Mastering Water Control: Harness the Power of Water in Watercolors

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Water control is one of the most difficult concepts to explain or teach in regards to watercolors. But it's also perhaps the most valuable skill one can learn about the medium. It is the absolute foundation of watercolor painting as all of our values and luminosity or lack thereof, are derived from our ability to guide the water across the paper effectively and with purpose. In fact, I myself have said before that I often spend more time painting with water than with actual pigments. Hello everyone and welcome to mastering water control. Harness the power of water in watercolors. My name is Denise Soden and I am a full-time water colorist and educational content creator. I have always been the artistic type, and several years ago I completely fell head over heels with watercolor painting. Paired of my professional background and environmental education, I changed the direction of my career four years ago. I now create detailed reviews and pigment resources on YouTube, real-time wildlife tutorials on Patreon, and detailed classes here on Skillshare exploring my various fascination with this incredible medium. I'd hate to start off a class by simply saying that this isn't really a skill that is taught but rather learned over time and experience with your supplies, but truth be told, that is what most water-colorist including myself would answer to this question. Water control is ultimately a feeling and a relationship between you and your supplies that will take time to fully grasp and harness as you move through this journey. However, I've spent the last several years trying to figure out how to approach this complex subject and I've spent the last several months working very hard on this class, trying to make the most helpful exercise as possible to get you started with this relationship. We'll learn how the supplies that we use affect our watercolor paintings, how to paint flat and graded washes, how to control values in combination with the white of the paper, and how to glaze effectively. By the end of this class, you will have a better handle on these skills which you can then apply to our class project painting, and then out into the world as you move along with your watercolor journey. I truly hope that the lessons in this class live up to your expectations and help to demystify this complicated subject. Although this will take your time, dedication and patience to master, I can't wait to see what you create in this class. 2. Overview of Materials: This class will be dedicating a fair amount of time to looking at each of our supplies individually and discussing how they impact water control. For that reason, we're not going to be spending a ton of time talking about our materials here, but I will list them off so that you can prepare your workspace. You'll need a couple of traditional Watercolor brushes and I say traditional as opposed to water brushes that hold the water in the handle as that would be a subject for a different class or perhaps a part two to this one. I would recommend at least a size eight and a size two round if you have nothing else to go on or something similar based on what you like to use. You'll also need some water color paints. For this class, the quality or type doesn't really matter. We'll explain more about that in just a few moments but if you would like more information on your Watercolor pigments and paints, go ahead and check out my Watercolor Mixing and Pallet Creation Classes here on Skillshare. You will need Watercolor paper and we'll talk more about cellulose versus cotton, etc when we get there, but I really don't recommend using anything less than Watercolor paper as the lessons that we'll cover will be rather lost on other types of mixed media or thinner papers. You'll need two water containers, one for clean water and one for dirty rinse water, a clean reusable rag or paper towels for blotting off your brushes, a board to tape your paper to if you want, as well as masking tape to do so. However, both are completely optional depending on how you prefer to work. This class also has a set of worksheets which you can find in the Projects and Resources tab below this video. They are technically optional you can free hand everything if you want, but you also have the option of printing those worksheets directly on a Watercolor paper. If you have a printer that can do that, or you can print off the sheets and trace them on to your Watercolor paper with whichever method you prefer. If you are going to be tracing or free handing your worksheets, you will need either a pencil or waterproof ink to do so. You can find a link of class product recommendations in my Amazon shop using a link in the Projects and Resources section below this video [MUSIC]. 3. How Paints Affect Water Control: Before we get started talking about direct sources of water control, let's first talk about our watercolor paints. As I stated in the material section in this class, you are not required to have any particular brand or type of watercolor, but there are some things that you should be aware of based on what you're using. Some watercolors prefer only to work from fresh tubes of paints, while others insist that pans are much easier to work with. This ultimately is up to personal discretion and the way that you paint as well as how large your work will have an impact on your preference. For beginners, I would recommend working from dried pans for a couple of different reasons. It's easier to control how much pigment you're adding to your water, and it's also easier to keep your pans uncontaminated from other colors. You'll produce less paint waste if you're willing to work with dried pigment as well as you can rewet anything that dries on your palate. Artists who have a bit more experience under their belt in all of these areas may choose to work with the creaminess of fresh tube paints instead. If you paint in large format, it's also much easier to mix up large amounts of paint by pouring fresh paint from the tube and mixing them up in large wells. This will save a lot of time and effort, rather than trying to rewet large quantities from your dried pan paint. Watercolors are made from pigments, gum arabic, which binds the pigment to the paper and a variety of other ingredients that depend on each brands preference for their own unique formulas. Two types of common additives are humectants, and flowing agents. Humectants like honey or glycerine, allow the paints to draw moisture from the air. Brands that use honey in particular like M Graham and [inaudible] tend to remain more moist even in a dry pan than other brands that do not use honey like Daniel Smith. The reason this is important in our discussion of water control is that it will impact the amount of water that you need to use to physically pick the paint up on your brush. In general, in watercolor painting, you'll also need to add more water to the paper if you want your paints to spread out further across the surface. Some brands or specific pigments are reluctant to move on their own, so you may need to put more water on the paper than you would normally like to just to create a flowing effect. Adding so much water can dilute or disaturate your colors, so some brands opt to use a flowing agent to help the process along. Flowing agents like ox gall or synthetic ox gall may be added to paint to help increase the rate of which the paint flows across your wet paper. Brands like [inaudible] and [inaudible] are known for some of these components in their formulas and have paints that dance across the page with less effort and less water than some other brands, keeping their paints very luminous in the process. Whether or not you want your paints to move on your own or stay put is entirely up to the individual artist, but just keep in mind that these factors can impact your relationship with water control. In general, student quality paints contain the last pigment overall when compared to professional paints of the same color. This is why student brands can be offered a less expensive price points since pigments are generally the most expensive ingredient in a paint. If a paint doesn't contain as much pigment, then what accounts for the extra volume of paint in student brands? Student quality paints may have more binder, glycerine, and/or other colorless fillers in their formulas. Adding excessive binder or glycerine can cause paints to dry on your paper with a shiny surface, a quality that usually is not considered desirable in watercolors. Adding too much colorless fillers can cause these paints to appear chalky, also not something that most people want from their paints. You can of course still create beautiful artwork using student quality paints, but knowing about these aspects of the paints will help you to better understand the relationship with water control. As long as we prepare ourselves with this knowledge, we can combat these potential road blocks and move forward. For the class exercises that we'll be doing in just a little bit, I have chosen to use Da Vinci watercolors. They are an affordable professional brand of paint if you live in the United States. They do not contain honey, but they do still rewet decently well, and the paint's disperse a moderate amount, but not overly so. I figured there a middle ground for all of these different factors, and I'll also be using them from dried paints as this is both my personal preference and we'll be working on smaller formats. 