Playful Watercolors: Color Wheels in Watercolors

1. Welcome to Class!: Hello, I'm Stephanie. I welcome you to this class. In this class, we're going to have fun painting these wonderful color wheels to get to know our watercolors and play with colors. When we play with colors, we can do very abstract works. When you practice with watercolor wheels, you get to learn the different palettes that you can have and you can use them in more abstract pieces or in more realistic pieces afterwards. So during this class, we're going to paint together a little color wheel with some pattern on the side. We're going to choose our colors. We're going to warm up together, and all of the class is filmed in real time. So you can paint together with me and do the exercises at the same time. You don't have to pause, speedy videos throughout the class, I will give you tips on how to make the color wheels, how to test the patterns. I'll encourage you to explore and try to come up with your own design for your page. I'll show you different examples. And all in all, I think we're going to have last with playing with our colors, and that's the main goal here. This little exploration will be a side quit that we do after we're done with our color wheel. I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. Class Project: Color wheels are something very fun to play with. You can put them on paper sheets and put them in different areas of your paper. You can put a bunch of them on one page and have beautiful color palettes to choose from in this class. We're going to make these tiny sheets where you have the color wheel on one side and a nice fun pattern on the other. The pattern can change depending on the brush, depending on the brush you're using. So these ones have a similar round brush, and this one was done with a planter brush. You could also, as in this example, make a tiny tiny sketchbook that will be filled with color wheels. Of different palette. In this class, this is going to be our final project. We're going to paint one together in real time, so you have the time to put all your colors, make all the mixes. I'll guide you through all of this, and you can repeat them as much as you want, end up with many different color wheels and color palette. The reason I like to do this is one not waste the paint that I'm using while making the mixes, reuse them on the side. But also whereas the color wheel section give you more academic, if you want, or theoretical view of the colors. This one is a bit more organic, there are more mixes, the colors touch, and I find they give you better feel of how the color palette works as a whole. These are different ways to showcase the colors. You're done, I would love to see the colors you chose for your color exploration. They can be primaries, they can be a little bit different. Please share them in the project section. Ask away any question that you want as well. I do look at every project that is shared with me and with everybody else taking the class, it would be lovely to see your take on this pattern. Yeah, that's it. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. How to Uplaod a Project: To share a project with other students, you can see below the class, below the videos, below project section. You can click here. You can also find the resources, so the templates I shared with you, click on Creative proroject, add a project description. Color full watercolor swatches. You can add a project description. And I'll I'll make the description a bit better later. You can upload a cover image. We'll put this one as the cover image. Make sure it's under eight Mags. Here you go. Submit. And you can add images. And I'd love to see all of your swatches so you can drop them, drop them in and click Publish. The class will be launched in this section in the project section, you will be able to see the project of your fellow students and comment on them. I will personally go look into each project and leave you a little feedback. So I'll ask your questions away, and I'm really excited to see your projects coming. 4. Materials Needed in Class: For this class, we're going to make these little cars with a pattern on the side and a color wheel on the right side. We're going to paint them with watercolor. What do you need to make this project? You need some watercolor paper, 300 grams/square meter. Or 140 pounds. These are standard weights for good watercolor paper, so it doesn't bend easily. It takes quite a bit of water. These color wheels were made on this paper, which is pretty fun because it's twice as wide as it is high. You can fold them into half pretty easily like this. I want to make a tiny watercolor sketchbook with these. For these, I cut out larger sheets of fan piano artistico cold press, which is a pretty fun paper, and this is what I'm going to use in the class. In the resources section down below, I did put a template, if you want to simply trace this out. Or during the class in one lesson, I'm going to show you how to make your own. You might need something round to trace out the color wheel. I like these a lot. They are mason jar tops because in one, you have two sizes. It gets pretty handy and I'll show you how to use this. I use them to make little templates for the color wheels so you don't have to guess every time you make one. You're of course going to need some watercolors, either in pans, like these ones or in tubes. We're going to use probably both during the class. You're going to need something to mix the colors in. It can be the top of your palette. It could be some Put paper which I really enjoy using because we can make very easily fun side projects with our palettes afterwards. Brushes, of course. You can do the whole class with only one brush. I will be using a couple of brushes during this class. First off, this is a synthetic sable brush, which I prefer because they are easier to make straight lines with for these patterns here. You can use the same brush that you use to make the color wheel or you can use different brushes to have different shapes in the patterns we're going to make on the side. Finally, to trace out our pattern, we're going to need a