Paint What You Feel: Joy in Abstract Watercolor

1. Intro: This is not a class where we learn more tips and techniques for creating realistic artwork, but rather we delve into the beautiful world of abstract emotions. Hi, everyone. My name is Sheryl, and I'm your Skillshare teacher for the lessons to follow. I'm a self taught artist and a student of physics based in India. In my opinion, if art were to stay completely objective and reflect what we see in the real world right in front of our eyes, then it would have nothing to offer beyond what science already does. But there is more value to art, and that is what abstraction teaches us. The world of the abstract is subjective, based on interpretation and perspective. With that in mind, this class takes us into a world where we ground ourselves into a specific emotion such as joy, excitement, or energy, and we use that to lead us to scenes, compositions and shapes that we will use in our artwork. The abstracts that are created through this procedure and method that I teach you in the lessons to follow can be used and translated for any emotions such as calm, nostalgia, melancholy, or whichever emotion you would like to base your abstract artworks on. So do stick around for the lessons to follow. I promise that you'll enjoy them and take home something of value to you. Let's dive right in. 2. Class Overview: Before we proceed to the lessons, let me give you an overview of this class and your class project. Here, we generate an abstract artwork that is based on an emotion, and the specific emotion for this class is joy, the kind of joy that gives you energy and excitement, and we'll use that emotion to create a couple of beautiful abstract artworks. I will guide you in the procedure and method that lets you generate these artworks, and this involves the following steps. The first step for us is to take a few minutes to just calm ourselves and meditate on that emotion. Feel the joy in your body. What does that mean to you? What pictures, scenes, events, does joy and energy bring in your mind? Then we'll journal about those emotions and those events, what those mean to us specifically. And from our journaling or meditation exercise that we will spend 5 minutes on, we will extract shapes, compositions and colors. We will use these shapes and compositions into creating artworks. But before we go there, we will also take a pause to do some warm up exercises with watercolors. I will teach you how to control your water in watercolors, how that impacts the painting, whether you have more water on the brush or the paper, and what kind of results you can expect based on your amount of water versus amount of paint and different techniques such as mixing on palette versus mixing on paper and so on. Once we have done these warm up exercises, we will move on to our paintings, our actual paintings, which will be a couple of abstract artworks, and you can generate your own depending on the colors of your choice, the compositions and shapes that you have come up with to drive a result that is uniquely yours. It is not something that has to look the same as mine. It may or may not. It's up to you, but the method is general and you can apply it to different emotions as well. Your class project is to create these two paintings based on the emotion of your choice and post them in the project gallery below. This helps me and your fellow students view your diful works and provide feedback that help support you in your journey. So see you in the lessons where we'll first look at the materials that are needed for this class. 3. Materials: The first item that we need for class today is a notebook and some pens. This is for our journaling exercise that we will do at the beginning of the class. We also need some watercolor sheets of paper. This paper is specifically meant for watercolor painting. I'm using 300 GSM and 100% cotton paper today. But if you have cellulose paper available, that is fine and any brand works. We also need watercolor paints. They come in two formats primarily, pan sets and tubes. I will use tube paints for painting today, but if you have pan sets available, that is also fine. We also need watercolor painting palettes, but you can easily substitute this with ceramic plates, which can work just as well. Paint brushes, I have one flat and three round brushes. But even if you have just one or two brushes, one flat and one round, that is fine. A jar of clear water and a piece of cloth to dab off excess water from our paintbrushes. So these are all the painting supplies that we need. And let's also talk about some additional items which help us create patterns. The first item is a leaf, which I picked from my garden, you can get any leaf that has a good venation pattern at the back. We will use this to press patterns onto our paper. We also need the circular cap of old bottle that we'll use to press circular patterns, and a wax crayon or oil pastel or even a piece of wax is fine. This helps us create water resistance patterns. Those are all the materials, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Journaling Exercise: Before we start painting, we are going to pause for a moment because in this class, we are not just learning techniques. We are