Live Encore: Painting Watercolor Flower Moons

1. Introduction: It's just like letting loose, letting go, and just the flow of it is really important to having just like an interesting watercolor practice in general. My name is Ana Victoria. I'm a watercolor teacher, author, and artist. I have a bunch of really cool classes here in Skillshare, and I'm proud to be with Accenture as well. My artwork is licensed on a bunch of really cool products. Some of my clients include Hallmark and Iris stationery paper goods, on stock. Then I've also published a series of watercolor books, which have been translated into 10 different languages. For today's live class, I'm actually going to be teaching you how to paint a flower moon. So this is a wet on wet watercolor technique. It's very loose, very experimental, and it's part of the series that I'm creating of different full moons that correspond to basically each full moon of the year has a name. Today, we're going to be painting the flower moon. I decided to share something with you that we can do in a relatively short amount of time. In painting terms, one hour is not a long time. By the time we'll finish with this video, you guys should have your beautiful flower moon. I hope that students feel that they can play around with their watercolors, not take it too seriously and still make something that's super beautiful and they can continue along with this theme, with cosmic florals. Thanks for watching my Skillshare live class for Grid with participation from the Skillshare community. All right. So let's get started. 2. Lunar Inspiration: Hello everybody. My name is Tiffany Chow and I work on the sculpture community team. I'm going to be your host for today's live session with Ana Victoria so without further adieu, let's go over to Ana. Thank you, Tiffany. First of all, I want to tell you a little bit about this project in general and why I decided to share this with you. I always like to give you a little bit of insight unto what I'm working on in real life because as you know, I'm a Professional Illustrator. Besides teaching on skill share, I actually make a living off with my paintings so I always have a bunch of different projects going on. This one here is a collection that I'm making. It's the very first pieces and I thought it would be cool to share this process with you. I don't know if you guys are aware of this, but every full moon of the year has a name which is super cool. The one that's coming up in June is actually a Strawberry Moon. The Full Strawberry Moon. That one's coming up, I think it's June 5th. I'm pretty sure. The moon that we had in May at the beginning of the month was actually the Flower Moon. That's what we're going to be painting today. I think it's a really good example of something that you guys can do with me right now. Just for some fun this far, there are also different names of moons are Snow Moon. We have the Peak Moon, we have a Corn Moon, Harvest Moon, Wolf Moon, every moon has a name. There's actually a really cool website called the Farmer's Almanac, I think. I think that's what the website's called and it has all the names of the moon and I actually plan all my watercolor retreats and events around these moons. I haven't talked about them that much, but they are like a big part of my life. I'm actually right now creating, it's actually a collection for a calendar. You might see it in stores one day which is really cool. You'll see the origin of where this whole thing started. I did this example of the Strawberry Moon. You can see it has little tiny strawberries here. It's basically a Wet-on-wet technique. What we are going to be doing today. This means that we're going to be playing a lot with our water. 3. Gathering Supplies: I'm going to show you the supplies that we're going to be using. You guys know what I'm working with and just to make sure that you guys have the supplies at home. This paper here is Canson XL Watercolor paper. I think this is a really good paper for all the practice runs and especially if you're an illustrator like me and you actually have to go through a lot of paper all the time. You don't want to be using super expensive Arches paper for example, which is like super fine quality. When I'm doing pieces for my personal collection, that's what I would be using, but right now, this is a really good paper. It's inexpensive, but it's actually pretty nice and it's cold press paper and I always like to use a 9 by 12 inches. This is totally up to you. You don't have to use the same size of paper. But I'm just telling you that this is the size that I personally feel comfortable with. Then it's also really nice to have a little bit of extra scrap paper or like, let's say this is just like a little bit of watercolor sketch book. You can see it's like a little notepad that I take with me on trips and stuff and it's just watercolor paper, but it's nice to do little color tests in. It's just good to have this to the side of your actual painting. You can also even use the backside of an old painting you don't really care about that much, but it's just nice to have some extra paper that's not your actual painting. Then I'm just going to keep this to the side. Then you're going to need some watercolor paints. If you have taken my classes in the past, you will know that I really like mixing it up. I would call this my main palette. This is a Sennelier watercolor palette. You can see the brand here. This is a professional brand of watercolors. These are more on the pricey end, but I paint every day of my life and I've had this for about three years. Just so you can tell how far watercolor actually goes. Then if you have tube paints, you can also mix that in. I like to collect, for example, this is Lunar Violet by Daniel Smith. Daniel Smith has some really cool watercolors that are in tube form and they're like duo pigments and they have these really fun properties to them. I'm just sharing a little bit of my personal collection here. What I usually do with these paints is that I will, let's say, take a little bit of this tube paint and just add that to my pan-set, it becomes part of my entire palette here. Lastly, if you have India ink. There's a bunch of different brands but I have this one right here. It's from Higgins Black Magic or I also like to use this one, it's Bombay Black Ink by Dr. Ph. Martin. Pretty much all black ink. I mean it's all good and it's a very common art supply. Then you could also mix in a little bit of liquid watercolor. I like to mix and match all of these different supplies. Liquid watercolor goes a really long way because it's super concentrated. This brand that I'm using here is Dr. Ph. Martin's. I really enjoy this brand because it gives like that pop of vibrancy to watercolors that sometimes your pans can't give you. When I will be painting, as you will see, I'll be mixing in this with this and then this with this, it all goes together. Real quick question for you on that. Great to hear about the different types of products that you use. People really loved the little mini watercolor sketch book that you take on your travels with you. Is that a particular brand that you would recommend? It's actually called hand-book and it's made by Global Art Materials. It's just a little travel book. Moleskine also make some really good ones. I have one here if you guys want to see it. Actually, I have a couple. I'll show them to you. These are a couple of different travel books. This one looks like it's the same brand but I think it's Strathmore. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this one is Strathmore. This is some really cool metallic paint that I'll show you in a bit too. These little books are good to have to swatch in and to travel and just to play around with it. See I had this gold paint here and so on. I'm just leaving that. It's just like playing around and doing different color swatches which we'll also do here. Just so you guys know, it's really good to have, see all these little sketches here that I don't really want to waste on nice, professional, large-scale paper. Then another brand is Moleskine. I actually really like this brand. They're called watercolor albums. It's just like sketches and this is a really old one. I've had it for years. That's just some watercolor paper. Usually they come in cold press, which is a medium texture. I'm just going to put these away for a bit. We want to have paper, some paint. Obviously you need some clean water and a variety of brushes. Right now I've been really into this brand here. It's called Princeton. These green brushes here. These are round brushes with a pointy tip. These are really good for florals for example, which we will be making today. Then I always like to have a flat brush if you guys are into splatter, which it's like a personal touch that I always add to paintings. Flat brushes like this are really good. It's like the toothbrush effect where you do this and it's splatters paint around. If you guys are using masking fluid today and I'll go over that also. But if you guys are using masking fluid, it's nice to have a brush that you don't care about that much. Masking fluid will eventually ruin your brushes. There are ways to care for your brushes after using masking fluid. But as you can see this it's fabric castle, but it's more of like a cheapo like screw, like a student brush. This is what I'm going to use for the masking fluid. I always have a little bit of kitchen paper. You can also use a rag or any type of cloth. With watercolor, there tends to be excess water sometimes, and it's really nice to be able to have a place to clean your brush off or to just dab a little bit if you went overboard with your paint. Something else that I wanted to show you that I think is really cool, and you guys might have done this before is you can also make your custom watercolor handset. I bought this pan-set and all the pans were empty and then I just squeezed in some of my favorite two paints into here, and I let everything dry. Watercolor one of the most amazing properties that it has is that it reactivates with water for all eternity. I love that about watercolor, that it's eco-friendly that way also. I love all other mediums too, but for example with acrylic, once it dries on your palate, it turns into plastic and you have to lift it up and throw it away. With watercolor, all this paint here that you see on my palette, this does not mean that my palette is dirty. It means that all of this paint can be reactivated it and it will continue to work. In fact, I think that the best way to mix your color is not always going just straight for whatever original color you have. Playing around with all this area this way, you'll have a really organic palate. When someone is "Oh, what color is that?" It's not just one color. It's all this mix that happens organically and there's no way that I could tell you 50 percent this and 50 percent that, because it just happens naturally. Watercolors a lot about letting loose, letting go. It's actually the flow of it. Is really important to having an interesting watercolor practice in general. 4. Using Masking Fluid: Now I'm going to prepare my circle with the masking fluid edge around the circumference. I am going to be using masking fluid, but I'll also talk you through it if you're not using masking fluid and something else that you could do instead. This is masking fluid for those of you who don't know even what it is. It's basically a medium that is really popular amongest watercolor painters because one of the main challenges with watercolor is that you have to paint from light to dark. Once you have a darker area, you can't paint light over that. Masking fluid is really good at helping you block certain areas off. It's basically to protect a certain area. It's also called frisket. If you can't find the name masking fluid, that's like another way that you can find it. Basically, the way masking fluid works, and you should maybe start doing this now. I used the magic of television and prepare this about half an hour before we logged in here and what I did was I drew a circle using my compass here, like this. I usually like to go into the center. I just drew around here. If you don't have a tool like this, you can also just grab a plate or a big mug and just draw a nice circle around here. What I did was that I placed masking fluid like a pretty thick layer all inside of this circumference here. The reason that we're doing this here. I'll show you the finished piece and why we're using masking fluid. This circle was also masked the same way that I did this here. It's basically to protect the edges all around this area so that these flowers here that I'm painting are loose florals. That means that there was no pencil and we're just letting the water flow naturally. That means that if I have this flower that I'm painting, so I'm painting in this way, more of a organic way and not necessarily a planned out flower by flower way. I'm hoping that makes sense. It really helps you out to just be loose and paint all around. What I'm going to actually do now it's just demonstrate quickly how masking fluid works. Draw your circle. That's number one. I did this beforehand because your masking fluid has to be super dry before you actually get started. It doesn't take forever to dry, but I just want it to be super sure but this would happen in time so that we wouldn't waste too much time. Anna, do you have a favorite brand of masking fluid that you would recommend? Every brand that I've tried has worked out great. The thing is that you have to know how to use it and the number one thing is letting it dry, I think, because a lot of people I've seen in classes that they say, my masking fluid lifts up. I don't know what I'm doing. Some times it has to do with the paper and sometimes you're just not letting your paint or your fluid dry. Right now I can touch this and it's pretty dry. I really like this new brand that I just tried out. It's from another lens and it's called talent. I like it because it drives dark like this. Usually, masking fluid dries transparent and it's a little harder to see what you're doing, but this one is like this grayish color so you can actually see where you've masked it. This is a good brand, I like it. [inaudible] is also really good. What of those who are interested in an alternative and don't have fluid today? The alternative is going to be the way that your paint is going to be a little bit different than the way that I'm painting and I'll go over that when I'm actually doing the fluoresce. If you would like to try something else, you could also use, let's say washy tape or masking tape. But that means that you would have a straight edge. You