couple of pencils and eraser is always fun. Permanent pen or some fountain pen with ink, whichever you prefer to write out the names for reference. Of course, a cloth or some paper towels to dry your brush. We are also going to need a ruler for tracing out some lines in the pattern, and if you're going to cut some more color paper, metal rulers are easier if you use an exacto or you could also use scissors if that's easier for you. And finally, don't forget. A water jar to rinse your brushes. When you paint with watercolor, a lot of people will suggest you have two water jars, especially when you're working with this type of thing where you want to document colors and are using very pale colors. However, on my part, I always confused a clean water jar. And the dirty water. I only use one and I will change the water if needed, but up to you, if you're good with the two water jar systems, please go ahead. If you're like me and you tend to confuse the dirty water and the clean water jar, only one water jar is enough and you will make pretty paintings nonetheless. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Tracing the template: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how I prep my page for one of these. We're going to keep our examples right here and this one is one I already did. What I will do is take another one to use for alignment purposes. You put the one where you already painted or the one your other traced ones and you make a tiny mark to show approximately where the center of your color wheel is on the other page. You mark the middle. And you mark the lines on which we will paint. Same thing on the horizontal space or you're going to make a little mark where the top of the color wheel is in the lines for the colors. Now you can see in this one that the lines show you can see, right? Now you can see that on this one, the lines will still show underneath. I don't mind these lines personally, especially on works such as these, which are meant to be references for colors. Also, for the sake of the camera during this class, I'm going to use pencils that will show up on the screen here, which were quite dark. If the lines bother you in the finished works, I suggest that you use a three H or two H pencil, the lighter the better and that you erase the lines a little bit before painting on them. But if this doesn't matter to you, you can just use any pencil you have on hand. I draw the middle line. If you don't have one that's already ready for you, you could just measure the paper, make a line in the middle. And when I make these lines, I try and by all means, do whatever you feel looks best for your page, but I like to have margins that are roughly the same on each side. Here I'm about 2 centimeters each way. I'll just let me trace these lines course, you can do the same thing as before. You can measure where the side of your lines stop on your previous patterns and I'll show you in a sack. Here are the four lines. You could simply use these as references as well and I made these little short. You could decide that you want to have them a larger, similar to the other ones. You can draw the lines with ruler. You can also free hand them And I totally encourage you to make this paternur now, next, we're going to draw the color wheel. This is why I like these a lot as artists. Another to we often have on hand is tape rolls. You could use those as well. They come in different sizes. But the main thing is you can see through. So when you make these lines, they will help you make the marks in the right place. We try to align the center, and of course, this is not doesn't have to be super precise, you try to align the middle of jarlid here, and this was my mark for the top. I want to go down like this. You make the circle. Now we're going to make color wheels with six sections. This is something that's a bit annoying for me to draw. I made myself a little template in a very easy fashion. You take some other piece of paper, you make a circle, you cut it out, and then you take the time to draw the lines. Once that's done, and you can please refer to the templates and you can print them out if you want. Once this is done, you can just put the circle here and you make little marks. Here. And then you know where to draw your lines. So just in case you want to draw the vertical one as a first line, make sure that it is straight and parallel to the side of your paper or not, once again, make it yours. Then you draw then you draw the second line. Finally, once you make your final line, this is just a simple thing to pay attention. Make sure that once you make that third line, that it intersects with where the two previous lines intersected. There we have it at six part color wheel. Finally, last thing we want to do is draw the lines for the name of the colors. You can also free hand them once you're done. I like to have the colors aligned with the exterior of the wheel, but I do this very quickly in terms of plcing. I also made a few other things where I put the colors at the bottom. You can try to put them on the side on the top, whichever works for you. Once again, I encourage you to experiment and see which one you like best. Finally, before we finish, I always, although I made so many of these, I always forget in which order I like to put my colors and I love to have them side by side and see which mixes I can get. I enjoy having the yellows, the reds, and the blues in the same order. But when I start a new one, I always forget which color I put first. I always write them down. Here when I make my first pattern, whether I make them in this fashion in these or in standalones. I always use the same order. This is something you can do. You can do it somewhere in order, in some other fashion. Once again, make the pattern years. In the next lesson, we will choose the colors that we will use in our color wheels. 