Principles of Watercolor: Learn to Paint a Torch-Ginger Flower

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Which color is a beast? It is the most difficult of all the painting mediums. Those beautiful pans of bright, enticing colors actually harbor a personality that is fussy, temperamental, and downright wayward. Welcome to my class. I'm Catherine Jennifer, an artist and surface pattern designer living in Oxford, UK. I've loved painting since I was at school, but the truth is, I've avoided watercolor painting my entire life. When I was at university, I wanted to be a proper painter, so I focused on oil on canvas. After university, I moved on to working in water mixable oils and then later acrylics. To my mind, watercolor was boring, dull, and difficult. Every time I tried, it failed hopelessly. But in recent years, I started to see amazing work done in watercolor. I resolved to spend at least 20 minutes a day for an entire year working with watercolor. What I discovered was that I had to throw out everything I've learned about oils and acrylics and start from scratch. In this class, I have distilled what I've learned over the year into a few core principles or with thoughts which I hope you will find helpful. Then you can draw on when you do your own watercolor work so that you can experience for yourself the pure joy that working with this amazing, annoying, mesmerizing, magical, difficult, wonderful, medium can provide. 2. Project: [MUSIC] The project for this class is to try a few warm up exercises, which I will demonstrate. These will help you to embed some of the watercolor principles into your own art-making. Then the main part of the project is to paint a torch-ginger flower. These flowers are easy to paint and they enable you to practice all the principles in one painting. If you look in the resources section, you will find a PDF, which is a summary of the principles. This is for you to stick up on the wall near where you work, to help you remember the different things. I chose this project because watercolor is really difficult. But if you learn these principles and you practice and try them out, I hope you will discover the absolute joy that working with watercolor can give you. To set yourself up for a successful project, I would suggest that you have a space ready to work, get your paints out, get some watercolor paper, and then just dive in without too much thinking about it. As your final project, I would encourage you to upload some of the exercises you've done, as well as your torch-ginger flower painting. By the end of the class, you should have a really good grasp of what a wonderful high maintenance friend watercolor can be. [MUSIC] The high maintenance factor, I promise you, it's worth it. I can't wait to see what you share. 3. Materials: [MUSIC] Materials that you will need for the class are obviously some watercolors. I will be demonstrating with these Kuretake Gansai Tambi, which colors which are just divine. I also like to use some tube watercolors. My favorite ones are Holbein, which are really beautifully intense. I have a few Winsor & Newton, and Daniel Smith's also great. You don't need to go out and buy super expensive watercolors. If you've got some, just have a go with what you've got. But I have discovered that with watercolor, you do get what you pay for. The artist quality ones have a much higher concentration of pigment and give you much brighter, more vibrant colors. You will also need some watercolor paper. My absolute favorite brand is Arches, cold pressed. I really like working on watercolor blocks like this. They glue together at the sides, which means you don't need to bother with stretching the paper before you paint. Then when you finish, you just slide a letter opener underneath to get it out. You don't have to go and get Arches paper any, watercolor paper will do. Just make sure the thickness is 300 grams, which is 140 pounds. Otherwise you will get buckling. For brushes, you will need a range of different sizes. My favorite brushes to use are these ones. This big one is sip to gold, and it's a size 14. It comes to a really sharp point. This is a round brush. The next one I use most often is this. It's been so used, I can't even tell you what it is. Then I've got a number 10 round. I've also got this which is a rigger brush, which is great for really fine lines. Then I recently purchased this one, which I'm still getting used to. It's a silver black velvet brush and it's a 3/4 inch. If you do purchase brushes, just make sure you are purchasing a watercolor brush. The other thing you'll need is a palette. You can use cheap watercolor palettes like this. This one actually seals. It's a good travel palette. I've got two on the go. It's useful to note down what you've squeezed into the different pans because you will forget. You can also use the palette that comes with your watercolors. But I absolutely love my porcelain, which is block, which is this. It's smooth and really easy to clean and it gives me lots of space for mixing, which I really like. But again, you don't need any of that stuff. You can just start with whatever you've got. In the next section, we'll start with the principles. See you there. [MUSIC] 4. Principles: [MUSIC] Principle number 1 is watercolor is not like housework, don't scrub. Whereas with other mediums like oils and acrylics, you can layer the paint, you can