can maybe do a square instead of a circle. The reason that masking fluid is so awesome is that you can actually paint super fine lines and do any shape that you want and then lift it up and that area will be protected. The reason that we're using masking fluid now is because I have a circle instead of a square basically. For those of you who are going to be doing this live, start out by actually drawing your circle, have that drawn out. I like to use the middle of my paper, but it doesn't matter. It's up to you. Give your masking fluid a nice shake like this because sometimes it dries a little bit and gets clumpy on the top. I'm just going to use this area to show you how to use the masking fluid. It's super easy. There's really not a big mystery to it. I'm just drying my brush a little bit. Make sure it's a brush that you're not obsessed to it. It's not your favorite brush and then I'm just dipping it in here and actually I'm just doing this here, and that's it. That's how you use your masking fluid. There's not much to it. I like to keep it a little bit thicker because I think that it's easier to lift up after that. Once you have your masking fluid applied like this, you're going to need to let it dry. It won't take too long and in the meantime, we're going to do something else. Right after you use your masking fluid, you see this is just a medium amount. Maybe if I do this, you'll be able to see better how much it actually is. I'll even do a close up, but I just wanted to show you that I put it in my water immediately after I'm done using it. If your masking fluid dries on your brush, it's going to be really difficult to remove. There are some tricks that you can use like, I really like essential oils for this afterwards. You can just for a little bit of essential oil like lemon oil or any oil that you have and just rub it and the masking fluid will come off. Let me see if I can do a little close up here so you guys can see the masking fluid. For those of you asking how much to apply, this is a good reference. See, it's not too thick. It's just like a medium layer of masking fluid and then see it's already starting to dry. I can already see how this area here is drying. It doesn't take too long, but I wanted to have this prepared anyways. Have you ever used a blow dryer or a hairdryer to make it dry faster? I personally don't and I'm not sure how that would react to masking fluid. I know a lot of artists do it with watercolor because it's just water, but this is like a latex mix and I'm not sure if the heat would affect it, I would just let it dry naturally. It's not going to take hours, it just takes a few minutes. It'll be fun. You're just patient for a few minutes. See, it's already starting to dry here. The one that I just applied, if you can see like the glare, how in this area it's already dry enough. But one thing that I will say about timing is I actually did the masking fluid like a half-hour before we started the session, not before. Masking fluid it's a really delicate balance of time. Having it the least amount necessary but necessary enough where everything has dried so that you can lift it up. That's like the balance with masking fluid, I wouldn't leave masking fluid on paper for days. I would try to lift it up as soon as it has dried. In the meantime, there's actually something else that I wanted to do before we actually get started. 5. Picking a Color Palette: While you guys do this circle, I'm going to show you the first step that I always do before creating any type of artwork. We're going to figure out our color palette before we actually dive in to the flower moon. I am thinking that I actually want to have like a blue moon with some dark colors here. I'm just prepping a little bit of paint. I'm just going in with my blues and then I have some darker colors here that I had from a tube. These are like Indigo. I also have indigo here and it's really no big deal, it's just like I really personally like this specific indigo from the specific brand. That's why I keep certain colors also available here on my pen set. As you can see, I'm just preparing the paints a little bit, getting it a little wet. I'm going to put this here so you can see how I'm mixing. I have some of the Dr. Ph Martin blue that I dropped into here. It's all going to be a big mix of colors. I'm going for like moody blues and darker blues, and then I'm going to actually have my laurels be a little bit of this bright pink here. The name of this paint is opera. I really like whole binds opera. It's actually name of a color, and it's this really cool, bright pink. Before I start any watercolor paint, I just like to swatch really quickly just to get an idea of the mood of what it's going to look like. I'm just playing around right now, but I also already have an idea of what this is going to look like. It's also nice to swatch a little bit of blending, let's say, blend the pen set with a little bit of this tube to see how that's going to look. Which size of brush are you're using? Right now, I am using a medium-size brush, and this one here is a four. I usually like to use brushes that are on the smaller size. I don't really use huge brushes, but that's really personal preference for each artist. It also depends on the ultimate size that your florals are going to be too, really has to do with how your brushes. Then I have a little bit of green left over here and I might see if that looks good. Green is going to be like my secondary color and might use it just a little bit for leaves. But I think I'm going to stick more to these blues, deep violet, and some of this pink. Now I have my color palette and I'm just showing you the natural process of how I would go about any watercolor painting before actually starting. As you can see, this masking fluid, now I'm touching it and it's dry. There's a few sections here that are still wet. 6. Painting Loose Florals: Our masking fluid has dried, so now the first step is that we're going to start painting flowers around the edges of our circle. If you don't have masking fluid, basically you're just going to be more careful. I mean, it's not a big deal and you'll see what I mean as we thicken painting. Now I have my brushes here. I have my palette here. I'm actually going to be using this area of my pallet more. What we're going to start out by doing is actually painting some loose florals around this circle, which is eventually going to be our moon. You can have fun with the proportions here or even the layout. I like to do it like, let's say I'll do this edge and then this edge and it'll just pop around and be all foliagely around that. We're going to just start diving deep into painting some watercolor florals. What we're going to start doing is grabbing just some basic, this is my water. I'm just putting my water here so you can see, this water is clean. I'm going to start doing some floral shapes and I'm going to zoom in a little bit here some that you guys can see this better. Right now it's just transparent, so you won't be seeing exactly what it looks like at this point but you'll have a better understanding once I add a little bit more paint in here. Right now I'm just using some clean water. I'm just doing these irregular shapes here, that are a petals that are going outward. Then I'm going to grab in a smaller brush and I'm going to grab a little bit of