6. Choosing your Colors: In this lesson, we're going to choose some colors. Throughout the class, we're going to use primary colors, different primaries. But you can make color wheels with any color that you wish. Please explore, either document your different primaries or go wild and choose something that's totally out there. For this first color wheel, I'm going to choose three bright primaries, permanent red, deep, permanent yellow, lemon, and Prussian blue. 7. Warm-up and exercises: In this lesson, we're going to have a little warm up session. We're going to play with different brushes to see which pattern we prefer, and we're going to test out a few colors. You don't have to do this. It's always a good idea to warm up. You can listen to this lesson while you're setting up if you don't feel like warming up and diving, you prefer to dive right into it. But let's get to. These are the three brushes that were used to do these three patterns. So as you can see, so these three patterns have a different feel, a different look, but they were equally fun to make. For painting the color wheels, as I said, I usually use this one. I prefer this one for the pattern. This was interesting, as was the other one. So we're off. If you have palette of colors that are dry like this, you might enjoy using this give when it works. There you go. You give tiny mist to activate all your colors and we're going to start saying with them. Which colors you use for this is totally up to you. You can go at random and what you'll want to do is make Tiny shapes just like this with the paint slightly touching the paper. I didn't mention, but take any paper you want. Those were little piece that were left out when I cut the paper for my templates. When you add colon is next to the first ones, you can have them slightly touch or you can put them a little further apart. And wait for them to dry a tiny bit before adding another color. This part is truly to see what marks you can have with your different brushes. You can see this brush is quite round If we try this one, it has a bit let's just use some color here. A bit of a pointier shape, which is difficult to say pointier shape. Less rounded and um leaner, so not as thick of a mark. Of course, this is going to be different with brushes you have. And Even if I tell you which number size my brush is, from brand to brand, I say, from brand to brand, the size will be different. So it doesn't matter as much. Just try your different brushes to see how they behave, which marks you prefer. And more importantly, perhaps which marks you enjoy most making. This third brush, as you can see, holds much less water. It's a little bit different to paint with it. It's not a watercolor brush. At best it's some mixed media brush or acrylics brush. I don't even know. I think I got it on special or something. But it makes wear interesting shapes. This is just to show you that maybe your favorite mark is hidden in a brush you don't even think can be used for watercolors. So I encourage you to have fun in this first section and try out. Whoops. Se too much water here. To have fun experiment with different brushes and truly find one you enjoy playing with. The second warm up you might want to do is to try different colors that you have on your palette and see how they mix. For example, if I put this yellow on the page and add this red, what color will I get? Will it be a beautiful orange or will it be a more muddy color? Now, when you do this, please write the colors because you will forget. I think. Now I'm going off memory for this, but if you have many colors, please take a moment to check and you can see that if you take another yellow with that same red, you might get what you should, if the car is not the same, you will get different results. Understanding all of these subtleties This is Indian yellow. I didn't touch too much water here. No, I just simply pick it up with a brush that is a little dried up. There you go. So you can try these and warm up a bit, or you can make them directly. Or you can make them directly in your color wheels. Totally up to you. As you can see, each color behaves a little differently. Depending on how much water you have, what pigment is in there? Here, that yellow totally overpowered the blue. Same thing with the reds and blues. If we put the reds here. You can see this is a very orangy red. It starts. If we take the warmish blue, we will have a very dark purple in the middle. Too much blue here. I have a very dark, almost black color if we try very a much cooler red. She's almost purply. We had that same blue. That blue is very strong. I still dark, but I'll add some water just to show better the color. But I'm more purply colors, whereas here, we have a very muddy color. There you go. You've warmed up a bit playing with the colors, you've warmed up, finding the brush you prefer to use in the class, and we're going to go right into making our class project. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Let's Paint our Project: Let's paint our first color wheel. I'm going to use this little UPO sheet as a palette and we're going to do something fun with it once it's done. I tend to put the colors in the same order as the color wheel because if not, what happens, it's so easy to put the wrong color in the wrong place or the right color in the wrong place to put colors in the wrong place. Quick tip if you have a tube that you can't open, put it in some water for a little while. Let the water do its magic. I will dissolve the color. I over this and it will end up opening. Crack. You want to put enough, especially of the lightest color. You want to put enough that you have to play so that you don't have to reopen your tubes. Well, making the color, I already forget Blue goes left. You want to put enough color that you don't have to go back to your tube though they're not far. This one dry down So the blue, you need a little less of it because as we'll see, it takes very little blue to add to yellow to make green red is similar. The reason I say not to put too much is because in this case, I want to reuse what's left on the palette to do something fun with it. But if ever you have too much, they are watercolors, so they'll dry and you can reuse them in some other projects, so it's not too bad. It's not like it will go to waste. We're going to start with a yellow because as our water is clean right now, it's probably the best time to put yellow. It