Transcripts
1. Watercolour Pumpkin Introduction: Hi and welcome to the class. We're going to be painting a
watercolored pumpkin today. But don't worry if it's not Halloween when you're watching. Because it's actually
a little squash that I picked up that
I couldn't resist. It's so cute. And I've taken some photographs of it
in a little set up, which we're going to
be working from today. And we're going to learn some basic watercolor
techniques. As we go, I'll be showing
you how to use mask and fluid so that you could keep your highlighted areas
bright and light. We'll be using various
watercolor techniques, which will include wet and wet dry brush and a bit of lifting. Finally, I'll show
you how you can use other materials to create
definition in your artwork. We'll be using a
restricted palette of ultramarine Alizarin
crimson and cadmium yellow. I'll explain a little bit
about building layers in watercolor as we go along
and about color mixing. Join me for the next chapter so that we can get our
materials together just in time for Halloween. But don't worry if it's not Halloween when you're watching, there's nothing spooky
about this at all because
2. Watercolour Pumpkin Part 1 Materials You Will Need: Right. So what you
need for this project, it's some watercolor paper. I'm using, cold
pressed from a pad. It's an A four
pad, it's 300 GSM. Cold pressed has a little
bit of texture basically, if you're wanting to use
a lot of fine detail, you could use hot pressed. It goes through rollers,
it's really flat paper. You could get handmade paper. You get rough paper. These
are great for loose painting. Again, if you want
somewhere in the middle. Co pressed is a great general
paper for most water color. If you don't have that,
don't rush out to buy it. Just use what you've got. Paints, You could
use tubes or pants. I'm using pants. Today
I'm using ultramarine, A lizard, and crimson
and cadmium yellow. These are pretty much
standard colors for your palette and you should
have them in your set. If we don't have them in
your set, don't worry. Just use whatever blue,
red, and yellow you have. You'll still be able to create a range of colors
for what you've got. Brushes you'll need three sizes
a large for doing washes. A medium brush, which is great for just
putting the color on. Add a smaller brush
for the detail. I'm not going to
tell you the sizes I'm using because sizes vary over all the different brands of brushes I'm using,
watercolor brushes. You do get mixed media brushes. A color brushes tend to hold
more paint in the bristles. If you do have watercolor
brushes, use them. If you've got mixed media
brushes, that's fine. You'll also need kitchen towel. Some of the optional materials that you can use today
are mask and fluid. If you're using mask and fluid, you might need a no brush that you're willing to
get a wreck because it's really gunky and it's
difficult to get out water soluble or
watercolor pencils, black and white chalk. You could use quant stick or pastels again,
black and white. White, Posca pen, white. If you're using gouache, you might want to use a hack or a goatirrush which has got fine bristles on it
and it's good for pulling out the paint.
You don't need these. As I say, these are
optionals and we'll come to that in the last section
of the painting. If you don't have them, you
could still do this project. And if you want to add them
to your collection later, then you could decide. But don't worry for now. Okay, that's enough
about the materials. Let's move on and
start this project.
3. Watercolour Pumpkin Part 2 Drawing the Pumpkin & Masking the Highlights: Okay. So let's get started. What you'll need to do is if you can tape your watercolor
paper to something, like if you've got a
board or something, or you could even
tape it down to other sketchbook pages so
that the edges don't curl. If you know how
to stretch paper, you could also stretch it. If you don't have a particularly
heavy weight paper, then stretching your
paper works well and you can use gum strip to
tape that down to aboard. Today I'm just
using masking tape. And I've taped a
piece of paper to and masked off the
right hand side so that I have a square. There will be a photograph on
the top right hand corner, which you can refer
to as we go along. You could copy the
little drawing that I've got here
on the screen. You could pause that
while you draw along, or you could do your own
drawing from your own pumpkin set up and then come
back once it's complete. Now you've got your
drawing down on the paper. What we want to do is
we want to mask out the areas where we want
to keep the high lights. If you look at the photograph, you could see little areas
where the lights just hitting on the pumpkin
and also on the leaves. And we've got a
little bit as well on some of the little branches and twigs at the background. That little white berries, I'm not sure exactly
what they're called, but there's little
areas on there. We're going to mask
these out as well. If you don't have masking fluid, you can use candle wax or you could use an
oil pastel or crayon. But make sure it's
like white or clear. Don't use too much because the water color
won't go into the paper. Wherever you've put any wax, just highlight just slightly if that's what you've
chosen to use. There are various
different kinds of masking fluid
that you could get. You get masking fluid
that's really yellow, so you could see where
it is on the page. You could get a
white masking fluid, or you get blue masking fluid. Get masking fluid that you could use a brush with or
you could draw it. I'm going to use a bit of
brush and a bit of drawing. I'm starting here. You can see on the photograph
there's a little twig. I'm just going to
highlight that, the center of the leave. Another part of the leave highlights
where the berries are. Then I'm taking the bottle which I need to apply
with the brush. Use an old brush because
it gets really gunky. And make sure to
give it a good clean with washing up liquid. When you're done,
you don't need to highlight the little area is where the lights
hitting the pumpkin. Here, just on the top
and on this side, while that's drying, we could
get out our water colors. You're going to
need ultramarine, cadmium yellow, and
lizard and crimson. If you don't have these
colors, don't worry. As long as you use a red, blue and yellow, you'll be
able to get similar results.
