Loose and Abstract Watercolor Painting - Getting Started and Gaining Confidence

1. Introduction: Today we're taking the fear and that bewilderment out of abstract art and leaving ourselves just with the fun, the experimentation, and all those other positives we can get from exploring abstract and semi abstract scenes with our watercolors. Before long you'll have boosted your skills, boost confidence, and have a greater understanding not just of what abstract art, but also what your watercolors can do in all sorts of different styles. My name is Toby and I lose painter and an ink and watercolor sketcher as well. What makes my, my art is definitely that it's a bit abstract and that is what I really enjoy. Whether I am basing my art around the scene or basing my art around the medium, around the watercolors themselves. I gain the most joy, the most pleasure from putting myself on the page, from putting my twist onto the page. In this class, we're going to have a look at some really fun, really simple techniques which can create some controlled chaos on the page. It's a chaos because that's what makes watercolors amazing. They will do their own thing. We just control them. We just explain to them what we want to happen, and we hope it happens. And more often than not, with enough practice, you will get those amazing, happy accidents and produce these wonderful works of art. It's not just random though, and that's what we're going to be looking at today. Understanding how you can set yourself up using really fun techniques, cutting up cards to use them as palette knives, splashing on and spraying on water, Using gravity to create something magic on our page. Then taking that step back and looking and thinking, how do I take this to the next step? By the end of the day, you'll have produced some amazing projects, some really lovely works of art. I'm sure just like me, you will also have made loads of mistakes. And that's wonderful to you, because through mistakes, we learn so much more about our media, about our project, about ourselves. If this all sounds like fun, let's get cracking. Let's get painting. Creating some gorgeous, fun, creative, loose abstract and semi abstract watercolor paintings. 2. Supplies: Time to have a look at the supplies that we're using today. Now, today is an abstract painting lesson. I'm going to keep things minimalist, but there are a few fun things we could also try. As I show you my supplies today, what I'm using, I also want you to be aware that you don't need everything I'm using. I'm going to talk you through how to make do with just paint, brush and paper. But if you have the extra little bits, then feel free to use them to explore, to experiment in your little abstract journey today. This is everything you might need for today's class. In fact, this is more than you need. I'm going to take you through everything bit by bit and explain why we've got each bit, what is really important, and what is a optional thing or something you might want to experiment with. Firstly, of course, we have hiding under all of this some paper. Now the paper I'm using is good quality watercolor paper. For the techniques we're using, using watercolor paper will make your life much easier. It won't be impossible to use good quality sketching paper as long as it's quite dense. But this watercolor paper will make life much easier. Hot pressed or cold pressed. That smooth texture doesn't matter so much, you'll just get different effects. I happen to be using some lightly textured, cold pressed paper today. The first thing, probably the most important thing to think about today is your paper. The other thing with the paper, I am sketching on a block. So you can see here, this is all glued together. That means that this paper probably won't buckle. At least it won't buckle very much the other way round that. Now if you don't have a block of papers, not a problem. Just get some tape and a drawing board. Or you could I pop it down on your desk and just take the edges down nicely, so you've got this piece of paper flat so that it can't move, it can't buckle too much as we play around with lots and lots of water. Of course, you don't need to use loose watercolor paper. You could also use a watercolor sketch book like this one. If you are going to use a watercolor sketch book, then it's really important to get some clips. Because clips can hold your paper flat and can keep it stretched a little bit, like we could use masking tape on loose paper. The next thing to think about, the next most important thing which is vital is some colors. Over here, I've got some colors, and I've just got them on a ceramic plint, because having a big surface is going to be useful to play around with our colors. This is just one of our old side dishes from home. I've got a range of different colors from a range of different brands. So it's really not important which brand. This is a student grade paint, the others are more artist grade paints. What I have thought about is the mood I want to go for in my painting today. I've got four colors which are all in that brown, orange, red spectrum. So that's going to invoke a certain mood. Got Quinaconome, coral, burnt Sienna. Monty genuine and spa. They're all going to be a little bit warm but also moody. For one of a more exciting term, if we look at a color theory opposite these oranges on our color wheel comes blue. I have a blue, which will provide a nice contrast. All of this mood, moody stuff going on ten and nice blue. Now you can do something like that and justify it through color theory if you like. Or you can just pick two or three of your favorite colors. What I wouldn't do is go mad. I wouldn't use loads and loads and loads of colors because things will get too complicated. And as we'll see, simplicity will be the king. Today, I've also got a bit of Gh. Now I don't know if we're going to use the gash or not, but sometimes things can get dark and dense when we popping down lots of colors and having some white to pop on top of our paint can be quite handy. There you go. Paints to have a think about, the paints I'm using will all be listed down below. Now you can see we've got a range of other implements going on today. Got lots of brushes today. Quite big brushes. I've got a hake brush, I've got a couple of flat brushes and a Chinese style brush. Having a nice big brush takes away some of that control and lets things get a little bit more loose and abstract. What we're mostly going to be using though, is a card. Now you could use a palette knife, a nice flexible palette knife if you wanted, but I would suggest finding an old card, and I happen to have an old hobby craft club card here, which I thought was very of the moment to be doing a sketching painting video with. What we're going to do with our card is chop it up to be able to use it like a Palete knife. So I'm going to make some random cuts. I can do them all at angles. Because if I cut an angle, what I end up with is four differently shaped sides and corners. That's giving me lots of flexibility. If I chopped up lots of meat squares, I just have lots of squares. And I might have done it wrong. It might not be exactly what I find I want or need. I'm going to chop down again. And there we go. I've now got a series of homemade palette knives. No matter which way around I hold it, I've got lots of different edges I can use as palette knives. They're quite long, so I'm not going to get