Magical Watercolor Flower Paintings 101: The Art of Dispersion

1. Introduction: Frustrated with dispersion? Is dispersion ruling all of your watercolor efforts? Join me to learn how to wheel dispersion to create dreamy watercolor pictures, and have some fun. Hi. My name is Shelly Scale, and I'm an Artist and Illustrator. I really like working with watercolor and ink, and I tend to make images that are somewhat whimsical. I live in Edinburgh, Scotland with my family. Art school is a real family connection for me. I started doing arts and crafts with my grandmother, and now I get to do arts and crafts with my daughter. In this class, we're going to learn how to use dispersion intentionally. It can quite often happen by accident in watercolors, I know it does to me. So we're going to learn how to wield it and control it. Most importantly, I think we're going to look at having fun while we do all this. Dispersion is unique really to watercolor and ink as media. You can easily replicate how it looks with other artistic mediums, and it makes us a dreamy magical thing. Throughout this class, we're going to look at water control, where we treat water like a paint itself. We're going to look at paint control, so that's controlling the escape of paint from your brush. We're going to do a little bit of sketching, focusing on getting your hand to go where you want it to go. Also, looking at representing things, not replicating them. By the end of the class, you'll create four different watercolor flowers with this dreamy texture if you're just beginning with watercolors, and this is a great introduction. If you're already painting with watercolors but you're getting frustrated with dispersion, then here's a class to make friends with it. If you are a watercolor artist and you're not having fun, this can help you rethink your approach. If you've seen something relaxing, a bit fun to do, maybe you've had some art block or a night pen, come have fun, relax here. So are you ready? Let's get started. 2. Class Project: Hello again. What we're going to do in this class? We are going to create four different magical watercolor flower images. We will first get to grips with water and paint control, then we'll swatch our paints and learn how they disperse. We will practice sketching and sketch out two flowers that we will then paint, and finally, we'll paint two flowers with no sketching at all. Along the way. I'll share my tips with you so that you can get the best out of your materials without tying yourselves into knots along the way. You'll need the following materials for this class. Watercolor paints, paper, and brushes, containers for water, a pencil, and eraser, some paper towels or a rag and a heat tool, if you're impatient like me. Along the way, please upload your creations to the project's gallery of this class. If you like, you can share them with me on Instagram by tagging me, @shellyskail. I hope you find this a fun and relaxing class. The fun part is so important, and I think not just for our life in general, but especially for art. I remember when my daughter was a baby, I'd gotten out off art for awhile, and we were in a doctor's office and there was another mother there with a toddler, and the toddler asked her mom to draw a cat. I remember thinking, what if my daughter asked me to draw a cat when she's that age. I can't draw a cat. Cats are so hard. This other mother just took her notepad, drew a stick figure cat, gave it to her child, who was totally delighted with it. It was a real wake-up moment for me. Art doesn't have to be hard, it doesn't have to look exactly like the thing. It can be simple and it can be fun. That's what this class is about a lot. If you have any comments, questions, or thoughts that you'd like to share, please post them up in the discussion section of this class. Come join me for your first lesson. I'll see you there. 3. Materials: Hi again. Welcome back. In this lesson we're going to look at the materials you need to do this class. Firstly, you're going to need some watercolor paints. These can be pants which are the small cake versions of them. They can be in tubes, watercolor paper or inks all of that's fine. You're going to need paper. Watercolor weight starts at 140 pounds or that's sometimes written as 300 GSM or grounds per square meter. This comes in a variety of pricing from the student grade wood pulp papers, which are less expensive to the 100 percent cotton, which is more expensive. You're going to need brushes. I recommend round brushes that are a bit bigger, size eight or 10, somewhere like that. Whether it's synthetic or sable is entirely up to you, the sables usually more expensive and tends to hold more water. But for this class that shouldn't really matter too much. So that's entirely your choice. You'll want a pencil and an eraser, a standard pencil, an HB pencil is totally fine for this. I'm going to use a mechanical pencil. Most pencils are fine, try not to use something too soft. It'll say B in the description of the pencil because if you erase that, it can leave smudges and it makes your finished pieces look sort of dirty. Try and