slap it on, scrape it off, work into it. The more you work, the more you build up the layers of paint. With watercolor it's completely different. With watercolor the harder you try, the worse it gets. You actually have to learn to really lean in to the unexpected qualities of watercolor and learn how to put on your mark and leave it alone. It's really hard to do but don't worry because the principles coming up are going to show you how to get the best out of this medium. Principle number 2, watercolor is like a ballerina on the opening night of Swan Lake. A ballerina goes on point, she leaps, she twirls, she's heavy, and then light as a feather, all in one swift movement and that is how your paintbrush needs to be when you work with watercolor. Your paintbrush needs to dance on the page. In one mark, you might go from heavy to light, you might twist or turn but you've got to know where you're going to start and where your movement is going to end. Your action needs to be light and quick yet disciplined. In the demonstration, I will show you some ways to practice this. But if you think of your paintbrush as a ballerina dancing on the page, you'll be halfway there. Principle number 3, watercolor is like football. When you watch a football game and the players just suddenly gel and they pass the ball up the field, each player only touching the ball once, it's the same with watercolor. When I try and get into the mindset of painting with watercolor, I try to bring up the thought of one touch football and think one touch for each strike. It's similar to the don't scrub principle, but the one touch also particularly applies to the use of color and to blends. Watercolor loves it when you let the colors blend on the page and all you need is one touch between two colors to get this to happen. You can also drop one color into another color. Again, it's the tiniest little touch is all you need and the magic just happens on the page. So far we've got watercolor is not like housework, don't scrub. Watercolor is like a ballerina, let your paintbrush dance on the page and watercolor is like football, one touch is all you need. The fourth principle is watercolor is like a newborn baby or I can speak from experience newborn twins. Timing is everything. With a newborn baby, you have to both anticipate what it's going to need but also watch, observe, and then react to what it does need and it's the same with watercolor. One of the things I love about watercolor is that it dries so quickly on the page, which means you have to work really fast. One of the ways I like to work is to have a few things going on the page, but I've got always keep in mind how close to dry each thing is, knowing that I may want to come in with another color to get some blends going or knowing that I want it to get dry so that I can come back in with another layer on top of a different color. I'll demonstrate some of this in a little while but for now, just remember, watercolor is like a newborn baby. Timing is everything and getting the timing right just comes with practice. Principle number 5 watercolor is like [NOISE] curry. With a curry, the intensity of spice can vary from mild like Korma to super hot like a Vindaloo. That's the range of intensity. But the viscosity, the runniness has to be right. Just because you have a mild curry doesn't mean you want it to be so runny, it just drains off the folk and it's same with watercolor. The consistency needs to stay the same but the intensity of color is what you change and it's not the other way round. When I first started working with watercolor, if I wanted a light color I would put in way too much water. Finally I've tweaked that actually the amount of water is to say the same to have the right fluidity but the amount of pigment that I add needs to change depending on whether I want beautiful, transparent washes or really vibrant, intense, bright colors. I'll show you some practice exercises for this in the next section. But if you can just remember that watercolor is like a curry and if you can get the intensity and the viscosity, the paint to water ratio then you will be filled with water colorful joy. Principle number 6 is that white is to watercolor like oxygen to humans. When I say white, I mean the white of the page. I think it's because watercolor is such a transparent medium that your painting really starts to zing if you allow little bits of white to show through on the page. That's all, easy. Those are my principle. I hope you found that memorable. Go ahead and download the PDF from the resources section and stick it up where you work. In in the next section we'll have a go at practicing some exercises to help embed those ideas and then we will have a go at painting some torch ginger flowers. See you there. [NOISE] 5. Demonstration: The project for this class is to paint a beautiful torch ginger flower. I've put a selection of torch ginger flowers into the resources section, and you are welcome to work from these. I've also put versions of the same flower in different colors into the folder because it's fun to paint them in different colors and it gives you an easy way to practice. Before we start painting our flower, I'm going to show you a few warm-up strokes you can do. They are all good ways for you to embed the principles into your mark-making. The first principle was watercolor is not like housework, and there's actually