4. Watercolour Pumpkin Part 3 Painting the Background Layers: Okay, so we're going to
start our first layer, which we'll be working
into the background. I want you to make a brown
color using all of the colors, that's cadmium yellow, ultramarine blue, and
Alizarin Crimson. Essentially, what we're
doing here is we're mixing all of the
primary colors together. When you mix all of
the colors together, either a brown gray, depending on what the
ratios of the color are, I just want you to put equal parts on your
palette and mix them, color together until you
could see it turning brown. If you're sure, always have
just a piece of paper handy. Just cartridge paper or
a bit of scrap paper, an old envelope or something, and you can test out your
colors as you go along. Once you paint a little
bit onto the white, you'll actually see
just how it looks. Because it tends to look
a bit different when you put it onto the paper
than it does in the palette. Make sure the masking fluid is completely dry
before you start. Okay, I'm using
quite a big brush and what I'm doing is I'm wetting the background area in the top where we're going
to be putting the color. Now you want your paper to be
quite wet but not soaking. You should be able to see
a slight sheen on it. Then what we're
going to do is take the brown color that
we've mixed and we're putting that around
the edge of the drawing. The brown paint
is going to bleed into the water that's
already on the paper, which will give you
a nice softness. This is great for background areas where you don't really want to
focus the attention. I'm just adding a bit of yellow into here just
for a bit of variety. Variation is always
good in paintings. Then I've just added
a little bit of blue for the left
hand side here. Then now putting
in a little bit of red and just dropping that
in at the right hand side. That's all going to
run into one another and you'll get a nice
soft background. We need that to dry before
we go on to the next bit, you can see where it's all
bled into one another. And we've got a really
nice softness here, a bit of yellow now, down at the bottom, we've got a nice
orangey brown here, again working around the shape. But this time we're
working onto dry paper. It's a wet and dry technique, and most of the paints
come on off my brush here, I'm going to drag it down
and that's going to leave some little areas of
white still on the page. If you've got too much
paint on your brush, just dab it on a piece of
kitchen roll or a paper towel. Then we'll just work
around the leaves as well. While this is still damp, I'm going to mix a
purple gray as well. I'll just add about blue in here at this side because
there's a lot of shadow, a lot of dark in this area. I had a bit of red
and a bit more blue. Just to really get a
nice dark purple color, I'm just dabbing it
around the edges. If we refer back
to the photograph, you can see that they've
got layers of leaves here. I'm just hinting
at that. We don't want to make too
much out of that because the main focus is going to be on the
pumpkin itself. But we just want to add
in that bits of dark, so the pumpkin looks
really way down. If we've got shadows
underneath the pumpkin, then you could really see that the pumpkin is sitting
on something and it's not just floating in the air because we're working
wet to wet again. It'll all bleed in, so we'll
get a nice soft effect. We just need to
let that dry now. Just add a little bit more here. Just underneath the leaves where it's cast in
shadow as well. Then I'm going to go where
the little berries are. That's a really dark area. I'm going to work
into there as well. I'm just going to
paint the whole area and work around the berries. We'll want to leave those white because we'll create a bit of shape about them
once the paints dry. But for now, we
just want to paint the background in adding
a bit of yellow here. Again, again, just
for a variety. If we did everything
the same color, it would look really born. Now I'm just using my brush just to lift some of that color out. And wiping it on a paper towel so that the darker shadows
are underneath the berries. And then we'll let that dry.