my fingers too messy. Although you can see I've got some plasters on here and they're already covered in a little bit of paint. That is what I'm mostly going to be using to create our fun on the page. Now, the other thing which is really useful but not necessary, is a water spritzer. We're using, there's quite a lot, but without a water spritzer, you could just use any old bottle of detergent, all that kind of thing, things that you use, home sprays, as long as you've washed out. And just fill it up with water. And that's all that's in here, is a little bit of tap water. If you don't have that, we can make do with just a big brush and instead of spritzing the page, you just apply a light wash of water. I've got a straw here. This is a metal straw. It looks fancy. It's just a reusable straw for home. You can do things with blowing through this. We'll experiment with that as well. Blowing shapes onto the page. Lastly, big thing of water. We'll have to refresh this a few times because the amount of paint we'll be using. And I've also got a towel here or you could use kitchen roll or again, here's more paint covered tissue I've been using earlier this morning. And that's everything you need a few bits to think about, but I hope you get the idea that it doesn't matter exactly what paints. Even if you just have two or three paints which you like, find an old card or something plastic, you can chop up, make your own palette knife, a couple of brushes, and you're good to go. 3. The Project: Of course, there is always a project in school. Sharing today's project is to create ourselves a lovely abstract or semi abstract piece of art. We're going to have loads of opportunities to do this. At the end, I'll be producing a semi abstract piece of art which takes on board all the learning, all the ideas and mistakes that I'll make in the warm up lessons with you today sneakily. We'll also get the opportunity to create a couple more little works of art along the way, because abstract art, it's all about experimentation. What I would love you to do is use the warm up lessons as opportunities to make mistakes, to have a play, to discover more about your colors, but potentially create an amazing project. It may be that it all just works the first time for you in our first lesson. If not, that's fine. You can post all of your happy failures. You happy successes, your random accidents, which create magic and learn from them. And create a little work of art at the end with me where we bring it all together. Your scene can be anything, it can represent, landscaper, cityscape, portrait, and emotion. It can just be an exploration of colors on the page which you think look great. Take a little photo popped up in the class resources and project gallery. And I'll come back, leave you a little note and of course, give you some feedback and encouragement. 4. What is 'Abstract'?: The thing which makes abstract art abstract is that it's not attempting to visually represent something in any realistic manner. That's the fundamental bit which makes it abstract. Now that can mean that we are doing something incredibly abstract. Splashes on the page which are representing emotions. Literally just an exploration of different textures. Or for someone like me, abstract often means we are taking the idea of a scene. It could be a still life, It could be a landscape, a city scape. It could even be a portrait, and we are stripping it back and analyzing something about that scene. The colors, the simple form, the simple shapes. In a lot of my sketching here, I use ink and water colors. It's semi abstract because I'm not visually representing the scene. But the shapes are there, the perspective is there. And then a lot of looseness on top, a lot of fun and expressivity on top. Today we'll be actually starting the other way. We will be applying our watercolors very loosely and playing with watercolor techniques and seeing what our watercolors do themselves. From that, we'll see what might this be. We're reversing our normal process in a normal realistic process. You look and you go, how can I make this scene? In our version, we're, how can we explore our watercolors doing that really abstract stuff. Then when we've explored our watercolors, we'll do that idea of the psychiatrist showing you a little splash on a page and going what do you see. We can develop that. We can pick specific things, specific shape, specific textures that develop idea that allows us to break a lot of rules along the way. We'll be playing with gravity, loads of water, using our watercolors in a naughty way. Instead of making them transparent in places, we'll be painting them quite opaque and thick. We'll use gush on top of watercolors, which is something that purists don't want to do normally, but it's all okay. We'll even be, of course, painting with a chopped up card. What else can we do to break the rules? Why would we do all of this? Well, frankly, because it's visually interesting, It's fun to do. It's a great way of learning our colors. To explore our colors like this. To explore watercolor techniques, teach a lot about your pigment. Even if you then want to jump straight back into more realism based art, there's loads of benefits, there's loads of fun, there's loads to learn. Hopefully, this little lecture for a couple of minutes will help you understand the aims of abstract art and what we're trying to achieve today. 5. Card Painting Techniques: The first practical thing we're going to do, this is all about being practical, experimenting, having rid of fun. Well, the first practical thing we're going to do is play with our cards, our homemade Palett knives. We're going to experiment by wetting our page, playing with just two simple pigments, and just seeing what can we do now? By the end of this, we may even have started a scene. Play around and see what happens and see what develops on the page. Don't put too much pressure on yourself, but just enjoy the process as we go along. First, step one, we're just going to get used to using a couple of pigments with our cards, so I'm going to get rid of some of the brighter, more interesting pigments so that we can be more focused in what we're going to use. I'm just going to use PA, nice brown color. And my Windsor Blue, which is a nice bright blue. It's similar to Fallow Blue and other brands. Just squeeze a nice blob of paint onto your palette. Or if you're using like mere ceramic plate, we can just pop it onto there as well. And a nice little blob of that blue on the other side as well. That's what we need to get started. Grab one of your home made palette knives. Pick whichever looks good. I'm going to use one in the middle. So I'm going to use this and see what happens when we start playing with it. Now what we're getting used to the marks we can make with this but also the wet on wet techniques, we're going to be using one option, I mentioned at the beginning. I'm going to be using a lot of sprites, so all I'm going to do is sprit my page. What do you can hopefully see as I spritz out? We get this random pattern of water across the page and I'm going to fill up most of the page. You can also use a big brush. So I've got a 1 " flat brush here. I could instead just do some big brush strokes, just pushing the water around. That will produce different but also interesting effects. You don't need to go out and buy a spritzer just for this. Then let's just see what happens. This is the