nothing you can do to practice this other than put a big sign-up where you work that says don't scrub as a reminder. The second principle was that watercolor is like a ballerina. Let your paintbrush dance across the page. A good way to warm up and practice this is to do a few strokes. I'm taking one of my favorite pinks from my Kuretake paints. Think about where you're going to start, where you're going to finish, and be purposeful yet elegant in your stroke. Think about the weight as you do it. I'm going to start lightly and then I go heavy, and then I'm going to go light. I'm going to do another one. Let me use a bit of red. While you're doing it, while you're doing these practice strokes, you can get the feel for your brush. You can get the amount of water on your brush to the right consistency. Then let's do another stroke. Thinking of dancing on the page, light, heavy, light. It's just getting a feel for that movement, that purposeful action. I like to warm up by doing a few leaves. I quite like doing this in one of my favorite blues, which is this indigo. If I'm going to paint some leaves and I'm thinking like a dancer, I'm going to do a stem. That didn't come out too well. Light, heavy, light. That's quite nice. Light, heavy, light. Light, heavy, light. All of this is great, just a great way to warm up and get ready for your painting. It's also a way to start getting your colors ready that you know you want to paint with. You can try going in different directions. You can also use different brushes. This is a brush I bought recently, and I'm still getting used to how it works and how it feels. It holds a lot of water, which is nice. I'm going to try another leaf. This brush is great for large areas of color. By twisting it, you get different angles on your leaves, which can give you a nice sense of movement. The third watercolor principle was that watercolor is like football. One touch is all you need. This relates both to the stroke, in other words, one touch per stroke, as well as to blending color. If I want to drop some color in, let's do another leaf. Now if I want to blend color, I can take a contrasting color. I'm going to take some of this beautiful yellow. If I drop some in there, literally one touch is all you need. You can let the paint do the work on the paper. Anytime you think of watercolor being like football, think of one touch is all you need, one touch per stroke. For color blending, often, one touch is enough, sometimes you want to load it a little bit more. The fourth principle was that watercolor is like a newborn baby. Timing is everything. Timing is really important when you are letting your colors blend on the page. This here is almost completely dry. If I go into it with a darker color, because it's almost dry, my colors are not blending there. It's just something I need to be aware of. If I want them to blend, I need to be quicker with my timing. If it is completely dry, then you can have fun going over the top in other colors. Because it's completely dry, now I can come over the top and I can start adding detail. Now in that bit, it wasn't completely dry. I'm getting that blue to fit. That is what I mean when I say timing is everything. You've got to know how wet your paint is on the page and react according to what effect you're trying to achieve. The fifth principle was that watercolor is like a curry. Intensity is everything. This applies to the paint-to-water ratio. The best way that I've found to learn this principle was to paint eucalyptus leaves. I'm going to work with this photo as reference material and I'm going to paint a few leaves. This is brilliant as a warm-up exercise, as well as a way of practicing your paint-to-water ratio. I'm starting here with just water on my palette. I'm going to take quite a lot of my indigo paint. I know that I actually want to paint these leaves very, very translucent. So I'm going to wash my brush and now I'm going to make another pool of water here. I'm going to add a tiny bit of the pigment to that. Now, can you see that the size of the water is the same, these two blobs of water? They're the same size and they've got roughly the same amount of water in, but the amount of pigment in each one is different. That is what I mean when I say the viscosity has got to be right, and then you add the pigment according to how translucent you want your leaves to be. To practice translucency, the curry principle, we're just going to make some single strokes. Now that came out almost invisible. I'm going to add a little more pigment. It's always better to start off with too little and then add more because you can always add more, but it's not so easy to take away. There's my first leaf and it's lovely. Now I can feel that I've not got quite enough water there. It's going to take a bit more pigment. This control of the pigment-to-water ratio is the key to watercolor painting. I'm going to just paint a lot of very relaxed marks to get these leaves down. Each time I might vary the amount of pigment. I'm going to use a thinner brush and make a stem coming down here. Make a stem here. It's super relaxing to paint this kind of leaf. When you want to learn transparency, I found this to be the best practice exercise out of all of them. That was a nice one. Someone coming down here. I'm purposefully using a big brush and I want to get lovely fluid strokes. What I'm going to do is