concentrated pink here. I'm going to go in and do some little tiny dots. Let me get closer. I'm going to do these little tiny dots here and as you can see, the dots are starting to bleed into the water that I have set up. This is like the pollen of your flower. Right now, you're really going to want to paint fast, because you don't want this wet area to dry. Maybe if I do this, see, you guys can see that better, how it's still wet and how it's a bit Blair's. Now I'm going to go in and actually paint some leaves. When I did that, it wet a little bit here. I'm just going to lift up a little bit of the paint. I'm going to go in with these blues that I had. I'm going to be using a lot of blue here. I'm going to start painting leaves. The way to do this is actually using your round brush, apply pressure and then lift up. You have your tip and then you're applying pressure, then you lift up. It's all about how you use your brush here. Pressure and then you lift up. My most recent class on Skillshare is actually all about watercolor leaves. If you did that, you'll be really excited to try this out here. As you can see, the reason that I really like using masking fluid here is that I was able to very freely painting these leaves and I don't have to worry about the circle area being painted into. What I'm doing is I'm masking the moon so I have this border of floral around it, instead of having a moon that has florals go inside, if that makes any sense. What can you do if you don't have masking fluid? You can paint florals the same way and just have it on the edge and then it's going to be like a different layer, which means that your flowers will be on top of the moon. Instead of painting a circle, you'll paint around the flowers once we do the moon. Another thing that you could do if you don't have masking fluid is just be very mindful, of how you're leaves and how your flowers are being painted in. Just being like very careful around the edges. But I'm enjoying not having to be very careful around the edges now because I have this masking fluid that's protecting the area basically. Also the size of your brush it's really going to depend on how this whole thing looks. I'm want to grab some violet here. It's really important to be able to flip around your water color paper so that you're comfortable. Here I'm want to make some leaves that are a little bit smaller. Also the size of your brush really helps out. Then while your paint is still wet, you can even go in and add a little drop of another color. Here you go. I actually want this to happen. This is called bleeding in watercolor, when your wet paint mixes in with your wet paint. I'm doing this intentionally because I want that super flowy look to it. See how the other colors are starting to blend in naturally and I didn't really do much to make that happen. Then you could also go in and I always like to do little kind of like buds, little flower buds or berries, so we can also go in here and just have these more irregular shapes like this. I'm just laying my brush flat here. These could be little bugs or berries and then I'm going to grab a thinner brush. This is a size zero, and I'm just going in with a little bit of this green paint that I have here, just to make this little stems. They don't need to be perfect. They can actually be lines that aren't even finished really. It just makes it all look very loose and flowy and ethereal. We're actually going to continue to paint in this style. I'm going to repeat what we just did here, and I'm going to do a couple of more floral motifs around here. 7. Paint Along + Q&A: Tiffany, maybe if there's any questions to answer, this would be a good time because I'm going to do the exact same process, just around the moon here, which is going to be a little bit repetitive. So if anyone has questions about this process or anything else, this would be a good time to address that. Awesome. It's looking beautiful already. One question has been about paper. So the Kenson Excel mixed media has two different styles of paper. Which one would be the correct one or the one that you would recommend. To begin with, definitely do not use the mixed media paper for watercolor painting. Mixed media, the way that it's sold is for more like wash and markers and acrylics and stuff. Watercolor is a whole mother beast. Watercolor does not work well with other types of paper that are not specifically for watercolor, because we use so much water. As you can see, I have all these puddles here, they're still drying and mix media paper doesn't have the same absorption as this type of paper does. So It's not made out of cotton for example, like most watercolor papers are. So definitely look for it to say watercolor on the cover and not mixed media, you needs to say watercolor like this and huge. Looks great. A couple of questions about brushes. Which brand again are you painting with right now? Then do you also like brushes with more or less snap to them? I am using Princeton brushes right now. I've really been enjoying these, I think they're called Lauren, this specific line and I use a synthetic brushes, I'm not sure what the snap part means specifically like if it goes back into place, maybe. But I like to use brushes that, well they're synthetic and they're not soft. They're a little bit more precise and that's just a personal preference. It doesn't have to be that way, some artists like to use brushes that are super soft, and they just flow like the Japanese brushes would, like I have this, see how it's very soft, mine are a little bit more hard like that, and it's just because I have more of a illustrative style, I think, and it's just what I feel good personally using. Thank you for that. I noticed that you put some water on, first before you started painting the flowers. Do you often do that? Or what would be the difference between when you put down the water first? Right now what we're doing is actually, you could say it's a wet on wet technique. It means that I'm wetting a certain area of paper, and then just letting the paint actually flow into that. So I'm not sure if whoever is wondering that too, if you've taken my other classes, some of the techniques that I use in other classes are actually more illustrative, and this is a little bit more flowly, because I'm just enjoying painting with just playing around with the water, and just seeing what it does here. Great. Thank you. So here I'm just continuing on with that process. I don't want to use too much green. So when we talk about color mixing, it's really important what colors you decide not to use and what you're excluding. It's not just what you choose to use because I know this is going to happen to, I've seen it happen with a lot of students where they have trouble finding their color palette, because they feel like they just end up using the entire rainbow in every single painting. So that's why it's important to do that little first step that we did here, because now my natural inclination is just to like "Do all the leaves green" but I don't want to do that. I want to keep it into this specific color palette, by making sure that I honor that and that I like sticking to the decision that I made. Is a good life lesson. Yes. Watercolor is like that. We have folks in the chat, who are deciding to go rainbow this time, which is great. That's fine too. I'm just giving you