Lost and Found Edges in Watercolor Painting

1. Introduction: This class is about lost and found edges in watercolor. There are four types of watercolor edges, hard edges, also known as found edges, soft edges. Lost edges and broken edges. We are going to look at why edges are important and how to paint them. Then we are going to practice lost and found edges by painting some edges. This is edges with edges. Hello. I'm Catherine Jennifer. I'm an artist, art educator, and top teacher on Skillshare. Not sure who that was. In this class, we're going to focus on two of the most important aspects of watercolor painting, edges and tonal value. We're going to do simple paintings of vegetables, making sure to include lost and found edges. And we're going to combine this with a focus on mastering tonal value. I'm going to show you specific brush and palette techniques so that you can achieve a full range of tone in your paintings from light to dark. So grab your things. All you need is some black watercolor paint and your fiber day. Thank you. 2. Project: Project is to paint a vegetable of your choice using only black watercolor paint, and to make sure you include lost and found edges. If you don't have black, you can mix a black using colors that you've already got. I'll show you how to do this. Once you've done your painting, take a quick photo and upload it into the class Project Gallery. 3. Materials: You'll need black watercolor paint, or if you don't have black, you can mix a black using the colors you've already got. You'll need a nice big brush and also a smaller brush. And then the main thing is try to use good quality paper. 100% cotton paper will give you the best results. So gather your stuff and let's get started. 4. Edges Explained: First of all, let's look at how we create the different types of edges. So let's look at how to create hard edges. A hard edge, also called a found edge is the easiest one to make, and it's created by using wet paint on dry paper. Just like that. A soft edge is created by painting wet on wet. So to create a soft edge, you will typically wet your paper, like I'm doing here with clean water. The key to a soft edge is letting the water soak into the paper a little bit so that you've got a sheen on your paper. You don't want a swimming pool sitting on top, but you also don't want it to be too dry, in which case you won't get a soft edge. The paint won't travel. And then the third and important thing is you need to have the right amount of liquid in your brush, but you don't want it to be too wet. So I've picked it up here. I'm tapping it off there onto my tissue, and I will paint a wet line. And I will get a soft edge. A lost edge is created either through tone or through color. So if I'm going to do a quick painting of these strawberries, just to demonstrate the lost edge. If I put the first strawberry in here, and then if I join the next strawberry onto this strawberry, going to leave the leaves as the white of the paper. By joining these two strawberries over here, I have lost the edge between the two of them. You can also have fun using lost edges for shadows. So if I'm going to create the shadow underneath the strawberry, I can come in with a lighter tone of paint, control my water, and I can lose that hard edge underneath the strawberry into my shadow. You'll see this in action in the demonstration of the vegetables that I paint. Come in with a lighter shade of paint and lose that edge underneath. And then the final type of edge is a broken edge. And this is created using a dry brush effect. So you load your brush with paint, and then you take out as much of the excess water as you can. And sometimes it can also help to open your bristles. And you get this dry brush effect. If you don't want to open the bristles by hand, you can still get it. You can see bits of the paper coming through. It works best if you keep your brush flat to the paper. So not upright. And there you have a broken edge. 5. Rescuing a Soft Edge: Now, just going back to soft edges for a moment. I want to show you two ways you can rescue a soft edge if it hasn't softened as much as you wanted to. So I'm just putting some clean water on my perch. I want it to be nice and evenly covered. Okay. So my page is wet, but it's drying very quickly. And if I make my mark there, that one's working quite well and giving me a lovely soft edge. I'm going to wait a few moments for the paper to dry even more because I want you to see what happens if I get the timing wrong and then how to rescue it. Okay, so I can see that my paper is now pretty dry and also everything here on my palette is pretty dry and thirsty. So if I make a mark here, it's getting a soft edge there, but it's not getting as much of a soft edge there as I was wanting it to. And then if I make another mark there, as you can see, my edge isn't soft at all. So the first thing I can do if I wanted a soft edge and I'm not getting it is I take a clean brush, clean water. And I call this approaching by stealth. So starting away from the edge