experimental stage, the learning stage. We can just take a little bit of our paint, and if we just bring it over here, we get that whole edge covered along there. Let's see if we just draw a nice line. What's going to happen as we bring it across this wet page? You can see the difference between the sprit side versus the brush side. You can play with different touches and different marks. What happens if we go vertically? What happens if we push in? What happens if we make little lines? Hopefully, you can already start to see how a lovely abstract work of art, abstract landscape, can emerge from all of this. Just clean off the edge of your palette knife, as we're going to call it. Let's try a little bit of that blue now. Again, just to get that edge covered. And pop down those little dots and dashes of color here. You're, you're not thinking ahead in any way. All you're doing is just playing, see what happens. What do you think will look nice? Just play and make some shapes on that page, move it around. Start experimenting and drawing lines. Drawing circles, that kind of thing. Another thing that can be good to play with is what happens if we try mixing that two colors together? What's going to happen if we mix directly onto our palette knife? Well, look, we've got a very rich blue. So let's try again, and let's see if I get a little bit more brown into my mix. Let's see, do I end up with something different? Then we end up with a morse, almost a green coming for you. Don't we the, when I've mixed it up differently. But do you also see what's happening there? If I do a line, we get a blue Anabrw painting with our palette knife is going to let us create these interesting marks where actually one palette knife, one implement is causing multiple different shapes to form over the page from multiple different colors. Now obviously the next experiment, if I leave that one there, is to pick out a different palette knife. Let's just take some of this blue again, and we'll just use a different size and see what we can do with something different. Just try different scrapes, different lines. Another play that you can have fun with, a little bit of mark making experience. You can just clean it off, get a little bit of water on there, make sure it's nice and try. And what happens if you try scratch through? You can now start experimenting by not actually painting, but just manipulating the play with this mark making palette knife. So you can scratch. Look, I made some splatters by accident. There you might be able to find, you can lift white. If we come in here, we can make little white areas. What you will find as you scratch and scrape is you do affect the surface of the paper. You'll start making the paper potentially a bit damaged and that will affect the look of the painting. It might be something you want, but it might eventually be something which is too much and you wish you hadn't done so much of. One of the key things as with any watercolor is to avoid that phase where we end up overworking things. Have a play do keep going until you overwork it, by all means, because you don't know where that line is until you hit it. Until you've hit it, you won't know how much you need to hold back or how much further you could have gone. Keep playing, make some mark. See if you can start picking out things. Let's say, let's just start pretending. This is a city scape. When you could perhaps just see this sky emerging, you could start scratching in just with our two colors, these interesting shapes of little skyscrapers. We can imagine this city skyline emerging from all of this. This is the thing we'll explore even more later. But there's no reason you can't have a head start now and start pulling apart your marks into something more purposeful. Perhaps you could find even things like cranes coming out the side with little simple linear marks. Very easy to do with this. Much easier to do with a little card than it is to do in many ways with a brush. Have some fun. This first lesson is all about experimenting. Your card, your mark making opportunities that come with something novel, something different, Something you certainly can't buy because you've probably made it. Or you could be using a palette knife of course, which is another brilliant option. Something you might have lying around more typically used in gouache or acrylic or oils. But hopefully, you can see lots of possibilities here for you to use these same tools in watercolor to create these fascinating works of art. Having completed that, let your page dry completely. We're going to be coming back to these first little work shoppy bits at the end. And seeing how we can take our pseudo scene, our little splashes and experiments and actually turn them into something potentially rather pretty, very interesting and certainly a lot of fun. 6. Gravity and Water: Time now to have some fun with gravity and with water. These techniques or these elements of physics, they provide a little bit of randomness. But it isn't something which is totally random, as we'll discover in this video. Again, we can control that, Make it a little bit more predictable and therefore produce slightly more fun and interesting effects. Things we can't fully control that can influence. Again, I'm going to start by making my page wet so that we can get that movement started already. Time, I'm just going to wet the middle. Hopefully you can see there's a line of water going across my page. You can hopefully see the light reflected there. I'm going to take rather a lot of paint this time, quite a thick bit of paint. And I'm going to try that little mixing that we did before, so I'm going to have a bit of blue and a bit of Pm on tight genuine. That's just going to lay down in the middle, we can start to see how are different pigments move. See how this, it's a very heavy pigment, it's staying in the middle. This blue is really floating to the edges. If I apply the blue heavily, it still floats off where this red really likes to stay put. That's where we need to start to understand the pigments we're using. That again, is why this little experimentation phase is so important. Because different pigments will do different things. Pigments will interact with water in different ways, will have potentially very different effects like this. That is what we're going to experiment with even more. Look, I've laid down a thick layer of pigment along there. Now what happens if I simply tilt my page? Do you see how everything is moving and bending and winding? If I start wobbling, I'll start inducing different effects as well. What I can do is I can keep my page like this. What you might want to do is just have a little bit of tissue, for example, handy, then just spritz. This is one option we can split so we can get that movement even more. I can spray right into it and I'm going to invoke even more movement. I can spray above. Just start seeing what happens. You can imagine these billowing clouds, almost a nuclear feeling cloud happening up there, can't you? Over here? What happens to the bread if I come really close? Can I get it to move? I can, but it still likes to stay here, doesn't it? So it's still sitting in one spot in many ways. If I split gently above it, are we going to get more movement? And we are, of course. Then maybe I lay it flat and bring down some more water here, then give it a shake, and we get this settling of the pigment here. Do you see that? As I