an insight onto tips of how I work and what worked for me, sticking with the color palette. So I'm just continuing on with these leaves, and then you can see how it looks. So the initial water, you can see how these one's already drying up here, and how it gives that super magical watercolory flow. Watercolor is the only medium that can do this. So that's really awesome, and lot of students I noticed they get a little bit frustrated sometimes about wanting to control what the paint is doing, and my tip is always like just let it do its thing, because watercolor dries in mysterious ways and it's also nice to observe. Just sit and observe and see what it's doing for you. There's a few questions around how do you avoid getting sharp edges or lines when it dries? Is that the wet on wet technique? I've noticed students talk about this and I honestly don't think it's not a bad thing. It's just a natural way that sometimes watercolor dries, and it has to do also with the amount of water that you're using. So if you're noticing that there's a rim around your watercolors, I would just be mindful with the amount of water that you're using. Maybe you're using a little bit too much. But it's not a bad thing, it's watercolor really all these weird textures that you get in these strange, like for example, what's happening here, which is called the cauliflower effect. Let me see if I can zoom in here. This part here where it's drying and you get this strange shape here it's called a cauliflower effect. But that's not bad, that's actually something that you want to happen with watercolors. You want all your strange textures to pop up because it's the only medium that can give you that. If you don't want that, if you would prefer something that's really flat, you should work with gouache or acrylics. Super-helpful. Thank you. Yeah. So I'm just going in here with these berries. As you can see, I'm trying to keep it a little bit irregular, I'm not doing like a perfect circle. I'm also okay with the blending in with the green, for example, that I had here. So these little berries are very cute. I'm just going to do a couple more around the edges. So this side is pretty much done. As you can see, painting in this style is super quick. You actually do have to be a little bit fast with this style because you want to play with your wet paint. Sometimes you just need to also take a step back, and I'm actually going to zoom out a little bit, and just see how it looks. If it's balanced, I feel like it is. I want to keep it in this shape where it is a reef going around the moon like that. I like it, I'm happy with how this is going. I like that I am sticking to the color palette. I think that's really important. Now what I'm going to do is actually flip over here. It's important to play around with the positioning of your paper because this is still wet. If I go in and I start painting and my hand is on top of here, It's going to ruin what I just did. That's why I flip the paper, now I'm going to work on this side and I'm going to do maybe a little bit less than I did here to keep it interesting and just have a little bit of just some play with the actual composition here. Continuing on, I'm going to grab some plain water again. I'm going to do maybe instead of two flowers, I'll just do one up here. Again, I'm just doing this irregular shape here, which is this loose petal. Just using plain water. My brushes at an angle here. I'm not trying to be to precise. If you prefer drawing florals, if you're more of a illustrative type of persons, instead of this loose, flowy stuff, you wouldn't really even need the masking fluid then because you would have it all drawn out and planned out and you would play very meticulously in section, which is another style of painting that I actually do use a lot, but I really like painting florals specifically in this. In this style for these be the moons, I'm going in and I'm painting these tiny little dots using my opera pink. As you can see, once it touches the wet area, which is just plain water of the petals, it's going to start to bleed in there. That flower is done and now we're going to go in with some leaves all around here. As you can see, how I'm mixing, I'm not sticking to one color, it's very intuitive, I'm playing around just discovering what I have here on this palette. Sometimes it's even old paint that I don't know. I'm not sure when it even was. But that's cool because that gives you all this range of color. How long do you usually, oh, I'm sorry. I was just going to point out really quick that I always have two brushes handy. So this one's a little bit bigger, then when I need to do thinner lines I have to zero brush on this side. Okay, sorry. What was the question? It was going to be about your color palette. So how long do you usually take when you're deciding to limit yourself to certain palette? Do you have any other restrictions that you tried to apply? Like a certain number of colors, for example? I don't have a number of colors or restrictions like that, but I think it all starts out with a mood. I would say that. Right now, the reason I chose these colors, even though this hot pink is technically a warm color, in the entire spectrum, it's actually a cooler pink. It goes a little bit more towards violet. So the entire color palette is going to be a cool palette just because I feel like the moon is spacey and I wanted to be like, for example, the strawberry movement you saw at the beginning that's more of like an earthy palette because it has these strawberries and I wanted to keep it looking like Mars or something. But I want this one to look really cool and have the specific color palette. I usually go with temperature I think when I'm choosing a palette like this. Switching brushes. Moving paper around. Remember, the way that you position your hand is super important. Just adding in some leaves here. Layout and composition. I know a lot of people always wonder about that part. It's a hard question to answer because I feel like composition and layout is very much about your instinct. It's what feels right to you. That's, I think what makes each artist individual like the way that they feel that something looks. In this case, I just had a feeling that I wanted to have these three leaves be a little bit more prominent up to here and just have two flowers here and then one here. But maybe if you like working super symmetrical and you like everything to be very geometric and imperfect, that might not be something that's interesting for you. You might want to be just very like planning out and making everything be super symmetrical. Last brush strokes here. I'm actually being a little careful here because I have these thin lines. When you want to have thin lines like this, it's best to hold your brush at a 90 degree angle. These lines aren't super perfect there a little bit wobbly on purpose because I want to have this like loose style going on. The flowers are actually done. 8. Adding Unique Details: Right now, we're just waiting for the edges to dry a little bit as you can see when I lift up my paper and show you like that. There's still a little bit of glare. It's still shiny and we need for this to dry completely before we lift up the masking fluid. There's actually a little detail that we can add in. I'm actually going to lift up a little puddle, extra water