Matte Medium Masking & Watercolour - A Short & Sweet Class

1. INTRO: Welcome To The Class!: Hi there and welcome to this Holly shorter, sweet class. I'm gonna start with a confession. I am terrible when it comes to concision. I get so excited about sharing things and creating art relaxation videos that I forget some terms that all we need is a short little painting section, especially when we're warming up for exploring new techniques. And it's also more accessible for those of you who are also dealing with chronic illness or disease immunity. Now, you know how I love to use materials in a way which is slightly different from the norm. Well, one evening when I was an experimental Holly mode, I grabbed my gel medium and I thought I'd see how it behaved when creating layers like you would when using masking fluid. Now of course, the gel medium stays put, whereas masking fluid is lifted. But it's a similar process. But you don't get the messy bits at the end of the gel medium. So I immediately thought of you could not wait to develop this week class view. We're going to be doing a very, very simple technique which as always good to really beautiful, interesting results. Look this technique because I have developed this class as a kind of a taster. Then if you really love it, perhaps we could do a more detailed class together further down the line. 2. Materials : If we look at what we'll need for this class, I'm going to start out with a matte medium, and we definitely need that for this class. I do try to choose materials that you already have in. But we definitely need this for this class because it's such a unique technique. For those of you who aren't familiar with that medium. It's usually used with acrylic paints and people use it to prepare services mixed with our paints or seal paintings. But you can also use it as a glue. And I've seen a lot of people using it with decor and collages. Now, paper, this is really important because it's not about the quality for this class at all. It's about the surface. Now this is actually one that I did very quickly earlier just to demonstrate that normal copy paper will work. It gets a little buckles, But I'm quite pleased with that result. Very surprised. We're looking for any smooth surface to paper that you have. Now, for the first part of the class, I used Fabriano hot pressed, which is my favorite. This class will do really well with any hot press paper that you have. Also worked really well in the mole skin sketchbook, which is the watercolor on. I tried it with cold press paper, with cold press sketchbook, watercolor paper. It didn't do very well. But I did try it with Arches cold pressed and it came up reasonably well, but I would suggest going for the smooth surface if he can. Move on to paints. I've kept the palate pretty simple. Any pink that you have all read, any purple and then a yellow. And I just use a little bit of brown burnt umber here, the mixed, but you don't really need that. I used quinacridone, lilac, dioxazine, purple, cadmium yellow. But anything that's close to those colors would be great. To finish with. I just choose. Well, I could have actually gotten away with one brush, but I use my S gotta size ten, which is around brush for the first part with a hot press paper. I use this really inexpensive brush, the Omega size 12 for the sketchbook. The only other brush I needed really was something to draw the wash over and that media. And I use this flat brush. Let's move on now to the first part of this class using the hot press paper. 3. Practising Matte Medium Layers & watercolour wash - Hot Pressed Paper: This is the Fabriano hot pressed block. I'm using the dioxazine purple. Going to put a little bit about good to mix it. I'm hoping for here. Is the magenta. Going to add a little bit of purple to the Quinn lie luck to me. More like pink. So I do use it as a pink, quite as much more than the red side. Just gonna add some water to them because we're going to want a nice In wash to start with. And then we'll go in with a deeper color for the next. I'm just going to get some off cuts here. Put some within that media are some color to it just so that you can pick up. When I put this downloads page. And otherwise it's just clear on white and it's really hard to pick up. I'm going to get some of them at median. I don't want too much on my brush just because it creates too many ridges. It's really hard to dry. It takes a lot longer and I'm very, very impatient, so I just wanted to have a fairly even application of the matte medium. I'm just going to do some, some leaves. Now. That first layer, quitting the first wash. The word sit down with a dioxazine purple. Just this first layer on its own is really pretty and you might want to just stop there. Let's do a second layer so it puts them new map made him down too, so that it's nice and clear. We're going to do another layer on top of ethics. They seize them dry. And I'm putting the medium, the dry watercolor. I'll just same shapes. Some of the maybe picking up areas where the first layer left room. That little pink key areas. A lift this up to the light. You can see that second layer of the media will just go on and fill this completely with that second layer. I also like sprinkler. So droid this thoroughly now an undercount stressing off because I've done this so often. Whether little bubbles, they're not quite dried. I've gone in and done the option Titan off the top. It's so easily done. So make sure that all of them at medium is really, really super. Try just going to mix up a tiny bit more paint because I want this to be quite a thick layer so that we can see the contrast. This is where the magic occurs because even as we pull this over, you can start to see the two layers coming through. This color is as gorgeous as well as just making sure that that's completely covered. It. See how the layers come through. You might be quite happy to stop there, just let that dry. We can go on to do the reveal. This is kind of a gentle one. You can see that often some darker ones there earlier. Just choosing my petals and wiping gently that watercolor layer, which is