shake it, the pigment is settling into the page. So we get this granulating effect and that is much more in the red than the blue. Again, we are seeing our pigments will act differently if we do different things to the same pigments or the same things to different pigments. It's all about understanding your palette in your colors. We can do the same, of course, with water. If I come along and perhaps what we'll do, we'll pop a little bit more pigment in, we'll create another layer to our sketch. Nice, deep pigment again, You can see with that pigment down, it's billowing up. It's doing its thing, if you like Now with a big brush, I've got here a 1 " flat brush. Ply water much in the same way we just spritz. I can apply water under there. I can ply water under there, I can apply water in, I can flick water in, I can move it and things will flow and move. We'll get this chaotic but controlled flow of our pigments moving around the page. Now in all of this, we have to remember that this is the first layer. We're going to have an opportunity to move and play even more. We don't need to overdo things. This is about that first layer of lightest colors. And exploring our colors, like I said in the last one, when we finished playing here, it's really important to just see what happens to the colors, how they dry. So you can understand, well, is this actually going to be really faint? Is it almost going to gray out? Is it going to be really transparent? Or obviously in places here, it's going to be very opaque. And when you start understanding those effects and your palate really well, then you'll be able to start manipulating things and having a lot of fun. Now, along with these movements, I did mention at the beginning we've got a straw. What happens with our straw? Well, look, if we blow, we can induce movement of that water. Again, I've almost cleaned out an area here, haven't I? If I blow on an area with more pigment, notice I can make these spider webbing patterns up here. Maybe. There you go. And I get some drips and things. I can now induce movement all over the page. You can blow without the straw if I do that. Do you see how the effect is much less controlled? Instead of getting these really specific movements, I'm getting a more general flattening of the color. You might want that, but you might not. It's important to be aware that actually the simple things like a straw are going to be able to give you far more versatility and control. This may not look controlled, but actually, if you think about what we've done every step of the way into creating this interesting watercolor pattern on the page. We've made decisions. We have controlled it. Again, just having a bit of fan blowing, moving things around. We can again, use this as another chance to experiment with our marks. Maybe this time we can imagine this is a forest or something. Let's just start putting those ideas in. Maybe there's a series of trees here we can let those trees emerge with, maybe I always say stems, I always means emerging here. So we can start creating these little extra marks which might suggest something else when this is all dried. It might not because we don't know what it's going to look like when it's dried, of course, but it might. Let's just have a plane, let's have a se, if we can just loosely apply lots of marks. And this will be something again that we can see what happens when it dries and then we can come back and perhaps we'll be able to make a little more of continue playing, don't be afraid to go too far and to make an absolute chaotic mess. Because only when you've made that chaotic mess will you understand when you probably took that step too far. For me, this is probably far enough. When it's stride, we'll have another look along with the other one that we did earlier. We'll have another look and see what happens when we start to layer and our different touches on top of these diffuse patterns we create through simple marks through water and through gravity. There we are. We've experimented now with how adding water with our brushes, how all of these things can interact together. What's going to be fun letting this dry, seeing what happens again. We can come back to this scene in a couple of lessons time and just see, can we actually turn this madness, this chaos, into something which resembles a scene as a bit of a semi abstract landscape perhaps? 7. Brush and Tissue: Now in the last of our warm up lessons, the last one, where we take a fresh piece of paper and experiment, we're going to be going back to our brushes, the things we normally think about using when we actually paint. Of course, here we are going to be exploring and experimenting to see what kind of marks we could make using these wet on wet techniques. Finding the little patches of drying, and seeing what kind of marks we can make. Within that, we'll also be using a tissue, trying our lifting, removing paint, removing water, and seeing what kind of effects and drama that generates. Now we're going to have a play with the ideas of a few brush techniques, as well as lifting and splashing to celebrate our brushes. I'm going to again, pick up my flat brush in instead of spritzing the page. I'm going to apply my water with the brush. And we're just applying a fin layer. Doesn't have to go everywhere. If we get those natural gaps that we've got gaps in the water here and here, that will affect how our paints evolve on the page which is everything we're after today. I think we're also going to have a bit of tissue handy because that is going to be one of our ultimate lifting tools that we can use. Now, I've added one more pigment again, so now I've got this quinacrodome coral, which is a very lovely bright pink coral pigment. Again, just going to apply that in a loose and interesting manner across the page. This is where you can start experimenting with other pigments as well. Just feel the different mood already. If we combine this pink and blue, we have something fundamentally different in feeling to what we had a moment ago. We're not, again, yet thinking about how we're making this into an abstract scene. We're just applying these abstract splashes of color onto the page. We can apply something a bit more moody. Just again, just get that feel of the difference our different pigments have. So this is the Pim on type genuine. Did you see how just by touching that in, we get a very different feel, suddenly emerging. Notice all the different strokes that we can use. We can use flat strokes. We can do little lines, we can scrub, we can dry brush and get different textures. There's lots of things you can do with your brushes, which you might not typically do when you're trying to neatly paint a seen, which can create something interesting on your page. Do you experiment again, like we did with our homemade palette knives, experiment with the different ways that these brushes can make marks on your page. Now we can experiment with how we can further influence those marks. One of the easiest things to do is get a bit of tissue, blue roll, kitchen roll, tissue, anything. Just scrunch it up. Now if you make it nice and flat, you have got an edge there. Or it can even do it one more time and make a really firm edge. We can almost paint with that. See I can pull out these neat little marks. If we make it a bit more random, we can pull out textures. Suddenly you see how this turns into a texture creator on our page. And what