That's why it's very handy as well. I will add more Okra to it. I will make sure that there is equal amount of Okra and blue. You see, now I obtained a new color. It looks quite green to me now, because okra is yellowish and blue is blue, yellow plus blue will create green for us. That's why my color looks a bit greenish. If I want to make it look more gray than green, I can add a color that is on the opposite side on the color wheel, which is red. That's why I will add some of this cadmium red to this mix and I will see what happens. These concepts I'm telling you here are from the color theory. If you are not familiar with color theory, this is something you can totally dig deeper into. Because in my opinion, it's very important for any kind of artist who paints with any kind of colors, watercolor, gas oil, anything. Color theory is super helpful for mixing colors. This method here, this knowledge of color theory, allowed me to create this neutral gray. My gray doesn't look like green anymore. It doesn't look like blue or red. It looks more or less uniformly, this is 1 gray. And then I will another one, this almost black color here. To mix it, I will add some of what is this color? Acd violet. It's basically a purple, pinkish purple, something like this. You can use magenta, you can other kinds of purple. For this one, I will mix it with my Indigo. I will add more indigo. I think this is not enough what I had here. The trick here, I will be using very saturated colors, A lot of pigment, and not a lot of water. What I will do also, I will add just a touch of green probably to my mix to see how it goes. For now, I will just put the green on this side of the palette. You see this green is very dark as well. This is just green from Nevsky Paltra, but you can find it in other brands under the name of Sap Green or something like this. This is just a very neutral green that I use all the time for everything, especially botanicals. I suggest you having it in your toolbox and I'm just taking a touch of this green and adding it to my mix of Acton violet, ultramarine indigo, and then green. You see, I obtained this color. I don't even know if you can distinguish the color from the screen, but it is, but it's not black. When I will apply it to the butterfly, you will be able to see that this color looks much richer, more saturated and vibrant then just a flat black color. So this is just my approach. And then if I want, I can create a third color by just using the same color here and adding some water to it. I see now it's very, very blue. So I can add more inacdone to make it look more violet. Then let's see if I add some opera to it, I will get this gray again. You see it's a very complex color. It's not just black, diluted with water. It's not this flat, simple gray. It's still a gray, but it's more complex and more rich. And it will result into a better painting for sure. Once I have these three colors on my palette, I can start to work on these darker details. Before I pass to it, I will tell you what I'm going to do first. I think at this stage I will start to work on this part of the wing because I'm not sure I will be able to finish this one first thing I will see what is the lightest dark color here. I think the lightest ones are here. And they're here. And then this side of the wing is almost black. I will be painting this at the very end. For now, I will just get concentrated on this part. One important thing, these areas here are quite fuzzy. You see we have these dots and this pattern here, I will create it now. 8. Introducing Texture Using Lines: The first step I will do is I will use my light gray color. Make sure this layer is dry area. If it's dry, you can go and do what I'm doing here. I'm just looking at my reference and adding this gray where I see it on my reference, the tip of my brush. I'm not going with the body of my brush, I'm using the tip of my brush. You can see I use these very thin strokes to already create this fuzziness, this texture I see on the reference. I will just fill these areas of my butterfly using this method. Instead of just going and applying the color with the whole body of the brush, I'm applying it with the tip and I'm using these short lines. You see it already created this texture here for me very easily. Then I will just continue on this upper side of the wing, I will leave this tiny line here untouched because that's what I see in my reference. There's a gap between these two wings. This is exactly what I'm going to do and I'm just going and adding these lines here. Again, I'm using this method. I will not be using Gag or white acrylic paint to add details. I'm thinking before on how I want this texture to look like. Making these strokes here will allow you not to use the white after you already create these white details by just making these gaps between the making this texture. I will do the same thing here on my reference, I see that there is this gray color going on here. I will probably dilute this color even more to make it even lighter. You see I've just added a touch of water and my color instantly became lighter. I will go and continue this paporation on this lower side of my butterfly. I'm just creating these very short hair strokes, thin