that I want to soften, I'm coming in with my clean water. The place where I first go in with my brush is the place where the most water will come off. And then I can control how much water I'm dragging upwards towards the edge that I want to soften. And then I just touch that edge and the softening will happen. If you get a bit jumping off there, just like I did, then you can dry off your brush and just pick it up and wipe it off on your tissue. So that's the first method approaching by stealth, and that's my preferred method because I have more control over the water. However, you can also try and bring it that way with water. Now, some people say don't do this because all you're doing is moving your hard edge that way. However, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't I've got clean water on my brush, and I'm carefully controlling how much I've got in there. And then if I start in the edge I want to soften and I bring it out, I can soften that edge. Now, I find this method not as successful as that method generally, because as you can see, it was harder to control, and although I took longer, so it had dried a bit more, there's still that hard edge there, and then there's a hard edge there. And as I said, some people say that if you do it this way, all you're doing is taking your hard edge and moving it making it bigger. You have to have a lot more control to get it to work with this method. And you can see how these have dried. This one was definitely more successful than that one. Then the second thing you can do if you make an edge that you wanted to be soft and it's not soft, let's say I was hoping that would be a soft edge. As you can take a clean brush, wet it, but not too wet, and you can just tickle the edge to soften it. Okay? Clean it, control the amount of wetness and tickle that soft edge. It works best if you use a harder, more bristly brush. This is more of an acrylic or gouache brush. I'll show you again on this side? Just tickling that edge. And this only works if you're quick enough and it hasn't completely dried. So those are two things you can do to rescue your soft edges if they weren't soft enough. 6. How Artists Use Edges: Now we know what the different kinds of edges are and how to make them. But let's look at how artists use them. Lost and found edges are very useful in landscape painting, such as in this example by William Turner. Basically, edges that are softened or lost edges are used to add atmosphere and depth. They often allow forms to disappear into the background, and edges that are hardened or are found edges are used for focal points and to bring objects forward in the painting. Here's another example of a really beautiful use of lost and found edges by John Singer Sargent. He simplified the details of the buildings and used soft edges in this section to almost get rid of the windows and get rid of any details that he didn't actually want the viewer to focus on. And it creates a beautiful sense of flow in this part of the painting. And then he's created found edges here with the bridge by actually painting the sky around the bridge and leaving some of the paper showing through at the top of the bridge. That's a beautiful example of a found edge. Then here in the foreground with these gondolas, he's used not only hard or found edges, but also a strong contrast of tone from the very light lights to the very dark darks to draw the viewers attention to that part of the painting. There's also a really beautiful found edge just on the edge of this building where the light meets the dark shadow. So your eye gets drawn in to that point in the distance. And then here is a beautiful softness of colors and forms all fading into each other. Here's an example of a still life painting that has very interesting edge control. The peaches in the front have these hard edges, these found edges here, as well as a strong contrast of tone, the dark shadow and the light peach. And the bowl, as well, has very hard edges, particularly at the bottom. And here in these complicated folds of the fabric, the artist has used soft edges and gradations of tone, as well as texture, which kind of blur into each other and help the viewer to focus their attention on the peaches. And then here's a final example of flowers painted by the same artist. And this is another beautiful example of edge control. We've got hard or found edges on this leaf and on some of these stems. Over here, we've got a beautiful example of found edges where the artist has painted around these white petals, allowing the white of the paper to show through. This is a beautiful way of creating white petals on white paper. Then up here, we've got a beautiful example of soft edges as the colors gently fade out into the white paper, and then even further out, we've got lost edges where the forms of the leaves are lost into the white of the paper. And all of this edge control combines to not only create a sense of movement in this painting, but to focus the viewer's eye on this central part of the painting. 