it's doing is it's picking up all the water in the spots that it's touching the page and leaving behind that repetitive texture. That repetitive texture is a texture that I've scrunched up, so if I change it to a different shape, we'll get a different texture. We can just do this suddenly brutal wash. But this very intense wash across our page is very soft and gentle and full of life, full of texture. Now if we put that to one side and we come back and we add a bit more pigment in a few places, play again with our colors, nice and rich pigments. What we can explore is actually the idea that using a brush, we could use the same brush or I'm going to use a different one just so it's definitely clean. Adding a little bit of water, then drying it off on my tissue to the side. We can actually do similar things with a brush I can lift out like so all I'm doing is I'm coming in to the side of the color, pulling through it with my clean brush, absorbing that water, which is why we need the brush to be a little dry. Then creating that shape and lifting up. You can do it in different ways. You could poke and stab. You'll get different textures. All these ways are ways of lifting and creating interesting things happening on the page. Now the other thing I want to show you with the idea of splashing. If we splash water in, do you see how that water creates a little puddles here? It's a bit dry. Do you see how nothing happens here? That's because the page is already dry. But if I create another little bit of pink up here, let it move around and create lovely little wash in there. Then I drop in some water, Then we get movement. Because this is got water, it can be pushed around, it's still wet, it can move. When it's dried, it won't do anything. But we can create these lovely cauliflowers, branching patterns of water, moving the pigment around the page. We can also, of course, do the traditional splashes, where we pick up a bit of pigment and tap and get this chaotic pattern of splatters happening on the page. This is just a fun way to create an interesting mobile page. Again, keep playing and experimenting. I would say this is one where I feel I've gone too far. There's a lot going on here. With all the splashes, all the movement, all the lifting. It's quite chaotic and busy. For me this is too much. The others had a bit more of a flow to them. It's a very subjective feeling, but this one, just for me, feels too busy. I've gone too far. But that's fine. Because I've gone too far in experimenting and playing with colors, learning how they interact with water, and learning how to play with these colors with my brushes and my paper. Don't worry if you go too far. These are just the way to warm up that we can start creating our abstract scenes with a lot of confidence and there we are. I have definitely overworked one. That is fine. I'm still going to show you this video as you can see, because it's absolutely fine for all of us to make mistakes. I'm sure that in a few days, maybe a couple of weeks, I can come back and I can find a use for this chaos on my page. Perhaps I will see a scene. Maybe there's a tree or a cloud blooming in the middle of it. Perhaps I can scan it in and use as a background to digital illustration. Or even I can chop it up and use it as pretty gift tags. Don't despair if things go too far. I will show this one again. In the next lesson, we'll talk about why it's gone too busy, why I'm not going to finish it off as a scene today. But I want you to feel okay with that and feel okay if yours have gone too far. But just learn from that and understand that these things will happen. 8. Finding our Scene: Now it is time to see how we can take some mad, loose experiments that we've been playing with and turn them into scenes. And we're going to see the value of layering up our colors, applying slightly thicker, more opaque colors, breaking some of those rules of water color. Water color should be used for loads of water, shouldn't it? That's what I always say. But when we're painting in a more abstract manner, actually, we can start being opaque with our colors instead of having that lovely water color transparency to create textures and different effects. Let's see how we develop our previous sketches from now. Now, our last little war map is going to be looking at the idea of layering. Here we can see this is the first thing we did. Remember we used two colors. We had our blue, our Windsor blue, and our sepia. And we started thinking about creating some abstract city scape. And you can see that hopefully emerging behind all these random marks. What I've done is I've added my last two colors to my palette. Now I've got my burnt sienna and a little bit of our guash. We're going to look at how we can start moving on top of this to create that little bit more structure perhaps. Or perhaps loosen things up if it's become overs structured and not as abstract as we'd like. I'm going to stick with mostly my panette knife, but we have got our brushes ready to go if we want, we've got our spray ready to go if we want. I'm going to start actually with a very loose light spray so that my page is not totally dry. But so that I don't move this paint by being too vigorous with a brush, you could just put a very gentle brush stroke of water across the top. Let's just start first by coming in with a slightly new color. This is my burnt sienna, very warm, bricky color. We can just start seeing how this is going to play with our others, what we're doing because we're laying it down much drier, it's going to be much more opaque. Watercolors normally are a transparent medium, and that is how we want to mostly use them, which is why I want that page a little we. But also it can be fun when being a bit abstract to break the rules and apply them in a slightly different way. Look, we can start applying these different layered textures where we're actually almost using the water colors a bit like gag, just applying some slightly different marks than we would normally even if this wasn't different enough already with our card. Now I'm going to move and start mixing those colors together. On my, on my palette knife, we've got this CPA, meats and CNA. And start creating maybe little lines that suggest these buildings, maybe it's suggesting windows, maybe it's suggesting the tops of buildings, things like that. And just move it around. So we've always got enough stuff on our palette knife to be creating something interesting. Going to get a bit of blue. Now stop moving that into the distance and we can just pull down some of these other shapes and then flip around. Do you see how just touching these little lines, in little lines and blocks of darkness, we're starting to induce that structure on top of the very loose stuff going behind. If that's too much though, well, remember we can splits, we can loosen that up, we can come in and we can actually start pushing color around again, using our color. We could push it around again. Having done that, we can use our straw or just our mouth to blow. We start loosening up things and moving them around. Now it's perfectly adequate as well to be using a brush at this time. A brush might give you slightly looser, lighter mark if we want to bring something down here. Well, first we could even just use the color that's already there. We can move gently around some of the pigments already there. We could take some of the pigment we've been using, so we don't