here that I see. This is a good tip for watercolors. Now, I'm going to show you something super magic. I know that you guys are going to like this and look how cool this is. It's my hydro color, which is a really cool Watercolor Brand. She sent me this cute box with my name on it. This is shiny. As you can see, these are iridescent watercolors. This brand is called hydro color. There's a bunch of different brands out there, but I'm really enjoying these lately because she has all these different pigments. I wouldn't paint an entire watercolor. I wouldn't to do this entire floral composition using only this. I would use it for little details, which is what we're going to do now and that's why I put into the Skillshare post. If you guys have anything fun that you want to try out, this type of activity is really cool to test that out with. I'm going to go in and, actually, with my thin brush. I'm going to grab a little bit of. My God. Now, I'm having trouble choosing. These are super fun but I think I'm going to go with a cool color because I'm sticking to the cool color palette. This color here is called night sky. It goes very well with what we're doing right now. What I'm going to do is just [inaudible] , I'm trying to think even where to add this, but I think I'm just going to do, maybe a few little dots. You won't be able to see this on camera that much because it's really in-person detail, but I'll move the camera around a little bit so you can see. I like to do just little dots, had some in with the wet paint there. These are all those tiny, tiny details that makes your watercolor be really, magic. You won't be able to even appreciate here on camera that much but maybe if you got in and you start to move your painting around like that, you would see what it looks like and it's just tiny dots. I always like to do really small details with that and I'll show you, actually. I'm going to give you a non-related peek into something that can be done with these metallic paints. I'm not sure if you can see that because the lighting is weird. Hold on. But if you are able to find black paper, these look very cool on black paper. If you can see how they shine with the black paper and these are watercolors and this has actually watercolor paper. It's called Stonehenge Aqua Coldpress and it's the best Block Watercolor paper that I've found. It means that it's basically takes the same amount of liquid. It can handle the amount of water that you use with watercolors. Now, before we remove the masking fluid, one last thing. Each artist has their thing that they like to do in their style and for me, it's splatter. I always like to add a little bit of splatter. What we're going to do now is, I'm actually going to go in with some of this pink here and it's going to be very water-down. I'm just going to go in and, actually, add a little bit of splatter around here. You can also use a toothbrush for this. I'm just going in and I have a couple of drops that fell into the moon but that won't be that big of an issue. Awesome. Now, we are finished with the floral part. I need one minute. I need one minute for this to dry completely before we can lift up the fluid but it's on its way. It's almost there. 9. Drying + Q&A: Maybe I'll take a few questions while this dries. Awesome. One of the questions that came in was, do you have any basic tips for how to paint more intuitively and loosely like you were saying? I think the answer is play. Play around, experiment. I've been a teacher for a really long time, and I noticed that a big thing with students is you don't have to be rigid about it is what I mean. For example, I see a lot of questions about what specific brush is that? How exactly it was that? It's all about really enjoying the process of painting, and experimenting and playing around for yourself. It's the same way with intuitive painting where you just have a topic that you really like and then explore that and sketch and draw, and you don't have to share everything that you make necessarily. It can be for you. It doesn't have to be something that you post on Instagram, for example. The splatter effect. Do you often do that when the paint is still wet or do you usually try to wait until it dry? I like to do it at a midpoint, where if I have a couple of areas that are still wet, it's actually cool because it does a tie-dye effect, and that's actually really cool activity too. I have two suggestions if you're interested in the type of art that we're making here is, number one, if you haven't taken modern watercolor techniques, which was my very first class on Skillshare. That's the basic water color class. We go over splatter, we go over experiments, we play around, which is actually what we're going to do next in the [inaudible] , which will be a little bit faster. All these playing around with salt, with nail polish remover, watercolor can mix with so many things, and we'll actually try that out here. It's so experimental. Yeah, everything goes back to play for me specifically with painting and art in general. Awesome. Thank you. A couple of questions about the splatter effect. Yeah. If you were to then want to scan your watercolor into Photoshop, for example, do you struggled to retain that splatter effect? Yeah. If it's super light and watery watercolor, then the splatter might not show up. Scanning watercolors is really tricky. I have a full Skillshare class on that too, where we clean up the edges and I have all these different tricks. 10. Lifting the Masking Fluid: Just so you guys know, I'm starting to carefully lift up the masking fluid here. You can see how it turns into this rubber. See. Do you hear that? I'm not sure if you did. Yeah. It's pretty much dry. I'm hoping it's dry enough. If you're either doing this live, make sure it's super dry. I'd rather you wait and finish this often just watched now, instead of doing along with me because if your paint is still wet, it might lift up the paper and we don't want that to happen because we've already done all this work. Here we go. Perfect. We are lifting up with no trouble at all, and you want to keep it close to the paper. See how I'm holding this area here and just being mindful and I'm not ripping it off. Just being a little bit careful here. It should lift up with no problem, as long as it's dry enough. There we go. Now we have a perfect circle with our floral edge. 11. Painting an Intuitive Moon: Now we're actually ready to start in painting our watercolor moon. This is the wet on wet part and this is going to be actually quicker. For this part I'm going to grab a brush that's a little bit larger, I think this is like an eight or 10. I can't see anymore, but it's just a little bit larger because I want to fill in this entire area. Now I'm going to go in with just plain water. Again, it's transparent, it's just plain water here. I am filling in the entire moon with the water. I'm going in. Here with edges, you have to be careful here and try just to be very mindful of your wet. We're going to actually be doing some wet-on-wet painting now. All right. Painting all around the edge. You have to do this pretty fast so that you get a uniform wet circle. Again, just going around. You guys can't see this now, but I am seeing the metallic, shimmery watercolors every time I switch this around and it looks so cool, but it's some of those details that are