lines. At this stage I can cover this white I had here. We needed this white just to separate the blue from the yellow while painting, and now it's time to cover it. You see me doing with these very short strokes. I'm already creating this texture here. There you go. Same thing here. I'm starting from this light gray. And then I will gradually add more depth and more dark colors. Don't worry if now it looks a bit flat and that you don't have this instant, very saturated, very beautiful result. This is one more thing I wanted to talk about. To be able to create a realistic artwork using this method, you need to pass this intermediate stage, which is not a stage where you see like all the details and everything looks amazing. This is the stage when things can look a bit messy and maybe a bit unfinished. Sometimes you may think, oh, am I doing it right? Am I going to make it look good? This is fine. This is just the stage that you need to push through. You just need to keep, add details, colors and layers very gradually and naturally, you will obtain a realistic result. Realistic result is not only what colors you use, it's mainly about how much time you put into creating your works. I could create this butterfly much less amount of time, 15 minutes, 30 minutes. But the result would be less realistic. So it will be more of a sketchy look and less detailed look, which doesn't mean it will be a bad work, it's just a different kind of work. But if you want to create something that looks like a botanical painting or, you know these illustrations from the old books. Entomology. This is personally what I love. I'm really inspired by the old, old illustrations and I just love the way they look at the same time realistic, but also with personal touches and details. They don't look like photographies. You can totally see that the illustrations. These are paintings, but there is still this amount of realism. And they're all made with watercolors, mainly a botanical illustration, entomological illustration, animal illustrations for like natural history books are all made with watercolors. This is the technique that these artists of that time were using. They were all using this layering technique, which means you patiently add layers on top of one of the other, then you obtain this vibrant, realistic looking effect. A lot of people also ask me, it's impossible that your paintings look so vibrant. Maybe like you use acrylics or you add gage to it. You actually can obtain very realistic and very saturated, very vibrant results only with water color. Using this technique, by adding layers one on top of the other, already started to add some of these veins on this butterfly. In the spots where I add this gray, you see I have already a darker color when you add layer on top of the other layer. Because water color is translucent, you will still be able to see the layer underneath it. And this is the trick on how you create all these beautiful transitions and different color graduations just by using layering. This is a very simple concept, but it needs time. You can see we will be working on this potter fly for about 2 hours. I will see what I will be able to achieve in this amount of time. Usually, when I just paint for myself without speaking, I am quicker. But because I'm explaining to you, I'm a slower because I need to think what to say at the same time and make you understand what I'm saying. That's why I'm a bit slower today. But I think you got the idea. You see, I'm not touching this area here for now just because I know I want to make it dark and there is no need for me to go with gray there. I will go directly with black after with black, with this very dark color which is mixed. Instead, I'm just going and working on all the other areas that I think are lighter than this area here. I'm already outlining these veins on the butterfly. Insects are an amazing subject, not only for beginners. It's great for beginners because insects are symmetric, symmetrical, and they're easy to draw. You don't need to spend a lot of time on the drawing because it's not the same thing as the animal. In mammals, for example, it's more difficult because you have the expression, the eyes, the head. It's more difficult to capture insect. Even if your wing will be a couple of centimeters smaller or bigger, there will be no much difference, nobody will ever notice it. That's why insects are more forgiving from this point of view then I think insects are also very fun to paint. You can really play around with textures and learn all of these techniques I'm showing you here in a fun way. And also experiment with textures like we did here on this wing for example. This texture, like the other important thing, this texture on the butterflies, are often similar to the textures you can create on fur, for example, on fur or feathers. This is the first step in illustrating animals, I think is making insects. It also depends on your level of skills. If you are already a skilled artist, I think you can absolutely paint animals and other subjects with no problem. But if you are not that skilled, if you're just starting out, I think insects are a great way of trying something new. After botanicals, after painting leaves like mushrooms and