lying on top it with remote media. Depending on how much water you have on your cloth and how much you wipe away. Effects how white or pink **** wiping it right back. We'll take it back to the white of the page. But you can also do like a gentle white PO for a petal, leaving some of the watercolor still in Situ so that it gets a slightly textured result. What's revealed at this stage, as well as the brushstrokes that we will put down. Putting these two layers, Dan, I'm just having a look. It's much more needs to be quite subtle difference. You can take the whole thing and just wipe thing, but we do risk taking up some of the watercolor on the page. I want to keep that deep pink in the background. I think I'm gonna leave it there. I'm really pleased with that. 4. Matte Medium Layers & Wash In Our Sketchbooks: Starting out with some Quinn lilac, which is one of my favorites at the moment. Any allylic pink, red, whatever you fancy him, I want to mix enough for the wash. I am also going to put in some cadmium yellow. I just wanted to mix a nice deep orange. I'm going to add a little bit off, but the burnt umber, quite know, tubes watering down. I've done this in a big palette. I've got room to experiment. I'm just going to let these all flowing together a bit. I feel a bit more Indiana, something like that. 6. Bonus Lesson! :O): So we couldn't start out by wetting our brush, taking the excess water off. And then we're going to just scoop up some of this matt medium and use it as you would masking fluid. But what we're doing is just creating lots of luscious layers. I don't want too many of these lines of the medium. I don't want it to raised from the paper, because from what I've gathered, from my little experimentations, it's easy to just take the top of that and it exposes the white paper underneath. We want texture, but we don't want it too thickly on unless it's something that you really want to go for. In which case I would say leave it overnight so that the map medium is completely dry. But because I'm eager to get on, I fairly impatient sometimes when I'm trying things out. All right, that's the first layer. I don't want to have too much of the paper peeking through. I quite like all of the layers that the medium creates. I'm going to dry that and then we'll do our first per layer. And that's looking good. I'm going to use some of that magenta mix and I'm just going to put like a paler wash of this over the top. You can see already at this stage how beautiful it is. You can take your time doing this because it's so relaxing. Not too much water in your water color to get a nice good color there. We don't want it to overpower it. That's our first pale air layer. Then we're going to dry that and put another layer of matt medium on top. This is how quick a process it is. Oh, I'm going over the layer under there. I really want to build up lots of brush strokes, lots of layers doing it quickly. I'm not worried about whether it looks like a petal flower or leaf. Just doing shapes. I want them overlapping quite a lot. You might need to hold it up to the light to see where you're at. Where a warn again, is just to take any of those excess bits that look a little bit like they're pooling because they take ages to dry, there's that risk of just lifting the top off them. Right? That's my next layer. I'm rinsing off my brush straight away after I've used them a medium just to protect my brush, I'm going to dry that layer. Okay, so that's that thoroughly dried. We're now going to just pull over a really rich top layer. This is that mix of Alizarin crimson and dioxazine purple and we've got that magenta thing going on there. Gorgeous. And you can take your time over this layer too, if you like. Because it's so restful to do things stop to pop out. And you can start to see all the layers, all the brush strokes overlapping each other. Just as it is, it is gorgeous. So you might decide that you love this so much that you just want to stop at this stage. And who would blame you because it's gorgeous. This photograph so well what's happening there is the map medium is working like a resist, But it's such an efficient resist because you can go over and over and over it and you've only got tiny bits of the original paper poking through. It means you can go back in and change things as well if you're not happy with something. Let me just show you what the further technique is I absolutely adore, which is starting to lift some of the paint off these petals. Now the water color is still wet. But you can let it dry and come back another day and do this because it still wipes off because of course, we've still got that matt medium underneath. Isn't that just like magic, you might not want to lift all of your petals, but you can see the outline of the petals. And you can just start to go in and gently lift with the clean water on a clean cloth. This also is very restful to do. You'll see the two layers coming out, some are paler. You've got that layer which is slightly darker that holds on to some of the water color, for example. This is a background color that's quite nice just to bring out this one here as well. Right, Let me show you if you have lifted a petal like this and you're not happy with it being as pale as that. You can correct it because we've got this lovely layer of the medium underneath. You can actually lay color back on top of there if you want. This is the beauty of this technique. Dab a little bit off if you want. Just get that, a little brush technique going. I hope you enjoy this as much as I've enjoyed developing it because I can see me doing this add in fan item. I certainly would do it as a little card for somebody. But I'm going to be doing this on a larger scale for designs for industry too. I have not seen this technique used anywhere else. It was pure luck really, that my brain somehow fired off two synapses and saw the ma medium, saw some water color, and thought, what if it's those moments that we live for, isn't it just love the discovery that can happen with art? I love all of that, the experimentation. I really hope that this is as restful as it was for me.