Pomegranate Portrait: Make Your Watercolors Pop

1. Introduction: The pomegranate is a spotlight fruit. Shiny, intense, and theatrical. It's the perfect fruit to use to practice watercolor techniques, such as using vibrant views, darks, lights, shadows, and high lights. Hi, I'm Wendy Lee an art teacher. I've been teaching for over ten years. I've been teaching adults and children, watercolors, as well as acrylic paints. I'm here for you to help you on your art journey. In this class, pomegranate portraits. Make your watercolors pop. You'll be learning how to use vibrant hes and textures, lights, darks, highlights and shadows to make your food paintings come to life. You'll be learning how to use different shades of the same color to create a depth and to make your paintings more realistic. And to make your paintings pop. For our class project, we'll be painting pomegranates together. But you can use the skills I'll be teaching you in any of your future watercolor paintings. That's what makes this class perfect for beginners and intermediate watercolor painters. Let's get painting. 2. Class project and Materials: For the class project, we will be painting these watercolor pomegranates together. You can use my reference picture or you can paint from real life, or you can paint any reference picture that you would like. If you choose to paint my reference picture, you can just trace it onto any watercolor paper and paint along with me. When you have done your class project, please upload it to the class project gallery below. For this class, you need watercolor paper. I've used cold pressed watercolor paper, but you can use any watercolor paper that you can find. You also need watercolor paints. You can use watercolor paints in a pan or in tubes, and then you need two brushes. A thin brush and a medium brush. It doesn't matter if they round or if they square, use which ones are more comfortable for you to use. You'll also need masking type or painters type to help you type your painting to a tabletop or to a board so that it doesn't buckle. Don't forget, you need a jar of clean water. You will see at the start of the next video that I have already painted a pale yellow and red background base layer for my mogramates. This is to make the filming easier so you can see it more easily. This base layer is totally optional. If you want to put it in, it will create a little bit of extra light in your painting. Remember to make it very, very watery and pale so that you almost can't see it. Gather up your materials and your reference picture and let's get painting. 3. Paint the first pomegranate: Now that the base layer, mix a red or burgundy color according to your liking and start painting this front pomegranate. This will have more pigment and less water than the base layer. Smooth out your brush strokes by keeping your paint brush wet to prevent solid lines from forming. By making the brush strokes rounded, we create contour to the pomegranate and make it look more three D. For this little neck section, I'm doing a rounded sideways brush stroke. I then drop a bit more color into the main part of my fruit as I felt it was too light. Feel free to mix up a bit of blue or shades of brown and add it to the reddish color while it is still wet. The wet blues and browns will blend naturally into the wet red layer, which then creates a more natural looking fruit. Remember to keep making rounded brush strokes as you add more color and using a little bit of water around the edges of these brush strokes so that they are not hard. Keep adding color to get the color that you are looking for. As you can see, I'm slowly, but surely building up my color layers. Yeah. Here I'm adding in a bit of burnt sienna while my red layer is still wet. Look how beautifully it blends. I'm using the same burnt sienna on the other side of the pomegranate and also on the inside of the stork section. While it is still wet, I add some darker brown to create depth. Now I'm going to leave this to dry before adding any more layers later on. Ary 4. Paint the pomegranate peel: We're going to use that same deep red burgundy color that we used for the first pomegranate to add to the peels around the bottom edges of these other pomegranates. The inner edges of the peel are uneven and a bit wonky, and you can drop some deeper darker shades of red into the peel as you go so that it doesn't look flat, and it creates a little bit of a more of a three D effect. Can you see how we are busy creating texture over here? We lightly tapping and stippling our paint brush and making that inner edge a little bit softer than the outer edge. Now let's work on this piece to the left. As you can see, I'm lightly touching my page with sharp soft movements, which helps to create texture. Once again, I in a couple more shades of burgundy, or you can a couple drops of blue or even of bro just to create an look around the edges. Moving to the pomegranate at the back, I've added a touch of blue to make my burgundy a bit darker so that it pushes this particular pomegranate more into the background. Remembering to make slightly rounded brush strokes from left to right as I paint and also making sure that I leave no hard lines over the middle of pomegranate. I cover the rest of my pomegranate. I'm just filling in all around the top and around the middle. To make