Negative Space Lettering with Watercolours

1. Introduction: Hi guys, welcome to my first Skillshare class. I'm so excited to be teaching this class. I'm Vinitha Mammen, I am a professional fashion designer and a self-taught artist. I'm lucky enough to have been born into a family full of artists. Art has always been a big part of my life. Now as my art is evolving into a side hustle, I dream of selling merchandise and art prints, and painting giant noodles, and also sharing my knowledge with the artists community like this. I like to explore several techniques and media, and I'm honestly still discovering my own style. My current favorite things to create are watercolor illustrations and hand lettering. For this class, I decided to combine these two and show you how I do hand lettering using negative painting and layering techniques with watercolors. I think negative painting is a very relaxing and almost meditative process. Sure, it takes time and patience, but I think the results are super rewarding. The effect of creating letters using negative space rather than positive, can be relatively easily achieved using various digital drawing, painting, and design tools. However, I think the breathtaking results of achieving this effect through analog methods is oddly satisfying and particularly charming. In this class, I'll take you through some basic concepts around negative space and how I use it in my art. I will teach you several brush control and blending techniques and some hand lettering tips through carefully structured practice exercises. I will also show you my entire process from sketch to finish, including all the initial mess that leads to a final piece that I'm proud of. Together, we will put all of our learning's to use by creating two fun negative space lettering projects. I'll also go over all the materials you'll be needing to complete these projects and show you the exact art supplies that I use. This class is aimed at beginner and intermediate skill levels but artists at any level are welcome to join and give these projects ago. Traditional lettering artists can even use this class to explore a whole new dimension. We will not be going deep into the very basics of hand lettering or using watercolors. But you will find all the information that you will need to try out these projects successfully here in this class. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me through the discussion section of this class. I really hope to see you in the next lesson. Do connect with me on Instagram and tag me in your stories as you learn from this class, so that I can repost them to my own stories and share some lovely moments with my students. Let's do this. 2. Class Project: Welcome to my class and thank you for joining. In this class, we will explore watercolor negative lettering by creating two fun class project pieces. The first piece will have a text against a bright and happy backdrop of fun stripes using a limited color palette but we will mostly be painting only a single color at a time. This will help us get a good grasp of brush control techniques to create the perfect stroke around tight negative spaces without worrying about blending colors. I will also share some tips I use, right from the sketching phase to make life easier for me while negative painting. Our second project piece will be text set inside a whimsical cloud, painted using a vibrant blend of three colors. Together, we will explore how to use color blending to fill up negative spaces to create a seamless magical effect and embrace the surprise effects of letting watercolors do what they like to do best; move around and play with each other. For both pieces, you can totally pick words and illustration subjects of your choice or feel free to follow along using my examples. I have included a bonus list of word and subject ideas to get you started in case you're stuck wondering what to paint. You can find these in the resource section of this class, so do check that out and be inspired. I have created this class in a way that you can complete each step along with me, not just watch me. I want to encourage you to get all your supplies together and join in on the fun. Do upload photos of your progress to the project gallery for this class. I'm eagerly waiting to see what my students create. These uploads absolutely do not need to be a finished pieces of art. The more process shots you share, the more valuable feedback I can give you and we can all learn together. Before jumping into the class projects, I have a few warm-up classes with some useful exercises to pump up your muscles and get you feeling confident to dive in. These will also help you get a good glimpse of the watercolor and lettering techniques we will be using in the projects. In the next video, I will take you through the materials you will need to create your very own class project pieces. See you there. 3. Materials: In this lesson, I will go over the materials you will require for our exercises and class projects. Please remember that these are just suggestions based on what I use. If you have your trusted set of supplies, please go ahead and use them for this class. If you don't have some of the supplies, don't let that stop you from trying, work with what you have and see where it takes you. Cool, let's see what all we need. First, of course, you would need paints. Watercolor comes in various forms like tubes, pans, and liquid concentrates. I mostly use pans, and this is the set I currently use. It's a Winsor and Newton Cotman set of 45 half-pans. Entry-level artist grade pins like these will be ideal, but anything available easily is sufficient to get you started. This is what my paint box looks like on the inside. I have designated zones in my mixing trays for each group of colors. It keeps the colors from mixing with completely different colors by mistake, and keeps things a bit more organized. I reserve the last two wells to mix new colors if I need to. I've also made myself a swatch card set with each of these colors along with its details for easy reference. I've given each shade a member of my own, which is indicated on the swatch card, on the pans themselves, as well as in the box below each pan. This helps me easily identify my paints. I also use the swatches to help me decide on color pallets for my pieces. Next, we need paper. This is important guys. You don't need to go buy the super expensive professional grade stuff, but you do need 300 GSM paper that is intended for watercolor use. I use this Canson XL Watercolor Cold Press, 300 GSM paper. You can find this cheap on Amazon, especially in the US. I don't think it's the best paper out there, but it's good value for money, so it works out for me. This is what I'm using for all the exercises and projects in this class. I also have these loose sheets from Canson, also 300 GSM, which I use sometimes when I don't want to cut down my bigger sheets. I have a thing for square paper, so I have this square watercolor pad from Master's Touch. It has a really unique texture, so I'm precious about it and mostly reserve it for special occasions. Now if you don't have immediate access to watercolor paper, I would suggest you find the heaviest matte paper you can find around you and give it a shot. Besides watercolor paper, we also need some regular printer paper, just any quality in whatever size to do all our initial brainstorming and sketching. Now brushes, you will need some round brushes in various sizes even better if they are especially meant for watercolors. I used Dugato and Arteza brands of synthetic round brushes. We will mostly be using a size 2 brush for larger areas, smaller brushes like size 1 and 0 for smaller spaces, and a detail brush like the Arteza 4/0 round that I have here for really tight spaces. We will also need a pencil to do all our sketching. Just any basic pencil will do. I use my favorite mechanical pencil, which is the Pentel