learning how to translate emotions into something visual. And for that, we need to find out what this emotion feels like for you. Today's emotion is joy, excitement and energy, not the kind that is quiet, but the kind that moves. The kind that feels like a burst, a rush or something that is expanding inside of you. I'd like you to think of a time when you felt this kind of joy. It could be something big or something very small. Maybe you were with a group of friends laughing or celebrating something or just feeling completely present and alive. Take your journal and write a few lines about that moment. Now let's move to something more universal. Think of a moment that almost everyone equates with joy and excitement. It could be a festival, celebration, dancing, music, colors moment. Write down a few words or short sentences describing that. Now let's move away from the specific event. If joy and excitement had no story and were just an emotion, what would it feel like? Ask yourself, is it light or heavy? Is it fast or slow? Does it feel like something that's expanding and getting bigger inside of you? Does it bounce, spread and rise? Write down whatever comes to you, even just a few words. Now, from everything you have written, I would like you to pick out three emotions and three moments. So the emotions or the feelings could be something like bursting, playful, vibrant, light. And underneath it, we want three moments which could be something like swirling, bouncing, expanding, radiating outwards. In the next step, we'll bridge this to the art. Step is very important because what you have just written is going to guide your painting. Instead of copying something you see, you're creating from something you feel. Before we move on, we'll take one more moment. Close your eyes if you're comfortable. And just notice, where do you feel this emotion in your body? Is it in your shoulders, your chest? Does it feel warm, light, energetic? Take one deep breath in and out. When you're ready, open your eyes. In the next lesson, we'll take everything you've written and translate it into shapes, compositions, and colors. 5. Colors and Compositions: Now that we have explored what joy and excitement feels like for us, we are going to translate that into colors because in watercolor, color is not just visual, it's emotional. From the colors that are available to me, I'm going to pick just three. Yellow brings light, warmth, and joy. Scarlet adds vibrancy, excitement, and intensity. And blue gives contrast. It keeps everything from becoming too overwhelming. You may select any three colors of your choice. They can be different from my colors. It's completely okay. Use what is available to you and what represents joy for you personally. Now that we have explored our emotions and built a color palette that reflects it, we are going to take the next step and start shaping our composition. This is where your painting begins to take form. Instead of sketching objects, we are going to build our compositions using simple visual elements. These are like the building blocks of emotion in abstract art. Circles are soft, continuous, and repeating. They work beautifully for joy because they create rhythm, playfulness, and a sense of moment. I'm just going to draw a few loose circles. They don't need to be perfect. In fact, it's better if they are not. Rectangles and straight edges introduce contrast. They feel more structured and little unexpected, which works well for excitement. Try placing a few rectangles between your circles. Notice how they immediately add variation. Next, let us have some flowing organic shapes that represent energy. They move freely, they merge, they expand. I'll draw one continuous shape that loops into itself. This is less about control and more about movement. This is the neuromorphic style of drawing, and we will soften the edges just to make it look smoother where the lines meet, just like that. It's almost like a meditation to smoothen out these edges. So I hope you take your time and really get your composition to match whatever energy and excitement meets to you personally. We can add some weight to some lines just to make it more interesting, just like that. This creates variation in our neuromorphic drawing. And then we have textures like leaves. These bring a sense of life, nature, and unpredictability. Now, instead of using everything at once, we are going to create two compositions. Your first composition will focus on circles and repetition. This creates a sense of rhythm like joyful movement, and your second composition will focus on organic flowing shapes. This is more intuitive. Think of energy spreading. In both compositions, try to think about where your eye goes first, where there is space, and where things feel dense. Not everything needs to be filled, leaving space is just as important as adding elements. As you drawing keep asking, does it feel like my version of joy? In the next lesson, we will warm up. 6. Warm Up: Part 1: Before we start our final painting, we are going to take a few minutes to warm up. This is my favorite part because there's no pressure to be perfect. We are just exploring to see how watercolor behaves. Before we begin, you can download the worksheet