Painting Snowflakes: Simple Watercolor Exercises to Improve Brush Control

1. Welcome To The Class!: Hello, everyone. My name is Will Elliston, and today we'll be embracing the magic of winter by painting these delicate snowflakes. A perfect subject to explore the transparency and layering that watercolor offers. One unique technique that we'll be exploring today is using white watercolor to refine the shapes and edges of the snowflakes. This class is a perfect chance, an opportunity for you to explore and experiment with wet on wet painting. Because the background is so expressive, we're really pushing the limits of what watercolor can do and learning how far we can take it without any fear of error. Also, because we're only painting in one color, just various shades of blue, we don't have to worry about color mixing. We can just purely concentrate on tone, texture, edges, and transitions. I've been a professional artist for many years, exploring lots of different subjects from wildlife and portraits to cityscapes and countryside scenes. I've always been entranced by the possibilities of watercolor. But when I started, I had no idea where to begin or how to improve. I didn't know what supplies I needed, how to create the effects I wanted, or which colors to mix. Now I've taken part in many worldwide exhibitions, been featured in magazines, and been lucky enough to win awards from well respected organizations such as the International Watercolor Society, the Masters of Watercolor Alliance, Windsor and Newton, and the SAA. Watercolor can be overwhelming for those starting out, which is why my goal is to help you feel relaxed and enjoy this medium in a step by step manner. Today, I'll be guiding you through a complete painting, demonstrating a variety of techniques and explaining how I use all my supplies and materials. Whether you're just starting out or already have some experience, you'll be able to follow along at your own pace and improve your watercolor skills. If this class is too challenging or too easy for you, I have a variety of classes available at different skill levels. I like to start off with a free expressive approach with no fear of making mistakes as we create exciting textures for the underlayer. As the painting progresses, we'll add more details to bring it to life and make it stand out. I strive to simplify complex subjects into easier shapes that encourage playfulness. Throughout this class, I'll be sharing plenty of tips and tricks. I'll show you how to turn mistakes into opportunities, taking the stress out of painting in order to have fun. I'll also provide you with my watercolor mixing charts, which are an invaluable tool when it comes to choosing and mixing colors. If you have any questions, you can post them in the discussion thread down below. I'll be sure to read and respond to everything you post. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking the follow button at the top. This means you'll be the first to know when I launch a new class or post giveaways. You can also follow me on Instagram at Will Elliston to see my latest works. So if you want to explore wet on wet and expressive techniques as well as refined brush technique, then this is the perfect class for you. 2. Your Project: Thank you so much for choosing this class. I deeply appreciate that you're here joining me today. So looking at this painting, there's so much fun we can have with it because we start off with an expressive wash, as well as later on in the painting, practicing our brush technique, and it doesn't take much mental energy. It doesn't take much concentration, and you'll find it doesn't even take much time. Another thing we'll explore is using white watercolor and usually we use gouache or white watercolor at the end of the painting just for a few highlights. But to really master the use of it, today's painting uses it quite heavily. So we've got a great opportunity to see how we can control and manipulate white watercolor for use in all paintings. In the resource section, I've added a high resolution image of my finished painting to help guide you. You're welcome to follow my painting exactly or experiment with your own composition. As we're going to be focusing on the painting aspect of watercolor, I've provided templates you can use to help transfer or trace the sketch before you paint. It's fine to trace when using it as a guide for learning how to paint. It's important to have the underdrawing correct so that you can relax and have fun learning the watercolor medium itself. Whichever direction you take this class, it would be great to see your results and the paintings you create through it. I love giving my students feedback, so please take a photo afterwards and share it in the student project gallery under the project and resource tab. I'm always intrigued to see how many students have different approaches and how they progress with each class. I'd love to hear about your process and