avoid those if you can. You're going to need two containers for water, one for clean and one for dirty water. This can be like I've got old jars or glasses or cups, whatever you like. Some people like to use large containers and just one of them. That's fine as well. You're also going to need an old rag or a paper towel. This is important for drying your brush. You might want a palette if you're going to be mixing colors. That can be something as simple as a dinner plate, preferably white so you can see the color of it better, but you may have pallets already the often come as part of pan sets. But if you don't, don't worry about it. A plate is totally fine. If you're impatient like me, you might want some heat tool to speed up the drying process. I use an embossing heat tool but hairdryers also fine as long as you keep the hairdryer away from your page so that the air from the hairdryer doesn't push the water and the paint into places you didn't want it to go and that's it. Just a reminder of the materials that you're going to need for this class. You'll need some watercolor paints, some paper that's suitable for watercolor, and try to avoid hot-pressed paper. You want cold-pressed, which is sometimes called knot or rough. A brush. The round ones are best and watercolor brushes they're the fluffy ones. A rag or a paper towel, a pencil, which is HB or harder. You might want an eraser and you might want the drying tool, like a hairdryer or a heat gun. So I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye. 4. Water Control: Hi, welcome back. In this lesson we're going to be looking at water control. That's controlling the amount of water that's on your brush and controlling the amount of water that's on your page. I'm going to start by just putting my brush in the water and having it really wet, and putting a dot of water and a color of my choice. If you're painting along with me now, pick one of your paints, if you've got it in a pan, put a drop of water in it and we're doing that to activate the paint. It starts to dissolve the binder that holds that together, which means we can paint with it soon. Then while your brush is still really wet, I want you to do a blob or a rectangle on your page. Now, mine's not quite wet enough, I want this to look like a pool of water. If I hold up and look at it I can see the water laying on the surface. Depending on where you are, what kind of paper you have, the temperature, and the humidity, this might take a lot of water or not very much. Then leave space and next to that blob do another blob. This one is going to have less water. Leave another space and then do another blob, this will have less water again. Then finally do your last blob, and this will have even less water. I hold my paper to the side to get an idea of how wet it is by how shiny it is. If it looks completely flat and shiny like a puddle, that's very wet. If it's shiny but you can see the bumps of the paper, then that's what I would call damp. Then we're going to go back to our color that we activated earlier, swish it around on the brush. You want to have quite a rich deep color on your brush for this. Then what we're going to do is we're going to paint a stripe through those four blobs. You're going to start the stripe on the side of the driest blob and finish it after the wettest blob. Then we're just going to see what the paint and the water does together. When you clean your brush off, make sure you use the type of water you've decided is your dirty water for this. I scrape my brush against the side of the container to get some of the water off, and then I might dry it on my rag. What you should notice, as the way the paint has spread is different, depending on how wet your blob was. The very wet blob will take a while to dry. You might want to use your heat to or go have a cup of tea, and then come back to it and have a look. This spreading of the paint is called dispersion, and it disperses differently depending on how damp your papers is. If your paper is very wet, the pain disperses quite evenly and forms a diluted version of the color. Usually, it will be darkest around the edges of the shape where the wet bed meets the dry paper, and on the inside it will be paler. For the ones that are just damp, you'll see a sort of spreading pattern that will vary depending on the kind of paper you have. What we are going to be looking for in this exercise is the sort you get when the paper is damp, but not really wet. That first blob that was like a big puddle, we don't want that. We want it where when you look at the paper it's shiny from the water, but it's still got the bumps of the page clear. If you haven't tried this along with me, now it's your time to go do it. I will catch you in the next lesson. 