for this exercise from the class resources below. I highly recommend drawing it out so you can follow along and paint directly on it. Let us start by preparing our colors. Take your palette, and we are going to squeeze out our three colors, a primary blue, a primary yellow, and a scarlet red. Give each color a little space on the palette. You don't need a lot of paint here. Just enough so your brush can move freely. Now, take a moment to just look at these colors. These are all we are going to use for this exercise, and you will be surprised how many variations we can create from just these three colors. Now, let us begin with our first warm up exercise. This is what I call a watery brush blend. Pick up your brush and load it with a generous amount of water. Really, let it soak. This is important and create a very thin layer of water onto the first shape. The shape itself is not very important, but we need a very thin coat of water on this. It should feel like a slight glaze and not like a pool of water or a puddle of water on your page. Like you can see from this angle, it's just a slight glaze on the paper. Next, we dip our paintbrush into our first color. And we paint the top section of our shape. Keep your strokes light and fluid. Don't overthink the shape, fill it in gently. Now, without cleaning your brush completely, pick up your second color and place it right next to the first. Notice how the colors immediately begin to move into each other. They don't stay separate. They start blending on their own. That is water doing the work. You'll see soft edges, gradual transitions, and sometimes even unexpected textures form. Try not to control this too much. Let the paint spread. Let your brush be very watery relative to the page. So my brush is loaded with water, whereas my page only had a slight amount of water to begin with. If needed, you can tilt your paper slightly and watch the colors flow. This stage is all about letting go. You're not forcing a result, you're observing what happens. Take a moment here. Look at what your colors are doing. Are they merging smoothly? Are their blooms forming? Do you see areas where one color dominates the other? Every paper behaves a little differently and every amount of water creates a slightly different effect. That's exactly what we are exploring. Now let's move to the second variation. This time we are going to work with a watery paper surface. Start by cleaning your brush. Now instead of going straight in with color, we are going to apply a layer of clean water onto the paper first. Gently paint water into your neck shape, and I'm going to have a thick puddle of water this time, and the surface is really wet and glossy. You should be able to see the sheen. Now, pick your first and second color and just touch it to the fifth surface. Notice how differently it behaves compared to before. It spreads much faster, much softer, almost like it's blooming outward. Drop your colors in and watch. The colors don't just met, they diffuse into one another. The edges become even more blurred. There's less structure and more flow. This method gives a very dreamy atmospheric effect, but it also means you have less control. If you add too much water, the colors become very diluted. If you add too many layers, they might start to lose clarity. So again, this is about observing. What happens when you add more pregnant and what happens when you add less? Try it lightly tapping your brush instead of dragging it. See how that changes the moment. Now let's move to the third variant. This is what I call a balance blend. This is somewhere between the first two, not too watery, not too dry. Start again with your brush clean and slightly damp and wet your surface of the paper. Pick your first color and make sure the amount of water on your paintbrush and on your paper match. So there should not be more water on any one of them. This time, notice that your brush is not dripping with water and the colors are controlled but still fluid. Paint your first section. Now, pick up your second color and bring it in gently. You'll notice something different here. The colors still blend, but they don't completely take over each other. There's a bit more structure, a bit more intention. If needed, you can lightly guide the colors. Use the tip of your brush to nudge the edges. Not too much, just enough. This is where you begin to develop control over your watercolors, understanding when to let the water do the work and when to step in. You can try adjusting the water slightly. If it feels too dry, add a touch more water, if it feels to lose, reduce it. You'll start to feel the difference. In the next part, we'll explore how colors behave when we mix them on the palette and what leads to those muddy or results and how to avoid them. 7. Warm Up: Part 2: In this part, we are going to go a little deeper into how colors interact. Not just how they blend, but what they become when they met. We will explore this in a few different ways. Let's begin by wetting the paper. Take your brush with clean water and gently apply an even layer inside your shade. Make sure the surface is nicely wet. You should see a soft she but no large puddles. It helps to take your time to make sure the paper is