what you learned along the way or if you had any difficulties. I strongly recommend that you take a look at each other's work in the student project gallery. It's so inspiring to see each other's work and extremely comforting to get the support of your fellow students. So don't forget to like and comment on each other's work. 3. Materials & Supplies: Before we get started with the painting, let's go over all the materials and supplies I generally use. Having the right materials can greatly impact the outcome of your artwork. So I'll go over all the supplies I use for this class and beyond. They're very useful to have at your disposal and we'll make it easier for you to follow along. Let's start with the paints themselves. And like most of the materials we'll be using today, it's a lot to do with preference. I have 12 stable colours in my palette that I fill up from tubes. They are cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, cadmium red, Alizarin crimson, Opramarne blue, cobalt blue, serlean blue, lavender, purple, viridian, black, and at the end of the painting, I often use white gouache for tiny highlights. I don't use any particular brand, these colors you can get from any brand, although I personally use Daniel Smith, Windsor and Newton, or Holbein paints. So let's move on to brushes. The brush I use the most is a synthetic round brush like this Escoda Purl brush or this Van Gogh brush. They're very versatile because not only can you use them for detailed work with their fine tip, but as they can hold a lot of water, they are good for washers as well. They're also quite affordable, so I have quite a few in different sizes. Next are the mop brushes. Mop brushes are good for broad brush strokes, filling in large areas and creating smooth transitions or washes. They also have a nice tip that can be used for smaller details. But for really small details, highlights or anything that needs more precision, I use a synthetic size zero brush. All brands have them, and they're super cheap. Another useful brush to have is a Chinese calligraphy brush. They tend to have long bristles and a very pointy tip. They're perfect for adding texture or creating dynamic lines in your paintings. You can even fan them out like this to achieve fur or feather textures as well. And that's it for brushes. Onto paper. The better quality of your paper, the easier it will be to paint. Cheap paper crinkles easily and is very unforgiving, not allowing you to rework mistakes. It's harder to create appealing effects and apply useful techniques like rubbing away pigment. Good quality paper, however, such as cotton based paper, not only allows you to rework mistakes multiple times, but because the pigment reacts much better on it, the chances of mistakes are a lot lower and you'll be more likely to create better paintings. I use arches paper because that's what's available in my local art shop. A water spray is absolutely essential. By using this, it gives you more time to paint the areas you want before it dries. It also allows you to reactivate the paint if you want to add a smooth line or remove some paint. I also have an old rag or t shirt which I use to clean my brush. Cleaning off the paint before dipping it in the water will make the water last a lot longer. It's always useful to have a tissue at hand whilst painting to lift off excess paint. Also, you never know when an unwanted splash or drip might occur that needs wiping away quickly. I also have a water dropper to keep the paints wet. When you paint, it's important to have them a similar consistency to what they're like in the tubes. This way, it's easier to pick up sufficient pigment. A hair dryer is useful to have for speeding up the drying time and controlling the dampness of the paper. And lastly, masking tape. And this, of course, is just to hold the paper down still onto the surface to stop it sliding around whilst painting. Also, if you plan on painting to the edge, we'll allow you to create a very crisp, clean border. Another thing to add is you may want to use masking fluid for some of the white splashes that preserve the white of the paper. But even if you don't have masking fluid, that's fine. You can just use white watercolor or gouache at the end of the painting. Now, let's get on and start the painting. 