4. How Brushes Affect Water Control: The main method for adding or removing water from ones workspace, is with a paintbrush, and this will likely be one of the most important factors to consider when learning about water control. In this class, I will be using round brushes as my main examples, but the same concepts can be applied to any brush shape. The first general assessment we should make when considering a brush is its size. As common sense would dictate, larger brushes hold more water and more paint, while smaller brushes hold less. If you need a large area covered such as a large sky wash, bigger brushes will be easier to accomplish this task. Not only because it is physically larger and therefore can cover more space, but also because by holding more water the large brush will need fewer trips back to our pallet to reload, resulting in a smoother, less streaky wash overall. On the flip side, one might want to use a smaller brush for fine details. Some larger brushes are perfectly capable of making small marks on your paper. But depending on the brush, some might be prone to dispensing more water than others. Doing so in such a small space may cause an undesired look or take too long for your liking to dry. The next factor to consider is fiber type. The main terms that you'll likely hear for this discussion are synthetic versus natural. However, it does go a little bit deeper than just that. Let's start with natural hair brushes. The two most popular natural hair types in watercolor painting are specifically sable and squirrel. Sable brushes are soft, strong, come to a very fine point, and provide a decent amount of spring or in other words, it can retain its shape very well if pushed on. Squirrel brushes have extremely fine hairs that are often even softer than Sables and are commonly used to make mop brushes and quills. This type of brush does not have very much bring at all, which means it can flop over and lose its shape, but it does hold a tremendous amount of water. The most common synthetic brushes likely to be available in your local art store are made of taklon, a synthetic polyester fiber found in Artis and makeup brushes. Artis brushes made of taklon, can either be white or gold and are typically, a bit more stiff than either of the natural hair brushes that I mentioned. This material is extremely resilient to damage and holds up well for artists who are a bit rougher on their brushes, but they do hold less water over all. They are also the most affordable option by quite a large margin. Then there are synthetic brushes that are made to mimic natural hair such as stable or squirrel. These are continuously improving over the years as technical advances are made. One example of a purely synthetic squirrel brush are those found in the Princeton Neptune line. Though my personal favorite brushes, are those in this silver brush black velvet line, which are made from squirrel and synthetic scroll blends. I find the best of both worlds here, though they are extremely soft brushes and might not be preferred by beginners. The size and fiber type will determine how much a brush capable of holding. But what does that capacity means in terms of actually painting? For that, we should take a moment and briefly look at capillary action. The scientific term capillary action is the ability of a liquid to flow into narrow spaces without or even against, the aid of additional forces such as gravity. This can be directly witnessed if you touch a dry paint brush, gently to a vessel of water and a watch as the fibers draw water up between the fine bristles, even against the forces of gravity and into the brush. We don't have to dive further into the science of this. But what it basically means is that a dry brush will want to pick up water either from your water bucket or a wet piece of paper. In the opposite direction, a completely saturated brush will want to deposit water on a dry or damp surface, such as a piece of watercolor paper or a paper towel. This movement of water based on the saturation of your brush and your paper, is the heart of water control, in watercolor painting. We can apply large amounts of water to dry paper by fully saturating, a very thirsty brush and spreading the water out over the paper surface in one or more brush loads depending on the need. If we find ourselves with too much water on our paper, we can also dry off our brush on a clean towel and touch the thirsty brush to the wet paper surface and the brush will once again, soak up as much water as it is capable of holding. You can repeat this process as many times as necessary until you've removed the desired amount. One more little note is that your brush can turn into an unintended vessel of water, if we're not careful. The metal section of your brush, called a ferrule, may collect water drops each time you go to rinse your brush. While this might not be problematic on larger brushes with larger water capacities, you'll want to watch for this when using small brushes in detailed areas, that water drop may succumb to gravity and fall down your brush with the small bristles being unable to hold the extra water and drop onto your paper. This has ruined many a details in my day. So be sure just to keep an eye on those water drops on your ferrules. If you do come across this issue, you can use your towel to carefully wipe off any excess water on the ferrule, bonus tip that you can also use this little trick to remove any excess water from the top of your brush fibers too. If you have a loaded paintbrush and you don't want to waste the pigment, but you want there to be less water, you can wick away the water by touching a towel to the top edge of the fibers, rather than the tip of the brush. For this class, you can use what you have on hand, but feel free to refer back to this information to make assessments about the tools and perhaps identify what you do or don't like about your current brushes. [MUSIC]. 5. How Paper Affects Water Control: In the years of teaching both children and adults, in person, it was a common occurrence to see students attempt to use watercolors with too little water, often coming from other mediums like oils or acrylics. There seems to be a natural tendency to try and use them as one would one of these other mediums. However, watercolors are unique and approaching them in this way might rob you of seen their true beauty at gliding across the page with ease in a suspension of water. On the flip side, of course, there are also some new comers that might encounter the opposite issue. Using too much water can cause issues like blooms or color flowering while the paper dries on evenly and presses dark rings of pigment around the outside of a wash. In this section of the class, we're going to talk about the importance of your watercolor paper, how its type may affect how it absorbs water and water color, and how to recognize different drying stages. This isn't going to be an entirely in-depth analysis of watercolor paper as that has enough information to be its own class. We will cover the important topics as they relate to water control. The biggest consideration you'll have to decide between whether you're using cellulose or cotton paper. Cellulose paper is made from wood pulp, which is understandably less absorbent than paper that is made from 100% cotton. Since cellulose is less