flowers. If you want to start to paint animals, I highly recommend sugar from insects, then gradually making your tasks more difficult, for example. I don't recommend you to start from super complicated, right? In the beginning. This is the thing I always say to my students, because starting from something very difficult and not appropriate for your level is not good. Because you will just get frustrated and you will think, oh, I'm not good enough. Like I don't like the results I'm getting. But it's totally fine. It's totally understandable. You need to start from something more simple. This is as simple as it is. Animals are a more advanced topic then flowers and other botanicals like fruits. I think gradual approach is the best thing you can do if you're just starting out. Because if you want to paint portraits, let's say landscapes, you start right away from that. Very likely you will not be satisfied with the result, but it's not because of you. It's not because you're not good, it's just because the subject matter is too advanced. Start with something simple, You see, I've created this outline already, just to guide myself a little bit. I think at this stage I'm done with this light gray color. I will just add a couple of touches here. You see I've created the body. I made the body a bit more detailed already at this stage. You see I'm leaving all these yellow details that I want to be lighter. I'm not covering them, but I'm using this same hairy texture, I will call it. Then I will already paint the eyes with a darker color. You see I did actually everything with my big brush. You've noticed that. That's why I love these round brushes with a sharp tip. That because you can use the whole body of the brush and that you can work just with the tip and create very thin lines. Oftentimes, I just use only one brush for everything because I want to work on the eyes. I want to have a bit more control. That's why I took a slightly smaller brush. And then I will make these, really paint these antennas as well. Be careful with antennas, make sure your lines are very thin because in watercolor we cannot just go and erase what we just did. Well, there are some methods to correct mistakes, but it's better not to make these mistakes. That's why when you paint these details, try to be very focused and make thin lines. Oops. There you go. 9. Applying the Darkest Tones: I will darken this blue color here. I'm just taking this blue I just mixed with you. I will apply this blue to the lower side of each one of these spots here. For now, I'm just applying it. And then I will smooth out this edge as well. With my usual method, I think I will go and do the same on this side. There you go. Now I just wash my brush, clean it with my paper towel. And again, I'm smoothing this edge a little bit. I'm just blending these colors nicely into one another. You see it works better with some colors. For example, with yellow, you can obtain like almost seamless transitions. With darker colors such as this blue color, it's a bit more complicated. But we don't search for perfection here because we will be adding all of this texture after it will be covered. Anyway, that's why I don't really care about making things perfect. Now. It looks fine for me. For now, what I'm doing here, I already started to add this very dark color. It got dry. I added some water to it to activate it. Again, I will start to paint these areas here. What I will do, I will start from this lower side. At this stage, I just need to be very, very careful. I'm working with wet on dry technique, almost dry brush, I have a lot of pigment on my brush and almost no water. This is why I am obtaining this super, super dark color. It looks like black, but it's not black. It's more blue or purple. Because I have a lot of color and not a lot of pigment. I have a lot of control over what I'm doing. You see that my color is not going anywhere. It goes exactly where I put it. I create this very textured mark. So all I need to do right now is to be careful and very patient of, of not accidentally touching the things I don't want to cover again, because we're not using any white. I need to think in advance what is going to be white here. That's why you see, I'm avoiding, for example, these spots here that I see on my reference are white. I will make just the outline with a very, very thin line. I like making the outline personally, this is what you don't have to do it if you don't want to, if you do want to make an outline, make sure it's very thin because a dark outline can actually ruin all the work you just did there. I'm already creating these veins in the middle of these blue spans because that's what I see on my butterfly reference. And you see how our butterfly instantly started to look more alive, more saturated, more vibrant, just because I'm adding this black now, it's all about contrast. But the trick is here, as I said, is to wait until you can start doing it. The approach here is to go gradually. You see we first applied all of the yellow, then the blue, we've created some texture with this light gray color. And only after that, we are starting to add these very dark details. When we add these dark details, it means I will not touch this area anymore. I will not