Graphgear 1000 and 0.9 mm size. I'm not particular about the pencil lead that I use in these. I know there are very soft pencils that are helpful in making light clean sketches on watercolor paper but I just use my regular pencil and rub gently on my paper to keep it light. Yes, any regular pencil is just fine. Then of course, an eraser, just whatever clean eraser you have lying around. I also have this little guy for detail erasing, it's a pen style eraser called the Tombow Mono Zero Eraser. It just helps with erasing tiny areas at a time. Super cool, but totally not a requirement for this class. Then we need a ruler, again just whatever you're used to. Since I also sew in my studio, I have a bunch of these grids rulers that come in handy, so I just use one of them. Next would be some black Fineliner Pens. I mostly use the Uni Pin Fineliners from Uniball or Pigma Microns from Sakura. We will be using these just to go over our outlines and make them more crisp for easy tracing. You can use just about any black pen or thin marker. You can even ignore them altogether and trace off of your pencil sketch. You'll also need a jar of water for dipping and cleaning your brushes, some masking tape, if you would like to give the borders neat and crisp, and a box of tissue, toilet paper, paper towels, whatever works. You will also need something for tracing. If you have a light box that helps. I just use a Tracing App in my iPad Pro. You can even just place your paper against the light on your window glass and trace over it if you don't have either of those. That's it. Again, don't let these materials scare you. 4. Negative Space : What? Why? How?: Before we get hands on with our learning, let's get some basics out of the way. In this lesson, I'll take you through what negative space is in the context of art, what we mean by negative painting and some methods by which we can achieve negative painted artwork. We will also look at some examples of work by other artists and myself to try and understand the significance of negative space in art. So what is negative space? Simply put, negative space is the space around the subject of an image. Usually, especially when it's a solid area, we tend to just refer to it as the background. So if this is my subject, then all the space around it is the negative space and the subject is the positive space. Now, what is negative painting? Negative painting is when you paint by laying down your colors in the negative space, as opposed to the positive space. That is around a shape instead of inside a shape. For example, I want to paint a heart on this page. I can do it by painting inside a heart shape, or I can do it by painting around a heart shape. Either way, I still have a heart, no pun intended. The latter is what we would refer to as, negative painting. There are different ways in which we can achieve the effect of negative painting. Let's look at some analog methods, specifically when using paint on paper. Masking tape is one of the most commonly used items to mask away positive areas while painting. We will be using masking tape too, but only to get neat borders, not for negative painting as such. Then there's masking fluid. This does the same job as masking tape, just that it's in liquid form and so can be applied with a lot more control, especially in smaller spaces. This is a commonly used method by several artists. I currently don't prefer to use it a lot, especially for lettering, mainly because it messes up my brushes and I can never get a clean stroke because I have to use an old brush. We will not be using any masking fluid for our projects in this class. Which brings me to the next method, which is what we will be using. Just straight up, avoiding color in your positive spaces by manually painting around them. Sounds crazy? That craziness is what makes this so exciting. Now, let's look at some examples of negative space being used creatively by other artists. This is a portrait, but barely any of the paint is in the face itself. Same here, the shape of the person is suggested by the negative space around her. Here that bathing suit is practically nothingness on paper. But you know, it's there. Is that [inaudible] orange hair or a black bear we're looking at? Spaces between buildings shaped like spooky hands, coincidence? Here's life formed solely by the botanical line drawings around it. A clever ad campaign promoting pet adoption. Do you see the canine in the negative space? Negative space becomes a valuable tool in logo design as well. One of the most famous logos that use negative space creatively is the FedEx logo. Do you see the little arrow in the negative space? It's there without being there, and that's the beauty of it. Here are some more Logos demonstrating the clever use of negative space to sneak in design elements that are relevant to their respective brands. Negative space, as you can see, is something that I'm always drawn towards using in my art and design process. Let me show you a few of my own pieces. I meticulously doodled around the letters here to create this one. Here's another negative space lettering job down with pen doodles. Some holiday chilled, but negative space watercolors. This is one of my favorite pieces which also inspired one of our projects for this class. I used negative space here to create an illusion of a window [inaudible]. This is negative space lettering set against several layers of negative painted leaves, double negative. This one is a digital negative lettering piece, and I'm using the contrast of both negative and positive spaces to illustrate the salt. Another digital piece with negative lettering. Check this one out. I've used negative space to imply the presence of a square around which the flowers are arranged. I also use negative space elements in most of the logos that I design. Here's a few. I hope I've shown you enough to get you excited to create some negative space projects. In the next lesson, we will dive right in and get to discovering some brush control techniques that will help you master painting around shapes. 5. Brush Control: This lesson is all about exercising those brush control techniques. We will learn how to paint within and around shapes using a single color to start with. Lookout for some very useful pro tips that I throw in every now and then during this lesson. To make things easier for you, I have included a template file that you can download from the resource section of this class. You can get started by printing this file and transferring the outlines over to a sheet of watercolor paper. You can use a light box for this, or if you have an iPad Pro, you can download a free app called Lightbox trees and use that. You can even just place your paper against the light over a window and trace. Or you can ignore the template altogether and draw freehand directly onto your watercolor paper. This is what I have done, I have just used my pencil to sketch out the shapes onto a sheet of nine inch by six inch watercolor paper. You can start with whatever size feels comfortable to you. You can even start with an in full-size, and progress to smaller sizes to hone your skills further. What we are going to do here is use one section of the template to practice painting within the shapes, that is the positive spaces, and the other section to learn to paint around the shapes or the negative spaces. Feel free to pause or slow down the video and practice these as many times as you need to. The more, the better. Let's get to it, shall we? I have taken out some paint and I'm mixing in some more water. My brush is wet and loaded with paint. Now we start off by placing the paint inside the square, and then just drag out the wet blob you've just placed on the paper to fill up the square. That's basically it, you place paint and you pull it to where you want it to go. When the blob is not wet enough anymore, you dip your brush and paint again and repeat. Now, our aim