5. Watercolour Pumpkin Part 4 Painting the First Layer of the Pumpkin & Leaves: Just using the Alizarin crimson and the cadmium yellow
to make an orange color. And this is going to make up, this is going to be just
a general overall wash across the pumpkin. And this is pretty much a
general approach for a lot of watercolor artists to build up your painting in
around three layers. You don't really want to do
more than that three layers. I'll give you enough just
to create that form. But you also need to think about the highlighted areas
and definition. And you could work
into that either after you've finished
your painting or you could use mask and
fluid just to prevent any paint from going into
these highlighted areas. Then you could work
into that layer just as you're
finishing the painting. It's good to have some
variety in your color. You can add a bit of
yellow as you're painting in just to give it
a bit of a glow. I'm just moving the
paint about here. You could say it's a
little bit heavier in some areas than the
other. That's good. Again, just a bit of
variety in your wash. I'm mixing up a darker maroon
here to get this color. I'm using all three
of the colors, but slightly heavier on the red. I'm using this color
just to go in between each segment just to create
a little bit of shadow. Now we're using this
into the wet paint, and this will just soften it a little bit so you've
not got any hard edges. Just soften it into the pumpkin. I'll drop just where
there's a bit of shadow. We are going to
work into this when we'll work into
the second layer, but it's nice just to fill
this up as you go along. Then you could use a bit kitchen
paper as I'm doing here, just to lift out any highlights. Again, I'm going a little bit darker with orange, the left hand side, and at the the front. Now, I don't want to overdo it, I'm going to leave it here. No water color will
dry round about 50% lighter than when it's wet. It looks quite good just now, but it will be a lot
paler once it's dry. And that's the reason why we want to build that up in layers. What might just before
this driest go a little bit more into the
segments with a cooler color, I'm adding some ultramarine to the maroon color and
that'll give us a cooler gray. Now we've got your little
piece of paper here just to you could test test your color out on
you don't want it too blue. This is like a purple
grey I've made here. Then we could just
go to the second, don't just draw an outline. It's nice to just leave little gaps in
between your lines. So I'll just put one here. Of course, you've got
shadows at the bottom. So could add in some
of that as well. You can see it'll start to
bleed into the wet paint. We're still working wet and wet like we did
for the background except we do have a little
bit more definition here. Well, let that try. Well, let's try
and look at mix up some paint that we can then work into this,
some of these leaves. So I'm going to add a bit of blue and yellow to make a
green for the leaves. But I'm still, I'm
mixing it into this color that we
originally had, maroon. We've turned it into
gray but a purple gray. And now we're creating, it's almost like a moss green. It's amazing. All the
different colors you could get just
from three colors. But add harmony to
painting if you use a restricted palette
rather than just using paint out the I'm just going to, you could see this leave,
it's what you call it, like a vein down the middle. It's yellow, yellow on the edge. So I'm just going to add in some pure color straight
from the paint pan here. Then I'm just going to, I think I'll make a darker gray here just by adding a
little bit of red to that. That's the opposite of green. That'll just cool. That'll just make that a
little bit more neutral. That's maybe a bit more to just making it a
little bit greener. Again, I'll add that in,
that's a bit better. We could then use that on
the second leave as well. I've not decided quite
how much definition I want on these leaves, just keeping it quite
loose at the minute. Again, I'm painting
a little bit of yellow on these veins. The pumpkins dry enough now, so it's the colors won't
run into one another, I should probably say, as well. When the way Adam
colors into the leaves, the paint isn't
soaking on the paper. And that's why you're
still able to see a bit of definition the same way, like when we were working
into the pumpkin, it's different from when we're working into the background. Earlier the paper was slightly Okay, so I'm still going to use this green color because
we need to paint some of these little leaves that
are in the background. So we could just use that
just to paint those in. There are quite dark areas in amongst those leaves as well. But we could paint them
after this is dry. Depends how much
definition we'll want to create The wait until
it's dry and add it in. Look at a good definition
of these leaves, but if we're wanting to
blur them out a little bit, we could put the dark in
while it's still wet. I'm just going to
put the light areas in first and see
how it's looking. This is the thing
with watercolor. You're always trying
to think a couple of steps ahead as you're
painting there. A lot of planning to be done when you're
painting in watercolor. When you're painting in acrylic, you could paint over things, but with water color,
you really do need to plan how you're going to
approach your painting. I'm going to use
part of this green in some of those leaves that were painted earlier as well. I'm still trying to create
an edge on this front leave. I'm lifting it out
with a little bit of the kitchen paper at this stage. I'm just thinking
about what I can add or if I want to just
wait until that's dry, I could probably work
into this a little red, leave in the background
here as a maroon color. I'm just going to mix up
a bit of maroon again, just by adding some red into
this might be about blue. I'm adding a bit of
blue just to make it a bit darker and give
it a wee bit variety. Well, I've got this
mixed up as well. I'm going to go around those little white berries because that is a
really dark area. And again, I'm just lifting it out as it comes to the front, just so that it really creates
a shadow around these. Then we'll leave it there and move on to the next
stage once it's dry.