7. How To Mix Black: It's always better to mix your own black than to use black straight from the tube. And if you don't have black straight from the tube, then this will, I'm just going to show you a quick method on how to create a good dark color. So there's various different ways you can do it. The first way is you mix your primary colors, red y own blue. A second way is you mix complimentary colors, which is actually just the same. It's just that instead of mixing red, yellow and blue, you're mixing red and green, but green consists of yellow and blue. So it's just two different ways of saying the same thing. And the third way is to mix your earth tones with some darks. And the classic one is burnt sienna and French ultramarine. So I'll just whiz through that very quickly. The secret with mixing your primary colors is getting the relative portions of each color, right. So you're going to need more of the yellow than you'll need of the red. And that's because red is much stronger than yellow. So over here, I've got a handsome yellow light, a parle red light, and an ultramarine blue. These are core water colors, and I'll just get those out the way. If I take some of the yellow, and I add a little bit of the red, but not as much and then some of the blue, I end up with basically a brown, okay. So to get it to be more black, I need to add more of the blue, more of the red, less of the yellow. And mixing a good dark just comes with practice of adjusting each color until you've achieved the kind of dark you want. You can get a dark that's more red in tone or a dark that's more blue in tone. So it's a great way to control if you want a cool dark or if you want a warm dark, you just adjust the relative proportions of each thing. So here, I've got a lovely dark, actually. It's not too cold, it's not too warm. It's just right. If I'm going to mix my complimentares, red and green, let's say you don't have a tube of yellow, but you do have a tube of red and a tube of green. Then I'll use that same red, the pearl red light. But let's say I've got Thalo green, blue shade. I'll just pop a bit over there. If I take some of that red, Okay. And I mix in some of that green. Now, this green is very strong. So what I've got here is much more of a green dark color. So I'm going back to my red, adding that in. If I put too much red in, it's going to lean towards brown. So back to my green just adjusting, adjusting until I have the kind of dark I want. I'm going to put that over here. Beautiful. And it's very similar to that one, actually. Likewise, if I have blue and orange, um, so if I take my ultramarine blue, it's always best to mix colors with a darker blue rather than a lighter blue. You'll have more success with a French ultramarine, if you're mixing colors than you will with a cerulan blue. A Cerulean blue will give you lighter shades so you won't get to this lovely dark color with a cerulan blue. So blue and orange. So I've got altamarin blue. And if I use this, it's a permanent yellow orange. And I'll put that there. When you're mixing a color, always start with your lighter color onto your palette, and then bring in your darker color. It's just a better way of doing it. So I've got my orange there. I've got my blue hair. And usually you'll get quite a browny color. So this is one of my least favorite ways of mixing a dark. But just to demonstrate blue plus orange gives me that kind of dark. And then if I mix yellow and purple, purple is basically red and blue mixed together. But just to illustrate this point about mixing complimentares, if I take some yellow, and I add some purple, this is a KuratakiPurple. I'm just going to control the wetness with my tissue. I can see it there. And I mix that in. Okay that's gone brown, and that is often what you get when you mix complimentares. So you have more control when you mix your three primaries than if you go for the two complimentaries option. So I've basically got a brown here. If I take a different purple, slightly darker one, and mix that in, now I've basically got purple. I'm going to go back to my yellow and put that in. And you can see how it goes back to brown quite a lot. So this complimentary method involves quite a lot of tweaking. This is the purple, makes it in there. And you have to be quite disciplined to get to the dark that you want. So you can see here it's more of a purply dark. Then there's the third way to mix a good dark is to mix an earth tone with a dark color. The classic way is burnt sienna and French ultramarine. Now, I don't have burnt sienna. I've got raw sienna, and I've got rinacridon gold deep. So I'll take a little bit of my raw sienna. Raw sienna is basically just a bit lighter than burnt sienna. And if I mix in a bit of my cacrodon gold deep, it will be closer to Burnsena Okay. And then if I mix those two with my French ultramarine, which was up here you can see I'm getting a nice dark. I need a bit more of that French ultramarine. Mix it in there. And you basically just tweak the colors you've got until you get a dark that you