5. Paint Control: Hi, welcome back. We're going to move on from water control to paint control. I'd like you again, using your clean water, to activate a color of your choice. Then dry off your brush about, we don't want it too wet. The reason for that is if you keep it really wet and go back to the color you've activated, you'll dilute it so it will be hard to get a strong, rich color from it, which is what we want for this next bit. If your brush has been dried off, go back to the color you want to use and swirl your brush around in it so that you can get that deep rich color. Then I want you to paint a rectangle or square, it doesn't have to be perfect at all. It's just really a blob of color. But if you're using brushes you haven't used before, this is time to get used to it. Then we're going to clean that brush off in the dirty water container, dry it off a bit on the edge and then on your rag. Then we're going to get our brush with some water, but not too much. I've been scraping off on the edge so that it's damp but not too damp. Then next to that shape that you just painted, we're going to paint a longer version of it with water that doesn't quite touch it, but is right next to it. When you're happy that it's the right amount of wet, you're going to connect them back. For me just know I'm looking at it and I can see it looks more like a puddle than that damp look we went for before. So I'm dabbing it with the brush that I dried off to lift up some of the water. You can also dab it with your rag or your paper towel. I just tend to use my brush because it doesn't lift as much water because I need to rewet it a little bit. Now that I used the paper towel, so I'm going to make it a bit wet. Trying to go for that damp look, where it's shiny but you can still see the bumps of the paper. Once I'm happy with that, I'm going to extend that wet bit so that it touches the shape I just painted. You'll see the paint start to spread into that damp area. I'm going to go back to the paint I first used and get more on my brush. Then using the very tippy tip point of this, I'm going to go around the edges of the wet shapes I just painted. Depending on your brush and how you're used it, this might be easier or harder. That's fine, this is just an exercise to get used to controlling the paint on your brush and where you put your brush on the page. If it doesn't work out in a way that you're happy with the first time, just do it again. I'm trailing the tip of my brush around the edge of this shape. Because it's damp, the paint is spreading into that damp shape, which I think is lovely. Then I'm going to take my brush and do some dots inside that wet shape. Hopefully, if you're doing it with me, you'll see your paints spread out in a really lovely random dispersal pattern. I'm just hiding it off a little bit. You'll see from my shape it's not a perfect rectangle, and that really doesn't matter at all. This is just practice. Now, let's do four separate blobs to see how the wetness of the paint affects how much you can control it. I'm going to make four different blobs with water. This time I want them to be all the same kind of wetness. I'm looking for that damp where the paper is shiny, but you can still see the bumps. I'm just going to adjust each of the blobs until I'm happy it's the right level of shininess for this particular experiment. Now, I'm going to dry my brush off, swirl about in my paints and do my first blob. I'm just going to outline the blob. It doesn't have to be perfect, it's just an experiment. Then once it's outlined, I'm going to do three little dots inside the blob. For the next blob, I'm going to get a bit more water on my brush, swirl it about in the paint, and then repeat the process. I outline the blob, doesn't need to be perfect, and then do three dots inside. I'm going to make my brush even more wet, pick up more paint, do the same thing again. For the last blob, I want my brush really wet. Let's get it quite wet, swirl it in the paint again and repeat the process. You should notice quite a big difference in our ability to control the paint depending on how wet the brush is. I'm cleaning my brush off now. I'm just going to have a look at these and get them dry. Now, it's over to you. If you haven't done this along with me, then have a go. You want four damp blobs on your page, and then vary the amount of water on your brush that you mix into your paints. The first one is basically a dry brush and then it gets progressively wetter until the last one is very wet. See how it changes what the paint does. In the next lesson, we'll be learning about all of our paints and how they behave with water. Come join me, I'll see you there. Bye. 6. Swatching: Welcome back. What we're going to do now, well, we're going to learn about the paints that you own. I'm going to be using a set of Winsor and Newton pans for this. I'd like you to use whatever paints you have, and we're going to create swatches. In the last lesson, you did an exercise where you made a blob of paint and then a wet area, a dump area, and then connected the two to see how it spreads. You also painted an outline of the wet area and the dots inside it. That's a swatch. Our kind of a swatch. It's the kind of a swatch I'm going to getting you to do anyway. Let's do that for all of the paint you own. That way you can see how each one of them disperses, because every single paint has its own personality. It's useful to know what that is if you're going to be painting with them. Even