won't be contaminated with another color. A drop of water on each color while we start. Now the process is pretty straightforward. You will first off, add colored here. I'm not going to tell you a lot of not a lot, but sometimes teacher will tell you not to rotate your page that you're going to have to be comfortable with painting every which way. I mean, we're just having fun making color wheels and seeing how colors interact, by all means, turn paper as much as you want. I'm going to try to not turn it too much because of the cameras, but let me see, I already failed at this right now. Now once we're done with the yellow, you could directly go for the orange or you can let your color dry a little bit. What happens is if you make the orange right now and you touch and when you put the orange, it touches on the yellow. We'll make it right now. I'll show you. You can paint along with me because we can try so many ways and then you should try so many ways and then you can decide which one you prefer. When you're going to make your orange, you don't want to put too much red in a put way too much. It takes not much red to make orange. It takes not much blue and yellow to make green. What we'll do since we have a color that I find is too red, we'll start with our pattern. Depending on the brush you have, the marks will be different, which is what makes it interesting. For this one, I will use the same brush. You could depending on the effect you have, this one was done with a small flat brush. These ones were made with a more rounded brush. You see that each brush will make its own beautiful mark. I like these today, so I'll keep going with this one. Now, once I don't have much paint on it, I can rinse out my brush and make lighter marks as well. In this type of pattern, the fun thing is, it doesn't matter which way you make them and which order, the only goal is to use what's left on your brush to have fun mixing the colors and seeing the color palette that comes out of mixing the primaries or the three colors you chose. Now we're going to put some more yellow in there. You can see that this is a more muted yellow. I'm not going to go into deep in the color theory in this class, I might make another one later on. In this one we're just going to observe and have fun with our colors mixing them. What I was saying a couple of minutes back is if your colors are still wet and you put them side by side, you might see some reaction between the colors I enjoy these little reactions and mixings on the page. These mixes on the page or the mixing on the page. Very much. If this is something that you do not and please be careful not to put your hand in your new paint, right? Yeah. As I was saying, you can see here where the colors touched. You can see they touched and the yellow went into the orange. I traveled quite far. If it bothers you, you can just pick it up, put some more orange on it. It's a side note, if you're going to correct it, if you want the color to be not straight but flat and uniform, you're going to want to go over the whole section with a little bit of water. Just to make sure that just to make sure that it all has the same level of water in it. But you could definitely leave the colors touching in there. I find that beautiful, just wanted to show you the option. 9. Let's Paint our Project - Part 2: You can pick up the orange right now, though I forgot and I wash my brush which is fine. You can pick up the orange right now and make more little marks on your pattern. It's quite dry right now, but you can come back to it afterwards. Next up, we're going to go with blue because it's opposite opposite of the yellow and the orange, it'll leave a little bit of time for those to dry. I tend to forget to put the colors right here. We're going to do this right now. You can do them afterwards. If you don't want to end up with paint on your hands like I just did, we're going to try to remember we just painted this yellow bit. B for blue. This is where it seems silly to pencil it in. But when you're with your colors, you can just forget that part of it and just look for the spot you mark blue on your page and go for it. Once again, make it yours, try it different ways. See which is more comfortable. Which color we you had more fun painting. Nos. I went over the but that's okay. We're not making a masterpiece. We're having fun with the colors. We're seeing what happens. Now I'm going to something I'm going to do here dry this color to not have to dip or rinse off the blue too many times. I'll put a dash of blue here to go with a yellow later. I'll put some blue over here to go with the red afterwards. We're going to use what's left of the blue to put a bit in our pattern. Make sure to not water down too much your colors because once you rinse off your brush and add the other color, one of the risks is having too much water in the mixes and having very light washes, once again, which are beautiful on their own. But for wheels for color wheels, I enjoy having very saturated mixes. Once again, if you're making a color wheel or color study for a project that has light colors, not to have. See, I put my finger and then blue again. I usually don't do this as much when I'm alone painting and not talking about it. If this is something you tend to do like me, maybe paint stuff in an order that will make it so you won't run the risk of putting your fingers in wet paint. She is off fine. I will all go away once I'm done and I wash my hands. This is quick. I think we're done with the blue. If you're new to watercolors, even if the water is a bit dirty and my cloth is very well loved, once you into your brush, just make sure that there is no color left in it as you can see here, and then you know your brush is clean. Let's go with red now. So once again, I'm going to turn my page. The way I like to make the paint these high slices. These slices is to go on the edges. I'll tell you when I do the next one. But basically, I mean, I'll show you as I do the next one, but basically is drop the a good bit of color in the middle and then make the edges, and then you can fill in the rest afterwards. Once again, you're playing