evenly wet. Use back and forth moment of your paintbrush to give it an even coat. And if you have excess water anywhere, you can get it on your paintbrush and dap it off on the towel. Now, pick up your first color and lightly place it onto the wet surface. Let it spread on its own. I cover about one third of this bigger rectangle with my yellow color. Next, I clean off my paintbrush, and I pick my second color. I place it nearby, and I let it mix where both of them meet. I make sure I have enough pigment of this second color on my paper. And I pause to just watch. I lightly encourage it with my brush where they meet to see what intermediate colors I get when they blend into each other. Then I introduce my third color, which is the blue. I place it at both the edges, so at one edge it mixes with the yellow, and at the other it mixes with the scarlet. So I can see the range of colors easily that I get from this. Your choice of colors might have been different from mine, which is completely okay. But it's important to do this exercise to understand what colors you get from three colors that you have chosen based on your expression of joy. Mixing blue and yellow here gives me green, whereas mixing blue with reddish orange on the other end gives me a slight purple and while this dries, I'll move on to the next shape. We'll try a different approach now. This time we are going to mix colors on the palette first and then apply them onto dry paper. Make sure your neck shape is completely dry when you apply the color and now picking two of your colors from the palette, let's say red and yellow and mixing them together intentionally gives us an orange on the palette. Take your time here to adjust the ratio, add a bit more yellow or red until you get a color you like. Applying this mixture on the paper gives me a very vibrant orange. The color is more uniform, more predictable. There are fewer surprises. You can repeat this with other combinations. Blue and yellow gives a green and orange mixes with green because they are complimentares, they give a brown. Next, let me mix some blue and red or blue and orange, however you see this color. That gives a blackish purple. I will place that so that it can mix with the other two colors. Once again, this is very predictable the way it mixes because my paper was tried to begin with. It has a hint more red in it, which is why it looks warmer, like a warmer purple rather than more bluish. Now pause and observe and compare this with your previous shape. When we mix on paper, we get variation, softness and movement. When we mix on palette, we get control, consistency, and intention. Neither is better. They just create different kinds of results. Now let's explore something a little more interesting. Take your next shape, and this time, we are going to place a scarlet red and blue next to each other. You can work either slightly wet or slightly damp here. Place your red first. And I think I dropped a bit of water on the side of my page. I'm just clearing that off with my brush right now because I like my workspace to be clean. Anyway, moving on, bring your blue beside it and watch what happens where the reddish orange and the blue meet. These are near complimentary colors. They don't blend as cleanly as others. Instead, they start to neutralize each other. You might see deeper purples, muted tones, or even slightly dull areas forming. This is where things can start to go muddy, but not necessarily. The key here is restraint. Now in the next shape, let's try blue and yellow. So I make this shape damp first with clear water. And next, let me adjust a bit of water on this other side because I don't want it becoming too muddy on this side and perfecting a shape a bit too. Back to the shape we are working on and we place a yellow first, then we introduce our blue. Watch how differently these behave compared to the previous pair. Instead of dulling each other, they create greens, bright, fresh and vibrant greens. You may see multiple variations of green forming, some leaning more towards blue, some more towards yellow. Again, try not to overwork this. Let the colors meet and do their thing. This exercise helps you understand which combinations stay vibrant and which ones start to neutralize. I like to perfect my shapes, but of course, you don't need to. That's just a kind of tendency that I have got. Let's move on to the final exercise, and this one is very important. We are going to deliberately make a mistake. In your last shape after you have added water and my water has a bit of muddis to it already. But I create just a thin coat of this and I start adding my colors. I use all three of them. First the yellow, then I move on to the orange. And finally, I add more and more strokes, move the paint around, go back into areas that are already wet. I blend again, put colors, and then I blend again. I keep blending them with each other. I basically just overwork the square with my brush. With a dam brush, I just overwork the square. I blend over and over and over again and you can see how this creates a muddy texture and a dull, brownish grayish tone. Almost every beginner struggles with keeping their colors vibrant, not because they choose the wrong colors, but because they don't know when to stop. Watercolor rewards restraint. The more you go back into it, the more you disturb the pigments, the more they mix into each other completely. 