is to fill up the shape, so we need to go as close to the outlines as possible without and actually touching them. The moment the paint or even water touches the pencil mark, it becomes unerasable. We will all end up doing this accidentally at some point, but we need to try our best to avoid it, and trust me, practice does help a lot. It is important that the paint is still wet while we do all of this, once the paint dries out, it will leave a mark. Since we want to get an even layer of paint, we are not brushing it exactly, but we do need to always be mindful of time when we paint with watercolors. Let's move on to the next shape. Just follow the same principle, place paint and pull. It helps to make careful outlines with paint inside the pencil outlines before filling it in. You can later go back in and refine your edges. Now for the leaf, start off from the tip by applying light pressure on your brush so that you get a nice thin and clean stroke. Then pull with more pressure on your brush so that you can fill up the larger areas of the leaf smoothly. Continue dragging the paint around to finish of this leaf. Again, we start by lightly placing the paint near the tip, and dragging the paint to fill up the rest of the leaf. Reload your brush with paint whenever you feel there's not enough wet paint to put. Now for the J start by painting the horizontal top part, and then drag down the paint into the vertical section, evening out the layer with your brush strokes as you go. You can take a little time to refine your edges and smooth out your curves. Now I see some areas where the paint is not a smooth blend, so I go over them again, while the paint is still wet, and blend it into the top section which is still wet. Now that we have an idea of how to paint within a variety of shapes, we can move on to painting around the same shapes. It is essentially the exact same thing that you are doing here. You only need to identify the space around the shape as your subject matter instead of the shape itself. What I mean is, instead of looking at the square as what you need to fill in, look at the frame around it, and tell yourself that that is what you need to fill in. Do the same thing, place paint and pull. Again, getting as close to the pencil outline as possible without touching it. Now you will have to take some decisions, there's two possible areas of the frame where you can continue from, the top or the bottom. There is no right answer, you need to make a judgment based on how wet your paint is at each of these spots. If you see that it's drying out, you might want to go in there and save it by adding more paint and dragging. Here's a tip, did you notice this wet blob I added? When I leave an area idle to fill up another area, I load up my brush and leave some really wet paint at the end of the spots I'm temporarily abandoning, so that I can buy some time to pay attention to the other area. While I paint, I'm constantly checking to ensure this blob that I added is still wet, and if it looks like it might be drying up, I switch back over. Now I notice that the bottom blob is drying up, so I try to get there quickly and drag it out to fill the shape. Now just use the same techniques to paint a around the remaining three shapes, remember to leave wet blobs when you abandon an area, and to not touch the pencil marks as you paint. This here has a very tight space between the two leaves, so I switch over to my detail brush to get right into it safely. Once I'm in a larger area, I switch back over to my larger brush. Pro tip, when there's a large area to fill in, it helps to imagine some outlines in addition to the ones you have drawn to break up the space into bite sized areas. But you need to do this strategically, notice how I take advantage of the smallest space here near the tip of the leaf, and imagine a separation between the top and bottom areas right there. This helps me focus on smoothing out one area at a time without ending up with large dry marks. Again, we use the same techniques and tips to paint around the lettering. It makes it less intimidating if you see it as just another shape instead of a lettering elements. Once I fill in most of the larger areas around the J, I go in with my detail brush to refine the edges while the paint is still wet. That's all it is. I hope you enjoyed that exercise. In the next video, I will touch upon some basic watercolor knowledge, and how we can apply it to our advantage in our project here. 6. Wet vs Dry: You have probably come across the terminology of wet on wet and wet on dry techniques of watercolor painting. These are essentially the two broad categories of paints application methods used commonly in watercolor painting. In this lesson, we are going to touch upon this a little bit and talk about their major differences and applications. Simply put, wet on dry is when you paint with wet paint on dry paper. Wet on wet is when you paint with wet paint on you guessed it, wet paper. Now we know that what we did throughout our exercises in the previous lesson was entirely the wet on dry technique. For the wet on dry, I am just taking some of the mixed paint on my brush and link down a stroke on the paper. Next, I'm doing the same thing, but painting a larger area this time. Then I'm taking some more paint and just touching the brush entirely on the dry paper. Take a look at this. We have clean strokes with well-defined edges. The boundaries are clear and distinct on all of these. Now for the wet on wet, I've thoroughly cleaned my brush and I'm dipping it in clean water. I'm going to lay down a layer of nothing but clean water on the dry paper, basically to make it wet. I'm going over this wet area with my brush a few times to get a smooth and even glaze. This is very important when painting wet on wet. How smooth the paint layer is largely depends on how even your water layer is in the first place. It really helps to look at it from an angle. Do you see that glaze? That's what you want to achieve. I'm doing pretty much the same thing with my paint, just laying down a stroke on the wet area of the paper. Do you see how the edges are feathering out? Continuing the same kind of strokes as before. If you compare it with the wet on dry version of this, you can clearly see the differences, the edges has so much more defined depth. Whereas here the wetness keeps pulling the paint out, causing the boundaries to feather. I'm painting a few more wet on dry blocks to demonstrate the differences when painting a second layer, while the first two dry up. Let's see what happens if you lay using the wet on wet technique. I'm painting my second layer before the first layer dries out. The paint just slowly blends out into the rest of the shape. Also, do you see a light spot in there? That's because the previous layer was not a smooth glaze. I take some more time to smoothen the next one out. This time, I'm going to demonstrate painting the second layer with a different color. Once again, you can clearly see the colors blending, the blue slowly moving into the green layer. Now, let's try these on the wet on dry side. The first layer has fully dried and I'm placing some paint on the second layer. Hold on. Here's another very important tip. While wet on wet and wet on dry are both useful techniques, what we don't want to use is wet on damp. You never want to go back in on damp paper and paint. It messes up the people and the paint dries up looking much less vibrant. Damp paper is a big no for me. Moving on, we can see that the second layer does not blend into the first in this case, the paint just forms a separate layer with its own distinct boundaries. The same happens even when we try using a different color for this second layer. The blue just sits on top of the green, not mingling, just minding its own business. Let me show you one more cool thing. I'm just using clear water to wet a small strip of area on the paper. Now I take paint