from the same brands, different colors behave differently. The same color across different brands will behave differently as well. It's good to know how the paints that you have work. Let us begin. Oh, I should say, if you have loads of paints, if you're a bit of a paint collector, you don't need to do them all. Pick some and let's play with them. The first thing you're going to do is get all of those paints activated. For our watercolors, that involves putting a blob of water in each of the colors that you're going to swatch. I use my paint brush for this, but if you've got a dropper you can use that, some people use a spray like a master, like you would use for plants to get them dump. All of that's totally fine. Whatever your preference is. I'm going to do this in a sketchbook I have where I like to do my swatches. I'm going to take a new page and I'm just going to swatch them in the order that they appear in my set. You can do it whatever way brings you the most joy. I like to have it this way so that when I look at my swatches and look at the paints and set, I can tell which is which quickly. I can also see how they behave so I can pick the one that works best for what I want to do. We're going to swatch it in the same way we just did for paint control. I'll swatch my paints. If you like, you can swatch along with me or wait till the end and then swatch your own paints. I'm starting with this yellow here. I wanted to say a little bit about it because this yellow is different from the other pans in the set. This was a set of Winsor and Newton Cotman pans that my godmother gave to me when she couldn't use them anymore. All of the pans in this set are original except for this yellow because I finished it, so I replaced it. I replaced it with another Winsor and Newton paint, and same color, but it was a different grade. This is Artists' grade instead of the Cotman, I think, which is student grades than the other paints are. Artists' grades are more highly pigmented and easier to activate, so I don't need to swirl my brush around in it like I do with the other colors, like you can see here when I go onto the darker yellow. To speed this bit up, there's a little bit here where I do this first blue. You can see my water control wasn't particularly good because it's spread really quickly and far along it. I left that in because I thought it would be interesting for you to see. You can see how on the leftmost side it's not as intense as it could be because it's diluted by all the water there. I just thought that would be interesting for you to see. Lastly, I do swatch this way, although it's basically invisible. I like to put the brand's name and the official color of the paint that I swatched in a little swatch book so it looks like a little catalog. I think it's really cute and nicely organized to do it that way. You can write it below, above, next to, whatever suits you. You don't have to do it at all if you don't want to. This is entirely optional. Thanks for joining me to swatch your paints. I hope that's been fun and that you've learned something about how your different colors behave. Let's go on to the next lesson where we'll start to use those properties to make really magical fun pictures. See you soon, bye. 7. Sketching Flowers: Hi again,welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to simply and quickly sketch flowers, but don't worry if you're not good at drawing, it's fine. We're going to be practicing some simple shapes and here's the best part, imperfections make it look better, more realistic, so it's quite a win. Now, flowers come in a huge variety of shapes and colors. What we are going to be creating are images that are representative of flowers without the need to replicate exactly any particular flower. We're trying to create the impression of flowers, so don't get caught up in looking exactly like any specific flower. With that in mind, let's crack on. Grab yourself a bit of paper. We're just going to practice the basic shapes that we're going to use for this structured approach. Like I mentioned, there's a teardrop shape where it's wide at one end and it comes to a narrow point. I guess this is your basic flower shape, well, petal shape. It can be long and quite leaf-like, like in a daisy, or very rounded with maybe a little point like rose petals often are. Some are more diamond-shaped like hydrangea with different degrees of thinness and longness. These are all the different petal shapes and there's plenty more, but I think this is a good start. You might want to practice drawing these kinds of shapes. I'll upload this into the resources section. If you want to have a copy, you can save, maybe printout and trace to just practice your shapes, but pick some of these that call to you and we'll put them together to make a flower. Notice that my lines aren't straight. They're a bit wobbly and that's fine because nature doesn't have a whole lot of straight edges when it comes to plants. Go ahead and practice doing those kinds of shapes. You can do on any paper. That's fine. Sketch them out quickly. You don't need to be doing feathery little lines like this