8. Painting: Circles: Now we are ready to begin our first painting. This one is all about joy through rhythm and repetition. We will be using circles as our main element and combining them with color, flow, and texture. We are starting with a completely blank sheet of watercolor paper. Keep your paints, palette, brushes and a piece of cloth nearby. This will help you control excess water as we go. Dipping my cap into paint first, and I'm pressing it onto my paper. I have used yellow this time and I will use the lighter color first as I build more and more circles. The circle that I place next touches the first circle. And the one after that has both yellow and orange, a bit of orange to it, and it touches both of the first two circles. So this I find to be a pleasing overlay for how I want to place my circles. But if you prefer to have more overlap, that is also okay. But this looks more symmetric if you let all the circles touch each other, like so. Before picking up pigment, always take a moment to understand how much water your cap can hold. If your cap does not have much paint sticking to it, you won't be able to create these patterns. So you want a thick consistency of paint that you have prepared on your palette. You also want a palette large enough that your cap can dip inside it, like so. We are not aiming for perfection here. These circles are just a base for our colors to flow within. Notice how I gently place the color onto the paper instead of scrubbing it in. I let the shape of the cab do the job. Try to observe how the colors interact with each other. I place some blue circles now and it's advisable that you clean your cap before every turn. I did not clean it last time, so I got a bit of a yellow color on my paper this time. I'm sorry, a bit of green color. I keep repeating this process of pressing more and more circles on my paper until I have a sufficient number of those that I'm satisfied with. Composition finally is what is pleasing to the eyes. So because you have the same shade that is being repeated many times, this will look pleasant. But you want to be sparse in how you crowd your circles on the paper. They should be more crowded at some places and more sparse at the other places. And that gives it a beautiful look. Now the next part for us is to grab our paintbrush now that we have laid our circles down. And we dip our paintbrush in water and then bring it to our page. We want to paint the areas outside all of the circles. We will stay outside each of the circle and the places where the circle overlaps, and we'll just paint clean water outside the circles. You'll note some bleeding of colors like you can see here, the blue is bleeding out into the water, and that is perfectly fine. In fact, that is good if it bleeds out a little bit because that gives an interesting effect. I'm very careful to maintain the shapes of these circles and not distort them too much as I work with my brush around them. And the amount of water I'm placing on the paper is actually quite a lot. It's like a puddle of water, like you can see from this ankle. It's not a little conservative amount of water. It's quite a lot. And that is helpful because in this part, we would want to allow our paper to take its time to dry. We do not want it drying too fast because if it dries fast, we won't be able to put colors later on, which we are going to do in the next step. Wetting all around these circles. I have wet the bottom part now and time to move on to the top part. You can already see how pleasant the colors that are flowing into the water look at the bottom part of this painting. They give a rainbow feel. And they look fresh because the colors are very few right now, and each circle is one specific color, so it gives you one specific shade a next to it. I do recommend that before you start painting, you watch the entire video because this way you will have no surprises and you will know what to do at each step. But if you have already started and you're painting along with me, that's also fine. P a bit of blue in my paintbrush. I clean my paintbrush frequently enough that I don't muddy all the colors and mix all the colors. And if the gaps between the circles are difficult to close with larger size brushes, use your smaller size brushes. It might be the case that in your first attempt of trying to paint this that you messed up and your composition did not look as good or your colors got muddy. That is not surprising if you're painting this kind of composition for the first time. In fact, it took me two or three tries to get this painting right. But the happiness you get from seeing this painting work is really worth it. It's worth the time you take to make mistakes and learn from them, and it helps you grow as an artist too. So when my colors bled out earlier, I noticed some yellows at some places and some oranges at other places, blues at the other places and so on. Right now, I'm just placing more intense colors right off my palette, where I observed the yellows oranges and blues. I'm not mixing them with my brush. I'm not overworking