absorbent, you can imagine that the water will have a tendency to sit on top of the paper rather than sinking in immediately. Over time it will either absorb into the paper and or evaporate. But this method of drying is quite different from higher-quality papers that are made from cotton. They will leave more pigment on the surface of the paper rather than inside of its fibers. While it's absolutely possible to create wonderful artwork on this surface, and some people might even prefer it. It is important to know that you'll pick up different habits, even if subconsciously to cope with this method of painting. Cotton papers, on the other hand, have a tendency to absorb water and pigment more readily and evenly. In my opinion, which is shared by many other professional artists. Painting it with cotton paper is a much more intuitive and easier process to manage. Therefore, if you're trying to decide which of your supplies to upgrade, I would recommend starting here. In this clip that you're watching these samples of watercolor were painted out with the same amount of concentration of pigment over the same amount of drying time. You can see there's a vast difference between the way that the end results look between the cellulose and cotton papers in both their texture and the vibrancy. The next decision to make about your paper is the surface type. The kind of default in a watercolor paper is cold press or not, which stands for not hot press. This surface has a light to moderate amount of texture which might vary depending on the brand. The slight tooth allows the paper to better grip the water and pigment, provides grooves for granulation to settle on if applicable, and tends to stay damped for a little bit longer, which allows the artists more time to paint in kind of mess with each of their washes. This is my preferred texture and the one I'd recommend for nearly all beginners. Hot press paper has a smooth surface and a primarily see it used for portraits as well as some floral work. Hot press paper generally dries faster than cold press, so you'll have less time to work with a wet wash, but the washes will also dry faster in between layers. If that's the style you prefer to work in, It's much, much less forgiving than cold press in terms of the way that your washes dry. I would only recommend it for more advanced water colorist. There's also a third surface called a rough. This has even more texture than a cold press, but is much less common. This texture is best suited for very textural pieces. Not surprisingly, where the artist wants to retain the look of the paper, even through the paints. Watercolor papers come in many different ways, but the most common are 90 pound or 185 GS M, a 140 pound or 300 GS M, and 300 pound or 640 GS M. I would recommend a 140 pound for most general-purpose applications. 90 pound is a lighter weight paper that can't handle as much water and is often found in watercolor sketch books. It may be a more cost-efficient option for artists who are exceptionally light handed with the amount of water they use or good for practice, but do be aware that the paper will likely buckle. 300 pound paper, which is roughly twice a sturdy as a 140 pound paper, is capable of absorbing a lot of water and will stand up to just about whatever you throw at it. It is, however, very expensive, so I'd reserve this option for really polished pieces or if money is not a factor in buying your art supplies. For this class, I will be using a 140 pound arches watercolor paper, which is very ubiquitous and it's the one I use most often. I also want to add that for any weight of paper. You can do something called stretching your watercolor paper, which is a process that involves water, your paper, a board, and either staples or gummed artist's tape. It allows your paper to dry, flatter and buckle less while you're in the painting process, but it's not something that I'm an expert in, so I would recommend that you find another tutorial, our class, if that is something you're interested in learning how to do. None of the exercises that we're doing in this class today will require it. The last thing in this section that I want to address or the different drying stages and when it is or isn't safe to add additional brush strokes to a given area. When you first lay down AGC brush, the paper will obviously be quite wet. During this time, you can continue to add both paint in water to a wash and they will continue to flow and mingle freely. You can continue to add more paint and water in this way until the water begins to absorb into the paper, leaving a moderate shine that without raised water above the page. When it reaches this stage, you can add a little bit more paint in water, but you should do so sparingly and a much more conservative manner. Once the wash begins to lose its shine, we are walking a very fine line. You can add driers strokes of paint with little to no water and the wash will soften off those edges. However, if you introduce water during this stage, blooms will begin to form once the paper no longer looks wet or even damp, but it's still cool to the touch. We have officially reached the danger zone and it is time for a hands off approach. You do not want to touch this area with a brush until it is fully dry, unless you're specifically wanting to create blooms, will explore creating and preventing blooms a little bit later in the class. Once you've paper has fully dried and is no longer cool to the touch, you can glaze and new layer safely without risk of bloom's. 6. How Environment Affects Water Control: Before we start our class exercises, there's one more thing I wanted to just throw out there, and that is that we all live in different environments and climates. Environmental factors will play a large factor in how faster workspace dries and I don't just mean your paper, but also your pants and your palletes. If you live in a dry climate or perhaps it's winter and your heater is running all the time or like I am now in Central Texas summer with the fans running constantly, your workspace might dry out more quickly than those who live in humid environments. This means that you'll have to consistently add more water to all of your work surfaces in order to get the same results as someone living in one of those more tropical climates. On the flip side, if you live in a very tropical place, you're going to want to be careful not to add too much water to your palette and your paper. They're going to take a really long time to dry, colors might get washed out if you're not too careful, and on your palette, you might also be running the risk of growing mold. In any case, you'll want to make sure that you allow your palletes to dry out in between uses, and in general, you'll have to allow for more time for your layers to dry between washes. For reference while you're watching this class to let you know what my environment is like it is the middle of Central Texas summer, as I mentioned, my art space usually stays between 76 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit and it's usually around 50 percent humidity with a fan running all the time. While I can't replicate this exact environment for you and your home, it'll at least give you a basis of what I'm working with and why there might be something a little bit different in your own space. 