and place a stroke diagonally across it, so that it is partially on the dry parts of the paper and partially on the wet part. Do you see what the wetness does to the very same stroke here? It feathers out only to the boundaries of the water. This behavior not only contrasts the two techniques, but also becomes very useful for us in our projects. Let's summarize all the differences we discovered between the wet on dry and wet on wet techniques of watercolor painting. First, the obvious, wet on dry requires dry paper and wet on wet calls for wet paper to begin with. While painting on dry paper leaves us with well-defined edges. Painting on wet paper results in edges that feather out into the wet areas. Finally, in the former case, the paint pretty much stays where you put it. Whereas, in the latter, the paint moves and spreads into the wetness. How about we put all of this knowledge we've gained in this lesson to use and paint a second layer over some of the shapes from our previous lesson? Take a clean brush, wet it with some clean water, and lay down a layer of just water over this circle. We are doing this pretty much exactly like how we handled the paint, placing a blob and pulling it to spread. Now pick up some paint on your brush and dub it lightly around the boundaries of the shape and watch as the paint blends in beautifully. Remember how the paint is not going to feather out beyond the wet area. This comes in handy here so you don't have to worry about the paint bleeding past the outlines, so long as the water hasn't. Repeat the same process of laying down a layer of clear water and then dubbing in paint. Watch how I smooth in this leaf out. I'm going to show you how I did that in a bit. When excess water forms puddles, you're going to end up with weird dry marks. Not that it's always a bad thing, but fortunately for us, there is an easy way to make sure that, that doesn't happen when we don't want it to. Here are some signs for you, when there's less water in the brush than there is on the paper, the water gets absorbed by the brush as soon as it touches the wet area. We use this to add advantage. Simply dub the brush onto a dry tissue to take out the excess water from it. Now since there's definitely more water on the paper than on the brush, it will get absorbed right away, leaving us with an even layer of paint. Let's use these techniques and tips to add a wet on wet layer on two more of these shapes. Remember to strive for a smooth water glaze before dubbing paint and to remove any puddles with a dry edge brush like I just showed you. Our main aim for doing the second layer is to intensify the edges of our painted areas and make them pop more. This is why I'm mostly placing the paint on the edges and letting it blend into the rest of the areas. Wasn't that's an exciting exploration? In the next lesson, we will have even more fun by blending colors. See you there. 7. Blending Colours: Now that we've gotten a hang of dash control and some important techniques, let's take this knowledge up a notch by trying the same exercise using a blend of two colors. Learning to blend colors within and around spaces will help us achieve a new level of awesome with our negative space lettering projects. In the end of this class, I want to lightly touch on some color theory basics so you can use this knowledge to avoid muddy water color blends. For now, join me as I paint some color blends. So I'm starting with the positive spaces, which means we will paint inside the negative space paintings we did in the previous exercises. I'm laying down a paint blob of my first color, which is a pink shade called permanent rose. You know the drill by now, please paint and pull the wet blob around to fill the space. Add more paint and repeat. This time though, we won't fill in the entire shape. Just bring the paint down to about half the area and stop so that we can blend our second color into the remaining area. I've picked a deep orange sheet called cadmium red pale hue to blend in with the pink. So I pick up the orange paint on my brush and place it where I left off with my pink section. Place the orange blob right on the pink blob, which is still wet and drag it. So it's basically just like we've been refilling our brushes with paint every now and then, just that in this case, we're using a different color and then we're just gently smoothening out our paint layer. That's it. While we move to the next shape, here's something to think about. When painting a blend like this, you need to have an idea of what type of gradient you're trying to achieve. In case of the square, I just went for a linear gradient from top to bottom. In this case, I'm doing a diagonal gradient. So I mentally cutting the circle in half across the diagonal and placing my first color on the top left off alone. Then I switch over to my second color and blend it in. I'm just finishing off the circle by slowly going over these edges to give them nice and smooth. Now for the leaf, I'm not doing a definite gradient, and that's okay too. A color blend doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a color gradient. So in this case, I'm just switching between the colors wherever I feel like to get a random blend. I always keep the shape in mind when I do this though, so it's not entirely random. Like in this case, I want the tips of the leaf to be a different color than the rest of it, so I keep that in mind as I'm blending the two colors. I'm once again doing a linear top-to-bottom for the J. I start off with the orange from the top and move down. However, I start the pink from the tail of the J and not from the middle. This helps to keep a rich pure pink think at the very tip, but it's perfectly okay to do it either way. I'd say try out both methods and see what you like. This is how it looks like when it's fully dry. Notice those crisp intense edges. To me, that really gives it a champ unique to hand painted watercolors. So next we are going to use the top section of this to paint negative space watercolor blends. Here again, the only real difference is in the way we see the shape. Think rectangular frame instead of the square inside. I'm doing a diagonal gradient again, so I have to constantly keep that in mind as I paint and make sure my color blend is along this angle. When I reach somewhere around the diagonally opposite corners of the shape, I switch over to the pink paint and continue in the same manner. Remember our tip to leave a wet blob to buy ourselves some time, keep using that. So now I feel like the initial orange spots have dried up rather harshly and I want to go over this again to try and fix that and then, add some more pink to blend it in. For this one, I want to do a radial gradients, starting with pink close to the circle and moving out into orange radially. So paint a pink ring around the circle and try to be as quick as you can with this, because we need to capitalize on the wetness of the ring to aid the blending as much as possible and then go in with the orange and pull the pink ring outward section by section to blend it into the orange that you are constantly adding. If the pink paths begin to dry, try to reactivate the paint by going over it very gently with the brush as you paint. But do not overdo this because you can end up damaging the paper. Of course, it's okay if that happens here as we are just practicing. With enough practice, you'll figure out how much is too much for these things. Since the orange seems to be taking over a bit, I'm going in with some more pink right next to the circle and blending it out again. Here also, I want to paint pink close to the leaves and blend out into the orange. It's essentially the same concept as with the radial gradient, just that the shape is irregular now. So I'm going to subdivide my space into smaller areas to do the same thing, switching between the colors within each section. Now, why did I go over the pencil marks