the paper. In fact, I'm letting it naturally mix with each other where they meet. The water does the job for me. I do not need to move the colors around. If I see white space somewhere, I might encourage the colors a bit, so the painting does not look empty at certain places and so that the composition stays interesting. But beyond that, I really just let the paper do its job. Our painting is nearly complete. We just want to keep intensifying and building colors to the extent possible, while our paper is still wet, if you notice the paper starts to dry, you would want to stop working. Also, you could fill out all these small gaps with paint directly if you did not have water there earlier. You can use a small brush for this because this makes it easier to get in the smaller spaces rather than a big flood brush or a big round brush. Before we proceed to the next part, we will let this first layer dry completely. And once our paper is bone dry, we will press leaf patterns onto it. So you would want to wait for about 20 minutes or more, depending on how hot it is where you're located. And once it's dry, I'll see you in the next part. To finish off our first painting, we will print some leaf textures onto our dried circular watercolor vase. So I have my leaf here and you can see the texture at its back. And to begin with, we want to cover that texture in colour. I will take my blue, and I'm using blue here because I want a very sharp contrast. I suggest that you also choose the color that is darkest on your palette for this part because that will make the textures most visible on your paper. I use a very thick consistency of this blue and I use my flat brush to paint over the veination patterns at the back of the leaf. Then with this leaf in my hand, I press it down on the paper. Let's start from this end. Let's say we rotate the leaf a bit, our leaf is pointing outwards from the pattern. I will keep the orientation that way all along that the leaf is pointing outwards from our circular pattern at the center of the page. And you just lightly press it down and lift it off. It's not too visible on this side because it was already blue, but when I put it over yellow, it will be more visible, like so. Now, time to go again with more paint because the back of my leaf is almost out of color right now, and I just use enough color to leave a light pattern. If you're not very confident with this part, you could try making leaf prints on a separate piece of paper before you print it on your actual artwork. This is a really fun and relaxing part of the painting, and there's no hurry anymore because our paper is completely dry, unlike when it was wet and we needed to work before the paper starts to dry, we can take our time with this part. It's also important to know when to stop. Depending on the size of your paper and the size of your leaf, you don't want too much pattern because that will be distracting from the central circles. I only just place enough that the texture is visible but not overwhelming. I also start to go in with my other colors, a mixture of orange and blue and this gives a brown. I start to print that in as well. Very lightly. I really love the look of this organic texture on my painting, but if you prefer to leave it at the circles and not print these organic textures, it's fine. You can skip the part where we use the leaf. But now our painting is completely ready, and I will see you in the next part where we'll move on to our second painting. 9. Painting: Neuromorphic Flow (Part 1): In our previous painting, we used reputation and structure to express joy. In this painting, we are going to let go of that structure and explore energy in its most fluid form. This is about movement, intuition, and allowing the paints to guide you. Once again, we start with a blank sheet of paper, and this time we need our wax crayon, or you can use an oil pastel or a piece of wax in its place to create the neuromorphic form. So this is similar to the pattern that we drew in our journaling exercise earlier. I just draw these doodly lines that are really flowy and then optionally, you can smoothen the edges. This part is optional, but I prefer to do it. The white of this crayon is only visible from the side angle because really it's a white crayon, so you won't expect to see it unless light reflects differently from the side. In fact, from the top view that I'll next show you, you won't be able to see this much at all. But take your time to smooth all the edges and add weight to some of the lines optionally. You should be able to see your design as well if you view it from the side in a way that light reflects off the paper onto you. Then you would be able to see the wax because wax is more velvety and you'll see that texture from the side. So take your time to do this with all the hard edges smoothen them. We're using the wax here because it repels water. So when we paint over this, wet on wet or even wet on dry, the white space where the wax is there stays intact, whereas the paint stains the rest of the paper. And that the water that's rippleed off of this white space leaves an interesting pattern where the wax is applied, exactly the same as what you had put down on the paper. So this really acts