Make Easy Watercolor Letters | Aura Lesnjak | Skillshare
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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome to this Easy Watercolor Lettering Tutorial!

      0:56

    • 2.

      Lesson 1: Finding and Printing Awesome Fonts

      3:47

    • 3.

      Lesson 2: Painting Time! First Watercolor Wash

      1:48

    • 4.

      Lesson 3: Easily Trace the Font onto the Paper

      2:18

    • 5.

      Lesson 4: 1st Wet-on-Wet Watercolor Application

      4:49

    • 6.

      Lesson 5: Making Happy Designs and Doodles

      2:24

    • 7.

      Lesson 6: Final Wet-on-Wet Watercolor Application

      3:32

    • 8.

      Lesson 7: Removing the Masking and Next Steps!

      3:10

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About This Class

This class will show you how to create a vibrant, dimensional watercolor painting focusing on negative painting techniques...no hand lettering skills needed!

You will learn:

  • How to work with a harmonious limited color palette
  • How to apply masking fluid in multiple layers to achieve depth and create interest
  • How to find free and low-cost incredible fonts or create your own for this project
  • How to easily transfer an image onto watercolor paper
  • How to create multi-colored washes

This class is an excellent starting point for beginning watercolor painters, but these techniques can be used for artists of all skill levels.

Meet Your Teacher

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Aura Lesnjak

Watercolor & Mixed Media Artist

Teacher

I am a self-taught artist, and I have been painting in watercolors for over 20 years.

Although I work fluently in many mediums (watercolors, colored pencils, acrylics, oil paints, and mixed media) my art all expresses a love of color, the natural world, and (quite often) the fantastical and unexpected.

As much as I am in love with creating, I also have a passion for helping other artists through my tutorials on YouTube and courses on my website. I especially love to help beginner watercolor painters go from overwhelmed and frustrated to confident creators who love to paint!

I am super excited to be sharing my projects and processes on Skillshare!