4. How to Sketch It Out: So even though there's a lot of details in this snowflake, actually, they're quite arbitrary details, quite random, so they don't need to be so precise. I'm going to start off by doing a very light circle where I want the main Snowflake to B. Then maybe another one just half off into the side there. Maybe a few abstract ones around here. Just to visually map out where we want to space the snowflakes. Okay. Is going to add a few crosses here to mark out small little snowflakes we might want to add in. You can, of course, place them wherever you want. The idea of composition is to lead the eye. So these little abstract lines here are going to be a bit more loose than the main snowflake. You can use the tracing template if you want. But it's good practice to experiment with your own drawing sometimes because especially with a class like this, it's quite general. The details don't have to be so specific. Even though it looks very sharp with a lot of edges and it looks very geometric, they can be very flexible. You don't have to feel much pressure at all. A nice way to think about these snowflakes is to imagine they're a bit like pine trees, but at different angles. For most of these, we'll be using white quash. But you can experiment with how you want to do it. You can use masking fluid at the very beginning and then paint over. Now let's move to this main snowflake. I'm just going to find the rough center there. I'm going to do a line going outwards line going outwards. I'm going to aim for about six or seven equal slices of pie. Again, it doesn't have to be so accurate. I see, it's very uneven these slices, these divisions. I've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. That's fine. Let's start to build on it. You can get very abstract in the middle there. We don't need to worry so much about what happens in the center of this snowflake. You can see there's a kind of pattern going on, and we're just using this pattern in all different angles. A good drawing exercise, really. The human eyes are attracted to patterns. They see patterns. We notice patterns in things. So they're almost triangles, but slightly tilted. My an overlap sometimes like that. We're going to do another one here. Let's put the center there. The strands coming off here. In fact, we didn't actually need to draw this out. It's just a good idea to practice it, rehearse it in our minds before we start putting paint to paper. Now, of course, the tape will cover some of this. I like to do the drawing before I tape it up onto my painting board because I might want to rub out pieces. I might want to start the whole drawing again if I'm not happy with it. And just saves time and makes it less overwhelming. Okay. I think we're ready to attach this to the paper. I'm just going to maybe for your sake, I'm going to darken some of these lines and then scan in a nice little template to help guide you if you want to trace it. 5. Choosing Your Colours: Before we even get on with the painting today, let's have a look at what color blues we can use. You can have a look at your collection of colors and see what you might prefer. I think today, I quite like the feeling of Cerlan blue. So I've got two types of Cerlan blue. Actually, I've got the Cotman and I've got the Daniel Smith. And I'm just going to play around. You could see the difference between Daniel Smith, Cerleanblue, Winds and Newton, and Cotman, all very different, even though they're the same color. Slightly different feelings. Then we got cobalt blue, verteablue. I think I'm going to use that and ultramarine. So I've got these tubes. It really doesn't matter what to use. You don't need to follow along exactly. In fact, having your preference is what shapes your art, makes it unique and helps you develop your own practice. 6. Getting The Consistency Right: We're going to be using a lot of white gouache and white watercolor at the end of the painting to paint a lot of these snowflakes. But before we do that, we can choose to use a bit of masking fluid. And masking fluid will protect the white of the paper, of course. And this is not essential. Just a few drops. Of course, we can do that. The white wash at the end. Excusing what's already on there. The back of a brush. Nicely spaced out. Different range of sizes too, some bigger, some smaller. That should be enough. I'm just going to get my tissue and soak up some of the bits that are a bit too thick because they'll take a long time to dry and they'll also affect the brush marks. There we go. Now I'm going to get the hair dryer and completely dry those dots. Now that it's completely dry, I'm gonna take a medium size brush, something that's not too small, but not too big, something that holds enough water. And now I'm going to start mixing the kind of base color that I want. So I'm going to start off with this ultra ultramarin So cerrillan. And this vertical blue, which is a bit like cobalt. I'm just going to jumble them all up together and get a feel for what I kind of want. Looks like a lot of paint that does, but that's okay. I think I found the kind of color there. 