7. Exercise 1: Application Methods: Welcome to the first class exercise. As I mentioned in the materials section, this class has five exercise worksheets which are optional to print and can be found in the resource section below the class. You're more than welcome to follow along by just free handing these lessons. But for those of you who want something that's had more polished, you're welcome to use the worksheets. If you have a printer that uses pigment ink instead of dye and can print on watercolor paper, that of course will be the easiest option. I however, do not have a printer like that, so I printed my worksheets out on regular printer paper and then reentering them to watercolor paper using a light tablet. Light tablets or light boxes are a great way to transfer line art for many different watercolor needs in general. So if you're interested in picking one up, I've linked mine in the Amazon class supply list. However, this is not the only way to transfer an image. If you have a bright window, you can just use that or you can even go further back into our old-school methods and use transfer paper or a graphite rub. But this isn't a class on transferring images. So let's jump on into our first exercise. In this first lesson, we will be exploring the various ways of putting paint to paper. In the first box, we're going to be painting a wet paint on dry paper. You want the consistency to be wet enough to glide across the paper easily, but not so wet that it's in a sopping puddle. In the second box, we're going to be using a dry paint on a dry paper, which is going to give us something called a dry brush effect. This isn't a texture that you're going to use all the time, but it is great for adding texture in detail to some of your finishing layers on a painting. The third box is wet paint on wet paper. Now, even though I don't use this very often, it is very common in the watercolor world and a lot of abstract or flora painters may implement this technique. You're going to wet down the entire box with water before bringing paint to it and then you're going to use the same consistency of paint that you used from the first box and put it in to this one. This is going to let the paints flow pretty wildly around that box and you're going to lose a lot of control. One of the great things about this method is it really lets watercolors be watercolors. In the fourth square we're going to wet the box again with water and this time we're going to use the consistency of paint from the second box, using a dryer consistency paint on a wet paper will still allow the paint to diffuse, but it'll stay in a more centralized area. This can be great if you still want to have the nice flowery texture of a wet and wet wash with a little bit more control. In the fifth box, we're going to do something that is called softening off. We're going to once again put wet paint on dry paper, and then we're going to create a graded wash essentially by adding water to the tail end of this area. I mentioned earlier that a wet paint on dry paper is what I use most often, but I also use that in conjuncture with this method. By adding the water after the patient is already on the page, I find I have a lot more control over where I put the paint and it's my preferred application technique. You can do this exercise once or as many times as you would like to get comfortable with the different methods before continuing on to exercise two. 8. Exercise 2: Flat Washes: In our second exercise, we're going to practice painting flat washes with a variety of different brushes and with different application techniques. A flat wash is one that is uniform across the entire surface, ideally with no streaking or blooms. First, start by choosing your brushes. For this exercise, I'd like you to pick at least one large and a one small brush. Then the remaining three can be different sizes, shapes, or fibers depending on what you have on hand and what you want to experiment with. I chose to use a squirrel and synthetic squirrel blend from Silver Black Velvet and a size eight round, a white taklon size seven round, a white taklon size two round, a golden taklon size four flat brush, and a half inch silver black velvet flat brush. You can write the names of the brushes you're using on the column headers to keep them straight. I will be using fresh two paint for this demo so that I can mix a large amount of wash that I'll be using consistently across my entire worksheet. While I would recommend this method if you have two paint available to you, you're still welcome to use [inaudible] if that's what you have on hand. Though, do note that it will be harder to keep the boxes consistent across the entire page. It's extra practice, right? Just as a reminder, for all of these lessons, I'm using cotton watercolor paper. If you're using cellulose, it will be more challenging to create consistent flat washes, especially in large areas. The first two rows on the worksheet are labeled with application techniques for you. The first row will be wet on dry, while the second will be wet on wet. We'll come back to the third row and just a little bit. You're going to use your first brush to pick up your wash and moving from one edge to another, you're going to bring that wash across the box. Since I'm right-handed, I'm moving from left to right. But you can also do right to left or top to bottom, whichever is easiest. The spaces on the worksheet are small, but it's important to get into the habit of working from one edge to another in a flat wash, since backtracking may lead to blooms. You can go over this small square to even things out if you are quickly, but keep in mind that those drying stages I mentioned earlier will play a factor. Once it starts to dry, you'll need to leave it alone. Going back over it again will cause blooms. You're going to continue across the row using your different brushes. While the visual aim of this worksheet is to be relatively consistent, the importance of this lesson comes not with the result, but the observations along the way of how you're different brushes handle this task. Which brash was easiest to use? Which gave you the most trouble? You can even make notes if you'd like. For the second row, we will repeat the brushes but use a wet on wet technique instead of a wet on dry. Pre-wetting the paper, especially for large washes can be very helpful for getting consistent flat washes. However, we have to remember that with more water the paint will lean towards wanting to be more diluted. I encountered this in the entire second row, which resulted in all the box being slightly lighter than my first. After you've completed both rows and made your observations of the brushes and the results, I'd like you to choose whichever technique was more difficult for you and repeat it in the third row. For me that was the wet on wet. But if you had trouble getting the paint to flow across dry paper, you might want to practice some more with the dry. You'll repeat the same steps you did before, but altering them a bit to hopefully get the results you're looking for this time. If you do paint in a larger format and the smaller exercises aren't as helpful, feel free to use much larger areas, even full sheets of paper if you want practice and making flat washes in larger spaces. 9. Exercise 3: Graded Washes: For this exercise, we'll be practicing graded washes. I mentioned this term earlier when we tried to soften the edges on our first exercise. In short, a graded wash is a wash that transitions smoothly from dark to light or from one color to another. Here we are going to practice the type that go from dark or highly pigmented to light with mostly water. I've created a swatch sheet with little coy fish that I'll be using for this demonstration. You can choose any colors that you'd like but I do recommend using a variety of colors, including ones that are naturally dark and naturally light, which I'll explain a little bit more as we go. The first fish I am working on has been painted in a cool red which is a naturally vibrant and moderately valued color. I will paint the fishes space with a strong concentration of the paint, making sure that the mixture is still wet enough to glide across the paper. Once I get to the front fins, I'm going to rinse my brush gently in water and with a lightly damp brush begins to pull a paint that's already on my paper down the body of the fish. I'll repeat this process a couple of times to get a nice smooth gradient and by the time that I get to the point where the body meets the tail, it should be a very pale wash of color. Rinsing my brush a final time, I'm aiming to make the tail as a light as I possibly can and flow into the white of the paper. The next fish is a warm yellow and I want you to know how lightly valued this color is even at full strength. Light colors are often harder to gauge when doing graded washes or value studies because there isn't as wide of a change between the mass tone in the white of the paper. You will continue the same process that we did on the first fish but I want you to pay extra close attention to make sure that the gradient is noticeable. The green fish is another moderately valued color like the red so the process will be similar, but additional practice is never a bad idea. As we come to the purple fish, you'll notice immediately how dark this color is and its mass tone it's almost black. Here, we are going to have the opposite problem that we did with the yellow. Instead of having too few steps between the mass tone and fully tinted out, will need to be careful to pace ourselves