really only appreciated when you see it in real life, I think. I am finishing up with the water around the circle. What we're going to start doing now is actually adding paint. I'm trying to get it pretty uniform too. All right. What we're going to do now is actually start adding in paint to this wet circle, and that's how we're going to get our fun mood effect. If you have indeed taken modern watercolor techniques for Skillshare class, all the activities that we did in the little planets activity, which is like the experimental circles, you can apply that here. Basically, I'm just going to grab and grab some paint here. You can either observe a photo of the moon or you can just play around like I'm going to do now. When I paint moons, I always like to keep in mind that there is a large crater on one side, so I'm just adding in paint to the wet circle. I'm dabbing it in here, I'm not being super-mindful. See how it's just naturally opening up. Then with a little bit more water, I'm going around the edge here. Since you already drew that perfect shape, you don't really need to worry about the edges that much here. I'm just going to add a little bit of paper here because I went a little overboard. Continuing to add in paint here. You're just going to go around and again with this intuitive thing that we're talking about is just like a feeling, where do I feel like we need some paint right now? We're pulling a lot with water. Right now the paint still looks a little bit separate, but since all of this is wet, you can see the edges are really wet, it'll eventually start to bleed together and you'll have the whole area will be painted. Now I'm going in with that bright blue. You also, it's nice to have this pallet figured out because I'm not going to use any pink in here, but I am going to use some of the same blues that I used for the leaves. I have this crater area here. Then, for example, in these areas here, where we have the edge with the flower, I do want to go in and have the edge be a little bit darker, so we have some contrast there. I'm going in with this darker black watercolor, just around the edge here, so that we have some nice contrast. Now the moon is starting to take shape. I'm going to go in with a little bit more paint. Right now I'm using this pigment called Lunar Black, from Daniel Smith, and it's actually really cool paint because what it does is that it has magnetic particles in it, and you'll get these really cool granular effects, which means that basically the pigment is repelling against each other and attracting each other at the same time, so you'll get a really cool granulation effect. Now I'm just going on with a little bit more water and some areas are a little bit dry, so I'm just going in there and playing around. Now the moon is actually taking shape. As you can see, the little dabs of paint that I added are starting to bleed and it's opening up like that. Then sometimes you'll have a little bit excess, like in here I feel like there's a little puddle that's a little bit too much water. I don't want it all to just sink into that area. I'm also going in and fixing that, and I'm keeping this area moist as well, because that way I can keep adding in some paint into there. Another thing that you can do is actually add in some salt while it's still wet. We'll do that right now. Okay. I'm just going in with some extra water because a little section here had already dried and I want to keep it wet because it's an active moon. All right. I have a little bit of salt here. Any kind of salt will work and it also depends. If you have a larger grain of salt, you'll get a different effect, but you can play around with that as well. I'm just dropping a little bit of salt into the moon. I can still keep painting, but I want to make sure that while I have this area wet, that I can add some salt into here. The effect won't be immediate, it'll take a couple of minutes for us to be able to see what it's going to look like. Then continuing to go in here, as I mentioned before, I have this crater here and I'm always going back to it, because the paint will expand and expand. I want to make sure that I have that crater there. You can see that the paint is all still wet here. I'm just gently pushing it around a little bit and I feel like for example here, we're missing a little bit of color on this side. I'm going in with this and just playing around with all these paints that I had laying around here. I'm going to go down here and also just go around the edge a little bit. But you can just dab a little bit of paint into here. Remember, you don't necessarily want to do brushstrokes when we're painting wet-on-wet like this, you want to just let the paint drop. We're actually almost done. It's just like when you decide that it's ready. Continuing to just add a few drops of paint here and now I'm just pushing, that's the right word. I'm pushing the paint around. In here, I feel like I have a little bit of excess on this side. You can always use your paper if you feel like you have a little bit too much paint going on. Again, I'm going to go in with my pan set here and actually use a different black because I do want to add some black into here, some deeper black and this crater that I keep going back to, I want it to be a little bit darker. This is super relaxing and super, just gratifying when you're all done with it. I'm just feeling like we need a little bit more depth here on this side. Yeah, that's better. Again, someone was asking you about the intuitive part. It's like observing as you paint. You can start out by even looking at a picture of the moon and maybe trying to imitate just some of the shadows, but not being too serious about it either. Here I'm just adding in. As you can see, as your paint dries, it'll start to fade a little bit. That's why you have to keep adding in some color. When I dropped paint in here, I felt it was a lot darker and now as it dried, it sort of faded a little bit. I'm going to go in and just gently tap a little bit more paint in here. I want to have a little bit of shadow around that edge too. I'm just going to go in with a little bit more of concentrated paint. I feel like it needs a little bit more up here too. It's all about feeling and then taking a step back and looking at your painting. See I have this little excess puddle of water here that I'm not that into so I'm going to just lift it up a little bit. A lot of artists work with their paper taped around the edge, but I didn't do that here. That's why this warping happened. It'll straighten out later. But if you really want to prevent that, you can just tape the edges around. Here's the question about if you can add masking fluid to an area that's already been painted and dried. You can, but just keep in mind that, that paint will lift up a little bit. You'll still be able to see what was underneath, but it might still lift a little bit. Now I'm feeling like it's looking more like what I want it to look like. It's really important I think to be mindful of the shadows around the actual shape, around the moon. Just right now going in gently with the brush while some areas are still wet although it's starting to dry. We're almost done here. Can you see what it's looking like? Cool. Right now, what I'm feeling is that we need a little bit of paint here in this area. Yeah, that looks better. It's