7. The Main Snowflake: We want to start off very light. Look at the center and try.Thk about how you want the pattern to look like. Trying to keep it balanced. This middle snow fake takes the most work because we're going to be painting a lot of it using negative paint technique. In fact, we can have two brushes. We can have one full of pigment and a smaller one to control where to move the pigment, where to move the water and the pigment. I'm taking it about up to halfway at the moment. You can see there, start moving across. And it really doesn't matter so much about the shapes. At this stage, it doesn't make much sense at all, that's okay. Keeping it fairly even the tone. If there's not enough water on the brush, you can of course, dilute it more 8. Painting The Middle: So it looks quite complicated, but as long as your drawing is correct, it doesn't even have to be so correct. As long as your drawing is clear and you can work it out in your mind where you're meant to paint and where you're meant to leave white. Then it doesn't have to be too complex. It's a great exercise for brush work because we're working a free 60 angle. Okay. Now, of course, we could have painted it differently. We could have painted the whole background and painted completely using the white guash. But I figured for this central snowflake, we can challenge ourselves a bit to paint it from the beginning with the blue paint rather than the white guash. 9. Painting The Background: But now we've painted all around the central part, and it still doesn't make much sense to our eye, and that's okay at this moment. We'll refine it later on. We're just blocking out the main idea to begin with. And now we can start over here with the broad brushes and create some nice interesting textures. I'm going to use this brush, a larger brush. Pre wet some of the paper. I do like this serian blue, so I'm going to use a bit more of that. Maybe even this serleu too. Okay. Can be very bold. Maybe some ultramarne some of these spots, organically dabbing them in. We have to be careful when it reaches the edge like this close to this area we painted here. You can swap over back to small brush and lead it into these little areas. We can actually start using pigment from what's already on the paper to fill in these points now. I 10. Splats Of Water: If you scatter water right here, get some texture. Okay. Start working our way around. I want to make it a bit darker here because we're going to add white gush on top of these areas. I really want to make it stand out. I only stand out if there's a strong contrast. Maybe we can leave a bit of a need a bit more pigment here, but maybe we can start painting a little bit of a snowflake here. As we work our way around. That's very quickly going to drop in more thick pigment right here. 11. Negative Painting: Careful not to leave hard edges where you don't want them to. It's always nice to have hard edges in well placed areas. Okay. Okay. Sometimes using a big brush, it's a great exercise because it still has a very fine point, and it forces you to really work on your control. And it holds so much more liquid, you can carry on going with it for a very long time. And also, the advantages of using a good brush is, you can scrub it onto its side and kind of make a chisel kind of shape. So you can also get a very straight line. So it fills out go in and do thin lines like that. Okay and it does speed up the process. Using a small brush really takes a bit of time. Now it's making a bit more sense, isn't it? Seeing the snowflake complete. I want to leave a few areas completely white. 12. Finishing The Background: I think I'm going to introduce another color. Just because I want a bit more texture. I'm gonna use this idscent electric blue. Just drop bits of it here and there. A few splats of pure water. Because this keeps it organic. Often brushw looks too contrived, too forced. So by adding splatters, we make it look a bit more natural. Using a very light bit of tone. We can go into this snowflake a little bit and give it a bit more of a pattern within the white by patterns, I'm just basically adding diagonal lines going towards the center. 13. The Small Flakes: I'm just going to dry it off. Now I'm going to get my white guash. And straight from the tube. I'm just going to do I actually got a little pan in my palette here where I use my white. Going a few test strokes just to see if I have the right consistency. I'm basically going over all the pencil lines I can see and blocking them out. And then if I can't see anymore. I kind of just go to where there's a dark area to get that nice bit of contrast. Now, we can always go over these areas again if they dry too light or in this case, too dark, they're not light enough. H. All straight lines. Trying to avoid any curving lines for the time being. It's good practice to use squash because in many paintings, even if you use it just for a tiny few highlights at the end, getting to know your material is very good. So doing a painting like this where we're using a lot of it really forces us to get in touch with our medium and really feel what it's all about. 14. Defining The Flakes: So I'm just doing a few lines to mark out where the main directions of these frosty flakes are. And then I go back to further define them and add on more spiky bits. You can do quite abstract ones or try and be a bit more fancy if you want, you can really do them as you like. Trying to be a bit more symmetrical on some of them maybe. 