well enough to see the various stages of both light and dark. The blue fall somewhere in between the moderately and darkly valued colors. Now that we've had practice with both, we can approach the gradient accordingly. There are only five coy on this sheet, but feel free to print or repeat as many as you'd like to practice this skill. This is also a good time for me to remind you that you can begin uploading each of your exercises to your class project here on skill share. By the end of the class, you'll have a nice little portfolio of exercises that will be great reminders of how hard you've worked and how far you've come. 10. Exercise 4: Creating and Preventing Blooms: Every water colorist is sure to come across blooms at some point while painting. Also called backgrounds or color flowering, blooms occur when a wash dries unevenly or when new water is introduced to an area that has already started to dry. When a wet area is against a damp or nearly dry area, the water will try to push into the dryer space. When it does that, it carries any pigment in the wash and pushes it to the outer rim of the puddle. On this picture, you can tell that water was added here and here, pushing out to the nearly dry tails of these graded washes. Today we will be learning how to intentionally create and prevent these blooms. Similarly to how we did the flat wash exercise, you'll have one row creating blooms, one row preventing them, and then choose whichever you want more practice with in the third row. To be honest, I had a blast with this one and I hope you do too. I'm going to start by laying down flat washes as quickly as I can across the top row. They don't have to be perfect as we are going to be wreaking havoc on them shortly. Once you have your boxes ready, it's time for the fun part. With a clean brush, pick up some clean water and gently touch your brush a few times. Show one corner or one-half of the square, then repeat all the way down the line. Due to filming this, the first couple of boxes dried a bit more quickly than I originally intended before I was able to add water. But I'm actually glad they did as it will allow me to show you how blooms look when introduced at various stages of drying. I'll point this out more at the end of this video clip in the final scan. In the second row, we're going to be trying to prevent blooms or in other words, just make flat washes. However, the difference from the second class exercise that we did and this one is that we are intentionally going to put away too much water down on our paper. Here, we're only going to work one or two boxes at a time in order to make sure we don't allow too much time to pass before saving our washes. Once your box is loaded up with water we will practice removing water with a thirsty clean brush. You can repeat this process as many times as needed to kind of ferry the water off of the wash until it is smooth again, and then continue down the line. For my third row, I decided to create more blooms not only because they're ridiculously fun, but also to show you how blooms look like when your paper hasn't dried quite as much as my first row did. I worked much more quickly this time and was able to drop the water and when the boxes were still nice and wet. On the finished scan, you can see the first row of blooms look a little bit more like a head of cauliflower or perhaps broccoli since they're green. The dark ridge makes it really clear that water was pushing back into this damp paper. In the third row, these blooms are much softer and show slight veining. They are a bit more loose and free and I actually think they look really gorgeous. If you're trying to create blooms for a textural effect in a painting, be sure to play around on a scrap piece of paper to estimate how long you should let your wash dry before introducing additional water. 11. Exercise 5: Controlling Value: [Music] Finally, in our class exercises, we have arrived at value. Everything we've been learning in this class will ultimately help us to control water and none is more important than learning how to harness the power of value. Often one of the biggest hurdles that new watercolors must overcome is learning how to balance value in a painting. The white of our paper is the basis for all of our whites, light tones and overall luminosity. It's understandable that we're afraid to cover it up. How we are failing to add any or enough dark values to a painting will cause it to look incomplete. Therefore, we must understand and not be fearful of exploring value through water control. In this lesson, we will be exploring how to create different values on the palatte, as well as how to glaze and get darker values directly on your paper. You may find that you gravitate towards one or the other, but most of us will use a combination of both in our artwork. The first two rows that we're going to be working on, I'm calling measured value, which means we're going to use the brush to measure out how much water we're putting in our mixtures. I'm using a silver black velvet size eight for this first row. This is the larger of my toothbrushes. Then using perylene green, a very darkly valued color. You can use any darkly valued color that you like, such as Payne's gray or in the throne blue. In this first square, I'm going to be using as quickly as they possibly can, as darkly as I can with as little water as possible. It is going to be hard to scoot across the page, but just do your best to get it there as best as possible. For the second square, we're going to dip our brush once in clean water and add that to the paint that we have on our palate. We're measuring the amount of water in a term I like to refer to as a brush load. It's where I'm bringing one brush load of water into the paints that I have on my palate. I'm mixing up the next square. I'm going to repeat that process for the next couple of squares on this page. So, one dip in the water and move that over to my palatte. This will incrementally lighten up our boxes and give us a nice base town or starting value for the other rows that are going to be doing on this page. [music] By the time you get to the last box, you will need to rinse off your water more completely because we've been adding paint to our clean water, it's no longer nice and pristine. So feel free to get some clean water and make sure that this last box is really nice and bright. In the second row we are going to be using a smaller brush. I still want to refer to this as being a measured value as we are still doing the same type of thing. But because our brush is so tiny, we're going to have to add a lot more water in terms of brush loads into the pigment. Ultimately, for this row, I didn't try and count brush loads as much as I tried to match the color that was up above it. Because this brush is so much smaller, it's a size two instead of a size eight, it is going to be harder especially to cover this first box. However, after that, I'm just going to do my best to make the paint on my palatte match the color of the paint on the paper. Do you remember that watercolors lighten as they dry. When you see this white paint goes down, it's going to be slightly darker than the row above it. But by the time it drives, they were pretty close. [Music] Now that we have our controlled or measured value down by mixing on our palatte, we're going to try and achieve darker values through glazing. So, instead of individual boxes, I just have long rows here and we're going to be working backwards from the right side of the paper to the left. I'm going to be using the lightest value I can to fill in the entire box, with this first glaze. I've switched to a larger brush, but instead of using the round brush, I am using a flat brush. It's the half-inch silver black velvet, and for the bottom row, I believe I'm going to be using that size for flat shader that you saw earlier in the class. So, I'm just using enough water to make sure that these glazes all the way across the paper and then smoothing it out so that I don't have any back-ends. I'm going to repeat that process on the bottom row, which will take a little bit longer because the brush size is much smaller. I think this is one of the hardest areas to fill out of the entire class just because of the relative size compared to the brush. But it does give us a good feel of how much harder these tasks can be if we do so to ourselves, just to be clear, I wouldn't recommend doing a glaze in this tiny