and just do confident sweeping lines. Go ahead and practice drawing these shapes. Wobbly lines and asymmetrical shapes are completely fine and remember to leave spaces between the petals. That will become important later on once we start painting them. In the next lesson, we're going to pull this all together to create our magical flowers. Come join me. 8. Planned Project: Hello. Welcome back. So what are we going to do now? Well, we're going to take what we just learned to sketch some flowers, and then we're going to use the painting techniques that we've practiced to make those flowers magical. Are you ready to make some flowers with me? Come on, go get your swatches and your painting materials, and let's do this. Go ahead and activate the colors that you want to use. Maybe activate all of them in case you change your mind while you're painting. Or get your paints ready if you're using tubes or inks. Pick one of those styles of petals that you liked and we're going to draw 3, 4, or 5 of them together to make a flower shape. I usually start in the middle and work my way out, but you don't have to do that. I find it helpful for my placement, but that's a real personal choice. I'm not having the petals touch one another. You'll see my shapes aren't all exactly the same. They're slightly different. I like to put variety in there and that's what you want. Similar shape, but with some variety to keep the interest. I've sketched out, I haven't drawn really heavily, and this pencil doesn't make really dark marks because it's a medium hard pencil. Now that I've got my shapes, I want to take my brush and get it all nice and wet with clean water. I'm going to paint within the lines, more or less, with water. My top tip for this, it can be quite hard to see where your water's going because it's clear. So instead of looking straight down at your page, if you look a bit to the side, you can see the water much more easily. I'm just going to speed this bit up here. I was never that great at coloring in the lines, but that's all right. Sometimes my water goes out the lines too and if that happens to you, don't stress too much about it. A bit of variation is fine. Have a good look. See if it's got the right amount of water, dab off any bits you don't want there, load your brush with paint, and then add your paint to your picture. Now, I am repeatedly dabbing it because I want it to spread quite far from the center and it doesn't seem liking to do it. By touching it again and again, that encourages the pigment to spread. Now I've done that, I'm going to take my tip and run it around some of the edge, and another bit, so I'm going to leave gaps. This gives it that sort texture. If you're not sure what I mean about the difference, how it would look if there weren't gaps, go ahead and do it all the way around as an experiment and see what it looks like. Maybe you'll like that better. You might want to add some splotches in the petals, depending on how dark your paint is. When this is done, you might not see the pencil lines anymore, but you might, and that's not a bad thing. It's just a thing. You can clean off your brush, put this on the side, and sketch another flower, maybe using a different petal shape this time. I'm going to use the diamond-ish shape, the hydrangea shape, if you're into flowers. Although this won't look quite like a hydrangea because they don't overlap. That's fine because we're not trying to replicate reality, we're trying to represent it and just have some fun. We're making things that look like flowers without being any exact flower. I'm going to check how wet they are. They look good to me. I want a purple for this one, so I'm just going to mix this crimson. I really like that crimson. I'm going to add a little bit of this ultramarine blue. Here we go. I really like that color. Start in the tip, let it spread. I like the way that's spreading. That's really pretty. I rather like that. Now it's over to you. I'd like you to create at least two flowers. If you've got a really strong idea for what you'd like to see, then go ahead and do that first. Then maybe mix up, change something, and see how that turns out. Then congratulate yourself, you created something, well done. Please upload it to the project section of this class. If you like, maybe say a little something about how you find this process. In the next lesson, we'll be taking a more free form approach to creating these flowers. So come join me there. Bye. 9. Freeform Project: Hello, welcome back. Let's get started with this free form process. What do I mean by free form anyway? Well, it's not that different from the plant process that we just did, the only variation is that we don't draw out the shapes first, we go straight into painting with water. Now, if the very idea of that fills you with terror, I hear you. It can be really scary to be not able to finesse the shapes before we start painting them. I'd like to share with you a bit of advice that I got from another Skillshare teacher called Marie Noelle Wurm. She says if you're feeling really intimidated and are afraid to start, then the best thing to do is get