waste it. Use that with our brush. We can create those almost opaque marks in the same manner. Maybe we get, we had these little ideas, didn't we have? Maybe these are cranes going on. We can create some of those more marks as well. Let's do a few more. All we're doing is just looking around and thinking, how can we adapt this image and make it interesting? How can we balance it in different places, in different ways? We did some splashing before. We can splash at this stage as well. So we can put these splashes maybe into the foreground again. If that's too much, we can either come back and soften them with our brush, that's fine. Or we can soften them with a little sprits. That's going to do something else, something different. Maybe in the sky, we just want to add something else. Something different. So maybe this is a bit brave, but maybe we'll just add these touches of pink into a lightly sky. And that light spritzing will hopefully carry that pigment around. We've seen that will move around. Hopefully just that light spritz will enable that pigment not just to sit in one place, but here, look, it's moving splurging and it gives that balance. We gradually almost using all the pigments we came out with. With that in mind, let's have a little touch of this white. Let's see what happens if we do lighten things up. We can come in gras, in theory is opaque. Watercolors like I said, are transparent when we apply in gouache, We're going to be fundamentally changing the texture of things going on. So we need to think about it. If we apply it to watery, what it will do is it will coat the whole page and it will give it a very different feel to the abstract. Looseness of watercolors. Just again, as you're using your guage, just be careful and thoughtful. Why am I adding it here? Well, I'm adding it here to bring a bit of light into some of these buildings because they're opaque. If I bring it in there, look, that building comes forward. If I wanted to outline the building, that building comes forward because we've got this opaque line sitting on top of things. We might be trying to bring up real specific areas of little touches. Maybe this is now like pretending to be some reflection in. I don't know, is it a sea or a river? Getting these little areas of light pooling around with our guage will bring that forward. Bring those ideas forward. We can even mix it together with one of our colors. If we take a bit of our paint, can we mix that? What we'll end up with is a opaque pink. So now we can apply opaque lines on top which are pink. Again, we do not want to overdo this because we are fundamentally changing what water color is by applying these opaque marks. But we're also being abstract. So it's okay to break lots of rules. It's always okay to break lots of rules. But it's especially okay to break lots of rules when you're trying to just have a bit of fun, an abstract, a scene from your mind like that. Like I said, we don't want to go too far. We can always add more. So I'm going to leave that there and call this little D scape done. Then we can have a look perhaps, at the others that we've been playing with and see how we can bring those forward as well. That is the first scene done. Now, I guess it's time to move on to the second scene. The second scene, of course, we said maybe there's a wood emerging. Let's look at this. Let's start applying our second layer of colors and see what develops. 9. Scene Two Ideas: Without further ado. Like I said, at the end of the last video, it's time to add to our woodland scene. Let's see what happens if we apply similar ideas to a very different feeling image. And see at the end, can we produce something that we're equally proud of? Just like that. We have our other one up and it might be here that we want to apply even more paint. So I'm going to get my palette ready with a bit more of this. The reason I'm saying that is because we said maybe this is a forest. We can kind of see these trees. Maybe this is a lake. I'm not sure. Not sure yet. So I'm going to want lots of deep browns to start coming in and looking at like, what can we create, sort of stems here and trunks and branches. So let's start with that idea. If that's what we think is going on, let's start finding where maybe there might be a few trunks, maybe there might be a few branches sort of coming out and then just find those. You can see this page in places, it's actually still a bit wet. So over here we're still going to be applying some wet on wet and that's fine. So we can apply these little wet on wet touches underneath. Maybe we just use some of this Perman type, the slightly ruddierort more pigment compared to the Spa, which is definitely a deep brown. And just start edging that in as well. Now we're bringing that structure out. Hopefully little by little, we can do lots of lines to start bringing in branches, lots of lines here. Just do these repetitive patterns. Repetitive patterns on top of our very loose marks. Earlier, when we're abstracting what we do, we are just focusing on the basic, most fundamental colors, shapes, tone forms, patterns that we find and are representing them in a different way. Going to switch over to a bit of blue. I don't want to make it too, Samy. I'm going to use a bit of blue to suggest some distance to these trees. Blue tinges in our colors tend to suggest things are further away. If you draw mountains going back the furthest away mountains will tend to appear more blue. That's a real effect. That's actually what does happen in reality. It's worth being aware of these things even when you're being abstract. It lets take the visual shortcuts which get us so far in these funny little scenes. There we go. Then in the front here, we said maybe this is a lake. And yeah, I can start to see that emerging actually. How are we going to get that lake compared to something more ground or more like tundra? Well, for me I think that's going to be about getting more of our brown into here, making it feel more three D, more solid. We get this brown color in and we get it as a solid land mass. If you like, we can create those little edges. You might expect a little bits of grass. Maybe we can introduce a bit of our pink as well. We've got these lovely pink tinges going back then in here. Well, we got these blues. Let's just give it a little bit of blue to create some of these more reflected areas. We want to leave it fairly transparent. I can almost start to feel now like maybe there's a river coming through here. So let's keep playing with this idea. This isn't planned and it doesn't have to be planned for me. This painting is about a little bit of mindfulness, bit of fun, and actually you can end up creating some wonderful things. There will be disasters along the way, just with all painting, and probably more so with this style of looseness. But also there'll be those unexpected amazing accidents, which just work and create something wonderful. Just play with your colors. And for me again, don't want to go too far. I can really start to see it now. I can see, I can see these trees in the distance here going back, this river flowing through. Do we want to put some gosh on? I'm not sure we do, but let's try the experiment. Anyway, just for a bit of fun, Let's just see what happens. Does this add to the field or does it take away? It's okay, we're playing experimenting. Maybe it will add a little bit of just light into these other ways. Quite