go and make more washes here. Because if I go on top of it with washes, I will just smudge everything because this color is so dark. And that if I will apply water on top of it, it will immediately get activated again and it will just create a huge mess. Once I started to add this dark color, it means that I'm happy with all the rest. I'm happy with the blue. I'm happy with the yellow. At this stage, I just want to pass on these details. Again. You see I'm working with the very tip of my brush. I'm covering the lower part of these sections and also this upper part. I'm not doing of these spots yet because I just want to add this dark black, black color first. I want to add the texture at the end very patiently. I'm just going to cover all of it again. Here you see I'm not covering the, these white spots, I'm leaving them. One more thing you can also do to be able to preserve these small areas of white is using masking fluid. This is a very handy tool for artists. I think masking fluid, this is something I use a lot, especially when you need to paint a subject. Let's say a mushroom flying. If you imagine a flying Gc, you have this red cap that is very saturated, vibrant, and very uniform. So you need to create this volume on the cap of this mushroom. And then you have all of these tiny white spots on the cap. If you want to paint the cap without the masking fluid, you need to avoid all of these white spots and paint all around them. Or you can use Gag or white acrylic and just paint these spots on top of the red. But again, this is, I think this is personally not my approach because I am for classical watercolor, just watercolor without anything else. Because in my opinion, this way watercolor just looks much more pure and more professional. And I think it's something you will not be able to see on pictures, but it's definitely something you will notice on when you see the work from like in the real life. I don't say that you should not use any of that. You can totally do it. But in my opinion, it just looks better if you avoid these white spots or if you protect them with masking fluid. In this case, applying masking fluid is very handy because you just put it there, you let it dry, and then you go on top of it without hesitation, without thinking of it because it's protected. And then once you're done, you just remove the masking fluid and you end up with these areas completely white. It's a super cool tool. You see, I finished this part of the wing and now I will do the same thing on this upper wing. Again, I'm avoiding the details here. There you go. It's a very tedious process. I think at this stage it's really about being patient because it will really pay off. At this stage we want these details to look nice and perfect. Then I have this blue, I will already outline it as well. Then once I'm done with this phase, I will pass to adding this texture, which will be very fun. 10. Adding Texture Using Dots: Insects. Sometimes it's like painting something abstract, These textures and all these things. Especially when it's like the intermediate stage of painting, sometimes it's look like like a mess or like something abstract. And then once you start to add these dark details and it brings everything together, I think, I think it's a little bit magical when you paint insects see already started to add this very dark color in some areas of my painting. For example, on the body I see here in the middle, it's dark. I will add this dark color there in the eyes. I want to give them this color as well. Then I will darken a little bit. These antennas I see, I'm working with the very tip of my brush going very, very carefully, because I still want this lighter gray to be visible in some areas. I'm not covering it completely. I'm just adding some of this gray on top, almost black. I don't know if you can see it on the video. This color I'm using here, it looks almost black, but it's still not. If you zoom way and you can see it's more like a purple, purple, dark purple or dark blue. I think it just looks nicer than simple black. There you go. I created this outline a bit better. Now, I will darken this of the texture as well. I still want some of this gray to be visible. But I'm adding one more layer of this darker gray on top using the same movement, the same lines. What it will give me, it will allow the viewer to see this lighter gray underneath. Then I'm a more darker color on top to make it look more rich, more contrasted. You see I'm doing the same thing here. I think it just adds an extra depth to the butterfly and makes the texture look even more interesting and less flat. Also, if you look at the butterfly, sometimes you can notice this a hair texture in it, especially you can notice it on moths. Moths are very hairy. You can totally see that the body is very hairy and sometimes even the wings. But same thing on the butterfly. If you look at a butterfly with a ****, with a magnifying ****, something like this, you can see this effect too. That's why I think this texture I'm making here helps me to underline this effect and make it more obvious for the viewer. I'm just continuing this way and do the same thing here. Once I'm done with this process, I will start to add these dots here. We're