let this layer dry completely and then once I know it's completely dry, I'm going to come back in and paint over and that will demonstrate the principle. Now we're going to go on to painting our torch ginger flower. I'm going to choose an image. This is a beautiful one. I'm going to use my biggest brush and I'm going to start on the central bit with all the overlapping leaves. What are they? Petals, I guess. This is a great way to start because you literally just start drawing little shapes. If you want to you can sketch but I hardly ever sketch mainly because I find that sketching makes me tense when I come to painting. I find that I'm much freer and more spontaneous if I don't sketch. But if you find it's just too terrifying to paint without a sketch, by all means do a little pencil sketch. Keep it really light and use a really hard pencil like 4h or 3h so that you can easily erase the pencil lance. I'm preparing my pinks. I want to get some variety of tone into my centerpieces so I'm going to do a few of these and I just want to keep it super loose and fun. That's the main thing. Keep it super loose and fun. This torch ginger flower is a really good one to practice the watercolor principles because you can practice all of them in one painting. As you can see I'm leaving little white gaps between the petals and that is the sixth principle which allows the painting to breathe. I like to get a variation of pinks into my middles and all the time I'm reminding myself to remember about dancing. Don't get too stiff. Don't get tensed, just relax, loosen up, have fun and enjoy the process. One thing about watercolor is you can't always control what happens and if you know that then you must give yourself license to make paintings that aren't what you hoped they would be. It's all part of learning how to watercolor. Now I'm going to start doing some of the bigger petals that are lower down and so for this, I'm keeping in mind the football principle, which is one touch and one stroke. I'm going to do one stroke and leave it and by doing that I'm getting a nice variation of tone through my one stroke. I'm going to do another one stroke. I know where I want to start. I know I want to finish, so I'm going to just go for it and then leave it. Want to get a bit more red in. One stroke there. You can go from the bottom up or from the top down. Wherever it's generally heavier is where you should generally start. So I've started at the bottom and pulled up because the weight of the petal is actually at the bottom. Another one here. That's sometimes quite hard to get your brush to go in the right direction. I feel like I've got enough of these petals. Just going to pop another one in here. I'm not too worried about photographic accuracy, because that's not why I'm painting this. I want to get some nice effects. That's why I'm painting it. Now I'm going to start on these lovely big petals. For that, now I want to start with my light pink. As a general rule with watercolor, it's always good to paint from light to dark. I found that blends work better when you add dark to light. We're going to start with these big petals. Now we want one confident stroke. This is the football principle. We're going to come start here and just do one really big confidence stroke. Beautiful. Then that's not quite the right shape so I'm just going to shape the top and then again here we go at one touch coming in and boom, beautiful petal. I'm controlling the amount of water on my brush. I'm just going loosely for the shape of this lovely flower and I'm thinking of ballerinas dancing. It's really quite therapeutic painting in this way. Let's have a slight variation of color. I can't actually see many petals at the back. I started this one a little bit low on the page. But that's okay. I'm just going to come around here. You can see lovely movement in here. Now timing. Before it's too late I want to put more dark colors in so we need to work fast. We need to not stress and we just want to get some of these marks in, like that. Here we've got a shape like that. Like that and like that. Now, this is the fourth principle. The newborn baby principle. Timing is everything. I want to come into my flower with some deep reds and I want to do it while it's still wet. I was too late. That's okay. What we can do is we can add water. There I was perfectly in time. I'm going to just bring a bit of water in with a bit of pigment. Well, yucky dirty brush. I'm going to bring a bit of water and pigment into this one. Now my pinks got all discolored. I'm going to clean up before I carry on. It's really important to keep your colors as pure as possible. I always use two jars of water. One is for the initial wash so I have a dirty jar and a clean jar and I first wash in the dirty jar and then I wash a second time in the clean jar. By going over that with a wet brush and a bit of pigment in it I've created an interesting blend. Now I've got to work super fast because everything is drying. I'm going to come in here. We want to get some variation so I'm going to change to a different red. Some a bit of this one. Well, that's nice. I'm going to try and get an even deeper tone. This is really all it takes to paint these beautiful flowers. These clean strokes and confidence to go for it. Now just to add some interest and alternative color, I'm going to again with the timing and with the football principle