dark trees, having these opaque little bits of white. These little bit of light punching through might be actually exactly what we need, but let's not overdo it. Say maybe two more little touches, something just to balance the white around the page. Let's call that a second scene done. Got that light flowing through, we've got these trees, we got this ground, this river, and little lake. Very abstract, very fun, very relaxing to do. Now, the last scene I did was of course, this one. Now for me I can't see this one. This one wasn't as well thought out, I'm not going to touch this one. Because I can't understand today how I would approach this and make it into something which I am proud of. That's okay. That doesn't mean I have to bin, it means it'll sit on my side and maybe in the next week or two, I'll use it to experiment. I will see something in there and that's okay. So don't feel that every single one of your experiments has to work for me. This one I said it and as I did it, I'm not sure what's going on. It's too busy, too much going on. So I'm going to leave it. And in our project, where I'm going to complete a scene from start to finish with you, I'm going to explain how I avoid these unplanned accidents with a tiny bit of planning that helps create more interesting things more reliably. And like that, hopefully you can see the way that you can take something very loose and abstract and start to actually build it into something slightly representative. That slight representative feel often makes us feel more happy evolving our sketch. We can see what we're aiming for as we move through it, but we didn't need to come in with a plan. We did literally experiment and see what happens. And this is the beauty of painting in these abstract and semi abstract ways. 10. My Project - Layer One: It's time now to start on our scene, our final project before we were very much starting with an experiment and seeing what happens. But there was behind the scenes, perhaps some cheeky planning that I was doing. The first bit I'm going to show you just now is how we do that sense of thought that goes into our experiment that maximizes the chance that we'll find a scene. Then we will use that planning to first create a very loose scene in this lesson. In the next lesson, of course, we'll add on those extra layers that bring it to life and create all that structure to the madness. Keeping it very much abstract, semi abstract, but also making it represent something about a scene like we talked about back in the first little lecture, as I called it, about abstract art. It is time now to start creating our project. And the first stage of our project is actually to do a little bit of planning, which might sound a bit odd when we talk about abstract. But let's have a look at what we did earlier. Let's have a look at the key feature. The thing which made this possible was we started with a strong line across the middle. This strong line, just like in the other successful one, here was a horizontal line, which set the idea for what was going to come later. When it didn't work. In our slightly more manic one, there wasn't such a plan. We just splattered colors everywhere. Actually having that starting point, that understanding of what you might be trying to achieve is really important at the beginning, even though we're doing abstract. Now a key part of that might be doing a horizontal line or a vertical line. Or it might be creating a cloud like pattern or something like that. So let's combine these ideas and we'll do something a bit different. So what we're going to do is we're going to do a cloud like pattern with a little vertical going into it, and we'll see what that evolves into. The idea perhaps is to create a tree or something like that. But we'll see, because that's the beauty of this abstract idea. I'm going to start as ever by creating my sprits, this time my little splits. Or if you're using brush, should be in that pattern you're planning to create. We've got, I called in a little bit, coming down here, I've got my colors out here. I've Coral my Windsor blue, my CPM, my Pm. I've not got any burnt sienna at the moment, we may introduce that. We may not. I've got my white gouache. Again, we're going to look for a different feel here. In our previous ones, they were very dark color heavy. This time let's try something different. Let's try opening with a lot of our quinones and our blues here. Let's start with our strong vertical line. From that we can start just maybe we're imagining a branching pattern coming up, nice and soft marks. What might be useful here is actually if we lay down these chunks, I'm going to get some blues and pinks, but mostly focusing first on these bright colors. We lay these down. We can then start using perhaps, our spritzing and our gravity to move things around, but to keep it light and fluid. Let's have a little bit of a play here here. Hopefully you've got a maybe from that base. Can have a bit of a vertical, horizontal line as well. But keeping it geometric so that it has that feel that we're after then just scrape and move a few of these bits around before it dries too much. Let's come in, let's just see what happens if we just start spritzing and letting things flow. You see how these marks suddenly become so fluid when the water really gets into them. The water is also giving it that push out effect. We could try a bit of gravity, so let's just try letting things flow around. We might just create something interesting, look at those blues flowing with those pinks. Maybe we got this idea of shadow emerging on the right hand side here. Just from doing that. There's a lot of water going on in here. Something which would be useful to do will be a lifting, just gently lifting some of that water and maybe that's too harsh. When you use the tissue, it really does lift very effectively. But sometimes we just want a little bit of the water come out. They're going to dry out a brush. Instead, I'll use that brush. That brush will pull out some of that water, but it will also not overly dry things out. We can be more specific as well. With our softening, we can soften some of the colors in here. Perhaps just to create a bit more of a fluid flow through our image. A bit of this red can come round and use our brush to create some interesting patterns. Maybe we still want to lift some though. Maybe this is still too dark. We're going for much lighter. So we'll lift the load of the water and pigment out and then just pop in. A few gentle brush strokes might even want even more of this pink just to push things around, let things flow and move out. Then remember, we can do water splashes as well, so a few splashes of water. This is all about creating something interesting. At the very beginning, we hopefully, you can literally see the paints moving, the pigment granules, moving and fluttering, and splashing around. And that's what we're after in this stage. Nothing fancy. Nothing clover. We're not trying to necessarily paint anything brilliant as of yet. This may be a little too intense. Again, let's use our lifting just to soften it and bring it back a little bit down here. We can just let this spread out, maybe introduce tiny bits of this blue and we get this feeling flowing through the whole thing. Get more of this pink in the top still. We argue this is really too deeply blue, too much blue going on. We want a lighter feel. I can just come in with my little brush and gently lift things up. There we go. Now we've got a light swirling pattern. It has actually ended up quite tree like, hasn't it? Let's do a few little splatters to get a of radius. Or perhaps leather leaves, perhaps there's something else just fluttering off to the side. Get a bit more of that pure pink buried in under there. Now all we need to do is let this dry and see what it looks like. And remember, we really do want to let these things dry. It's going to take a little while. There's so much water going on that we don't need to rush this. We can go and experiment with something else. We can make a cup of tea, cup of coffee, whatever you like really. But don't rush it, Just let this abstract flowing image dry properly, so that you can then add on top of it with confidence. 