See My Tutorial Videos on Youtube

Visit My WebsiteSee full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Welcome to this Easy Watercolor Lettering Tutorial!: I am aura. Welcome to this class. I'm going to teach you how I made this painting, using naked of watercolor painting techniques and masking fluid and pre made Fonsi confined free on the Internet. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can create vibrant and multi dimensional artworks using a series of washes over masking fluid. This is a great technique for beginners to try, because as long as you can paint with masking fluid inside the lines, anyone can do this painting. The best part is no calligraphy skills are needed. I will show you how you can use pre made fonts you find for free on the Internet. The project I designed for this course is to make a miniature, simple version of the demonstration. It is mostly for the purpose of practising using your masking fluid and also for experimenting with color combinations before beginning a larger artwork. So let's get started 2. Lesson 1: Finding and Printing Awesome Fonts: for this project I used canvas dot com. I love Canada. You can use it for free, and you can do more than just find fonts to print. Obviously, you can use it for social media headers, Logo's block, post graphics infographics so many things that that you want to use for design, especially if you don't have photo shop can. Va is great. I'm just growing down till I see something that I like and this one Parmesan cheese and you can delete any elements of it. And I want to use another one, too. And again, I'm gonna delete those elements that I don't want there. Neil Seal be able to resize Andry, Rearrange the the fonts that are there. So here's a drop down with a font selector. Pretty straightforward, changing the size. Obviously, we need this one bigger. I never wanted make another ah, word in the same font. I just copy it, drag it where you want and change it there. The other nice thing about this system is that it will show you guidelines. You'll see it will pop up and they'll indicate when you actually do have it centered. Now I'm just fiddling a bit lining it up more, and I'm just going to re rename it, then go to download. Since I'm printing it, I will prefer to do it is a a J. Peg. And then that's all there is to that. Now, another resource that you can get more variety of fonts is creative market. But you can pay as little as $15 from some of these designers, and you can get really a large variety of different, um, high quality fonts. So I'm just opening this one, and you can see with one package, you can get all of these a lot of fun. City won't find on camera. Join me in the next session where I show you how to get the printed font onto your watercolor paper. 3. Lesson 2: Painting Time! First Watercolor Wash: to begin the lesson. I set up my watercolor paper on my board. I'm using £140 cold press paper to do the first layer with a big wash. You can choose to either use a round or a flat brush for the first layer. I'm using yellow Oakar, getting it in a nice wet consistency. I want to make sure he makes enough to cover the entire paper because it's a small area. I chose just to do it wet on dry paper, but you can pre what, the paper and do a wet in wet wash if you prefer. I'm not trying to make it even either. I'm kind of going for the more textured look on this one. Now I'm going to blot it a little bit just to get a little more, uh, of a leather looking texture. But you could just let it dry like that as well. Yes, this is Dr and Step One is done 4. Lesson 3: Easily Trace the Font onto the Paper: So I have a graphite stick, and I just use this the the wide flat end, and I rub it along the back. You could also use a pencil, but it will take longer if you don't have a graphite stick. So I'm just going to smooth it along the back as evenly as I can that I'm using a tissue to swirl it around, which will help even it out. And it also pick up extra loose particles that you don't want to have on your paper on your watercolor paper. Make sure it's thick enough so that when you put pressure on it, it'll transfer. I'm gonna center it on my watercolor paper to try toe position where I want it, and I'm going to tape it down so doesn't move around. When used the pressure of a pen, you can use any ballpoint pen. I'm gonna just take a peek to make sure that I can see it, that I'm just going to carefully trace around all the letters. In the next lesson, we will do the first layer of masking fluid 5. Lesson 4: 1st Wet-on-Wet Watercolor Application: Now that our font is traced on tour paper, I'm going to use masking fluid in a find liner applicator to fill. You can also use regular masking fluid with a small paintbrush and just use your paintbrush to fill in the areas of the letters. A paintbrush does give you a little bit more control, but I liked the fine liner because it's faster. Once that's dry to the touch, I'm going to start adding my colors, too, my now dry layer. First, I'm gonna Prewett the paper using my large round mop brush. We're going to paint all these colors wet on wet so that they blend into each other and make pretty patterns. I'm using yellow ochre again, as well as French, ultra marine, blue and quinacrine own magenta. I like French ultra Marine because it is a granulated color or sentimentally, and it makes really interesting speckled um, patterns on the paper when it's dry. It's really kind of a need effect, but you can use any shades of colors that you like, starting with the Joker, and I'm just going to place it in a few random areas around the picture. The yellow car is a nice neutral color, and it goes really well with the pink and the blue. So you're not gonna end up with any muddy colors when you use all of these colors in conjunction with each other? So same with the blue. I'm just jumping around the paper. I'm leaving, uh, blank areas where I'm going to go back in with the pink later. You want to work a little bit quickly because if your paper starts to dry, you're not going to get the same kind of washi blend E effect. - Once I have the paper all covered, I'm going to tilt it around a little bit, too. Just help those colors mixed together a little bit more. You will notice that it will gather around the letters a little bit. And if it gets on the edge of the tape and just wipe it down now, I already know that I'm gonna want more contrast around the letters. Otherwise they may not show up very well later. So I'm gonna paint another, um, layer of darker blues and pinks over that just so that I could make sure that we can really read those letters when we're all done tilted again. Mix it up and again we're gonna let this layer dry, and then we will move on to the next layer of designing and masking. 6. Lesson 5: Making Happy Designs and Doodles : While I'm letting the watercolor paper dry, I'm going to sketch out some of my little leaves and flowers on my original font paper. If you want to do this on a separate piece of paper first, just in case you make a mistake and you want to race and, uh, you know, rearrange it, then. That's fine, too. You could do flowers, leaves pretty much anything you want. And now that I'm done with all of my designs, I'm going to take my graphite stick again and move it on over to the corners so that I could make sure that I can transfer all of the designs onto the watercolor paper. Now, this part can be a little bit tricky, but you want to try to make sure you line up the font right on top of where we already painted again. I'm going to use my pen and just you some pressure to make sure that the designs transfer onto the paper. Now you can see that they're all transferred. Might be hard for you to see that they're on there. But I can see enough. I'm going to keep it, uh, handy in case some lines start to seem a little bit too faded. But again, I'm going to use my my masking fluid in my friend liner. And I'm just gonna fill those in this part will take a while. 7. Lesson 6: Final Wet-on-Wet Watercolor Application: Okay, All of that masking is dry, and we're going to do the same thing we did before with our water colors. But this time I am using again yellow Oakar, still using quinacrine own magenta. But instead of the French Ultra Marine I'm using quit acrid own violet. It's a nice dark color, and it'll really make all of these designs pop when we're done. So I'm gonna wet the paper again. Make sure all of the masking fluid is dry and use a very light touch because you don't want to lift the prior layer of paint. And you also don't want to lift any of the masked off areas. Once it's evenly wet, I'm going to start with my my violet shade. I'm going to focus around the letters again because again, I want to concentrate on that contrast. Gonna tilt it again just a little bit. I want to keep some of that darker color in the center so I don't want to spread it around too much again. Wipe down the sides. You can let it air dry or use a hair dryer to speed up the process. But once it's all dry, we get to do the last and final step, which is the most fun and rewarding. It's taking off all of the masking fluid to see how it looks when it's all finished. 8. Lesson 7: Removing the Masking and Next Steps!: all of our paint is dry. So first I'm going to do is I have some of those little dried bits that are stuck to the mask. Include We don't want it to spread onto the paper as we lifted off. So I'm just going to get it cleaned off in these areas were kind of puddled on top of the But Dr Masking, I'm gonna use this special square everything that is used for lifting masking fluid. You can also use the tip of your finger again. This part can take a little time, but it will be worth it. You can already see some really nice contrast around those flower designs. You can see the texture of that French Ultra Marine, too. I'm just gonna jump ahead and speed up a little bit. I think you can kind of start to see why we did this in a couple of layers of masking because the flowers and leaves and other designs have a little bit of contrast. But the letters have the most interest. It just gives it a really nice dimensionality and really brings the text forward and pushes the designs back a little bit into the picture frame. Rub your hand over to make sure you got all of them asking and it's done. All you need to do is sign it and frame it. When you get comfortable with this process, you can even make it more complex, using multiple layers of masking fluid and layers of paint, letting it dry and keep going. Just make sure that the most intense layer, the brightest contrast you want to have masked off first. And then that's how you will go about planning that. Thank you so much for joining me today. Have fun Bye.