of one touch, I'm going to just drop in. It's too much there, a few other colors because it adds a lot of interest and actually if you look carefully at the photograph, you will see there are other colors in there. There are touches of yellow. I'm letting the magic happen on the page. This is a lovely blend happening there. How are we doing? Let's add a little bit more here. I like to mix up my oranges and reds. It's fun just to drop in bits of color and see what happens. I find with watercolor that quite often a single layer isn't quite enough but you've got to be super careful that you don't overwork your painting. It is so easy to overwork a watercolor painting. I'm going to just give an indication of a stem down here. That's it. To make the whole thing a little more unified, I'm just going to drop in tiny bits of green here, just so that there's a suggestion of green in some of the leaves, just to make it hang together nicely. Now with the timing, I want to put a tiny bit of dark green on that stem, but I know it's too soon. I'm going to wait a few minutes. I'll keep going with what I'm doing here. There we go. Always stop before you overwork it. Now, the stem is a little bit drier. I'm going to come in just with a hint of dark there. That's it. That is a demonstration of how to paint a torch ginger flower. Now, I'm going to come back to my, you can look at these leaves and I know that everything is completely dry. I'm going to go over them. It was another layer. I'm trying to achieve transparency. Now, I put too much water on my palette there. I immediately felt it was too much. I'm using my paper towel here to take a bit of water away. I need to start mixing again to get that consistency right. Working on a bushes palette like this, I find really works well because you've got a lot of space for mixing and it's really easy to clean. I'm now going back to my eucalyptus photograph to use as inspiration. There's lots of beautiful overlapping. There, you can see some of the transparency. I didn't have quite enough water on my brush, so I've actually got a dry brush effect, which I wasn't intending to get, but I quite like it. What can we do here? We can go down and overlap here. It's this overlapping magic that no other paint has this quality. Learning how to work with it in watercolor is really rewarding. I want to slightly tinge my paint with green. This is not always successful, so it's an exercise you can come back to again and again, and practice. That was a good one. That was a perfect one and you can see the transparency. It's like blend modes in Photoshop, like multiply or screen, and you can actually do it by hand, which is pretty cool, and one more. Here, my timing wasn't right. This leaf was still wet. I drew over it and now they've smooshed together. But once they dry, that might create some interesting effects as well. That shows you what I mean when I talk about the curry principle. Adding your pigment to your water rather than the other way round. Thinking about your intensity of color and it's basically learning how to manage your paint to water ratio. I'm going to put one more stem down here just because I'm having fun. I'm going to come in with another leaf here. I want a little more. Let us see if I can get one more overlap. I've done really nicely. Let me come down from here. Yes, that was a good one, and I can see very clearly what is underneath. This is completely dry under there. I'm trying to blend the stem with the leaf. I'm going to paint another torch ginger, this time, I'm going to switch to a different color. For this painting, I'm going to work from another photograph. I've changed the colors of these in Photoshop. If you are doing a painting that is using a specific color palette, then using the hue and saturation tool in Photoshop is a really great way to see the subject you want to paint in the colors that you want to use. I want to paint this in these lovely blues and greens. I'm preparing my paint on my palette and I'm trying to get it to the right consistency. Again, I'm going to start with the centerpieces. This time, I'm going to go a little bit higher on my page. I'm going to just have fun putting in these little petal things with these blue. It's not quite so easy to vary the blues because I don't have as many. I'm going to do a little palette mixing of my blues and my purples just to get some variation. Off we go again. I'm taking great care to leave white gaps in-between so that my painting can breathe. That's looking nice. I'm remembering to think like a dancer, let my paint brush be light on the page and just have fun and enjoy it, that's the main thing. Let's get back to my blues here. I want to do some slightly bigger marks as I come to these petals that are further down. I want to start introducing some of my green. Watercolors are very thirsty paints. You have to wet them more often than you think. Let's have a go at some of these. I'm thinking of the football principle. One touch, one stroke, and leave it. I've inadvertently started painting with a dark instead of a lighter shade. I'm going to go back to my light blue. I'm purposefully making this blue quite intense, quite heavily pigmented, because I want my painting to be quite vibrant and not wishy-washy. Here, you can see I did dark and then I blended light over and it works, but it's just not quite as effective as doing it the other