6. Watercolour Pumpkin Part 5 Adding Layers: Okay. So I've mixed up the, the dark purple again. And I'm just using this in the leaves and
around the leaves. And I'll use my damp brush here just to pull the paint out. So a bit softer at
the edges here. Can I just mixing up a
little bit more purple here? This purple? Slightly bit
more red than this one. And then I'm just
going back into the shadows at the
bottom of the page again. Get the damp brush and just pull it
out at the sides. And you could see that
it's really starting to give form to the painting when we leave
in the background here. I'm just going to
hint at that as well. Using the red, I'll add a bit of blue just for a
bit. Shadows at the bottom. Again, using my damp brush
just to pull that out so we've got no severe edges of everything's softening off
at the bottom of the page. I'm just going to let
us try a little bit before I start working
into it anymore. Okay. I'm just going to make a dark brown because we'll
need to start thinking about the shadows in the
segments of the pumpkin. You can just try that on your
piece of paper just to see how dark it is and if it's
color you're looking for. So I'm going to paint
the stock in that. I'll get rid of the
white paper here. It's an almost chocolate brown color that
I've mixed here. I've left just a little s of light just to give the
stock a little bit of form. Then I'm adding some blue
because I'm going to go on the right hand side of the stock just to darken it
down a little bit. That'll also give the stock
a little bit of form, but I'll just wait till it's
dry, just a little bit. And then we could add it in. I'll just bleed a
little bit into. Do you want to make sure that it stays mainly at
the right hand side, but a little bit of
bleeding is just fine. Then I'm almost
drawing in this color. I'm just drawing in where the really darkest areas of the little segments
of the pumpkin are. When you're putting
in line work, it's always good to just
leave little gaps in between. You could see I'm drawing in all of the lines
on the segment. Just little areas. Then while that's
trying, I think we'll go back and work
into the berries. They're looking really
white on the page. Now I know they are white. But if we look at
the photograph, the areas that aren't
highlighted a pale gray. Just using the color
that we've mixed up. I'm just adding a
little bit more water. And then we could just add
that around the berry in the darker areas by making sure that
we're still leaving a little bit of
white highlight dry. Then using the darker color, I'll just a little bit in the bottom just to give
you those shadows. Again, make sure that the paper is not too wet
when you're doing this. Otherwise it'll just
cover the whole berry. If it does bleed into
the berry too much, you could dab it
with a little bit of kitchen roll just
to lift it again. I think the pumpkins should be trying not
to start working into. Now I'm painting, I mixed up really almost
like a golden brown mixed up here using the cadmium yellow
and lizard and crimson into the mixture
that we used earlier, roughly painting
into the pumpkin, leaving some of the areas behind more yellow and red. I'm going to paint this
where the areas are slightly darker and you can see it
with having all the layers, it's got more form. It's interesting to
look at one's dry, lighter water color paint
always dries lighter. You need to have a
number of layers. When you're working
in water color, you tend to work with
the lighter areas you're thinking about the
highlights first of all, then your mid tones and
then your darker tones While the paint is still wet. I'm just starting to put a
red to the dark gray color. I'm going to put that in between the segments and at the bottom of the
pumpkin just to create a little bit
more shadow again, you'll find that the more that
you paint with watercolor, you'll get used to this
way of method of work. If you've not used
water color before, or if you're used to
using acrylic paints, it is a different approach, but you're always thinking
about the areas that you want to show through. And I'm just going to
lift this bit out. Put a little bit too much at the at the top of
this pumpkin here. So I'm just going to lift it out with a bit of kitchen roll. Kitchen roll is
definitely your friend, when you're using watercolor, just dab in here
because I've put paint too far to the edge
of the back of the pumpkin, just dropping it in here, just towards where the stock
is, where it's darker. And just let this, I'm just
going to give my brushes, ah, I'm going to come back and working at the
fore that's dried off now, so give your brushes a
wash. And if we try, it's a wonderful end
for a dark purple. Again, we get plenty blue,
plenty of red in here. You find when you're mixing colors that your
color is too strong. Use the opposite color, red, you're looking for green. And to get green, you mix the
blue and yellow together. If it's to green, then add a bit of red. If it's to blue, you need to add a bit of orange. For that, you mix red
and yellow. It's orange. You need to add blue to yellow. Purple, red and blue. It's purple. Add a bit yellow. This is the third layer
that we've put down here on the in the shadows
at the bottom. I'm just wetting the paper again then exactly like
what Bob did before. Just go right in
around the edge using this purple brown color. I'm just going to go into the leaves about
the leaves that, if you could see on the
photograph, are really dark. I'm not going to go
quite as dark as that. I feel like that would
just be too dark. I'm going to just
a hint at some of these raggedy lines here
where the leaves are sitting. Pull some of that dark down. Again, I'm just looking at the areas where
I think I need to add more shadows just to lift, to lift the lighter areas. When you add more shadows, it's going to accentuate the lighter areas so
that it appears to be more three dimensional pickings, leave a bit darker. I think I'm going to
just let that dry for now and I'll see you
in the next section.
Alison Whyte, Painter and Printmaker