little brush. But as with the rest of this class, I just want you to get a feel for your supplies and what tools are correct for which jobs? Once these first layers are completely dry, we will begin the second glaze. What you'll do is get a glaze that is just slightly more pigmented than the one you put underneath it and layer it on top. Unfortunately, I am so sorry to say that some of my video footage got corrupted for this, so I'm missing a couple of layers. However, we get our footage back at the fourth glaze, fifth total layer. I can show you the process with those. By the time we get to these darker layers, we do need to increase the pigment load a fair amount just to get close to the ones that were in the measured value rows. If you remember back to our fish when we were talking about how many increments are in that really dark purple. We just don't have enough room in these six stages to cover every single nuance of this color, which is what the glaze would do for you. But really this exercise is to show you that you can still build up color, even if you've already put down paint on your page. It'll approximate building up in layers, which is something we often do in watercolors. I always found this assignment really frustrating in school because you have to wait so long for the layers to dry in betweens if you're frustrated at me, I really apologize. You could use a heat tool or a hairdryer to speed up the process. But I ultimately put it in here because I feel like it's an important tool to know regarding water control. We can either find the right values the first time or if we don't, we don't have to fear anything by layering another color on top of it. So, I hope that this lesson has helped you to explore those different avenues and your different tools in accomplishing those goals. Here's the final scan of the project, and I think I did a pretty good job of matching the values for the most part. You can see towards the last three sections of the glaze value, they're not quite as deep as the measured value. As I explained before, that's to be expected. I hope that you survived these class exercises. Don't forget to upload them to your class project and let's move on to the main event.[Music] 12. Class Project: Rhinoceros Part 1: We've finally made it to the class project, and it's time to put all of our newly found or brushed up skills to use. You can find this reference photo and the line art for this project in the projects and resource tab below this class. If you feel comfortable sketching, you can do so or you can just transfer the liner and get right to painting. This detailed tutorial will be best viewed on a desktop monitor or other large screen. Since this is a water control class, I felt it important to include my workspace and views that you can see both my water containers and my towel. But that does mean that the area that I'm actually painting in is quite small and will be hard to see on a mobile device. My Workspace is set up with a silver black velvet size eight round brush. One container of water on the right for dirty brushes, and one on the left for fetching clean water and some water color paints. Although this palette is rather large, I am only actually going to be using two colors from Schmincke; neutral tint, and mahogany brown, the latter of which only comes in at the very end of this painting. You can use any neutral tint or gray tone that you have on hand and a burnt sienna would substitute while for the brown. As for the subject, I thought long and hard about what image I wanted to use for this demonstration. I wanted to choose something that would really allow us to focus almost entirely on water control with little distraction from intense detail or bright color. The lack of fur, feathers and scales will allow us to play with the water and value freely, while the texture of the skin and the horn will bring the interests to the piece as well as give us a technical challenge. Although I have been at this rhinoceros more than half a dozen times myself, often when I'm instructing new students, I somehow never get tired of him. I am going to start off the piece by putting a wet paint on dry paper. This video is going to be in real time, so i am not going to be able to voice over every single moment of it because I am sure you will get tired of hearing me talk. I'm not going to have any music on in the background for this. So there will be patches of just kind of silence, but that's that you can either put on your own music or podcasts, or movie or YouTube or whatever you'd like to do while you're watching this video. And hopefully it's not too distracting. So here I'm cleaning off my brush and using a lightly damped brush to soften off some of the edges that I've put down. Now I don't usually soften off every edge.I'd like to leave a few little hard spaces to create an interesting texture on the piece. I continue doing this until the entire area looks like what I want it to. And then just to reiterate, I mentioned before that we were going to be using one single color for the vast majority of this painting. That way you don't have to worry about color changes or anything like that. So everything that you're seeing until I tell you otherwise, is with the neutral tint. We're going to be working with a couple of different layers in this painting. And I will have a little slides that tell you when I walked away from the painting and let it dry. At that time, you could either take a break or use a heat tool to dry your painting before moving on to the next step. Here I'm adding more pigment to the edge of the horn. So the top edge of that line is prewet from the areas of already softened up and you're going to have a hard edge down below that's touching dry paper. I'm going to wiggle my brush along that line just to soften it off in so that it doesn't look as harsh. If I didn't soften off when I go back to the skin, it's going to look like two completely different entities instead of part of the same body. You can see a good example of that here as the top part of that mark I just put down on the page was touching a wet wash and the bottom portion is not. The bottom portion is just wet paint on dry paper. You can see that there is a bit of paint for me in there. And I'm going to do the same thing in this area that I did with the horns. So once I have some color down, I'm going to dry off my brush, use it to pick up some excess water that I don't really want on my painting and just soften off some of these edges. Getting some fresh paint and going to just softly put in this bottom edge, we're going to define it. We're not going to be doing a background on this piece, we're just focusing on the rhino, so even if some of the edges of the rhino are lighter than the background, when we have this white background, we are going to want to put some value along the edges of our piece, so that we can tell it apart from the background. Every time that you might see my hand pausing, I'm probably looking up at the reference photo just as guidance. I'm not looking to put everything down in a photo realistic way. One of my favorite things about painting wrinkly skin is that you can still get the texture of that conveyed it without having to copy it photo realistically. It gives you a little bit of artistic freedom. And I also think just personally, I find it really, really fun. Here is our first drying break. And when we come back from this little break, I'm going to be working on the second horn. Now this painting is large enough that I could have worked on another area like the ears or the neck. But for some reason when I was painting and I just wanted to work from left to right and so I let it dry. I maybe also just wanted to break. So there's lots of different reasons to take pause. We're going to be doing the second horns similarly to how I did the first one. So we're putting down a wet paint on dry paper at first. And then we'll be softening off some edges. Here, I'm just barely touching the bottom of that horn so that we can get a little bit of a bleed, but I do want that distinction to be pretty clear between the horn and the skin. The forehead is one of the lightest regions on the rhino, so I want to have a really light hand at that, so that I don't cover up too much of the white of the paper. I'm not sure why, but the area between the nose and the eye seems like a really high stakes area to me. The eye is obviously going to be the highest focusing