your brush ready, close your eyes, and just make a mark somewhere, anywhere on the page. Once you've started, once you've got over that initial bump, then the rest of it is much easier. Are you ready to make some flowers with me? Come on, get your supplies and let's do this. First off, if you're using pans, go ahead and put some drops of water and the colors that you want to use for this to get them nice and activated. Then get your brush wet and not super wet, just damp, and then let's paint our shapes. My paper is really thirsty, so I'm going to put quite a bit of water on to start with because I knew I can always lift up later. Once you're happy with the petal shapes that you've got there, damp but not puddles, then go pick the color you want to use, swatch your brush around in it, and we're going to use the very tip of the brush, just like when we were doing swatching. I'm going to dab it at the center bit and let that spread. Then I'm going to trail that fine point around the edge like when we did our swatches, but this time I'm not going to take it all the way around and maybe do a blob in the middle. Very similar to how you did your swatches, take that tape, run it some other way around the edge, maybe for some of your shapes, you want to do it all the way around the edge just so they're not all the same, and we're going to let dispersion do its thing. Remember, where you touch the brush and lift it back up again, you'll get a big splash of paint coming in there where you just move it, there'll be less paint. That's our first flower. This color isn't dispersing as much as the other one. Maybe this is wet or it's just this particular paint. Some I'm having to dab it more to get the paint to come off my brush and spread into the water quite like that detail of the pointy tip. So I'm going to highlight that detail by dropping paint in there. This one I'm going to really crooked petal shapes. I think that can look really nice as well. You might be thinking, "Shelly, why are you doing green? You don't get green flowers." Yeah, that's probably true, but I really like this color, it makes me happy, I like painting with it. So why not? Now it's over to you. Try making at least two watercolor flowers using this technique. Maybe the first one, you want to replicate a flower that you did in the plant process, and then after that, mix up. Then congratulate yourself for taking the time to create something, especially if it scared you. Well done, and please upload your images to the Projects section of this class. If you like, maybe say a little something about how you find the process, particularly how it compared to the plants process. Now we've done both techniques for making these magical watercolor flowers, we're almost finished with this class. Join me in the next lesson where I'll share some final thoughts, and say goodbye. See you there. 10. Bonus: Other Applications: Hi, kidding. We do have one more lesson and then it'll be time to wrap up and this one is super important. It's about what else you can do with this technique. So for a start, you don't have to just do flowers. You can do all kinds of shapes. They look really interesting and cool with this effect and you don't have to limit yourself to one color per shape. Mix up. You can make all kinds of interesting looks. It doesn't have to be just a simple shape. This can be a detail of a much larger piece of work. It's really good for incorporating texture. Think sky, sea, mountains, clothing, hair. All of these things can be given a really dreamlike, magical appearance using this technique. It's some things some of my favorite artists do as well. Here you can see this piece by Marie-Noelle, where she's used dispersion to really dramatic effects on the sky and the sea. Another piece by her, she's used it on the landscape to create this gorgeous texture in the forest which is near this little cottage. This piece by Isa, she's used dispersion with inks to create this really incredible magical looking forests. So go nuts, have fun with this, create stuff. When you do, share it to the projects section so that we can all see, I'd love to see you what you do with this. But now, we really are coming to the end. So come join me in the next lesson where I'll give my final thoughts and say goodbye. See you. 11. Final Thoughts: Hey, you made it. Well done. We've looked at everything from water control to sketching to free-form painting with dispersion and all of that. If there's one thing that I'd like you to take away with you it's this; watercolors can be simple, they can be relaxing, and they can be fun. So as a final reminder, please upload your pieces to the projects section of this class so that we can all share in them. If you liked this class, follow me on Skillshare. Should be a little button here, and you'll get notified when my next class comes out. You might also want to follow me on Instagram and tag me so that I can see your work there. I'd love to see what you create. Please do leave this class a review. I'd really appreciate that. Thank you for taking the time to come on this journey with me and I'll see you next time. Bye.