like a negative space. It's almost a substitute for masking fluid. In fact, the first time that I was preparing this class, I tried the same method, but with masking fluid instead, that I found to be harder than using just a crayon. And so for the sake of my students here, I have used this crayon. But you could try if you're interested in experimenting by substituting the oil crayon or the the piece of wax that you're using, you can try substituting it with masking fluid and create the same pattern with masking fluid instead. If you have success through that method, I would love to see it as well. Now, nearly all of my edges have been smoothened and I take care to add weights at certain places, as well as to press down on my crayon or wax really hard because I want to leave enough on the paper that it will repel water very well. The harder you press the wax down, the better it will be, especially with cold press paper because it needs to get into the teeth of the paper for the water to stay repelled from the texture that's on top of the paper. Hot Press would be ideal for this part, actually, but cold press is fine, and I do not think it would work for rough grade, but if you have success doing this with rough grade, if that's the paper available to you, I would love to see the result in that case as well. Let's keep doing this. Just pressing down hard, going a second time over the lines to make sure I have enough of the crayon on white paper. I also add some circles here just to fill up space because I did not like how it was empty over there. And I add weights to one side of the circle as well, maybe a circle there too. That's it for our neuromorphic form. Now we'll start to paint on top with the same colors that we used when we did the circles using the cap of the bottle. So I have the same colour palette this one, too. First, I'm going to wet the entire sheet of paper, and this time, I don't need to be careful. I can go over all the lines. In fact, that's why we drew the lines there, so the wax repels the water and the paint doesn't settle on top of it. So I'm very carefree in the way I apply water right now. I just thoroughly soak the entire paper with water. I try not to have puddles, but rather an even pool of water. Because I would not want my colours to flow too freely just enough that it looks appealing. So all those same colors like I mentioned, the yellow, the red and the blue. And once again, I go in with my lightest color, and usually in watercolors, it's a good idea to start with the light color because the darker colors can overwhelm the painting too early, and you really cannot go from dark to light in watercolors. You can only go from light to dark. You cannot remove paint in watercolors. You can only lay them on the sheet, which is why it helps to choose the lightest color to go in with first, and then progressively darker hues go in next. So now I mix in some of that red or orange, and I start to place that where my yellow is not there, so I'm placing it at different places than where I put my yellow, and this will prevent the colors from becoming muddy and let them interact naturally where they meet. As you can see, very clearly now that the wax is repelling the colors because it repels the water in which the colors mix. The orange here is a very strong color. It draws attention, and blue helps us balance it out. So I go in with my blue now. And I place it on my sheet where both the yellow and the orange are absent. So I have left space for all three colors. I haven't necessarily planned it out in the beginning. In fact, I'm very spontaneous with how I do this. I place the colors wherever it looks appealing to the eye and every now and then I take a step back from the painting to see how the colors look and whether one side of the painting looks too heavy and the other too light and to balance the painting accordingly. Which place could use most colors, which place could use more white space. Those are questions I constantly ask in my mind as I create these artworks. Now, after I've laid this color down, I use a watery brush. Remember the watery brush from our warm up exercises where we had a lot of water in the brush and relatively less water on the paper. I use that to make the colors flow because right now the colors are not flowing that much. You can expect to see blooms. Blooms are cauliflower like patterns that appear on paper when you have more water on the brush for this style of painting, cauliflowers are fine. There's nothing wrong with having cauliflowers for this one. They might be really unwelcome in realistic styles of painting depending on your subject. But here, all textures are welcome and everything is beautiful because it conveys what you feel at the end of the day. This composition, remember, is built on how we feel our expression of joy. To B. This neuromorphic form was one way to express it and the other way was the circles that we did earlier, which we came up with in the journaling exercise. We'll add some squares to this one next, some rectangular patterns, which also was one pattern that we had made in our journal. Earlier during our exercises before this painting session. I will show you how to do that once this paper is completely dry. Once