all about balance too. You just need to take a step back and see what feels right, and then here actually I feel like it needs a little bit of water. You can also just drop in some water to lighten up an area like that. This is why it's really important to use watercolor paper and not mixed media paper, because the amount of water that we use in watercolor is just insane and no other type of paper can really handle this. I think I'm almost done adding in paint. For couple final touches, I'm just going to add in a little bit more salt. You can see that. What the salt is going to do is it's going to give us this effect. Where do I have this [inaudible]? This effect that we have here. You can see, that it's like a mineral effect. That's what it looks like to me. It has that here too. It takes a little bit for it to show up. We have some salt around here. You can see it's starting to lift up. But maybe if you don't get to see the actual super, super dry like what it looks like tomorrow maybe. Because even though it'll dry, it does take a while to actually show up and it's a 100 percent dry where you can even scrape off the salt. But we're getting there, we're almost there. You can see where it is here and it's starting to do that texture. Right now all we have to do is just really wait for this to dry and then if you want, we can add some white splatter. Actually, white ink is the one thing that we're not going to do while this is wet. That's why we are waiting for this to dry. You can actually even do it in a few days. 12. Adding Finishing Touches: Now, I think we're actually ready to add in some white detail. So what we're going to do with the white ink is just a final detail here. We have these tiny little stars in here and it's ladder. If you took my very first-class, modern watercolor techniques, this is what we do in the final activity, where we paint the galaxy. So it's the same thing, but now we're just applying it to this moon. If you're doing this at home right now, you can use white ink, you can use white acrylic, or you can use whitewash. So right here I have some white ink. This ink here is called copic opaque white. I am obsessed with this ink, it's Japanese. It's not super hard to find, but whenever I do find, sometimes I get five jars because it's just so good. There's other brands of course, but I just really, really like this and you can also use some acrylic or some wash. It just needs to be opaque. Watercolor is translucent, that's why using just whitewater color will not work for this step. It needs to be opaque paint. So we have our beautiful flower moon here. It's almost dry. You can still see it has a few wet sections, but for time purposes, I'm going to do just a couple of stars around the area that has already dried. So we have our white ink here. The table that I use to work can double as a pallet, as a mixing palette, so I'm just going to do that here, or if you have a small dish, you can also add in some of your white there. So I'm just grabbing a little bit of this white. You can see that it's a paste, see. I'm just adding some of that here. Don't mix this in the same place that you mix in your watercolors. Try to use a different spot. Because if this mixes in with your watercolors directly, it'll actually be fun, but your watercolors will get chalky. It'll make them opaque. So now we need, again, we go back to a flat brush. I have a smaller flat brush here. See flat brushes, you need to be able to do this. So we're going to do a little bit of splatter. These are our final touches and we're pretty much done with this. Normally, I would wait for this to dry completely. We still have a little bit of wet area, but because we're doing this live, I'm just going to go ahead and do the best I can with this part, and then maybe I'll go in and redo a little bit of that. So right now, I'm just adding a little bit of white splatter. These details, they don't seem like much, but they actually are really important. They do that little final touch that. I don't care if it's really blending into the flower parts too, because it's actually going to have it all be tied together that way. So a little bit of white splatter and a tip with white splatter is, if you go higher up, you'll get more separate scattered splashes like this, little dots. If you get closer, you'll get really tiny, tiny dots like that. So that's like the spacey magic. Then you can also go in and I'll choose an area that's pretty dry, and do a translucent dot here, and then wait for that to dry and paint of opaque white dot inside, so it'll be like a sparkling star. So I'm going to go in with a little bit more of this white ink, and I'm not going to dilute it this time, it's more pasty. I want it to be more opaque. I'm going to go in and do some individual dots like that. So I want some of them to be a little bit bigger like that. So I'm just going in with the tip of my brush and then adding in some larger splatter here. If we were painting a galaxy, this would be the stars, the night stars, but right now it's a moon, so it's more like the moon texture. So we're just going in here and I'm starting to see the salt do its thing here as well. This is pretty much it. These are our final details. So notice how all these tiny details really help out with that magical watercolor effect. That's it. We have our flower moon. There's also certain details that you can add as an artist, that makes your artwork recognizable as your own. One of those things is having like a personal lettering style. I'm thinking I'm going to letter in the names of each moon underneath or just something like that, to have it be a full illustration, and then maybe a little small icon on top of here. Since these are meant to be a bigger project that I'm going to be scanning and sending over to one of my licensing clients, I can play around with that, and erase this in Photoshop if I don't like it later, or if the client doesn't like it, for example. So I always like to give you guys a little bit of insight on what it actually is to be an illustrator to and just the way that I work. 13. Final Thoughts: Thank you everyone for watching and for painting along with me, it's such a fun activity where you can play around with different color scenes. You can do just leaves, maybe. You can do like a crescent moon. Instead of painting the entire full moon can also do a crescent and just have some flowers around that area also. There's so much you can do. I think that what I'm going to do in my personal art practice next is I'm actually going to paint the harvest moon also. Imagine how cool it will look with all of different browns and ocher and these are earthy tones which I loved. Those are one of my favorite color schemes. If you enjoyed this live session, make sure to go back and check out all of my Skillshare classes. There's tons of variety for all different levels and motifs and there's a million different things you can paint along with me. My upcoming Skillshare class, it's actually all about watercolor florals in this style. We're going to paint roses and lavender and all different styles of watercolor florals. Thanks everyone for tuning in around the world for today's Skillshare live class with Ana Victoria. For more about Ana Victoria and her Skillshare classes, be sure to check out her Skillshare profile page. Bye guys, thank you for joining.