15. Gouache Is Cool: The good thing about using Guache on blue paint is that blue is a cool color obviously, and guoche or white watercolor like this tends to dry quite cool rather than warm. So it fits in perfectly with the temperature that we're trying to achieve here. Miscellaneous diag wines. Some of them are a bit like trees like pine trees. 16. Varying The Composition: Now, of course, you don't have to do such a complicated or large composition as this. You can, of course. Do a smaller one. Maybe you just do one snowflake in the middle. Maybe a few small ones up here. And now I'm going to completely dry it off just so that I can put my hand on the paper without smudging any of the wet paint. Again, I'm going to go back in here and add a bit more suggestion of detail. M. 17. Using Ultramarine Blue: Is hub ultramarine tab, my pallet there, so I'm going to use that. Okay. 18. Building The Contrast: Again, a bit more contrast up here. Trying to soften out the edges a bit. There's always little bits that have been missed. So that's why I'm going back around a second time just trying to tidy it up. 19. Rubbing Out The Lines & Fluid: Now I'm going to dry it off again. So now it's completely dried to the touch. I'm going to use the rubber to rub out what little pencil markings there are. And also, this rubber will take away the masking fluid we put on earlier. I've been careful not to rub away the seam of the masking tape. A a few more pencil lines just there. Now, I'm going to go back with the masking with the white wash. Now, you can call this painting done whenever you feel it is. If you don't want to spend as much time messing around with the details, then that's perfectly fine. I just want a little bit more white. I want to be a bit bolder, so I'm going quite thick. I'm even using a bit of dry brush texture on here. That dry brush over the dark pigment underneath. It's quite effective, isn't it? This is rough paper I'm using, of course, there's going to be a lot of texture with the tooth of the paper. Just a few miscellaneous dry brush strokes up here, too. I know we spent all that time doing the detail, but this dry brush gives a nice little aesthetic. Not everywhere. 20. Finishing Touches: I'm going to add a few sharp little points to the snowflake. Okay. And now I'm going to take the tape off. And when it reveals that nice sharp line, it has a lovely feeling to it. It's the most satisfying part of the painting. Rub off plays lines to reveal that nice white edge. 21. Final Thoughts: Well, the painting's finished. I hope you had fun watching, and I really hope you give this painting a go because I promise you you'll learn so much from doing it. You'll learn so much from the expressive side of it at the beginning, doing the background, and you'll learn so much with the precision of the brush at all different angles of the snowflake by using the brush to go in through all those crevices and lines and angles. Not only do we learn how to angle the brush, but we learn more about the consistency of the water to achieve a nice even wash before blending it into that soft background. Remember, watercolor painting is not just about technical skills, but also about expressing your creativity and personal style. I encourage you to continue exploring, experimenting and pushing your boundaries to create your own unique watercolor masterpieces. As we come to the end of this class, I hope you feel more confident and comfortable with your watercolor painting abilities. Practice is key when it comes to improving your skills, so keep on painting and experimenting. I want to express my gratitude for each and every one of you. Your passion for watercolor painting is so inspiring and I'm honored to be your teacher. If you would like feedback on your painting, I'd love to give it. So please share your painting in the student projects gallery down below, and I'll be sure to respond. If you prefer, you can share it on Instagram, tagging me at Will Elliston, as I would love to see it. Skillshare also loves seeing my students work, so tag them as well at Skill Share. After putting so much effort into it, why not share your creation? If you have any questions or comments about today's class or want any specific advice related to watercolor, please reach out to me in the discussion section. You can also let me know about any subject wildlife or scene you'd like me to do a class on. If you found this class useful, I'd really appreciate getting your feedback on it. Reading your reviews fills my heart with joy and helps me create the best experience for my students. Lastly, please click the follow button Utop so you can follow me on skill share. This means that you'll be the first to know when I launch a new class or post giveaways. So I really hope you enjoyed this class and that you can take the techniques learned in this class to elevate your paintings to the next level until next time. Bye for now.