you have laid your colors down, the art that is flowing and dreamy and blending into each other is done, and now you want to wait for the page to dry completely. You want it to be brown dry before proceeding to the next section where we will paint some rectangles on top of this composition. See you there once your page is completely dry. Okay 10. Painting: Neuromorphic Flow (Part 2): So now that my paper is completely dry, I will demonstrate to you the next part. I choose a color for this one that is very strong so that I can clearly see it on top of my painting, the base that I have already painted. I use my flat brush for this part, and this is a large flat brush. If you do not have a flat brush with you, you can use a round brush to create round patterns. But the idea basically is that you use the shape of the flat brush to pull out these rectangles like so, and you want to vary their length so that there is interest in the painting. Just like that. I've been holding my brush pointing sideways, and you could also hold it pointing downwards, and this will give you different heights of the rectangles as well. I now do exactly that. So now I have some shorter rectangles and some longer ones. And I paint these rectangles in a diagonal pattern along the paper, because this indicates what direction the eyes are led along when a viewer looks at it, because this is the area that has most detail in this painting, the diagonal, going from the top left to the bottom right. You can also vary the colors slightly. For instance, I'm going to make my orange more intense at some places and even blend it with a bit of blue at some places. Just like that. So where I had already laid my orange and it's still wet, it's okay if it's not still wet for you, but you can just add a bit of dough right on top of it. Just like that. This gives it a feeling of shadow as well. And that again, adds variety to this painting. You can also vary the intensity of colors. For instance, you can dilute it with more water to have less intense color, but I like mine this way. But I'll demonstrate it for you, so you know what I mean by that. This is a very dilute mix now, not as strong as the earlier one, and it gives you some lighter rectangles. This again helps add variety to the painting. I don't want to overwhelm my sheet, so it's important to know when to stop, and it's tempting to go on, but this is all for this painting. See you in the next lesson. 11. Reflection: Now that you have completed both your paintings, let us take a moment to pause and reflect. This is an important part of the process because it lets you understand not just what you have created, but how you have created it. I'd like you to place both your paintings in front of you. Try not to judge them as good or bad, but rather just observe them. Let's start with your first painting. The circles with structure. Ask yourself, does it feel calm or energetic? Does the repetition feel playful or structured? Where does your eye go first in the painting? This painting reflects how we often experience joy with structure, rhythm, familiarity, and balance. Now look at your second painting, the flowing one. Ask yourself, does it feel more free, more expressive, more unpredictable. This painting reflects how we experience excitement and energy, movement, change, and spontaneity. Now look at both your paintings together and ask yourself, which one feels more like your joy? Which one did you enjoy painting more, and which one was more natural versus which was harder to paint? Sometimes we are drawn to structure. At other times we are drawn to flow. Neither is better. They are both just different ways of experiencing the same emotion. If you'd like, take a moment to write one or two line about what you feel your joy is really like. I also want to take a moment to encourage you that it can happen when painting with watercolors, that things did not go as planned, that colors behave unexpectedly and the shapes turn out different from what you had foreseen. And that is completely okay. That is part of working with watercolors and a part of working with emotions. What matters is that you showed up, explored, and created something that came from you. There is no single way to feel joy and neither is there a single way to paint it. 12. Final Note: Congratulations. You have reached the end of this class. I hope you enjoyed creating your abstract artworks as much as I enjoyed teaching this class. The next step for you would be to submit your projects to the project gallery below, where I and your fellow students in this class can view your project and provide constructive feedback and support. As always, if you have questions, feel free to reach out in the discussions below. If you enjoy this class and feel that it impacted you positively, do feel free to leave a feedback and review this class. This helps my class reach more people who might benefit from it. It was my privilege to be a teacher in this class, and I hope you'll stick around for more classes along similar themes. More than anything, my hope for you is that you continue painting and creating and exploring in your wonderful creative journey that you have embarked on. And I wish you the best for all your future paintings.