point, but you also have a horn and the nose, and then there's just this empty space in between that needs something, but being too heavy handed here could be a detriment to the piece. I'm also bringing in some tissue when I got a little too heavy handed down at the bottom there. Don't be afraid to use other supplies if you want to remove water from your page. I know we didn't really talk about that in this class, we just talked about paint brushes, but you can use tissue, paper towel, I think some people use Q-tips or cotton balls depending on your style. I'm pretty simple, I just use tissue or paper towel if I need it. I will note that if you're using a very staining color, that this technique might not work very well. Schmincke's neutral tint seems to lift pretty well, and so I can get back to the white of the paper as long as I act quickly. But if you're using something that has, maybe a feather blue in the mixture, it's going to be a lot more stubborn, so you'll want to be more careful about those dark layers that you put down. You might recognize this segment from very early on in the video, I think in introduction, when I mentioned that I often paint more with water than with pigments. This whole area is just about moving the water around the page, pushing the pigments where I want them to go, but there's so little paint on the page. I love that about watercolors as you can do so much with so little. Here, we're starting to define where the cheek hits the neck, and we have some of our darkest shadows in the piece. I'm just laying down a precedent for that, something that I refer to in paintings where I'm using a lot of color. Not necessarily this one, since this is the bulk of the painting, but I'll do something like this with a light color on a full piece and color a value map. Just going around, even if it's with something as light as yellow ocher on a natural brown base piece, just to lay down where I want my shadows and highlights to be. Obviously those aren't going to be the final colors, but at least I have something to go off of when I start to build up layers, and can no longer see my pencil lines. You'll see there, I accidentally picked up a perylene violet, but that's not part of the tutorial. It wasn't intentional, and I'll end up covering it back up with the neutral tint in just a little bit. For me, these neck wrinkles were the hardest part of the painting. It is really difficult to convey those shadows and those highlights, so make sure when you're looking at your reference photo, don't look for shapes that you recognize. Don't think, "Oh, this is what a rhino's neck is supposed to look like, or this is what folds of skin look like." Just go off of what the shadows and highlights are telling you, and it will probably result in a more realistic piece. I'm going to be working on the ears, starting with the tufts of hair. This is a rather slow process, so just a reminder that you can speed up Skillshare videos in the lower toolbar there. If I'm going too slow for you, you want to just get straight to the point, you can do that, but this was probably the most slow going portion. I'm just really carefully trying to map out the edges of those ears. I'm going back in with the tip of my brush after I put down too much pigment, so that I can pick up some of that color and it doesn't dry too darkly. It's very unlikely that you'll spend the bulk of your time on your big, giant, loose washes. Most of the time is spent on paintings, at least in the style that I work on, are spent on the details. Since these ear tufts are pretty prominent and they're awfully cute, I wanted to make sure I spent enough time to make them look right. I'm trying to be really careful on the skin portion of this ear to make sure that I don't disrupt the paint that I put down too much, while still also conveying the colors, the shapes, the shading, and make it look like a more three-dimensional body part. I'm going to repeat this process on the second ear that is closer to us, going really slowly around the edges, looking for those little inlets. What word I'm I looking for? There's little pieces taken out of the ear that are missing, and so I want to make sure that I'm giving a little character, that it's not just this perfect ear. This ear in particular has a lot of dimension to it, and I tried to be really careful, and slow, and deliberate, about what I was painting. For those of you who might be taking this class early on in your watercolor adventure, as I mentioned before, I've painted this little guy over a half a dozen times, I think seven or eight times. This is definitely the best an ear has turned out. So if your ear doesn't look quite like this, please don't get discouraged. It takes a lot of practice to make something look like a cylinder on a flat piece of paper. But in order to help with this, I'm putting down that really dark shadow in the middle of the ear and then really, really carefully trying to soften off that edge, to give it the appearance that it's receding in to that shape. You'll see me mess with the layers a little bit more, pick up more paint with the brush, and I'll come back to it in future layers and re-enforce those values that I've put down. We're adding just a touch of detail to the top of the forehead here, and that'll help break up the really big flat shape. We'll do more layers of this in the future as well, but just starting with a wrinkle or two up here, or three, will help to define the space of skin and not just a really flat, steely surface. We can curve that around to fit in with the shape of the ear and the temple, and make sure that everything flows together. You can see on my palette over here, I try and keep one puddle or half the puddle more strongly pigmented, and I add water to the other part of the palette. That way, when I'm going back and forth from the painting to my palette, I can pick up the paint in the water in a quicker fashion, than having to rinse out my brush every single time, but of course you will see a combination of those things. I'm just putting in some more wrinkles, making sure that they curve with the shape of the ear so we can get that cylindrical form. Guiding that water, controlling that water to make sure that it's working for us and not against us. We want to fade off these really strong shadows into the rest of the back. We'll make them darker a little bit later on, but just like we did on the face, we want to make sure that the folds in the neck don't just abruptly end. Like the horn, we want the back to all be one entity, and not be multiple pieces of stacked skin layered together, because that wouldn't look very good. There's one more really dark crease here on the neck that's the back side of that one roll. So I'm just going to spend a little extra time defining that, making sure that we have enough contrast to make it look realistic. You can see this entire piece is really low value. Going back to our value lesson and me talking about wanting to make sure that we bump up the contrast, that's going to come in later layers. Don't worry that you don't see them yet. Now that we've painted the entire surface of the rhino, we need to make sure that it all dries before we can move on to the next layer. You'll see if you look closely, I added a lot of water to the neck before it dried and it did end up pushing him back into those wrinkles a little bit more than I'd like to. Here, I'm just pointing out the areas that I want to work on, but you'll see that wash didn't dry quite like I intended it to. In this next layer, I'm going to be working in those areas. You might see me scrubbing with my brush a little bit more trying to soften off those blooms that occurred. At this point, I decided to speed up the footage since I have been chatting a lot about the different techniques and you pretty much know all the steps or what to look for by now. You can see that the horn looks almost identical to how it did at the beginning, where I'm just reinforcing those shadows, reinforcing that texture, and adding a little bit more depth so that the color layers on top of each other and provides a little bit more interest. I suppose I can note that if you look at the reference photo, there are little patches of brown or dirt and I am waiting to the end for those, those will end up being that mahogany brown I mentioned earlier, or the burnt CNF you want to replace it, but I'm going to do everything in gray first. It's just so much easier that