way round. This next petal actually want quite a lot of water. I'm coming here; one movement, that was nice. This one here. One movement, one petal coming down here. Get a bit more pigment. I don't want to put too many things on the page because I don't want them to dry before I have managed to blend. I'm going to stop with that one. Let's just put one up here. I'm going to change color, and I want to come in with some of my greens. I'm going to come down here. I just want to get all of this in before it gets too dry. Remember to let the paint do the work on the page. One touch is all you need. Timing is everything. A few more petals up here and I want to just get some of this to join at the bottom. There we go. These leaves are really fun to paint. You don't need a lot of time, you can have a go in about five or 10 minutes, and I hope you have fun with it. I'm just going to switch over to a smaller brush to get the specific and precise shapes that I want here. As a general rule, I try to use the biggest possible brush for the task that I'm trying to achieve. Because then I do less marks and the few marks, the better. This is already dried, which I didn't really want to happen, but never mind. Let's just wet it slightly. I'm going to come back in here, just with a slightly darker color just to anchor and color my flower a little bit. I love that purple. Let that blend on the page. Just going to bring that down a bit. There we go. This here has blended a lot. The paint was quite wet when I did the blend, and I actually preferred it how it looked a few minutes ago, but that's okay. I'm just going to see what happens if I come in with a little bit of this dark purple to add a bit more contrast. Yeah, that's looking nice. For this one, I'm just going to do the stem in a blue green. This one. That's it. I hope you've enjoyed watching how I paint these flowers, and I hope you will have a go yourself, download the pictures from the resources section and just dive in. I hope you have fun. 6. Conclusion: [MUSIC] That's it. I hope you have enjoyed the class and that you can take something from it. The first principle was watercolor is not like housework, don't scrub. The second principle, watercolor is like ballerina, let your paint brush-dance on the page. The third principle was watercolor is like football, one touch, is all you need and that applies to both the paint stroke and to color mixing. The fourth principle was that watercolor is like a newborn baby, timing is everything. The fifth principle was that watercolor is like curry, intensity is key, and by intensity, what I mean is adding the pigment to the water rather than the water to the pigment and getting that water pigment ratio exactly right, and that is the key to watercolor. The sixth principle was that water is to watercolor like oxygen is two humans, let the water from the page show through leave little gaps between your motifs and your watercolor painting will spring to life. One thing to remember about watercolor is that there's a lot of color shift, so what you start with when you're painting it, compared to what you end up with when it's halfway done, compared to when it's completely dry, those things are different. Understanding that means that you mustn't judge what you're doing while you're doing it because come back in half an hour and it's going to look different anyway. Good thing to bear in mind is that you can't always control the outcome of a painting session. You can control that you turn up, you can control with your paints, especially around with them, have a go, but you can't always control whether or not you create a masterpiece. But that's fine, that's part of it. Embrace the things you can't control, turn up, have a go, have fun. Don't worry if it ends up being a mess on the page, it really doesn't matter, what matters is, did you enjoy the session? Did you learn anything? Do you feel better afterwards? Then come back the next day and try again. If, like I was, you are new to watercolor, then you have to embrace all those really uncomfortable feelings that learning a new skill brings the feelings of being a beginner, being like, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't like what I've made, all those things, just don't worry about them, push through, keep turning up, keep showing up, because when you get these principles right and you make that breakthrough, [MUSIC] water coloring is so much fun, it's just joyful and it gives you time away from your real life, time away from your stress, time away from your worries, so that you can then go back into your real life feeling rejuvenated. I absolutely love my watercolor sessions and it really doesn't matter whether it was a fabulous painting or not so great painting, what matters is continuing to practice every day. If you need help with developing a daily practice, I have a class on that, it's called the toothbrush approach to daily creativity. Please share your project in the project gallery, a little snap of what you've made, any thoughts you have about the class or about the project, or about your experiences with watercolor, I'd love to hear from you. If you liked the class, I'd be really grateful if you could leave a review on Skillshare, and if you want to connect with me on Instagram, I'm @catherinejenniferdesigns. I would love to see you there. Thanks for watching and happy water coloring. [MUSIC]