and destroy the white space here? Because I did not switch over to a detail brush don't be me, switchover to a smaller brush to paint such tight spots. I'm keeping it simple with this one and doing a linear top-to-bottom gradient. So you know how to go about this now. Just be mindful of the corners cost by the J and try to get in there nice and tight. Check this out, that's way too much water in the paint I just added. This can happen every now and then and you know how to fix it already. Remember the science tip I gave you earlier, just dab the brush on a dry tissue and go into soak up that excess water, then continue painting as before. Now, I'm not happy with how this dried up, so I'm going over this once again with a new layer. I've checked and made sure that the first layer is fully dry. Remember the dangers of painting on damp paper, actually try it out, I would say. So you can see for yourself. Anyway, let's finish this layer off similar to how we did layer one. Now let's take a dip and the color theory ocean. Color theory is nothing but the science of colors. We are particularly interested in the color wheel, which is what the color theory is based on. So let's take a look. First, we have red, yellow and blue, which are called the primary colors. They are called so because in theory, all other colors can be made using combinations of these three colors. Also, when all three are mixed together in equal proportions, you get black. Now, when you mix red and yellow, you get orange, with yellow and blue, you get green and with blue and red, you get purple. These are your secondary colors because each of them are made by mixing two primary colors. When you mix the primary color with the secondary color, you get your tertiary colors. This is how a basic color wheel is formed. Colors opposite to each other on the color wheel are called complimentary colors, so red and green perfectly complement each other, and so do yellow and purple, and blue and orange. Similarly, you can find the complimentary color to any color on the color wheel. These colors have the highest contrast between them and can give you a very vibrant pieces when used next to each other. But these are also the colors that you need to be most careful with, especially if you're using blending techniques with watercolor. Take for instance, yellow and purple. We know that purple is a product of the primary colors, red and blue, and yellow is the third primary color. We also know that mixing up all three primary colors results in black. Depending on the proportion and the intensity of each of these colors, you can actually end up with browns, grays or other neutral colors instead of black. So while yellow and purple look great next to each other, when mixed they can result in a neutral color. So if you try to blend yellow and purple, the blend would end up looking muddy. Instead of the pink and orange, if I had used yellow and purple for this exercise, all the places where they interacted with each other would have ended up looking muddy because of the neutral colors they will mix to form. You can get really pretty muted color schemes by experimenting with mixing complimentary colors, but if you're going for a vibrant color scheme, you don't want to destroy it with muddy blends. I want to encourage you to make a small quantity of these complimentary colors with each other and see for yourself. This is why when I choose colors for a watercolor blend, I try to find colors next to each other on the color wheel. These are called analogous colors. For example, green and blue, blue and purple, yellow and green, or like I picked for this exercise, pink and orange. You can even pick more than two colors that are near each other on the color wheel and end up creating beautiful, vibrant color blends. So refer to a color wheel and experiment with these a little bit and you'll find yourself figuring out your go-to color choices. This was just to make you understand that just because two colors look great next to each other, doesn't necessarily mean they will be a good choice for blending. I hope this lesson has inspired you to play with colors. Let's meet in the next video, where I will take you through some hand lettering basics to get you started on that. 8. Lettering Essentials: The world of lettering is such a beautiful place to take yourself to. Are you ready to explore this exciting form of art? In this lesson, I will take you through some of the very basic essential concepts of hand lettering. Specifically speaking, I'm focusing on full calligraphy, which I think is one of the most straightforward approaches for beginners. If you are already into lettering, feel free to go about this, using the styles and techniques that you are familiar with. For the sake of our projects, you need to only be able to trace around your letters that you create in whatever style you choose. If you are completely or relatively new to hand lettering, doing these exercises with me will definitely be beneficial to getting you started. I really hope this lesson inspires you to keep lettering. I mentioned my focus will be on faux calligraphy. So what is faux calligraphy? Let's first look into what calligraphy is and what makes hand lettering different from it. Calligraphy is the art of beautiful writing. So you might be using tools specifically intended for calligraphy like, fountain pens, calligraphy nibs, brushes, brush pens, etc, to write out letters in a particular style. Hand lettering is the art of illustrating letters by hand. So you are essentially drawing out the different shapes that create each letter in the respective style. Now, faux calligraphy basically means fake calligraphy. It is a hand lettering technique, where you recreate the look of calligraphy, using regular tools like a pencil or a pen. So you're mimicking the final look of the stroke seen in calligraphy, but not by actually making those exact strokes. Let me show you what I mean by this. I am going to first show you how I would do some calligraphy with a brush marker, so that I can then show you how to fake it. Here I'm using a brush marker from the brand Karin. I'm writing the word hope using a brush marker. So this is me doing some brush calligraphy, which is a form of calligraphy using a brush or a brush marker as the calligraphy tool. Notice how there are both thick and thin strokes. This variation in line weight is created by varying the pressure I apply to the brush pen. If you observe this word, you can see that this variation is not random at all. There is a formula to do this.There's two basic types of strokes that make up every letter. At any given time, I'm either going upward or downward. When I go up, the stoke is called an upstroke, and when I go down, it's a downstroke. This is a downstroke, and then an upstroke. A downstroke, a small upstroke, a downstroke, and again, an upstroke. Similarly, an upstroke, a downstroke and a small upstroke. Can you see the formula now? All the thick ones are downstrokes and all the thin ones are upstrokes. So downstrokes, are thick, and upstrokes are thin.This right here is the most basic concept in calligraphy. These are some of the basic strokes you will be practicing, if you are learning calligraphy. But for full calligraphy, we only need to mimic these strokes, so we don't need to practice the technique. But first, why exactly are we trying to mimic this formula? Let's try doing the opposite. Let's make our upstroke thick and downstrokes thin and see what that looks like. Even though this looks like an H, doesn't it look odd? We're used to seeing letters look like this. That is why we respond better to this. Even when we write normally with a pencil, there is an involuntary variation in pressure, which also aligns with our formula. So let's see how we can recreate this effect using a pencil. Instead of doing a thick stroke, we draw the outline of something like a rectangle, and for the upstroke, it's