almost there again. See, because it takes time and I just wanted to show you all the textures. I decided to leave this part unfinished, but because butterflies are symmetrical, you will be able to finish it on your own just by repeating the exact same things we were doing here. Okay, I think at this stage I will start to add my dots. I will start with this lighter gray color, again, always working from light to dark. This is very important. I will be working with this medium gray. I just took some of this very, very dark gray, added some water to it, and it became lighter. I will use it to create these tiny dots. I hope you can see it, but all I'm doing, I have more color than water on my brush. Again, one more time. That's why it gives me this possibility to create these tiny dots. I think it's visible on the screen. But it's just very simple. I'm just lightly touching this area here because I see this dot pattern here. I'm just slightly touching with my brush and creating these small dots. Make sure you don't have a lot of water on your brush, because if you have a lot of water, you will get the big splashes of color that we don't want. That's why your color should be a dry, very small amount of water on your brush there. Watercolor is always about the amount of color and the amount of water you have on your brush. Depending on this, you will obtain drastically different effects if you are a beginner, if you are not very familiar with watercolor yet, this is my advice. Really try to control the quantity of water and of color. Play around with it. See how it works. If you add more pigment, so more color happens. See when you have more water, what happens? By experience, you will start to notice these things and you will start to understand how watercolor works. Of course, one more thing is to understand basic watercolor techniques. Watercolor, it has like a reputation of being a very complicated technique because you cannot just correct the mistakes with white, go like, and paint on top. This is something you cannot do with watercolor for sure. But if you know how it works, if you know the basic techniques and if you know how to use them, you will not be that intimidated by it. Like a lot of artists tell me that they've watched countless tutorials and then they're having a hard time of painting something that they want to paint from their head or invent something. Or even paint something that they want to paint without following a tutorial or someone to be able to do these things. You need to learn the fundamentals, as I said, You need to understand basic principles of drawing, painting composition, basic watercolor techniques, which is very important to be able to master watercolor, you need to understand what's available there, what things you can do with watercolor. Once you have these, you can start to use them creatively. Instead of following someone letter by letter. You can decide for yourself like, oh, on this subject I can use and this technique, I will paint it this way. Once you have this knowledge, everything just becomes easier. You can start to express and create what you want to create without necessarily following someone's tutorial or someone. Video 11. Last Touches: This is today. We covered, we don't really covered the wet on wet technique. We covered layering, how to create washes. We covered wet on dry technique, we covered how to smooth the edges. Then now what I'm showing you here, I call it usually like the dry brush technique because you have more color than water on your brush. Your brush is basically a dry, that's why it's dry brush that allows you to create these textures like you see me doing here. Once you know that these techniques are available, you can start to apply them to different subjects and you can paint anything you want. If you know how to use these techniques, I will make this outline just a bit darker. There you go. You see this is not perfect yet. And of course, I'm going a bit quickly here because of the time, But you got the idea by creating these tiny dots. And then I will create some in the middle. You see I'm varying the intensity of these dots in their size. The dots I'm placing in the middle are distanced, like there's more distance between them and they're smaller then the dots that you see on the sides are more densely concentrated. This is what will give us this three D effect. This is the most I think, long but also relaxing part of the process. I know some people maybe are impatient, they just want to finish the work as soon as possible. But most of people actually, I think, enjoy this process of adding details. I personally enjoyed a lot. I think it's a meditation. You can just focus on the process, focus on adding these small details. I personally find it very, very relaxing and even addicting Sometimes it gets hard to stop adding details because it's just satisfying. I will add these dots here as well. The most important thing is these dots should be very small, a lot of color, in just a tiny touch of water. This is very important. And then of course, you should have a nice brush. What I mean by nice brush, I think nice brush should not necessarily be very expensive. For example, I have a lot of brushes, almost all of them are synthetic. It's