way, we can really focus on where the water's going, we can focus on the brush that we're using, on the paint and the paper. This is how I paint a lot of different things. A lot of wildlife tends to be one overarching color or an underlying color. If I'm working on a lion, say I'll use lots of tanns and browns and just build up most of the painting in that. At the very, very end, we'll bring in some contrasting colors, maybe we'll bring in some complimentary colors, we'll add some cool shadows just to offset all the warm tones we've been using. I've really come to like this style where you're using mostly one color. You can focus on that for the main part of your painting and then just bump it up in that last moment. Here, I'm just reinforcing a shadow just behind the nostrils to make sure that area is set back further. In general, darker tones will be set back in the shadows a little bit more, while lighter colors will come forward towards the viewer. Anything that you want to look a little bit more recessed, you can add more shadow to it and it will help with that illusion. I mentioned earlier that I was struggling with that space between the eyes and the nose, so here I'm just adding a lot of extra texture to have something happening in that area, whether or not I see it on the reference photo, artistically, it just felt really void of anything interesting to look at. I'm just adding a few. You can see a couple of tiny hard edges in there where the paint wasn't fully blended, and then the rest of the wash melts in it to the rest of the skin. I'm finally coming back around to the eye. This is something in wildlife art that I find really interesting. There's a lot of artists who like to start with the eyes because it gives the subject life, and helps give them something to focus on and filled the space around it. For me, I'm the opposite. The eyes are my absolute favorite thing to paint. I find by saving them for last, it's like saving the last good bite of a meal for last, or just something that you really want to savor. Even though it looks a little bit creepy without having an eye there for a good portion of the painting, I just find it so much more rewarding once you've put in all this work, all these layers, you've really carefully built up everything around the painting to then drop in that I inhabit come to life. I also find it really helpful from a technical standpoint because the eyes are usually going to be one of the darkest areas, at least the pupil. If you have like a blue eye, there's still going to have black in the middle of it, and when you put down a lot of solid black in a painting, there's going to be a tendency that if you accidentally touch it with a wet brush, it's going to reactivate and that's just kind of what happens. I find that by putting it down last, I can make sure that I don't disrupt that pupil or that shadow. That's just going to come down to personal preference. You can decide if that is the first thing you want to do, or the last thing, but you'll see me put it in pretty close to the end. 13. Class Project: Rhinoceros Part 2: So here I've switched to a smaller brush, I believe this as a Size 4 from the same line. We're going to be doing details with this smaller brush. So in general, as a personal rule, I try and use the largest brush I can, for as long as I can. That helps me not get too focused on the details too early. Now, you probably saw the brush earlier in this class and notice that it has a really fine tip on it. I could do detail work with it. But I also mentioned earlier in the class that brush holds a lot of water. In order for my brush not to hold too much water, and make sure that I get enough pigment down, I decided to switch down to this smaller size. I'm going to be reinforcing a lot of the shadows, filling in a lot of details and adding some texture. Here I'm going to be very gently dotting in some pigment onto the forehead, to create some of the black spurts. But like there's areas that are shadowed or speckled on his forehead. I'm putting this down wet on dry and then we're going to rinse off the brush and just spread out that area. Make them blend into the skin a little bit more seamlessly. I'm finally going to revisit that front ear and really deepen our shadows. Better I'll let the colors that we've already put down become the mid tones. These deeper shadows will give there more value to the overall piece in general and help with that cylindrical shape we were trying to achieve earlier. By putting a little bit of black at the tips of the ears where the [inaudible] are that helps balance out just the visual heaviness. We've got the dark inside, we've got the dark on top, and it'll make for a really nice piece. We have finally reached the time where it's time to put in that eye, this will be the absolute darkest area on the painting.In the rhino's eye we can't really see much of an Iris or anything of that like. It is still fairly large and there is a reflection in it. So we want to make sure to leave that in there. You can add white highlights with ink or acrylic or gouache after the fact. Coming up, there's going to be a fairly large stretch with me not saying anything because I'm just going over and doing the same things we've already done to the most detailed areas and trying to reinforce those shadows, which I've already told you about. So I don't want to keep repeating myself. So I'll tune out here and I'll see you back in a little bit. All right, I am finally back and it is time to add a second color. So again, this is mahogany brown from [inaudible] but you can use a burnt sienna or a Venetian red, [inaudible] looking for a nice warm, earthy tone. We're going to use it in a very dilute wash. We're going to be glazing over the tones that we already have here, which will help to give the entire piece more dimension since it's only in one color right now. I'm starting with the horn because that's the area that is most obvious to me that there is a lot of brown. You could especially see it reflecting off of the ground and the light from below, and we're just going to go around and select areas, making sure that they're important choices and that they'll impact the piece in a positive way. The final step for my painting process at least, is to add some highlights. I mentioned earlier when we were talking about the eye that you can use ink, you can use gouache, you can use acrylic, whatever you would like to use for your piece. I use this water soluble ink or at least I did this time, and I'm just going to be adding in a couple of highlights that we lost during the painting process. There are some watercolor peers who frown upon doing this, but I enjoy being able to add in those white areas back into my pieces and sometimes not in this one necessarily, but sometimes pieces just call for white being on top of other colors which can be really difficult, especially when you're starting off in watercolor. So I'm just going to be highlighting a few of the wrinkles, highlighting, sorry my face has [inaudible] in there. We're going to go about the nostrils, maybe a couple of spots on the horns, but we're not going to overdo it. Just a couple of light touches to balance out the piece. Usually after I add my white, I go back one more time with a paint brush and just touch up anything, soften edges of that white if I need to, add some more dark just to make sure that there is balance in the world and we will be wrapping up. 14. Final Thoughts: [Music] Thank you guys all so much for joining me for today's class on water control. I hope that the lessons here helped to demystify this complicated subjects and I hope that you guys had fun painting a rhinoceros friend and that it wasn't too challenging. I would love to see what you guys were able to create with this class and hear about your experiences with water control. So don't forget to upload your class project in the class projects section of this class and you can even throw in some of your class exercises if you weren't able to do the entire class project on its own, any little bit is a helpful start. You can do this over the course of a week or two weeks or however long you need to complete it and I hope that you guys had fun with it. Be sure to check out some of my other sculpture classes if you want to learn more on pigments or perhaps painting and allies and I will see you in the next sculpture class. Thank you again for joining me and I'll see you next time. [Music].