just a line. See how I didn't even draw it upwards. Now let's try writing the same word, hope, using this idea. First, we just write it out with the same line width throughout. Later we will go in and thicken the downstrokes alone. You don't need to write the whole thing in one continuous movement of the pencil either. In fact, it helps to break every few strokes. Next, we need to take in the downstrokes. We start from the point where the upstroke changes to a downstroke and gradually increase the thickness. We repeat this for all the downstrokes. I decide which side to thicken it from based on where there is more space. This is why for the P I thickened the stroke on both sides. Now let's try doing some uppercase letters. This is how you would normally write an A. So upstroke, downstroke, and then a horizontal stroke. Horizontal strokes are usually kept thin just like upstrokes. So start like how you would normally write. Then just thicken the downstroke. Similarly, you can do a B as well.Try this with whatever letter you like. Let's try E. A thick downstroke and three thin horizontal strokes is enough. Now for some lowercase letters, just follow the same concept and keep trying. You'll get the hang of it soon enough. Let me give you a peek into the steps we will be following to get our lettering ready for our projects. First, like we did before, we just draw the letters of our word with a pencil and then go in and thicken and all our downstrokes. Then we will switch over to a fine liner and go over all the outlines. This is so that we can see them better while tracing them onto a watercolor paper.Then erase all the pencil marks. You can do the entire word in uppercase as well if you'd like to, using the same steps. In certain cases, depending on the scale of your artwork, leaving the upstroke or horizontal strokes as a single thin line may not work. You can definitely make them a bit thicker as well. Just make sure there is enough contrast between the downstrokes and upstrokes. Same applies, even if you are using lowercase script lettering. You can slightly thicken your upstroke too if the size of your final piece calls for it. So once I've thickened all the strokes to my liking, I go over the outlines with a black fine liner. Now erase the pencil marks and you're ready to trace over it. This was probably the quickest lettering lesson ever, wasn't it? I just wanted to very briefly introduce you to a relatively easy approach to get you started on lettering, if you haven't tried it previously. I hope I have demystified it a little bit for you. Keep practicing different words and you'll soon do this without giving it much thought. I'll see you in the next lesson, where we get into the most exciting parts of this class. 9. Project 1 : Sketching & Layout: Yes, we're finally about to get started on our first project. Who's excited? In this lesson, I'll take you through all the behind the scenes of my sketching process, including all the trial and error and all the mess that eventually results in a piece that I'm happy with. Let's start writing. I've picked the word sunshine for this piece and I want the lecturing style and the general mood of this artwork to convey all the bright happy feels that the word sunshine brings to me. You can follow along and go with my style choices or give it your own twist. I suggest that over time, you build yourself a library of lettering styles to refer for inspiration on Pinterest or Instagram or other platforms of your choice. First, I need to explore some lettering style ideas before I narrow down to the one. I begin by trying out a fine mix of uppercase and lowercase letters and I'm thinking this would look good with a uniform line weight throughout, something like this. I'm trying another continuous mono-line strips style with a playfully whimsical touch. I feel like giving retro ago with a cursive script style. How about the same thing but on an angle? What I have in mind is for my word to be set inside a background of colorful stripes. I'm just sketching out a little thumbnail version of my initial vision. The word needs to come somewhere there and I'm wondering there are some horizontal lines with this style that would probably clash with the stripes. I'm thinking this angle here would be a good thing that way. A good contrast against the horizontal stripes. I decide to explore that options some more. I try out a little flourish edition to amp up the retro. What if I do something similar but with more bouncy letters? I actually like both these but I'm feeling the retro style slightly more than the bouncy one. I like that feeling of nostalgia that it brings, that's the one. I've drawn a five-by-five inch square so that I can make a more refined sketch to scale to fit inside the six by six inch square paper I plan to do this piece on. I've also marked the center line. Then I am drawing some angled lines as guides for my text to sit inside. Now, the word sunshine has eight letters, so four on either side of the center line. But normally, since I, is a much thinner letter than the others, I would compensate for that and plan to shift the center of it. However, in this case, I'm not doing that. You see how the flattish starting from the E, takes up some space in the end. I need to account for that almost as an extra letter. I'm keeping the center line as it is just before h I normally work from the center to give my texts centralized. I'm starting by sketching out the H. I use my grid ruler to help keep the angles of all my down strokes similar. I realize I need to reduce the height of my letters to fit them well in the space. I erase everything and shifts my top guidelines slightly downwards and sketch out my letters again. I now switch over to the left side, again, starting from the center and working outwards. I'm constantly making slight changes in placement and angles as I go based on my judgment of how the layout is coming together. I have to go over this s a couple of times to get it looking satisfactory. Now, for the flourish element, I'm just figuring out the shape as I go. That looks pretty good to me but I think we need a little something on top to balance out the flourish at the bottom. I'm going to mess around with my h a little bit.f I'm trying out a few ideas to figure this out and refining the shape as I go. Now, I feel like there's too much empty space to the left of the H. I need to add something that goes with the whole mood of the piece maybe a sun. I play around with this idea for some time figuring out where and how I'd like this element to fit in with the rest of the layout. See in this particular way, I put it in that angle because I wanted it to be perfectly parallel to my baseline. It just helps bring balance. Once the skeleton looks good enough to me, I go in and taken all the down-strokes and round off some of the tips to make everything look nice and juicy. I seek every opportunity I get to make more corrections that I feel might help. Oops, I just realized I drew an N instead of the h. It's okay. I can go back in later and correct it. I want to keep all the line widths in the sun constant. I just thicken them all slightly. I go over the entire outline with my black fine line up so that I can lead to erase out all the pencil marks and keep it clean and crisp for tracing over. There we have it. Our sketch is now ready to be transferred to the watercolor paper. I do all of this because I don't want to put my watercolor paper through this much trial and error. I want the pencil marks on it to be minimal. I then take a photo of the sketch using the camera in my iPad Pro and I use a free app called Lightbox Trace that effectively turns my iPad into a light box. I had already cut out my watercolor paper to the six-by-six inch square that I wanted. I just placed the watercolor paper on my iPad and trace the design with my pencil using very gentle pressure. We want to keep the pencil marks as light as possible so that we have a clean piece in the end. I've also added in pencil guidelines for my stripes using lines that are half inch apart. In the next lesson, we are going to bring this pencil sketch to life by adding in some fun colors. 