with watercolors. The goal is to keep this section with the same level of wetness, if you will, the color dries evenly. We'll see I always forget. I have these references next to it. I can see red is the second one I usually put, we'll color this one in. Okay. There you go. You can make if you red additions to our little pattern, and having these on the side of the wheel where we want to color in the lines and this pattern is a bit more freeing because there's no right order. You could just drop color wherever you want. You can leave white spaces if you want, you can fill the whole thing. You can paint over another color if you want. Even things out for me because making only color wheels can seem a bit tedious, but here we have a perfect bounce. We're going to have to remember we did not put some yellow in there. We're going to come back to it afterwards. Instead of rinsing my brush, I could have just simply picked up the red and put it in the blue, which was the original plan. And I invite you to take notice of what you have in front of you. You probably did not choose the exact same colors that I did. You might have something very different on your page. I have a very muddy purple in front of me and this is due to the blue I picked and the red I picked. So for now, just take notice if you make different ones, you're going to have different results, and this is going to be very interesting. I said I would explain how I do. I drop a bit of color in the middle then when there's a bit less water on my paintbrush, I make the edges with the round one straight edges. Hoops, the touch that's okay. There. Have the lines. Once they're done, you can just even things out in the middle. It's a beautiful day here. When I'm filming this, it's a little bit hot things and there's some coming out of my window. There was not when I started, so the paint tends to dry bit quicker on my page today. So it's all right. It just means I have to work faster than I usually do. And you can see on my palette you try something you going to pick up a bit more water. We're going to add a lot of yellow to a tiny bit of blue. You can see how quickly we get a green color. Once again, half of the code in the middle. Paint the edges. Take your time. Paint edges. Put the yellow but I forgot earlier. And when you finish the pattern, you can just pick up whichever color you have left and create Umixes We 10. Let's Paint our Project - Part 3: Swear inches Color please. As I said earlier, you can just go over and add cards on top to see how things later and truly just have fun with it. Sometimes you'll discover. Very fun. It's like this very blue very turquoise color here. And there you have it. If you went over and want to correct some things, I mean, there's still watercolors, but you can always try. So corner here. Before you move on, write the name of the colors because you will not remember them. I spare you the number of times I said, I will remember the colors and knew I did not. Red deep and crushing blue. And there you have it. Your first color wheel. 11. Bonus Lesson: An Abstract Art Piece: The fun things I do with these little palettes once I'm done with them. So here we're going to make a tiny bit more orange because it's fun to have these different colors. And for it to work, I'm going to add some water because parts of them have dried. This is a sketchbook that I love a lot, which is very smooth. We're going to simply take the yupo page, flip it on there, press and you'll see depending on the quantity of water that you have on top of it, you're going to have lip. You're going to see some water coming out of it. You could just leave it like that or you can add water to make the pigment travel out from under there. If you put water all over the area, it will travel around the page, see. Then you can catch it. It's fun because one of the things you have no idea what's going on underneath the page, maybe you'll end up with a big muddy thing or you'll end up with something very fun. But it's fun for me anyway, it's fun to play with the pigments on their own. Without worrying too much about the result. Once it's done, you can simply let me say simply, sometimes it's not as easy as it should be, it's really stuck. Always have a talent knife not too far. You just use it to pick up the talent and it's under there. There was lots of blue. You can play with it. A bit more water with your brush to direct the color a bit. I could play with water and pigment for hours. This is a bonus exercise, exercise, a bonus creative endeavor. After the color wheel. Now these little yupo sheets you can wash them off. You can print them again if you want, or I have a few in the sketchbook, which I left here. Sometimes you get very interesting textures. In this one, I had a very nice dendril pattern appeared. I kept this. But you could definitely use them over and over, just wash them down or print a few more times and don't forget to date and add the date of the things you did and if you want, as a reference, you could write somewhere, the colors you use, and this is another way to document your color palette. 12. Before you leave...: Oh Hello. It's Stephanie again. You've been listening to me for a little while if you've been doing the lessons or just watching along. I hope you had fun during this class, playing with your colors, trying new mixes, making that little abstract at the end with your palette. If you didn't do it because you didn't play with yupo just try it with some plastic wrapper or packaging and stuff that you could use for that. I really hope you share your project in the project section. It's always fun to see what people make. I'd love to hear how you made it your own, what works for you, what doesn't if you have any questions, never hesitate to put them in your project. I will go and check them out. You can share your project here in the project section. You can always reach me on Instagram. You can tag me at D Migdt over there, and I'll go see your project. It's always fun to see on either platform here or over there. I hope you enjoy playing with your colors and you'll have some more fun with them. So keep playing. See you soon.