want. So a little bit more blue, a little bit more brown. Let's have a look. And what happens with that is that when you do your actual painting, you'll get the different tones sort of separating out and coming through, and you'll end up with a much more interesting painting. So there you can see, it's almost a bit more brown than black here, but when you are painting with it, it will basically if you layer it up, it will look like a dark. And then I've just written here various colors plus indigo and various colors plus Panes gray because you can take, you know, a combination of your reds and your yellow and your blue. And then if it's not quite the dark you want, mix in a bit of indigo or mix in a bit of Payne's gray and just keep working and tweaking it until you've got a dark color that you're happy with. 8. How To Control Tonal Values: So now we know about edges, let's take a look at how to control tone or value. The secret is that, no matter how light or dark your tone is, the amount of water in your brush needs to stay the same. What changes is the amount of pigment. So I'm going to make a series of blobs along here from light to dark. So if I start with my light pigment, now you can see here I've got a little round patch of water and a tiny bit of pigment, and there I've got a beautiful light tone. Okay. I'm going to darken that up slightly. I'm going to control the amount of liquid by using my tissue. And I just want to go a little bit darker each time, taking a bit more pigment, adding it in, control the liquid, get a bit darker. Take a bit more liquid pigment, sorry, add it in. Control the wetness, a little bit darker. This is a very good thing to do as a warm up exercise. And it's really important that you have this discipline of getting things right on your palette and in your brush before you go onto your paper. Okay? So I suggest you do this as a practice before you start painting your vegetables. You can see there, it's getting darker. And then one last one where I want to go really, really dark. And for the darkest dark, it's almost pure pigment. Okay? So that's a great exercise to do working from light to dark. Now, slightly more tricky is to go from dark to light. So I'll show you that. So starting with almost pure pigment, dark. Now we've got to reduce the amount of pigment. So I'm going to wash off I'm gonna bring my water in a bit. So I'm going to wash that pigment off. Well, first, I'm just going to start from the heavy pigment, okay? So pure pigment over there. Now, I'm going to wash off some of that, tap on the edge, make a new pile here on my palate. Now, the important thing is to control how wet that is. If it's too wet, I'll just tap on my tissue here. Make another swatch, and it's a tiny bit less dark. Now I'm going to do the same thing. Wh a bit off in the water, tap on the edge, make a pull. Now, the difference between those is quite marked. So I'm going to take a bit of that pigment, put it in this poll. And I can feel that this is very wet. So I'm going to control that wetness and make my little dot. That's quite a big difference between those two. Let's go back in, adjust it, control the wetness, put a bit more pigment on there. That's better. Take a bit of the pigment out. Make a new pile. Can you see how the amount of water is not changing? It's still the same amount of water, but I'm adjusting in each time the amount of pigment to make it less. Now, here I can feel, let's see, is that right? Yes, a little bit less. Take a bit out. Make a new pile. Take some pigment from here. That's too dark. Take a bit out. Make a new pile. That looks better. Yes. And you just keep doing that until you have got a whole row of dots going gradually lighter. And as I said, the key thing is to keep the water the same and change the amount of pigment. Okay? That's the secret. The final one, I've almost got no pigment there just a bit of water. There we go. So light to dark or dark to light. Have a go at that as a kind of warm up exercise. It's really important you have that palette discipline and you maintain the correct fluidity of the water in the brush before you actually make any mark on your actual painting. The other thing to know is that when you are first loading up your brush, make sure you do a lot of work on the palette like this. So you want to get the paint really soaked up into your brush. All the way to the ferrule of the brush because then you've got lots to work with on your actual painting. Don't just have the bottom tip of your brush covered in paint. You need to work it on your palette until it's fully loaded and at the same time, control the amount of water that's in there by using your tissue. You'll see how I do that when I paint the actual vegetables. 