10. Project 1 : Painting: The time has come for us to pick up our brushes and put all of our watercolor learnings to use in our first project piece. Everything I do in this lesson is some application of what we have previously covered in other lessons. So I want to invite you to observe closely as I paint this piece. Feel free to slow down or speed up this video as you need too. I hope you are ready with your supplies to join me on this ride. I have my sketch ready from the previous lesson, and missed to talk about the masking tape. So I've gone ahead and taped out all the edges of my paper with a half inch wide masking tape. I do not tape the paper down to my table, I want to be able to move the paper around as I paint. So all the tape is doing here is giving me some nice crisp edges around the borders, and of course, some tape removal pleasure when I finish. I've taken out my paints that I need for this piece in the mixing wells. I decided to do a pink, yellow, orange color story with this, perfectly in line with the happy sunshine mood. So here's some of the pink, which is the shape called permanent rose. Then I've picked up a cheerful, almost mango like shade of orange called cadmium orange hue, which I'm going to keep referring to as mango. The orange I'm using is mostly cadmium red pale hue, mixed with a little bit of my mango to brighten it up, and the yellow as cadmium yellow hue. I'm assigning colors to the stripes pretty much randomly as I go. I want to start with a pink first. Paint the first stripe in, just like we did in our exercises. Place a wet blob and move it around to fill up the stripe. There's no text clashing with the first stripe, so there's nothing stopping you from easily filling in the entire stripe. Just remember to not touch the pencil marks as you paint. Similarly, with the second stripe, there's nothing in your way. I'm going with my mango shade for this one and filling in the entire stripe. The third one is going to be yellow. Now here we encounter our first shapes that we need to keep white, or in other words, paint around. You know how to do this. Just go carefully around the shapes as you paint without touching the outlines, of course. While the yellow is still wet, I'm adding in a line of mango here because I want to keep things more interesting, by making it look like the paint from adjacent stripes are bleeding into each other in some areas. I tried to fill in large continuous spaces first, before going into the smaller enclosed spaces. I know my next stripe is going to be pink, so I add in some pink here for the same bleeding effect that I talked about, and then fill in the remaining tiny bit here. I do the same thing with all the subsequent stripes, fill up the larger areas first, carefully going around all our lettering elements. Remember to switch to a detailed brush as spaces get tighter. Now, why do you think i decided to fill up our negative space with stripes? Well, colorful stripes are always fun to look at, aren't they? But that's not the only reason. One, they help us focus on painting one color at a time, so we don't need to worry too much about blending colors just yet. Two, they break up the negative space that would otherwise have been very large, helping you avoid harsh drying marks if you were trying to fill all that up in one go. It's good for us to think about these things beforehand. As you do more pieces, you'll figure out ideas to optimize your design in different ways like this. Negative painting is already time-consuming and requires a lot of patience. We don't need to make it even more complicated for ourselves. I'm going to let you observe me paint for some time now. Please excuse my very curious strands of hair that want to get in the frame every now and then as I paint. Here's a genuine mistake for you to learn from. Accidents like this can happen often during watercolor painting, and most of them are fixable. In this case, I'm adding a drop of water over the accident spot with a clean brush, and then using a dry tissue to dab and soak it up. I add more water and repeat till it looks clean enough. Chances are it's never going to look perfectly clean. But when it dries up, it will be a lot lighter, so you can almost always get away with it. You can even use a cotton bud instead of a tissue, especially in tighter spaces. The key is to not panic and act quickly. That pencil mark where you did all that correction is not coming off now or ever, but that's just something we need to live with. Notice how I'm using my smaller brush to get into these tiny spaces, then I switch over to my even smaller detailed brush as the spaces get even tighter. We've gotten through all the stripes and the painting is dry. I've gone ahead and erased all the pencil marks. If you look closely, you can see that some of the edges are not smooth and some tiny spaces have been left out. Now that the pencil outlines are out of the picture, we can get up-close and personal with our edges without freaking out about touching the pencil marks. So let's move them out and fill up any little gaps. But of course, only after layer one is fully dry. If we just paint near the edges and leave it, you're going to end up with some harsh lines, which can be unsightly. So you have to blend these out into the larger spaces to get them looking more cohesive. It's basically like doing another layer over the whole thing. The much awaited deep removal is here. I sometimes wonder if I paint with water colors just to do this. It's so satisfying to watch, isn't it? But really do this only after you're sure your painting is fully dry. Trust me, and we are done. Congrats on finishing your first project with me. I'm so excited to see your creations. So go click a BEC and upload it right away. I hope you enjoyed this project as much as I did. Let's meet in the next class where we will start with our second project. 11. Project 2 : Sketching & Layout: Project number two is here. Once again, we start with the sketching phase and we're going to do this together right from deciding our lettering style and arriving at the layout to having a refined sketch ready to be transferred to the watercolor paper. This time, the word I've picked is destiny and I want it sitting inside a playful little cloud. Again, the final artwork is going to be a square, so I begin by making a thumbnail sketch. I want my text to sit inside a warped trapezoid of sorts to give it more energy. I start by writing out the word in cursive and see where it takes me. I try out a couple of flourishes from the y and the t. I'm not liking that s continuing into the t detail so I'm going to change up my s and try some other flourishes. I make a few more of these thumbnail sketches, trying to make the lettering look more curvy and bouncy. Well, so I think the curves on that trapezoid need to be a bit more dramatic to give me the intended effect and dynamics in the lettering. Yeah, I definitely like how this y is shaping up now. I'm taking the shape straight out of the t. I like this one for a start, so I am drawing in the cloud around it to give us a starting point for our bigger sketch. Once again, I've drawn a five-by-five inch square on a piece of printer paper and I have the thumbnail sketch next to me for reference. In the thumbnail, my cloud is overflowing from the borders which is not what I want. I think it's a good idea to start with the cloud itself to get better placement. As you can see, I'm using the thumbnail as an overall guide for the shape of the cloud and I'm sketching in a bunch of little curves. Here's a tip for these clouds, don't just draw a bunch of curves that are similar to each other. To keep it looking fun and playful, mix it up