11. My Project - Layer Two: Time now to finish off our project. Apply those little touches of structured color or more fit color of something which brings our little scene or perhaps our tree into life. And here we are. We are dry except at the edges. And that's fine. Like before, I don't mind having a little bit of dampness in places because that's going to let our colors blend and merge and become something slightly less controlled. We've still got our same pan out. We've got this funny mix, which we've already got down, but we're going to try something different now. I'm going to grab one of my smaller flat brushes and we're going to move on to our darker media colors to start getting some of that structure we got here, my sepia and my Pimantp genuine. You can see they're subtly but definitely different, although they have a similar feel. Now we're finding structure. We can imagine our tree is already coming together, isn't it? I'm going to just come in and start using the edge of this brush to find a little branches and look where these bits are wet. Look at that wonderful effect. That's not something we can plan for, It's just something which happens. But maybe we can plan for it in the sense that we'll just take some of our lines into that wet so that we can know what's going to happen. Take advantage of that rather fun little dalliance. Let's continue around. We're just going to use the edge of our brush to create these fun, lovely branching patterns going up here, going along, coming out. And this is going to be probably really, very quick, isn't it? We could, of course, be using our credit card and maybe that's what we'll do for other bits here to more texture on our tree, our trunk, which is definitely what's emerging, we can come through. And now just scratch in some of these lines. And perhaps having done that over here, we're like, you know what I like that actually provides more interesting texture. We can come and do some more of these marks in our first half as well. It's okay to experiment, try different techniques in different places. We can mix in a bit of our blues. We get some of that undertone of the leaves coming out on top now as well. Get it all the way up there. We're really getting that love bleeding, mixing effect coming through all the way into our lovely little scam. Now we can do much lighter lines. Maybe we just use the corner of a card and we just get some of that business. We don't want too much business, but a little bit of business will be great. We can even have lines coming out here. There's nothing stopping our tree from having a few little roots and things. A little bit of scratching over here as well create something interesting into that foreground. It's otherwise a bit, say Samy at the bottom. Isn't it really just exploring, Having fun. It might be where we want to lift out light. We'll create some texture, can scratch. Did you see how that lift some of that light? That underlying light here is again where perhaps we'd start to want to play with our gas so we can really inject some light but also some opacity into a few places, little chunks of pushing through the base of the tree, maybe going up the side, creating idea of light going through our tree here, little patches of leaves which perhaps are in the front and therefore feeling a bit more opaque and forward. Perhaps little white branches or so excited I dropped my card there. Little white branches flicking around. But always take a step back and just go, have I gone too far yet? I think we're still a bit safe. I just want a couple of last touches. These are just going to be bits of the idea of these opaque white, pink, white blue coming forward and creating some of those little patches of leaves at the very front. The final, final touches to my little final project will of course be a few splashes coming out here. Few splashes. If you wanted, you could inject a little bit more randomness. We could sprits in the middle. We could come and soften maybe. Let's even do that. Let's just go for it and do a little bit of spritzing in the middle here. Just soften. Do you see how that just immediately softens the hardness just in a couple of places? Can we do it somewhere else? Maybe just down here at the edge. Letting these colors run again, the risk is doing too much and undoing the planning. And actually I'm very happy with this. It's definitely an abstract swirl and abstract thing which is emerged from a little bit of planning, a little bit of thought, but a whole lot of just playfulness. So I don't want to go too far. I'm going to get a little bit more of something in the foreground just to bring the foreground definitely to the front. And this is where we are painting. We're not just being random, we're using our skills and our kind of artistic knowledge to make it work whilst getting buried in this random approach where we do get to just have a bit of fun and see what happens. And there you go. That is my final project. Almost finished. Do get to jump to the next lesson where we will absolutely finish this off and talk about what else we could have a play with in the future. 12. How to Finish Your Art: Now we are, of course, into the final lesson. Before we move and look at the most important thing to finish off our painting, I just wanted to say, thank you. Well done. This is probably, for many people, a very scary class. I'm really grateful you've come and join me. But hopefully what you have got from it is a heap of new understanding, how your paints work. A little bit of bravery that you can take into even realism based art. If you enjoy my teaching, then do follow me here on skillshare. I have loads of classes, more than 25 now. This might even be my 30th class that we're watching today. It'd be great to see you join me in other fun explorations of sketching and loose painting techniques. With that, let's look at our painting and what's missing. What's been missing from everything I've done today? Well, it's that sense of pride and ownership which comes from signing it. I'm going to sign it using the same silly techniques we've been using. My credit card, just to add my initials to the corner, I always think it's great to sign because there's always something to enjoy, to learn from a work of art. It gives a sense of having finished it No longer looks like you haven't completed your painting. And you can now put it to one side and look at it in a couple of days. And that is when you'll really see the beauty when you've had that little bit of time and space away. If you've enjoyed this, do leave me a review. And most importantly, stay creative. Have fun, happy painting and happy sketching.