9. Painting a Red Onion: So now we know what lost and found edges are and how to make them, and we know how to control our tonal value. So let's dive in and paint a vegetable. For the first vegetable, I'm going to paint this beautiful red onion. I've already painted these cherries, and as you can see, they've got hard or found edges at the top. They've got lost edges where these two cherries join, that's a lost edge. And where the cherry joins the shadow over here and over here, those are lost edges. And then they've got a soft edge over here, where the shadow kind of peters out onto the page. That's a soft edge. So I'm going to paint in the basic shape of the onion with hard edges at the top. I'm going to work quickly, and I'm going to leave white gaps on the paper where the skin of the onion overlaps the underneath layer. Now, for this lost edge, I'm going to start with water down here and I'm going to do more water than I need. So I'm going to cover more area than I actually want the shadow to take up. Okay. And as I come towards the onion, I'm going to bring the water up and then I'm just going to touch the bottom of the red onion with the water. And as you can see, that flows out. And into that shadow in a lovely wet, loose kind of way. I don't want it to touch any more up than that, so I'm going to stop it there. And now I'm thinking about my values. So first, we think about edges, then we think about values. The shadow's got almost two rings in it, two tones. If you squint your eyes, then you can see where the shadows are darker. And there's a darker bit there. And then towards the end of the shadow, there's another dark bit there. And then there's a stark there. And I'm just going to do it as loose as that and leave it to flow a bit into the water. Then there's a little bit of the shadow coming out here with a found edge. With my smaller brush, I'm going to come in and just paint a few of these little interesting pieces and bits that are trailing off it. It doesn't have to be exactly accurate. And a few of these top bits up here. And now, again, I'm returning to my big brush and I'm thinking about my values. So I want to go for my darkest darks. So if I squint my eyes, it's very dark here, and I'm just dropping in some deep dark black and letting it flow on the paper. And then it's also quite dark here. So let me come in and darken these tones. And again, at the bottom of this onion, if I bring it down and round, the paper is all still nice and wet, so that watercolor will move into that shadow. I'm going to wait a moment to see what happens with that before I make any other moves. I can see here a hard edge is forming a found edge, and I'd like to soften that. So if I clean my brush, and then if I approach that edge from outside with my water, come creeping up to it, approaching it by stealth and just creeping up and just gently touching it, and then it will soften that edge a little bit. One thing I want to do is a little bit of lifting here because this has got very solid and there's actually light on that. So I'm going to clean my brush. I'm going to dry it. And now I'm going to just come in and lift a little bit of the paint out. Can you see it softens there and clean it off again, dry and lift. And it just allows you to take out anywhere that you had excessive amounts of paint that you didn't want. This is forming quite a hard edge there, so I'm going to clean my brush, take out most of the water. So my brush is damp but clean, and I'm going to do the final technique for softening an edge, which is just while it's still wet, just creeping up to it, and gently tickling it and pulling it this way. Can you see how we've softened that hard line? I'm going to wait and see how that looks once it's dry. So it's dry now, and I'm actually quite happy with how this came out. It's got some found edges over here, which are hard edges created by wet paint on dry paper. And then it's got these lost edges here, where the shadow and the bottom of the onion has merged together. And it's also got soft edge in here where the shadow has merged and softened but not lost completely. So it's got a hard edge, which is a found edge, a lost edge, and a soft edge, tick tick, tick. And then looking at the values, it's got a full range of tone from the light of the paper through mid tones, one, two, three, four tones, and right through to a very dense black. So that, in my eyes, is what I set out to achieve. So I'm happy with that. 10. Painting Figs: For my next painting, I'm going to do a very quick painting of these beautiful figs. I'm going to have lost edges where the figs join, and I'm going to have found edges on the edges of the figs themselves, and then I'm going to lose the edges where the figs join the shadows. I'm also going to have a soft edge where the shadow peters out on the plate. So I'm just going to start with a medium tone on the side fig. That. Then here where they join, I'm going straight in to the next one and the third one will come out there. I want to cover my area quickly, so I'm getting my pen Brush and sin close down onto my paper. Notice that I didn't draw an outline first of the fig. Well, apart from that outline. But in terms of the shape of the fig, I'm going straight in to try and get the shape of the whole fig in as one tone. And then this front one will come here. It doesn't have to