and keep varying the sizes of each of your curved sections. See the difference? I continue adjusting the shape of my cloud till I think it's good enough for the time being. Then I start laying down the baseline for my lettering. I'm still going with that trapezoid shape because I really want this piece to be full of energy. I want the word destiny to look almost as if it was mid flight from the sky, so I mark guides for the starting and ending angles. Then I start laying down my letters one by one. I need to not only distribute the spacing evenly, but also the angles in this case. I'm eyeballing this and mentally distributing the angles to each letter as I go based on the start and finish guides I have in place. I'm not liking the angle of that y. See how it's not looking balanced against my D. So I'm just adjusting that till it looks more symmetric. I'm adding a nice curvy crossbar to my t. I love it when I have a lowercase t in my word, especially so nicely centered, it gives me a lot of room to make it look all dreamy. Now, the D looks too basic against all the other fancy letters, and we definitely don't do basic, do we? Let's fix that. Now that I'm mostly happy with a skeleton of my lettering, I'm going to refine the cloud a little bit making small adjustments to make everything look more balanced. Now we go in and thicken our down strokes. By now you know how this works, so just go ahead and have fun with it. For each letter, I mentally gauge the amount of space on either side and make decisions about which side I want to thicken my strokes from. I feel like adding in two simple curves around the cloud just to balance out my flourishes a little bit and bring in some more of that decorative element. Yep, that looks pretty good to me. Now let's go over all the outlines with a black fine liner. Then just erase all the pencil marks and we are done. Did you enjoy building this one up from scratch into this fun sketch? In the next lesson, we will together blend in some beautiful cool blues and purples inside our cloud and bring the magic into this sketch. See you there. 12. Project 2 : Painting: Time to bring our cloud to live with some vibrant color blending. Let's get to it right away. I have my sketch transfer to the watercolor paper, which once again is a square measuring six by six inches. Now we're ready to pick out a paints and get painting. I have my mixing tree, a few different blues that I've picked out. This here is the shade, intense blue, this is some cobalt blue, and up here I have some turquoise. Then I've also chosen a purple shape called dioxazine violet. These are the paints I'm going to start off with, and then we'll see if we need to add or remove any colors as we go. The way I envision my cloud is with the edges all being intense with purples and dark blues, and the center being more warm with that splash of turquoise. I've started off on the top left corner of the cloud with some purple. I'm getting the paint nice and close to the pencil outlines, but definitely trying my best to not touch them. I'm going to pick up some intense blue on my brush and try to blend out the purple with it. The purple was not wet enough to really blend with the blue. I am going in with some more of that purple to help put the blending. You see how I'm using the smallest piece here to my advantage to break up the larger area into more manageable sized chunks to paint at a time. Always look out for opportunities to do this. Instead of stopping off somewhere random. I'm just dragging the intense blue paint down some more and then adding in some cobalt blue as I move towards the center. Then I go back to the center, this time, with some turquoise, I'm switching over to my detail brush to get into these tiny spaces. We continue doing this till the entire cloud is filled up. In order to get the full effect of the negative space letters, it's important for us to keep the cloud looking as seamless as possible. Even if there's lettering elements separating two areas, we need to always try to continue with colors from the adjacent area. For example, this part here is purple. When we get here, which is essentially right next to it, we have to make sure we start with at least some purple there for it to look like one continuous area. Besides staying off the pencil outlines, we just need to maybe, remember the overall effect we are trying to achieve. Like I said, maintaining continuity is important and sticking to the general idea of the gradient is also part of the continuity factor. In this case, we have a radial gradient, just not exactly a so-called situation here. Pick the pins accordingly in each area, you can give yourself some room to break away from the gradient every now and then to keep things more interesting, but don't overdo it or the gradient may not even be evident anymore. Remember the two strokes we added around the cloud and the end of our sketching face. I just erased those pencil box and I'm recreating them with faint trying to vary the line wave slightly to give them looking more dynamic. You see how these beautiful flourishes get lost because they ended up outside the cloud. I have an idea to try and bring them back into the picture by adding two more curves, just like the ones we did now, right next to the flourishes. In effect, even though they're not in the painting exactly. These additions suggest to the viewer how the flourishes curve out outside the cloud. Our first layer is done. I already like how this is looking, but we have some more work on this to take it up another notch. Once the first layer is fully dry, I erase all the pencil marks. Now we can go in and paint a second layer over this. We have a few incentives for doing this. One, we want to smoothen out all the edges without worrying about touching the pencil marks, while also making the edges look more defined. Two, the negative space pops out more against an intense positive space. Another layer will make up colors more vibrant and intense and it turn have the lettering stand out even more. Three, this is an opportunity for us to diminish the appearance of any harsh drying marks. But we're going to keep this layer light, with more watery paint, so that we don't lose out on much of those precious color blending effects. Try to keep the colors in blend to similar to the first layer as you go over each area. Now these areas look intense enough and have some beautiful blending effects, so I'm not going to touch them, I'm just continuing with the rest. This is going to be our last step. If there are any parts and the negative space where you ended up painting by mistake, you have this opportunity to fix that using a white pen. I use a jelly rod. I'm going in and just correcting the little curves and the S just like this. Try not to rely on this too much, because if you look close enough, you can't see these pen marks. See this as nothing but a last resort. There we have it. A playful whimsical cloud with our negative space lettering sitting nicely inside it, and that brings us to the end of this class. Do you feel accomplished? There's one last video with my final thoughts, let's meet there for our leave takings. 13. Final Thoughts: Congrats on completing this class on negative space lettering with watercolors. Thank you so much for doing this with me. It was such a joy to teach you. I hope you had just as much fun doing our exercises and class projects. I want to see all of the beautiful work that this class inspires you to create even in the future. Do tag me in your Instagram posts so that I can see them. They're really as so much to explore. This was mostly an introductory class and I aspire to create more advanced classes on this topic in the future. Do follow me here on Skillshare so that you will be notified right away when I publish a new class. If you enjoyed this class, please leave a review and spread the word with your friends and family. Thanks again. See you next time.