normal that they wear out, so I need to replace them from time to time, buy new ones, but they're very cheap. Synthetic brushes are very cheap, and depending on the brand, of course, you can find more expensive brands than the other ones. But honestly, I think you can paint a good artwork with $101 brush. I think so. You're not be able to do the same thing with $1 paper. The paper should be very good. That's why I use arches, which is quite an expensive brand. Cotton watercolor paper is usually expensive, but it's worth it 100% Never save on paper, You can save on brushes, you can save on watercolors. So maybe if, for example, this brand, this Russian brand, Nevsky Patra, it's quite affordable. It's much less expensive than Daniel Smith or other premium brands, but I think it does the job really well. And I have been using these colors for years, and honestly, I think they do the job. If you really want to try some expensive and very, very good quality colors, you can do it. But I think what will really make the difference for you is paper. Good paper is everything. Sometimes you can even make this experiment. Try to paint the same thing on the regular cellulose paper and on cotton paper, I think you will be able to see the difference yourself. Some things, especially if you're working with layers, with layering, and if you want to create realistic very detailed artworks, it's just going to be a nightmare to try to do it all on cellulose paper. Then one more thing about cellulose paper is that even though if in water color we say you cannot correct mistakes, you still can correct some mistakes by removing some of the color from your paper. But this method only works with good paper. For example, arches paper allows you to do these manipulations and then paint on top of it, and everything will look amazing. But a cheap paper will, it will not produce the same effect because the structure of the paper will be ruined. You will have this like messy surface. And the result of this manipulation, it will be likely that you need to start it all over on the new sheet of paper. Water color is a lot of work, especially if you want to create detailed botanical artworks or insect artworks. Why not starting already on good paper? This is just my advice. You don't have to buy blocks. For example, this arches paper is available in blocks that are glued from all four sides, which is the most expensive option. Then you have blocks that are glued just from one side. Then you have spear sheets that you can buy like big sheets of paper and then cut it yourself in smaller pieces. And usually these are even cheaper. What I usually do, I just buy a couple of blocks. When I'm traveling, I just put one in my suitcase and I bring it with me. Then I buy spear sheets and then I cut them as I want to create bigger artworks or, um, for sketches, things like this. It's less expensive to buy spear sheets. That's why you will not have this anxiety and like this nightmare of ruining a very expensive sheet of paper, which is useless pressure. We need to, if you really want to experiment and be crazy, you can totally practice on cellulose paper. I think it's even better this way. You can do all the crazy things you like without being guilty of ruining a nice sheet of paper. But when you're serious about something, like maybe you're working on a client's work or you are preparing an artwork for an exhibition, or just a work that you're serious about. I think it's much wiser to start it already on a good paper. Oops, there you go. I think we're almost done here. I will just add a little bit more volume on this body here. I will make it just a bit darker. What I did, I just added some water to my opera. I will make this body of my butterfly just a bit darker. Of course, I could go and add even more details to this painting. Again, as I said, it's all about the time you have at your disposal and more time you spend on your artwork. More detailed, it will be more realistic, they will be. Sometimes it's really about the time you want to spend on your works. I think I will add just a couple of more dark brush strokes worth the very tip of my brush quite of how this butterfly turned out to maybe a couple of details here. I could go and add details until after tomorrow here, because this is my favorite moment. But I think for our today's session, we obtained quite of a realistic result. I showed you some of these textures, how we can create textures on insects, especially on butterflies. Adding a couple more here, and there you go. 12. Final Words: I hope you enjoyed this class. In that now you feel more comfortable sketching insects and butterflies in particular. So now you have the exact algorithm that you can follow next time when you will paint subjects on your own, for example butterflies or beetles. Please share your creations with me. You can upload your paintings to the project section of the class. No matter if you painted the same butterfly I did, or if you chose a different subject, different insect, please put it there and I will be happy to see it and review it. Also, if you enjoy the class, don't forget to put me a review. And it will help me tremendously. Thank you again for watching and I will see you next time. Bye.