areas lighter over the middle, I add a touch more water to my red mixture on my palette. Or if you have a lighter pinkish color, you can add it here to create that middle tone. I'm just painting it a little bit darker around this edge here so that I can see the difference between the back pomegranate and the one that's slightly in front of it. As I paint, I'm always mindful of softening the edges of my brush strokes. If the paint was quite thick, it will make hard lines across my pomegranate, so I'm remembering to soften those harder lines. Because if it dries, it will hard outlines where I don't want hard outlines. Once again, I'm going to be adding a little bit more depth to the back of this pomegranate. I'm adding a bit more blue into my original burgundy color and adding it into this gap to create a greater contrast and a shadow. Once again, remembering to blend that color as I put it, layer it on top of the burgundy color. Once you are happy with your peel, add the medium brown shade again to the stem sections, Leave some of the parts lighter to create depth. If your paint is a little bit wet, it might bleed here, but that's okay. It creates a very natural look. 5. Paint the inside of the pomegranate: For the inside fleshy part, I'm using yellow ocher and holding my brush loosely to make random loose brush strokes, which in turn, create texture. I'm also going to be adding a few strokes of a bit of light yellow. As you can see, it looks really nice to leave a couple of gaps open in your pomegranate. You can fill these with seeds or leave them open as is. For the pips, I'm using a bright red or vermilion red and just doing the outlines of the pips. Some I will paint solidly, but most I'll just leave the outlines. I'm also putting them on random places, and you can decide if you want to fill your pomegranate with pips or leave open spaces. Leaving a few open spaces creates interest and focal points in your painting. Every so often, I add a different re or some of my leftover burgundy to one or two pips, so they don't look alike. As you can see, I fast forwarded a few of these sections a bit as it can become a bit tedious watching me painting pips. But I'm sure as you paint along, you are enjoying painting these pips because it's quite relaxing, painting little pieces all over this pomegranate. Here, if you want to, you can add a bit of darkness again, bit of that burgundy or a little bit of dark blue, just once again to create that so that when you step back from your painting, it just a bit. This, of course, is optional. I'm also adding a little bit of 1 million into the peel, and I've also added a few seeds sprinkled around the pomegranates to make the overall picture look more authentic. As you can see, don't forget that last little piece of pomegranate on the left hand side. Look how beautiful this is. We are ready for our final details. 6. Adding the details: We are going to be adding the finer details now to make our painting pop. If you have a paints gray, a dark blue, or a mix of purple and dark blue, mix it to a medium consistency, and use this to add the shadows to the left hand side underneath your pomegranates and their pips. By adding it on this side, it shows that our light source is coming from the top right. I'm using the same color that I used for my shadows to add a few soft dabs into my stem. Just to create that little bit of contrast. Then I'm going to add a touch more water to this color on my paint palette, and paint in a couple of shadows on random places on the fleshy parts of my pomegranate. You can see they look like little sea shapes, and you can really put them anywhere you want to as this is just to create the illusion of depth. In real pomegranates, these would be the little ditches or the little holes in the pomegranate where the pips would sit. I've squeezed some white gas out of its tube, but it's just too stark for my liking, and so I've added a very small amount of red to it. We'll use this mixture to add a few highlights. This small brush, it really helps me with these tiny details and making the light spots look delicate and natural. Remember to add them to your tiny as well. Don't overthink the highlights for the bigger pomegranates. Add a few to the tops and the sides, being mindful of keeping the brush strokes slightly rounded to show the contour of the fruit. Just putting a couple here at the top and on the right hand side as well. As you can see, this is an upside down C on this section so that it's just adding a little bit more contour. I'm also adding a few small highlights to the outside and inner parts of the stem. V, I think we are done. 7. Final words: Thank you so much for taking this class. I really hope that I've helped you to make your watercolors pop. If you enjoy this class, or you have any tips to help me improve it, please leave a review in the comment section below. Please also subscribe to my skill shed channel so that you will be the first to know when one of my new classes comes up again. You can also follow me on Instagram, as well as YouTube. All the details are in my profile below. Please take a look at some of my other skill share classes and do enjoy them with me. I would absolutely love to see your painting of your pomegranates. Please share it in the project gallery below. Well, that's goodbye for me. I'll see you soon.