be a perfect shape. I love a good wonky fig. Now, here's a shadow underneath. So I'm going to merge that shadow into that fig. There's a tiny sliver of light in there. So I'll leave that visible. Okay. I'm going to bring this shadow down around and lose this bottom edge into the shadow. And then squinting my eyes, I can see that the shadow goes a bit more that way with a lighter shade. So I'm going to just pull it out a bit. And then I want this to become a lost edge. So I'm going to start out here with some clean water. And that water was not clean. I'm gonna take my clean brush. Start out here and remember what I said about approaching by stealth. So coming up towards that edge that I want to lose and just touching it. Okay. Like that. Okay, now I'm just checking my values. I want to just bring this down a bit that because it's quite dark there, and it's quite dark there, and it's dark there. And then I'm going to pull up some of this dark in stripes because it's got sort of stripes. Like that. I do love a fig. Figs are great to paint. Squinting my eyes again to get the values controlling those cauliflowers that were threatening to form. Lovely. And then under here, I deepen this out a bit. Like that. And then I want to lose the sedge into the shadow. And the shadow goes around the side a little bit, and then it kind of disappears so same thing as before, approach by stealth from here and just gently touch into that shadow. Lovely. And in the middle of this fig, if I squint my eyes, it's kind of a mid tone. So just gonna pop it in as a mid tone. It has got a little flecks of white, so just gonna leave a few gaps where the little seeds are. It doesn't have to be accurate, but it'll add a little bit of sparkle to our fig and everybody needs sparkle. And then the same for the middle And then the middle bit here goes a bit darker. Darken that up. And the same thing there. Beautiful. I just want to revisit this shadow and just adjust the tones and those edges slightly. There's shadow here, the shape is a bit funny, so I'm going to just take another look, bring it around a bit, like that. And then we have a simple, quick painting of figs, focusing on lost and found edges and tonal value. I had to rush out and fetch the children at that point. So while I was out, this has dried, and as often as the case with watercolor, it has dried lighter than I was hoping, and it doesn't have the deep dark darks that I wanted to have. So I'm just going to come back in and darken some of those really dark areas. This has to be done quite carefully because now that it's dry, it's more tricky. So first, I'm wetting the areas that I want to darken. And it's important to control this wetness, just as you would if you were painting a first layer. I like the beautiful blend I got on this shadow. So I hope I can get the same thing again. And to do that, I'm just coming in with clean water. Like that. Okay. And now I'm going to bring in my dark tones. It doesn't need a lot. Just like that. And then I'm just softening the edges that dark tone there. Evening out the shadow a little bit. And then here where I want the shadow to disappear. I'm going to approach from far away, approach Batalth and just touch into that pigment. And let it flow on the paper. There we go. I'm going to wait till that dries and see how that looks. So here's a before and after picture, and I think that by darkening our dark tones, it has definitely made a difference to the success of the value contrast in the painting. It's now got a full range of value from light to dark. And I'm happy with the lost and found edges that I've created. So I hope you found that interesting, and now it's time to celebrate. 11. Conclusion: So now you've got the edge on edges. We looked at four different types of edges, how to make them, and how artists use them. And we looked at brush and palette techniques to master tonal value so that our paintings can contain a full range of tone from light to dark. And then we painted some wedge, making sure to include a full range of tone plus lost and found edges. If you haven't already done this, please take a quick photo of your painting and upload it into the class project gallery. It encourages others to have a go, and you can add even more goodness by liking and commenting on other students projects. If you would like to, you can share your work on Instagram using the hashtag Bedges with edges. If you enjoyed this class, I'd be really grateful if you could leave a review. And if you'd like to connect with me on Instagram, I am at Catherine Jennifer Designs and the same on Facebook. You can also find me on YouTube search for at Catherine Jennifer Designs. And if you want even more goodness, join my newsletter via my website, which is catherine jennifer.com. Until next time, I hope you have a great time practicing edges with edges. You know the rules. No pudding until you've eaten all your getables. Thank you. 12. Outtakes: Intro T one. This class is about lost and found edges in watercolor. There are four types of edges. Look.